Soothingly mature

Okay. I think I get it now.

A lot of the Dickens I've read in the last year is of the mawkish, syrup-sweet variety that's basically impossible to read with a straight face. It's been a long time since I've read Hard Times and a longer time since I've read A Tale of Two Cities so I haven't seen the good side of Dickens in a while. But David Copperfield fixed that.

This is a wonderful coming-of-age story, and it's full of love and loss and realistic pain that reaches out and touches the reader. It has none of the over-the-top picturesqueness of The Old Curiosity Shop and isn't quite as focused on plucky, stupid, stolid women as Bleak House or Little Dorrit. David Copperfield is full of characters who ring true, who make mistakes that are honest and avoidable and frustrating instead of, say blindly perusing a law suit for decades or protecting a grandfather who relentlessly gambles away his savings. The characters in this story made me groan in sympathy at their misfortunes and mistakes instead of making me bang my head on my desk out of frustration with their plain masochism and inability to learn from experience.

What a relief!

And that's what I get, that's what I needed reminding of. Dickens isn't just about grimy descriptions of London or hilarious character names or relentless mockery of the Victorian educational system (though, yes, that gets its share of poking here too) - Dickens also wrote about people who were vulnerable and weak and depended on the kindness of others and were sometimes hurt by that. Dickens cared deeply about children and the future and the damaged world he was living in and Dickens wanted to make that world a better place. And he did - writing about what he wrote about, even if it included the ridiculous Little Nell and a whole bevy of insipid pedestal-standing straw-women, taught his readers to keep an eye out for the filth they had been blind to and to try to be kind where they could.

And the message still stands - clearer in David Copperfield than in any of his other books that I've read - that it's up to those who have the liberty to be kind, generous, and patient to be kind, generous, and patient with everyone they can.


Cheers,
     - Alli

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Modern Library Classics. New York: New York.
     2000. (1849-50).

Comfort and joy in the off-season

Look, I can't tell you why I decided to read A Christmas Carol for the first time in the middle of July, but that's what happened. Life is weird. And yeah, the book loses something when you're sweating through a monsoonal flow and being a little bit jealous of people who are experiencing cold weather, but other than that it's pretty good.

I mean, yeah, it has all the flaws that you'd expect out of Dickens - there are no interesting female characters who aren't evil, it's sappy as all get-out and I couldn't even manage a tiny tear for Tiny Tim (though Bob Cratchit's mourning for Tiny Tim is moving, even to a cynic like me). We get it, Chuck, poverty sucks balls and the rich are slowly marching toward hell. But I can only bitch "we get it and I'm tired of this message" because Dickens was hugely instrumental in communicating messages about child abuse and labor laws and debtor's prisons. So I guess I'm sometimes a bit sick of Dickens because we owe Dickens for giving a voice to some of the major changes that our society has seen. It's old news to me because Dickens was the one making the news.

But, for all that, it's not as monolithic as a lot of Dickens is. The book is only about 70 pages and can easily be read in an hour or two. Reading it aloud might take a bit more time but also might be a fun Christmas activity for Christmas-celebrating folks. As for me, I'm a bit of a Grinch. Hell, maybe I was able to enjoy this book more for not being caught up in the endless jangling of Christmas carols and the crowds of people spending too much money on trinkets and the stress of dealing with crowds of people and unpleasant gatherings. I like the message of generosity and kindness and redemption, I'm just not so wrapped up in the Christmassy aspect of the thing. Though if you are, that's cool too. You'll probably like the book. And it's relatively inoffensive regardless.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Simon & Schuster. New York: New York. 2007. (1843).

Wilde was right

I don't seem to have read many of the Dickens books that most Dickens fans have read. I've never read Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, or David Copperfield, but I have read Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, and now I have also read The Old Curiosity Shop. It's a bit simpering, to say the least, but then so are a lot of Dickens' novels.

There's a great Hark, A Vagrant! comic that makes the joke that Dickens must have had a personal fetish for silent, inoffensive women. The main support for this joke (which I've sort of adopted as a pet literary theory whenever I'm reading through Dickens' industrial London) is essentially every single woman the man ever wrote. Dear, sweet, dead Nell is no exception. She's so totally un-self-interested that it kills her and the grandfather she's so unselfishly trying to protect. And I can only think of one woman in the story who IS self-interested - Sally Brass is the exception and she's "a fine fellow" to all the villains of the story when Dickens isn't busy sarcastically calling her a fair flower.

So, like pretty much every one of Dickens' stories other than Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, there's not much going on with the ladies who are supposed to make up the tear-jerking subject matter in this book. What's going on with the men is surprisingly hilarious at times, but largely tedious. I really don't understand the Quilp dynamic with ANY character in the story because, holy shit, he's so terrible, he's such a caricature of a terrible, monstrous asshole, that he's wholly unbelievable and pops off the page like a grotesque little jack-in-the-box. He's tremendously amusing to read but makes absolutely no sense as a protagonist, a plotter, or anything other than a literal demon. Maybe that's what Dickens wanted to do with the character? There are enough suggestions about it, but I don't think Quilp is supposed to literally be the devil. He's just drawn that way.

And, in case there was any doubt, The Old Curiosity Shop has affirmed for me the genius of Oscar Wilde. It may seem odd for a Dickens novel from 1841 to cement the brilliance of a playwright active forty years later, but Wilde made the most accurate statement I've seen in my copy of the book (printed cheekily by Penguin on the back cover): "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears of laughter." There were several moments that made me laugh inappropriately (and the discovery of Grandfather's gambling made me throw my book at the floor) but little Nell's little death takes the cake. It's just so pathetic, and so desperate to be moving, that you can't help rolling your eyes and snorting at the page.

HOWEVER - if you ever need an illustration of The Gambler's Fallacy look no further than The Old Curiosity Shop. It's a textbook illustration of one of the fascinating ways that human brains are broken that also happens to nicely show that Nell SHOULD have been taken from her delusional, thieving, gambling grandfather.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Penguin Books. Middlesex: England. 1974. (1841)