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.

The root of the disagreement between Johnson and Swift?

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift's work is famous. Jackson Bate offers the reasonable explanation that what Johnson saw in Swift was a dark reflection of himself--the self he could have been had he let his satiric bite run free rather than constantly attempting to check it and temper it with religious belief. Bate writes,

The Life of Swift strikes the modern reader as the only hopelessly biased Life. Here we can only try to remember Johnson's lifelong fear, especially after the breakdown in his fifties, of the powerful satiric bitterness of his own nature, and his dread--a dread with which he was constantly living--of falling into the anger and the sense of emptiness about life that he associated with Swift.

I suspect Evelyn Waugh may have played a similar role--a sort of "there but by the grace of god"-style role model--for satirically inclined interwar writers.

Bate's position is convincing, and it conforms to what we know of Johnson and of Swift (even as it does nothing to lessen the wish that their lives could have overlapped, giving them an opportunity to meet). But perhaps the explanation is simpler? Perhaps, it's rooted in a simple disagreement about the proper way to approach a hill?

As we saw on Friday, Johnson is documented as a hill-roller: in his fifties, while on the trip to Scotland with Boswell, he took a wistful roll down one, to the amusement (and, presumably, brief worry) of all around. Swift, on the other hand--well, let's let Leo Damrosch, author of last year's excellent biography, tell it:

Swift . . . became convinced that exercise was beneficial, in an era when medical theory discouraged it, and most people avoided it. At Moor Park, as he told Deane Swift long afterward, he would work for two hours and then take a break by running up to the top of a nearby hill and down again. "This exercise he performed in about six minutes; backwards and forwards it was about half a mile."

Oh, I'll admit it seems silly: Could two such great minds as these truly be set at odds by such a silly difference? Could a preference for rolling rather than running down a hill really be enough to cause Johnson to cast Swift beyond of the pale of his appreciation?

Perhaps not--but then, perhaps we should remember what Swift's friend Gulliver learned about the origins of the ongoing conflict between Lilliput and Blefuscu:

It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Suddenly that hill is looking more like a mountain, isn't it?

Samuel Johnson gets silly

At the end of a too-long, too-busy work week, what better than to share too instances of Samuel Johnson being utterly silly? In case you haven't realized it from my Twitter feed, I've been immersed in Johnson the past ten days or so, going from Boswell to W. Jackson Bate's 1975 biography, and both are a reminder that Johnson is always more varied, more multifarious, than whatever impression is most recent in your mind.

And one of the ways he surprises is by being silly--physically silly. To wit, a moment at the top of a hill during his tour of the Hebrides with Boswell, as related by Bate, via the years-later memories of Johnson's companion that day, Bennet Langton:

Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to "take a roll down." They tried to stop him. But he said he "had not had a roll for a long time," and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length, "turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom."

Johnson was fifty-five at the time.

This one is even better. At conversation with the Reverend Alexander Grant, Johnson mentioned that Joseph Banks had recently sent back reports of a strange animal called a kangaroo. Then,

In order to render his description more vivid, Johnson rose from his chair and [in the words of Grant], "volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared . . . nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr. Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.

May your weekend be suitably bouncy.

Day Job

I suppose a more skilled self-promoter would have promoted this a bit more than twenty-four hours in advance, but, to to take Donald Rumsfeld's hideous blitheness in vain (and add a bit of Johnsonian self-knowledge), you blog as the blogger you are, not the blogger you wish to be.

My friend Dmitry Samarov, author of the wonderful Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, has roped me into a thing: tomorrow night, February 20, at 8:30, a post-martini hour in which I'm usually considering what book will ease my transition to bed, I will be up on stage with him and seven other readers at LivingRoom Realty talking about the Day Job.

If you're in Chicago and able to come out, here's what I can promise you:

1. Dmitry, who is personable and entertaining and a great raconteur.

2. At least one Tolstoy quote.

3. At least one Samuel Johnson quote.

4. At least one brutal dis of Jack Kerouac.

5. That I will talk briefly about my long-ago career as a radio DJ.

6. That I will be off the stage in under eight minutes.

7. Oh, and, crucially, that there will be drinks.

I don't do this sort of thing often, but I can't refuse Dmitry, and I've enjoyed working up something on the theme. If you're around, come out. If I don't know you, I'd love to meet you: in my relatively extensive experience thus far, it's never a mistake to meet people you've come to like through the Internet.

Full details in the image above, or at this link. Hope to see you there!

Johnson and Boswell

Winter finds me re-reading Boswell on Johnson. Which means admiring Boswell, and appreciating Boswell, and laughing at Boswell, and, necessarily and fundamentally, being grateful for Boswell. Good gods, how lucky we are to have had--exactly, perfectly, suitably--Boswell. In a certain sense, no stance but gratitude is appropriate; at the same time, being human, we can't help but, sentence by sentence, wrangle with him.

