What the blogger can learn from Dickens

Many people have a very soft spot for Charles Dickens and Victorian England as they are memorialized in both A Christmas Carol and a number of film adaptations of his classic novel over the past sixty years. But I’m not convinced that very many people have made the connection between what Dickens did a hundred and sixty years ago and what some contemporary literary genius may yet do blogging.

Dickens’ earned enough wealth from his writing to purchase the home of his childhood dreams, “Gad’s Hill Place.” Given that Dickens’ father was imprisoned for debt and his mother left him in service at the age of twelve (even after she had the means to bring him home), he really did pull himself up by his own bootstraps. I think the aspiring blogger in the 21st century can learn a lot from his example.

Most of Dickens’ life work was published in serial form in journals, which were more cheaply obtained than books. This closely resembles blogs which are equally cheap to read and write. The need then for Dickens and the blogger to produce a steady stream of quality material is inextricable from their success. The episodic nature of both Dickens’ and the Bloggers’ work mean that the work of both writers had to fall within a certain word range, and be able to stand on its own. The pay off for meeting this threshold of quality, however, is that both writers then are able to gather up their work and put it into collections for resale.

This is all interesting enough to me on its own, but I am even more fascinated by the democracy of blogging. Because he had everyone’s attention, Dickens was able to draw the Victorian’s awareness to some real social problems that needed fixing. The modern blogger could create and publish a body of work that defined the social problems and their solutions for a whole new age. Best of all, this new writer has no need to be rich or Ivy-league university educated. An ability to connect with the blog-reading public, to entirely capture their imaginations will do the job.