Book Review: Charles Dickens 9 - "David Copperfield"



Photo of Dickens (38 yrs.) from 1850 daguerrotype

I had to really push myself to get through Dickens’s previous novel, Dombey and Son – which I found rather uninteresting as a story – so it came as a real relief to be reading David Copperfield again. I think this is the third or fourth time that I’ve read it, and it always delights. It's impossible to resist story-telling that is this vigorous and poetic. I raced through its 880 pages in just over a week.

After completing the monthly serialisation of Dombey and Son in April 1848, Charles Dickens took a break of about six months before contemplating a new novel in the last few months of that same year. As always, events in his own life influenced the type of novel he would write and the key theme – or “leading idea” – that would guide the enterprise. William Hall, the man who had published Dickens’s first sketch fourteen years earlier had died in March; Dickens attended the funeral in Highgate Cemetry and spent a good deal of time thinking about the man and the effect that he’d had on his life.  And then his sister Fanny, the oldest of his parents’ eight children, died of tuberculosis on September 2. Her crippled son Henry died a few months later. During the writing of Dombey and Son, Dickens had been much moved by the long account of the decline and death of the young Paul Dombey – especially as he had narrated that section from the lad’s point-of-view. Death and dying must have been on his mind and prompting him to reflect on the course his life had taken. And entering, as writer, into the consciousness of a child may have released further painful memories of his own childhood.

Some time after Fanny’s death, Dickens wrote an extended fragment of autobiography (about 7,000 words), which he then sent to John Forster – his friend, confidant and agent. For the very first time he shared with somebody else the deep humiliation he had experienced as a boy of twelve, when his father had been incarcerated in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison in 1824, and he had been sent to work at the Warren’s Blacking Warehouse at the Hungerford Steps. The whole experience would be included in the upcoming novel. But even though Dickens had finally unburdened his mind, so to speak, about this incident – which had been the most formative event of his life – the public would not be aware that some of the key events described in David Copperfield were autobiographical until Forster revealed it in his biography, published three years after Dickens’s death.


Meanwhile, Dickens was busy writing a new Christmas Book. He hadn’t managed one the previous year, and this one proved to be his last. The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain was about lost time. It is concerned with the power of memory – how memory has the ability to heal psychic wounds. And Dickens even suggests that it is through memories of our own suffering that we are able to empathise with the pain of others.


Dickens (37 yrs.) - daguerrotype by John Mayall

At some point during Dickens’s long consideration of his new novel, John Forster suggested that he use a first-person narrator. Dickens had never used that technique before. He took the recommendation seriously. It’s often said that he was influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847. Undoubtedly he was, but the long section in Dombey and Son narrated from a young lad’s point-of-view would have already demonstrated to him the advantages of the technique, even before Forster made his suggestion.

As Dickens went through his typically tortuous gestation for this new book, other events in his life were being drawn on for the content of the novel. In early January of 1849, Dickens travelled with a couple of friends to Norwich, in order to visit the site of a notorious murder that had been much in the news. On the afternoon of their arrival, they made a side-trip to Yarmouth, and visited the beach, looked out over the North Sea surf, and wandered around the nearby marshes. Dickens said it reminded him of the Medway he had known as a child in Kent. Yarmouth would become the atmospheric home of the Peggotty family in the new book. And on a long walk back to Yarmouth from Lowestoft he passed a signpost pointing to the village of Blundeston. He remembered the name and used it as the location for the young Copperfield’s early life – changed slightly to Blunderstone. On January 15, Catherine Dickens gave birth to another son, their eighth child. Charles named the boy Henry Fielding, after the eighteenth-century author of Tom Jones, whose spirit and style – Forster later recalled – Dickens hoped to emulate in his new work. Finally, Dickens was also busy, at this time, writing a series of articles for the Examiner about the sufferings of abused children. Specifically, he criticised the practice of “baby-farming” – the shipping out of young children from workhouses and orphanages into the care of freelance guardians. They often became victims of abuse that was even worse than they had received in their former institutions. It was a situation that Dickens had described twelve years earlier in Oliver Twist, when the young Oliver is “raised” (neglected) for an extended period by Mrs. Mann.

