![\"\"](\"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/dickens-age27.jpg\" "\\"dickens-age27\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nIt’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. I don’t know which of his 20+ novels is my favorite. When I think about it, I am overwhelmed. Maybe it’s\u00a0Bleak House, a tangle of disputed wills and disrupted inheritance, orphans and mysterious benefactors\u00a0and country estates. The \u00a0heroine, an orphan named Esther Summerson,\u00a0is prissy and meek and painfully self-deprecating and\u00a0gets smallpox and goes blind. Characters like\u00a0Tulkinghorn, Detective Bucket and Lady Deadlock\u00a0populate the world,\u00a0an entire society really, in all its class divisions from the aristocracy down to the filthy street urchin, in one amazingly efficient, 900-page novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n the dancing school, from "bleak house"<\/p><\/div>\n In words written on his customary, late night insomniac walks through London, amongst the city’s homeless and hopeless, Dickens described the building that would become his burial place as being \u201cfine gloomy society\u201d for quarter of an hour. Westminster Abbey suggested to him a procession of the dead with \u201ceach century more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries going before\u201d. Instead, 200 years after his birth, Charles Dickens continues to have an enduring relevance, with unmatched wisdom and powers of expression. A chronicler of a world of urban inequality, he\u00a0was one of the first writers to depict the modern industrial city, a place where many of us still live. He was an\u00a0influential\u00a0participant in the social reform of Victorian England\u00a0with an unparalleld level of eloquence.\u00a0While the outward manifestation of the grotesque worlds Dickens often described may have changed, the underlying causes remain. He made\u00a0withering observations of the venal rich and the pathos of the poor, corrupt financiers, child labor, economic disparity and the\u00a0need for educational reform. It was his moral purpose that led the London\u00a0Times<\/em> to call Dickens “the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century” in his obituary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. I don’t know which of his 20+ novels is my favorite. When I think about it, I am overwhelmed. Maybe it’s\u00a0Bleak House, … Continue reading <\/a>