Dickensblog

Stalking Dickens

Simon Whistler at YouTube's Today I Found Out channel has a new video on "Charles Dickens and His Stalker," an interesting anecdote about Dickens's second trip to America that I had never heard before. Thanks to Lee for the tip!

A Dickensian Valentine's thought

Happy Valentine's Day, fellow Dickensians! Bas Bleu Bookseller's blog, The Bluestocking Salon, has included a Dickens quote on their list of "Literary Words of Love," and it's a good one. Go here to see which one they picked!

For services to humanity

Heartfelt thanks to Colin Dickey, whose essay in The New Republic (excerpted from the book Scratch, edited by Manjula Martin) debunks the egregious Dickens-was-paid-by-the-word myth -- which needs to be as debunked as often and as loudly as possible, considering how pervasive it is. Not only that, but Dickey shows one major reason why it's so egregious: "Once I’d formed this picture of Dickens in my mind, it became an easy way to discount his novels as superfluous."

Definitely worthy of the Dickensblog Order of Merit!

Recent Dickens sightings

A few mentions of Dickens in recent or upcoming novels:

• According to The Washington Post, Dickens's efforts with Urania Cottage, the home for former prostitutes, are mentioned in Charles Finch's latest detective novel, The Inheritance.
• In Elan Mastai's sci-fi novel All Our Wrong Todays, due out next month, Great Expectations is mentioned several times.
• Reader John Kyriacou reports that Dickens is a minor (but appealing!) character in British children's book The Girl Who Saved Christmas, by Matt Haig. 

Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and 'the contact of their imaginations'

As you may know, today marked the bicentennial of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. In the new biography Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart by Claire Harman, I found this passage about Brontë and Dickens:

A couple of lists

Joseph Luzzi, author of the new book In a Dark Wood, offers five recommended reads, one of which is A Tale of Two Cities: ". . . We are in Dickens Land, where story and imagination reign supreme, and where we are led onward by the most large-hearted of guides."

And here's a list from 2014 that I missed at the time: Kathryn Schulz's list of "The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature." Number 4 is the colon in the first sentence of A Christmas Carol: ". . . This sentence is insane, or anyway destined to foment insanity in the grammatically prissy. It has death, a dangling participle, and a wonderfully garrulous narrator with some kind of unmentionable Victorian-era disease: wandering colon. It is great."

Charles Dickens attacked by vampires!

. . . Well, only figuratively. (But it makes a good post title, doesn't it?) I'm referring to an article by Frances Wilson in the New Statesman about "vampiric writers" -- a vampiric writer being one who "one who sinks his, or her, fangs into the flesh of another writer, and in so doing gives him or her a second life as a fictional figure." Wilson argues that Stephen Jarvis does this to Charles Dickens in his novel Death and Mr. Pickwick, accusing Jarvis of both "demonising" and "dehumanising" Dickens.

Well, I've sent for a review copy of Jarvis's novel, so we shall see . . .

The poet's view

Just when we were trying to make nice with the Trollopians. . . . Here's Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: "Trollope is that rare thing: a strong writer with a trustworthy imagination. Dickens is a far greater sentence shaper, but his view of the world is a poet’s, painted in violent and unnatural colors."

You say that like it's a bad thing, Mr. Gopnik. 

Dickens in the 'Washington Post'

"In 1847, an English cleaning woman was extremely excited to learn that the boy lodging in her employer’s house was 'the son of the man that put together Dombey' — that is, the son of Charles Dickens. The woman could neither read nor write, but she lived above a snuff shop where, on the first Monday of every month, a community of friends would gather to read aloud the latest installment of 'Dombey and Son,' which had begun serialization on Oct. 1, 1846. By that time, the monthly installments of Dickens’s novels — which started with 'The Pickwick Papers' in 1836 — were such a staple of British culture that an illiterate woman with no access to the actual book knew the author’s work intimately."

Hillary Kelly, The Washington Post

Read the rest of Kelly's article -- which focuses on the technique and the possible future of serialization -- here. And here's a discussion question: If illiterate cleaning ladies were huge fans of Dickens back when he was writing, why is it that literate and educated high schoolers have such trouble understanding him today? Is it just that the uneducated people of his own time understood the cultural references better? Or is there more to it? (The common phenomenon of high schoolers hating Dickens at first sight came up again in conversation recently, which is why it's on my mind.)

Celebrating English writers

As today is both Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day, the Irish Times took the opportunity to celebrate English writers -- including, of course, Dickens! Writer Eileen Battersby refers to Shakespeare and Dickens as "a formidable pairing."