For example, when he makes fun of Dr. Johnson's friend and great comfort Mrs. Thrale. Boswell--whom we can never wholly free from self-interest, writes,

Mrs. Thrale, who frequently practised a coarse mode of flattery, by repeating his bon-mots in his hearing . . . 

etc., etc. No one, of course, collected or retailed Johnson's bon mots with anything near the assiduity of Boswell. He admits almost as much, or, at least, admits that he is a sponge for Johnson's wit. Mere pages later as he recounts what seems to have been a remarkably pleasant evening--the sort to perpetually tempt a time traveler--with Johnson at his home:

After the evening service, he said, "Come, you shall go home with me, and sit just an hour." But he was better than his word, for after we had drunk tea with Mrs. Williams, he asked me to go up to his study with him, where we sat a long time while together in a serene undisturbed frame of mind, sometimes in silence, and sometimes conversing, as we felt ourselves inclined, or more properly speaking, as he was inclined; for during all the course of my long intimacy with him, my respectful attention never abated, and my wish to hear him was such, that I constantly watched every dawning of communication from that great and illuminated mind.

Yet there is no question but what Johnson loved Boswell, occasional simpering and all, as a letter from August of 1775 reminds us:

Never, my dear Sir, do you take it into your head to think that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety. I hold you, as Hamlet has it, "in my heart of hearts," and, therefore, it is little to say, that I am, Sir, your affectionate humble servant.

What more could an English-speaking, Western-raised reader want? The approbation, Sir, of Dr. Johnson, is sufficient--and beyond--unto the day. And if I may: All, all, all hail Boswell, today and every day when we find ourselves with a drink in our hands and an anecdote on our lips. We could do far worse than to choose him as our watchword and our guide.

Gwen Raverat and the Fears of Childhood (!)

Gwen Raverat's memoir of growing up in late-Victorian and early Edwardian Cambridge, Period Piece (1952), is full of the detailed, charming memories of childhood that are the hallmark of the books that Slightly Foxed Editions republishes. What struck me today as I was reading it, however, wasn't the passages about childhood pleasures. It was the ones about childhood fears.

Here, for example, Raverat presents a catalog of unimpeachable childhood knowledge, much of it relating to fears:

Of course, we children had a few theories of our own. One was that the gum of cherry or plum trees was delicious, and must be eaten as a great treat. This is a mistake, as it is quite incredibly nasty; and so is snow with jam, which we also believed to be nice. Another theory was that if you swallowed the smallest speck of cork, it would swell and swell inside, till it filled you right up and you died. There was also the now-disproved idea that bulls were infuriated by red rags; for this reason I used to bite in my supposedly red lips if ever I met the oldest and mildest cow; and I remember carefully concealing the red halfpenny stamps on any letters I might be taking to the post, for the same reason. And of course we believed, as I think all nurses and children do, that if you cut, or even scratched, the fold of skin which joins your thumb and first finger, you got lockjaw at once, and died in agonies.

If a grade school classmate of mine were to pop up now (on Facebook, which seems to have been designed for that purpose) and tell me that all these beliefs were current at Lincoln Elementary School circa 1983, I wouldn't be particularly surprised.

But it's when Raverat gets to the describes the deliciously scary thrill of bicycling along the Backs (a road that runs along the rear of several Cambridge colleges) after dark that she starts to really bring to mind my own childhood:

I was afraid: but, of course, I never spoke of my fear; for it was above all things necessary to me to see my cousins, and I was more afraid of having my freedom curtailed than of all the terrors of darkness and solitude.

Ah, yes--this is familiar: a variation on the feeling of being out in the woods after dark, pleasantly chilled despite the knowledge that home was but a shout away. Freedom was de facto frightening just as it was de facto desirable.

Raverat's fear of the Backs, however, was more than a fear of the dark:

The Backs were a frightening place, even by daylight, because it was there, more than anywhere else, that Mad Dogs were liable to occur; or so my cousin Frances said, and she knew. For she had seen there a very mysterious figure, who was connected with mad dogs: a girl with red-flannel soles to her shoes. (I cannot imagine who she was, unless she was the Goddess of Hydrophobia?) The possibility, the probability, of Mad Dogs was very much in our minds; slinking about, with their red tongues hanging out, slobbering and whining; like Caldecott's picture of the dog it was that died. Of course there were real mad dogs in those days; and sometimes our dogs had to be muzzled for a time; so we had some excuse for our fears.

Are there any American kids born in the 1960s or 1970s who, thanks to Ol' Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird, didn't harbor the same fear? Didn't we all assume that at some point we would be called upon to put down a menacing Mad Dog?

That passage, combined with an entry on the Bermuda Triangle (inactive, it seems, since the 1970s) that I read this weekend to my nieces and nephews from a book of Mysterious Phenomena leads me to assemble this list:

Frightening Things That, When I Was a Kid, I Assumed Would Play a Significant Role in Life That, Thus Far, As I Approach Forty, Have Not

1. Quicksand

2. Mad Dogs/Rabies

3. The Bermuda Triangle

4. Space aliens

5. The ghost of Anne Boleyn

6. Kidnappers

7. Ninjas

Your list, I realize, may vary. Details, please?

