dovegreyreader scribbles

Dickens and I ... David Waller does Pickwick

As Christmas is now definitely heading our way, and the geese are getting fat etc I thought we should be festive and jolly this week and focus on some Christmas reading recommends, and what better way to start the week than by re-visiting that Dickens bi-centennial that we'd almost all forgotten about now. A Dickens and I seasonal reminder before the year is up, and my thanks to David Waller, author of The Magnificent Mrs Tennnant which I wrote about here,  and David has waited very patiently for this piece to appear, and my sincere thanks to him for writing it.

Pickwick Papers, by David Waller

Last Christmas we stayed with my in-laws at their lovely old house on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, not too far away I imagine from dovegreyreader’s own idyllic home.  Sitting by the fire, glass of sloe gin in hand, snoring dog at my feet, there was no better place to read Pickwick Papers for the first time.

Pickwick is Dickens’s first novel, the book that transformed him, a mere 24 years old when he started writing in February 1836, from a relatively obscure journalist into a colossal celebrity. After a slow start, the monthly episodes sold by the tens of thousands and Dickens became the darling of the pre-Victorian public, never to look back. It captured the imagination of his contemporaries, but does it appeal to the modern reader?

Like many people who love Dickens, I simply had never read this book, probably because by repute it is long, unrelentingly cheerful and perhaps not even a proper novel in the sense that we understand it: a structured story with a beginning, middle and an end. As I would find, Pickwick is indeed episodic, rambling and always improvised, a collage of unconnected stories and sketches, without the ingenious plotting and coherence of his mature works.

I wasn’t especially taken by the early, especially meandering chapters. But as the afternoon wore on and the sloe gin glass was replenished a couple of times, I found the story came to life with the arrival if the impish cockney servant Sam Weller, who plays Sancho Panza to Mr Pickwick’s Don Quixote. We follow the bumbling, benevolent Pickwick and his band of hapless chums as they travel the length and breadth of southern England on a series of madcap adventures.

Set in the late 1820s, the book is fascinating in part as a portrait of pre-Victorian England. This is the age of the stagecoach and so much of what we think of as typically Dickensian simply does not exist in the world of Pickwick: there are no trains, for a start, and the rapid industrialisation of the mid century and the build up of the overpopulated cities is yet to come. The chapters on the elections at Eatandswill are a classic description of rambunctious politics before the Reform Act of 1832.

Yet Pickwick is as much about a state of mind as a place: there is no evil, merely benevolence and good cheer. Whatever quandary Mr Pickwick finds himself in, whether breaking into a girl’s school at night or getting himself locked up in Fleet Prison, the world rights itself, assisted by copious quantities of Pickwick’s money, Weller’s ingenuity and generous helpings of porter, punch and other alcoholic beverages.

So Pickwick is a Christmassy book: bluff, hearty, always “the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness…” Sitting by the fire as you read it, you might doze off from time to time, but when you wake again you will soon find yourself chuckling and helping yourself to another glass of sloe gin.

As Mr. Weller concluded this moral tale, with which the fat boy appeared much affected, they all three repaired to the large kitchen, in which the family were by this time assembled, according to annual custom on Christmas Eve, observed by old Wardle's forefathers from time immemorial.

From the centre of the ceiling of this kitchen, old Wardle had just suspended, with his own hands, a huge branch of mistletoe, and this same branch of mistletoe instantaneously gave rise to a scene of general and most delightful struggling and confusion; in the midst of which, Mr. Pickwick, with a gallantry that would have done honour to a descendant of Lady Tollimglower herself, took the old lady by the hand, led her beneath the mystic branch, and saluted her in all courtesy and decorum. The old lady submitted to this piece of practical politeness with all the dignity which befitted so important and serious a solemnity, but the younger ladies, not being so thoroughly imbued with a superstitious veneration for the custom, or imagining that the value of a salute is very much enhanced if it cost a little trouble to obtain it, screamed and struggled, and ran into corners, and threatened and remonstrated, and did everything but leave the room, until some of the less adventurous gentlemen were on the point of desisting, when they all at once found it useless to resist any longer, and submitted to be kissed with a good grace.

