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Jean's Charles Dickens Challenge
Hard Times is the first novel he wrote in weekly parts rather than monthly ones, and he found this regime very restricting. It ended up as his shortest novel. I do miss the complexity of Bleak House - but occasionally we're getting some great descritions even with the straitjacket he has set for himself. Here's a description of "Coketown", which he based on the industrial city of Preston. Charles Dickens visited Preston while he was writing Hard Times - during an industrial strike there in 1854 :
"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness."
My review is linked in the master list at the beginning. I shall be starting the next novel, Little Dorrit, next.
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Little Dorrit was originally published over nineteen months, between December 1855 and June 1857:First Book: Poverty
I – December 1855 (chapters 1–4)
II – January 1856 (chapters 5–8)
III – February 1856 (chapters 9–11)
IV – March 1856 (chapters 12–14)
V – April 1856 (chapters 15–18)
VI – May 1856 (chapters 19–22)
VII – June 1856 (chapters 23–25)
VIII – July 1856 (chapters 26–29)
IX – August 1856 (chapters 30–32)
X – September 1856 (chapters 33–36)
Second Book: Riches
XI – October 1856 (chapters 1–4)
XII – November 1856 (chapters 5–7)
XIII – December 1856 (chapters 8–11)
XIV – January 1857 (chapters 12–14)
XV – February 1857 (chapters 15–18)
XVI – March 1857 (chapters 19–22)
XVII – April 1857 (chapters 23–26)
XVIII – May 1857 (chapters 27–29)
XIX-XX – June 1857 (chapters 30–34)
Each instalment cost a shilling (5p) except for the last, which was a double issue and cost two shillings. The illustrations were by Hablot Knight Browne "Phiz" again. I'm enjoying these as Hard Times didn't have any originally.
I had forgotten that this book starts in Marseilles!Dickens seems to make a point of starting most of his novels with an unpleasant description - whether a "London particular", a grimy city rooftop landscape or - as now - an unpleasant description of summer in the South of France, when the sun glares like a lidless, inhuman eye:
"Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves."
It's a very long descriptive passage - and very different from the much briefer - yet very pertinent - beginning to Hard Times. Dickens is enjoying revelling in his prose again :)
"with people lounging and lying wherever shade was, with but little hum of tongues or barking of dogs, with occasional jangling of discordant church bells and rattling of vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day.”
And this leads us to the claustrophobic little cell inside "a villainous prison” which contains two prisoners. Cleverly, Dickens does not name these two - and I was also struck by how remembering this novel was to be about the Marshalsea, the infamous debtor’s prison, Dickens actually started it in a different prison!
Dickens’s father was incarcerated in the Marshalsea in 1824, which is around the time this novel begins (since at the beginning, the narrator says it was “thirty years ago”. Dickens himself had been 12 at that time. It evidently made a deep impression on his mind to see his father incarcerated inside such place. In fact in The Pickwick Papers that when Dickens describes Mr. Pickwick being there, the text takes on a completely different mood.
One memorable point about one of the prisoners is that whenever he laughs, his moustache goes upwards and his nose moves down, which gives him a very cruel look. It also means that Dickens can cleverly give the reader clues as to when this sinister character appears in the novel - unbeknown to the other characters - and without spelling out his name. Not sure I spotted that the last time I read it.
One of the things I love about Dickens - and admire - is the way he doesn't always use an omniscient narrator to tell us the information, but lets it percolate through bit by bit in the course of the conversation. He's doing this when we meet the next group of people too - the travellers from the East who are in Marseilles in quarantine (from the plague) ie Arthur Clennam and the Meagles' family - a very entertaining group already!
I like this pearl of wisdom from Mr. Meagles:
"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind; I dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let out.”
Is this foreshadowing? Mr. Meagles seems kind and cheery enough - but does not adapt his speech at tall, seeming oblivious to whether anyone understands him In fact he's oblivious to quite a lot ... and why have the two named their child "Pet"? An odd relationship between the two children as well a child "adopted" to be a maid to another child. Is Tattycoram daughter or maid? She is described as a plaything and maid!
Miss Wade is already fascinating - uncompromising and unyielding Miss Wade. Why? Is she too in a prison of her own making?
And Rigaud the devilish character v. the counterbalancing character of John Baptist. He loves these contrasting pairings - is it to make it more memorable, since people needed to keep these characters in their minds for a lot longer than we do!
