Charles Dickens too long for today's students: Biographer

No doubt he had penned some of the English literature's most iconic novels, but Charles Dickens' works are too long for today's students, says his biographer.

Dickens, considered to be the greatest of the Victorian period, enjoyed a wider popularity than had any other previous author during his lifetime. But, modern children do not have the concentration to read his classic, but lengthy novels, according to Claire Tomalin.
"Very simply, he is, after Shakespeare, the greatest creator of characters in English. Today's children have very short attention spans because they're being reared on dreadful TV programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a dickens novel, and I think that's a pity," the 'Daily Express' quoted the acclaimed biographer as saying.

Dickens, Tomalin said, with his depiction of an unfair society was still "amazingly relevant".
"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant - the great gulf between rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt MPs, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it," she said as Britain celebrates his 200th birth anniversary on February 7.