Learning From The Classics Podcast: Dickens And Realism
This track is a recording of my weekly LIVE PODCAST - Learning from the Classics, dated February 21st, 2025. In this LIVE session, I will relate prompts from Classic Literature to the challenges we face every day. There is a certain sense of security in understanding some struggles are universal and not personal to ourselves. In such novels, there is also a reconciliation to be had with souls we cannot and will not ever meet, but who teach us so much. All LIVES are available week to week on a playlist. Folklore Relaxation Literature Historical context Emotional healing Grief Social dynamics Domestic life Nostalgia Reunion Emotional reunion Grief management Storytelling Imagination Fantasy Characters Classic literature Culture Adventures Moral lessons
Transcript
For everybody now welcome to my live I'm going to come off the screen and I'm going to go on to my notes so if you comment I won't see you at the moment I'm just going to go for it.
Today is Charles Dickens and I'm talking about realism and Charles Dickens is someone who wrote largely in the Victorian era and I'm just going to break down the three eras that I cover in my readings first of all so you understand where I'm coming from and then we're going to talk a little bit about the Victorian era today.
So before I get started I'd just like to say everyone that signs up to to come along to the live I really appreciate that every week that really keeps me going and it's nice to have people interested in the same things I'm interested in it can get quite lonely out there and it's really nice that we're all together sharing this stuff and if we can you know with this book club if we can grow it if you can share the lives with your friends on the app so we can teach more people about classic literature we can you know we can enlighten more people open their eyes to what's available the benefits of detaching ourselves actually from the 21st century for just half an hour a week yeah and thinking about something else and then hopefully visiting the readings and enjoying some I'm gonna say well before I'm gonna put myself on you know on the stage here I'm gonna say well before literature it's taken me a long time to get to that point and I have been acting and performing for a long time and I take it very seriously so yeah it would be really nice if you could share that even on your socials get people along open their eyes to the beauty of insight timer what we're doing here and hopefully we can amass a big crew yeah because life in the 21st century and I am a very positive person but I find having children now who are my I've got two children my youngest child is 17 and realizing just how much exposure they've had to stuff that wow we just had no knowledge of when we were kids we just didn't it's exhausting and it's actually quite sad and just to tap out of that for a while and tap into something else revisit maybe stories that we heard of as a child we may not have got round to not have got round to reading or weren't in a place that we could access that material maybe we were too busy maybe we were just you know life takes over doesn't it and tapping into that and saying no I need to take time for myself now and that's what this is about yes it's classic literature but it's about taking time for myself to listen talk about think about something I'm interested in that has nothing to do yeah nothing to do with this 21st century I'm in at the moment yeah it is relevant because it's somebody else's soulful account of their experience but it is not in any it does not reflect the situations I am experiencing every day thank God so this is your escape so welcome so if you can if you can possibly share that on your socials if you're not on social media with your friends within the app that would be really helpful because I want to grow the group and we want to get a little crew going you know we want to get we want to support each other and we want to get to that place where we're really we're really immersing ourselves in this you know the other time and speaking of another time period we've got the Georgian era we've got the Regency era we've got the Victorian era now most of what I read belongs to was published in one of these eras okay so King George 1714 to 1837 okay so when he got ill so 1714 to 1837 is the Georgian era when King George got ill this is the British King okay the Prince of Wales his son George he became a regent okay he's like a prince regent so somebody's taking over in the absence of his father so this was called the Regency era okay and that was sort of it a subdivision of the Georgian era so the Georgian era 1714 onwards and then you've got the Regency era where his son took over when he was ill within that okay so this is when the Brontes were doing what they were doing okay and that's why it's significant it's relevant that you know that period of time the Georgian era because obviously to be able to picture them in situ okay it's good to know a little bit about Georgian fashion about the architecture what was going on you can always you know reading the novels then whichever way you find out you know you do your research going to a library look on the internet look at images to get a feel for the time it helps and that you know when you're listening to the Brontes picture what was happening okay then of course you've got also you've got the dramatizations on the telly and so on then the Victorian era which we're talking about today we've got Dickens we've got Jane Austen George Eliot one of my favorite