"The Marshalsea (1373–1842) was a notorious prison in Southwark, Surrey (now London), just south of the River Thames. It housed a variety of prisoners over the centuries, including men accused of crimes at sea and political figures charged with sedition, but it became known, in particular, for its incarceration of the poorest of London's debtors. Over half the population of England's prisons in the 18th century were in jail because of debt."Of course the irony was that the only way to survive there was by purchasing items to keep you fed and alive. And as for getting out - it was well nigh impossible as how could those incarcerated earn any money?
"By all accounts, living conditions in the common side were horrific. In 1639 prisoners complained that 23 women were being held in one room without space to lie down, leading to a revolt, with prisoners pulling down fences and attacking the guards with stones. Prisoners were regularly beaten with a "bull's pizzle" (a whip made from a bull's penis), or tortured with thumbscrews and a skullcap, a vice for the head that weighed 12 lb (5.4 kg).
What often finished them off was being forced to lie in the strong room, a windowless shed near the main sewer, next to cadavers awaiting burial and piles of night soil. Dickens described it as, "dreaded by even the most dauntless highwaymen and bearable only to toads and rats." One apparently diabetic army officer who died in the strong room – he had been ejected from the common side because inmates had complained about the smell of his urine – had his face eaten by rats within hours of his death, according to a witness."
What a lot of secrets there seem to be in "Family Affairs" - in the house which used to be Arthur Clennam's home, where: "The furniture, at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams—got itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not.
WOW! Who else could ever imagine colours in a room being aborbed into sunbeams or butterflies. Amazing writing. I love that description - AND the first bit about furniture "hiding". Nobody but Dickens could write that :)
But what wrong has been perpetuated? And how will all the characters fit into this historic wrong? What is the great secret we are now itching to discover?
Arthur tries to winkle it out of his hard-faced mother. He thinks that before he died, his father may have had some secret memory of wronging someone, which caused him trouble in his mind. All the talk of grasping at money and driving hard bargains ... but his mother seems by far the most powerful member at this. She isn't having any of it.
Money is at the root of this dysfunctional family, and will be a motif in this novel. The Marshalsea Prison is a monument to the lack of money.
And we meet the title character, Amy Dorrit :) When her mother dies, she is so small that all she can do is sit with her father, who is nicknamed "The Father of the Marshalsea" (first as a joke, and then as a mark of respect because he is after all so gentil) but by the time she is sixteen she is thinking for them all, and running the "household".
It's another sort of dysfunctional family, with a tiny "little mother" - even called this by another character - and three adult "children" (her father, brother "Tip", sister "Fanny" and Uncle). Yet it is Amy who is the tiny child-adult! Hmmm. Not sure how realistic I find Amy - though the rest of her family I can quite believe! They seemed to have a learned helplessness - very convenient! And what leeches Dickens can draw ... Mr. Dorrit, Mr. Micawber, and Harold Skimpole. A sort of counterweight to Mr. Dick, who was a truly simple-minded person.
In these chapters (6 and 7) Dickens is switching between times rather than sticking to chronological order. It makes it far more interesting.
So clever, making Affery's dream - and second dream - foreshadow several parts of the book. "Those two clever ones" always plotting. The house which creaks and moans. Someone who seems to be a shadow of someone else. It is all so dreamlike and gothic! Yet much vital information is imparted here, such as the servant's "hold" over Arthur's mother.
Plornish the plasterer - is he going to become centre stage at any point? And I'm mulling over another theme common to Dickens - the older man as protector of the younger woman. What does Arthur Clennam feel for Amy as the novels proceeds? At first he has an impulse of pity for (and interest in) Amy. Why? Dickens often chooses this viz. the difference in age between Dr. Strong and his wife, or Florence and Walter, or between Esther and Mr. Jarndyce. Here, of Amy (ch 9):
"The little creature seemed so young in his eyes, that there were moments when he found himself thinking of her, if not speaking to her, as if she were a child. Perhaps he seemed as old in her eyes as she seemed young in his.”
But clearly Amy looks old facially (even if Arthur does seem to think she looks "ethereal" - as in a later chapter (14) the woman who was berating Maggy for taking her child out so late drew back shocked when she realised it was the other way around.
Amy - I still find her hard to suss - from my 21st Century viewpoint perhaps. But I'm wondering if Dickens had got some flack from his readers in Bleak House. Esther was a similar virtuous, hardworking and apparently modest young woman - the Victorian ideal woman. But was she really? Esther always let us know, in her parts of the narrative, how good she was. Amy never mentions it. Perhaps Dickens was trying to satisfy his readers here, and presenting an ideal woman, rather than inventing a well-rounded, more believable character.
