Parenting & Family Quote by Alan Bennett

There is something deliciously ungrateful in Bennett admitting Dickens was force-fed and still didn’t “take.” The line skewers a very British mode of cultural inheritance: classics administered like cod-liver oil, with the implicit promise that moral improvement will follow if you just swallow. Bennett’s phrasing, “put to Dickens,” is key. It turns reading into a kind of institutional placement, as if the child is being assigned to a worthy corrective rather than invited into pleasure. Literature becomes homework for the soul.

Then comes the real Bennett move: a deflation that’s both comic and telling. Dickens’s “unremitting humanity” is, on paper, the thing you’re supposed to admire - the big-hearted social conscience, the relentless sympathy for the poor, the innocence, the crushed. Bennett flips it into an irritant. “Cheesed off” is pointedly vernacular; it drags a monumental Victorian into the kitchenette of everyday impatience. The joke is not anti-compassion so much as anti-sentimentality: a refusal to be bullied by virtue.

Subtext: Bennett is quietly describing an allergy to being emotionally managed. Dickens can feel like a writer who insists you feel correctly and continuously, and Bennett - whose own work thrives on understatement, embarrassment, and the awkward gap between what people profess and what they can bear - bristles at that pressure. The intent isn’t to cancel Dickens; it’s to puncture the pious aura around “humane” art. Sometimes the moral spotlight is so bright it becomes a kind of glare.