Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

As anyone who's read my columns knows, I do like Charles Dickens. As a high schooler, I thought he was crap, but later as I reread his stuff as an adult, and learned more about him, I saw what a fantastic writer he was and how adept at his craft he was. I think all writers should give him a chance (or a second chance at least). He wrote about some pretty dark stuff well before that was part of our everyday literature. I mean, in Oliver Twist, both the villan and his loyal canine are hung from the side of a building as they try to escape. In Bleak House, a guy spontaneously combusts, leaving his gooey, uh, remains all over his junk shop; bodies are buried one of top of another, and the gravediggers litterally jump up and down on the bodies to get them all to fit.

Don't let Disney fool you, Dickens loved to write about the underbelly of society, and he frequently walked the ghettos of London to get a true sense of the real degradation that existed all around him. He wrote about sex, murder, racism, biggotry, prostitution on a regular basis. And he did it during the height of the stuffy Victorian era. Ya gotta give him credit for that.

He'd be remembered if he only wrote "A Christmas Carol"...no minor masterwork, that.