Walking

If I get myself organized--an "if" that this spring seems cacklingly determined to foil--this will be but the seed of a proper post down the line, but for now,  here's a brief quote that represents a conjunction of interests. As my mile-long walk to the train shifts from winter drudgery to birdsong-charmed pleasure, it's the perfect time to read Matthew Beaumont's Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London--and, specifically, his account of Dickens's legendary night roaming:

The nighttime journey on foot to Gad's Hill Place, driven by an acute sense of anguish and guilt, took Dickens little more than seven hours. He was a fast walker, who took pride in the fact that he could sustain a pace of at least four miles an hour across long distances. His friends, indeed, frequently complained of the speed and impatience with which he walked. "Sometimes his perspiring companions gave way to blisters and breathlessness," writes [Edgar Johnson,] one of his biographers. He himself was boastful of his feats as a pedestrian. "So much of my travelling is done on foot," he professed in 1860, "that if I cherished betting propensities, I should probably found be found registered in sporting newspapers under some such title as the Elastic Novice, challenging all eleven stone mankind to competition in walking."

Dickens was a night walker--"The streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter's night," he once wrote--but I am a morning walker. And 'tis the season for morning walking: the sun is now, finally, my companion once again, and it makes all the difference.

Dickensian Laughter

Though I read a lot of literary biographies, I don't read a lot of non-biographical secondary literature. Oh, here and there I'll read something about one of my favorites--Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, or Thomas Hardy, for example--but the only writer about whom I regularly find myself reading criticism is Dickens.

In part it's because Dickens, two hundred years after his birth, still seems inexhaustible. There's so much matter in each of his books that it seems there's always a new angle of attack or area of focus. He also has the benefit of being stodgy enough that even contemporary critical writings about him feel largely like the product of an earlier century: even as they may take new findings and new approaches into account, they nonetheless keep an eye on the general reader, and work in a prose register that is accessible to him or her.

In addition, those are the books that bring me into better contact with the wild world of non-novelistic Dickens writings. Any serious Dickens fan does some dipping, here and there, into Sketches by Boz, or American Notes for General Circulation, but those books don't bulk so large in our memories as the novels. And who reads beyond that, to the Household Words pieces, or the countless volumes of letters? But there are rewards in almost any page of Dickens's writing, and one of the great pleasures of a good work of Dickens criticism is the new acquaintance it offers us with those writings.

All of which is by way of a long preamble to saying how much I'm enjoying Malcolm Andrews's new book Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour. As Dickens's own people say, it does what it says on the tin, offering a number of different angles on how Dickens used humor, how his audience received it, how he fit with and broke from earlier traditions, and--best of the bunch--what we know about Dickens's own laughter.

The book is so rich with quotation that it feels at least as much like a conversation as an argument, throughout the book, Andrews treats us to gleanings from the minor Dickens, along with opinions and insights from his contemporaries and friends. I'll treat you to my favorite bit thus far, from a letter Dickens sent to Georgina Hogarth from a reading tour in Ireland on August 25, 1858. Dickens cast this portion of the letter in the form of a dialogue between himself and a young boy he met on the street:

INIMITABLE. Holloa, old chap.

YOUNG IRELAND. Hal-loo!

INIMITABLE (In his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are. I am very fond of little boys.

YOUNG IRELAND. Air yer? Ye'r right.

INIMITABLE. What do you learn, old fellow?

YOUNG IRELAND (very intent on Inimitable, and always childish, except in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils, and wureds of two sillibils, and wureds of one sillibil.

INIMITABLE (gaily). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words of one syllable.

YOUNG IRELAND (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly words of one sillibil.

INIMITABLE. Can you write?

YOUNG IRELAND. Not yet. Things come by degrees.

INIMITABLE. Can you cipher?

YOUNG IRELAND (very quickly). Wha'at's that?

INIMITABLE. Can you make figures?

YOUNG IRELAND. I can make a nought, which is not asy, being round.

INIMITABLE. I say, old boy, wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in the hall, in a soldier's cap? You know--in a soldier's cap?

YOUNG IRELAND (cogitating deeply) Was it a very good cap?

INIMITABLE. Yes.

YOUNG IRELAND. Did it fit uncommon?

INIMITABLE. Yes.

YOUNG IRELAND. Dat was me!

Dialect often feels like the weakest of jokes, but here it's animated so wonderfully by Dickens's sly stage directions, and by the fun that he and the young man both are clearly having. Oh, to have gone to your mailbox and found there a letter from Dickens!

Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Jewish characters

If readers know only one thing about Daniel Deronda, it's that it takes up the question of the Jewish experience, and the place of Jewish citizens, within British society. Yet that theme is barely present in the first half of the book: aside from a throwaway reference by Gwendolen to those "unscrupulous" "Jew dealers" in the opening pages, there's no reference to Judaism until the appearance of Mirah Lapidoth, nearly 200 pages in:

"I am English-born. But I am a Jewess."

Deonrda was silent, inwardly wondering that he had not said this to himself before, though any one who had seen delicate-faced Spanish girls might simply have guessed her to be Spanish.

"Do you despise me for it?" she said presently in low tones, which had a sadness that pierced like a cry from a small dumb creature in fear.

"Why should I?" said Deronda. "I am not so foolish."

"I know many Jews are bad."

"So are many Christians. But I should not think it fair for you to despise me because of that."

It's particularly interesting to read this--even knowing that it comes from the mouth of a character who has already been established as upright and sensitive--having earlier this winter read Oliver Twist (1838) and Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1876).

While acknowledging the fact that drawing inferences about social change from the skewed data points represented by a small group of novels is risky, it's hard not to in this case. Oliver Twist is infamous for Dickens's antisemitic portrayal of Fagin. Even when you know going in that it's going to be bad--so bad that Dickens himself later regretted his portrayal of Fagin, and reportedly tried to balance the scales a bit by making Riah in Our Mutual Friend an irreproachable human being--it's startling to encounter. Dickens refers to Fagin simply as "the Jew" 100 times. He makes off-hand reference to the size of Fagin's nose. And he depicts him as wholly without redeeming qualities, an utter villain driven by inhuman greed. As Stephen Gill writes in his introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition,

Fagin is the real agent of darkness in this novel. . . .What determines the presentation of Fagin is a kind of concentrated ferocity, but it is almost certainly without conscious anti-Semitic intent. . . . Fagin's Jewishness is part and parcel of his wickedness, for this is the age-old stereotype, the Jew as scapegoat.

It is the very unthinkingness of Dickens's antisemitism that is so suggestive of a social valence: casting about for a villain, he simply made him a Jew. And, to the extent that Philip Collins's Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage can serve as our guide, the portrayal seems to have gone all but unnoticed by contemporary reviewers--if they were horrified, it was by Dickens's choice to depict with some realism the squalor of London poverty and low life.

