Of all the pieces celebrating the life and legacy of ‘the Inimitable’ Dickens, Toby Young has, for my money, written the most important. In the latest issue of the Spectator, Toby reveals that numerous state secondary schools have dropped Dickens from their GCSE curriculums on the grounds that ‘ordinary children’ cannot cope with the books. Private schools, he says, challenge their pupils. Certainly, the independent school I attended forced us to read Hard Times in addition to Jane Eyre, which was the set text. We were also encouraged to read North and South and Middlemarch to produce exam scripts that ‘glisten among the dross’, I recall my Labour-voting, Guardian-reading English teacher remarking. (I didn’t know it then, but he’d left the state sector because he felt that it limited rather than expanded horizons.) As it happened, I couldn’t handle Middlemarch (and still can’t), but I lost nothing by trying.
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