 

 

David Waller’s latest book is The Perfect Man, a life of the Victorian strongman Eugen Sandow. See www.victorianstrongman.com for further details. His biography of Mrs Tennant, Victorian society hostess, was reviewed here in 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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...

Dickens and I...Helen Rappaport

A warm welcome to author Helen Rappaport and my thanks to Helen for today's Dickens and I...contribution. It is no secret that I have been a great fan of Helen's writing since the day I first read and wrote here back in 2007 about No Place for Ladies, her book on the women of the Crimea, and I have written about several of Helen's books since...Dark Hearts in Chicago followed by EkaterinburgThe Last Days of the Romanovs and most recently of course Magnificent Obsession. I will be on the very edge of my seat for the next book about the four Romanov sisters, and for a change US readers will get their hands on that one first.

I suspect Helen's recollections will chime for many of us...

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This may sound like heresy coming from a writer, but I’m going to start by coming clean and admitting that my earliest recall of Dickens is a very vivid, visual one.  I fell in love with him not on the page – but on the screen. When I was a child and we had our first black and white TV the one thing we all enjoyed as a family was sitting down for the Sunday afternoon teatime serial at 5.30.  It was usually Dickens, or one of the Brontes or Jane Austen. I’m not ashamed to admit that it was the truncated TV versions that first captured my imagination; I did of course read the books, first in abridged form in school and then later in their full version.  I loved them with a passion and, ever since, I have re-read them on a regular basis.

But Dickens, in the first instance for me, was seared on my brain not just by those wonderful tea-time serials, but also by the now familiar, iconic film versions. Every Christmas, regular as clockwork, there was a re-run of Alastair Sim in Christmas Carol, as well as endless showings of George Cukor’s 1935 David Copperfield....

....and David Lean’s inimitable Great Expectations made in 1946 with, for me one of the defining sequences not just of English literature but also English cinema: the unforgettable opening scene where Pip encounters Magwitch by the row of little graves in that bleak, windswept churchyard.

How could I ever forget that seminal cinematic moment, growing up as I did in sight of the mud flats and marshes of north-east Kent where the story is set?

It is for me an image that encapsulates my childhood and the birth of my love affair not just with Dickens but, as a historian, with the Victorian period.

My first attempts at the novels ended in abject failure. I tried to read them too soon – as I suspect many people do – before I could fully understand the great flights of the language and Dickens’s quirky humour. Nor could I at first appreciate their supreme grasp on the life, times and landscape of mid-Victorian Britain. By the time I had studied O-level history at school and fallen in love with the Victorians with a venegeance. the novels began to speak to me in a way that no other author did or still does, except perhaps for George Eliot.  They have the power to transport me within minutes across time into a world that my imagination recognizes and feeds on creatively.

I still enjoy Dickens on the screen – and one dramatization remains supreme – the glorious, kaleidoscopic and frenetic RSC marathon version of  Nicholas Nickleby of 1980.  It wasn’t just a thrilling piece of theatre, it was Dickens’s world brought vividly to life in all its poignancy, its humour, its visceral pain and passion.  And, more importantly, it made people want to read the original. Perhaps coming to literature the wrong way round, via dramatisations first, is not such a bad thing.

 

 

Dickens and I... Bill Rogers

Please welcome Bill Rogers to Dickens and I... today and my thanks to him for a really heartfelt contribution.

I first met Bill's writing whilst helping to judge the LongBarn debut novel award, and my fellow judges and I had no doubt about short listing his book The Cleansing.

Bill's first career encompassed roles as a teacher, Principal Inspector of Schools & Head of the Manchester School Improvement Service, Lead Network Facilitator with the National College for School Leadership, and Fellow of the Teaching Awards.  He is currently the author of seven novels – including the DCI Tom Caton Manchester Crime Series and that debut novel, The Cleansing,  which also earned him the ePublishing Consortium Writers Award in 2011.

 

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My story begins on a cold January night, on the northern edge of London’s East End.   Bursts of orange and red punctuate the sulphurous London smog.   The cry of a newborn baby echoes the wail of sirens, as agents of death fall from an ink black sky.  It was a Dickensian beginning.   And so the story progressed.

