(Author) Hilary Mantel doesn’t like Charles Dickens (because of “his moralising and crass sentimentality and the galumphing humour”.) He’s the only author that makes me laugh out loud when I read him.

nutella

- I’ve never been able to read Dickens (since being forced to for exams - Great Expectations) but I quite enjoy the TV adaptations.

AdmiralNelson

- Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. I’ve only read a few of his works but the sheer overuse of language makes them rather turgid for me. I know he was paid by the word when published in the periodicals but I prefer a briskness to my reading material. I say that while wading through a 700-page history book.

lanokia

- My favourite 19th-century novel is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but I love to immerse myself in Dickens’ highly entertaining world, even if it is sentimental and verbose for many modern tastes. Ms Mantel seems to have forgotten that Dickens was very much a man of his Victorian time, with his heart in the right place when considering the suffering of the poor, even if he was not always as sensitive in his private life. She needs to read F.R.Leavis’s Dickens the Novelist.

bobvincent

- I agree, bobvincent, and would also add George Orwell’s essay on Dickens to Mantel’s reading list... If there are better novels of their kind than A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations or Hard Times, then I have yet to read them.

Owen_Wingrave

- When people refer to Dickens’ work, it is always in the sense of a moralising, if somewhat didactic, teller of Victorian tales. But he is magnificently funny. Wonderful humour oozes from the page... Mantel is right: he was a moral crusader but laughter was a key weapon in his arsenal.

keyboard2

... Give me Victor Hugo any day.

artboyusa

www.tesconnect.comdickens.