I am sixty years old and I am still rereading books that I first read at the age of twelve or thirteen. Most prominent of these are the novels of Dickens. No writer has affected me more. The other day, after sitting in on my online class, Teresa pointed out the gothic echoes in one of my poems. She wondered about a Poe influence. "Dickens," I said, "of course Dickens." He infects my sentence rhythms, my grammar, my word choice, my taste for melodrama, my tragicomic characters, my sentimental home scenes, my social commentary. He is everywhere in my creative life, peering over my shoulder as I peer over his.

Part of what makes him indispensable (to me, I mean; most other people find him dispensable enough) is how exact he is in his exaggerations . . . which sounds like an oxymoron, but read this passage from Nicholas Nickleby to see what I mean:

It is observable that when people upon the stage are in any strait involving the very last extremity of weakness and exhaustion, they invariably perform feats of strength requiring great ingenuity and muscular power. Thus, a wounded prince or bandit-chief, who is bleeding to death and too faint to move, except to the softest music (and then only upon his hands and knees), shall be seen to approach a cottage door for aid, in such a series of writhings and twisting, and with such curlings up of the legs, and such rollings over and over, and such gettings up and tumblings down again, as could never be achieved save by a very strong man skilled in posture-making. And so natural did this sort of performance come to Mr. Snittle Timberry that on their way out of the theatre and towards the tavern where the supper was to be holden, he testified [to] the severity of his recent indisposition and its wasting effects upon the nervous system, by a series of gymnastic performances which were the admiration of all witnesses.

Look at his precision in describing theatrical overacting; look at how overboard he goes in that precision; look at how he then transfers that description seamlessly into the absurd public behavior of an extremely minor character who appears only briefly late in the novel . . . which is to say, Dickens puts this level of descriptive intensity into even the throwaway elements of his narrative. This is the kind of stuff that killed me when I was a kid, and it still kills me. 

I could talk forever about Dickens but one other thing I've been noticing on this rereading of Nicholas Nickleby is his commentary on working-class women: specifically, the contrast between actresses and seamstresses. The women actors are lively, self-confident, talkative, and full of power. They hold equal status with the men actors; they make decisions for themselves, both in life and on the stage. Yes, they are silly and grubby and down-at-heel, but they are essentially happy. In comparison, the seamstresses are wan and pale and meek. They are at the mercy of unscrupulous men. They are derided by fashionable women. Yes, these are Victorian tropes for suffering virtue. But the seamstresses have no fun. And the actresses have so much fun.

Certainly Dickens, in his personal life, was deeply confused by the cult of pure womanhood that he himself promoted in his genteel characters. But when he was able to slip out of those blinders and look at real working women, he saw things clearly enough.

Maybe I love Dickens in part because I sympathize with his murky longings (often unreal and ridiculous, and don't we all have them?) and am wholly in love with the incisive clarity of his exaggerations. So what if his novels are sentimental? So what if his social answers are too easy? No one else has ever created such worlds-on-paper . . . crowded and dirty and brawling and beautiful.