Does Charles Dickens Matter?

Wall Street Journal:

Being named to Oprah Winfrey’s book club is a boon to working authors, but this week the talk show host dug into literary history and named as her latest pick two novels by Charles Dickens: “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations.”
Setting down our paged-through copy of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” for a bit, Speakeasy has been thinking about Dickens’ legacy. Will modern readers relate to the impoverished 19th century social conditions that are so associated with Dickens’ work — is yesterday’s chimney sweep today’s downsized auto worker? We put the issue to two Dickens scholars: Michael Slater, author of a well-reviewed biography, “Charles Dickens” (Yale University Press) and Lillian Nayder, author of “The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth” (Cornell University Press) about the novelist’s wife.