Past Surveys - August 2003

Would Dickens have been the great novelist that he was without a difficult childhood?
Response	Number	Percent	Graph
Yes	18	17%
No	68	62%
It's hard to say	15	14%
No Comment	8	7%
Total Number of Responses: 109

And here are some comments from people who participated in the poll:

• 'Tis hard to distinguish his profound brilliance from his profound hardships. However, I believe that he based much of his fiction on the intolerable events of his childhood. And from those hardships he created a rose.
• His Genius was natural. As Shaw pointed out, with a fuller education would only have made him a better and more accomplished writer.
• Difficulty can build character but childhood is not the best place to experience it.
• Regardless of his childhood, Dickens was destined to be one of the greatest writers of all time. However, we are all the sum total of our parts and there is no question that his difficulties greatly affected his writing.
• The man was absolute genius, no getting around that. However, sudden tribulations often render the course that wouldn't have been made possible otherwise. It was his misery through which he learned, and it was his misery through which he progressed.
• The rough times in his life helped him to include and relate himself in some of the stories he wrote.
• The man was pure genius, no getting around that. Either how pleasurable a childhood or how wretched a childhood, these are not determining factors for the man of earnest faith.
• I think the experiences you have in life help shape you even if they don't completely define who you are. It's hard to imagine Dickens having the insights into people living with poverty and suffering if he had not understood that world himself.
• It's always better and easier to write on something you've experienced, so if Dickens hadn't lived it, I don't think his stories would have been half as good!
• hardship is a way to success
• Dickens needed his writing as an outlet for his tortured soul....