Dickensblog

The pleasures of rereading Dickens

David Gates has a lovely essay in Newsweek about why he enjoys rereading books -- and many of the books he most enjoys rereading are Dickens books.

Above the table on which I'm now writing hangs an old framed print showing Mr. Pickwick's street-smart servant, Sam Weller, prophetically pointing out to his chubby little master—in tights, gaiters, and spectacles—a vast, teeming mob of tiny figures: the characters Charles Dickens was to create in the novels to come after The Pickwick Papers. I still haven't identified all of them, but I see Fagin and the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, Little Nell and her grandfather from The Old Curiosity Shop, the sanctimonious Mr. Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, the choleric Major Bagstock from Dombey and Son, and Bob Cratchit from A Christmas Carol carrying Tiny Tim. Ah, and that must be the mad old dealer in secondhand clothes from David Copperfield. His name, in what appears to be an odd self-tribute, is Charley—Dickens names another madman in that same novel Mr. Dick—but I remember him best, as you will if you've read the book, for his greeting to young David: "Oh, my eyes and limbs, what do you want? Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!" It's because I can't get enough of characters like these that half my Dickens paperbacks now have their covers held on with duct tape. . . .

I suspect that the most widely reread writers in English have been Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen—hardly a month goes by without my revisiting one of them—who combine the sleepy-time comforts of story and character with all the challenge and complexity, the inexhaustible newness, that anyone could ask for. I've taught them all in the classroom, while in the bedroom their books have slipped from my hands as their stories shaded into my dreams.

The whole piece is worth a read, but probably the best line of all -- a line that any lover of Dickens will appreciate, even though it refers to multiple authors -- is this one: "In a recent New York Times op-ed in defense of rereading, Verlyn Klinkenborg lists some of his old favorites—he turns out to be a Dickens hound too—and concludes: 'This is not a canon. This is a refuge.'"

Great press for 'Great Expectations'

Great Expectations has been enjoying a bit of the spotlight lately. First of all, there was a nice mention from Denny Drabelle in the Washington Post:

I want to add my two cents to Jack Murnighan's new book, "Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits." I agree with some his skip recommendations. For example, I consider everything in Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" after Hans Castorp's dream in the snow to be anti-climactic, and Murnighan seems to stop on roughly the same page.

But when I saw that he'd included Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations," my razorback bristled. I wouldn't cut a line from that masterpiece and would shake a fist at anyone who tried to. On turning to Murnighan's entry on GE, however, I found this: "What to Skip: Nothing at All." Well done, Mr. Murnighan.

Well done, indeed. (Drabelle does go on to say that he'd cut out the travelers' tales in Pickwick Papers. But after his respectful treatment of GE, I'm inclined to be lenient with him. So I'll let him get away with that.)

Then Edith Hamilton in the Washington Examiner picked GE as the book that changed her life:

I had been concentrating on something else when I read this book. I was very ho-hum about it at first, but once I started, I couldn’t stop, literally; I stayed up until I was finished from a Saturday to a Sunday, only dozing now and again before making another pot of coffee or pasta to keep me awake. And so it was that the Victorians took over a part of my life and one Victorian in particular changed how I saw the world. Good thing, too, for this one book made my life full in ways it wasn’t before.

As I've said, GE was the book that changed things for me too, so I particularly enjoyed her tribute. And here's a bonus: She's got a link that tells about a new Great Expectations musical!

Also, don't miss part 2 of Hamilton's article, where she has some glowing words for A Tale of Two Cities as well.

Hold me like you did in the drawing-room at Canterbury

I've learned via Nibs's site that Hayden Christensen is set to play David in the new film version of David Copperfield. (Update: Maybe not "set," Nibs tells me; it seems Christensen hasn't confirmed the report.)

I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. I'm not one of those Hayden-haters who seem to be all over the Web; I liked him in Shattered Glass and even in the Star Wars prequels (the truth is, if you're playing a petulant teenager, you really have no choice but to act like a petulant teenager). But I can't see him mustering the necessary earnestness and naïveté for David.

What do you guys think?

Brits have more fun, part 2

They even have a Dickens-themed restaurant. (Actually, if you read the comment section, it sounds like they have more than one!)

Dickens in the funny pages

An original Peanuts strip about Dickens has sold at auction for $17,080 -- more than expected. Editor & Publisher says this shows that "Charles M. Schulz is still the king." Undoubtedly -- but I'd like to think our Mr. Dickens had a little something to do with it too. :-)

I've been looking for the strip online, but so far without success. If you see it, please send it along!