That's what makes the depictions of Jewish Britons by Trollope and Eliot not quite forty years later so interesting. Trollope's concern, as always, is with depicting society as it is, and thereby showing us both its foibles and its progress. And what he reveals in The Way We Live Now, published while Disraeli was Prime Ministe, is a society in which antisemitic prejudice, while still present, has receded to a place where it is merely one of a number of prejudices--against trade and new money, for example. Jewishness, like a lack of a title, is an obstacle to be overcome before one can be accorded full membership in society, but some sort of acceptance--if not full--is at least conceivable, provided there's enough money involved. This exchange, between Georgiana, desperate to escape her home life and thus looking to get married at almost any cost, and a old friend who married well is indicative of the improved, if still equivocal, place of Jews in the novel:

She had plucked up so much courage as had enabled her to declare her fate to her old friend,--remembering as she did so how in days long past she and her friend Julia Triplex had scattered their scorn upon some poor girl who had married a man with a Jewish name,--whose grandfather had possibly been a Jew. "Dear me," said Lady Monogram. "Todd, Brehgert, and Goldsheiner! Mr. Todd is--one of us, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Georgina boldly. "And Mr. Brehgert is a Jew. His name is Ezekial Brehgert, and he is a Jew. You can say what you like about it."

"I don't say anything about it, my dear."

"And you can think anything you like. Things are changed since you and I were younger."

"Very much changed, it appears," said Lady Monogram.

That seems, roughly, to be the same position that Eliot's characters find themselves in. The fact that Mirah Lapidoth is Jewish conveys nothing like the horror occasioned by Fagin, certainly, but at the same time the essentially kindly Meyricks seem utterly perplexed by it. The daughters attend synagogue with Mirah, which seems quite ecumenical of them, but they find it largely uncongenial. Their only reference point is Sir Walter Scott's Rebecca, and they find Mirah's Jewishness "less reconcilable with their wishes" than Rebecca's malleable faith was with Scott's plot. "Perhaps," wonders Amy,

it would gradually melt away from her, and she would pass into Christianity like the rest of the world, if she got to love us very much, and never found her mother. It is so strange to be of the Jewish religion now.

That "like the rest of the world" tells you almost everything you need to know about the British mind of the 1870s, doesn't it?

So what, in the second half of the novel, will Eliot do with the theme of Judaism? Unlike Trollope, her concerns are more intellectual than social, so I expect that the Jewish faith and the Jewish race will surely be wrestled with as ideas at least as much as social qualities--but who will do the wrestling? Will Deronda's infatuation with Mirah hold, and draw him away from his upbringing? Ah, the fun of watching a novel unfold, not knowing what is to come!

Back to Eliot, at least briefly

Last week's cross-temporal hunt for emoticons and the many pages I need to read as a judge for the fiction category of the Daphnes has put me behind both my reading and my blogging schedule for Daniel Deronda. Rather than leave you (and my co-Derondan, Maggie Bandur) in the lurch entirely, I'll stall a day or two by offering a brief bit from George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections, a volume edited by K. K. Collins that gathers contemporary reports of encounters with George Eliot. It's not as rich or quotable as the comparable book about Henry James, The Legend of the Master, but it's well worth having alongside when reading or thinking about Eliot.

Tonight I'll just share two anecdotes. First, a short, secondhand impression, via James T. Fields, published in his Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches in 1881:

[Dickens gave] an excellent description of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes. The latter he finds most interesting "with her shy manner of saying brilliant things."

And then this one, also secondhand, published in James Adderley's In Slums and Society: Reminiscences of Old Friends in 1916:

I have been told that George Eliot was in a railway-carriage once with a friend, and there was a "muscular Christian" sort of parson conversing with them about all the topics of the day. The reverend gentleman got out at a certain station, and the friend remarked enthusiastically:--

"Ah! That's the sort of parson I like. No nonsense about him!"

"Is he the sort of parson you would like to have at your deathbed?" said George Eliot.

"Oh no!" said the lady.

The only proper way to close the post after that, I think, is to turn things over to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon:

Mirah Lapidoth appears, bearing tears and treacle

{Editorial note: this is the fifth in the series of posts that my friend Maggie Bandur and I are trading back and forth as we wander through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.. Scroll back for earlier posts if you want to get up to speed.}

I'll start by following up on Maggie's post about Gwendolen Harleth's specific brand of awfulness--for which she makes a solid case--by noting that her skeptical eye led me to read a later exchange between Gwendolen and her mother differently than I would have. Their fortune lost, the family is in scrimp-and-save mode, which does not sit well with Gwendolen, who, reluctantly, is about to go out as a governess while the rest of the family takes residence in a small, remote cottage. "How shall you endure it, mamma?" asks Gwendolen. After she expands on the incipient horrors a bit, her mother replies,

"It will be some comfort that you have not to bear it too, dear."

It would be, wouldn't it? At risk of doubting a mother's sincerity, I find myself reading that as less about her daughter's tender sensibilities and more about the fact that a crowded house is more tolerable the fewer self-entitled whiners you fill it with.

Distrust of intentions and sincerity is actually a good way into the point of today's post, which addresses a new character whom Maggie mentioned at the end of her post: Mirah Lapidoth, "the very Dickens-like, beautiful, but oh-so-sad eighteen-year-old" who is prevented by Deronda from acting on her intention of throwing herself in the Thames.

What Deronda didn't realize is that the Thames might have puked her right back up. She's awful. Throughout this discussion, Maggie and I have in different ways given Eliot credit for her complicated, nuanced portrayals of women . . . and then suddenly she drops on us a character dripping with all the worst sentimental Victorian ideas about the innocence and purity of young women. Deronda is clearly love-struck at first sight by those very qualities, allied as they are to a helpless frailty that is equally intolerable to a contemporary reader, and decides to take her under his wing. Even Eliot seems to sense that perhaps she's taken things a bit too far, for she opens the next book with an account of his hitherto unsuspected romantic side:

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. . . . To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo.

Now, I suppose it's entirely possible that Eliot has brought Mirah into the book primarily to complicate and advance the plot. As those who've suffered through the unlikely machinations of Raffles in Middlemarch can attest, Eliot is at her weakest when she is trying to make her novels conform to Victorian expectations for mystery and surprise; it makes you wish she could have read some late Henry James and realized that it is possible to write a great novel in which almost nothing happens.

Even if that's the case, it doesn't quite excuse the load of sentimental bosh that is Mirah's life story. After Deronda takes her to the home of his friends, the Meyricks, she relates her entire history. At length: it takes up more than 13 pages in the Penguin Classics edition. We get page after page of her sinister father and his sinister companions, her pure heart only slowly awakening to danger, the desperate measures she took to escape, her childlike faith in the goodness of people that is only slowly eroded. Of her life on stage, she says,

I missed the love and the trust I had been born into. I made a life in my own thoughts quite different from everything about me: I chose what seemed to me beautiful out of the plays and everything, and made my world out of it; and it was like a sharp knife always grazing me that we had two sorts of life which jarred so with each other--women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners.

It's all not only bloatedly insipid, and thus dull, it's also hard to believe. And that's the part I keep getting hung up on. Here, for example, is Mirah's disjointed first explanation to the Meyricks and Deronda of how she came to this pass:

My name is Mirah Lapidoth. I am come a long way from Prague by myself. I made my escape. I ran away from dreadful things. I came to find my mother and brother in London. I had been taken from my mother when I was little, but I thought I could find her again. I had trouble--the houses were all gone--I could not find her. It has been a long while, and I had not much money. That is why I am in distress.

Now, if a stranger came up to you on the street and told you that story, would you instinctively believe them, and want to know more? Or would you slowly back away? And what if they followed it with one of those life stories in which every man's hand is against them, every piece of luck is bad, and everyone is always doing them wrong?