Thinking of docile, virtuous, young women - like Mary Hogarth and Ellen Ternan whom Dickens so admired in his own life. He certainly could create positive and spirited women, such as Edith Granger, Lady Dedlock and Miss Wade, without making caricatures of them. But in each case we get a strong sense that the author does not actually like or admire them.
I am struck by all the contrasts - not just with Amy and Maggy, who are like chalk and cheese in every way, but also Maggie's behaviour. Dickens says she took "pains to improve herself, and to be very attentive and very industrious; and by degrees ... got enough to support herself, and does support herself."
How ironic that Maggie, who is at a disadvantage because of her mental ability, is independent but Amy's father, brother and sister have perfected the art of doing nothing.
We tend to give Dickens's novels convenient labels, ie. the one criticising the workhouse (Oliver Twist), the one criticising schools (Nicholas Nickleby), the one criticising the legal system (Bleak House), the one criticising unions (Hard Times) - and this one criticising government bureaucracy in the form of the Circumlocution Office.
I'm not sure he ever wrote one specifically dealing with how society treated those with deformities or mental health issues; those we now term "differently abled". Yet many of his characters in thee novels fall into such a category - far more than in other classic Victorian novels, I would say.
I think chapter 10, "Containing the Whole Science of Government" is possibly the funniest thing I have ever read in Dickens - and that's saying something ...A brilliantly waspish satire, introducing the perfectly named "Circumlocution Office" in which we are left in no doubt that “How not to do it!” really means not doing anything rather than the impled “doing a thing the wrong way”. The piece eventually develops into action, where we meet some of the equally well-named "Barnacle" family who stick to this self-serving system of sinecures like glue - or like ... well, limpets ;)
There is one exception to the limpid family of limpets ... an engaging gentleman referred to by Dickens as a “dashing young Barnacle, [who] in a word, was likely to become a statesman, and to make a figure”.
How about this open, frank and helpful description?
“‘When the business is regularly before that Department, whatever it is,’ pursued this bright young Barnacle, ‘then you can watch it from time to time through that Department. When it comes regularly before this Department, then you must watch it from time to time through this Department. We shall have to refer it right and left; and when we refer it anywhere, then you'll have to look it up. When it comes back to us at any time, then you had better look us up. When it sticks anywhere, you'll have to try to give it a jog. When you write to another Department about it, and then to this Department about it, and don't hear anything satisfactory about it, why then you had better—keep on writing.’”.
The picturesquely named
Bleeding Heart Yard
does apparently exist - I must try to search it out next time I go into London."Bleeding Heart Yard is a cobbled courtyard off Greville Street in the Farringdon area of the City of London. The courtyard is probably named after a 16th-century inn sign dating back to the Reformation that was displayed on a pub called the Bleeding Heart in nearby Charles Street. The sign showed the heart of the Virgin Mary pierced by five swords.
Urban legend has it that the courtyard's name commemorates the murder of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, the second wife of Sir William Hatton, whose family formerly owned the area around Hatton Garden. It is said that her body was found here on 27 January 1626, "torn limb from limb, but with her heart still pumping blood."
So we can forgive Dickens for attributing various urban myths about it to his characters - whether a murder or a doomed love affair. The myths were there before this novel!
Flora Finching
Flora is the wonderful twittery, chattering, nonsense-babbling, almost ditzy (yet quite astute), good-hearted ex-amour of Arthur Clennam. I do love the way Dickens can make her speech run on so. For me, she will always conjure up Miriam Margolyes in the part, and narrating it in her show too. She simply becomes Flora!
In the story, Arthur feels he is well out of marrying her as she has become a peony instead of a lily (I don't quite understand this bit - I love peonies!) And Dickens has written her as a kind of spiteful "tribute" to an old flame.
Flora Finching is based on the real life Maria Beadnell, with whom Charles Dickens had fallen madly in love, in 1830, when he was 18. She like Flora, was pretty and flirtatious, and the daughter of a highly successful banker. (Casby, Flora's father, owns lots of properties.) After three years, her parents objected to the relationship, because Dickens's prospects did not look good as a struggling young court reporter and they sent Maria to Paris.
Dickens wrote to her, "I never have loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself." He was heartbroken over the break up. His portrayal of Dora Spenlow in David Copperfield was based on his memory of Maria.
However, things changed. Although Maria had married, and was now Mrs. Henry Winter, Dickens kept the flame alive, in retrospect telling his friend John Forster that his love for Maria,
"excluded every other idea from my mind for four years... I have positively stood amazed at myself ever since! The maddest romances that ever got into any boy's head and stayed there".