 During my seventh year my mother, my father, sister, and I were relocated to South Oxhey - made famous last year by Gareth Malone’s TV programme The Choir - a sprawling council estate built to re-house victims of the Blitz.  My parents were already terminally ill; my mother with leukaemia, my father with TB.   Mum died the following Christmas, Dad, shortly before I sat the 11 plus.  My sister and I were alone in the world.

I was sent to a Boarding School in Hitchin, which now has a website devoted to the harsh regime inflicted on us pupils.   Before I left home, our neighbours, Phyllis & Lew Isaacs, gave me a boxed, polished Morocco, hard backed copy of Great Expectations. 

It was my first introduction to the rich and fascinating world of Charles Dickens, and became a lifeline.  Already in trauma, I found it impossible to concentrate during the three hour study sessions every evening.  Instead, I made up stories in my head.  At night I read one Dickens’ novel after another, beneath the blankets, with the aid of a torch.  Each morning brought a caning for homework neglected.

My adolescent mind found resonance with Pip, Oliver Twist, Mr Squeers, and Dotheboys Hall.   I moved on to Thomas Hardy, Steinbeck, and D.H. Lawrence.  But it was Dickens who propelled me to study English, Drama and History at St Mary’s College.

Nobody has captured Victorian London as effectively as Dickens.   The serial nature of his work made it the archetype of the page-turner novel.   Master of the social novel, he seamlessly intertwined mystery, romance, crime, class, psychology, and politics.   I know he has influenced my writing, for better, and for worse.  Great Expectations remains my favourite.  It fed my thirst for reading, fired my imagination, and was instrumental in my desire to become a writer.  It gave me hope when I most needed it. 

Like most of Dickens’ novels my story has a happy ending.  I met and married my Estelle.  Set about helping to change schools for the better.   Found a second career as an author.  I can’t pretend I owe it all to Dickens, but the day that I was handed Great Expectations set me on a never ending journey of self-discovery.

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me... Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”  

Chapter 9.  Great Expectations. 

Website:  www.billrogers.co.uk

Twitter:  @RogersBill

 

 

 

Dickens and I... Susan Hill

A warm welcome to Susan Hill, author, publisher and all round very generous and tell-it-like-it-is person, and my thanks to Susan for her thoughts on 'Dickens and I' today.

If you have perhaps been in a coma for the last few weeks... and if so I hope you are better now:-) you may have missed the current box office storm that is The Woman in Black starring Daniel Radcliffe and which opens in UK cinemas today. Daniel's first film without that zigzag mark on his forehead and Voldemort on his trail, but I doubt things could have taken a much more frightening turn than they have with his role as Arthur Kipps in that god-forsaken Eel Marsh House. I hear the film is causing normally quiet people to shout out in cinemas and grab whoever is sitting next to them, and is apparently the first British film in twenty-five years to take the number one slot in the US box office rankings, and you can read Susan's personal thoughts on all that excitement on her website, but for now Susan Hill on Charles Dickens...

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No greater influence, no greater source of reading enrichment and pleasure – Dickens.

My Great Aunt had one of those glass fronted bookcases containing, besides an English Dictionary and a medical ditto, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens. I was 9 when I first opened the glass doors and browsed, first enjoying the old line illustrations by Boz, but then, attracted by the chapter titles, starting to read Great Expectations. Still fed by Enid Blyton, I didn’t know what to expect. How could I possibly have foreseen that Dickens would have such an effect on me, or understood how his novels would help shape every future one of my own ?

What was it  about him ?

Yes, the stories, yes, the characters, but before those it was his places that enthralled me and I have always started a book with a strong vision of its setting ever since. Dickens’s London. Ancient dark houses. Dank courtyards. Slums. Counting houses. Shops. The Marshalsea prison. The law courts and the inky offices of the lawyers. The wet grey flat Wolds of Lincolnshire. The Kentish Marshes. The river. The wharves and warehouses.   I lived in those places, I smelled them. I wanted to make my own fictional worlds as exciting, dramatic, palpable.

