You know, Oliver Twist is actually not one of my... I wouldn't say favorite, I don't know if I have a favorite Dickens novel, but I did read... the first Dickens I've ever read, it's not even Copperfield. It was actually Great Expectations《遠大前程》。

I do like that one. So this is the story of Pip. So Pip is an orphan,again. (Pip Pirrip（菲利普·皮里普）：小說的主人公和敘述者，一個孤兒，由他的姐姐和姐夫撫養長大。

They're all orphans who dreams of kind of rising above his so humble beginnings really, he wants to advance in the world.

And this novel is quite famous for some of its characters such as Miss Havisham.

You know before we talked about British like the ultra rich British gazillionaires, they pride themselves for being eccentric, yes. And Miss Havisham was very eccentric.

She was very weird. So the idea that she was left at the altar, she just basically wandered around the house, like a ghost dressed in her old wedding dress kind of surrounded by the wedding feast. It's a really really powerful image.

Even nowadays there are lots of parody, 現在還有很多惡搞 Great Expectation里面肯定會講到Miss Havisham.

Exactly. Then you have Magwitch, so he's benefactor, the one who gives him the money The mysterious.

Yeah, and I won't say I won't give any spoilers in case you actually want to read the book.

Spoilers for Dickens?

You want to watch, I would say watch the adaptation.

It is long. But this is more about this orphan trying to rise above humble beginnings and try to turn himself into a gentleman.

Exactly. And the other one that is very well known, probably not as famous is Bleak House.

中文的譯名叫做《荒涼山莊》. I just love that Bleak is actually built into the name, the title.

Well exactly. So it's all about the legal system and how it affects individuals.

So Basically it is all about a legal case that is more and more complicated.

Have you ever read? Like I think his favorite book that he wrote was David Copperfield that was supposed to be his semi-autobiographical novel ?

I do like David Copperfield. It is I would say I prefer it to Great Expectations. There was a really really good film adaptation of it a few years ago.

The colorblind cast.

The colorblind cast which was so so good. I really enjoyed that.

大家如果有興趣的話, 其實可以看一下近幾年很新的這幾個改編版本的狄更斯的, 我跟安瀾剛才說 colorblind cast指的就是你不用看他的原著里面是什么樣的人種, 現在他們就是所謂的色盲選角, 就是我可能David Copperfield主角可能選的是個比如說印度裔, it was like an Indian actor, wasn't it?

British Indian actor Dev Patel. It was really really really good.

So the whole point colorblind casting is really just focus on the acting, not the skin color.

Okay. Do you know there's another Dickens book that is very popular or well known in China?

Which one ?

A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

That's my extent of the knowledge of that book. I guess the extent for most people.

It's set in the French revolution.

Exactly. Okay. But having talked about all of these famous books, you would think as a former journalist and then as a like a writer, he constantly talks about injustice and talks about the system, talks about child laborer, exploitation and all that. You would... did he actually try to push or advocate for some social changes?

He was a social reformer. And he used his writing to push for change. He was mainly focus on the condition of the poor and just the injustices of the Victorian era.

So what he's very good at in his novels is pointing out people's hypocrisy.

就是虛偽。

So for example, he would show kind of rich people as superficially supposed to be very nice, very caring, but they do things that is completely hypocritical.

So it's mostly like having like sort of criticism on the upper class or middle upper class.

Exactly. So the people he would show they would be very proper, they would do the right things superficially. But actually they were exploiting other people. They were taken advantage of their position. So he was very, very good at pointed out hypocrisy.

I see, yeah. I mean I wouldn't say Dickens is one of my Top ten favorite writers, but he is very important if you want to know anything about English literature, English language literature for that matters you need to read at least some Dickens.

I really like Dickens. The only thing is that it's so so dense. So I remember when I started learning Dickens when I was at school, and I read the first page of Hard Times and another one.

I read it and it was like, okay, then my teacher explained it and made us look at every single word like how he was using the imagery.

And you just felt like this is amazing, but the problem is that you can only really do that if you are literally analyzing word by word.

