>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." >> charles dickens, the great british writer, was born in 1812. throughout the english-speaking world, his 200th birthday is

being celebrated, including at new york's morgan library. >> the library was founded in 1906. he was an avid collector of dickens, as was his son. the museum holds the largest collection of dickens in america. we're joined by the curator and department head of literary and historical manuscripts at the morgan library. >> here we are in mr. morgan's study. we're looking at the first installment of "david copperfield." one shilling would get you the monthly parts. here is the beginning part of the booklet. it is page after page after page of advertisements for books and pills and remedies and all kinds of things. here you have the original illustrations that accompany each part, separated by tissue, of course.

here is the very first page of the narrative. "whether i shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." >> they are written month by month. is this particular to dickens? >> it was really dickens who pioneered this and was the most successful perpetrator of publishing installments. >> these numbers could afford to read it. >> very affordable. bob cratchit earned 15 shillings a week -- even someone as poor as bob cratchit could have afforded to buy a novel. >> dickens was a charismatic figure and knew how to

manipulate an audience of one or an audience of 3000 people. there are reports of people fainting at readings. people swooning at other parts of his readings. he certainly knew how to manipulate the emotions of a live audience. he was a consummate actor. dickens relationship to the u.s. was very much a love-hate relationship -- love before he came here, quickly turning to hate after about three months. he came full of high ideals. he had been reading about america for a long time and looked upon america as a place that had thrown off all of the old problems of europe and britain, the social system and those kinds of things. when he got here, he was idolized straight off the ship.

he was invited out to dinner every night. he was not pretentious. he was many things, but pretentiousness was not something that he ever displayed. >> this is a picture of two great victorian novelists, friends and rivals. >> what the caricaturist has tried to capture is the social distinction, their class difference. thackeray in the top hat. dickens in the hat of the common man. what the caricature is pointing to is the difference in their readership. dickens has much broader appeal to the reading public. also, i find a bowler hat is a hint at his american audience as well. dickens was highly aware of how

perilous his own life was in terms of the social circumstances when he grew up and his father was imprisoned for debt. dickens was the sole family bread winner at the age of 12. in retrospect, he said, i could have been a vagabond or a little thief for all anyone cared of me. dickens may well have ended up like one of the characters in "oliver twist." >> twist. are you out of your senses? >> please, sir. i want some more. >> what? >> dickens as a young man starts to go to the theater. his diet of theater -- he is steeped in shakespeare. hamlet is referred to often. >> to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

>> i think it is the focus on the young man and the formation of the young man and the way in which he cannot quite grasp fate or take control of its own life. in a sense, that is what dickens did manage to do. he was able to turn his life around. he was master of his own destiny. dickens was fascinated with the character of hamlet, his vacillation. in a sense, it was what dickens was most afraid of in himself. in some ways, the more you know about dickens, the more shocking it is that he was a man who seemed to need no rest. a man of absolute indefatigable commitment to good causes. he was a tremendously benevolent man and sought to change life in very real ways.

>> we go now to london to talk more about dickens and his legacy. simon callow has played dickens in theater and television. his new book is called "charles dickens and the great theatre of the world." also from london, oxford professor robert douglas- fairhurst. with me here in new york, harvard historian jill lepore. john romano wrote "intolerable cruelty" and "the lincoln lawyer" and is a former professor english at columbia. and salman rushdie is a lifelong dickens enthusiast. i am pleased to have all of these guests and to talk about charles dickens on this 200 anniversary. i begin with you. why dickens? what is it about dickens? >> one of the things was reading dickens before i ever came to the west was that these cities

that dickens describes, a great rotting metropolis, it felt like the city outside my window. if you grow up in a city like bombay or delhi, it feels exactly like dickensian. it has exactly that characteristic of corruption and filth and these huge larger- than-life characters. >> jill, you are the historian among us. >> in the united states, dickens is taken as an american writer. it is curious about dickens because he had such a painful relationship with the united states. "great expectations" is the ninth most frequently assigned novel in american high schools. it is interesting to think about dickens readership in the united states changing. i first read dickens as a schoolgirl. george orwell talks about

dickens being ladled down your throat as a child. how do you reconcile yourself with a writer who has been forced on you as a kid? >> in london, how do you see him? >> keep the child in view is what he said. that is what he did throughout his whole life. he kept the child in view. there was his own childhood that he could never get rid of and dragged around behind him. that sense of wonder, that sense of the imagination is something that he always kept with him. that sense in which he would always make even the most familiar brits of the world looks uprising. >> why was it that he never told anyone about his experience at the factory? >> shame. simple, unadulterated shame.