Of course by now he had begun to make quite a name as a writer, and Maria was flattered when they began to exchange letters in 1855. Dickens wrote:
"Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman - you - whom it is nothing to say I would have died for.... that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you... I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy."
Maria tried to warn him, describing herself as being “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” But Dickens's own marriage was in trouble, and he did not want to believe her description. They agreed to a secret meeting without their spouses, whereupon Dickens was extremely disappointed to find her, as she had said, in her forties, fat, and dull.
Dickens then only met Maria in company, and rebuffed her flirtatious attempts. His letters to her underwent a sea change and became short and formal. Maria tried to renew the relationship, but he then broke it off for good.
The more I read of Little Dorrit, the more it seems a natural successor to Bleak House, rather than the very different quickie book Hard Times. I do know he was trying to make some money quickly, with Hard Times, and also increase his sales. His public had been a little jaded with the very effort of reading the lengthy complicated Bleak House (not having the luxury of reading it quickly, as we do, but having to sustain it for over a year!) And Hard Times does have all the hallmarks of Dickens - except that the descriptive passages where he could usually indulge his flights of fancy, are necessarily rather brief.
But even taking all that on board, business and industry in Hard Times was described with a very vitriolic pen. Plus oddly, after showing us time and time again how the workers were unfailt treated, the most sympathetic character, the worker Stephen Blackpool, ended up by promoucing that it was not for the workers to unite and change things but for the factory owners and the government to do something about working conditions. It's almost as if Dickens chickened out of making the workers have any voice at all.
In Bleak House we had a very favourable portrayal of the character of Rouncewell, and even earlier, in Dombey and Son, Dickens had represented the two faces of England at this time fairly; the old ways and the new, as the Industrial Revolution took hold. Dickens pointed up advantages - and disadvantages - in both. He was not so polarised in his views.
However, here in Little Dorrit we have a very sympathetic and fully rounded character, that of Daniel Doyce, the inventor, who seems eminently more intelligent and kind than Mr Meagles.
Perhaps it is simply a matter of space after all. Dickens can provide us with caring and liberal capitalists, if he has room and does not have to use them entirely as easy fodder for his sarcastic wit.
"and his moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache" ...What a master Dickens is, to keep this little mannerism in and mention it each time. He teases us mercilessly, being very mysterious about which character he's talking about - or possibly even introducing a new one - and then Boom! - we get that little phrase and all our suspicions are confirmed :D Masterly - ...and something no dramatisation could ever capture! What a joy it is to sit and actually read this :)
And yet the new characters still keep coming! That "grand Refrigerator" Stiltstalking :D Blandois is probably not a new character as such, since the swaggering stranger's facial expressions show that when he laughed, "his moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache". So this mysterious character is the Frenchman Rigaud, alias Blandois, and up to no good. Why is he interested in Mrs. Clennam, her house, her business - or her son Authur.
Dickens loves to tease us ... while we're coming to the conclusion that Blandois and Rigaud are one and the same, we get the extraordinary suggestion of an extra double character (or maybe a doppelganger?) Blandois seems to know Flintwinch because at the sight of him he oddly bursts out with, “Death of my soul! … How did you get here?” (Flintwinch for his part does not seem ever to have set eyes on Blandois.)
Ah Dickens seems very preoccupied with malicious smiles at the moment. Rigaud's smile is always described, as a way of telling us who has entered the scene, and now Miss Wade's parting shot to Arthur Clennam is accompanied by "a smile that is only seen on cruel faces: a very faint smile, lifting the nostril, scarcely touching the lips, and not breaking away gradually, but instantly dismissed when done with". Cruel characters, both of them.It has been suggested that Miss Wade and Harriet (Tattycoram) might have been lovers, but I can't find much evidence for this in the text. Unless Dickens was so careful not to broach the subject of lesbianism (Queen Victoria did love his novels, of course) that he didn't make it at all easy to pick up.
And there's Old Nandy, who enables The Father of the Marshalsea to feel even more insufferably magnanimous than usual. We get an idea of Old Nandy mostly through everyone else's various views of him - from his admiring daughter Mrs. Plornish to Fanny Dorrit, who detests what he represents.
I'm struck by all the different types of prisons characters make for themselves in Little Dorrit. There are the literal ones of the Bastille and the Marshalsea, but also Mrs. Clenhams' self-imposed coldness of heart, and exile from the world, Mrs. Merdle's prison of class-consciousness, always talking of Society (and her pointed parrot-in-a-cage accompaniment), Mrs. Gowan's prison of hypocrisy, Harriet (Tattycoram)'s prison of self-wilfulness and so on.