Dickens, like Thomas Hardy, writes in great scenes and set-pieces, and both writers have a theatrical or painterly way of lighting those scenes, from within or without, by candlelight, lamplight, gaslight, firelight, moonlight – the sun seems to feature little.  I read leaning against the back of my great aunt’s moquette sofa, not  understanding some things but never less than absorbed – and at that age, what puzzles you in a book you skim quickly over. The nuances, the subtleties, the adult take on life and death, the social minutiae, all of these pass a young reader by. It is the broad brushstrokes, the excitement of the plot, the larger-than-lifeness of the characters, their grotesqueness, weird appearance, that impresses. The rest comes later, which is why Dickens is both for young readers and for adults.

Every decade, I have discovered more in him as I have experienced more myself. Nine year old tears were wept over the death of Joe the crossing-sweeper but the tragedy and loneliness and innocence of Miss Flite requires a more mature reader to understand fully. As a teenager I was full of righteous indignation over the social injustices Dickens highlights, the poverty, oppression, suffering, misery, lack of decent housing and medicine. Those still matter but after many years of reading him you come to see how balanced Dickens is, how the political and humanitarian issues are offset by family happiness, requited love, and above all, by humour. The irony and bleakness are countered by the sweetness, and yes, the sentimentality, of the love affairs. There is nothing, nothing that he does not know about, understand and explain by presenting it in fiction. Domestic violence, the betrayal of children’s innocence, ‘the insolence of office and the law’s delays,’ pomposity and self-regard, pride, humility, self-sacrifice, altruism, greed….it is all, all in Dickens. I often wonder if I need any other writer.

Dickens and me...

Well after toasting the Queen it's now time to charge the glasses again and let's hear it for dear old Charles, two hundred today and doesn't look a day older for all the love he's getting right now....

and I'll be shot for this desecration of the sacred image, but something tells me that the Charles Dickens I am getting to know quite well this year might just have smiled and quite enjoyed a bit of merriment amidst all the serious eulogizing... before writing me a stinker of a letter about the visual humiliation to which his attention has been drawn.

Except I hope he might have read the rest of the post and felt the respect, because, having asked lots of people to write about their own experience of Dickens I have been wondering, and pondering and thinking... what does Dickens really mean to me. Surfacing unbidden every time and before any thoughts of the books, is his Great Ormond Street connection and now well-documented on here, my nurse-training at the alma mater. That hospital connection will see me in London for the October 1972 set's fortieth reunion later this year, and I hear friends are travelling from America and Australia to be there so I'd better hie me to London for that weekend.

I never cease to be amazed by the circularity of reading either because my attentions are also currently guided in the direction of sick children thanks to Linda Grant's recommendation on Twitter at about 7am one morning last week that I read Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones. The joy of the Kindle is the instant gratification of the downloadable sample, swiftly followed by the book in this case, because it makes such compelling reading from the off. It's the 1950s and a late diagnosis for little John Cromer of Still's Disease starts yet another Great Ormond Street train of thought, Sir George Frederic Still, a clinical assistant there in 1894 and eventually to become one of London's most popular paediatricians.

I also buy every book I see and hear of about Great Ormond Street, but my favourite remains a slim volume published in celebration of the hospital's centenary in 1952, an apposite year for us on here this week, and written by Senior Surgeon, Thomas Twistington Higgins. Mr T-H makes a very prescient observation in 1952 that seems no less relevant now...

'There is a remarkable parallel so far as the hospital is concerned between 1852 and 1952. Then as now, the national environment was charged with revolutionary change. Our forbears had to plan their new hospital venture in a changing world in which the tumultuous developments must have made it exceptionally difficult for them to look ahead...'

I find it harder and harder to imagine, given twenty-first century communications, the constraints of effective information sharing back in the nineteenth century, and how great must have been the impact of having a figure like Charles Dickens on your side if you were a small, impecunious team setting up such a mammoth venture as London's first proper hospital for children. Not unlike asking Stephen Fry (almost four million followers) or Neil Gaiman (lagging behind with only a million and a half) to re-tweet something for you on Twitter these days perhaps, and requests to do so apparently come back with warnings about making sure your own website can cope with the potential volume of traffic.