he managed to make it from a working-class childhood through the lower middle class through the ranks into a stable bourgeois family life. he always felt he was able to climb the ladder. it could have easily taken him back down to where he came from. he did describe that past. he did in disguise. he did it by manufacturing incidents and characters and references that he dropped into all of his novels as if he wanted to let people know, but could not do it out loud. >> simon, i knew of dickens because of his books, but less about his love of the theater. tell me about that. >> it was all consuming. from a very early age, he displayed great gifts for

performance. he would stand on the table in a local pub and tell stories and sing songs. he went to the theater at a very early age and fell in love with it. fell in love with the process of making theater. he went to rehearsals, for example. he started acting himself. there was a serious desire to become an actor. illness stopped him from taking in up. instead, he was invited to become a parliamentary reporter on his uncle's newspaper. and then his destiny was set in that direction. he kept harking back to the theater. he performed many plays by other people. he became a great director, too.

that is the most surprising thing to me is that he became a brilliant director, sought to raise the status of the stage in his productions. he was quite obsessed by it. he did an amateur production the week before he died. he was incredibly frail and he said to a friend, i should have run a national theater. that is what i should've done with my life. >> did it impact his writing? go ahead, simon. >> his writing is a performance. you feel more than you do with any other great writer in the presence of the author. you feel him doing it for you. even the prose passages are like great arias. it is all performance. >> his daughter reported that once she passed by his open door when he was writing and saw him standing in front of a mirror acting something out. he gave a very interesting answer. if you ask someone to list the ways in which an old man walks, he might think of eight or 10 things.

a decent actor is imitating 100 motions. he would rush to his desk and write down what he had just done. >> robert, you were going to add what? >> do not talk about it, do it that is what he used to say. the reason he loved acting so much was that you could do things by talking. simply by talking on the stage, you could see the reaction on the faces of your audience. you could make them laugh, you could make them cry. it took the time lag of publication and it crushed it. you could see the effects of your words on the faces of your audience there and then. >> his performances were like writing a book in company. >> i want to talk about the public person, too, when he came to america. he had a successful run as a

lecturer. >> that is what he did. two of these enormous lecture tours that he undertook. he would like to perform his greatest hits. he would do all the characters in different voices, including the female characters. >> the violent beating death of nancy. >> he would perform and nobody seemed to mind that she had a beard. >> he wrote under a pseudonym for a while. >> his critics like to say that boz is all buzz. the writing itself was very physically exhausting. he wrote like a maniac. he had this arduous writing routine where he would wrote from 9:00 until 2:00 every day. he was bubbling over with the enthusiasm of his characters. he would go walk for as many hours as he had written. there is something physical on the page for him.

there is this wonderful story about how fast he was writing. he was barely ahead of his readers. he runs out -- and dickens rushed everywhere. people often were taken back. when he was writing copperfield, he rushed out to buy a new ream of paper. he stopped to buy his stationery and there was a woman waiting for the next number of copperfield. she was waiting for the number that he was about to write. he had to rush home and write for her. >> robert, you said that he used his pen like someone scratching an incurable itch. >> that is absolutely right. he needed to write. i think it is largely because he saw the act of writing and the act of his hand moving across the page as a way of escaping

from the past. as he wrote, the more and more he wrote, each one of those lines started to look like a little prison bar. he used it to pin down those characters. then he could be not just the prisoner, he could be the governor. he could be the governor who could make those prisoners do whatever he wanted them to do. he could leave them on the page and he could escape. >> there is something we should not miss one we talk about dickens. he was a street reporter. he began life walking the beat, telling what he saw. he was a recorder of the world around him. he is one of the great first observers of the city. >> he maintained a journalistic >> he maintained a journalist. >> the magic of dickens is that he has this grounding in

naturalistic knowledge. if he is writing about london, you know every brick in the street. you know every crack in the sidewalk. and then he grafts into this very carefully observed reality these elements which we would now call surrealism. a government department that existed to do nothing. a court case that never ends. the city dwarfed by its own garbage. you have these larger-than-life surrealistic images which are powerful because they are grafted on to the real world. they grow out of the real world, they gain power. >> do you agree with that, simon? >> god, yes. sometimes you ask yourself, what is this guy on?

