Food banks, the lack of state support for children’s services and the attack on the health service has made the work of Charles Dickens more relevant than ever before, according to the author’s acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin.
Tomalin, who wrote Charles Dickens: A Life in 2011, told the Radio Times that Dickens’s focus on the parlous living conditions of the urban poor was just as important more than 200 years after his birth. “Dickens is very relevant at the moment in England. Because we are producing Dickensian conditions again,” she told the Radio Times.
“The need for food banks, the ending of children’s support from the state, the attack on the health services and the BBC, the universities being commercialised – so many of the things that Dickens fought for and stood for are being attacked. I think he was never so relevant. We miss him.”
Tomalin compared Dickens to the writers of today’s soap operas in the Christmas issue of the listings magazine ahead of Dickensian, a new 20-part BBC drama written by Tony Jordan of EastEnders fame.
“It’s not surprising that modern soaps use methods employed by Dickens – the intense interest in colourful characters and the violent or exciting interchange between them. If Dickens were around today he’d be interested in soaps as a platform for reaching as many people as possible,” she said.
The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first success, was published in monthly one-shilling instalments, as was most of his work. Most met with broad acclaim from the poorest members of society to Queen Victoria understood to be fans. At the peak of his fame his books were bestsellers in France, Germany and the US.
After being sent to work in a boot-blacking factory at 12 when his father went to prison for not paying his debts, the Victorian writer became rich on the back of his regular instalments. “He wanted people to come back and buy the next issue – and they did. That’s why driving the plot is very important with Dickens,” says Tomalin.
Tomalin, now 82, is the winner of several awards including the James Tait Black Memorial prize for her work, which includes biographies of Samuel Pepys and Thomas Hardy as well as The Invisible Woman, which detailed the life of Nelly Ternan, the mistress of Charles Dickens. She said she first started to love the famous author aged just 7.
“Dickens has this extraordinary immediacy that children love,” she says. “David Copperfield takes children seriously – their mentality, their imagination and their feelings ... the characters are the reason Dickens was so popular.”
Dickensian is based on a plot that throws several different characters together from the 989 created in his many novels.
“I think Dickens would have liked this TV version,” said Tomalin. “He was excited by new things and new ways of reaching people.”