Dickens's mentor, friend and biographer John Forster wrote of Little Dorrit, "The book took its origin from the notion he had of a leading man for a story who should bring about all the mischief in it, lay it all on Providence, and say at every fresh calamity, "Well it's a mercy, however, nobody was to blame you know!" The title first chosen, out of many suggested, was Nobody's Fault; and four numbers had been written, of which the first was on the eve of appearance, before this was changed. When about to fall to work he excused himself from an engagement he should have kept because "the story is breaking out all round me, and I am going off down the railroad to humour it." The humouring was a little difficult, however; and such indications of a droop in his invention as presented themselves in portions of Bleak House, were noticeable again.
'As to the story I am in the second number, and last night and this morning had half a mind to begin again, and work in what I have done, afterwards.'
It had occurred to him, that, by making the fellow-travellers at once known to each other, as the opening of the story stands, he had missed an effect. 'It struck me that it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way, as fellow-travellers, and being in the same place, ignorant of one another, as happens in life; and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection a part of the interest.'
- Life of Charles Dickens
At the beginning of Part 2 - chapter 1 echoes the second chapter of Part 1 in its title, "Fellow Travellers". Great description of ghosts - and remains - of earlier travellers, introduces the "living travellers ... an elderly lady, two grey-haired gentlemen, two young ladies and their brother" plus all their necessary entourage.We have various references such as "Chief of the important tribe", "the lofty gentleman", "the grey-haired gentleman who was the Chief of the important party", "the head of the large retinue"(whom we have immediately recognised by his manner-ha-of speech-hum- ) "the young gentleman", and "the taller of the two ladies". There's also someone in another party who pulls at his black moustache - who could that be?! An "insinuating traveller". This party also contains a couple "still partly on a marriage, and partly on an artistic tour", "a man of family", "an artist gentleman traveller" (more broad hints here.)
I also love this irony, "the space was so-ha-hum-so very constricted. More than that, it was always the same, always the same." And of course the host of the hotel rather rubs it in by repeating at length that Monsieur could not understand, not being used to confinement.
The "younger of the two ladies" so impressed by the beauty of the young wife ... "I like to look at her ... I like to see what has affected him so much".
And we find we know who she is, whom she is gazing at - and even which man is in her thoughts. What skilled control of writing!
I thought it was very effective, the way Dickens refers to each character by a sort of tag-name, and it is only right at the end that we have it confirmed which each of them is (although we are pretty sure in our own minds). We read that Blandois uses the opportunity of being left by himself to look up the travellers’ names in the guest book - and to add his own name,
ending with a long lean flourish, not unlike a lasso thrown at all the rest of the names".
This image of a lasso is fabulous - all the major characters seem to have been ensnared in one way or another by Blandois.
What a joy it is to read an entertainingly written account of English persons taking the Grand Tour, rather than the interminably boring one in The Mysteries of Udolpho. It is Dickens who in this way imbues it all with mysteries!
I'm loving Mrs General too - a perfect name for someone who deliberately holds no opinions! And she was the only person to be assigned a name in chapter 1! :D"Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people's opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs General's way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways of forming a mind—to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way, and, beyond all comparison, the properest."
Thinking about which novels Charles Dickens split between here and abroad, apart from this one ... Well there is the next one, A Tale of Two Cities which is actually set abroad (from the author's and my point of view) in France, and also Martin Chuzzlewit, which is partly set in the USA. Perhaps both Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorrit benefit a little from their two - really three - part structure - home, away, home. It gives a feeling of spaciousness to go with the claustrophobic nature of other parts of Charles Dickens' writings.
The difference between England and Dickens's scenes abroad; opening the action out, has another dimension too. Venice is a decaying city and perhaps this crumbling edifice is reflected by the characters in it: Gowan, Blandois, Amy Dorrit being attacked from every side, suffering Mrs. General's "varnishing", her sister's coquettish and patronising attitude, and her father's pompous personality, so quick to take offence. All show, all crumbling.
Everything is surface and gloss - "varnish" with Mrs. General:"Papa is a preferable mode of address,' observed Mrs General. 'Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to yourself in company—on entering a room, for instance—Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.'
There are so many dysfunctional relationships in this novel - as so often with Dickens. Fanny Dorrit's treatment of Edward Sparkler is one such, with Fanny veering deliberately from one extreme to the other. But it's not just parents and children, there is a broad range of relationships which do not work in Little Dorrit. Parents and children sometimes have unhealthy relationships, like Mr. Dorrit and Amy, and also Mrs. Clennam and Arthur, since the mother imprisons her feelings to him. Mr. Gowan's treatment and feelings towards Minnie - "Pet" - are also unhealthily indulgent and rather smothering, and the mystery of Harriet - "Tattycoram" - is another dysfunctional, as yet unexplained, relationship.