So when Charles Dickens made his legendary speech in April 1852 at the first Great Ormond Street Festival Dinner, a fund-raiser to acquire further premises in Gt Ormond Street , and then published his article Drooping Buds in Household Words, news spread fast, and to many who hadn't even know of the existence of the hospital. The dinner alone raised enough to buy the premises and with plenty left over.

In searching online for this I made a very fortunate discovery, has anyone else come across the Dickens Journals Online Project??

A team of volunteers have scanned and transcribed every edition of each of Dickens's journals and after a quick registration process they are accessible free online. I was staggered at the scope of the undertaking and apparently the plan is that every one will be completed by today...98% there on Saturday, so congratulations to them for a fantastic endeavour and the provision of a brilliant resource. I have already been sidetracked into reading other articles so beware, it is slightly addictive.

Jenny Hartley's recent volume of The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, published by OUP, also reveals that in March 1852 Dickens had written to his closest friend John Forster ...

'...My Highgate journey yesterday was a sad one. Sad to think how all journeys tend that way. I went up to the cemetery to look for a piece of ground...in a foolish dislike to leaving the little child shut up in a vault there, I think of pitching a tent under the sky...Nothing has taken place here: but I believe, every hour that it must the next hour...'

Charles and Catherine's eight-month old daughter Dora had died the previous year and the birth of their next baby is imminent. Of all men Dickens knew that his family would not 'be exempt, as to our many children, from the afflictions of other parents,' and it is not difficult to imagine how acutely this may have focused his attentions on his speech on that April evening or the article that followed.

But those famously melodramatic lines had the desired effect on the public consciousness...

'Oh! Baby's dead and will be never, never, never seen among us any more!'

along with the news that one in three coffins made in London is for a child, and with some religious overtones added in, Dickens, who surely never lost touch with his own 'inner child', cleverly appealed to all the right people and the donations poured in.

Just looking at the infant mortality rates gleans a perspective, currently standing at 4.6/1000 live births per year here in the UK in children under a year old, and though Dickens quotes the figures for children up to the age of two, the figures in 1852 add up to 240/1000.

As a cause the Hospital for Sick Children, as it was known until very recently, rapidly captured the hearts and souls of the wealthier Victorians for whom philanthropy and religion were comfortable soulmates, whilst there is much evidence that the Anglican church also benefited from an alliance of opposing high and low church factions, offering good opportunities for some extra displays of holiness and moral earnestness and a chance to pull together.

But the motives for giving were genuine too,

'...it is above all things the charity which, in the old scriptural words, beareth much and is kind. Children cannot repay.'

said the London Journal in 1875, and the plight of London's children, whose health had been sorely neglected for too long suddenly achieved much greater prominence.

Working as one of the first doctors at the hospital with Charles West was Queen Victoria's physician William Jenner, and surely it is no coincidence that Queen Victoria announced royal patronage within two weeks. Dickens's fund-raising legacy continued apace and by 1868 the endowment of cots had became an established money-maker; for £2000 wealthy Victorians or collaborative groups could see their names in perpetuity over the head of a sick child, and by 1880 120 beds were thus favoured.

I have dragged countless friends through Great Ormond Street to look at the hospital chapel whenever we are in London and passing. It is a dazzling microcosm of Victorian ecclesiastical decoration... even Oscar Wilde moved to acknowledge its beauty and spirituality.

Tiny child-sized pews and astonishingly intricate and colourful frescoes, stained glass and a rich and elaborately painted dome depicting the pelican in her piety, an image of self-sacrifice, surrounded by the angel choir peering down on the little people below.

And there, to one side of the chapel, a plaque dedicated to the man who surely helped give the hospital the financial start it needed...

Charles Dickens1812-1870
Honorary Governor
Inspirer and Champion of the Hospital for Sick Children
"Charles Dickens the children's friend, firstly fairly set her
on her legs and in a few eloquent words which none who heard can
ever forget, gave her the gift that she should win love and
 favour everywhere."