Yet Deronda--and the Meyricks as well, who don't even have love as an excuse--seem to harbor no doubts at all. They are wholly sympathetic, positively brimming with belief. I realize there's always a substantial risk in trying to extrapolate about real people in the past from what we're given in fiction, but could people possibly have been that much more credulous then? Are we that much more thoroughly cauterized by cynicism?

As a modest, unscientific test, I decided to turn to Dickens's Little Nell, whose untimely death in The Ol Curiosity Shop is held up as powerful evidence of Victorian love of Dickens's treacly heroines. But was she really received that heartily? Were there no dissenting voices at the time?

If so, Philip Collins didn't turn any up when he assembled Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. "Little Nell," he writes,

made her mark immediately: [Dickens's friend and biographer John] Forster was able to predict for her "as long a life as any member of the great family of English fiction can hope to enjoy." Comparisons with Cordelia and Imogen were frequent. At a less literary, more personal, level, she could be imagined "cling[ing] with a never-ending fondness around our necks, inseparable for ever." (Ainsworth's Magazine, January 1844). . . . Nor was the international furore about her restricted to simple unsophisticated readers and arguably ga-ga old men like Landor and Jeffrey. For the austerely intellectual Westminster Review, for instance, she was "the happiest and most perfect of Dickens's sketches . . . a tragedy of the true sort."

The "fierce reaction" against her, Collins notes didn't begin until much later.

Which suggests that, yes, Deronda and the Meyricks may not be atypical in their susceptibility to Mirah's sentimental innocence, and that perhaps Eliot herself thought she was creating a character as believable, and fully fleshed-out, as any of her others. At this point in the novel, I think that's the only way we can read the situation; even so, it's hard for me to reconcile with Eliot's perceptiveness and intellectual acuity, or with the flaying, modern wit she allows Gwendolen to wield.

Two ways of entering a room

I happened to be entertained on consecutive days by two different descriptions of characters crossing the thresholds of rooms in two wildly different novels, so, since they amused me, I'll share them and hope they do the same for you.

The first comes from A Tale of Two Cities and is one of the only passages in which the prose carries some of the usual Dickensian playfulness and life. Dickens is describing a room in an inn along the mail route:

The Concord bedchamber being always assigned to a passenger by the mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all kinds and types of men came out of it.

We have been living in deep winter for so long here that the concept is familiar: the L train takes in nothing but identical passengers, but once we get to our offices, we as suddenly our own individual selves again, if a bit the worse for wear.

The second passage comes from The Acceptance World, the third volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. This volume finds Nick Jenkins in his mid-twenties, properly embarked on life, if still working out how to unknot the lines that tether him to the dock in love. Early in the novel, his college acquaintance J. G. Quiggin, a forcefully left-wing writer and critic, arrives unexpectedly in the restaurant of the Ritz:

However, my attention was at that moment distracted by the sudden appearance in the palm court of a short, decidedly unconventional figure who now came haltingly up the steps. This person wore a black leather overcoat. His arrival in the Ritz--in those days--was a remarkable event.

Pausing, with a slight gesture of exhaustion that seemed to imply arduous travel over many miles of arid desert or snowy waste (according to whether the climate within or without the hotel was accepted as prevailing), he looked about the room; gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design: then turning his eyes to the chandeliers and the glass of the roof. His bearing was at once furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers. He seemed to be surveying the tables as if searching for someone, at the same time unable to believe his eyes, while he did so, at the luxuriance of the oasis in which he found himself. He carried no hat, but retained the belted leather overcoat upon which a few drops of moisture could b seen glistening as he advanced into the room, an indication that snow or sleet had begun to fall outside. This black leather garment gave a somewhat official air to his appearance, obscurely suggesting a Wellsian man of the future, hierarchic in rank. Signs of damp could also be seen in patches on his sparse fair hair, a thatch failing to roof in completely the dry, yellowish skin of his scalp.

I enjoy the whole description, especially the way that it pauses the action to not only take in, but reflect on, all of Quiggin. It's one of the things Powell is best at: reminding us that our minds are always working, even in company, and letting his narrative slow for their deliberate operations and flights of association. And how effective is that run of adjectives midway through: "furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers." Can't you just see Quiggin's face at that moment? Finally, there's the opening description that spools out from the hint of exhaustion--so entertaining. It makes me think we should all commit to adding a bit of over-the-top comic description to our daily lives.

A Tale of Two Dickenses

An upcoming staging of a stage production of A Tale of Two Cities here in Chicago made me realize that I've not read it since high school, so, before I finally embark on The Old Curiosity Shop, my last unread Dickens, I'm turning to the Tale.

A Tale of Two Cities occupies an odd place in Dickens's oeuvre, at least in America. Huge numbers of students read it as a middle school or high school assignment, with only Great Expectations coming even close to it in popularity on syllabi. Presumably for most of those people, it's the only Dickens novel they'll ever read. Its choice as a textbook is understandable: it has a tie to important and (relatively) familiar and easily explained historical events, it offers easily (too easily) explored moral lessons, and its plot features moments of high drama.

For a Dickens fan, however, what's more important is what's missing. It's the only Dickens novel--even counting the books like Martin Chuzzlewit and Barnaby Rudge, that border on being failures--that doesn't offer any truly memorable characters, and it is also the only one that is utterly devoid of humor. Dickens himself described it as a sort of experiment in a letter to John Forster in 1859:

I set myself the little task of making a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than that they should express themselves, by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the odious stuff that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway.

It's hard not to admire Dickens for trying something new that late in his career, but the problem is that by going away from dialogue and self-expressing characters, he was going away from his strengths. The critical reception reflected that: in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, Philip Collins calls the roll:

It "pleased nobody," according to the Eclectic Review (October 1861); for Adolphus Ward (1870) it was "one of the very few of Mr Dickens's works which require an effort in the perusal."

The only people, it seems who liked it initially were Forster, Thomas Carlyle, whose history of the French Revolution formed its ground and who deemed it "wonderful," and Wilkie Collins, who called it "Dickens's most perfect work of constructive art."

Reading it in high school was my first encounter with Dickens, and I loved it. I was utterly caught up in the drama, and in Sydney Carton's overcoming of his own bad nature. Even a terrible teacher and a classroom technique that consisted almost solely of having the students read aloud at their desks, one sentence per person, consecutively, couldn't dull the excitement it offered. Rereading it, however, I find myself less satisfied. I miss the fire of Dickens's prose at its most inventive, and I very much miss the twinkling eyes of his humor. Ultimately, I find I come down near where Claire Tomalin does:

It is true that the plot is too long drawn out and elaborate; . . and that the depiction of the ancien regime is somewhat mechanical in its horrors, the characters like emblematic puppets representing good and evil--virtuous doctor, perfect daughter and wife, wicked marquis, vengeful woman of the people.

And that not to mention that the "perfect daughter and wife" is yet another of Dickens's insipid, unbelievable, flawlessly dull female characters.

Yet Tomalin is right in how she concludes:

The climax of the action is preposterous and deeply sentimental, but the tension is so built up that Carton's famous last words before the guillotine--"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . ."--make their effects on all but the most determinedly stony hearts. This is Dickens the showman, amusing his people and drawing their tears.

What's perhaps most interesting about A Tale of Two Cities--drawn, as noted above, with as clear lines of black and white, good and evil, as ever he would use--is that within a little more than a year Dickens would publish Great Expectations, his most morally complicated and interesting novel, the one book of his that fully acknowledges ambiguity. And after that, of course, we would have Our Mutual Friend, as brooding a book as he ever wrote, and the stump of Drood, whose shadows seem likely to have matched it. For all the violence and horror of the Tale, its moral certainties make it essentially an untroubling book, and give no hint of the complexity to come.

