"Dickens’s books are forever metamorphosing into plays, films, musicals; his characters have permeated the collective imagination. His reputation as a craftsman, as opposed to a hack, has slowly expanded, as critics have begun to appreciate the fictional ground he broke. His influence is paramount. Mervyn Peake wouldn’t exist without him, nor Iris Murdoch. Any novel today that has an ensemble cast and concerns itself with social matters is labelled “Dickensian”.
There are many reasons for this. He, more than any other author, stands firmly entrenched in the lineage of English writing. He stretches back into the storehouse of the canon, drawing on the Bible and Bunyan for his morals and absolutes, reaching into Shakespeare for those bumptious personages like Pecksniff and Micawber. He is part of the genetic coding of the way that we think about books."
Philip Womack/ Telegraph /continue reading
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