Anthony Powell and the publishing world of the past

As I promised on Monday, today I turn to Anthony Powell's letters for a glimpse at the publishing world of the not-so-distant past. The letters come from The Acceptance of Absurdity: Anthony Powell and Robert Vanderbilt, Letters 1952-1963, a slim volume that was published in a limited edition in 2011. Vanderbilt was a New York bookshop owner, and the correspondence began when he proposed to Powell that he reissue Venusberg and Agents and Patients in a single volume. They had been published in the UK years earlier, but had failed to find a US home and, as Powell himself noted in a reply to Vanderbilt, were hard to find:

My books are practically impossible to obtain secondhand, which, although satisfactory from one point of view, is most inconvenient from another.

Vanderbilt's proposal met with approval, and by the end of the year he had published the book, complete with cover illustrations by Powell's friend Osbert Lancaster.





That's when the publishing part of the story gets interesting, at least for someone who works as a publicist today. In its first three months on the market, the book--which, remember, was an edition, by a bookshop, rather than a proper publisher, of novels that were at that point twenty years old--Vanderbilt had sent Powell reviews from Newsweek, the New York Times (which Vanderbilt characterized as "doubtless . . . more like a press release of our own than any other we shall get"), the New Yorker (which Powell told Vanderbilt was so good that it "absolutely staggered" him--and which he viewed as useful in England, too, because "In some ways in certain circles, New Yorker book reviews are looked on with even more awe than in the States."), the Atlantic, the New York Herald Tribune (written by Elizabeth Bowen and, Vanderbilt wrote, "rapturously favorable" despite Powell's earlier worry that she wouldn't like his work), the San Francisco Chronicle (contributed by a woman of whom Vanderbilt wrote, "She's been described to me as a type who has gone a long way on self-confidence. She thinks BM [Powell's Dance novel A Buyer's Market] is like Trollope. A friend of mine remained calm, and said 'Also like Proust, don't you think?' This arrow was never recovered."), and Vogue (where it was listed as "a modish subject of conversation"). Oh, and after Vanderbilt poked his head in at the Scribner's bookshop, while they declined to devote a window to the book, they did take five copies.

This happens every once in a while: just when I think I've fully taken in just how different the publishing world, and especially the book review landscape, used to be, I'm surprised anew. The coverage Powell's book received would these days be viewed as a solid success for a new novel, and out of the realm of all possibility for a reissue. Wow.

The letters themselves are a pleasure: Vanderbilt is a congenial interlocutor for Powell, and Powell himself is just as amused, opinionated, and entertaining in his letters as one would hope. I look forward to what will surely be a larger, more complete selection somewhere down the line.

I'll close with another amusing glimpse at older ways. In a letter of February 11, 1953, Vanderbilt tells Powell,

A few days ago my mail included a small blue note saying the following.

Gentlemen: I ordered and received (for which I paid $4.00) a copy of Venusberg. After reading 11 pages of this book I knew it was not the kind of book that I could give as a birthday gift to an elderly, churchgoing lady. It is also not the type of story I enjoy or admire. The book shop from where I purchased it is not carrying any copies--it was a special order--so therefore I cannot expect them to refund my money. Therefore my request to you is will you allow me to return it to you and I shall be satisfied with the refund of the wholesale price. It is in the same perfect condition in which it was delivered to me. May I say in addition I think it a vulgar, salacious book and one which I do not care to read further. (Eleven pages are more than sufficient).

Which leads to two thoughts:

1. Elderly, churchgoing ladies differ in the States and England. Barbara Pym would have found such a gift perfectly suitable, as, I dare say, would a number of her characters. (Though I suppose it would likely have given rise to a flurry of quiet speculation about the motives and stance of the giver.)

2. The woman's understanding of the business, and willingness to adapt to its structures, impresses me. Asking only for the wholesale price is a remarkable concession considering how powerfully she reacted against the book.

Vanderbilt sent her the refund, and the story amused Powell, who replied with an anecdote of his own:

I remember when I was a publisher [with Duckworth] the illustrated catalogue designed by myself elicited a letter saying 'as I have a household of children and young servants I should be obliged if you would not deliver your cess on my door.'

Enjoy the weekend, folks.

A brief descent into scatology

I am not, in general, a fan of body humor. That's not to say I don't appreciate vulgarity: friends will gladly attest that, given the right situation or set-up line, I can be as vulgar as any fifteen-year-old boy who's just learned that the gerund form of a certain words can serve as a forceful adjective.

For the most part, however, I line up with Nina Stibbe--or, at least, the twenty-year-old Nina Stibbe who wrote the letters collected in the wonderfully funny Love, Nina. After complaining that A Winter's Tale "doesn't even seem like a comedy" because "the poor little son dies of a broken heart and the baby daughter is left in the woods to die and the wife spends sixteen years as a statue," she moves on to another of the authors on her A-Level syllabus:

It's like Chaucer. People always going on about how rude and funny it is because someone farts.

That said . . . two bits of low body humor made me laugh this week. The first came in Leo Damrosch's excellent new biography of Jonathan Swift--which is appropriate because Swift was as attuned to bodily effluents as any writer, and he's one of the few whose ventures into scatology can make me laugh. There's the sheer horror of the exclamation "Celia shits!" (on which Patrick Kurp can offer a refresher, should one be needed) and also Gulliver's multi-sized problems with waste: his unappreciated firefighting by micturation in Liliput and his spectacular failure to jump a giant cowpat in Brobdingnag.

