The art of fiction: Dickens and social apartheid

David Blackburn

Friday, 10th February 2012

Of all the pieces celebrating the life and legacy of ‘the Inimitable’ Dickens, Toby Young has, for my money, written the most important. In the latest issue of the Spectator, Toby reveals that numerous state secondary schools have dropped Dickens from their GCSE curriculums on the grounds that ‘ordinary children’ cannot cope with the books. Private schools, he says, challenge their pupils. Certainly, the independent school I attended forced us to read Hard Times in addition to Jane Eyre, which was the set text. We were also encouraged to read North and South and Middlemarch to produce exam scripts that ‘glisten among the dross’, I recall my Labour-voting, Guardian-reading English teacher remarking. (I didn’t know it then, but he'd left the state sector because he felt that it limited rather than expanded horizons.) As it happened, I couldn’t handle Middlemarch (and still can’t), but I lost nothing by trying.

Toby is right to conclude:

‘We will never dismantle our class system if we allow children from poor backgrounds to waste their time at school…while rich kids are being introduced to the best that has been thought and said. That’s not social justice. It’s social apartheid.’

The real crime here, as Toby notes, is that Dickens is accessible. Earlier this week, we asked three writers to choose their favourite passage from Dickens. None of their choices is unduly taxing; but even if they were a teacher could turn to faithful screen adaptations to contextualise and inspire. I remember catching the opening of David Lean’s Great Expectations on television for the first time. It was one of those headachy afternoons that come to dominate one’s memory of childhood summers, and I was jolted out of my thumb-sucking stupor by Magwitch. The cricket was on, but I had to watch more.

Blog Tags: Education , Film , Spectator , The art of fiction