I published a piece in Plough this week about why so many of us still love reading Dickens even when we’re disappointed in his marital behavior. The question I pose is this:
“‘Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes,’ as Dickens wrote of Mr. Merdle. Dickens, in his own way, gives us feasts — great feasts of words that fill readers with delight, indignation, pity, distress, a whole host of emotions — but knowing what we know of his personal life, are we tainted if we partake? Will those feasts poison our minds and souls?”
Go here to see how I think through this question and suggest an answer that, without minimizing anything, attempts to take into account the complexity of Dickens and, beyond him, of humanity.
Coincidentally, at the same time I was working on this piece, a Dickens-related controversy arose at the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, England. MSN reports: “A museum has been branded “ludicrous” after staff were told Charles Dickens would ’cause great offence today’. Staff at Rochester’s Guildhall Museum have been given guidance on how to respond to visitor queries about the author’s opinions on race and empire, despite the institution having received no complaints on the matter.”
It’s worth reading the whole piece and considering the views of all involved. In this case, it sounds to me like the museum had the germ of a good idea — be open and honest about Dickens’s flaws when they come up — but neglected context and failed to consider his ideas and actions in their entirety. Again, people are complex, and Dickens was enormously complex, and in situations like these, we need to be sure we’re taking a whole person into consideration, not just the parts that disappoint us or the parts that delight us.
(Image courtesy of The Victorian Web.)
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