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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3761 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: America dumbs down: a rising tide of anti-intellectual thinking

    “He scarcely ever passes from the humourous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.”

I've read every Dickens novel your average guy on the street can name, and then some, and this is total crap. He was quite good at exactly this. Hurts to see George Eliot say that.

I don't find any of those criticisms terribly convincing. Dickens' greatest fault was his occasional over-over-verbosity. His characterizations were often brilliant and almost always very apt. They were essentially stereotypes, but there's nothing wrong with that.