Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Dickensian. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Dickensian Quotes And Sayings by 80 Authors including Craig Schaefer,Claire Tomalin,Douglas Booth,Robert Gottlieb,Darren H. Pryce for you to enjoy and share.
It's like a Charles Dickens orphanage collided with a furniture-store showroom.
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.
With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.
These incident acquaintances and the twisted stories that grew out of them, made John thinking that "Charles Dickens" was not just another pub, but a special place in the Universe, where life itself ties the knots.
As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.
Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.
In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.
Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
In A Midnight Carol Patricia Davis illuminates the dark and brilliant humanity of Charles Dickens
the man who lived a rags-to-riches life more remarkable than any of his stories.
Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.
One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.
It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.
EXPLANATORY NOTES A NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF OLIVER TWIST
As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.
Sure, at heart I wanted to be a Dickens, but I hated being great on command.
I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.
I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.
I've never finished anything by Dickens.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.
The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.
I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.
The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.
All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.
As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.
Dickens writes that one of his characters, listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business.
Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.
Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
(On Dickens) No other writer is quite as good at making marriage vows about remaining together "till death us do part" sound more like a suicide pact.
I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS [1867 Edition] by Charles Dickens [Project Gutenberg Editor's Note: There is also another version of this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition]
I remember one review of The Office Christmas Special that compared it unfavourably to Dickens. What? You're saying I'm not as good as the greatest storyteller ever. Boo! Boo! I think I can live with that.
I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.
Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.
The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
Dickens writes that an event, began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
Matthew and I used to read Dickens together. Oh my god, it was so great. We would sit in the bathtub and pass the book back and forth reading passages out loud.
'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.
A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him.
[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]
(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.
I didn't want to be stuck in Dickens period dramas because then I would never know if I was any good.
Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
My great-aunt ... said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens ... She was right.
Dickens must have first heard his famous The law is an ass quote from a woman. And she was damned right, for all the good it did her.
Oliver liked to play the part of disaffected youth, but he liked shopping in SoHo even more.
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)
The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility.
Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Charles Dickens.
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.
I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.
It's all so un-Victorian.
'Great Expectations' is one of the greatest stories.
When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
Own company, reading a classic British novel, curled
We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we're not running debtors' prisons, that this isn't Dickensian
His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling - as he often did - as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.
Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
The possessor of such great expectations, - farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood, henceforth I was for London and greatness;
My respect for the law was diminishing with every exchange. Dickens was right. The law is an ass, and I was starting to think that people are asses as well.
Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.
The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
APPENDIX 4 THE THIEVES' LANGUAGE IN OLIVER TWIST
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh ... he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can, An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man.
Coincidence has been cancelled, honey," Susannah said. "What we're living in these days is more like the Charles Dickens version of reality.
I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.
I am a freeman and jolly as a beggar.
Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating
Sometimes my family thinks I've made my childhood a bit more Dickensian than it was, and it probably wasn't all that bad. But I was uncomfortable as a kid.
David Copperfield.
It hasn't snowed like this for years. Real, proper snow. Dickensian snow,
How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!
Jane Eyre may be an orphan, homely, battered, alone and abandoned, but she is not, never has been and never will be a big fat sausage.
The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.
Victorian and touchingly respectable. "I have been crying," confessed Lady Agatha. "I was afraid so, Lady Agatha," said Emily.
With Graham Greene life is a precious, perpetual, snot-sodden whinge.
like a disaffected swan -
CHAPTER XIV COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER'S STAY AT MR. BROWNLOW'S. WITH THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG UTTERED CONCERNING HIM, WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND
Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
I had this almost Dickensian look. I was quite fragile.
Oliver Twist has asked for more!
What decadence this belonging rubbish was, what time the rich must have if they could sit around and weave great worries out of such threadbare things.
CHAPTER XVIII HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME, IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS REPUTABLE FRIENDS
The Lord of Rags and Tatters.
Was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing. It