It seems appropriate to wish Charles Dickens a happy birthday for today despite the fact he’d be 200 if he was still alive. I had to study Bleak House last year and my teacher drowned us in facts about the poor man, actually maybe we were the poor ones, Bleak House is tremendously long and challenging to read.

Dickens was quite forward for his time, being interested in social reform, this was a theme in a number of his works. He didn’t write the way many writers do by writing the whole book then proofing it and editing it before finally hitting the publishing machines, he wrote it a month at a time, publishing each chapter before going onto write the next one. In order to keep people engaged he’d finish the instalment on a cliffhanger and often people in America would be waiting at the docks for the boat with the new instalment and would be calling out asking for the news on Little Nell and her health.

I find that writing rather challenging, I’ve heard that some writers will go back through their finished work to check for inconsistencies and to make sure the plot and details match up all the way through, Dickens wasn’t able to do that with a number of his works as each chapter was already published and he had to just do the best he could…his best was incredibly good. He must have had quite a brain in order to be able to plot a whole book and then write and publish one chapter at a time before going onto write the next chapter. It’d be like me publishing paragraph one then writing paragraph two, publishing that then writing paragraph three, publishing that and so on, without making any changes to the previous paragraphs. If you read very carefully, you might be able to see where he’s changed things a little, maybe the name of a character, maybe even the spelling of a character or just some little details about how the character behaved.

Just popping back to Bleak House briefly before I finish. There are three reasons I found it challenging to read. The first is its length and the time it was written, I do have trouble reading English written then, I’m much more au fait with modern English. The second is the sheer number of characters detailed within its pages, there were probably double the number of people with details written about their houses, lives and their traits than there are in most other books. The other is the vast amount of information stored within each book. Bleak House is about 900 pages but has enough detail for three books, he talks using imagery, aligning people with animals, as well as words. In order to have done better in my class last year I would have had to have read the book at least three times and it took me weeks to read it the first time. Thank heavens for the BBC who put together a brilliant mini-series of the book, it does leave out some details while keeping the flavour of the book.