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.

The Joy of Six 1413

Peter Black says the Liberal Democrats must continue to oppose national identity cards.

Wealthy donors are increasingly funding political campaigns, eroding the public’s trust in the political process. The government has the opportunity to reverse that trend by limiting the allowed individual donation amounts and capping campaign spending by political parties, argues Rose Whiffen.

"Our results showed that being bullied was associated with significant reductions in extrovert traits and conscientiousness (that is, being dependable and organised). The drop in conscientiousness could be because the target feels demotivated by the unfairness of being bullied – or the bullying may even take the form of removing meaningful tasks from the colleague." Samuel Farley, David Hughes and Karen Niven have researched how bullying can affect your personality.

Cambridge Town Owl introduces us to Cambridge's Elspeth Dimsdale, a pioneering woman Liberal parliamentary candidate.

Moon In Gemini calls Barry Lyndon (1975) a masterpiece: "He is despicable in many ways, but are the aristocrats he so desperately wants join really that much better? Do they snub him because he is cruel to his wife and stepson, or because he isn’t one of them?"

"He was so worried about being late, for example, that he would invariably arrive hours ahead of time – he once had to scale a wall at Lord’s after arriving so early that the ground was still locked. In 1984, confused about the regulations during an early-season Benson and Hedges Cup tie between Scotland and Yorkshire at Perth, he called two tea intervals. Whether it was bomb scares or pitch invasions, reflecting greenhouses or errant pigeons, they all conspired to trouble him." David Hopps has written the Guardian obituary of the umpire Dickie Bird.

The Joy of Six 1344

"At the turn of the 20th century, British protectionists waged a long and unsuccessful crusade against free trade. Like President Trump’s policies, their campaign for tariff reform expressed the anxieties of a global power in decline." Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri draws an enticing historical parallel.

Will Hutton talks to Yvonne Wancke at North East Bylines: "Capitalism ... does produce wealth, it does produce innovation…but it has a propensity to inequality, a propensity to monopoly, a propensity to oppress and exclude, it has phenomenal inbuilt instabilities that have to be pro-actively managed by public agencies, and that is elected governments."

"HS2's so-called bat tunnel has become a political scapegoat, used to justify rolling back environmental protections. But the real story is very different. The tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife laws - it was a consequence of poor decisions made by HS2 Ltd and approved by parliament." Holy correction! It's the Bat Conversation Trust.

Mapping the Quartet follows the careers of four eminent women philosophers who began their careers at Oxford during the second world war: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley.

Andrew Miller argues that the appointment of Harry Brook betrays the shocking tangle that England's once-formidable white-ball set-up has got itself into.

"What captivated Kubrick about Thackeray was his ability to expose the cruelty beneath the polished facade of aristocratic life. The rigid etiquette of the 18th century – a period described variously as an age of gentility, sensibility and enlightenment – demanded an emotional detachment that fascinated the director." Nathan Abrams believes that Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon deserves another viewing.

To him that hath shall be given: Hilaire Belloc's Mr Petre

Our leaders' appetite for the good things in life, and getting them for free, has put me in mind of a satirical novel I read years ago - Hilaire Belloc's Mr Petre, which was published in 1925.

My hazy recollection was that the hero was taken to be a rich man and so was never asked to pay for anything. Showered with gifts, soon he really was rich.

A contemporary review from the Manchester Guardian fleshes out the plot:

The story begins in 1953 with the return of Mr Peter Blagden from New York, and for a page or two the irony seems to be held in reserve; we have time to think that Mr Belloc could, if he would, give us a very interesting "ordinary" novel. But Mr Blagden loses his memory completely, and from no particular cause; chances combine to identify him with Mr Petre, the great American millionaire. 

So he becomes involved in enormous transactions, and on the strength of an occasional "Exactly" or "I quite understand" his reputation as the most astute man of his time becomes assured. He puts up at the Splendide (or, as the proof-reader leaves it on one occasion the Savoy), and so courted is he that he must bolt to the country sometimes for breathing space.

If he buys everybody follows, and his chance expression of opinion breaks up a luncheon party, everybody rushing for the telephone. Perhaps the loss of memory is a little arbitrary in its working, but it is a good device for the display of Mr Belloc's scornful irony. 

For, of course, everything that Mr Petre says and does is idiotic. A man reputed to have fifty million pounds must be a master-mind, and financiers feel that they must crawl before him or be ruined.

Belloc was Liberal MP for Salford South between 1906 and 1910. Though he was a raving antisemite, his book of political theory The Servile State is worth seeking out. I think of it when I read that the government is to give itself powers to investigate the bank accounts of people receiving welfare benefits.

Another feature of Mr Petre is that, according to that review, it was illustrated by Belloc's great friend G.K. Chesterton.

These days we think of illustrations as suitable for children's books but not fiction written for adults. Yet some of the greatest 19th-century novels were illustrated.

And in Vanity Fair, where the text says one thing and Thackeray's own drawings suggest something more sinister is taking place, we instinctively trust the picture over the words.