I see. You know I used to keep Pickwick Papers by my bedside by my pillow side when I was in university it was an actual paper book, it was really thick.

And the reason for that was not because I was really in love with this work. It was really because that put me to sleep.

Exactly.

5 pages I'm out.

Okay, I read it somewhere that he was also very skilled at public speaking.

He was. Charles Dickens actually wanted to be an actor and he was famous for giving public readings of his works.

And these were bringing huge crowds who wanted to hear him speak because it wasn't just a boring reading out of his book.

It was more like acting.

He was acting. So he brought his characters to life and this was actually what he was also very famous for as well, for these public readings.

He was almost like a literary superstar.

Exactly. Unfortunately this all happened before we were able to record Dickens, but from what we've read from what we've seen, he would put on the different accents, he would put on the different voices. He was very, very skilled at accents and he would just kind of read it out. Think of it as like an audio book.

Yeah,that's what I was gonna say, not even audio book. It was almost like a廣播劇.

Yeah exactly.

It's like a radio drama of such. And he was every character.

Exactly. So he used to go around Europe and also the United States. In the United States, he was so popular that he couldn't get his haircut.

Why?

Because when he did, the barbers would sell his hair as souvenirs and also...

Talk about stalker fans.

Exactly.

And in the United States, people would actually wait at the docks for the next ship from the UK to find out what happened in the latest book.

This is really not that different from now modern day追星的人 and they were waiting for the next album to come out.

Exactly.

So these people were literally waiting by the coast, waiting for the ship from England to come. And kind of asking people, do you have the latest Charles Dickens?

So guys appreciate Dickens. If you are now getting bored by Dickens, think about that what his works used to... what that the impact of his works.

Exactly. But there was also a lot of scandal with Dickens.

So he actually left his wife because he fell in love with an 18 year old actress.

And he was ?

45 years old.

You know they would say he is just making the mistake that every guy would make, blah, blah.

He divorced his wife who gave birth to ten of his children.

Please don't tell me these children were sold into child labor.

No, he did look after the children, but he left his family to marry an 18-year-old.

Which really tells us we have to separate these literary giants or like our giants. We need to separate their works from who they were as people.

Oh, exactly .

Obviously, his reputation really suffered because of that, divorce was unheard of the Victorian era and also this was a man who was talking about social change and exploitation and... exactly. And Dickens also, random fact, he had a fear of trains, he was scared of trains.

That's a factoid.

He was involved in a train crash and it traumatized him so much that he was terrified of trains.

That probably limited his mobility.

Well, I think he ended up going around on ship or there was always some other way. It was Charles Dickens after all.

Okay.

But ultimately Dickens died when he was quite young. He died at the age of 58 in 1870.

Okay. Now Before we wrap this up, I really want to ask, 安瀾 since Charles Dickens is such a household name in Britain, as a student, as a schoolboy, were you required to read Dickens? If so like, which book ?

I wasn't required to read Dickens when I was at school, when I went to college, I had to read Dickens as part of English literature, and I read Hard Times.

Hard Times（《艱難時世》）是查爾斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens）創作的一部長篇小說，首次發表于1854年。這部作品通常被認為是狄更斯對英格蘭社會的評價，特別是對當時工業革命影響下的社會矛盾和階級沖突的深刻反映。

Okay. But... so it wasn't really for everybody, wasn't like中小學必讀那種書.

The problem with Dickens is that they do actually read Dickens a lot at school. The main issue is that it's very, very dense and it takes so much time to read.

Yeah, This is why I wanted to ask like if you had to like really read intensively read parts of it and also get quizzed by your teachers.

Yeah exactly.

I would assume it's very difficult it's perhaps at points even more difficult than Shakespeare because it's longer.

Yeah, well. Pretty much.

All right.

So on that note, we're gonna wrap up this episode. And thank you,安瀾for sharing with us so much information about Dickens. So if you have ever read Dickens either in English or in Chinese, leave us a comment in the comment section, tell us how you think or which one is your favorite Dickens.

So until then.

We'll see you next time.

Bye.

Bye.