What made me laugh in Damrosch's book, however, came not from Swift's own work, but instead when Damrosch needed to help the reader understand how poorly sewage was handled in the period. To whom did he turn? Another writer who was never afraid to note what goes into and comes out of the body: Samuel Pepys. In his diary entry for October 20, 1660, Pepys wrote,

This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one that Sir W Batten had stopped up; and going down into my cellar to look, I put my foot into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.

It's the easily (and horribly) visualized "great heap" combined with the now archaic, even prissy-sounding "house of office" and "doth trouble me" that makes me smile: this feels like a misfortune that could only occur to Pepys.

With Swift and Pepys on my mind, I was primed to appreciate a passage from Gwen Raverat's memoir Period Piece (1952) I came across this afternoon, in which she writes about the sewage-laden Cam River late in the nineteenth century:

There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge, "What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?" To which, with great presence of mind, he replied, "Those, ma'am, are notices that bathing is forbidden."

Which can only be topped by the genius of Bill Watterson:

 

And with that, we flush the scat humor. By Friday, it will all be clean as ever around here, folks. Promise.

Trollope tries to let a friend down easy

Part of the fun of reading writers' letters--something I spend a fair amount of time doing--is getting a glimpse of publishing's past. I made discoveries on that front in two collections recently, of letters from Anthonys Trollope and Powell. I'll start with Trollope, and pick up Powell later in the week.

That Trollope's letters offer insight into publishing is no surprise: as Michael Dirda writes in Bound to Please of Trollope's Autobiography,

It reveals, better than almost any other work in English, that a writer is a man (or woman) who sits down at a desk each morning . . . and writes. To Trollope, the creation of fiction may occasionally rise to Art, but there's no nonsense about awaiting inspiration or a timely visit from the Muse. . . . He frankly discusses his contracts, even listing the exact amounts he was paid for each of his works. . . . When An Autobiography was published posthumously (in 1883), as was always intended, readers were said to be horrified at its mercantile tone.

So it's no surprise that many of his letters are addressed to publishers: settling fees, checking on dates, discussing editions. This bit from a note to Frederic Chapman, head of Chapman and Hall, of September 25, 1871 is not atypical:

One of the "Australian" people--Editor, manager, or owner [of the Australian magazine] told me that he had bought from you the rights to republish my book about Australia. What is the meaning of this? I have never spoken a word of an Australian novel to any one.

Write again like a good fellow, and send me all the news about the business & other things.

The most striking series of publishing-related letters that I've come across thus far, however, are a string to Trollope's regular correspondent Mary Holmes, an acquaintance of (and eventual governess for) Thackeray of whom the volume editor, Bradford Allen Booth, says she had "literary and musical enthusiasm, and worked hard, but there was little talent." Late in 1874, she sent Trollope a manuscript of a novel, about which he had been theoretically encouraging and which he promised to forward to Chapman and Hall. On November 9, he wrote to Holmes with bad news:

I have seen Mr Chapman the publisher today and he tells me that his reader has said that your novel in its present form will not do, but that he thinks that, with certain alterations, it might do. I presume the novel has been sent back to you. It will be for you to decide whether you will make the alterations which will have been proposed to you--

I did not look at the MS myself. In such a case I can do no good by my doing so. Should I not like it, it would break my heart (as it has done in similar cases) to have to say so; and should I like it my opinion would go for nothing with a publisher who would regard my opinion simply as that of a friend.

Despite Trollope's combination of forthrightness and delicacy, Holmes's response must not have been particularly accepting or even-tempered, for two weeks later Trollope wrote to her again:

Your letter has made me unhappy; because I feel that you feel that you have been ill-used. I feared that it would be so. It generally is so when some little assistance is wanted by literary aspirants. One cannot give the help that is needed. One can only try, and fail, and suffer in the failure.

You think that Chapman and his reader have illused [sic] you,--but I believe you to be wrong in so thinking. I know them both well and would not have put your MS into their hands had they been unworthy. The firm is existing (you suspect that there is no such firm). It is doing a very lucrative business (you imagine the contrary). Mr Chapman is not deterred by the need of publishing the works of either his friends or his relatives from publishing yours. He has in truth done with your MS as he does with others,--but has done this somewhat quicker than he usually does under my instance. He sent your MS to his reader, and acted on his opinion. . . .

You write,--(and not only you but many others with whom I become acquainted, and who use my services because, being an old stager, I am supposed to be able to give assistance,)--as though it were the publishers business to publish your work and as though he injured you by not doing so.

Trollope goes on to explain the role, and necessity, of the publisher's reader, in the course of which he strips away some of the gentleness of the earlier letter's rejection, noting that the reader said it might be publishable "with very great alterations."