Some seem to be made deliberately extreme, so that later on we are even more aware of the contrast. Things do not bode well for Minnie - "Pet" - always previously petted - now married to such a callous man (view spoiler) who thinks nothing of kicking his dog so viciously :(
As I read it I'm conscious very much as I was before that Little Dorrit is a novel in two parts. Odd, because Bleak House was also a novel in two parts, but they were interwoven - or at least alternated with the two points of view.I'm also hopeful for A Tale of Two Cities, bearing in mind this one and the superb Barnaby Rudge (as his only other historical novel). I had remembered the writing in A Tale of Two Cities as being rather dull, and wondered if this was to do with the alien turf so to speak, but perhaps I'll feel differently this time round :)
I now think Martin Chuzzlewit is one of his best! Some of the middle ones lack so much humour - I reckon he was overly concerned to have a literary status.
from book 2 ch 13"As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr Merdle. Nobody, as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the greatest that had appeared."
Dickens is building him up so much - I'm waiting for everything to come crashing down!
I'm finding Fanny's character very hard to believe,
"I would talk of her as an old woman. I would pretend to know—if I didn't, but I should from her son—all about her age. And she should hear me say, Amy: affectionately, quite dutifully and affectionately: how well she looked, considering her time of life. I could make her seem older at once, by being myself so much younger. I may not be as handsome as she is; I am not a fair judge of that question, I suppose; but I know I am handsome enough to be a thorn in her side. And I would be!'
but I guess she might not have been so consumed by spite had she not been brought up in the Marshalsea for most of her life. Is she really any less likely a character than Amy I wonder...
I've begun to consider how many of these characters are creating their own dream worlds. Mr Dorrit is the most obvious one, with his airs and fancies as "Father of the Marshalsea", then there's poor Maggy with her "hospitals", the various Barnacles' view of the world as all revolving around the Circumlocution office, Affrey Flintwinch's delusions and dreams (though I feel the mysterious creaking sounds she hears forbade something else) and now the Plornish family painting the exterior of a thatched cottage in their parlour. All attempting to get away from their various realities.
Merdle ... Charles Dickens's names are always a joy, and often slyly appropriate in a rude way like this one!Mr. Merdle:
Mr. Merdle is the first character we've had for a while who was based on an actual person. Dickens was doing this all the time in his earlier novels! This time he based Mr. Merdle on an Irish financier and politician called John Sadleir . There's a book about him called (view spoiler)
John Sadleir was one of the leading figures in the Independent Irish Party, which held the balance of power in the House of Commons when it formed in 1852. He then held minor office in the coalition government for 2 years, but resigned his ministerial position when (view spoiler)
This is so similar to Dickens's account of Mr. Merdle that I felt I had to put it under spoilers!
It's interesting that I didn't feel Dickens signalled Mr. Merdle's true character at all - except by building up the public's opinion of the man to such an extent that we suspected something might come tumbling down. Comparing this with the outright villainy - or at least selfishness - through their greed, we see in characters such as Uriah Heep, Daniel Quilp, Seth Pecksniff, Josiah Bounderby and Paul Dombey Snr., Dickens seems quite subtle here.
Thinking about the "Circumlocution Office", and I'd always assume that it is a general criticism of red tape in government circles in particular. A place where all the employees learn "how not to do it" as Dickens keeps reiterating at great length, (and great self-indulgence, to be candid) where all innovation, creativity, individualism and enterprise are efficiently stifled and quashed. Little Dorrit, is set in about 1826, but it was actually written a few years after the great Crystal Palace Exhibition "of the Works of Industry of All Nations" in 1851, designed to show off England's grand industrial and social advances. So did Dickens consider that the British political system was very stifling leading up to the Great Exhibition? Or something else? Perhaps it didn't influence his thoughts in that way.
