Why is charles dickens important

Much comedy today is conditioned by the way Dickens wrote it in the 19th Century and comedy writers today owe a huge debt to him. In reality, we don't finish our sentences and we all interrupt each other. While everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Miss Piggy has taken a role in a film adaptation of Dickens's work, many argue that he was as instrumental in creating the conventions of cinema as he was for inspiring the content itself. Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein said that important aspects of cinema were created by the influence of Dickens on pioneering film director DW Griffith.

He argued that Dickens invented, among other things, the parallel montage - where two stories run alongside each other - and the close-up. The BFI says that there were around versions of Dickens's work recreated in film in the silent era alone. And those adaptations continue to this day. This is in large part because of the visual way Dickens wrote, creating painstaking depictions of places.

Prof Theodore Hovet, of Western Kentucky University, has argued that Dickens's influence stretches further than just adaptations in modern cinema, actually providing themes and techniques that are still used today.

For example, he says , the film Dirty Pretty Things' depiction of London pays "homage to a model established by Dickens's compulsive wanderings of the city". The development of the characters in Dickens is often heralded as one of his greatest achievements. While characters in many novels before had used symbolic names, what Dickens did differently was refine the practice to suggest character traits and their role.

In Great Expectations, Magwitch has a number of different interpretations - from a magpie representing theft to Magi, a Biblical reference to the wise men.

His family moved around though, and he grew up in London and Kent. When Charles was 12 his father was sent to prison because of financial problems. This meant Charles had to go to work, and he got a job at a shoe polish factory pasting the labels on to bottles. Many experts have said this period in his life had a lot of influence on the stories he went on to write.

Charles Dickens wrote 15 novels, five novellas and hundreds of short stories. But his most famous work is probably A Christmas Carol. It was first published just before Christmas in , and its first print of 6, copies sold out in just 8 days.

The story of Ebenezer Scrooge learning about the spirit of Christmas is still well known and the BBC made a new television adaptation of it just last year. Oliver Twist was turned into a musical that is still being performed now, and there have been several film versions of Great Expectations.

Away from television adaptations and stage shows, many people still read his books. They have never been 'out-of-print,' which means, even all these years later, book shops are selling enough copies to need new ones printed.

Dickens wrote about topics that lots of other authors ignored. He wrote a lot about people who lived in poverty, who were ill, or who had to fight for their place in society - a lot like he had to do as child. Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. Many of his characters were based on real people and their lives.

That made people understand his stories more, and reflect on what Britain was like at that time. We read Dickens not just because he was a man of his own times, but because he was a man for our times as well.

We read Dickens because his perception and investigation of the human psyche is deep, precise, and illuminating, and because he tells us things about ourselves by portraying personality traits and habits that might seem all too familiar. His messages about poverty and charity have travelled through decades, and we can learn from the experiences of his characters almost as easily as we can learn from our own experiences.

These are all wonderful reasons to read Dickens. But these are not exactly the reasons why I read Dickens. My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came — not surprisingly — from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous efforts — an explanation so simple and beautiful that only a year-old could have written it.

I could add all of the decoration to the argument with my years of education — the pantheon of rich characters mirroring every personality type; the "universal themes" laid out in such meticulous and timeless detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre — but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had come from someone else.

As is often the case in Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main character here was induced by the forthrightness of another party.

What is Charles Dickens contribution to English literature? Why is Charles Dickens famous today? Was Charles Dickens insane? Who did Charles Dickens marry? Who was Charles Dickens father? What age did Charles Dickens die? Why was Charles Dickens a supporter of the poor?

Why does Scrooge hate the poor? What was Dickens an advocate of? What does the boy ignorance Symbolise?