In an interview on Progress

And lastly, I wanted to choose Dickens because every few years I read one and then I get completely into it and become so moved. It is hard work in a way because Dickens is so intricate, and there is nothing contemporary about his novels really. There are contemporary themes but you have to put yourself back in that world. 

I see, so we are allowed to read novels if they are improving. 

I read Little Dorrit last year and by the end of it, which took about three months, I had put a lot of work into the characters, who are completely unlike any of the people that you might meet. Not just because they are living in 19th-century London but also because their eccentricities are so way out – people like us just don’t hang out with people that weird. Yet one becomes so attached to these odd people that he creates, not just his main characters but his supporting cast, who are some of his best creations and those that stay with you. 

I read Great Expectations at school and it was hard for me to admit that I liked a ‘proper book’ but I did. Afterwards, I also loved the David Lean film, and I read it to my sons at night when they were young. When we started I thought, ‘Well, this is a big endeavour’, but they stuck with it. The younger one fell asleep but could still pick up what was going on afterwards. So I’m proud of reading it when I was young and finding that serious literature can be good even if you are a 14-year-old, and I’m also proud that I read it to my sons.

I think I will probably do David Copperfield next. I’m quite an instrumental person and a show-off too, so this exercise is good for me: you can’t show off about reading Dickens because everyone says, ‘Well yes, of course, I read that years ago’. So it’s a discipline for me. 

In an interview on Victorian Fiction

Which leads us to your first choice, Great Expectations, which we have already touched on. Some critics argue it is all about upwards mobility.

It is, yes. In the early paragraphs he refers to the universal struggle of life, a term which he lifted from Darwin. And it is a very Darwinian novel. There is a lot of struggle in it. But it is a novel not just about survival of the fittest and evolution. It is also a novel about the ways in which you make your way in the world, and how it is that you can reach a place in life which is different from where you started.

It is not just like Samuel Smiles’s 1850s “self help” manual on how to be successful. Dickens is particularly good at showing the problems that come when you rise above your station, which he himself did, of course. He was the son of a clerk who was imprisoned for bankruptcy in a debtor’s prison, something which is traumatically recalled in Our Mutual Friend. Charles Dickens could have been a noble, “Sir Charles” – he could have taken a title if he had wanted it. Instead, he ended up one of the most famous British commoners of his time, and one of the most revered.

He bought a house in Rochester in his later life. He had looked at this house through the railings of the garden as a boy, and came back to purchase it. It was triumphant, but at the same time he never threw off among his enemies the sense that he was slightly vulgar. They made comments about the too-colourful waistcoats that he wore. They saw him as jumped-up. There was too much cockney about him.

You could argue that the English upper class was very good at making people feel inferior if they felt threatened by them.

Yes, and I think Dickens had to combat that. In Great Expectations, Pip rises in life by, in a sense, casting off his true friends. Later on, we see him suffering a great fit of remorse after his illness. He rushes back to the village where he was brought up and proposes to his childhood friend Biddy, only to find that she is just about to marry someone else – his old guardian, Jo. So his isolation is the price of his success.

A theme that is still relevant today. Do you think it was also typical of Victorian times?

I do think so. Growing towards the light, they called it. But the further you grow towards the light, the further you grow away from your roots. That was something that Dickens couldn’t make his mind up about – whether it was better to rise in life or to stay in the community you started in. This dilemma is reflected in the two different endings he wrote for Great Expectations. In one of them Pip gets together with Estelle, and in the other he doesn’t.