HalJordan wrote:
It probably makes me a bad person, but I don't really like his work. A Christmas Carol and Tale of Two Cities are good. The rest I've read is just not that great. I thought Great Expectations was one of the worst books I've ever picked up.
It doesn't make you a bad person, but it does mean that your opinion of what qualifies as 'good' literature is suspect.
As far as goes, Dickens was an excellent writer, one of the best English writers of all time.
The main problem with his work is that all or almost all of his work was originally serialized in magazines and newspapers, which meant that he had an incentive to make his stories as long as possible. The common assertion that he was paid by the word is wrong, but not far off. He wasn't literally paid by the word, but he was paid by the number of installments. A story which was originally plotted to be in 6 parts could, and often did, end up getting extended to 10 parts or 12 parts if the story proved really popular with readers and the newspaper asked him to make it longer. Also, since his works were published in monthly installments, this meant that during the writing process, he got feedback from readers, and often he would change his plan halfway through a story in response to criticisms or suggestions from readers.
So the two biggest flaws of his work, a tendency to pad stories with irrelevant details and a tendency for the story to undergo a radical shift halfway through, are both products of the way he published his stories.
This is why, on the whole, the stories that he did not serialize, such as A Christmas Carol, tend to be better than the ones that he did serialize.