Dickensblog

Why we love Dickens

"This is why we love Dickens; why today, when many of the social issues this book discusses have become history, he is still among the most popular authors of all time. We love Dickens because he tells us that things happen for a reason, that chance encounters mean everything, that we are all -- rich or poor, good or evil -- bound up in the plots of each other's lives. We love Dickens because he tells us that life is funny, and cruel, often both at the same time. We love Dickens because he tells us the truth, when the dominant strand of contemporary postmodern literature so often tells us that there is no truth. And there isn't, perhaps, not that can be put into words. Truth, at least complete truth, isn't held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.

"We love Dickens because he tells us stories, and because he tells us that we are all stories. We are. We are more than stories, of course. But we have to start somewhere. And there are many worse places to start than, 'Chapter One. I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.'"

--H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, Chapter XXII

This delightful fantasy novel plays with the ways that literature erupts into and transforms our lives. As the title and the passage above suggest, Dickens and his works in particular show up in all kinds of expected and unexpected ways. It's my favorite book of 2019 so far, and I highly recommend it to everyone, but especially to fellow Dickensians!

Happy Easter!

The impulse toward resurrection is grand motif of human existence: it’s the arc of all creation and everyone within it, groaning and aching for the dawn of better days, when all is put to rights and evil is subdued. The hope of resurrection is the thing Sydney Carton takes refuge in before his own death in A Tale of Two Cities, as he rests in the truth of John 11:25-26:

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

Brett McCracken, "Batman, Dickens, and Resurrection"

Happy 205th, Mr. Dickens!

"From Dickens himself readers wanted more and he gave it, prodigiously. The huge sweep of his novels makes them as extensive as cities, as complex as labyrinths, and as comforting as fires to sit beside. Over the eight hundred pages and, for his first readers, the eighteen months of serial publication, a Dickens novel builds a parallel world to run alongside our own, an ample and welcoming family to be part of our daily lives."

Jenny Hartley, Charles Dickens: An Introduction

How to read Dickens

"She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him." --Eudora Welty, quoted by Faith Sullivan in Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

London as Dickens saw it

NPR has a review of The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders. She's quoted as writing, "Dickens would describe all of [London's] qualities as though no one had ever seen them before. . . . And [afterward] no one would be able to see them again except through his eyes."

That might explain it

"Accustomed to the luxury of major and minor revision, of multiple drafts, of months or years in which to add or delete a single comma, we can barely comprehend the imagination and the technical skill required to compose an eight-hundred-page masterwork in regular installments of a length determined not by the needs of the artist, but for the convenience of the printer. Though Dickens wrote notes for some of his novels, and sketched out the conclusion of Great Expectations in advance, this working method demanded a prodigious ability to keep a large cast of characters and an elaborate narrative constantly in mind. The wonderment we feel when we contemplate this strenuous mode of composition has, in my opinion, been best expressed in the question posed about Dickens by novelist David Gates: 'Was he a Martian?'"

Francine Prose, Introduction to Great Expectations (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2012).

A life of their own

"As in its author's previous fictions, we are almost oppressed by the fulness of life which pervades the pages of this novel. Mr. Dickens has one of the most mysterious attributes of genius -- the power of creating characters which have, so to speak, an overplus of vitality, passing beyond the limits of the tale, and making itself felt like an actual, external fact. In the stories of inferior writers the characters seem to possess just sufficient personality and presence to carry on the purpose of the narrative; one never thinks of them as enjoying any existence at all outside the little tissue of events that has been woven for them. They are ghosts whom the author has evoked out of night and vacuity to perform certain definite offices within the charmed circle of the fiction to which they are attached; and when we step out of that circle at the conclusion of the ceremonies, they vanish again into nothingness, and we think no more of them. Such is not the case with the conceptions of larger geniuses. These do not seem to belong wholly to the one set of events with which they are associated, any more than the men and women we actually know present themselves to our thoughts as the puppets of a definite train of circumstances. The creations of authors such as Mr. Dickens have a life of their own. We perceive them to be full of potential capacities -- of undeveloped action. They have the substance and the freedom of actual existences; we think of what they would do under our conditions, they are possessed of a principle of growth."

London Review, October 28, 1865, quoted in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History

Praise for 'David Copperfield'

"At its best fiction is not opposed to or inconsistent with real life, but rather its defense and articulation. And whether by calling our attention to the varied sorts of people we already know without noticing, or by sounding out our own inner selves with whom we have neglected to become acquainted, Charles Dickens shows himself to be a high practitioner of this advocacy. And it is in David Copperfield that he reaches the height of his practice."

Paul Joseph Prezzia, The Civilized Reader, Crisis

A passion for human peculiarity

Many of the book’s admirers detect an artistic falling off as David passes from childhood into manhood. And while I don’t myself see any slackening of brilliance up through the final page, David’s harrowing early years are unforgettably vivid. Everywhere the boy turns, he meets singular souls. Dickens rivals Shakespeare in his fascination with nature’s sheer prodigality in creating so heterogeneous a troupe under the heading Homo sapiens. A passion for human peculiarity fortifies most of Dickens’s fiction, but it shows special potency when filtered through the eyes of the boy David, who is such a scrupulous, fervent interpreter of the world. He has to be. For him, a grasping of diverse personal motivations isn’t merely a satisfying of curiosity. It’s a necessity. David’s future, his deliverance from the forces determined to annihilate him, depends on his ability to construe character. 

Brad Leithauser, "Big Reading: A Hike through Dickens," Page-Turner, New Yorker, October 18, 2012

The magic of 'Great Expectations'

Not everyone appreciates the magic of Great Expectations, but that's the thing about magic: it doesn't work on everyone. In order for magic to work, first you have to believe. This passage in Great Expectations about Joe's Christ-like love is one I always read aloud when I teach this novel, usually during the last class we will spend on the book. One semester, the class I taught was unusually large. The course had become popular in the department, and I was always willing to sign high-achieving students into the class no matter how overfilled it had become. Because the class was not only large but also populated with an abundance of well-read, confident, and loquacious students (several of whom were on the university's champion debate team), our classes were always lively -- sometimes downright boisterous. One student practically turned Pip-hostility into a sport. Later, after had graduated and become a mission worker in Guatemala, he emailed me to tell me that he had just read Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities -- and loved it. That was a partial victory: at least Dickens, if not Great Expectations, was redeemed.