there is a wonderful passage in "a christmas carol" where he says it was up a yard which it had so little business to be in, you could not help fancy that it must have run there as a young house playing hide-and-seek with other houses and forgotten the way out. he is tampering with your brain in the most thrilling way. >> talk about his home life and his wife and his wife's sister. >> he was married for 23 years. her father owned the newspaper that he wrote for. he lived in that house with catherine and their 10 children. she was pregnant 12 times. he eventually left his wife, or forced her to leave him, in one of the biggest scandals in british literary history when he fell in love with a young actress. he forbade his children from

seeing his wife, which caused a great scandal in england at the time. the scandalous way in which his marriage ended and his behavior toward his wife -- >> it was suggested that she had mental issues. >> this was a conventional defense that men offered when they left their wives. it is not to be credited in any way. we have no evidence for that. >> who was john forster, robert? >> forster was an ex-legal person. he was a reporter. he became dickens's best friend, his only really good friend. he became his agent. he became his best editor.

eventually, he became his biographer. when he wrote the life of dickens, in many ways, it was the life of a friend. it was a life written by a friend about a friend in a friendly way. like all good friends, it told a few sharp truths about dickens, but it did them in disguise. we've just been hearing about the relationship. forster reproduces dickens's will in which turner is the first person mentioned, not his ex-wife or his children. it is his way of tipping a wink to the reader that this woman was the love of his life. >> i want to go back to the poor. growing up in india. where did that come from? what is it about the urban poor that so compelled him?

>> it is the thing he escaped. it is a place he might have -- he has that great quality of the great novelist. he is omnivorous. there is nothing of life that is not interesting to him. he would plunge into these worlds, the poor world which he might have escaped from, but still feared. the world of the rich industrialist, any world that there is, dickens would push his hands in up to the elbow. >> he was always interested -- >> the politics of the poor are more interesting than it first seems. "oliver twist," you really feel how poverty criminalizes and creates prostitution. at the same time, one of his targets in "oliver twist" are dysfunctional liberal attempts to cure poverty.

these are liberal institutions and he attacks the philosophers and the ideologues as much as he attacks what poverty does to the poor. he does interesting -- for him, it is the same thing. the poor suffer at the hands of their friends and their oppressors. in "a tale of two cities," it is very dramatic. the two targets are the brutality of the aristocracy and it is also the tyranny of the left that then rises. they're all the enemies to the people in the street. >> karl marx said dickens issued to the world more political and social truths than uttered by all the professional politicians and moralists put together. >> dickens's political vision was largely thought of in his lifetime by serious political thinkers as mickey mouse. there was a profound naivete

about his way of thinking about the ordering of power. orwell's famous essay on dickens, the whole problem with "oliver twist" is no system saves oliver twist. >> that is an interesting critique. he was very moderate and very sort of, he was a kind of an anti-ideologue. he perceived that some of the things being done to cure poverty, one of the things the poor were suffering from. >> it is not really the function. what he does is to see it and show it. >> to observe and expose and sometimes explain. >> when he talks about the schools, he was telling his

readers something they did not know about these schools. in an age before television and radio, the novel could still bring the news. >> he could observe the political grotesque. and that is what led to his downfall in coming to the united states. he wrote a travel narrative of his trip to the united states. it is making fun of americans for their love of money. what he chronicled is what he thought a partisan spirit that infected all of these elements of american life. americans were unwilling to hear that from him. >> had he created unrealistic expectations? >> absolutely. dickens was obsessed with the poor and the story of rising

from poverty. he thought the united states would be the idol that had been detected by other writers at the time. >> he had a particular personal experience of what he thought was american hypocrisy. when he arrived in new york, one of the first things he did was to talk about international copyright law. he thought writers were being cheated of their due earnings because copyright tended to reside with publishers and there was no international copyright law ever in america. his books were endlessly reprinted. this was regarded -- his statement was regarded as outrageous by the american press, who denounced it instantly. if that is all you've got to say, go home. they believed that you could download anything from the internet free. it was in the public domain.

