Dickens was never a slog for the Victorians: Are we reading him the wrong way?

That Guardian list of the 100 best novels of all time has given the anti-Dickens tendency fresh legs. They tried him at school and hated him. He was paid by the word – that's why his books are so long.

I will admit that my love of Dickens has probably been helped by the fact that I didn't study him much at school. There was a play based on the early chapters of Nicholas Nickleby when I was 12 (I read Wackford Squeers as it happens) and a passage from Hard Times three of four years later. That was all.

But if you had too much Dickens when you were too young, here's a thought: maybe the judgements you made when you were 15 shouldn't be allowed to last a lifetime?

I remember our O-level English teacher trying us with a Joseph Conrad short story, The Secret Sharer. None of us – not me, not Allison Pearson – could get anything from it. He had the sense to abandon the attempt and move on to something else.

So for years I remembered Conrad as a difficult writer. But when, in my forties and after the 7/7 bombings, I decided to read his The Secret Agent for its insights into terrorism, I found that I loved it.

No, Dickens wasn't paid by the word, but the great thick books we now consume weren't the way his original readers experienced him.

Dickens published his novels in 20 monthly instalments, with the last two appearing together. So the Victorians took 19 months to read, say, Bleak House and never experienced it as an intimidating peak they had to scale.

His later novels were carefully planned before he began to write, but that was not the case with the earlier ones. There's a chapter in Oliver Twist where Dickens pauses to try to make sense of its complicated plot - and fails. Martin Chuzzlewit wasn't selling well, so he sent its hero off to the United States to spark new interest. And in The Old Curiosity Shop, he soon changed the nature of one character and dropped another altogether when he realised he wasn't necessary.

And the books had illustrations; indeed, The Pickwick Papers was written to fit existing engravings. After that, Dickens was careful in his choice of artists and always worked closely with them. To him, the illustrations were an important part of the book, but today his novels are often published without them, either to save money or out of a strange disapproval of pictures in a novel for adults.

That disapproval is even stranger in the case of Thackeray's wonderful Vanity Fair, which he illustrated himself. Sometimes the text tells you one thing and the illustration says another, and you instinctively believe the picture rather than the words. So leaving out those pictures fundamentally changes how you experience the book.

So, go on you antis: give Dickens another try.