So, Dickens was toying with all this material – struggling to find a “leading idea”. He constantly took long walks during the day and night through the streets of London pondering his book. He described the process as a “violent restlessness … vague ideas of going I don’t know where …”. Eventually he committed himself to an autobiographical novel written in the first person. As he set to work writing at the end of February, 1849, an announcement was made of the imminent arrival of the novel's first instalment. But the writing did not come easily. He worked at it steadily throughout March. His main problem seemed to be finding the right tone. The content was so personal - often quite painful for him to remember - but he still managed to sustain a convincing and sympathetic tone. He took the utmost care on this book and planned it carefully. There would be no theatricals and foreign-travel during the first year of its careful composition.



Charles Dickens's desk and writing chair



In the book Dickens – his brilliant, comprehensive, and definitive biography of the writer – Peter Ackroyd provides a detailed account of Charles Dickens’s methodical approach to writing. He would rise at seven o’clock; eat breakfast at eight; and be in his study at nine. He would remain at his desk for five hours – until two in the afternoon. Then he would walk until five o’clock around London, or into the nearby countryside. Dinner came at six, often lasting a couple of hours. And then it would be an evening spent with family and friends, before retiring punctually at midnight. Dickens's desk was set in front of a window, so that he could gaze out at the world, but not really focusing on much - his mind being lost in the fictional world of his imagination. He demanded quiet; in his house in Devonshire Terrace, he had a second door added to the entrance into his study, in order to keep out any noise.



Dickens (46 yrs.) photographed by George Watkins in 1858

He wrote with a goose-quill pen, dipping it into blue ink, on blue-grey pieces of paper measuring 8 ¾ inches by 7 ¼ inches. On an ordinary day he would complete about 2,000 words (2 – 2 ½ slips of paper). But when he was all fired up, he might churn out almost 4,000 words in one sitting.  Sometimes, of course, nothing at all would come. But he would not break from his routine; he would remain in his study doodling, dreaming, planning – keeping religiously to his daily five-hour session.

He needed momentum; he didn’t like to write “cold”. He preferred to wait for inspiration – when his mind would be seized by an image, or an idea. He would then write quickly, almost instinctively – adding or amending things as he went along. He used what he called an “incessant process of rejection” – cutting stuff out after weighing carefully its tone and effect. If he accidentally exceeded the limit of a month’s instalment, he would usually cut passages of improvised humour or external description. And when the proofs came back from the publisher for his perusal, he worked very quickly on his corrections.



Cover of monthly issue of David Copperfield

David Copperfield was Dickens’s eighth novel. It was published by Bradbury and Evans – in the usual fashion – as a series of monthly instalments from May 1849 to November 1850. The illustrations, again, were done by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”). The full title of the novel, as shown on the cover wrapper (green, as usual), was very unwieldy: The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account). Is it any wonder, then, that it came to be called simply David Copperfield? The novel was first released in book-form in 1850, shortly after the publication of the final monthly issue (in the familiar two parts).

Surprisingly – given the quality of the writing and its cavalcade of fascinating characters – the monthly issues did not sell as well as previous novels. Sales were down significantly from Dombey and Son. David Copperfield was selling, on average, 20,000 copies. Compare that to the 35,000 copies of its predecessor. When he realised the effect the drop in sales would have on his income, Dickens decided to take on other work to provide a more stable source of funds. He had long wanted to establish a weekly magazine - a literary and journalistic compendium stamped with his personal touch. The political manifesto for his magazine, he said, was “the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social conditions.” He would pay particular attention to education, housing and sanitation. What he proposed to his publishers, Bradbury and Evans, was that he edit the weekly, and be given full editorial control. Regardless, he needed significant help, and he got it from the experienced journalist and writer W.H. Wills, whom Dickens hired as sub-editor. He was an excellent choice: a meticulous editor, careful with detail, and frugal in running an enterprise. Dickens picked Household Words as the title of his new magazine; it’s a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V – from the famous feast-of-Crispian speech:

Then shall our names, familiar in his mouth as household words,

be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red. (IV, iii, 54-55)

He set up an office at 16 Wellington Street, just off The Strand.

Charles Dickens signed a contract with Bradbury and Evans that would give him 50% of all the profits from Household Words. In the first two years he earned about £2,000 annually from sales. He also got paid separately for each of his own contributions. He was now set financially. He continued editing the magazine for another twenty years – the rest of his life. And he no longer needed to worry about his fiction paying for the bulk of his ever-growing expenses.



