/lit/ - Literature

There is nothing wrong with Dickens. 4Chan just don't enjoy things that other people enjoy unless it's psued-tier.

Dickens is premium cozy content. His are the stories we need sometimes

>>13964197
/lit/ is fairly pro-Dickens you crypto-pseud

Dickens is great

which dickens should i read next? i enjoyed great expectations, oliver twist and david copperfield. i didn't really care for a tale of two cities though.

>>13964307
Little Dorrit is a good one, and doesn't have that over-familiarity problem Dickens often has

Currently 2/3rds of the way through Bleak House. Thoughts on the spontaneous combustion scene? I like the way Dickens uses ghosts as a theme in his works quite a lot.

>>13964358
>Thoughts on the spontaneous combustion scene?
It's kino. The fat dripping through the floorboards is such a great detail. The slow build up, the mounting horror, the final revelation, its a writer in full command of his tools. Dickens can do set-pieces like that better than any writer

>is it alright with you guys if I like X

Just asking this makes you a pleb.

>>13964379

It felt so random and out of place but after reading how popular the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion was during his time it makes sense now.

>>13964394

I should also add that one of my favourite scenes from Bleak House so far is Esther arriving into London thinking the city is on fire when it is just really foggy. Just an amazing scene all together.

>>13964394
It worked for me, felt in keeping with the whole murky goings on in spooky parts of old London town vibe. Think it helps that Dickens isn't a strict Realist author, bit like Shakespeare in that he's never averse to putting in some supernatural or fantastic element to keep the story moving

>>13964483

This is what I like about Dicken's atmosphere, he's good at creating a suspense of dread and Gothic vibe towards his works even if they aren't pure horror in a sense it makes certain scenes way more memorable and stand out. Like when Pip encounters Havisham for the first time and he describes her as being like a wraith or when Joe sees the Lady in Consecrated Ground in Bleak House.

>>13964505
Pip meeting Magwitch at his parents grave is full on Freudian psychodrama. Like a dream sequence

>>13964179
>>13964206
I almost never see people talk about Dickens on this board, so I'm surprised this thread even exists. I wanted to get into Dickens a month or so ago and went to /lit/ asking for their opinion on where I should start first and/or for an infograph on him. What few posts I made or threads/generals I questioned yielded little to no results. So I wound up reading A Tale Of Two Cities. It was good here and boring there, but got really good towards the end of the second and the beginning of the third act when the stakes got higher and you learn how everything is connected and why it's all important.

Anyway it would be nice if this thread yielded some kind of consensus for reading through Dickens's corpus of works.
Pic semi-related

>>13964307
Pic related.
Charlie is /ourlad/

>>13965151
Personally, I think sketches by Boz is as good a place as any to start.

>>13965151
Two Cities is absolute gold. The first book is pretty brutal but that second half of the book is Dickens firing on all cylinders. Sydney Carton is Dickens' greatest achievement. As for a Dickens syllabus, I'd say One should read Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Two Cities, and Bleak House in that order. GE and DC are two sides of the same bildungsroman coin with different focuses (and DC is semi-autobiographical) while Two Cities and Bleak House are his strongest works. Two Cities being a great example of Dickens' historical fiction and shorter than the others, and Bleak House mixing the urban London-weaving of GE and DC with solid mystery and Dickens' strongest thematic argumentation. After that one could explore the rest of his works, I haven't read too much outside of a few of his Christmas stories and starting Oliver Twist (which is the biggest gap in my Dickens knowledge. The one Dickens book I read that I felt was totally worthless was The Old Curiosity Shop. That one was prone to every sentimentalist and Victorian cliche of the day.

>>13965357
Can we talk about how the Miss Pross v. Madame Defarge confrontation is like a 19th century anime battle?

I read Great Expectations and liked it. Small problem is that as I read it more my language started to change any help with this?

>>13965151
Alright here's what I have so far. What do you ya'll think? Excuse the retard format. I'm too poor to buy Photoshop, and too lazy to pirate and get good at it, but it's a first draft and I expect it to go through several drafts over several anons.
>>13964358
>>13964505
I think The Mail chapter in ATTC is one of my favorite examples of an author setting a stage. His description of the place and atmosphere was so on point that the illustration a few pages later was a near exact match of the picture in my head. That's something no other author has done for me.
>>13964483
The way he lets a scene play out feels borderline surreal at times (at least until it is explained later). Like the three Jacques in the beginning of ATTC.

>>13966344
Maybe have a flow chart like start David Copperfield, want more funnies go here, want more seriouses go here.
I'm not sure Dickens ever wrote a novel without a few lumpy chapters you could cut out. But when he's really firing and on top of his game he's top tier, so vivid and intense. He can be better than any other writer when he wants to be. The gambling turning into a duel chapter in Nicholas Nickleby is as good as anything similar in any Russian novel

>>13966231
prescription antipsychotics?

>>13964179
Anglos can't write good literature at all, so yes he is pleb tier.