Dickens

Back when I was in school, I never much cared for Charles Dickens' works. I know he's one of those authors we're "supposed to" study. But you know the saying -- "So many books; so little time." His books were never ones I wanted to foist on the kids. But I always felt like I was leaving them with a big gaping hole in that area.

Then I saw that American Players Theatre was going to be doing a play about Dickens and his works this summer. I thought this was a great chance to fill in that educational gap. So we plowed into the Dummies version of studying Charles Dickens, without desiring to give it serious time or attention, but just enough to give us a bit of a nodding acquaintance with these works. (Turns out, in the end, that the play about Dickens is a one-night fund-raiser that isn't available for the school matinees anyhow. Bummers.)

Having other topics that took higher priority, I decided we'd just watch some videos to get the gist of a few stories. We had already seen the Muppet version of A Christmas Carol repeatedly, as well as some other versions. So the kids knew what "Scrooge" means. We'd also seen Nicholas Nickleby, which my husband and I found quite enjoyable even before we watched it for "educational reasons." The kids weren't as impressed with Nicholas Nickleby as I was, but it was an okay movie even for them.

The first thing we watched was an educational video from our library. It was called The World of Charles Dickens and was only 17 minutes of non-fiction. It touched on the politics and philosophy and history that impacted Dickens and his writing. Although we often hear that Dickens was protesting the shabby treatment of the poor, it seemed to me that his stories soemtimes went further than that, as though he may have bought into certain "progressive" ideas of the second half of the 1800s.

The first movie we got for our introduction to Dickens was Oliver Twist. Boy, that didn't rank very high in our opinion. Too depressing. Too dark. What a bummer of a movie. I wish we hadn't spent the time, even if we did gain some cultural literacy out of it. I wonder if the book is as bad as the movie made it seem?

The next movie we watched was the Masterpiece Theatre version of Great Expectations. That was significantly better than Oliver Twist. A little convoluted and hard to follow in some spots. Not something I think I'd want to bother watching again, but not terrible either.

We were beginning to think that we really didn't need any more exposure to Dickens, but the next movie in our Blockbuster queue arrived in the mail. So we watched David Copperfield. This one was a good movie. I think we liked it even better than Nicholas Nickleby! The host of Masterpiece Theatre pointed out that this is one of Dickens cheeriest stories. On top of that, we liked the way the story was told on film. The kids especially were interested in the actors they knew from the Harry Potter movies. Some of the key characters in this version of David Copperfield included the folks who played Harry, McGonagall, Umbridge, and Madam Hooch. I thought we counted five people from the Harry Potter movies, but right now I can only recall those four. But Gandalf was in the movie too. I was glad that we lucked into seeing the best of the movies as the last one: it left a nicer concluding touch to our brief foray into Dickens.