Armando Iannucci: "Charles Dickens is one of us"

 
Charles Dickens, like William Shakespeare, wrote a body of work that has seeped into the public consciousness. We mention the likes of Oliver Twist and Mr Micawber in the same breath as Falstaff or Lear's Fool.

Yet many more of us would be happy to wager a night out seeing Shakespeare than risk many weeks indoors reading a Dickens. We accept Shakespeare's status as a dramatist, but Dickens challenges, possibly even scares us, as a novelist. His work seems so out there, so profusely marketed in the form of BBC adaptations, live musicals, decorative biscuit tins, Toby jug figurines, Simon Callow cameos and Christmas advertising campaigns for Pickwick pepper pots and David Copper kettles, that we feel fully saturated with Dickens already.

We can recite incidents from A Christmas Carol or Great Expectations so well, that it's almost surplus to requirements actually to read him. So, while the Dickens industry booms, our reading of Charles Dickens goes on the decline.

Possibly that might change as we celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of his birth this year. I hope so. It was when I first read Dickens that I first knew I wanted to write comedy. In fact, it was when I first knew I wanted to write.

To read a Dickens novel is to read someone in the act of quite magnificently enjoying his ability to describe, to summon character and personality out of nowhere but his own imagination. Every paragraph contains a phrase or moment of dialogue that has you laughing or throwing your hands up in amazement at the sheer power of his story-telling ability.

You'd call him a master of his art were it not that that phrase feels much more sombre and portentous than Dickens actually is: what you actually feel when you read Dickens is that he's one of us.

That's the Dickens problem: he reads so well, he appeals so directly, he feels so mainstream, that a large part of the critical establishment looks down on him as a populist entertainer rather than a serious novelist. He's categorised as an eccentric rather than as head of the pack. 

He didn't go on writing courses, study the Greek classics, or set any manifesto in what literature should do. Instead he wrote about what he knew, about poverty and debt, social status and the embarrassing maneuvers people go through to improve it, about wandering and homelessness, and about sad and dysfunctional childhood. He could write about these things because he felt them, and had the instinctive ability of a natural genius to turn them into classic literature in an instant.

Dickens grew up in a lower middle-class family whose father was forever getting into debt. A constant theme in his novels is the unpredictability of fortune. Characters in his stories lose money, gain wealth, search for riches or fall in debt at the turn of a page.

Dickens knew the fickleness of fate from an early age. By the age of 12, his father was serving time in a debtor's prison while the young Charles was earning pennies working long hours at a shoe-blacking factory sticking labels onto bottles.

Yet, by the age of 28, Dickens was the most famous writer in the world, having produced just The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. His great masterpieces, like Great Expectations and Bleak House, were still decades away: a notable exception to the rule that a writer's ability tails off the more famous he or she becomes.

It’s as if Dickens fed off his fame, and needed the contact with his public to urge him on to greater and more daring experiments in literature. His novels became angrier, more cynical. He started off as an optimist, keen to wrong injustices and bring cheer to the poor. By the end of his career, this sentiment had turned into a resigned sigh that nothing could be done to improve the state of the nation.

Little Dorrit, for example, satirises a country and a banking system immune to the deprivations of the city dwellers around it. In an early novel like Oliver Twist, the hero gains wealth and is welcomed in the landed gentry, and this is regarded as a happy ending. A late novel like Great Expectations tells the story of another boy, Pip, who comes into wealth early on and thereafter feels inadequate, and guilty at his own pride.

That Dickens cared to make his hero so unsettling, that he continually challenged his readers to think about their own circumstances and action, that he constantly tried to break the boundaries of what literature could do while at all times seeking to hold on to his wide readership, marks him out as the very greatest of our novelists, whose writing is as important today as it's ever been.

Armando Iannucci has featured as part of the BBC Dickens Season. For more information on the Dicken’s bicentenary on the BBC visit www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/books/