No… I LIKE Dickens! This was an anti-dumbing down piece. I was attempting to show what it would be like were Dickens watered down for the modern reader. Here ENDETH the comment!
Criticism / Dickens (For The Hard of Thinking)
“A Story About Two Different Cities That Are Shown To Be Very Similar”
By BIG CHARLIE D, Author of “Xmas Hymn” and “David Copperfield: Not That Fatuous Magician”
1
The (Time) Period
They were good and bad times.
They were stupid and clever.
You needed God on your side because things were pretty messed up.
It was dark and light some months.
Spring was alright. Winter was sad.
We had some stuff sometimes and no stuff the next.
We were going to Heaven, but were also going other ways, ways that led back to the same place in a symbolic kind of style. The point is that what goes around comes around.
The king had a big jaw and the Queen looked OK when on the throne in France. Things were going to stay the same with these people in charge, everyone knew this.
It was 1775 and people thought God was doing eerie stuff behind their backs. Mrs Southcott was 25 and some psychic officer had a dream about London being wiped out. The ghost from Cock-lane didn’t spook people as much anymore and other spirits were also quite crap now. Royalty in the UK thought they were getting messages from spirits that were far more important than silly ghosts that scared chickens in poor people’s farms.
France didn’t go in for ghosts and instead got very rich. They started getting nasty with the poor people; chopping, burning, and killing a youngster for not kneeling to praise some monks. In France and Norway there are similar trees. It is likely that the Woodman already knew the kid was done for before he was bumped off. The Woodman is a metaphor for Fate. It is also likely that the Farmer has chosen beforehand which pigs in dirty farms he wants to get rid off beforehand. The Farmer is a metaphor for Death. The Farmer and Woodman work together in this place, but no one can say this or they’ll be looked at funny.
In England the police were rubbish. Crime was everywhere. Burglaries, street shootings and so on. Families were scared stiff. A city tradesmen shot a whole bunch of people after a robbery. A guard shot three of seven robbers, then got shot by the other four. The Mayor was robbed too. Prisoners who escape were shot on site. Lords had their jewellery nicked. Criminals even started to shoot and rob other criminals. Hundred of criminals were getting hanged. People started targeting criminals and getting their own justice.
This was 1775. The Woodman and Fate ruled the place big time. They will be central figures in the rest of this book.
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JamesPatrick reviewed Version 2 -
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I sympathize with your cause, but you’ve left your criticism incomplete! Now that you’ve showed the reader a translation of Dickens, it’s best to continue with your argument. All you’ve done is illustrate a point you made outside your paper!
Fun though.
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Deanne reviewed Version 2 -
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I never read that particular Dickens but knew enuf about it to enjoy what you did with it. I loved the by the author of…part. You did this superbly well and kudos for that. But Dickens is not really such a bad writer, ever…it is “The Great Gatsby” I could never read. Dickens has a way of keeping even young people reading. So—-wonderful satire, but there are a lot more mundane writers it would work better with. Still, you’re really good at what you do.
icedsapphire reviewed Version 2 -
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I fear you are attempting to steal my title of “Most pompus ass on Urbis”. While this is quite funny, a very interesting take on modern writing I think you made a few errors in your judgements.
First off: I only find a few reasons why people don’t read the classics. One-They are force fed them in school and as anyone knows, you will have a hard time enjoying something if it is shoved down your throat. So in that sense it is partially the fault of scholars for a lack of interest (I guarentee you, if people were forced to read Stephen King and analyze his words, they’d probably be a little less popular than they are now.) Two-classics can be very boring. Not always, but many times they don’t really have the punch and wollup that some of the modern pieces have. Our culture is becoming immune to more and more each day. People crave written words that hit them like bricks. Three-people right now are so busy running quickly from moment to moment that we don’t allow ourselves time to stop and read something. Why spend six days reading a book when we can watch the movie in two hours? Sound bytes are the new wave.
I do not disagree that people are making themselves more and more stupid. However I feel that you sitting there preaching how we are morons is not going to change much. This piece is not a criticism, it is more of a satire. Calling it a criticism does not work really. Because all you are doing is allowing some moron to say “Yeah! If That is Dickens, give me more.” Besides, I’m assuming that you made a very large error. Spell check and grammar. Even a moron knows how to do that. And you did not. Does not really credit you much. And you only solidify your statement by taking the time to create “Dickens for Dummies” instead of actually creating something new and profound.
Try a spell check and a bit more originality and try it again.
goofygoober168 reviewed Version 2 -
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I am absolutely agreed to everything you said in your reviewer notes. As an English major, I hear that kind of crap all the time from undergrads in my classes, even non-English grad students. It makes me want to strangle them.
The reworked chapter is humorous (at least to me) and makes its point quite well. It sounds as if it was written by an uninterested freshman rather than Dickens, very believably so. Phrasing and word choice make the piece, especially this one.
DCAllen reviewed Version 2 -
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I agree absolutely with your point of view. That said, there are great authors alive today who carry the flame, as it were. I think the dumbing down of literature is a vicious circle in which The Publisher is mostly to blame.
Your very well-written dumb-down of A Tale of Two Cities would be more effective (in my opinion) if it were put into a context, perhaps a what-if situation if Charles Dickens had to please a publisher these days.
I gave you a ten for “Most Patronising . . .”, but I didn’t really find this patronising.
Tryptophan reviewed Version 2 -
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To preface, I disagree with your analysis of both 19th century literature (including realism, romanticism, transcendentalism, etc.) and your analysis of literature in the post-Hemingway literary world. I argue that classical literature is inherently indulgent as opposed to intelligent; the writings of Hawthorne, for example, provide sentences with several clauses not for imagery’s sake or thematically-intriguing prose (like a Pynchon sentence), but instead to personally explain the symbolism of his characters (there is a particularly painful section of the chapter ‘Pearl’ where he specifically explains the significance of Pearl’s personality on Hester’s mind and on the theme of adultery.) Wharton, Austen, they all have the similar problems. There is little beauty in complexity.
In contrast, the modern literature of Hemingway, Sedaris, and Vonnegut (in particular), etc., is concise in prose but still thematically significant. Slaughterhouse Five is, in my opinion, far more thematically significant and original than anything Dickens ever wrote, but still is easily accessible to many audiences. For ultimately, the purpose of writing significant literature is to essentially advertise your views upon society, and if the writing is too difficult for many to read, then a book has failed in swaying those to a point of view. Undoubtedly, the writing you have criticized in particular is terrible, however, it is barely representative of modern trends.
Well, if you need to rescind this comment for being a rebuttal as opposed to a critique, then cest la vive.
Now, I believe that this criticism could be strengthened by, after the excerpt of the new version of A Tale of Two Cities, explaining how it is terrible, and, far more importantly, how it is indicative of modern literary trends. Point out the terribly unspecific diction, and the lack of imagery. Compare it to other published works with similar problems, to make a more comprehensive argument.
Pogopaws reviewed Version 1 -
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Well done, and I couldn’t agree with you more. The dumbing down of literature is infuriating. Not to mention the increasing diregard for the classics. I am not sure I would call this criticism so much as a Dickensian pastiche. You capture his method and not a little of his madness.
“You needed God on your side because they were pretty messed up.” There is a problem in that sentence with pronouns. You go from “you” to “they.” Stick with one or the other (I’d stick with “they”). I am not sure of the correlation between France not going in for ghosts and getting rich; the use of “instead” doesn’t quite work.
Fun. Would be great if it inspired people to go to the original.
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