It's hard not to feel for both parties, of course: Holmes's letter must surely have been intemperate, but her ambitions are far from uncommon, and it's hard to deny a Victorian woman of slender means the reed of hope that artistic success could conceivably represent. And Trollope's position is certainly unenviable. The bulk of his correspondence with Holmes reveals that he really did think of her as a friend, and the emotional cost he incurred by trying to do her this favor becomes fully apparent in the final paragraph of the letter:

For myself I may say that the task of dealing with the MS of other persons is so painful,--the necessity of explaining to an aspirant that his or her aspirations must be disappointed is so grievous,--that I have often been tempted to say, that I would never again incur the punishment. I can hardly bring myself to tell a friend that he or she cannot do that which I by chance can do myself--But I remember how often I failed myself before I succeeded,--how Vanity Fair and, as you say, Jane Eyre were carried here and there before they were accepted. I would suggest that you should read your own MS carefully and see if you yourself think it capable of improvement--and,--let me say this in pure friendship, without giving offence,--do not allow yourself to be tempted to think evil because the thing does not go as you wish it.

The fulsome closings of old letters ring hollow to contemporary ears, but when Trollope closes this letter with "Yours very sincerely and with true friendship," we believe him.

The real Donald E. Westlake peeks through in Killing Time

In the brief introduction to the collection of Donald E. Westlake's nonfiction I'm editing, The Getaway Car, one of the reasons I gave for being interested in Westlake's nonfiction is that he gives us so little of his own self and opinions--explicitly, that is--in his actual writing. Oh, we certainly can glean a few things: he appreciated hard and careful work and craftsmanship, believed firmly in the power of entropy and error to derail plans, and thought we all were closer to the dark side than we like to think. But compared to, say, the digressive sermons offered up by John D. MacDonald, or the obvious protagonist-as-stand-in-for-author of writers like Robert Parker or even Raymond Chandler, Westlake the man is invisible on the page. Part of the fun of the nonfiction, therefore, is collecting and sharing the instances where he did explicitly offer opinions on his own work and that of others, when he straight-up gave us his point of view.

While I've been working on the book, I've also been slowly making my way through the last thirty or so of Westlake's novels that I've not read, and that led me not too long ago to his second book, Killing Time (1961). It's a good little corrupt town novel, with nods to Red Harvest but none of that book's whiffs of nihilistic brimstone. In this book, everyone's corrupt, and, frankly, while that's certainly not good, it's not necessarily all bad, either: rather, it's quite simply the way it is.

Late in the book, the protagonist, Smith--a private eye quietly kept on retainer by the corrupt powers that be in the city, another in what would become a long line of Westlake heroes who are nothing like heroes--goes on a rant when he meets a do-gooder from an upstate civic organization that, by arriving and making noises about cleaning up the town, has infected the town with a murderous case of nerves. On learning that Smith has files on crimes in the town dating back years, the do-gooder tries to shame him, only to be told by Smith that turning those records in simply isn't his job.

I'm going to quote at far greater length than usual, because the passage needs to be reproduced in full for Westlake's point--and mine--to be made. His point will be clear; mine is simply that this passage reads to me like as close a statement of opinion from Westlake as we would ever get. Not an endorsement of crime, but an endorsement of the acceptance of reality, and the pointlessness of naive idealism. See what you think:

"Not your job?" He sounded honestly shocked. "Surely, Mr. Smith, it is every citizen's job--"

"No," I said. For all his individual personality and appearance, completely unlike Masetti, he wound ups spouting the same tired civics-class garbage. "My job," I told him, "was to be a confidential investigator. If the facts I learn wind up in court, I'm not useful."

He shook his head slowly back and forth, the lips once more pursed. "I don't know, Mr. Smith," he said, "I have no idea what sort of arrangement Mr. Masetti had in mind, or what offers he made you, if any, but I'm afraid I'll have to know quite a bit more about the situation here in Winston before agreeing to do business with you. If you are trying now to gain immunity for yourself by making some sort of deal with the Citi--"

"Immunity? What the hell kind of immunity?"

"Now, really, Mr. Smith," he said ponderously. "After all, you have just stated to me that you have in your possession a record of governmental crimes in this community covering the last fifteen years, and that you have, until this very moment, never once attempted to reveal this information to the proper authorities. Quite the reverse. You have gone so far as to admit to me that you have actively concealed the evidence of these crimes."

"Never!" This interview wasn't going at all as I'd expected, and I was beginning to lose my temper. "I have never," I told him angrily, "concealed the evidence of any crime. The evidence has always been there, and is there now. And any proper authority who's interested can go find it exactly the way I did, by looking for it. It isn't my job to do the proper authority's work for it."

"Your job, as you describe it, Mr. Smith," he said pompously, "is a dishonest one."

"As a matter of fact," I went on, talking over him, "what lousy proper authority anyway? The District Attorney? He's one of the biggest crooks in the state. The Mayor? The Chief of Police?"

"that isn't the point," he said.

"Why the hell isn't it? I live in Winston, in the real world. I have to make my living in Winston, in the real world, and that means I have to make my peace with the people who run Winston, and who run the real world. I tried that, and it's always worked pretty well. Now you people have come in and rattled this town out of its wits, and that arrangement doesn't work any more. I'm adapting myself to the new conditions, that's all. I'm no more honest, or dishonest, in the vague abstract total way you use those terms, than anybody else alive in the world. I have a job, and honest and proper job, licensed by the state of New York and the city of Winston, and I do that job as well as I can. And a part of that job is its confidential nature. My job is confidential in exactly the same way that a lawyer's job or a doctor's job or a psychiatrist's job or even a priest's job is confidential. Is a lawyer supposed to report every crime he hears described in his office? Is a priest supposed to report every crime he hears described in the confessional?"

