Parenting & Family Quote by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett folds a dry joke into a small social history of British reading. Being "put to Dickens" sounds like being put to bed or put to rights, the schoolroom dose of improving literature ladled out as moral tonic. For many mid-century pupils, Dickens was not a discovery but a prescription, taken young, long, and under supervision. The result, Bennett hints, was not enchantment but resistance.

"Unremitting humanity" is both praise and a nudge in the ribs. Dickens never stops caring: he pleads for orphans and debtors, parades hypocrites and bullies, presses readers to feel for the wretched and despised. The compassion is panoramic and noisy, peopled with saints and villains, uplift and comeuppance. For a child, though, that steady philanthropic glow can feel like a sermon that never breaks, an obligation to emote page after page. There is no cool space in which to hide, no dry corner for irony to take breath. Small wonder a Yorkshire schoolboy ends up "cheesed off", a phrase whose comic mildness makes the annoyance feel ordinary and human rather than rebellious.

The line also sketches Bennett’s own aesthetic. He prefers the sidelong look, the quiet bathos of ordinary lives, the bite of understatement. Dickens is maximalist: crowded, sentimental, impatient to move hearts. Bennett trusts pauses and ambivalence; Dickens supplies certainties and tears. The clash is not simply taste but tempo. Unremitting feeling can numb; intermittent feeling can sharpen.

There is a wider observation here about how canons are made and transmitted. Force-feeding the classics often blunts appetite. Readers meet writers at the wrong age and blame the writers. Later, some return to Dickens and find craft where they once felt piety. Bennett keeps the ambivalence intact. He recognizes the grandeur of that humane project while recording how, pushed too early and too hard, it provoked the very boredom and resistance it sought to cure.