 

 

 

 

 

Dickens and I... Amanda Craig

Please extend a very warm welcome to Dickens and I... for Amanda Craig, writer and journalist and great encourager of all things dovegreyreader. Amanda's most recent novel, the hugely successful Hearts and Minds is currently optioned for development as a TV series and for the novel's all-seeing eye over 21st century London, it is surely covering territory that Mr Dickens would find very intriguing were he to walk back into our lives today. Another of Amanda's novels, A Private Place has just been re-published in Kindle format, and with its themes of life at a boarding school I think our man would have been fascinated by that one too.

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When I was 21, I discovered Our Mutual Friend, and it was like getting an electric shock.  I’d read several other Dickens novels (David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby as a child, Great Expectations and Bleak House as a teenager) but I read them too young, without understanding, and with a good deal of resentment in the case of the last because it was a set text for English. I found his style and his characters grotesque. But one day I found nothing but Our Mutual Friend to read on a long hot summer abroad, and it pretty much turned me into a novelist.

What thrilled me wasn’t the obvious things – the exuberant language, the fantastic characters, the suppurating gloom – but the way that Dickens combined so many genres of story.
Our Mutual Friend (or OMF) is at once a murder mystery, a thriller, a romance, a social satire, social realism and a contemporary literary novel of its time. From the very first chapter when we realise the figures we see floating on the Thames are towing the body of a dead man,

 to the second with its exquisitely funny description of the Veneerings’ dinner party, to the third with its three lawyers describing their frustration, loneliness and boredom  – it was like moving through a succession of brightly-lit railway carriages, and living with each of the passengers. Each carriage was different, but all were connected.  

It had never occurred to me that a big, serious novel about contemporary life could have a detective story as its engine, and of course I copied it years later. But Dickens did it first, and best. If a few modern novelists are rediscovering his panoptic technical genius, it’s because he understood so clearly how to make us understand that life isn’t all written in the same key. The very aspect of his work that makes refined critical sensibilities recoil in horror is the source of his greatness,  because he shows how our existence can seem tragic one moment and wildly farcical the next.

I love his vulgarity, his energy, his passion and his compassion.  Who hasn’t met people like the Veneerings, with their “bran-new house in a bran new quarter”, immensely pleased with themselves and mindful at all times of social advancement? But then, who hasn’t walked quickly past people like the Hexams? Going into their miserable, decomposing home after the Veneering mansion is a classic Dickens manoeuvre: you are made to shiver, then laugh, then find yourself moved to tears. He’s the only writer besides Shakespeare whose imagination contains a whole world.

Of course, if you’re looking for the perfect Dickens novel, you turn to Great Expectations. Unlike the “baggy monsters” it never wastes a word, and the tightness of its construction is in contrast to OMF, Dickens’s last completed novel. Nor does OMF have the gorgeous squalor and oracular passion of Bleak House. Yet to me it’s the most fascinating, and in a way the most topical of his works, equating the worship of money with filth, and dismantling the heavy materialism that corrupted both the Victorians and present day society. It has an exceptionally moving heroine in Jenny Wren, a disabled child who transforms her pain and poverty and shame by becoming a dolls dressmaker; the whole novel is shot through with the spirit of fairytales. The lovely, kindly Boffins may not be able to rescue us from the world of the Veneerings (Mr Veneering, inevitably, becomes an MP) but to encounter them as characters always puts a smile on my face.

 

Dickens and I... Stanley Wells

Professor Stanley Wells is a Shakespeare scholar and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and my grateful thanks to him for sharing his Dickens and I contribution today.

 

Although I’ve devoted most of my life to Shakespeare, Dickens was my first literary love, and provides my earliest bookish memory. It must date back to around 1940, when I was ten years old, a primary school child in Yorkshire. I remember spending much of a weekend sitting behind a sofa reading The Pickwick Papers to myself, constantly erupting into laughter and giggles, to the complete bemusement of the rest of the family. It was a pretty well bookless home, and I’ve no idea where the copy I was reading came from. But I do remember afterwards that a friend of my father’s, the editor of the local newspaper, offered to sell us a set of the novels for £5, and I suppose my father must have bought it for me.