Dickens's magazine Household Words

Dickens was responsible for almost a third of the writing in the first issue of Household Words. He would write a lot less in subsequent issues, but the pattern he set would be maintained: several articles about topical issues, some history, a story, a bit of travel writing, and  a poem. Dickens edited it to be entertainment and instruction. He wanted it to be readable. It wasn’t pitched primarily at a literary audience. He wanted to make it popular and reach the middle class. The first issue came out at the end of March in 1850. It cost twopence. It came out every week, but was also released in a monthly format and sold as a bound volume. Circulation settled in at about 39,000 copies per issue.

So, for nine months – from March to November of 1850 – Charles  Dickens was writing half of David Copperfield, in monthly instalments, and editing a weekly magazine. When he felt inundated with work and obligations, he would find a way to get out of the city, so that he could write in peace – even though it often took him a while to feel comfortable in the new environment. Thus, he did 13 days in Brighton; and then he leased a magnificent country house called Winterbourne, near the town of Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight.

 

It’s astonishing that David Copperfield did not capture the imagination of his reading public in the same way as some of his earlier books, because it would soon emerge as Dickens’s most popular book. It was his favourite too. Whenever he was asked which of his own books he like best, he always picked this one. In a Preface that Dickens wrote for the 1867 edition, he wrote:

“Of all my books, I like this the best … like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.”

Most readers seemed to agree with him. Dickens was the favourite English writer of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy; and he loved David Copperfield the best. Dostoevsky was also captivated by it – he read it first in a Siberian prison camp. James Joyce knew it well, and wrote a parody of it in his modernist masterpiece Ulysses. Even Virginia Woolf – not much of a fan of Dickens’s work, it is true – found this book irresistible. She read it half a dozen times and remarked in a letter to Hugh Walpole that it was magnificent: “it belongs to the memories and myths of life.”

I think the power of the book’s attraction for its readers comes from two main things: its amazing collection of compelling characters; and its status as one of the first truly interesting bildungsromans, telling the story of the coming-of-age and cultivation of a young gentleman.



Uriah Heep, Mrs. Heep (both "very 'umble"), the young David and Wilkins Micawber



In his influential little book about novel-writing – Aspects of the Novel – the Edwardian novelist E.M. Forster distinguished between flat characters and rounded characters. And he identified Dickens as the prime example of a writer whose stories are full of flat characters – often based merely on a physical trait, or a repetitive turn-of-phrase. As such, they ought not to be very interesting, because they show almost no development. When you think about it, David Copperfield is full of these flat characters. Mrs. Gummidge, the widow of Daniel Peggotty’s partner is a “lone, lorn creatur’ [for whom] everythink goes contrairy.” Wilkins Micawber is always waiting “for something to turn up”, and his wife is forever declaring that she “never will desert her Wilkins”. The carrier who drives little David in his horse and cart keeps asking the young lad to tell his nurse Peggotty that “Barkis is a-willin’.” And the odious clerk Uriah Heep is continually telling us that he is “very ‘umble”. But, surprisingly, Dickens does show development in some of these minor, flat characters. After Little Emily elopes with Steerforth, for example, Mrs. Gummidge abandons her whiny negativity and becomes a comfort for Daniel Peggotty. And Mr. Micawber serves as the catalyst for the come-uppance of Uriah Heep. So many fascinating characters crammed into this book – whether they are flat or not!

And the “leading idea” of the book is giving a full account of Copperfield’s rise from a troubled youth to a successful adult – told in a first-person narrative from the boy’s point-of-view. What gives the story its imaginative power is Dickens’s reminiscences of his early life. The book is not straightforward biography; he incorporates several key experiences from his own life, but then finds ways to present correspondences between real experiences and the fictional imaginings he was creating.

The most dramatic parallel with Dickens own life (the subject of the 7,000-word fragment he had sent to John Forster) was the time spent in a blacking factory, sticking labels on bottles. When Dickens got to the beginning of this section of the novel (Chapter XI), he took a very long walk of 14 miles into the country, in order to ponder how he would handle this episode. On the slip of paper that contained his plans, he wrote this poignant and cryptic note: “What I know so well”. The manuscript shows that he went through this chapter with much less revision than elsewhere. He knew what he needed to do; and he was able to control his feelings and maintain the narrative tone he had established.

Other autobiographical details which Dickens inserts into the life of Copperfield, his narrator, were his job as a parliamentary reporter for a “Morning Newspaper”, his laborious effort to learn shorthand (in order to report on those Parliament speeches), and his shift from journalism to fiction-writing. He also writes about the steely ambition and discipline that led to his success as a writer: “I never would have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence.”