Little Dorrit sometimes has seemed to lack a focus ... but it is a wonderful novel. I love his descriptions and the way he personifies everything - even old houses or chimneypots. And that biting satire! His sarcasm has me in fits sometimes! Wicked Dickens :D
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A Tale of Two Cities was initially published weekly, in 31 installments in Dickens's new literary periodical "All the Year Round" from 30th April 1859. Then from the next month, April 1859 until November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. This was unusual, as most of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments.It is his only historical novel apart from Barnaby Rudge, and is divided into three books:
"Recalled to Life" (which also serves as a sort of coded message)
"The Golden Thread"
"The Track of a Storm"
The beginning is one of the famous beginnings of a book, and is a series of paradoxes:“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
The rest of this chapter is very droll and tongue in cheek, and the story proper starts with chapter 2, plunging us into events on a dark and stormy night, as the Dover Mail races through the countryside. The weather creates a great atmosphere of gloom and foreboding, and the passengers are so jittery and suspicious of one another. It reminds me very much of Barnaby Rudge at this point, which is set around here! We don't have any highwaymen any more, but that's what is in everyone's mind in both novels whenever they travel. We don't learn any names, which is trademark Dickens, cranking up the tension and mystery. Great stuff :)
We begin to learn more of the story with ch 3 - Dickens has set up the atmosphere nicely, and we discover Mr Lorry (which my edition infuriatingly keeps printing as "Larry!" Grrr!!!) is mulling over various memories. It ends tantalisingly:Eighteen years!"said the passenger, looking at the sun." Gracious Creator of Day! To be buried alive for eighteen years"
And by now, what with all the darkness of both people and setting - the cold and the mud - the mistrust, gloom, suspicion and danger, Dickens has once and for all hooked his audience:)
Ch 4 and the pensive passenger has an important secret to divulge to Miss Manette.
Now, knowing the story very well, I can't remember ever not knowing to what he refers, but I still have a feeling that the readers guess the "secret" well before Miss Manette appears to, which gives the audience a nice feeling of being in the know".
We get a lot of info via flashback here, and it's done very well, with an element of gentle humour through old "Mr Jarvis Lorry" (Is he old, I wonder? He's certainly staid.)
The next chapter, ch 5, introduces the Defarges, the bull-necked strapping wine-shop keeper and his stolidly knitting, impassive wife. We're suspicious of both of them from the start - or are we? Again, I wish this was my first time of reading! But ... yes there are many sidelong glances and why is everyone called "Jacques"? Definitely a shifty pair.
The next part is chapter 6, set in the prison with a prisoner who appears to have forgotten everything except his trade, is gripping and tugs at our heart-strings. The reunion between (view spoiler) was very moving, if a tad melodramatic - I can always envisage these moments on a stage - as I'm sure Dickens himself did. Ah well I can forgive Dickens his "staginess" on such momentous occasions ;) And now we know to what the "golden thread" refers - unless it is also to have another meaning. We still have all the second book to come.
I wonder if any later illustrator did an illustration of the broken cask of wine of chapter 5. It begs out for it with all those thirsty tongues!I am reading on the page - the edition I uploaded to the database and is now on my status page. No illustrations :( I need to google them!
I do love the metaphor "on his way to dig someone out of a grave".
So many sort of taglines "Recalled to Life", "One Hundred and Five, North Tower"
The illustrations by Phiz were just in the monthly editions, and there were a pair per month - ie both etched on one plate. "To maintain as wide a readership as possible, Dickens issued the weekly numbers of All the Year Round without illustration, the price of that small pulp magazine being only 2d. per issue" ...
One naturally wonders what Dickens felt had gone so wrong with the illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities that he determined to severe a collaborative relationship which had lasted twenty-three years, and which had resulted (by Albert Johannsen's calculation) in "724 drawings ... of which 567 were etched [i. e., "steels"] and 157 engraved on wood".
from "The Victorian Web"
This wasn't very much work for Hablot Knight Browne, and in addition Dickens was beginning to feel his style was old-fashioned (!) so after this one he gave him the chop. A Tale of Two Cities was the last of Dickens's books to be illustrated by Phiz. Interestingly, in 1867 he suffered a stroke which reduced his artistic output considerably, although he did not die until long after Dickens, on 12th July 1882.
Is this illustration a bit mawkish, I wonder?
Chapter 6 "The shoemaker"
Apparently Dickens also thought the "golden age" of illustrated novels was coming to an end. He was so single-mindedly ambitious though, callously casting people aside when they were no longer of any use to him :( I do wonder how many illustrators would have put up with Dickens's specific demands and instructions for each illustration.
These are some I do like :This by John McLenan for the atmosphere:
And this by Harry Furniss for the humour!
A very good depiction of the fiery Miss Pross there, I think :)
On to the second book, and I'm wondering why it's called "The Golden Thread". Dr Manette carefully kept the few precious golden hairs for 18 years - at first I thought they must be his daughter Lucie's and then that they must be his wife's hair, because it was too long ago. But to name more than a third after them seems very odd. So I'm thinking now that they must be a metaphor for something.Lucie "was the golden thread that united [her father] to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery"
So Lucie herself is "the golden thread" and must be going to be a central focus in this novel.