novelists we've got I'm going to be reading some of her soon Arthur Conan Doyle one of my favorite Victorian male novelists I love his work Robert Louis Stevenson Lewis Carroll Dostoevsky will be reading as well so they're all Victorian lots lots was happening in the literary world in the Victorian era and then you've got the Edwardian era in which sits the wind in the willows a little princess and a green gables so Edwardians early 1900s 1907 early 1900s onwards Victorian era is 1837 to 1901 so they're back-to-back okay Georgian first within Regency is within that where the Brontes during that time wrote then Victorian then Edwardian and today we're talking about the Victorian era and you know consequently most of what I'm reading is in the Victorian era massive time for change why because of the Industrial Revolution lots was happening then and with that you've got the invention of the printing press so Dickens Charles Dickens he serialized his work he was writing at a time his work was largely based on urban living in London in the Victorian era and this is where you get the phrase Dickensian because there's a cross between he was so popular that there's kind of crossover between him the meaning of Dickensian and Victorian they exist in the same space okay so anything Dickensian you would hear about is referring to that period of time the Victorian era and his work is intrinsically tied to the illustrations that accompanied it so he was serializing his work in magazines periodicals and so on and it can be argued that the artists that were illustrating okay I'll explain to you how they illustrated shortly illustrating the work that he was producing week after week after week it can be argued that you know their contributions are essential to a rounded understanding of his work I am actually reading Oliver Twist at the moment from a modern edition and it has no illustrations and it is sorely lacking in the feel of it I'm not getting the taste of it at all because what was happening was it was a massive investment in Victorian times to produce a book okay massive financial investment and we always have to refer back to what's gonna make us money the publishers are interested in something that's going to sell so if I am an author of the Victorian period I need to prove myself and if I can't prove myself as a novice as someone who's come along that nobody knows on I'm not gonna get invested in so what I do is I say to myself like Dickens okay what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna have these small snapshots these little articles regularly produced and you as a publisher are going to read them and you are going to invest in the story you look at the illustrations you're going to see that the illustrations can also be used as posters in bookshops they can be used as marketing tools and guess what you're going to buy into me and then you are going to fund me to write what I want to write okay so he was Dickens was as involved with his illustrators as with his writing it was a huge part of the whole picture okay and again it's essential for us to appreciate their intrinsic value to his work so he he revolutionized between 1836 and 1870 he issued some things and short stories the Pickwick papers that I will be reading in the future and this revolutionized the publication of new fiction okay it was a big commercial venture and that was the impetus for others or authors and publishers to say yeah we're gonna do this too now the reason these illustrations were so essential to his work was because the world he was born into 1812 that lost a significant percentage of the population were illiterate okay and deprived of visual material they didn't have TV they didn't have movies photographs there was no regular press so the illustrations were done by etching on copper plate and then printing one by one by one you can imagine before the Industrial Revolution everything was is very bespoke it was laborious process a lot of time is invested in it so there wasn't that much about okay it wasn't even a public art museum so you'd have a few random pictures advertisement signs keepsakes and so on but they were largely you know the rich were exposed to so when these weekly periodicals came along they became popular they were keenly anticipated what's the next illustration going to be and of course the illustrators were of caricatures because in Dickens work the characters are larger than life and they were relished and they were and largely anticipated and the public was excited about these became excited about these productions and they were satirical works okay so where he wrote larger than life characters he's the accompanying illustrations would be much the same and he's he had a lot of sane illustrations that were produced and he was largely influenced by someone called William Hogarth he was in the 1700s etching on copper plate and producing illustrations and they would have looked something like this get that up on the screen I'm gonna change to see if you can see that there do you imagine how long it would take to etch and then print that Wow okay so graphic satire was a huge branch of art it had its own cultural identity and because because the movement was literary realism so we are talking about realistic representations of what was happening at the time it was it was natural to be satirical about it because every day in a very poor London urban environment you will be exposed to many ridiculous things so it's natural that they would make fun of that right they would the best you know medicine is laughter right and these