Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens

Yesterday was Charles Dickens' 200th Birthday. There have been lots of celestial birthdays recently. For example, we recently remembered my paternal Grandfathership on what would have been his 98th birthday. In celebration, there was lots of Handel and Dvorak and Debussy all round. But I digress... It was so great to see Dickens so fondly remembered decades after the time he inhabited, by other authors, the general public, and even the clergy of Westminster Abbey where he is buried.

Apparently he had asked to be buried in the yard of a sweet little village church somewhere, a place he associated with serenity and rest, but his eminence at the time of his death was such that he was instead upgraded to the rather more fancy Westminster Abbey. He is therefore now posthumous flat mates with the likes of Charles Darwin; not because he asked for it but because the honour was conferred on him by virtue of his contribution to society.

For me, Charles Dickens will always be the author who got to grips with the metropolitan/cosmopolitan subculture way before it was deemed so achingly cool to do so. His documentation of Victorian London is second to none. His ability to evoke the putrid smells, the pungent squalor, his keen observation of social disparities, and the sheer mastery of human motive make for great reading every time. And he is still very much alive in modern Literature.

About 5 years ago, I had to read the first Harry Potter book for one of my Creative Writing seminars (I do not subscribe to Pottermania so I treated it as a transactional exchange of sorts, a bit like taking cough mixture). It struck me then, that the old Dickens appeared to be reaching through the ages and signing off on fiction with his trademark flourish. I'll explain. Now I don't know whether JK Rowling esteems him as one of her inspirations, but there seemed (to me anyway) to be a certain Dickensian rendering of names going on. What I mean is that Dickens' characters names are generally fantastically onomatopaeic and Rowling captured this in names like 'Voldemort' for instance, who was the big bad deathly baddie, and 'Hermione' the goody goody gosh goody two shoes, etc etc. Not to say that every onomatopaeic name is attributable to Dickensian influence, but you know what I mean.

So hey ho for old Dickens. Thanks for all the inspiration and hilarity, and I hope that in these disgraceful times where young people are unable to read or digest any information over 140 characters long, that the work of great authors like him will not pale into obscurity.