>> freedom is very interesting there. he hated about america was that people maybe too free with him. this was the great land of opportunity and freedom, the great democratic experiment. and people were too familiar with him. he did not like the fact that they treated him as equal even if they were working class ordinary people. that is very strange. on the other hand, it is typical of dickens. he hated hypocrisy of any kind. what he saw in america was an experiment in democracy that had gone wrong. it had gone wrong because it was based upon hypocrisy. everybody was equal and there was a slave owning class in which some people were treated worse than animals. >> no white man ever hated slavery as much as charles dickens. it has something to do with the childhood sense of imprisonment. there is a record where dickens

transcribes catalogs of escaped slaves from the south. in this one case, he simply writes down what he was reading. in this one case, you cannot out-dickens the reality of how gruesome it was. that kind of hatred of slavery, some personal bell had been rung. >> it looks very impressive looking back at this, how vocal and powerful a critic of slavery dickens was at that time. his voice was very loud. therefore, it was very influential in the discussion of the slavery question. the compassion of dickens is not to be underestimated. he had the incredible ability to put himself in the reality of the people. and to feel their life. that comes out of the books. what is interesting, how it

comes out is that in the earlier novels, there is the notorious sentimentality of some of these characters. as he gets older, he can still do that, but without the sentimentality. >> one of the best examples of that, there is a boy who sweeps the street in the terrible pollution of london. and he dies -- he finally dies and dickens says, "dead, ladies and gentlemen." he ends this passage by breaking the fourth wall. suddenly, you're being told, this is not a book. this reality is around you. >> simon or robert, talk about dickens and christmas. and how he became identified with christmas. >> it is often said that dickens

invented christmas, which is completely untrue. washington irving invented christmas. dickens made christmas into a symbol of something. if we can be kind to each other on this one day of the year, why can't we extend it across the whole of the year? the fascinating thing about "christmas carol" is that it emerged out of a parliamentary report on the employment of children in the mines. dickens read it with such disgust and horror, he determined to strike a sledgehammer blow against such activities. the book is the direct result of that. the core of the book comes when the spirit of christmas present is about to take his leave of scrooge. spirit, are these children

yours? this spirit says, they are mankind's. the girl is want and the boy is ignorance. those two will destroy civilization. that is the absolute core of that book. his passion and rage about what mankind does to its children. >> at the same time, he was acutely aware of how vulnerable that vision of a family christmas was. "great expectations," the scene on christmas eve. when edwin drood is murdered by his uncle, that happens on christmas eve. these are times where families get together, but they are also times where families are driven apart by internal discord.

>> let me explore dickens in london and during his time, how famous was he? how celebrated was he? how was he viewed? >> very famous, very celebrated. >> was he considered different then than he is today? >> i think it is the same kind of fame. the work is so authoritative. it shows you how to read it, it tells you what it means. it creates this mood and a voice so well, i do not think we read dickens differently than they did then. the richness of the language, the comedy, the unforgettability of the characters, the only difference is that we are not reading it in serial form. it created the whole business of installment publication, created a way for readers to interact. >> why did he do that?

>> everybody did that. >> was it to make it more affordable to everybody? >> that is how a publication was produced, buy chapters every month. you would have them bound yourself. >> the popular readership of dickens is for continuity. his critical reception has been subject to a great deal of vicissitudes. henry james, seven years old, crawled underneath his parents' table. he was listening to it and he was not supposed to stay up. he was sent to bed. henry james as an adult completely repudiates dickens. by the end of the 19th century, dickens was necessary for that generation of critics to establish their critical credentials by rejecting dickens as a caricaturist, as politically naive. as a lesser novelist. it is not until the 1920's and 1930's that his critical redemption is affected.

