Dickens and I ... Adele Geras

I am so excited because our guest today is Adele Geras, and a really warm welcome back to one of the very first occupants of the dovegreyreader asks...comfy chair (and for whom Bookhound drew a very special picture.) And for anyone with about twelve hours to spare and absolutely nothing else to do, you will find an impressive list of all the other armchair guests here.

Adele Geras writes for readers of all ages. Her latest children's book, a picture book illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas and out in paperback  in April from Orchard Books is called My Ballet Dream. She has written four novels for adults. Made in Heaven is still in print and it and the others (Facing the Light, Hester's Story, and A Hidden Life) are all available to download to all e readers.

Adele blogs once a month at The History Girls  and on February 7th, the actual day of the Dickens bicentenary, she hosted a party for him on the blog. 

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A confession: I am a Dickens lightweight. I have not read all the novels. Some of the very greatest (Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, even...oh the shame! A Tale of Two Cities) I am intending to read soon but there are others, like Martin Chuzzlewit and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which I won't be rushing to get under my belt, so to speak. But if I'm not a Dickens completist, I am a most sincere and devoted Dickens lover.

When I was eleven, at boarding school, we read A Christmas Carol. I was instantly hooked and ACC remains one of my favourite novels more than half a century later.  We studied  Great Expectations when I was fourteen and that's probably my top Dickens novel....unless it's David Copperfield. I find it almost impossible to choose between these two. Incidentally, many people claim that studying a novel at school has ruined it, or the author for them but the opposite is true for me. My English teachers were outstanding and I am immensely grateful that they helped us to enjoy Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, Hardy, Charlotte and Emily Bronte as well as great swathes of English poetry. 

That's by the way. Back to Dickens: the novel to which I am most sentimentally attached is Dombey and Son. In late April 2009, my husband and I went on holiday to Venice. It was the first time either of us had been there, and we travelled by train. This isn't quite the way a Victorian would have made the trip but it's a darn sight nearer to the experience than flying would have been. I don't like planes and I love trains, and so we made our leisurely way on the wonderful Eurostar, to the Continent. We stayed a night in Paris and the next day, went by the excellent TGV to Milan where we arrived at nine o'clock at night. 

This was the view out of our train window just before we crossed into Italy.

Next morning we went on to Venice and stepping out of that station and seeing the Grand Canal for the first time was an experience I won't forget. Everything anyone has ever written about Venice; anything anyone has put on canvas to try and depict her glories, just fades away when you are confronted by the real thing. 

We spent four days there and came back the same way, by train. This photo was the last one I took in the city.

While we were there,  we stayed at a most wonderful hotel and this [picture of Wisteria] was the sight that greeted us every time we stepped off the Vaporetto at our station, Ca' d' Oro.

As you might expect, we didn't have much time for reading but I'd decided to take Dombey and Son with me for the journey and the holiday and I can report that the book lasted me (and I'm a very quick reader) the full seven days from when we left Manchester to when we got to Paris on the way home. I started Colm Toibin's The Master on the London-bound Eurostar train.

To say that I was gripped by Dombey and Son would be putting it mildly. I was completely caught up in the Dombeys' marriage, the death of Paul Dombey, that dreadful school in Brighton, the lovely Polly Toodles, the fate of poor Florence, the secondary characters like Mrs. Skewton and, and  especially, always there behind everything, the presence of London just after the building of Euston station. I am no  railway buff but those descriptions of the trains have stayed in my mind.  I loved the parties Dickens describes and remember one line about women wearing 'very sparkling necklaces on very withered necks' which I now think of whenever I see anyone who isn't a spring chicken bedecked with bling.  Mrs Skewton wanting rose-coloured bed hangings as she is dying, so that her complexion might look better makes an unlikeable character a little more sympathetic. What impressed me most was Dickens's panache.

Bring on another character, why not?

Shall we now have someone return from the dead and hide away to pop out at the last minute?

What a good idea!  Do let's do that!

Simon Callow speaks eloquently and correctly about Dickens being a kind of director in the theatrical or cinematic sense,  but the image that occurred to me was of a magician with a huge box of 'effects' from which he is able to pull at will anything he likes. I admire the way he  jumps between the past and present tenses when he's writing. When you see the way he juxtaposes scenes and moves between groups of characters you are struck again by what a very modern writer he is. This is precisely the technique that works so well in soap operas and he used it all his writing life to huge effect.

This year, with all the bicentenarly celebrations will be a good time to return to him. Bleak House is up next. This, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, is what I would like to sing to the Inimitable...