Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, February 6th 1812. It’s also sees the launch of Simon Callow’s new biography of the Great Man. I like Simon Callow, but find much of Dickens’ tedious. So I feel a need to put the anti-Dickens case.

When I was at school, Dickens was something of a trial – like having to study Greek in the First Year, or do cross-country during Games. The method of teaching it back then was to set a homework consisting mainly of asking one to read 150 pages, and then take a ‘test’ on it the next day.

For this reason alone, I came to detest the arcane English of Dickens that made 150 pages the work of an entire evening and the bus ride to school the next day. I was also less than enamoured of Dickens’ dozens of characters, all with silly names and odd tics of speech that meant nothing to me.

In my third year at Grammar School, one English exam question asked for a critique of the Master’s role in the development of the modern novel. This was to be my revenge: I argued passionately that Charles Dickens was a fraud whose work hung on three papier-mache walls. First, ridiculous coincidence. Second, leaden use of character names to suggest personality. And third, maudlin and lachrymose situations that represented the worst kind of Victorian sentimentality.

To my acute embarrassment, the answer won me a prize: Dickens’ collected works. They sat gathering dust for a few months until, around the age of fifteen, I picked up first Great Expectations. And then Nicholas Nickleby. And then Little Dorritt. And on and on and on. The last two I read were Oliver Twist and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By then, I’d become a bit of a Dickens bore: the zealotry of the convert, perhaps.

But, some thirty years ago, I re-read A tale of Two Cities, and was suddenly aware once more of just what a heart-tugging old pot-boiler it is. The language in there remains, of course, exceptional: the best of times and the worst of times and so forth. But I really could not believe in Charles Darnley. And there they were, the same old coincidences and miraculous denouements leaving the reader amazed that an entire Victorian society could be taken in by the same trick being conjured over and over again.

I have now come to see Charles Dickens as the thinking man’s Dennis Wheatley. Once – maybe two or three years ago, I’m no longer sure – I messed around with the idea of a Dickens pastiche – openly presented as such, but purporting to be an undiscovered novel by the man himself. There were characters with names like Mr Podslime and Mrs Henpeck, villains called Jed Spoke and Lord Blacksoul, and fictitious towns: Grimespool, Stenchton and Woebury.

I think I got about twenty pages in before realising that if I hadn’t the stamina to write it, then it was unlikely anyone would have the energy to read it.

It is odd to think now that Dickens wrote each chapter as a monthly serial, and toured the country like some kind of rock star reading this tedious stuff to adoring audiences. But seen in his own time, there is no getting away from his extraordinary popular appeal, and lasting social influence. We should also not forget that he did say some profound things – my favourite being, “It is quite wrong to view poverty as a form of sainthood”. Most of the contemporary Labour Party should pay heed to that one.

Dickens was a social reformer and commentator who chose fiction as his aperture for persuasion. In that sense, he holds a unique position among nineteenth century writers. But for me, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a far more compelling account of Man’s battle with himself, and Jane Austen’s Northhanger Abbey a more amusing mickey-take of genre.

I do not believe it is an accident that, in recent decades, Charles Dickens has become the safe option for children’s television. It may well be that, as one columnist put it today, he is “impenetrable for today’s kids”, but Dickens is first and foremost a children’s author. And like most of his kind, one grows out of him.

The same cannot be said, for instance, of The Wind in the Willows, a book I first devoured at the age of eleven, read to my children, and still love today. It operates on the levels of anthropomorphic animal charm, engaging story, and social comment: Mr Toad was Kenneth Grahame’s “I yum considerably richer than yow are”, and the Stoats taking over the big house Unionised working labour. It is not children’s literature alone. Every phrase and characterisation is a delight.

So there you are then: Dickens dissed by Philistine shock. Comments please.