>> he was put aside by the modernists at first. he was part of what they had to throw away. there has always been a sharp aesthetic appreciation. he was huge for dostoevsky. the humanity of someone that evil. freud, these are great readers. it took awhile for the literary and aesthetic side of the english and americans to appreciate it. >> the books never disappeared. that is the thing. that is the proof of it. if your books survive after your death -- that never happens by accident. it never happens by accident. books survive because people love them. >> dickens story is about the limits of criticism. there is an aristocracy of

critics. literacy rates were spiking in the early 19th century. suddenly, readers outnumbered and outgunned the critics. dickens prevails. >> simon, weigh in on dickens today. he died at age 58. >> it is very interesting, that change of critical opinion is very striking. there is a huge industry, academic industry. at the end of the war, it was still regarded as absolutely beneath critical attention to devote your life to being a scholar of dickens. you had to be a very brave person to do that. in terms of the reading, the truth of the matter is dickens lives much more on celluloid in the popular imagination. the stories are so extraordinary. the characters are so huge and theatrical.

people do feel daunted by the look of the dickens page as they open the book. oh, my god, what is all of this? what is very fascinating to me is the moment that you read a page of dickens out loud, it absolutely comes to life. i wish that was more encouraged than it is in schools. people actually read the books. he was the writer as an actor. it is a script really. a dickens novel is a script. on the installment question, and very often, those books were bought by somebody who could read and read out loud to those who could not. his words were conveyed to the great population who could not read anything at all. >> one of the problems with biographers is that we have produce dickens as a public

celebrity, a public figure. we neglect the writing itself. dickens is responsible for that. he was the first literary celebrity, and is the one everyone knew about. the word celebrity comes into the language the year that he starts to write "david copperfield." he tries to live up to precisely that image. brightly colored, flashy waistcoats that he wore. they were his costume, his image. they were the brand he was deliberately cultivating. >> "david copperfield" is autobiographical? >> absolutely. like a lot of his works, it is autobiographical in disguise. the disguise is less marked in that novel than in some of the others. it would be impossible to take a single page of dickens and treat it as a mirror that he held up

to his own life. it is a distorted mirror where some bits have expanded and other bits are shrunken. what you get is a very strange melding of fact and fiction. >> this is a clip from "david copperfield." ♪ >> you have to be quicker than that. >> do i have the honor of addressing the bearer of the name of copperfield? >> yes, sir. >> at your service. i hope i see you well.

your esteemed stepfather has charged me with the honor of providing you a suitable quarters. >> i am to stay with you, sir? >> in short, yes. i place myself at your disposal. in case you get lost, i've come to take you home. >> in "copperfield," he confronted his youth. in "great expectations," he confronted his adulthood. >> i think he needed to write through both of those things. i think that shame was a really powerful thing for him his whole life. it was also where dickens

finally failed. to be a great american writer was to not be ashamed of your origins. in fact, to trot them out. that was what benjamin franklin did. nothing could be better. >> what is interesting -- if you compare the two books. in "great expectations," he allows his character to be morally flawed. to be ambiguous. and not simply the child put upon to overcome adversity. by the time he is writing "expectations," he is willing to accept that there are flaws to the character that he has tried to write through. that is what makes it such a remarkable journey. from the first to the second.

he begins to learn about moral complexity within himself. >> you have gone from professor to screenwriter. how does dickens influence what you might want to do on the page? >> i was so surprised when i made that move. i moved to los angeles to join the staff of "hill street blues." i found that people were talking about conrad and they were talking about dickens. the writer's room, which can be one of the great places, we were all at various stages of having dropped out of english departments to get there. the subject of dickens was always coming up - we were writing about cities, crimes, cops. dickens was one of the first people to notice how interesting

a policeman is standing between the legitimate and illegitimate. the conversation turned often as a popular writer. when you talked about the fact that the weekly parts would be read aloud to others in the family living room, it resembles nothing so much as an american family gathered around a television to see what happens this week. we felt the closeness to dickens. years later, he took the plot of the play that dickens wrote and reset in contemporary terms. dickens is on the mind for anyone who writes for the public and for their own artistic muse. >> simon, when you are playing dickens, what are you trying to find?

