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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of the popular YA series are 400-600 pages each and have 2-6 installments.

I’m reading a historical fiction series that on book 18 and each book is 350-400 pages.

There are new books that are destined to be classics.

Also, Charles Dickens was a horrible person and I can’t separate his art from who he was, so I’m fine leaving him behind. Bah humbug. [/quote]

How exactly was Dickens a horrible person? I'm looking at his wiki biography and don't see anything "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination. His marriage clearly was not fulfilling but that's not tantamount to being horrible. But you make it sound like he hired child labor and was cruel to the women of the slums. [/quote]
His wife was pregnant almost non-stop for ten years. He was also carrying on affairs and she only found out when he accidentally sent a gift for a mistress to his wife.

Then they separated and he decided he would keep four kids and she would figure out the other six.

There’s more to it, but this is common knowledge among British people. It’s a little strange that Americans don’t know and get mad about it if you tell them.

I’m going to guess the wiki for his wife talks about this. [/quote]

There are definitely things about Charles Dickens’s life that reveal a flawed character. But you need to take into consideration both the many and awful traumas of his childhood, and the norms of the society in which he lived. Having a dozen children was a normative thing in Victorian England and would still be today had we not figured out reliable birth control - just look at the norm in societies where women don’t have access to education and birth control.

I am probably the angriest feminist on this board, who endlessly fumes about the inequality in our society and reading this board I am daily disgusted by the realities of most marriages - I’m sure at one time or another I’ve clucked with sympathy at your marriage, poster, and how you are used and mistreated by your husband.

That said, I can still recognize the genius of Charles Dickens - and forgive him for being a flawed human being because he was able to convey the frailty of humanity including the terrible flaws of character in so many of his novels depicted in both males and females who abused and mistreated the people they loved. That’s life. Dickens is life, in all its glorious ugliness.[/quote]

+1 There are many fascinating stories of writer friendships at the time. Longfellow and Dickens were friends. Dickens gave him (and others) tours of the slums. He truly brought to light some of the grimmest circumstances in his time. [/quote]

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