Dickensblog

Helplessness to passion

"Let us also speak of Dickens, who is often undervalued because he hits the eternal verities on the nose. Sure, we cannot help being aware of his in-your-face morality, yet we are moved by it nonetheless, because, tossing sophistication to the wind, we wish to see the just rewarded and the unjust punished. No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil. Both Miss Havisham and Mrs. Macbeth probably would have preferred to behave themselves."

Roger Rosenblatt, "How to Write Great," Sunday Book Review, New York Times, July 27, 2012 (H/T Enuma Okoro)

I recommend reading the whole article -- it's really good. Also, there's a Tale of Two Cities reference elsewhere in it!

Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens!

"Charles Dickens was born at midnight on February 7, 1812. . . . It was reported that the newborn baby began to cry as the clock struck 12, and many feel that his voice is as real today as it was 200 years ago."
Raymond M. Lane

"The reason I love him so deeply is that, having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice. From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it, as do I."
Simon Callow

"I hold him in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings."
Mary "Mamie" Dickens

The shock of Dickens

I was reading today about Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's upcoming book, Becoming Dickens (to be released next month by Belknap Press). I love this endorsement from John Bowen, of the University of York: "Becoming Dickens never takes Dickens for granted, but helps us to be surprised--shocked even--that he existed, worked and wrote in the way that he did."

Charles Dickens, flashy dresser

The blog Past Is Present shares a rather amusing diary entry from a bank cashier who saw Dickens during his American tour in 1842.

Speaking of 'Martin Chuzzlewit' . . .

I just came across this lovely passage from G. K. Chesterton's introduction to it:

We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old Curiosities. We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all of them according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we require.

Rather unfortunately, Chesterton goes on to argue that Martin Chuzzlewit is the exception to the rule, thanks to its "melancholy" feel. Still, the imagery is brilliant and, I think, profoundly true.

And Chesterton does go on to say, "He poured into this book genius that might make the mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars." So there's that!

The art of enjoying everybody

Smollett was coarse; but Smollett was also cruel. Dickens was frequently horrible; he was never cruel. The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human writer, had to be a very human being; he had his faults and sensibilities in a strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will say one thing more, even from the bottom of the stairs.

G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, quoted by Kevin Belmonte in The Quotable Chesterton (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 62.

Eat your Wheaties

Today one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Jan Karon, is coming out with a new novel. In honor of the occasion, here's a Dickensian quote from one of her earlier novels. (The setup: Father Tim, the protagonist, is making his foster son, Dooley, read aloud every night while the latter is suspended from school.)

"That was a grand reading from Hamlet. We'll have Dickens tonight."

"Who's Dickens?"

"Only one of the finest storytellers in the English language, but long-winded, so eat your Wheaties."

"Man," said Dooley, wishing he were back in school.

A Light in the Window, chapter 15

Huge like the sky

"There is no one Dickens novel I could pick over all the others. Dickens is huge — like the sky. Pick any page of Dickens and it’s immediately recognisable as him, yet he might be doing social satire, or farce, or horror, or a psychological study of a murderer — or any combination of these. He’s always much more than you remember — more playful, more surreal, more campaigning, more sentimental, more Victorian, more good and more bad."

Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Oh no you didn't, Henry James!

Henry James called Charles Dickens “the greatest of superficial novelists’’ and went on to write words so shocking that, when I came across them, I gasped: “It were, in our opinion,’’ he declared in high subjunctive, “an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists.’’

So wrote Katherine A. Powers in the Boston Globe. I was glad to see that she went on to administer a proper put-down:

This is the sort of unhinged statement you might expect from a man who, as W. Somerset Maugham put it, merely “observed life from a window, and too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his friends told him they saw when they looked out of a window.’’

That's telling him, Ms. Powers!

That's not all from Mr. James, though; I found more of the review of Our Mutual Friend that Powers was quoting:

The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr Dickens's humor and fancy, will give us figures and pictures for which we cannot be too grateful, for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. But when he introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human emotions, all his humor, all his fancy, will avail him nothing, if, out of the fulness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those generalizations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of art. This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter; it is rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter.

Listen here, Henry: If you're so tin-eared that you think that maze of incomprehensibility you just wrote is "simple talk," you have no right to be pronouncing on other novelists, especially other novelists who can write circles around you. Got it?

Honestly, the nerve of some people!

Shooting the messenger

Here's Prime Minister Lord Melbourne on Oliver Twist:

It's all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets . . . I don't like these things; I wish to avoid them; I don't like them in reality, and therefore I don't wish them represented.

(Quoted by Les Standiford in The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits)

This raises the unavoidable thought that, if one doesn't like these things, and one happens to be Prime Minister, perhaps one could consider doing something about them.