Writing in the 1840s at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Charles Dickens depicted not only the horrid, inhumane working conditions and poverty that many, including children, toiled in but the results on society and on individuals. Born on February 7, 1812, Dickens was the second of eight children. His own father was sent to a debtors’ prison when he was 12 and he was forced to leave school and work in a London blacking factory, where he had the “hellish experience” of “sealing pots of shoe polish and pasting labels on them.” As another biographer of Dickens, actor Simon Callow, point out, Dickens “knew what poverty was. He knew what it was to be rejected, to be cast aside, to live in squalor.”
At a time when the Occupy movement and the voices of the 99 percent are being heard, Dickens is indeed “amazingly relevant.” His novels depict not only the early 19th-century’s dispossessed and downtrodden, but a full cast of “corrupt financiers” and “corrupt MPs” and politicians. But biographer, Claire Tomalin worries that today’s children “are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity.” She also decries the “dreadful television programmes” that children see as making them “unable to appreciate” one of Dickens’ admittedly longish works.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/charles-dickens-novels-too-long-for-kids-today.html#ixzz1o9pTXOHn
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