Daniel Peggotty searching for the fallen Little Emily

In a Preface that he wrote for the first Everyman edition of the book, English author G.K. Chesterton – while conceding that the book was a masterpiece – argued that the first half of the book was a brilliant move in a new direction for Dickens (psychological realism), but that the second half showed a retreat to the styles of the past. Specifically, he thought the use of the emigration-to-Australia theme was a cop-out, and an easy way to wrap-up various loose-ends in the plot. But events in Dickens’s own life, with which Chesterton may not have been familiar, help explain his introduction of this theme. There had been a set-back at Urania Cottage, the home for “fallen-women” that Dickens had established with the help and financial support of Angela Burdett-Coutts. Dickens became aware of the work of Mrs. Elizabeth Herbert and the Family Colonisation Loan Society, an institution which helped organize and fund emigration to the British colonies in Australia. He thought it would be a good idea to encourage some of the women at Urania Cottage to begin a brand new life “down under”. But the first group of young women sent there had taken up with prostitution on the ship itself. So emigration comes into the book. And prostitution too – both Martha Endell and Little Emily fall into that way of life in order to survive destitution in London.



Clara Peggotty, David's nurse and friend



Finally, a few observations about some of the interesting female characters in this book. Clara Peggotty, the infant Copperfield’s nurse and friend is a lovely character – one of Dickens’s quintessential nurturing women. She is completely loyal – first to David’s weak and ineffective mother, and then to the young lad himself. Little Emily, who David falls in love with on his very first visit to the Peggotty clan in Yarmouth, reminds us of Nancy in Oliver Twist – a woman with a heart of gold, who falls victim to circumstances and an exploitative man. Rosa Dartle, who lives as a companion with Mrs. Steerforth, is an astonishingly cold and cruel woman. Dora Spenlow, Copperfield’s “child-wife” is an irritatingly feckless character. Dickens must have modeled her on Maria Beadnell, whom he was infatuated with for several years in his late-teens and who eventually rejected him – probably because of his lower-class origins. He later hooks up with the angelic Agnes Wickfield – another of Dickens’s unreal specimens of perfect womanhood. Parenthetically, G.K. Chesterton writes an interesting critique of Dickens’s alternating attentions to Dora and Agnes in his 1907 introduction to the Everyman Library edition of David Copperfield. He felt the marriage that Dickens describes between David and Dora is wonderfully true and human; whereas the relationship between David and Agnes is entirely false. Dickens was wrong, he thought, to kill off Dora and then engage in a long, drawn-out account of how David is eventually united with Agnes. I take Chesterton’s point – but Dora really is quite annoying.

David's saviour, great-aunt Betsey Trotwood

And then there’s the wonderful Betsey Trotwood, David’s austere great-aunt. She is a good example of one of the apparently “flat” characters introduced very early in this novel, who go on to become fully-rounded, interesting and intensely human. She is a real eccentric, but proves to be genuinely kind and warm-hearted under the brusque exterior. She is the only person willing and able to confront and confound the evil Edward Murdstone, David’s step-father, and his cruel sister Jane. And the way that Aunt Betsey nurtures and champions the simple-minded Mr. Dick is Dickens at his most humane. She is one of the most sublime figures in this intensely compelling book.

If you were to choose to read only one of Dickens’s books, this would have to be it. The sheer power of his story-telling is at its height, here, and the novel is full of memorable characters – whether flat, round, pointed or square. If you want to know what all the fuss is about Charles Dickens, read this and all will be revealed.

 

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the ninth of a series.]

Next: Bleak House

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Dombey and Son by Lucy Michael Slater (1991); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]

David Copperfield meets the Micawber family

Book Review: Charles Dickens 5 - "The Old Curiosity Shop"

 Dickens drawn by Count D'Orsay in Dec. 1841

The death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s fourth novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, is one of English literature’s great cause célèbres. 

Lord Jeffrey, a literary critic and friend of Dickens, was found in tears after reading her death scene. And the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell threw the book out of a train window declaring, “He should not have killed her.” 

Oscar Wilde’s response? “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears … of laughter.” And the poet Algernon Swinburne called Nell “a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads.”

As the fate of Little Nell hung in the balance in the final few issues of the novel (printed in weekly-parts), American crowds at the harbour-front in New York City were reported to have yelled at the sailors on board of boats coming in from Britain: “Is Little Nell dead?” 