And speaking of comics, in case you didn't see it, Jo Wheeler of Classical Comics was nice enough to drop by and ask us which Dickens titles we'd like to see turned into graphic novels! Read her question and, if you'd like, offer your opinion here.

Poverty of thought

Remember that business a little while back about Dickens being opposed to the abolitionist movement? (Quick refresher course here if you don't.)

When I wrote about this before, all I had available was Tim Cavanaugh's blog post on the topic, not his original full-length article from Reason magazine. However, that full-length article is now online in all its, er, glory. Be aware that it contains spoilers about several Dickens novels.

I was hoping that maybe the article would be better than the blog post that followed it up. I figured that Cavanaugh would have had more room in the article to explain where he was coming from, so that his conclusions, strange though they were, would at least be revealed to have some sort of foundation.

In fact, the article explains his point of view even less than the blog post does.

George Mason University economist David M. Levy has tracked some of Dickens’ creepier predilections, including his curious hatred of the anti-slavery movement. “Dickens is attacking classical economics from the right,” Levy says. “But right-wing attacks on markets are very popular on the left.”

That's it. That's the only paragraph on the abolitionist movement. I'm not kidding. No "here's why Levy and I think Dickens hated the anti-slavery movement"; just "he hated it, period."

I guess when a man's been dead for more than a century, it's considered acceptable to slander him.

There's also a lot of complaining about how, in Dickens's books (most of which he seems to remember inaccurately), rich people are, well, rich, and how we usually don't find out how they got rich, and how that shows that Dickens believed "that the wealth just somehow exists and needs only to get to the right people."

This, Cavanaugh tells us, is "a boom-time mentality," of little value during an economic recession. But if our thinkers and analysts are this hard up for good, in-depth analysis, we're in a far worse recession than just the economic one.

Brits have more fun

This one's for you British readers: This Thursday, Lucinda Dickens-Hawksley, great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, will conduct a tour of the Charles Dickens Museum. If you get to go, have fun!

And remind me to tell you sometime about how I searched for the Museum through the streets of London with no success. Next time I'm taking TWO maps. And a guide. And a compass. And maybe some bloodhounds.

Four ways of looking at Dickens

Ann Kirschner has an interesting article at The Chronicle of Higher Education about how she "decided to read Little Dorrit four ways: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone." She learned a few worthwhile lessons as she went back and forth among formats -- and not just lessons about technology:

It was often maddening to keep finding and losing my place as I switched from format to format. But as an experiment, it taught me a great deal about my reading habits, and about how a text reveals itself differently as the reading context changes. Along the way, I also began to make some predictions about winners and losers in the evolution of books.

Little Dorrit was an accidental choice, but I could hardly have done better. Its length, multiple story lines, 19th-century allusions, and teeming cast of characters helped me to test the functionality of different formats. Beyond the artifice of my reading experiment, though, please don't think that technology compromised my ability to appreciate this beloved novel, written in 1857 at the height of Dickens's power and popularity. Just the opposite.

Read and enjoy. (But next time, Ms. Kirschner, would you mind leaving out the cracks about "good old paid-by-the-word Dickens"? I know you were going for a quick quip, but that's how nasty rumors get started. Thanks much.)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . . Pip!

Did you know Classical Comics was doing comic-book versions of Dickens? I didn't until just now, when I came upon this long, enthusiastic review of their latest adaptation, Great Expectations. (Warning: The article contains major spoilers.) You can order it here. Looks like their only other adaptation so far is A Christmas Carol, but maybe more will be forthcoming.

There's a little bit of artwork on display in the review. Not being a comic-book reader, I'm not the best judge of these things, but it looks pretty good -- except perhaps for the depiction of Estella, who looks more like The Bad Seed than an alluring but elusive young siren-in-training. But that's only one picture -- maybe the rest are better.

If you've read the comic, or plan to, reviews are welcome in the comment section!

Follow that train!

I've been able to track the Christmas Carol train just by watching my inbox, as reports and photos have poured in from L.A. (here and here); Williams, Arizona; Denver; Ogden, Utah (here and here); and more, thanks to good old Google Alerts. By the time this trip is done, we may feel as if we'd seen the whole movie already. If you go to see the train in your town, don't forget to stop by and give us a report of your own!