Dickens in the 'New Yorker'

You would not believe how hard it is to find a copy of the New Yorker in Northern Virginia. I tried my local Barnes & Noble, where the August 29 issue was all sold out within the first couple of days. (Who cleans a store out of New Yorkers in two days? Northern Virginians do, I guess.) And I couldn't find it anywhere else, either.

As you will have gathered from my post title, the reason I wanted the August 29 issue is that it had an article on Dickens. It's called "Dickens in Eden," by Jill Lepore, and it's about her experience at Dickens Universe, or, as she calls it, "Dickens camp." She went to the one where they were studying Great Expectations.

At long last, I gave up trying to find the issue and just downloaded the article online. You can do the same here, for $5.99. But after all that, I'm sorry to say that I didn't care for the article that much. As Lepore studies the behavior of her fellow Dickens campers, she has a little of that partly bewildered, partly condescending tone that writers sometimes get when they're writing about an enthusiasm they don't share. If the New Yorker was going to bother to send someone to Dickens Universe, I wish they had sent someone who could really get into the experience. An air of faintly amused detachment can be irritating in any number of circumstances, but it's particularly irritating when you're talking about Dickens, who was such a force of nature that, I think, the only way to understand or to capture anything of his appeal is to jump in and let yourself get swept away.

Still, there are a few things to like here. There are some observations on the irony of how much America still loves Dickens, when Dickens had so little love for America. There's this insightful bit of literary analysis:

Dickens always wrote this way, cleaving a man from his conscience by splitting one character into two and then locking them together in a prison, or a contract, or a marriage. His novels are cunningly arranged to appear all a-clutter, like a Victorian parlor, ottomans and mahogany card tables higgledy-piggledy with chintz-covered armchairs and marble columns topped with busts of Roman statesmen, a curiosity shop of characters, but somewhere, caped by heavy velvet drapes, there always hangs a pair of pendant portraits. Twain had his Huck and his Jim. Dickens had his Chuzzlewits and his Tapleys, his Pips and his Magwitches, locked in a cell, bound by a knot, fastened by a screw.

And there's this:

[Trude] Hoffacker told me about a camp regular who never said much and then, after he'd missed a year, and she asked him why, confessed that he hadn't been able to get the book on tape. It turned out that he didn't know how to read.

Come to think of it, the entire article was worth reading just for that passage alone.

Comments

[Katie]

I actually didn't think the article was that bad--in fact I thought it was done in just the right sort of way. I found myself chuckling and reading passages aloud to my husband throughout the whole thing.

For this kind of article, I think it made perfect sense to have an "outsider" be the one who actually came and wrote. We forget what we look like to other people, as Dickens-folk, and this perspective was both complimentary and enlightening.

She may have seemed to have "amused detachment" in part because she is an American history professor instead of a literary person. I thought that she wrote exactly like an academic historian.

I think that if a member of the Dickens-folk had written this article, it would have been much too saccharine and would not have explored the parts of the event that were not perfect (i.e. the amount of talks being overwhelming by the end). We tend to forget that there are BOTH good and bad things about Dickens and Dickens-events because we love his work so much. I think that this kind of careful and detached observer was exactly the right kind of person to write this article.

[Gina]

I see what you're saying, Katie. Let me try to put my reaction in context. As the bicentennial approaches, I'm seeing more and more articles about Dickens, and many of the writers seem to have no clue about how to approach him. Or his readers, for that matter. At worst, you get a tone that's something like this: "Hey, there's this wordy old dead dude and people still read him! How weird is that??"

Lepore wasn't quite THAT bad, but to my mind, there was still a sort of "National Geographic," "let's go observe these rare and incomprehensible creatures in their native habitat" flavor to the piece. (As you say, she's an academic, and that may have contributed a bit -- there's an unfortunate tendency among some of today's academics to be consciously anti-populist, and of course Dickens is the ultimate populist.) I think Dickens -- and most other classic authors, for that matter -- deserves better. It's okay for a writer to not quite get the appeal of an author as long as she's willing to acknowledge and respect it.

I'm about to post another article that I think provides a much more balanced treatment.

[Rob V]

I haven't read the above comments, but Jill Lepore just has this certain style of writing; I don't think she was trying to be anti anything, but she has this sort of light and airy attitude or tone in her writing which borders on snarky. I don't think it's intentionally negative. I wasn't as interested in the Dickens Universe part of the article, more on the developing relationship between Dickens and America (or the American definition of "democracy"). I haven't read "American Notes" yet but I'm going to start poring through some of it for some research I'm doing.

[Rob V.]

A follow-up after reading Katie's comment: I'm currently reading a book from 1927 called "Dickens Days in Boston". It's written by Edward F. Payne, one-time president of the Boston Branch of the Dickens Fellowship. The book is beyond saccharine, possibly right up to idolatry. So, one the one end you can see this sort of amused detachment, and on the other you have the deification of Dickens (I feel like I should trademark that term). I find the latter much more difficult to read.

[Gina]

Oh, believe me, I'm no fan of deification either. That's one reason I like the Vasudeva article that I posted last night: She doesn't go to either extreme.

[Terri Elders]

I read the article and shared the feeling that Lepore writes from an attitude of amused superiority. I went to Dickens Universe in 1984, I believe, when the book was Martin Chuzzlewit. We had some great discussions on Dickens' own attitude of not-quite-amused superiority to the barbarians he encountered in what he'd always thought would be a paradise. Last year I took a course, Criminals and Gentlemen in Dickens' Oliver Twist and Great Expectations at the University of Cambridge International Summer School. There were students and scholars from all over the world, sharing their admiration for or puzzlement about the characters Dickens created in those books. For me, he's no idol...he's flawed like the rest of us, but he addressed every major social issue of his time, and I still think for that he's the greatest English writer of fiction ever.