The novel, from the very beginning, has generated an intense and very mixed response. Modern sensibilities seem to agree more often with Oscar Wilde. The book is seen now primarily as a good example of the Victorian penchant for over-the-top sentiment.

The Old Curiosity Shop was Dickens’ fourth novel. It was published in 88 weekly parts in Dickens’s new magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock. He had conceived of establishing his own weekly periodical whilst in the final stages of writing Nicholas Nickleby. Apparently, the bad experience he’d had editing Bentley’s Miscellany for publisher Richard Bentley did not deter him from giving magazine-editing another try. His concept for the new periodical was a club of characters who would take turns telling stories.

Cover of Master Humphrey's Clock

Master Humphrey’s Clock was published by Chapman & Hall. They agreed not only to pay Dickens a weekly salary for editing it; they also picked up the tab for all of his expenses and shared the profits. The first issue appeared in April, 1840 and cost threepence a week. It was a handsome-looking publication – larger than the usual periodicals of the time, and printed on good quality, creamy-white paper. Each issue consisted of twelve pages of text and two engravings “dropped” strategically into the text, instead of placed at the beginning and end.

Charles Dickens was 28 years old and at the height of his fame. The first issue of the new magazine sold 70,000 copies. But interest soon began to drop. He realized that he needed to write a new novel in order to revive the flagging sales. Serialisation of The Old Curiosity Shop began in the fourth issue. By the end of its run, in November 1841, each instalment of the story was selling about 100,000 copies. Dickens’s usually wrote his novels in monthly instalments; this one was written in weekly parts and the episodes, therefore, are less expansive and the story proceeds at a more sprightly pace.

At the beginning of the novel’s weekly publication, Dickens was only two weeks ahead of the printer – a rather risky situation. But he was used to that sort of pressure. All of his novels were written like that. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of writing to strict deadlines. He wrote 16 pages each week. His routine was to start work at about 8.30 in the morning and work through until about 2.00 in the afternoon. As usual, he began the novel with a general idea of theme and style, but only a vague notion of where he was going. The details of plot and situations came as he went along – often adapting things according to the responses he was getting from friends, family, and the general public.

The framing device Dickens began with in this novel was that of an old man, Master Humphrey, describing the experience of seeing an old man accompanied by a young girl during one of his late-night strolls in the city of London. He stalks them for a while, and begins to imagine their situation. So the book actually begins with a first-person narrator in the first three chapters. But Dickens found the technique difficult, and he soon abandoned it – switching to third-person narrative in Chapter Four.

Nell and her grandfather on the road

Dickens conceived of the character of Little Nell whilst staying with Walter Savage Landor in Bath. Landor was a poet and essayist. The two writers had only recently met, but were already good friends. Dickens would name his second son after Landor. The character of Daniel Quilp in the new novel was also inspired by an incident in Bath – Dickens had seen “a frightful little dwarf named Prior, who let donkeys out on hire” in the city. Prior was known to beat his animals and his wife - in equal measure.

The structure of The Old Curiosity Shop is a blend of alternating sections dealing, on the one hand, with the sentimental story of an innocent, angelic young girl caring for a physically-frail and morally-weak old grandfather, and, on the other, comic and satiric scenes featuring eccentric and, often, low-life characters. And Dickens engages throughout in a lot of moralizing commentary, meant to take the edge off some of the more unsavoury aspects of the story.

It has to be said that much of the story dealing with Little Nell and the grandfather becomes tedious in its repetitious description of Nell’s struggles to care for the old man. And the eventual demise of this little angel is telegraphed to the reader over and over. In several scenes, for example, she is meditating about life and death in the cemetery of a country church. Much of the criticism of the sentimentality in this novel has been focused primarily on the infamous death-scene. But, as some critics have pointed out, Dickens actually handles the scene with much restraint. The death is not described directly - much to the surprise of many only familiar with its notoriety – an account is given of it after the fact not by the narrator, but by one of the novel’s characters. Regardless, the book is still cited as a major example of its author’s maudlin sentimentality, his obsession with death, and his manipulation of the readers' feelings.

Dick Swiveller and "the Marchioness"

And it’s true that over-the-top sentiment involving Nell can be found throughout the book. But there is also a lot of genuine feeling and compassion found in the situations of other characters in the book. Dickens often is most successful in touching a nerve in his readers when he is not consciously trying. A good example here is the relationship between Dick Swiveller and “the Marchioness”. Swiveller enters the story first as a rather minor stock character – a ne’er-do-well clerk looking for the main chance. But in his compassion for the much-abused servant in the Brass household – whom he comes to dub “the Marchioness” – he morphs into an admirable fellow. 