   Since then I’ve read, and sometimes re-read, all the novels and much of the miscellaneous prose, and enjoyed them in a variety of ways. I remember writing an essay on Dickens and the drama when I was an undergraduate. In it I made much of the theatrical quality of Tulkinghorn’s melodramatic death: ‘Mr. Tulkinghorn's time is over for evermore, and the Roman pointed at the murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him, from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the heart.’ Joining the RAF for my National Service I packed Nicholas Nickleby in my knapsack along with Keats’s poems as consolatory reading. When I became a schoolteacher I often read extracts from the novels to my pupils. Sometimes I drew on the anthology compiled by the actor and playwright Emlyn Williams for
his dramatic readings. Again Pickwick came in especially handy - the skating episodes were great favourites - useful particularly for Friday afternoons when I no less than the pupils was too tired for clause analysis and parsing and comprehension exercises. And more seriously I taught the whole of Great Expectations for their Ordinary Level exam, reading it aloud with them, to the greater pleasure of some than of others.

   When I became a university teacher, though I never lectured on Dickens I gave tutorials on some of the novels. Once the BBC invited me to record a conversation about one with Edward Blishen, then a popular broadcaster and autobiographer, and again I chose Great Expectations. I suppose this has to count as my favourite, though over the years I have continued to read unsystematically through the canon, especially for my winter reading, sometimes at the same time as a friend has been reading the same novel, for the sake of sharing the pleasure. And of course I have often seen films and television dramas based on Dickens. James Hayter seemed a definitive Pickwick in the 1952 film; just to read its cast list, which includes such great performers of the past as Donald Wolfit, Joyce Grenfell, Hermione Baddeley, Hermione Gingold, and Kathleen Harrison is to be reminded of the wonderful opportunities Dickens gives to character actors. Now Simon Callow – a joyous Micawber on television - follows in Williams’s footsteps – and, of course, in those of Dickens himself as a solo reader. I have read biographies - Edgar Johnson’s, and very recently Clare Tomalin’s, as well as her book about Ellen Ternan. I supervised a Ph. D. dissertation on Dickens and Shakespeare, by Valerie Gager, published by C U P, which reveals well over a thousand quotations and allusions. Writing about Shakespeare in the nineteenth century in my book Shakespeare: For All Time (2002) I discussed the performances of The Merry Wives of Windsor that Dickens organized (and took part in - as Justice Shallow) in the hope of establishing Sheridan Knowles as curator of Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I have used extracts from the novels and the essays – especially from Sketches by Boz - for party readings, and I’ve taken part in readings, most recently a jovial pre-Christmas occasion when a group of us read the whole of A Christmas Carol, fuelled by mulled wine and hot sausages. And on a visit to New York last year, I had the pleasure of examining the precious original manuscript of the book, marvelling at the sense of a creative mind working at white heat revealed by the author’s cancellations and interlineations and substitutions. So far as I know, no one has ever undertaken what would admittedly be the heroic task of trying to trace his creative processes by unravelling them.  

    Dickens can be sentimental, diffuse, sententious, preachy, muddly in his plotting, overlong. But I value him for the abundance of his imagination, the variety and warmth of his characterization, his inconsequentialities, digressions and irrelevances, the resonance of his prose, the vitality of his dialogue, the piquancy of his observation, his depth of human feeling. When all is said and done, for me he’s second only to Shakespeare.

 

Dickens and I... Erica Wagner

My thanks to Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of The Times, for her contribution to Dickens and I, My Favourite and Why.

Erica Wagner's latest book, Seizure: A Novel, is published by Faber & Faber and she is now working on a book about the Brooklyn Bridge.

www.ericawagner.co.uk

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I hated Dickens. Don’t get me wrong – I tried, I really did, to love him. I still have the copy of Oliver Twist I asked my Dad to buy me when I was, I think, about my son’s age now – eleven. It’s a Signet Classic and its spine is cracked from my repeated attempts to read any of it at all. Ugh. One year later, when I was in 7^th grade, our class read Great Expectations. Hated that too. I could not make any connection between  my New-York-Upper-West-Side life and Dickens’ world. I thought there was no hope. And, frankly, I was fine with that.