>> the thing you have to connect with is his torrential energy. that applies to playing dickens and playing his characters. it is like riding a bucking bronco. the man is absolutely bursting with energy. the great thing is that you have to master it. with dickens, you have to hang onto the ears. it is a very exhilarating experience, but you have to be in good shape to do it. >> robert, you have written that dickens is still becoming dickens. >> the shape of dickens in our minds, the way we understand dickens, is always changing. sometimes, he used a page like a

distorting mirror. he is also like a distorting mirror that we hold up to our own concerns. riots in london, we think about bankers. we think about riches bestowed on people who do not deserve them. that, of course, is "great expectations." >> there is a line from oscar wilde which says, real life is often the life that one does not lead. why did you choose that? >> dickens realized early on that he was going to have to choose some parts in life, but he tried a lot of alternatives, being a parliamentary reporter, being an actor. they were all these

alternatives. what he finally realized is that he could live out all these alternative lives on the page through his characters. through fiction, he could live a lot of parallel lives and he would not have to commit himself to any one of them. >> he must have made a conscious decision to turn himself towards the light. there was an engulfing blackness inside him. the 18 months he spent there was almost enough to wipe him out. he emerges from the warehouse at the age of 14 as a brilliant, lively person. that inner blackness started oozing up out of him.

>> it really was that inner blackness that had to come out in some way. christopher hitchens wrote about dickens. >> one of the things about dickens is the way in which he stays with you as a writer. if it is your profession, there is an extraordinary shelf of books. you can find endless contemporary references. as time has passed, the strength of that body of work has made him the english novelist. even shakespeare had a period where people thought he was not that good. his plays were given happy

endings. that was a bit of a downer. even shakespeare has a slump before he is established as the national poet and playwright. dickens, too. if you are a writer in the english language, you must know about dickens. >> i think shakespeare comes up a lot when you talk about dickens. think of a character like scrooge. how does one come up with a scrooge? how does one come up with a hamlet? there is something about a character creation that becomes iconic the first time you read it. you only find that in shakespeare and dickens. i think you can almost make that statement. >> one of the things they have in common is a brilliance portraying lowlife. think about shakespeare, he is incredibly good at soldiers

getting drunk in pubs and prostitutes. if you look at the lowlife of dickens and shakespeare, there is an enormous meeting point. >> take a character like mr. dick. he seems to have some kind of undiagnosable mental illness. whenever he sits down to write a memorial to parliament explaining details of his inheritance gone awry, he says the memory of charles i's head drifts into his writing. where does that come from? the word charles dickens is in there. it is beautiful, hallucinatory.

it is a miracle of the imagination. >> if you want to demur from the adulation for dickens, what would you most say? >> he could not describe women. he was a closet racist. there were times -- as his daughter said, my father was a very wicked man. none of that matters at all. the generosity and the warmth of the writing can extinguish all of that. >> simon, what would you say? >> you have to face the fact that there are uninspired passages. [laughter] christopher said in his final essay, it is little hard to know

which novel and which character comes from. one great big bale of fabric out of which the novels are cut. he was such an extraordinary and such a great and complex human being, you cannot get enough of him. >> when you are a reader, you make bargains with writers. when i was a kid, i could not stand the girls. estella just sent me over the edge. i will put up with the girls if you will be very funny. >> james talked about novelists like dickens and tolstoy. my problem is a technical one. they were often a mess. you have to wade through the

unfortunate parts to get to the good stuff. there is no question, there are structural flaws. that seems to be a lesser matter than the brilliance of the imagination and the heart. >> i think a lot of the children are really sickening. god bless us, every one. you want to smack him. sometimes with his children, you really want to beat them up. >> in "david copperfield," he moves from a kind of prissy and milquetoast to agnes. to be her husband and lover, you

must become everything that is in you to be. you are summoned to full growth by a woman like that. >> i would disagree with what john is saying. the formal problems of dickens are created by the serial form. you're having to produce these books in a partial state. it is remarkable how architectural they are. the end of the book, he will tell you what happens to every character later in life, including their pets. he had a great desire to make the thing shapely. >> on that note, thank you. a pleasure. an hour about charles dickens.

charles dickens 200th birthday in 2012 in february. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

. . .

>> the following is a presentation for focus t25. >> the number one reason people have for not working out as they don't have time. an hour,t work out for you kidding me? i don't have the time.