Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Rice

Rice’s praise of Dickens is a sly piece of canon-correction, the kind that tells you as much about her literary politics as it does about Dickens. Calling him “very underrated” isn’t a neutral assessment; it’s a rebuke aimed at whatever counts as tasteful in the present tense. Dickens, after all, is not obscure. His names are brand names. So “underrated” here really means: insufficiently respected in the way serious writers are supposed to be respected now.

The quote hinges on a deliberate contrast between mass adoration and modern coolness. “Everyone in his time admired him” evokes Dickens as a public phenomenon, a writer who belonged to the crowd without apologizing for it. Rice then pivots to “right now,” implying a contemporary culture that prizes minimalism, austerity, and irony over the maximalist pleasures Dickens delivers: big feelings, broad social satire, melodrama that doesn’t pretend to be embarrassed by itself. Her phrasing (“not spoken of enough”) is pointedly social, not scholarly. This is about conversation, not curricula - a sense that Dickens has been filed away as homework rather than kept alive as a living influence.

For Rice, a novelist who built entire cathedrals of gothic excess and moral appetite, Dickens is a patron saint: populist, atmospheric, morally charged, compulsively readable. The subtext is a defense of storytelling as spectacle and empathy as craft - and a suspicion that modern literary prestige often confuses restraint with depth.