I adore Dickens for his really complcated and delightful secondary characters, for a truly spectacular gift of description and language and even for some amazing primary characters (the leads from Great Expectations, Nicholas, Eugene from OMF), and his burning sense of social justice but for a lot of people of good taste (including my husband) the other characteristics of his work: sentimentality, plot coincidences, etc outweigh the things I mentioned above.
This said, Our Mutual Friend is my favorite Dickens book bar none, and much as I love the adaptation (and I do) it doesn't even come close. The book Eugene Wrayburn is one of my Top Fictional Crushes of all time.
And I don't find the desease thing as surprising any more, because in the Victorian times so many people died of so many horrible and not so horrible deseases, sickly people were a lot more common (I will never forget an introduction to my copy of Nicholas Nickleby where the writer said that when Miss Fanny Squeers admires Nicholas' straight legs, it would be something out of the common way because so many people had rickets, especially in such a plays as Dotheboys).
Also, I suggest trying The Pickwick Papers as even people who don't like Dickens often like this one: there is no melodrama, just prodigious fun.
In a way, I think it's a pity Oliver Twist is his best known book because I think it's his weakest. He hasn't yet learned to balance melodrama and social issues (though of course many people think he never had and I think you'd be one of the number, but I do think it's balanced better in his later books). But whenever I find too much fault with the admittedly oversentimental OT I think about how he was writing about very real, very horrible conditions and his books were a social crusade as much as literature and resulted in some good changes and I don't feel as against OT as I normally do (I think despite the layer of sentiment, OT is an incredibly angry book actually).
As to David Copperfield, it's another one of his I don't care for. I love Steerforth the doomed bad boy and the screwed up Rosa but grown up Davvy isn't my thing.
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I adore Dickens for his really complcated and delightful secondary characters, for a truly spectacular gift of description and language and even for some amazing primary characters (the leads from Great Expectations, Nicholas, Eugene from OMF), and his burning sense of social justice but for a lot of people of good taste (including my husband) the other characteristics of his work: sentimentality, plot coincidences, etc outweigh the things I mentioned above.
This said, Our Mutual Friend is my favorite Dickens book bar none, and much as I love the adaptation (and I do) it doesn't even come close. The book Eugene Wrayburn is one of my Top Fictional Crushes of all time.
And I don't find the desease thing as surprising any more, because in the Victorian times so many people died of so many horrible and not so horrible deseases, sickly people were a lot more common (I will never forget an introduction to my copy of Nicholas Nickleby where the writer said that when Miss Fanny Squeers admires Nicholas' straight legs, it would be something out of the common way because so many people had rickets, especially in such a plays as Dotheboys).
Also, I suggest trying The Pickwick Papers as even people who don't like Dickens often like this one: there is no melodrama, just prodigious fun.
In a way, I think it's a pity Oliver Twist is his best known book because I think it's his weakest. He hasn't yet learned to balance melodrama and social issues (though of course many people think he never had and I think you'd be one of the number, but I do think it's balanced better in his later books). But whenever I find too much fault with the admittedly oversentimental OT I think about how he was writing about very real, very horrible conditions and his books were a social crusade as much as literature and resulted in some good changes and I don't feel as against OT as I normally do (I think despite the layer of sentiment, OT is an incredibly angry book actually).
As to David Copperfield, it's another one of his I don't care for. I love Steerforth the doomed bad boy and the screwed up Rosa but grown up Davvy isn't my thing.