Three Cheers for Charles Dickens

I have just finished watching an episode of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a re-run of the series done several years ago by Masterpiece Theater on public television. Masterpiece Theater has done other Dickens novels that I can recall, among them David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit. All were beautifully done. While Masterpiece Theater also deserves credit for presentations of modern fiction—I recall The Rector’s Wife, several years ago, as an excellent example—some of its nineteenth-century works, other than those of Dickens, I have found a bit trying.

However, I find the Dickens presentations by Masterpiece Theater entrancing: the framing of the 500-plus pages of the novels into a TV production, the casting of the multitude of characters in the novels, the filming of 19th Century London, the occasional music. When watching them, I am taken back to the days when I was around eight to ten years old and played a card game “The Game of Authors” with two of my uncles. The cards had suits of different American and British 19th Century authors, the object being, by discarding and drawing, to build four of a suit. That way, I became familiar with Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Makepeace Thackeray, and many others.

Among all the crap that TV offers, it is delightful to find an occasional jewel like the Masterpiece Theater productions of the Dickens novels.