Dreamland with Edwin Drood

On a day when it seems inconceivable that winter's bite could ever lessen, what better to talk of than death, and last meetings? I'll share one of the most memorable and moving bits that Robert Gottlieb dug up for Great Expectations, his book on Dickens's children. This comes from the pen of Dickens's eldest, Charley, presumably from Reminiscences of My Father, which was published posthumously in 1934. He writes of the last time he saw his father alive:

He was in town for our usual Thursday meeting on the business of "All the Year Round," and, instead of returning to Gadshill on that day had remained over night, and was at work again in his room in Wellington Street, on the Friday, the 3rd of June. During the morning I had hardly seen him except to take his instructions about some work I had to do and at about one o'clock--I had arranged to go into the country for the afternoon--I cleared up my table and prepared to leave. The door of communication between our rooms was open, as usual, and, as I came towards him, I saw that he was writing very earnestly. After a moment I said, "If you don't want anything more, sir, I shall be off now," but he continued his writing with the same intensity as before, and gave no sign of being aware of my presence. Again I spoke--louder, perhaps, this time--and he rested his head and looked at me long and fixedly. But I soon found that, although his eyes were bent upon me and he seemed to be looking at me earnestly, he did not see me, and that he was, in fact, unconscious for the moment of my very existence. He was in Dreamland with Edwin Drood, and I left him there--for the last time.

In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd calls the moment "disturbing," and while I can see his point, in this account, Charley seems to be at peace with being ignored in favor of the work, a position that surely was far from unfamiliar. The Dickens children seemed to always be proud of their father's work, even as they struggled with his failings as a parent, and I suspect that even though it likely pained him, Charley saw this final meeting as fitting.

With the family's pain a century and a half behind us, I will admit to being grateful for any time Dickens spent on Drood, a book I greatly enjoy. I wouldn't go so far as the reviewer for the Spectator in 1870 who, in an otherwise perceptive review, wrote,

However characteristic the faults of the fragment which embodies Mr Dickens's last literary effort, we feel no doubt that it will be read, admired, and remembered for the display of his equally characteristic powers, long after such performances as Little Dorrit and Bleak House are utterly neglected and forgotten.

But at the same time, I think Wilkie Collins's assessment of it as "Dickens's last, laboured effort, the melancholy work of a worn-out brain" is nonsense, perhaps rooted in some protectiveness about Dickens's modest encroachment on his own more deliberately mysterious and sensational turf. It feels alive and fresh (despite recycling some of the devices, relationships, and structures of Our Mutual Friend)--and, as a reviewer for the Academy wrote in October of 1870, "there are signs of a more carefully-designed intrigue than in most of his earlier works." Solutions to Drood, including Donald Westlake's sharply analytic unpublished one, though fun, may quite possibly take the "Mystery" of the title too seriously: as many have pointed out, Dickens was never much of a mystery-style plotter, his revelations and reversals rarely that surprising. Nonetheless, Drood feels more intricate and planned than a lot of Dickens. If ever his surprises were to surprise, surely it would have been among those shadows.

We shall never know. Talking with his daughter Kate the night before he died, writes Peter Ackroyd,

He talked of his hopes for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, "if, please God, I live to finish it." Then, he added, "I say if, because you know, my dear child, because I have not been strong lately."

Father and daughter talked until three in the morning. The next day, he wrote the last words we would ever get of Drood, and of Dickens: "and then falls to with an appetite." Which, while certainly, and sadly, unsatisfying, seems not wholly inappropriate. For how else do we approach Dickens's work than with an appetite? And what other writer's works do we fall to with such vigor?

We already knew Dickens was good at naming

While I've got Dickens on the brain, here's a very quick post drawing on Robert Gottlieb's Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens. Gottlieb's book is brief and synthetic rather than groundbreaking, but for Dickens fans it does perform a service: while much research has been done, and many books and articles written, about the lives of Dickens's sons, relatively little of it makes its way into Dickens biographies, which tend, reasonably, to end with Dickens's own death. So our portrait of his children is incomplete, and, Gottlieb argues convincingly, somewhat unfair: even if we know better, we tend to take Dickens's own disappointment in them as a reflection of reality, whereas their lives and fates were much more mixed, and some could certainly be called happy and successful.

For today's post, however, it's all about the nicknames. All of Dickens's children had them, some more than one, and they're fun. Herewith, in birth order:

Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, 1837–1896

Flaster Floby (a corruption of Master Toby)

Mary Angela Dickens, 1838–1896

Mild Glo'ster

Catherine Macready Dickens, 1839–1929

Lucifer Box (which Gottlieb glosses: "A 'lucifer' was a safety match, and from her earliest years Katey's temper would flare up the way matches flared up--and the way her father's did as well.")

Walter Savage Landor Dickens, 1841–1863

Young Skull ("for his high cheekbones")

Frank Jeffrey Dickens, 1844–1886

Chickenstalker (Origin obscure: "One source claims it's descriptive of 'his make-believe hunting adventures around the home place.' More generally, it's ascribed to a character in 'The Chimes.' . . . But why would you name a baby boy after a jolly, fat old lady? Was baby Frank conspicuously jolly and fat? If so, we have no record of it.")

Alfred d'Orsay Tennyson DIckens, 1845–1912

Skittles (origin obscure)

Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, 1847–1872

The Ocean Spectre ("because of what Georgina [Hogarth, Dickens's sister-in-law, who more or less raised the children after Dickens repudiated their mother] called his curious habit of pausing in his play, cupping his tiny hands under his chin, and casting a faraway look over the ocean.")

Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, 1849–1933

The Jolly Postboy

The Comic Countryman

Mr. H, or just H

Dora Annie Dickens, 1850–1851

Dora, always frail, died after a mere six months of life and was never nicknamed.

Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, 1852–1902

Plorn (Plorn was the only Dickens child to actually use his nickname out in the world; it essentially became his name.)

Two immediate thoughts come to mind on seeing this list assembled:

1. The Dickens nicknames give the Mitford girls' nicknames a run for the money.

2. That's a whole lot of children in a short time span, even for the Victorian era. The failure of the Dickens marriage, like the failure of almost any marriage, surely had multiple causes--not least of which, by any means, was Dickens himself--but it's hard not to attribute a substantial part of Catherine Dickens's decline in health, emotional strength, and general appetite for life (which drove Dickens to distraction, scorn, and eventually cruelty) to the wear and danger of that constant cycle of pregnancy and birth.

