First of all, yes, Dan Brown is shit. But so is Dickens. Dickens is shit. So is Jane Austen. The only difference between the two is if you say Dan Brown is shit you're a genius and if you say Jane Austen is shit you're a troglodyte.
I've read every Dickens novel your average guy on the street can name, and then some, and this is total crap. He was quite good at exactly this. Hurts to see George Eliot say that. I don't find any of those criticisms terribly convincing. Dickens' greatest fault was his occasional over-over-verbosity. His characterizations were often brilliant and almost always very apt. They were essentially stereotypes, but there's nothing wrong with that.“He scarcely ever passes from the humourous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.”