"If You Live Long Enough You Will Find That Dickens Is Aways Right"

My current Angela Thirkell novel is Enter Sir Robert which features the family of Lady Agnes Graham and her always absent husband (the Sir Robert of the title) and the neighboring Halliday family.  Much of the first half of the book is taken up with the visit of the youngest Graham child, Edith, to the Hallidays where she spends a great deal of time with the aging and declining Mr. Halliday.  At one point Edith is reading to Mr. Halliday from Dickens (most likely Bleak House) and expresses dislike for Edith Summerskill, the heroine of the story.  Mr. Halliday responds with the above quote to the effect that in the end Dickens is always right.

References to Dickens seem to be more common in the later Barsetshire novels, I have commented before about the frequent references to Shakespeare especially to the history plays - "Henry IV, Part I" in particular.  There are also some novels with frequent positive references to the work of Sir Walter Scott and also the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson.  Since I had only read one Scott novel - Woodstock, Thirkell's comments led me to try another, Waverly which I believe is Sir Walter's first work.  I read about 100 pages without enjoyment, finding it to some degree almost silly so I gave up, but will at least give Ivanhoe  a chance.
Charles Dickens, however, is an author I am very familiar with, having read all of his full length novels (excluding The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which after all isn't full length) and enjoyed them almost without exception.  For whatever reason the comment that "Dickens is always right," made me think about reading books multiple times.  I think for all of us there are writers and books that we read over and over again simply for pure enjoyment - Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey come to mind.  In this case, however, I was thinking about the idea of multiple reads of other books for other reasons, perhaps to get a better understanding or appreciation and/or to see if we view the work the same way if we "live long enough."

This idea also came partially from Elaine Simpson Long over at Random Jottings who has the advantage of speed reading so that she sometimes rereads the entire works of one author in one year (Elaine read almost 300 books in 2009 - color me jealous).  It is a more difficult task for someone like myself who managed just under 60 books last year.  The idea still appealed to me, but in each case I want to have the benefit of some kind of commentary or explantory notes.  My set of Dickens' novels is wonderful, but other than a brief introduction and a listing of the cast of characters there is not much in the way of explanation.  

It seemed to me that Penguin paperback editions might be the best option so I looked at one that I had - a copy of George Eliot's classic Middlemarch considered by some to be the greatest novel in the English language.  As expected there are footnotes, but I was surprised when I randomly opened the book to find that I had underlined certain passages - something that I certainly don't remember doing.  Even more significantly as I quickly skimmed the passages it wasn't clear to me why they were so important to me.

This seemed to be pretty clear evidence that there can be some benefit to such multiple reads so I am going to give it a try.  Not sure exactly when, could be my morning reading, but one thing I am clear about is that I am not going to read every Dickens or Eliot novel again - just the ones that I found especially meaningful.  From Eliot that means both Middlemarch and Adam Bede, there are more from Dickens certainly Bleak House, Dombey and Sons and Little Dorrit, but there are others as well.  Also this time I think I will read them in whatever order appeals to me, not the order they are written in and we will see whether at 63 I also conclude that "Dickens is always right."