If you read one biography of Charles Dickens this year, seriously, make it Jane Smiley’s Charles Dickens: A Life, from the Penguin Lives series. (via LQ web editor michellelegro)

From Charles Dickens: A Life:

He made fun. He made fun of the Civil Service, he made fun of the courts of Chancery, he made fun of the aristocracy ad the factory owners and the bankers and managerial class. He made fun of educators and money lenders and women who married for money. He made fun of Parliment. He made fun of selfishness and self-interest of all kinds. He made fun of all sorts of religious types, but espically Evangelicals. He made fun of feckless young men and libidinous old men and government officials like beadles. 

But more important, his mind did not work by means of analytical sifting of premise and data, or through a refined analysis of motive and moral reckoning, as, say George Eliot’s mind worked. Dickens mind worked symbolically. He apprehended the word through figures that were endowed with meaning. Objects come alive and people become mechanical…

Dickens appeals to that part of the reader that recognizes that much is left undiscussed by reasonable discourse, that people and institutions often do populate our inner lives not as who they are but as what they mean to us, and that we often do not see them as whole and complex, but simple and strange.