Great classics on the 23rd April

This time they are my 1st and 2nd year ESO students the ones who write about those great English classics and stories everybody knows about: Romeo and Juliet, Oliver Twist, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, The Jungle Books...

Dickens, 200th birthday

If Dickens was immortal, he would be 200 years old today. If he was alive nowadays, he would probably have lots of friends on Facebook and he would be trending topic on Twitter quite often. He enjoyed such a fame and popularity during his lifetime that no other British writer has equalled him since then. Even Queen Victoria is said to have read his novels fervently. These were published serially in newspapers and delivered in monthly instalments, which were awaited eagerly.

The portrait he made of Victorian London is unforgettable, part of our cultural subconscious: an age of Puritan morality and strict discipline, with fathers depicted as god-like figures allowed to beat children and submissive wives; that awful fog that even made pedestrians die from walking into the Thames; the horror of prisons where whole families had to live due to debts; the chimney sweeps and the cruel conditions for orphans at boarding schools... He was the first great novelist in English to make childhood central to his fiction. Deeply wounded by the experiences of his early life, he was not only an entertainer but also an influential spokesman who attacked that new capitalist society and soulless and sordid industrialism.

Although he wrote for adults, not for children, I first encountered Dickens when I was only eight. I remember it perfectly because it was thanks to a classics illustrated comic book I got as a present for my First Holy Communion. Among other versions by authors such as Jules Verne or Stevenson, it included A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. Those well-rounded and enduring characters struck me. So trapped and fascinated did I feel that, when I started to read those lively plots, I could not give them up until the end. I was just a child, but now I believe it is incredible that at that early age I already got acquainted with Paris and the French Revolution or 19th London. Sometimes I wonder what kind of literary and historical references children have nowadays. We used to follow the adventures of D´Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, The Quixote, Tom Sawyer or Willy Fog in his 80 Days Around The World. Now they follow Sponge Bob and Dragon Ball... Maybe it is also just a question of belonging to another age...