Walk into any bookstore, and you can hardly avoid “bumping into” Charles Dickens. Many of Dickens’ works still sell well today.    1    

As someone who teaches Dickens, the question of why we still read him is often on my mind.     2     One day nearly 10 years ago, however, when I was giving a lecture, I was telling the students that for Victorian readers, Dickens’s writing was a “tune-in-next-week” type of thing that generated crazes.     3     “But why should we still read this stuff?” the student asked. The answer I gave was only acceptable, “Because he teacher you how to think,” I said.

The question annoyed me for years, for years, and for years I told myself answers, but never with complete satisfaction. We read Dickens because he is not just a man of his own times, but also a man for our times. We read Dickens because we can learn from experiences of his characters almost as easily as we can learn from our own experiences.

    4     But these are not exactly the reason why I read Dickens. My search for an answer continued until one day a text message came from a student of mine. “We still read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us why we are what we are.” Simple as it was, that’s the explanation I had sought for years.

Dickens shines a light on who we are during the best of times and worst of times.     5     If you have time, go to pick up one of his many novels, read it and enjoy what it has to tell you about yourself.