Dickens vs Shakespeare
Considering the greats of English literature through the eyes of Anthony Burgess.
Last week, in the Observer (2 March 2025), the academic and literary critic Peter Conrad admitted he had developed an ‘incurable monomania’: the belief that Charles Dickens was a greater writer than Shakespeare. In the article, Conrad claims that Dickens was ‘at once more uproariously funny and more violently scary, more freakish and fantastical, an originator who created his own universe and had every right to nickname himself “The Inimitable”.’
Conrad’s article is strikingly Burgessian, his strong opinions voiced with a playful mischief in going against the established consensus. It is easy to imagine Anthony Burgess writing something similar, but what conclusion would he have drawn in comparing the two masters of English letters?
Burgess described himself as a ‘Shakespeare-lover’ and much of his writing found its inspiration in both Shakespeare’s work and world. His novel Nothing Like the Sun, written to mark the quatercentenary of his subject’s birth in 1964, is his most thorough creative engagement with Shakespeare’s work, but he also wrote a biography, a film musical, and a ballet. Shakespeare also appears, in one way or another, in his novels Enderby’s Dark Lady and A Dead Man in Deptford, and in two stories in his collection The Devil’s Mode.
Burgess also returned to Shakespeare frequently in his journalism, and his opinions of the work are well documented. His praise of Shakespeare often focuses on his gifted use of language. He was, in Burgess’s opinion, ‘a magician with words’ who created so much of the modern English language that he is ‘in our ears and in our mouths every day’. It was not just Shakespeare’s ability to write everlasting phrases, such as ‘at one fell swoop’ or ‘cruel to be kind’, that impressed Burgess, but the way in which the work synthesised human experience: ‘If we can talk about art as having a use, then the use of Shakespeare is the clarification of what human nature is like. We are all Will, and sometimes “Will in overplus”. This supreme wordmaster found the words to tell us so. And what astonishing words they are.’
Despite his love of Shakespeare’s linguistic achievements, Burgess was also aware of the changing fashions in literary drama and the different attitudes to the poetic nature of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘The poetic drama, revived by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and others, was an embarrassment. So, to some audiences, is Shakespeare. Plain speech is wanted, as in Harold Pinter.’ And despite his obvious appreciation of many of the plays and poetry, he was not so starry-eyed as to forego criticism. He called Love’s Labour’s Lost ‘a suety comedy’, condemned King John as ‘the worst play of Shakespeare’s maturity’, and dismissed Pericles as ‘one of the worst plays he ever wrote.’
If Shakespeare was a constant presence in Burgess’s life and work, Charles Dickens was a more infrequent visitor. This is perhaps the result of Burgess’s experiences at Manchester University in the 1930s. He remembers that the English department had a set canon of works derived from the work of F.R. Leavis, and Dickens was not among them:
Dickens stood up very badly to the surgical operation known as practical criticism: his prose lacked complexity and firmness, he was sloppy, sentimental, rhetorical, demagogic. I was taught to despise Charles Dickens, and I was glad to despise him, because his books were very long.
Despite Burgess’s initial experience of Dickens’s work, he was inspired by T.S Eliot’s insistence on the Victorian novelist’s ‘decadent genius’ to reevaluate the work. It was a tentative re-entry into the densely populated world of Dickens’s novels, one that began with Burgess regarding him ‘not as a novelist but as a sort of showbiz man.’ The novels were akin to popular entertainment for Burgess, written with a ‘highly coloured simplicity’. In order to enjoy the novels, the reader must view them as ‘the spiel of the barker of the comic sesquipedalian tour de force of the music-hall chairman introducing or dismissing turn after turn.’ He doesn’t acknowledge that Shakespeare, a working playwright who wanted to please his audience and make money, could also be viewed as a writer of popular entertainments.
It is difficult to say whether Dickens’s work inspired any of Burgess’s fiction. A case could be made for some of the earlier comedies, such as Inside Mr Enderby and The Doctor is Sick, being written in the spirit of Dickens, but there is no direct engagement as there is in Burgess’s Shakespeare work.
Towards the end of his life, Burgess read Peter Ackroyd’s 1990 biography of Dickens and came to the more solid conclusion that Dickens was an important writer:
Finally, we have to accept that Dickens is supreme. We no longer have novels like his. Our Booker Prizewinners produce skimpy apologies for novels. The huge, the panoramic, the presentation, as Orwell put it, of an entire world is beyond us. We are stuck with our miserable 80,000 words, no feedback during the telling of the tale, and, for that matter, no subject-matter except adultery on Primrose Hill. We don’t have the world that produced Mrs Gamp. We have a measure of hygiene, but we lack the creative filth.
Burgess clearly had admiration for the achievements of both writers but we must suppose which writer he would have chosen as the greatest. It is clear from his lifelong engagement with Shakespeare, and his literary, journalistic and biographical interventions into the life and work, that he would no doubt have championed the playwright as the greatest. As for Dickens, perhaps it is best to allow Burgess to sum up his feelings: ‘He would not have been a Shakespeare – he lacked the complexity of both language and character: he could not present complex characters in complex language.’
Find out more
Read Peter Conrad’s article at the Guardian/Observer website.
Read Anthony Burgess’s books about Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre:
Nothing Like the Sun (affiliate link).
Shakespeare: A Biography (affiliate link)
All purchases from the Burgess Foundation’s affiliate shop at Bookshop.org support our charitable work.
Listen to Anthony Burgess read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:
A timely commentary: having bought books all my life with the intention of furnishing my retirement years, I am now reading, or re-reading, all of Dickens. They didn't appeal to me when I was young, and I feel the classic Hollywood adaptations of his best known works may have been responsible: having been stripped of the details that make Dickens Dickens, they would be watched on a black and white television (no loss as they were of the black and white era) simply because there was nothing else on. I'm now about half way through the volumes in chronological order, and have just emerged from Martin Chuzzlewit and dived into the first collection of Christmas stories. Dickens has an infectious joy in detail, and his love for the people he observes and works into his tales is apparent. My previous expeditions into Victorian literature (all of Trollope and Mrs Gaskell—if I am allowed to give her the name under which she published) were enjoyable, but I wish I hadn't left Dickens alone so long. Absolutely, they are entertainments rather than novels (thank you, Mr Greene), and being written as serials has affected their structure to some extent. One gets used to the adversity, misunderstandings and disasters of the early chapters, always knowing there will be a delicious come-uppance at the end, and he was not afraid to stint that part, with most or all getting their due deserts at the end. He is generous in tying up those loose ends. I doubt I'll have the opportunity to read them again after I complete them, and I regret that, but I shall not regret reading them all now.
So it seems I am a bit of a latecomer to Dickens, like Burgess. I hope that he enjoyed them as much as I am.