Of course Dickens wrote great literature!
But did he?
As I recall most of his early work at least was written for "penny dreadfuls" and/or serialisations. He wrote, as a journalist, for swift and profitable publication - in the cheapest mass media entertainment of his tiime.
It is only subsequently that some people have decided that his work is great literature - and they have made further commercial success out of promoting Dickens' work as "great literature".
Is there any chance at all that when Dickens sat down with pen and paper that he even dreamt that his work would still be in print even ten years on?
There have been a number of questions here recently about genre and similar things and these have frequently come back to issues of quality and (commercial) viability.
These things are importan - often very important (just to get the work out there) - but - I would like to stress the importance, for all of us, of just - writing.
Dickens would not have had a chance of producing "great literature" if he hadn't sat down and written something, anything in the first place.
What do people think?
David
Dickens was massively popular in his time, and although he did write for quick and easy publication, this was far more normal then. Thomas Hardy did the same. So did Henry James. I would class him very much as being in the same league as George Eliot, whom he himself really admired. His novels are so complex and psycological that I would argue that they are definitely great literature - the fact that they were read very widely upon publication doesn't mean that they were cheap reads. Nowadays Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks are very popular but I think that they're still classed as literary authors. I bet that if Dickens had never existed and somebody now wrote, say, 'Bleak House' (modernised, but with language similar to Dickens' in style) it would be a massive hit.
By the way, did anyone see Armando Iannucci's programme on Dickens that was on around Christmas time? If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend it!
It's not just Dickens. There was a news story a few years ago about a writer who was contiuously being rejected, so he edited Pride and Prejudice - changed a few names and settings that's all - and the publsiher sent it back saying "It's not even close to being a publishable novel."
I was just about to stop posting on here and get some work done ;-)
David