Keep it under your hat

I wrote about the pleasures of Judith Flanders's The Victorian City on Monday, but I can't help returning to it today to share one more wonderful bit. It comes from the same chapter as Monday's passage about the piemen, and it's a mere footnote to a section about coffee houses and the ways people ate there--including bringing their own meat for the waiter to put on the fire and cook. Flanders quotes from one of Dickens's All the Year Round pieces, "Night Walks," wherein he tells of seeing a man at a Covent Garden coffee house in 1860 take "out of his hat a large cold meat pudding." To that Flanders appends the following footnote:

If Dickens is to be believed, men kept almost everything they owned in their hats. It is almost quicker to itemize those characters who did not use their hat as a handy man-bag. Those who did include: Mr Pickwick, who keeps his glove and handkerchief there when he goes skating; in Oliver Twist a hat is home to Mr Bumble's handkerchief; the Dodger brings hot rolls and ham for breakfast in his; his pickpocket colleague Toby Crackit puts a shawl in "my castor" ["castor" = beaver]; in Nicholas Nickleby, Newman Noggs, flustered, tries to fit a parcel "some two feet square" into his, as well as keeping at different times a letter there, "some halfpence" and a handkerchief, while the moneylender Arthur Gride keeps large wedding favours in his; in The Old Curiosity Shop, Kit's handkerchief is in his hat; in Martin Chuzzlewit, Montague Tigg keeps old letters, "crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of broken cigars" in his, while the stagecoachman uses his to store his parcels for delivery; in Little Dorrit, Pancks, the moneylender's clerk, keeps his notebook and mathematical calculations there; and finally, in David Copperfield, David puts a bouquet for Dora "in my hat, to keep it fresh"--possibly the only fully middle-class person in Dickens's novels to use this caching spot. Much later in the century Shelock Holmes notices a bulge in Watson's hat, which indicates the has stashed his stethoscope there, but there are few other mentions in fiction. I suspect it was a standard location for a man's handkerchief, and for all the other items Dickens merely thought it was funny.

If that litany of silliness hasn't convinced you to buy Flanders's book, I don't know what will!

On the streets of the Victorian city

I recently discovered that, like many people, I had been led badly astray by my youth. But unlike most people in that situation, the discovery brought joy rather than sorrow (or decades of therapy).

Specifically, I thought I'd read all of Dickens except The Old Curiosity Shop (which I've avoided for years because of Little Nell, even as I've re-read the others)--but as I read Judith Flanders's wonderful The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens's London and kept encountering unfamiliar passages and characters from Oliver Twist, I realized that I actually had never read it. I'd instead checked it off the mental list twenty-plus years ago based on a jumbled recollection of having read an adaptation (think Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare) as a kid and then playing Oliver in Oliver! when I was thirteen. Oh, joy! My book bag for an upcoming London trip could be repacked--and Little Nell could live, insipidly, for another day!

That was far from the only joy I received from Flanders's book, however. I've long been a fan of her Inside the Victorian Home, which is exactly the sort of up-close, detail-and-anecdote-filled history I most enjoy, and this book takes that same approach to the streets of London.

At first I was worried that the conceit of the subtitle--that Dickens would be our guide--was merely a hook designed to capitalize on last year's Dickens bicentennial, and that Dickens would ultimately prove more window dressing (or even limitation) than central source. But oh, was I wrong: one of the great pleasures of Flanders's book is how much more she makes us appreciate Dickens's eye for detail, and how deftly she uses those details to help us understand the life Dickens was seeing around him. I can't count the number of times Flanders seizes on an expression or aside in one of Dickens's novels--the sort of descriptive texture that most readers would pass over, uncomprehending but untroubled, in the rush of Dickens's prose--and uses it to illustrate or explain some forgotten aspect of street life. Dickens, in Flanders's hands, is restored to his role of reporter and man on the street, never forgetting anything he sees his fellow Londoners do.

Perhaps my favorite example comes in the utterly fascinating chapter on street food, when Flanders gets to the piemen. Being a pieman, she explains, was not really profitable:

In the 1840s, the Corn Laws kept the price of flour high and, with it, the price of pies. To maintain their price at the expected penny, the piemen were forced to scrimp: their pies were made with cheap shortening, or had less filling, or poor-quality meat. Many of the legends of cats-meat, or worse, in pies spring from this period. In 1833, Sam Weller advises the horrified Mr Pickwick, "Wery good thing is weal pie, when you . . . is quite sure it ain't kittens," but in summer "fruits is in, cats is out."

Even the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1849 didn't help, as the piemen then found themselves competing with pie shops. So, Flanders explains, the piemen's customer base was reduced almost entirely to boys,

who worked in the streets, eating coffee-stall breakfasts, shellfish at lunch, hot eels or pea soup for dinner, perhaps with a potato, and a pie to fill in the gaps when they could afford it. What the boys loved about piemen was their method of charging. A pie cost a penny, but all piemen were willing to toss a coin for one: if the customer won, he got the pie free; if the pieman won, the pieman kept both pie and penny. Tossing for a pie was part of the language. Dickens used it regularly: in Pickwick Papers the stagecoach driver warns his passengers: "Take care o' the archvay, gen'lm'n. 'Heads,' as the pieman says.' In David Copperfield, little Miss Mowcher is like "a goblin pieman" as she tosses up the two half-crowns she is paid, as did Montague Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewith spinning a coin "in the air after the manner of a pieman."

See what I mean? I'm sure when I read those lines in Pickwick and the other novels, that I simply chalked them up as character-driven slang, with nary a though to the history they revealed.

The Victorian City is full of passages like that, ones that give you the feeling--brief and illusory though it might be--that you understand what it would have been like to walk down the streets of Victorian London. It's both a great book for the lover of London and a useful addition to the ever-growing Dickens bookshelf. (I should say: it's been available in the UK for more than a year, but the US edition isn't scheduled to be published until this summer.)

Dickens and Dostoevsky

The piano is eating up all my time tonight (remind me--why did I agree to be in a recital Sunday?), but I don't think you'll complain when you see what I have for you: a link to a story from the April 10 issue of the Times Literary Supplement wherein Eric Naiman takes last year's very strange kerfuffle over a purported meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky--noted in Claire Tomalin's biography and others--and starts pulling threads.

If I may engage in some wild, Friday night mixing of metaphors: the unraveling threads send Naiman down rabbit hole after rabbit hole into a world of fake names, fake citations, fake articles, and fake books, and even fake letters to the editor. I found it dizzying and deliciously entertaining, and I suspect that anyone even peripherally connected with academia--and its occasional log-rolling and insularity--will, at minimum, be amused.

Wilkie Collins meets a reader

Peter Ackroyd's brief life of Wilkie Collins, while disappointingly thin on gossipy speculations about Collins's seedier aspect--his two households, his opium addiction--does offer plenty of anecdotal nuggets to enjoy, of which the following is easily my favorite. Soon after the publication of his novel of a reformed prostitute, The New Magdalen, Collins took a trip on a train and shared a car with a clergyman and his two daughters. Ackroyd writes,

When the clergyman fell asleep one of the young ladies quietly took out a book from her bag; she dropped it and, when Collins retrieved it for her he saw that it was The New Magdalen. She blushed as she realised that her secret reading was discovered. "It's perfectly dreadful," she told her sister. But soon enough she was thoroughly absorbed in it. On signs that her father was about to wake, she quickly returned the book to her bag. When Collins looked at her, she blushed again.

It's a charming little story, almost too perfect to believe, like the story (for which I can't this morning find a reference) that Dickens overheard a reader in a shop asking for the next number of his current book and from that realized just how far behind he'd allowed himself to fall--at which point he raced home and set to work.

But it's more fun to believe it, so let's. And let's also be grateful that Collins wasn't traveling in Japan, where people wrap their books in brown covers, or in the future, where all e-readers present the same anonymous face.

