Let's start with one incontrovertible fact: Charles Dickens was one of our finest ever writers and it is right and proper that so many people worldwide have been paying homage to the great man this week on his 200th anniversary.

Of course, the occasion has given the media a nice wordy excuse to agonise – I have seen Dickens-related articles that clutch at every possible contemporary-related straw…

Did Charles Dickens create the TV soap-operas of his day? What would Dickens have thought about modern digital reading devices? Are today's kids so badly educated that they'd struggle to get through even the simplest of his stories?

I have seen all these debates highlighted in newspapers – now I'm about to join the affray. Why? Because I think Dickens would have approved. Of the affray, that is. He was the consummate media-man and would have recognised a good yarn or issue when he saw one.

So let's begin with that annoying and populist idea that Dickens was really just manufacturing the soap-operas of his day…

I realise some may think I'm being snobbish here – and I am well known among regular readers of this newspaper for reviling TV soaps – but I reckon Dickens was as close to penning one as he was to writing a theory on quantum mechanics.

He knew something every good journalist should know: every story has a beginning, a middle and an end – which is anathema to a TV soap writer, who must never finalise anything.

Soap-operas are all middle, which is why their writers must resort to ever-more-dramatic situations to keep the audience coming back night after night. This, ultimately, results in a surreal quality that is, more often than not, completely over the top.

Dickens certainly cranked up the drama at every touch and turn – but he somehow retained a gritty reality that the producers of EastEnders would die for. Let's instead, agree with Dr Christopher Pittard, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth (where, of course, Dickens was born) – who told reporters this week: "Although they were immensely popular like soap operas, his novels had a completely different mode of narrative, the soap opera is continually ongoing while his novels have a very definite shape to them, there's a hidden structure which isn't comprehensible at first. They are more like the DVD box-set of their time."

Now let's consider the subject of Dickens and digital readers or ebooks such as the Kindle – and the element of literary snootiness that seems to surround such devices.

Writing in The Guardian recently Henry Porter declared: "If Dickens were alive today, guess who'd be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks. Dickens loathed many of his publishers, whom he regarded as lazy, thieving parasites, and he would have been thrilled by the opportunities we have of unmediated connection between writer and reader."

Mr Porter is correct. Dickens loved reaching out to his audience – and the more directly he could do it, the happier he was. In fact, it killed him – or at least several gruelling lecture tours are thought to have hastened his demise.

So, no… Charles Dickens loved the written word and realised its real power lay in the numbers who read it – if ebooks allow more people to read more often, then he'd have embraced them without worrying too much about the smell and heft of the real thing made of dead trees.

And what about the idea that children today are so badly educated, they'd struggle to get through even the simplest of his tales whether printed on paper or on a screen? This chestnut was delivered by Dickens' acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin in an interview this week…

"What Dickens wrote about is still amazingly relevant – the only caveat I would make is that today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner," is what she said.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."

Given my loathing of rubbish TV I'd have to agree with Ms Tomalin – but would add that children are not stupid and they often know a good thing when they see one.

Dickens does, of course, lend himself to television beautifully – which is why we are treated to so many usually excellent adaptations on our screens – and I know of many young people who've embraced these down the years despite the fact that they portray an era which might seem more akin to ancient history.

And this would have been met with great approval by the great man himself because he knew perhaps better than anyone who has ever lived, one indisputable truth – that a good story well told is, and always has been, one of the essential ingredients required by the human existence.

Maybe he was thinking of this, and of the people who supply stories, when he wrote: "No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else."

And Charles Dickens certainly did that.