The Court ScenesThe style of writing in the court scenes is very unusual. Dire punishments and death in the most gruesome ways are described but in almost a remote fashion. Perhaps this comes about because Dickens is keen to shroud things in mystery - there's a lot of subterfuge. Sometimes it's not clear even to the characters themselves I think, on what grounds the charges have been made - yet the punishment for treason is death. And the crowds look forward to this - it is disappointing if anyone is acquitted. The chapter is even called "A Disappointment". Dickens is good at making clear his contempt for sensationalism and the attitude of the general public in the court waiting avidly for Darnay's execution.
Is Charles Darnay a spy or not? He seems to have (view spoiler)
I love the gruesome details - the herbs and vinegar spread around because of the stench. And:
"the crowd came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion."
Remembering Dickens's early days as a reporter, I guess the description of the proceedings in the coutroom must be fairly accurate, even though he is describing an earlier time.
We are certainly getting through the plot quite fast. It's very clever how Dickens manages to tell us enough to make it clear what's happening and also incur our curiosity about who someone is and what part they are going to play. We seem to have two more doppelgängers. He does love those :)
I'm also feeling that we have quite a good balance of atmospheric description in this novel, which was rather lacking in Hard Times. He does it so well that you miss it when it's not there!
Tellson's BankI like the descriptions of this very much. It's 5 years later and Mr. Lorry is still a clerk at Tellson's Bank, a place that was "very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious".
This apparently was something to be proud of, because if it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable!
"Tellson's was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street"
And especially this part:
"Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment."
I'd remembered A Tale of Two Cities as having a good story (hence its popularity) but a rather dour writing style with little humour. Passages like this one are making me rethink that!
Just finished Chapter 6 - and wow the atmosphere is cranking up. Is it really believable that after the story Charles Darnay recounts, (where workmen in a gaol find the letters DIG, and upon doing so find the ashes of paper some "unknown prisoner" had written and hidden to keep it secret from the gaoler) Dr Manette would really have given such a violent reaction because he hears large drops of rain falling? I think not!But I love the way the weather echoes the drama in the story. We started with a storm, and we now have a storm threatened, then developing, and lightning.
And the echoes in the room - of feet - but also of the past?
Fabulous atmosphere and allusions. And those portentous end sentences.
So we've had at least two occasions where Dr Manette seems to have been overwhelmed by past memories, which may or may not prove significant. Back in the courtroom he had a peculiarly violent reaction when he first saw Darnay:
"His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at Darnay: an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust, not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression on him his thoughts had wandered away."
I do not yet understand this, since Darnay's story was about the Tower of London, and Dr Manette was imprisoned in the Bastille, but I think we're being led to think it significant.
There are a lot of teasing hints in this novel, I'm finding.The delighful Cruncher with his rusty nails. What on earth is he moonlighting at?
I'm forming a theory as to why it's a more "sober" novel - to do with what else was going on in his life at the time, but need to explore a bit more.
The next few chapters are so densely written I'm finding parts a bit ... indigestible. The historic references are a bit obscure. Dickens is his sardonic self, and the episodes involving the Marquis and the people near the fountain, and then with CD (are the initials deliberately the same as the author's?) are enjoyable - I can see echoes of Rigaud in the Marquis. Perhaps it's my mood, but I feel Dickens's penchant for obfuscation is tying me in knots today!
Charles Dickens reversed his own initals for character, e.g. David Copperfield, and now he has used them for Charles Darnay.Thinking a little about doppelgängers,too, Dickens seemed to include them more and more as he wrote more and more novels and short stories. They've never been so centre stage so far as here. This seems to be the master culmination of the idea. Even in the previous one, Little Dorrit (view spoiler) doesn't really have a very big part. Often they're in more to add to the spooky atmosphere than anything, I think.
But this seems to be the one he was working up to. He'd never used doppelgängers as (view spoiler) before.
Reading the novels in order, there are other times where I can see he was having a practice run up to a famous characer. There are several early incarnations of Miss Havisham (coming up in Great Expectations) already in the previous ten, but only ever as secondary characters - or very minor ones. He'd never made them quite so critical to the plot (view spoiler). Oh Dickens!!
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"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!
It's very reminiscent of the early Charles Dickens - we have the voiced indignation of Oliver Twist, for instance, but written with the maturity and skill of the later writer.