Wilkie Collins loves America

Just after finishing Wednesday's post, I came across a bit that seems worth sharing as an addendum and counter to all the British anti-Americanism I included in that post. Peter Ackroyd, in his brief life of Wilkie Collins, writes of Collins's 1873 tour of America,

[H]e was generally beguiled and charmed by the Americans whom he met. They were frank, cheerful, and free; they did not obey the conventions of Victorian England that Collins himself cordially detested. They lacked the hypocrisy and frigid good manners of the English middle class. They had minor failings, however; they did not hum or whistle; they did not keep dogs; and they never walked anywhere.

Good to know that the American aversion to non-mall walking has been around for more than a century. Collins would surely be pleased by the spread of dog ownership, however, though I don't know that we whistle or hum any more now than we did then.

Collins's approbation stands in contradistinction to what his friend Dickens found in America. Upset by, among other things, the Americans' refusal to legislate and enforce copyrights--and what he saw as their disregard for his losses therefrom--he turned his American Notes for General Circulation into a savage indictment of the whole people. Much of the book's criticism is marred by spleen, and thus rendered not wholly convincing, but the following passage, at least, from the conclusion, describes an American trait that's certainly still with us:

The merits of a broken speculation, or a bankruptcy, or of a successful scoundrel, are not gauged by its or his observance of the golden rule, "Do as you would be done by," but are considered with reference to their smartness. I recollect on both occasions of our passing that ill fated Cairo on the Mississippi, remarking on the bad effects such gross deceits must have when they exploded, in generating a want of confidence abroad, and discouraging foreign investment: but I was given to understand that this was a very smart scheme by which a deal of money had been made: and that its smartest feature was that they forgot these things abroad, in a very short time, and speculated again, as freely as ever.

However, since we're but little removed from Independence Day--as evidenced by periodic explosions outside--I'll let Collins's appreciation be the last word on the subject today. Ackroyd writes,

[H]e had thoroughly enjoyed the experience; he had made new friends and had enjoyed the unaffected admiration of his audiences. "The enthusiasm and kindness are really and truly beyond description," he wrote. "I should be the most ungrateful man living if I had any other than the highest opinion of the American people."

And now to go whistle "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in Collins's honor.

Case notes, or, Some disconnected bits on the law and justice

1 When I'm between books, I often turn to John Mortimer's Rumpole stories, through which I've slowly been making my way for the past several years. Usually Rumpole's relationship with and characterization of his wife is a subject of humor verging on whining--he regularly refers to her, in a nod to Rider Haggard, as She Who Must Be Obeyed--but in "Rumpole at Sea," the story I read this morning, he quietly reveals that he has a lot more respect for Hilda than he usually lets on. In telling the story, Rumpole is forced to relate a number of events at which he was not present, but he explains, "I have reconstructed the following pages from [Mrs Rumpole's] evidence which was, as always, completely reliable." Later, he notes:

She Who Must Be Obeyed has a dead eye for detail and would have risen to great heights in the Criminal Investigation Department.

A reliable witness with a dead eye for detail? What higher praise could Rumpole offer?

2 One of the best moments early in Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity--a moment when you begin to realize that you're in the hands of a genius--is on the fifth page, when Casi, the protagonist, informs the reader that there is about to be a digression:

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Said digression ensues, explaining in intense and often hilarious language the case and judicial and legal activity that led up to "the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy" and led to the warning about self-incrimination that TV has made so famous.

With A Naked Singularity on the brain last week, I was surprised to see the following exchange late in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend:

"Don't!" said Mr Inspector. "Why, why argue? It's my duty to inform you that whatever you say, will be used against you."

"I don't think it will."

"But I tell you it will," said Mr Inspector. "Now, having received the caution, do you still say that you foresaw my visit this afternoon?"

So as far back as that, in England, an officer--of a police force that had been in existence for less than forty years--already felt it was his duty to warn a suspect, and it was already known as "the caution"? I had no idea, and neither, it seems, does Wikipedia: the section on similar rights in England and Wales in the entry for Miranda, while noting that the right may have originated there, only traces it as far back as 1912. Any legal scholars want to weigh in?

3 In anticipation of Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (which is one the best books I've read in recent years), I read Ford Madox Ford's treatment of a slightly later period in the career of Thomas Cromwell, The Fifth Queen. Ford, a Catholic, lays his sympathy with Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth queen, and in the process he paints a much darker portrait of Cromwell than Mantel does. Ford's Cromwell isn't the ruthless villain he is forced to play as the foil of the perfectly noble Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, but he is driven much more by self-interest than in Mantel's account, and his mutability is seen less as an emblem of his essential--and laudable--modernity than of an essential ethical slipperiness.

Mantel's Cromwell is so well drawn, so memorable, that he's hard to shake even as you're reading Ford, so when we see him meet the downfall we've known since the first page is inevitable, it's hard not to feel a real pang. The moment in The Fifth Queen when his last-ditch machinations fail and he's confronted by the lords who are his bitterest enemies, stripped of his chancellorship, and named a traitor unites the two characterizations and is vividly arresting:

Then such rage and despair had come into Thomas Cromwell's terrible face that Cranmer's senses had reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

"Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!" and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop's feet.

And now on to Bring Up the Bodies!

4 As seems only right on questions of the law and justice, I'll let Kafka have the last word. This comes from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka (1968):

How often is injustice committed in the name of justice? How often does damnation fly the flag of enlightenment? How often does a fall disguise itself as a rise? We can see it all now quite properly. The war didn't only burn and tear the world, but also lit it up. We can see that it is a labyrinth built by men themselves, an icy machine world, whose comforts and apparent purposefulness increasingly emasculate and dishonour us.

Dickens as a reader

One of the reasons that there were three years between Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and then another five before The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was that Dickens was devoting much of his time to his highly lucrative (and draining) reading tours. Most biographers put at least some of the blame for Dickens's early death on the grueling pace and physical demands of his reading tours. By all accounts, however, they were brilliant performances--sentimental and overblown by today's taste, perhaps, but gripping and effective, carrying away audience after audience.

In his account of Dickens's reading career, Charles Dickens as a Reader (1872), Dickens's friend Charles Kent, who wrote his book at the suggestion of Dickens and had access to the author's marked-up performance manuscripts, reminds us at the opening that not every writer is even a competent reader. He illustrates that with a story of Dr. Johnson and Virgil Thomson:

According to the grimly humorous old Doctor, "He [Thomson] was once reading to Doddington, who, being himself a reader eminently elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance, that he snatcehd the paper from his hand, and told him that he did not understand his own verses!"

Kent's book is admiring to a fault, but it's still of interest to any dedicated Dickensian. What's perhaps most interesting is the realization Kent comes to when he looks at the marked-up manuscript for Dickens's reading of the scene from David Copperfield where Emily runs off:

The wonder still is to us, now that we are recalling to mind the salient peculiarities of this Reading, as we do so, turning over leaf by leaf the marked copy of it, from which the Novelist read; the very wonder, we repeat, still is to us how, in that exquisite scene, the very words that have always moved us most in the novel were struck out in the delivery, are rigidly scored through here with blue inkmarks in the reading copy, by the hand of the Reader-Novelist. Those words, we mean which occur, where Ham, having on his arrival, made a movement as if Em'ly were outside, asked Mas'r Davy to "come out a minute," only for him, on his doing so, to find that Em'ly was not there, and that Ham was deadly pale. "Ham! what's the matter?" was gasped out in the Reading. But--not what follows, immediately on that, in the original narrative: "'Mas'r Davy!' Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he wept!"