And then. And then the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby came to Broadway in 1981. Another year had passed: I was thirteen. The stories surrounding the show were unprecedented. It was eight and a half hours long! The tickets cost – gasp -- $100 each! (Look at Broadway prices now and this is really quite hilarious, but trust me – it was a ton of money in those days.) My parents – not wealthy people – bought tickets for us, because this was a cast-iron Event, something not to be missed. I thought this to be a colossal waste of money, and went along on the first night (you could see it all in one day on a Saturday, or over two nights) wearing my most grudging and dismissive face.

But now, three decades later, the opening lines of the play – and of the novel – ring clearly in my head.  “There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr Godfrey Nickleby…” I’ll tell you the truth:  tears come to my eyes. I suppose those tears are in part for a lost childhood (and Dickens understood better than most what a lost childhood could mean) but they are also for the real force of the transformation I underwent over the course of two evenings in the Plymouth Theatre. That was it. I was hooked. I got it. There was no turning back. I was no longer excluded and mystified: I was enraptured and involved.

No, Nickleby is not, now, my favourite novel of Dickens’s, by a long shot – it is a testament to the power of Trevor Nunn and David Edgar’s production that in certain respects it brought more depth to the novel than it actually possesses. (Roger Rees’s Nicholas surpassed Dickens’ callow youth, for instance, by a long way.) Great Expectations is my desert-island Dickens, 7^th grade notwithstanding; it speaks to my love not only of its author but of myth and fable too in its structure and themes. But I’d also say that of A Christmas Carol, and then the list would begin to grow long. But Nickleby – and the Royal Shakespeare Company – will always have a very special place in my Dickensian heart.

 

Dickens and I... Phil Davis of The Reader Organisation

My sincere thanks to Phil Davis, Professor of English at Liverpool University and editor of The Reader magazine who launches the Dickens and I... series here with this wonderful piece.

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In his recent programme on Dickens, Armando Iannucci spoke of his experience of looking at the manuscript of David Copperfield in the V & A as being like that of a boy visiting a sweetshop. What is on offer though is something more than just sweeties. 

     Here is just one little example of watching Dickens in the act of writing. At the beginning of chapter 11, Dickens writes as the older David thinking back to the time when he was sent away from home, aged only ten, to work at his step-father’s warehouse:

I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age.

This is the manuscript’s first version. But then in the very midst of writing it Dickens added between ‘to me’ and ‘that I can have been’ one little phrase: ‘even now’. ‘It is matter of some surprise to me, even now’ - creating an adult vulnerable to his own memories and a writer vulnerable to his own words. ‘No one,’ confessed Dickens in his Preface to the 1850 edition, ‘can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.’ ‘Even now, famous and caressed and happy,’ he wrote of his own equivalent childhood trauma of being sent out to work at the blacking shop by his own parents, actually at the age of twelve, ‘I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life’ ‘Even now’ once again: it is one of Dickens’s sensitive little pressure-points.

A few lines later, the writer protests at the boy’s plight:

it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But there was nobody to make any, and none was made   . . .

It is at the proof stage this time that Dickens delicately subtracts rather than adds, taking out ‘there was nobody to make any’:

But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

That little comma-ed off phrase ‘at ten years old’ is another of those time-thoughts that was a later pained insertion. Yet when you see it in the manuscript, in the momentariness of Dickens’s own handwriting, from Dickens’s own secret autobiography, it is moving that what was inserted so apparently incidentally in the writer’s sentence was so central to the man’s existence.   

     But that is precisely Dickens’s craft: for those who dismiss him as just a popular Victorian serial-writer, please notice his care with small matters of language precisely for the sake of large emotional effects. The older David looks back at the younger almost as if he were now helplessly in place of the father that child never really had. Yet at the same time the man is also the hurt product of that childhood. This is the attentive reading which the manuscript shows Dickens was looking for.

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Phil didn't ask for his own books to be included on this post but I have taken the liberty....

The Victorians 1830-1880, vol 8 in Oxford English Literary History series, Oxford: OUP 2002.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters, Oxford; Wiley Blackwell 2008

Bernard Malamud; A Writer's Life, Oxford; OUP 2007

Shakespeare Thinking, London: Continuum, 2006