"That is not the same thing, Mr. Smith!" And from the shocked, wide-eyed way in which he said that, I knew I had blasphemed.

"And just why the hell isn't it the same thing? I shouted. I was on my feet now, without knowing how or when I'd stood up, and I kept shaking my fist as I shouted at him. "I've been responsible for crimes solved, reparations made, injustices corrected, without the people involved getting a lot of bad publicity, and without anybody getting a useless jail sentence, and I've--"

"Useless?" That one brought Danile to his feet, too. Blasphemy against the penal system was apparently even worse than blasphemy against the church.

"Yes, you're goddam right, useless! Look, you take a kid--" I had to stop and shake my head and take a deep breath and start all over again, so the words would come out slow enough to be pronounced. "You take a kid, " I said. "He burgles a grocery store. The law gets him, and the court gives him six months in a reformatory, and he comes out a worse kid than when he went in. And ten years and four penitentiaries later, he winds up in one of those modern clinks with the pastel-pink bars and more psychiatrists than prisoners, and they spend five years trying to undo the damage that was done by that reformatory."

"That's an oversimplification!" he shouted.

"How else are we going to talk, if we don't simplify, you fat-headed fact-filled do-gooder?"

"I didn't come here--"

"To be insulted, I know. All right, now, listen, you take that same kid, only instead of the law getting him, I get him. And nobody knows about his crime but me and the grocer and his parents. He gets the scare of his life, when he sees how easily he was caught, and he gets the word on what would have happened if the cops had found him instead of me, and the grocer gets his money back, and the kid never pulls that kind of stunt again."

He shook his head rapidly, saying, "And you accuse me of idealism, when you expect--"

"Expect, hell! That's what happened! That is exactly what happened with a kid who broke into Joey Casales's grocery store. The hell with your theories, I'm telling you what works, and I'm trying to tell you what the goddam system is in this world, and how I fit into that system. And if I don't fit into that system, I'm through."

"If Satan himself--" he started, but I cut him off. "You're goddam one hundred per cent right! I snapped. "If Satan himself were Mayor of Winston, and all the lesser devils had all the offices in City Hall, they would be the ones running my world. And if I expected to live in that world, I would have to make my peace with them."

Killing Time is a short book, under 200 pages, and this rant takes up four of them. It feels like a set piece that perhaps Westlake didn't even intend when he set out on it, but that he couldn't help but let run once it caught fire. And it works: it raises and amplifies the underlying themes of the book (and of this genre of book), and it doesn't deform either the character or the story.

(Still trying to decide about two of those adverbs, though: "ponderously" I think is perfect, but "angrily" seems unnecessary.)

Advice on use, and more

Friday I warned you that in the days ahead I would likely be quoting from Love, Nina, Nina Stibbe's wonderfully funny collection of letters she sent her sister from her London posting as a nanny to the children of London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers . . . and now we are days ahead! So herewith are a few of the many, many passages that made me and rocketlass laugh out loud.

After a number of grumbled complaints from the children (and regular dinner guest Alan Bennett) about the turkey burgers Nina has been making ("Because MK keeps buying turkey mince and what the fuck else can I do with it?"), she mentions the problem to MK:

Me: Can you stop getting the turkey mince?

MK: What's wrong with it?

Me: I can't make anything nice with it.

MK: It's versatile--simply use it in place of beef.

Me: You've memorised the pack.

MK: Yes, giving advice on use.

To be wholly fair to MK, we ought to note that the turkey mince wasn't the sole problem with Nina's cooking as she describes it: she was at that unsatisfying stage of learning, familiar to all cooks, where, as she writes to her sister, a recipe with more than six ingredients is too complicated.

Then there's this exchange, in which Alan Bennett (AB) is allowed not one but two perfect punchlines:

Someone drew something on our wall with a penknife or stick. MK thought it was a heart. I went and looked and saw a penis (scratched into the brick).

Me: I think it's meant to be a man's penis.

MK: I thought it might be a heart.

Me: How?

MK: An upside-down one.

AB: Like mine.

(Will [the older boy] goes out to look.)

Me: People don't usually draw hearts on walls.

MK: I might.

Sam [the younger boy]: I'd never draw a heart or . . . the other thing.

Will: (returns) It's definitely a dick.

MK: It looks more like a heart.

AB: You'd think they'd label it.

(AB phones later to say he saw it on the way out. It's a penis.)

The following exchange comes a few months after Nina accidentally scraped the family car up a bit, then attempted to convince the boys not to tell MK. Which they ultimately couldn't resist doing. The letter opens, "Good news. Mary-Kay has pranged the car at long last--a relief after all mine (prangs)." Which leads to a dialogue:

Sam: It's mum's first time crashing.

Me: Yeah, but it's worse than any of mine--in terms of damage done.

MK: Hmm.

Me: Mine never required any action to be taken.

MK: Only the untangling of deception and denial.

Me: You dented the number plate--irreparably.

MK: True, but my credibility remains intact.


Told Misty that MK is unusual.

Me: She's just very unusual.