illustrations and his work they will be distributed to print shops coffee houses scattered across crowded ship counters hung in glass sometimes to everyone who lived and worked within the city so of course they don't need to see graphic representations exactly what they experiencing every day there had to be something satirical about it something funny something ridiculous which is what Dickens produced in literary format okay and they represented the anxieties the preoccupations political social that characterized this English capital in this at this time okay and you know largely picturing that the human demise okay in old England so well they weren't particularly pretty but they were something to look at something to draw the eye okay so we've got mechanical advances coming along and then pictures suddenly could be printed more cheaply okay in part issues in volumes so then where you used to have your illustrated fiction classic in a huge novel maybe sitting on the shelves of some rich gentleman's London home somewhere suddenly they would be more readily accessible to everyone rich or poor they were commonplace they became commonplace and that was largely due to this this innovation by Charles Dickens so if this fiction was issued serially with illustrations it was more profitable it was less risky than the traditional unembellished three volume sets of books that a publisher would have to invest a large money up front in okay and this of course attracted the widest possible audience which then attracted more advertisers so the additional profits would absorb the extra graphic costs so again it was win win okay and with that if something wasn't working so the Pickwick papers was an idea by Charles Dickens and the publishers thought to themselves well if if it doesn't work we're gonna take a chance on this but if it doesn't work we can pull it just as easily and we'll try something else there's less of a risk so of course it's an exciting time whenever you get a time when the gatekeepers are willing to open the doors and take a chance that is an exciting time for us all you've got the Industrial Revolution and you've got everything happening and this is just one more reflection of that okay so what we have to know about Charles Dickens is and I've spoken about him before a little bit about his history he's not showing a biasness he's trying because he's a realist he's literally realist he's trying to represent what he sees whether it be the mundane whether it be the ridiculous and he's depicting that with humor okay with satire that is the foundation upon which his writing style is built so as a result you've got poor and rich depicted in his novels you've got heroes you've got villains you've got virtues you've got vices they all find a place and work together just as they do in real life so his work is like reading about the society of the time and that's what makes it so interesting for us now where we don't have the visual resources to go back we don't have the videos like we do now everything's accessible to anyone at any time we have the beginnings of mass-produced literary works that were just talking about society life at that time and I think that's what our fascination with it is the fact that we can tap into another time we have enough knowledge about it that we can tap into it and keep reproducing it and that's what I love about the Victorian era is just the sheer volume of knowledge that we have whereas some of the earlier times we have less information and that's the draw so he wanted to depict society truthfully accurately focusing on everyday life ordinary people but in a satirical way and it was without romanticism okay we're not talking about the period before we're not talking about the Georgian period or the Regency period we're talking about you know compared to Austen we're talking about something there's a lot more hard hitting and it's a reflection of emphasized observation direct experience so it's not written from within the four walls of a parsonage or a gentleman's home it's written from direct observation from the dirty London streets okay and anything that's reflecting social injustice poverty working-class life is going to be particularly at that time quite quite you know difficult to read about as is Oliver Twist at the moment okay so we can see here for example homelessness was a problem in Victorian times we've got street traders roaming the streets we've got people trying to make a living from street performance we've got a lot of crime and deprivation we've got children forced to work from a very very young age and it was a crime to be poor which was awful you know what a terrible thing so it was really survival of the fittest 20% of the population lived in towns at the beginning of Victoria Queen Victoria's reign but when she died that had risen to about 75% so it's a huge and of course everyone's moving to the towns to find work in the factories because of the Industrial Revolution there's no longer so much work from where they lived in the villages it'll be in the towns and then of course you've got these rows of poor quality terrace housing you've got the slums and this all fed into that satirical backdrop of Dickens's work okay right I think rather than dwell on the destitution and the misery of it all which is what I'm seeing a lot of here I'm just going to talk about some of the characters in Dickens novels they were not necessarily written as perfect characters or heroic they were just an honest depiction of what he saw you've got the character the beadle in Oliver Twist for example