Curtain calls for Charles Dickens

Press, 4 March 1983, Page 18

Curtain calls for Charles Dickens

By

KEITH BRACE,

literary editor.

“Birmingham Post”

Rated by many critics and by popular suffrage as the next greatest writer in English after Shakespeare. Charles Dickens has recently had his lasting fame boosted —■ if that were possible — by a stage version of one of his novels. The Royal Shakespeare Com-< pany's dramatic version of “Nicholas Nickleby” has delighted audiences in Britain and the United States with its brilliant evocation of the comedy, melodrama, and pathos of Dickens in this early and still much read novel.

Stage adaptations of Dickens were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the great actor, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, for instance, played the villainous Fagin in a famous stage version of “Oliver Twist." But there have been few English stage versions in modern times, apart from “Oliver,” a very successful musical version of “Oliver Twist.”

Within living memory there were English music hall artists whose acts consisted of melodramatic recitations from Dickens. Also, many films have been made from Dickens’s novels: notably the 1935 Hollywood version of “David Copperfield,” with the comedian W. C. Fields as the irresponsible soendthrift Mr Micawber; and, in the late 19405, British films of “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist.”

Ironically, the 1947 British film of “Nicholas Nickleby” was not a great success, nor was the 1952 film of “Pickwick Papers.” The later, more complex and more sombre novels of Dickens, have not attracted cinema directors.

Probably all the novels, however, have been made into television serials. of varying degrees of success, some, of them too reserved and played down to do justice to Dickens's soaring imagination and unrivalled serio-comic prose. And there is rarely a time when 8.8. C. radio is not broadcasting a Dickens serial. '

The current stage version of “Nicholas Nickleby” captures the vigour and brio that television ver-

sions often miss. Dickens himself was a brilliant amateur actor who. his friends among the leading actors of the time believed, could have achieved fame on the stage if he had chosen to make it his profession.

In his later years he gave many recitals from his works to audiences in Britain and America. The power of these often mesmerised his audiences, while women fainted and had to be carried out of the hall. Many biographers believe that the physical and emotional toll exacted by these performances shortened Dickens's life — he died aged 58 in 1870.

The stage “Nickleby." with its villains, heroes, its pathetic victim, the boy Smike, recaptures some of the hallucinatory power Dickens might have put into a recital from it. There is also a delightful company of strolling “ham” actors in the novel, a charming collection of characters brought to life by reallife actors.

The ups and downs of Dickens's popularity, of which the stage “Nickleby” is a resounding “up,” is a literary study in itself. He has never ceased to be popular with, and loved by, simple, uncritical readers. They laugh over his comedy but perhaps do not cry over his pathos as readily as their forbears did. Crowds filled the New York waterfront to meet the ship bringing over the last instalment of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” breathlessly eager to know if the heroine, Little Nell, was to be, allowed to live or not. Tough politicians such as the British Prime Minister, W. E. Gladstone, were said to have wept over her death.

Yet there have always been those who can read other Victorian novelists such as Thackeray, the Brontes, Trollope, and George Eliot, but who have not been able to cope with Dickens, finding his comedy excessive and his pathos distressing.

His critical reputation has varied, too. His contemporaries among writers admired him. but the general opinion was that he was a great entertainer rather than a great serious writer. And this opinion has lingered into the present time despite the championship of the writer G. K. Chesterton, the British critic. George Orwell, and the American critic. Edmund Wilson. who all saw Dickens as a great writer of Shakespearian status. The highly influential Cambridge - critic. F. R. Leavis. originally tell for the simplistic idea of Dickens as .. a great entertainer. It was only in • his later years that he came to' write about Dickens as the creative ■ genius he was. * Dickens’s fame as a champion of good causes, as a generous humani- - tarian using his novels to attack; abuses, such' as the slum school in • “Nicholas Nickleby,” the law’s delay. in “Bleak House.” debtors’ prisons in . “Little Dorrit,” has always stood in the way of his fame as a writer. '

• How can one attack a man whose writings do so much good? This was; the inhibiting thought in the minds, of many of his contemporaries. In fact. Dickens no longer appears', today primarily as the crusading novelist of his' popular reputation.; Many of the abuses he wrote about were eventually cleared up. or had' been got rid of by the time he came' to write about them; many of the novels are set' 20 or 30 years before, their actual date. Some of the abuses, such as the* delays of the law and government bureaucracy, are permanent abusesin all countries and cultures, at-; tacked by other writers apart fromDickens. Although schools such as; that in “Nickleby” no longer exist in civilised countries, the people who ran them were given imaginative; immortality by Dickens, and live again in the stage, version of his novel. London Press Service. ■