Misty: Is she a bit mad?

Me: God, no, she's 100 per cent sane.

Misty: That's unusual.

Me: That's what I mean.

Part of the fun of the book is that Nina is correct: Mary-Kay Wilmers comes across as remarkably sane, grounded, calm, sharp . . . and strange. Through dialogues like these we get enough of a sense of her slightly off-kilter character that when, later, she mentions that she likes it when people climb trees (prompted by Sam expressing his disapproval), it seems totally reasonable for Nina to suggest that the it makes sense because "it's one less person on the ground."

This is a great book, folks. Hie thee to your local bookstore and pre-order it--but do so knowing full well that you're going to laugh on the subway and read bit after bit aloud to your friends. Trust me: the risk of ostracization is worth it!

Thomas Hardy, "the man behind the pen"

Ever since I got back from London, I've been carefully rationing Nina Stibbe's always hilarious, sometimes poignant Love, Nina, a collection of the letters that the then-twenty-year-old Stibbe sent her sister in 1982 and '83 describing her experiences as the nanny for the two young children of London Review of Books publisher Mary-Kay Wilmers. The letters are full of absolutely hilarious dialogues among Stibbe, the boys, Wilmers, and their neighbor Alan Bennett, who's constantly dropping by for dinner (and usually supplying the mordant punchline to the group's exchanges). The dialogues are so good--so odd and funny and surprising--that I think I've read half the book out loud to rocketlass by now, to her great amusement.

The letters aren't solely of comedic interest, however. They also offer an interesting picture of early 1980s London as seen for the first time by a girl from Leicestershire, and of a moment in life that will be familiar to those of us who came from rural or lower-class backgrounds: when we begin to see higher culture, to know we want to be involved with it somehow, and yet we remain fundamentally (and often comically) ignorant of what that would entail. Stibbe's vacillation between confidence and fear, interest and frustration, knowledge and ignorance are charming and touching; they remind me a bit of similar moments in Caleb Crain's brilliant novel Necessary Errors, re-creating as his book did a very particular youthful feeling of inchoate ambition and hope.

I could spend the rest of this blog's year quoting from this book, but for today I'll just share an amusing--and far from unperceptive--observation that Stibbe made after encountering Thomas Hardy's poetry for the first time. She had been assigned some of his novels as part of her A-Level syllabus, and someone had suggested that she delve into the poetry as well in order to better understand "the man behind the pen." She subsequently wrote to her sister:

Got some of Hardy's poems out of Holborn library as per the letter. Most of them are rubbish and do not help me understand him. They make me think of him as wallowing and moaning and wishing for the olden days and that he hadn't been such a cunt to his wife.

Which I already knew from the introduction to The Return of the Native.

Later, she tells a university interviewer that Hardy makes her feel insignificant, which, given the high drama and fatalism of his fiction, seems like a not unreasonable response for a twenty-year-old.

I'm sure I'll share more from Love, Nina soon. Stateside readers, meanwhile, should go ahead and have their local bookstore pre-order a copy: it will be published over here by Little, Brown in April.

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?

Johnsoniana

A quick post tonight, for a three-day weekend looms, offering little but reading (and snow, to secure us in our indoor intentions). I'll merely share two poor snapshots that I took last week when an unexpected free afternoon in London allowed me to visit the house in Gough Square that Samuel Johnson lived in while composing the Dictionary. Like most house museums, it's small and unassuming, portraits and a few pieces of furniture offering the basic brushstrokes that help the imagination populate the rooms. And it's not hard to do: Johnson lumbering up and down the stairs and dominating the small rooms, the constant noise and commotion of the many permanent houseguests, the mess of papers and books that filled the garret as the work in progress progressed, letter by letter. One bit of additional period detail I didn't have to imagine: the clatter of horses' hooves echoed about the square, generated by two mounted police officers.

The snapshots are of items held in a vitrine full of Johnsoniana on the ground floor, commercial items created to commemorate (and capitalize on) various Johnson-related anniversaries. The first is a Dr. Johnson-shaped flask, sold in 1909 for his bicentennial.



The color is unquestionably unappealing, but the idea of having Johnson as a constant drinking companion does entice.

This, meanwhile, is a doorknocker, also from the twentieth century:



At its top is Litchfield Cathedral, in front of which is depicted the meeting of Johnson and Boswell. (Hooray to Boswell for achieving such prominence on the knocker!) Beneath Johnson's head--reasonably cast as the active part of the knocker--is, we're told, the figure of his cat.

Enjoy the weekend, folks. Happy reading to you.

"Colonel Greene Dies of Apoplexy"

Travel and holidays have delayed my acknowledgment of a welcome reappearance from my anonymous Texan correspondent. Regular readers may remember posts about two unsigned postcards that I received in late 2012, both bearing a Dallas postmark and choice quotes from A Dance to the Music of Time. Still a welcome mystery more than a year later, they were joined in early December by a new communication, one that expanded both my correspondent's epistolary and literary ranges: a printout of the obituary of Colonel Jacob L. Greene that was published in the Hartford Courant on March 30, 1905.

