"And A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite Dickens, but A Tale of Two Cities is my all time favorite Dickens. Let's look at the body of work and just say Homer is real. He has two pieces. Dickens has Oliver Twist, Great Expectation, Bleak House, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol... And those are just his most famous ones."
1. I'd argue Great Expectations is his magnum opus, and easily one of the Top 10 novels written in the 19th century overall (though Dickens himself chose the autobiographical David Copperfield as his favorite...which I also like...and which has an awesome version with Daniel Radcliffe in his first screen acting role--a couple years before he became Harry Potter--as Davy, and to top it off, McGonogall, er, I mean, Maggie Smith.)
2. Are you really arguing quantity vs. quality? Dickens is almost certainly the best English novelist of the Victorian period (a couple other contenders for that, George Eliot, but even then, Dickens wins pretty handily in my opinion.) You could make the argument for him being the best of the 1800s overall...
Really, if you exclude Jane Austen (who'd be a popular choice for a lot of people, and there is something to be said about her making her name with just 6 major novels...Dickens, Shakespeare and a lot of the other heavy hitters on this list have far more than 6 stand-out works, but they also had more overall, whereas all 6 of her novels, and 3--Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility--are in the upper echelon of the English canon...that being said, she wrote very early in the decade, and even with her lineup as famous as it is, Dickens still probably wins by the sheer tonnage of his works and memorability of his characters) I'd say the best challenges to Dickens comes from Russia--
Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
Tolstoy I can't speak for, Dostoyevsky...well, despite his just losing to Orwell, I DO think he beats Dickens, but as he himself was influenced by Dickens, you could make a case for Charlie there.
Even with THAT, however...
There is no way, as great as he was, Charles Dickens (OR Jane Austen OR Leo Tolstoy) can measure up to Homer. "Just" two works? They're the two works that, along with the Old and New Testaments, for the basis for nearly ALL the literature that came after it until AT LEAST Shakespeare's day...
And his influence was still strong after that, and frankly, I'm not so sure Homer doesn't remain as influential as he was if not for Shakespeare himself...
After all, Shakespeare today is the most referenced author out there, but before him, who was it? Take away the Bible, and you're left with it probably being Homer (and the Vergil fans might holler here, but come on, guys...you can argue he's better, but fair or not, Vergil's nowhere near as iconic as Homer is...even if they've never read him, people KNOW who Achilles and Odysseus are, in part because Homer's version of the story led to so many re-tellings as to make them famous...Aeneas has nowhere near that level of celebrity, and isn't quoted nearly as much.)
So, no Shakespeare, and who are we left to quote? Dante, maybe...if you wanted to be creative you could argue Marlowe might have been the star of that era...but it'd still probably be Homer.
I said in the Round of 32 thread that Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare are essentially the Four Gospels of Western Literature, as it were...lose any of them and Western Literature as we know it arguably falls apart...and I don't think there's a 5th Beatle there.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare--no one else and no one since is quite THAT indispensable.
If I were having this discussion at my college, I'd probably immediately get five or six defenders arguing for Jane Austen because she's essentially the godmother of female-penned English literature, and one of the godmothers of literary feminism...and if this conversation is had again in a few centuries, MAYBE she joins that list, if she remains as incredibly popular and influential as she still is today.
But for now, that's the list, those four, who are important to the whole world.
Dickens has a better chance than most authors of breaking the cultural barrier, both because he's such a titan and he had the added benefit of writing when the British Empire was at its peak, so in both ways his work got maximum exposure in lands and places he might not otherwise have penetrated...but he doesn't crack that Top 4 for me.
There's no replacement for those four...Dickens...again, I don't even think he was the best writer of his century.
Dickens' literary branch is one of the biggest in the Western Literature tree, and it'll almost certainly never die (I mean, the Doctor himself said so!) but Homer is one of the few seeds which gave rise to that mighty oak.
Homer did that...
Virgil was sort of Beethoven to Homer's Mozart, a sign that a major transformation in an art form had stuck and been perfected...
Dante was probably the guy who took both the epic and Catholic ideology as far as they both could go, at least in that direction...
Shakespeare is the "rebirth" of literature for the modern day, in one form or another, nearly all modern English (and quite a bit of non-English) literature, in one way or another, stems from the Bard...the earliest traces of modernity are in the Renaissance and immediately afterward, and Shakespeare's characters are the first modern characters we really see.
That's the list...so, yeah.
Shakespeare already lost, we had no Dante (ANOTHER shame for this list, no Dante, no Milton, no Bradbury...no Shaw, Twain or Wilde...geez!) and Vergil's still going...
So is this really going to come down to Vergil vs. Homer?
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