Kent goes on to give a number of specific examples of lines Dickens cut but whose emotional sense he managed to convey by tone or expression. Frustratingly, he doesn't give any further details of how Dickens achieved his effects in this case, which perhaps would have been difficult to determine outside the actual moment. But the complicated choices of what to omit are a reminder of what Kent notes elsewhere in the book: that Dickens, ever the craftsman, devoted copious attention to assembling his reading manuscripts.

It was not by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had, in his new capacity as a reciter, merley to select two or three chapters from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the fragmentary portions thus taken from his later works were re-written by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each as "A Reading," they were then touched and retouched by their author, pen in hand, until, at the end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way of correction or of obliteration.

Oh, to have seen him in action!

Reviewing and plots

In my re-reading of Our Mutual Friends over the past several days, I've been making extensive use of Philip Collins's collection of contemporaneous reviews of Dickens, Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. Among the twenty-five pages of reviews of Our Mutual Friend--most of them mixed at best--is one from the Eclectical and Congregational Review of November 1865 that, in passing, addresses one of the great problems of fiction reviewing:

Needless work, we presume, it would be to attempt to tell the outline of Mr Dickens's story. Most of our readers have either read, or will read it; those who have not read will, perhaps, not thank us for attempting to tell it.

Now, a fiction reviewer these days certainly can't presume that all his readers will be familiar with the work in question, but even given that, I prefer that attention to plot be kept to a minimum--fiction reviewing is difficult precisely because it should be primarily evaluative or analytical, yet it seems that often the reverse holds true: we get a recap of the plot and, almost as if they're thrown in as a bonus, perhaps a few lines at the end rendering some quick judgment.

That said, I'm not sure I trust the judgment of the Eclectic and Congregational Review's critic, however, based on what comes next in this review:

Yet, perhaps, as a story, it is quite equal to any Mr Dickens has told; it is sustained throughout; there is nothing in the plot too strained or unnatural. Mr Dickens has not always been thought happy in this, for a writer with so much of nature; he has sometimes and often devised most unnatural positions and situations. . . . Yet there is less that offends in this way than in many other works of the writer, as even in Great Expectations, where the reader is startled by the half grotesque and half horrible episocidal thread of Miss Haversham [sic].

The "episodical" thread of Miss Havisham? Imagine pulling her thread from that book . . . what on earth would you be left with?

The reviewer is right that there is less here of the grotesque or fantastic than in other of Dickens's novels--no spontaneous combustion, for example--but there is strain, as the plot turns on some unlikely events and a number of the novel's least convincing characters.

More perceptive is the opening of the unsigned review, by E S. Dallas, that appeared in the Times on November 26, 1865:

Novels published in parts have the advantage and disadvantage that their fortunes are often made or marred by the first few numbers; and this last novel of Mr Charles Dickens, really one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself, labours under the disadvantage of a beginning that drags. Any one reading the earlier numbers of the new tale might see that the author meant to put forth all his strength and do his very best; and those who have an eye for literary workmanship could discover that never before had Mr Dickens's workmanship been so elaborate. On the whole, however, at that early stage the reader was more perplexed than pleased. There was an appearance of great effort without corresponding result. We were introduced to a set of people in whom it is impossible to tak e an interest, and were made familar with transactions that suggested horror. The great master of fiction exhibited all his skill, performed the most wonderful feats of language, loaded his page with wit and many a fine touch peculiar to himself .The agility of his pen was amazing, but still at first we were not much amused. We were more impressed with the exceeding cleverness of the author's manner that with the charm of his story; and when one thinks more of an artists' manner than of his matter woe to the artist.

The reviewer is responding in part, it seems, to a characteristic that I noted in my first post on the book several days ago: that the opening chapters feel remarkably de-centered, jumping from location to location and character to character with barely a hint of the thread that will ultimately connect them all. It's a daring decision--all the more so because Dickens isn't explicit about it, neither calling out the fact that he is doing anything unusual nor hinting at who among these characters may end up as his hero.

Dallas ends up approving of the book, and his review closes with fulsome praise for Dickens's characterization of one of his heroines, Bella Wilfer, "without exception the prettiest picture of the kind he has drawn--one of the prettiest pictures in prose fiction." Bella is more interesting, and more complicated, than the usual bland, flawless Dickens heroine, but she's far from the best thing in the book. Still, I suspect it's that passage that led Dickens, as Philip Collins tells us, to take the unprecedented step of sending the reviewer a copy of the manuscript of the book in thanks. Dickens's heroines, it always seems, are the closest to his heart--the more you read about his life, the more you become convinced that this is simply how he saw women, how he needed them to be, and that blindness deformed a number of relationships throughout his life. To have an outsider recognize his portrait as perfect would surely have pleased him beyond most other praise.

Dingy London

As a counterbalance to the recent string of long posts, a short one today, quoting Dickens on London, which, in Our Mutual Friend is presented with more dinginess and dirt than in any other of his novels:

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy an dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself, when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was great, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe, it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

This one is, if anything, even more depressing:

A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun dial on a church wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is a set of prisoners departing from gaol and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state dwelling On such evening when the city grit gets into the hair

We can only hope that London presents such a welcoming face when the Olympics crawls in to strangle it this summer!

Finds among the faults

For all the praise I've given Our Mutual Friend in the past week, there's no denying that some aspects of it are weak. While John Lucas in Charles Dickens: The Major Novels argues convincingly that the flatness of Dickens's caricature of social climbers in the novel is intentional--that "they are his marvellously intelligent and imaginative way of exploring the cost of class consciousness in a society which can conceive of itself no other way"--that's a second-order response, generated by multiple readings and long engagement with the book. Our first acquaintance with the interpolated set-pieces that introduce the mannered, empty voice of society is much more likely to fall in line with this anonymous writer from the Saturday Review of November 11, 1865:

In Our Mutual Friend . . . we find only caricatures, but they are caricatures without either of Mr DIckens's characteristic excellences. They are not very witty or humourous, and we are unable to recognise their truth and purpose. Nothing, for instance, can be more dismal in the way of parody or satire than the episode of the Veneerings and their friends. Where is either the humour or the truth of caricature? The execution is coarse and clumsy, and the whole picture is redolent of ill-temper and fractiousness. This spoils it. A good caricaturist enjoys his work, however angry he may be against the object of it. Mr Dickens, in this case, seems to screech with ill-will and bitterness.

Though it's hard to banish suspicions of political disagreements underlying that review, even as Dickens's analysis of the fundamental emptiness of much society rings true a century and a half later, so does the reviewer's analysis--there is none of the glee of invention here that animates Dickens's best grotesques and villains.

Even so, there are moments of genius, like the introduction of the ready man, Mr. Twemlow:

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow. Being first cousin to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr and Mrs Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow, and then put leaves on him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves; sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves.

Another of my favorite parts comes amidst one of the novel's greatest failures, the conversion of Mr. Boffin, who has unexpectedly come into wealth, from a kindly man to a miser. Rather than having us gradually notice the change, Dickens simply has a character announce it--as if he himself has just thought of the possibility. But one of the ways that Boffin expresses his newfound miserliness is so amusing that it redeems the whole character arc: he starts obsessively buying and reading books about historical misers.

Morning after morning they roamed about the town together, pursuing their singular research. Miserly literature not being abundant, the proportion of failures to successes may have been as a hundred to one; still Mr Boffin, never wearied, remained as avaricious for misers as he had been at the first onset.