Who is Colonel Greene, you ask? Well, that's essentially the question that my correspondent is hinting I should have asked back in November when I shared a story Mark Twain told about him in his autobiography. Twain makes good sport of Greene's style of public speaking, which he explains was smooth to the point of barren dullness:

His speech was always like that--perfectly smooth, perfectly constructed; and when he had finished, no listener could go into court and tell what it was he had said. It was a curious style. It was impressive--you always thought, from one comma to another, that he was going to strike something presently, but he never did.

Greene, my correspondent would have us know, was more impressive than Twain's joking might imply. The obituary opens by identifying him as the president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company (surely the perfect job for a dull speaker, no?), but when the obituary delves into his earlier life, the story begins to get more impressive: his paternal great-grandfather was "a man of staunch character" who served as a lieutenant in the Revolutionary army, in which his maternal great-grandfather served as a general. Greene himself, meanwhile, was born in Maine, attended "the Michigan University," which at the time was newly opened and tuition-free, and became a lawyer just before the outbreak of the Civil War. "The blood of a noble ancestry burned within him," explains the Courant, "impelling the consecration of himself to the Union cause." He enlisted as a private, then advanced to lieutenant before being laid out for a full year by illness. Strength restored, he took a position under General Custer and served with "distinguished gallantry" in the battle of Trevellyan Station, where he was captured on June 11, 1864. While a prisoner at Charleston, he was among the Union soldiers forced by their captors into the path of Union shells. Eventually he was paroled, but he wasn't officially exchanged until April 8, 1865, the day before Lee's surrender. He served another full year before resigning his commission and embarking on his career as a life insurance executive.

More germane to Twain's story, however, is what comes next in the obituary:

Colonel Greene had made many public addresses. He was the orator of the day at the Grant Memorial exercises in this city and his address was pronounced a fine example of eloquence and power. . . . He had talked before Hartford audiences and elsewhere on topical subjects and on many occasions when his oratorical efforts were of the highest order. He was ever ready to speak in the interests of the poor and oppressed and always took a high stand for personal and civic morality. He was a graceful speaker and a polished writer. . . . and always acquitted himself to the satisfaction of those interested, and the great pleasure of his audience.

Which, set in the balance against Twain's depiction of a smooth-flowing river of boredom, makes me think that perhaps there's a middle ground: It's likely Greene was as good a speaker as the Courant claims, yet still wasn't up to Twain's standard. We can't all be Mark Twain, after all.

I'll close the way any sensible public speaker should do: with thanks to the person who brought me here. Hope it's a pleasant winter down there in Dallas, sir or madam. Keep the correspondence coming!

The perils of drinking in Victorian taprooms

I thought I was done writing about Judith Flanders's The Victorian City, but I can't resist sharing the passage I just read. I'm going to quote at a bit greater length than usual because (as you'll see) both sides of the story of Victorian London's drinking establishments needs to be told:

Hints to Men About Town, published in 1840, warned that "as every Man about Town is liable to be placed in situations where it is almost impossible to escape perfectly sober," such a young man needed to learn how "to take his glass . . . without making a fool of himself." The author, who called himself "The Old Medical Student," advised young men to eat as well as drink, to stick to one type of wine, not to get rowdy, and, above all, "Do not be prevailed upon to sing" (which is surely good advice today too). This was followed by a section on what to do when a friend passed out from drink and how to cure a hangover. It was all very matter-of-fact.

Is a medical student really the person to trust on this topic? I've not known a lot of them, but those I did definitely included in their number some intemperate drinkers. (Also, this is sadly pre-Jeeves: the best advice for dealing with a hangover is, of course, to ring for his assistance.)

Then there's the distaff side:

The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed was published in the same year, but could not be further away in tone, even though its author had similarly pragmatic views. Readers were instructed that many pubs were entirely respectable, having been established by servants of gentry, and in them one could expect to meet "some of the most pleasant company. . . . The conversation is often very instructive, and well expressed . . . about politics, the news of the day, parish intelligence, and the like." It was the taproom that was the danger: "Here collect the working men, male servants in and out of place, hackney-coachmen, omnibus cads, &c.," who "drink far more in proportion than those in the parlour . . . and frequently insult most grossly" the servant girls from local houses, the "wives of mechanics [artisans], poor tradesmen, and the broken-down gentlewoman who keeps a school." These blameless females, while waiting to collect the supper beer, were obliged meanwhile to mingle with "the washerwoman, the market-woman, the basket-woman, the gaudily-attired courtesan, the sad street-walker." This mixing, warned the author, was "highly dangerous," but it was the mixing he was warning about, not the drinking.

Choose your drinking companions wisely, lady lushes! (And choose your books wisely, too: go get The Victorian City! You won't regret it!)

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.)

One of the drawers in Donald Westlake's filing cabinet was labeled "Are you still here?" Which, I trust, is where, were he still with us, he would right now be filing 2013.

From Henry David Thoreau's journals, the entry for December 31, 1851:

Ah, beautiful is decay!

Or, as Timothy Hallinan in his crime novel Crashed put it,

Hope, the slut, always springs eternal.

Happy New Year, folks--and the gods bless Damion Searls for bringing us the NYRB Classics edition of Thoreau's journals, which are guaranteed to while away many a future day.