and he was quite hard-hitting and he came across as quite mean but we have to remember not to necessarily look at the characters through 21st century eyes and understand that every character in a novel by Oliver Twist is playing a part which is necessary to drive the plot forward and to counteract the development of other characters the beadle was someone who's controlling the young poor children is there to prevent them from moving forwards even though at the time he wouldn't have seen his role in that way he would have seen it as moving them on enabling them to find employment so he exists in the story as this kind of ridiculous larger-than-life character who's always getting things wrong the jokes on him according to Charles Dickens and that's the power that he had he's writing about real people in real life he can poke fun at them and as long as it's done tongue-in- cheek he gets away with it every time okay so he's trying to portray life in a more honest manner he's not romanticizing anything but he is having a little dig every now and then and this is what realism in literature is doing is making reference to imperfection it's not sugarcoating it okay life is not through a filtered lens in Victorian times it is you know the rough and the raw so realism in the arts in the illustrations same thing detailed unembellished depiction of nature or contemporary life okay and when we look at these etched illustrations we can see this one here this is of a London Street in the back-to-back terrace housing and actually it serves realism well in that I'm talking about this one here now that illustration there it serves realism well in that it's black and white so black ink and what that's doing is that's really picking up on the dark almost morose backdrop to London living and then you've got these old characters that occur hunched over with this perhaps borrowed or found top hat that somehow suggests delusions of grandeur oh I'll get there one day I've got me top hat and I'm gonna make it I'll be a gent I will so and then the other end of the spectrum you've got Queen Victoria and Prince Albert there in the lap of luxury so yes and the question did Dickens write a personal concern of consciousness around social conditions yes that was his driving force that was his raison d'etre which means that he was writing to open the discussion about the plight of the poor and the working classes but he understood that in order to do that he needed to write stories he'd experienced life working in a boot blacking factory himself he lost his father at a young age he was essentially poor himself he understood he had a working knowledge of deprivation and he understood the chasm that existed between the rich and the poor and he also understood that he was a respected man in society people were listening to him and he had he was obliged to open their eyes to what was happening so he's rejecting imaginative idealization he's saying no and guess what I'm gonna employ these illustrators as well and we're gonna show it as it really is but we can make fun of it so we can make a social comment so we might have a little comical illustration with the beadle perhaps his hat is a bit skew-whiff or he's looking a bit uncomfortable in his situation that pokes fun at him subtly satirically and as we know with satire it goes over the many people's heads but it's still there it's beautiful it's subtle but for those who understand which is not gonna be the illiterate right it's not gonna be your average guy on the street in those days okay it's gonna be the people who are actually reading what he's writing they are gonna be the ones the ones in power who actually understand there's a deeper hidden meaning here we might have to take note of that yeah he's got a point and as anything as with anything when you're trying to persuade someone to your point of view to your argument you need to sugarcoat it and you need to meet them where they are so that they are able to receive the message without feeling antagonized and he did that through written periodicals and illustrations so it was clever and that's where we are with the Victorian period now as I mentioned in the beginning we got Dickens writing now we've got Austin writing then and if we remember you know George Eliot Arthur Conan Doyle Lewis Carroll Dostoevsky if we remember we're talking about realism so we talk about social commentary and each of those authors in the Victorian era were seeking to open the public's eyes to change it was a massive time of change Jane Austen was talking about the women Dickens was talking about the plight of the poor okay and it's quite it's relevant and it's quite important that we understand the different periods of time and what was happening historically in each period of time because that directly reflects what's happening in the arts and I always refer to the visual arts as well as the literary arts because they run side by side and that's what was beautiful about Dickens was that he he embraced that he wasn't just an author he was a thinker he was somebody who championed the cause of social change and awareness and he was gonna do whatever it took use whatever tools he had whatever influences he had taken for example William Hogarth with his illustrations and he was going to put it all together and he was going to reproduce it in a way that everybody could see it okay and with satirical illustrations you did not have to be literate in order to understand the meaning okay so it was accessible to those who wanted to understand and that's education amazing amazing amazing man
