If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.
I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.
Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.
Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler.
Dickens belongs to the English people.
I didn't want to be stuck in Dickens period dramas because then I would never know if I was any good.
The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.
Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.