The great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago this year. Andre Marais looks back on his life and work and his relevance for us today.

What would Dickens have made of South Africa in this year of his bicentenary?

Despite all obvious differences with the times he lived in, Dickens would have been all too familiar with greed, the large disparities of wealth, the grinding poverty living alongside the shameless accumulation of wealth, the day to day struggle of the poor to survive in a society that displays only contempt for them. He also would probably have recognized the treatment meted out to and loathing it had for the most vulnerable among the poor, namely women and children. 

In his day, Dickens’ writings were dismissed as sentimental “sullen socialism” because it exposed and championed the experience of the poor. He had faith, as he put it, in the people governed rather than the people governing. His poor were not unlike the working class in most South African cities, fighting the harsh realities of hunger, unemployment, violence and exploitation. Dickens’ London and the characters he painted were ravaged by a profit driven system that left social dislocation and devastation in its wake. His novels like “Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist” speak the truth to power with brilliantly conceived stories about the lives of the excluded, the marginalized and the forgotten jostling for the right to be heard, the longing to be visible in a world that declared them invisible. The characters who inhabit his work had to deal with circumstances that dehumanized them, but Dickens bestows them with a life, energy and colour through the idiomatic use of language and transforms them into unforgettable characters on par with the establishment that seeks to drown them out.

You cannot read him without being struck by the way his novels capture, in comic and grotesque form, central aspects of capitalist alienation. Perhaps Dickens would have said the more things change, the more they stay the same! Please Sir, can I have some more.

(1812 ­ 2012) radical of a special type