He hands a bundle of these volumes to one of his assistants, saying,

Don't drop that one under your arm. It's Dancer. Him and his sister made pies of a dead sheep they found when they were about a walking.

He even finds a whole book--a real one, which Dickens himself owned, called Lives and Anecdotes of Misers; or, the Passion of Avarice Displayed. His assistant, Silas, reads from the table of contents:

I should say they must be pretty well all here, sir; here's a large assortment, sir; my eye catches John Overs, sir, John Little, sir, Dick Jarrel, John Elwes, the Reverend Mr Jones of Blewbury, Vulture Hopkins, Daniel Dancer--"

"Give us Dancer, Wegg," said Mr Boffin.

With another stare at his comrade, Silas sought and found the place.

"Page a hundred and nine, Mr Boffin. Chapter eight. Contents of chapter, 'His birth and estate. his garments and outward appearance. Miss Dancer and her feminine graces. The miser's Mansion. The finding of a treasure. The story of thee mutton Pies. A miser's Idea of Death. Bob, the Miser's cur. Griffiths and his Master. How to turn a penny. A substitute for a Fire. The advantages of keeping a Snuff-box. The Miser dies without a Shirt. The treasure of a Dunghill.'"

Dancer, we learn, did without a fire by sitting on his dinner to warm it, only one of many manifestations of his madness.

This is one of the reasons Dickens has lasted: even when he's at his worst, even when there are large problems within a scene or a novel, there are guaranteed to be enough jewels--to take a metaphorical cue from the misers--hidden in there to make the reading worthwhile.

Who's the hero here?

The most arresting scene in Our Mutual Friend comes just after the 1/3 mark, when schoolmaster Bradley Headstone and his pupil, Charley Hexam, confront the idle, casually ironic young lawyer Eugene Wrayburn about the attention he's been paying Charley's sister, Lizzie.

I wrote on Friday about Wrayburn's detachment, which at times verges on accidie; it is, from what I remember, something new in Dickens--a dissatisfaction with the world that results neither in action to change society nor in amoral abuse of it. In this scene, however, we see more clearly both the class basis of Wrayburn's cool and the real risks it represents to his character and the lives of those around him. With his friend Mortimer Lightwood at his side, he faces his two angry visitors:

"In some respect, Mr Eugene Wrayburn," said Bradley, answering him with pale and quivering lips, "the natural feelings of my pupils are stronger than my teaching."

"In most respects, I dare say," replied Eugeene, enjoying his cigar, "thought whether high or low is of no importance. You have my name very correctly. Pray what is yours?"

"It cannot concern you much to know, but--"

"True," interposed Eugene, striking sharply and cutting him short at his mistake, "it does not concern me at all to know. I can say Schoolmaster, which is a most respectable title. You are right, Schoholmaster."

It was not the dullest part of this goad in its galling of Bradley Headstone, that he had made it himeslf in a moment of incautious anger. He tried to set his lips so as to prevent their quivering, but they quivered fast.

"Mr Eugene Wrayburn," said the boy, "I want a word with you. I have wanted it so much, that we have looked out your address in the book, and we have been to your office, and we have come from your office here."

"You have given yourself much trouble, Schoolmaster," observed Eugene, blowing the feathery ash from his cigar. "I hope it may prove remunerative."

"And I am glad to speak," pursued the boy, "in presence of Mr Lightwood, because it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw my sister."

For a mere moment, Wrayburn turned his eyes aside from the schoolmaster to note the effect of the last word on Mortimer, who, standing on the opposite side of the fire, as soon as the word was spoken, turned his face towards the fire and looked down into it.

"Simlarly, it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw her again, for you were with him on the night when my father was found, and so I found you with her on the next day. Since then, you have seen my sister often. You have seen my sister oftener and oftener. And I want to know why?"

"Was this worth while, Schoolmaster," murmured Eugene, with the air of a disinterested adviser. "So much trouble for nothing? You should know best, but I think not."

"I don't know, Mr Wrayburn," answered Bradley, with his passion rising, "why you address me--"

"Don't you?" said Eugene. "Then I won't."

He said it so tauntingly in his perfect placidity, that the respectable right-hand clutching the respectable hair-guard of the respectable watch could have wound it round his throat and strangled him with it. Not another word did Eugene deem it worth while to utter, but stood leaning his head upon his hand, smoking, and looking imperturbably at the chafing Bradley Headstone with his clutching right-hand, until Braldey was wellnigh mad.

When Charley has said his piece, throughout which Wrayburn affects complete boredom, Headstone sends him out and addresses Wrayburn himself:

"You think me of no more value than the dirt under your feet," said Bradley to Eugene, speaking in a carefully weighed and measured tone, or he could not have spoken at all.

"I assure you, Schoolmaster," replied Eugene, "I don't think about you."

"That's not true," returned the other; "you know better."

"That's coarse," Eugene retorted; "but you don't know better."

Leaving aside the equivocal position of Headstone, who is in love with the girl he's claiming to try to protect, and Charley Hexam, whose sole interest in his sister is that she not impede his class-climbing, the cruelty displayed by Wrayburn is breathtaking. I can't think of another scene in all of Dickens--except, perhaps, a few between Pip and Estella--that carries this kind of power. In Dickens: The Major Novels, John Lucas writes that

The sheer malignity of the gentleman's assumption of inherent superiority is never more convincingly demonstrated than in Dickens's handling of Eugene.

Moreover, Lucas finds in this scene a key to the low critical opinion of this novel:

Most of the critics, whether working within the academy or as men of letters, who claimed to find Dickens vulgar were from class circumstances close to Eugene's. Many of them, I can report from my own experience, behaved and sounded like Eugene. No wonder they didn't--and don't--like what Dickens shows them.

That's twisting the knife a bit.

What's more interesting about the scene is the difficulty we have, reading it, in finding a place for our sympathies. Wrayburn up to this point has been silly rather than cruel, disaffected rather than superior, but in this scene, confronted with hot emotion, he steps instantly in the shelter offered by his class privilege, and he uses the weapons he finds there without a hint of compunction. He is bloodless and cruel to an excruciating degree. Yet at the same time, his antagonists offer us little to like. Charley Hexam, it is clear, will sacrifice anything to his desire to escape his roots; though he tells his sister earlier, "I don't want, as I raise myself, to shake you off, Liz. I want to carry you up with me," neither we nor his sister believe him. Headstone, meanwhile, ought to have our sympathy: he is a self-made man up against a thoughtless child of privilege. There are hints of Dickens the poor boy shuddering at the memory of the blacking factory in the curses he spits at Wrayburn at the close of the scene:

I scorn your shifty evasions, and I scorn you. . . . In the meanness of your nature you revile me with the meanness of my birth. I hold you in contempt for it.

A reasonable reader, knowing nothing of the arc of the story to come, would likely come out of this scene feeling that Headstone, though defeated, had been in the right--and just might be beginning to emerge as the hero of this strangely uncentered novel. But even they, I think, would maintain some reservations, for there is that in Headstone's barely repressed passion that hints of unhealthiness.

This is the sort of complexity that makes Our Mutual Friend stand out in Dickens's corpus, and that makes up for the relatively static, even forced quality of some of its other scenes. In Dickens, surprise usually comes from plotting, disguise, or simple misapprehension--not from actual ambiguities of character--but in this scene he draws two fully realized characters who have multiple, widely differing paths to choose among.