As is often the case with Dickens’s novels, the central characters here are not the real interest and moral-centre of the book. They are engaged in a series of adventures, often given allegorical overtones. It’s the motley collection of supporting characters who imbue the novel with interest and energy: Mrs. Jarley, the benevolent and earthy proprietor of a waxworks exhibition; Miss Monflathers, the cruel headmistress of a girls’ school; Codlin and Trotters, the squabbling entrepeneurs running a Punch-and-Judy show; and, of course, the grotesque and depraved money-lender Daniel Quilp.

The fate of Daniel Quilp

The contrast between the sweet innocence of Nell and the malevolent cruelty of Quilp presents the classic antitheses found in Charles Dickens’s view of existence: good and evil; angel and devil; female and male; masochist and sadist; asexual and lascivious. The sadistic delight which Quilp revels in, and the physical deformity he exhibits often repel and embarrass the modern reader. But this tactic of giving his most morally-twisted characters a corresponding physical deformity emerged clearly in his previous book. He takes it even further here, and Quilp is, perhaps, his most grotesque and repulsive creation.

Other strategies that had become familiar to Dickens’s readers recur here: Nell and her grandfather’s picaresque on-the-road adventures reminds us of the constant travels of The Pickwick Papers and the early experiences of Nicholas Nickleby with the Crummles’ acting troupe; the life-changing benevolence of the Maylie family in Oliver Twist and the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby recurs here in the Garland clan’s care for Nell’s friend Kit; and the element of mystery in the parentage of Oliver and Smike in two previous books occurs here in the background provided for Nell’s family – Dickens is unable to name the character chapter after chapter, instead he calls him the Single Gentleman. It’s awkward and formulaic.

The Old Curiosity Shop, then, despite a fair amount of tedium in the sections dealing with Nell’s and grandfather’s flight from the clutches of Daniel Quilp, and despite some occasional tear-jerking moments, is still an entertaining and diverting read. It’s full of the usual comic characters and satiric scenes of low-life in the city of London. When he’s not trying so hard to manipulate the emotions of his readers, Dickens writes with vigour and passion and creates scenes with intense atmosphere and presence. Problems of plot-coherence and narrative structure remain, but, with Dickens, it's the immersion into his created world, teeming with character and comic exuberance, that carries the reader forward. Not one of his best - but still worth a read!



[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fifth of a series.]



Next: Barnaby Rudge

[Resources used: "Introduction" to The Old Curiosity Shop by Peter Washington (1995); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]

Book Review: Charles Dickens 4 - "Nicholas Nickleby"

A woodcut engraving of Dickens in 1838 

Charles Dickens still had about a dozen monthly instalments left to write of Oliver Twist when he began work on Nicholas Nickleby in February, 1838. He was twenty-five years old and riding the crest of a wave. This new book - his fourth - would be his third novel. It proved to be hugely successful and confirmed his status as the most popular novelist of his generation. The first issue of his Pickwick Papers, published two years previously, had consisted of just 400 copies. Nicholas Nickleby sold almost 50,000 copies on the very first day of its publication (April 1st., 1838).

Dickens had signed a contract with his publisher, Chapman & Hall, to write the new novel back in November, 1837 – so it took him several months to decide on a subject, a theme and a style for the new work. His general idea was to combine the best elements of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but also to add something new. He wanted some of the humour and picaresque adventure found in Pickwick Papers; but he also intended to provide more of the hard-hitting social satire he’d used in Oliver Twist. His vision extended even further than that - he planned to focus these disparate elements around a plotline that would become essentially his first romance. The novel would tell the story of young Nicholas Nickleby, an aspiring young gentleman, much like himself, struggling against the vicissitudes of the world.

Cover wrapper for the new novel

Like most of his novels, Nicholas Nickleby was written in 20 monthly instalments. Each issue consisted of 32 pages of text and two illustrations done by Hablot Browne (“Phiz”). They cost one shilling. The first issue was published in March 1838; the final instalment (a double-issue priced at two shillings) came out in September, 1839. So, like the ten-month period in 1837, when Dickens was writing both an instalment of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist each month, from April 1838 to April 1839 Dickens was writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby simultaneously. He seemed to thrive on the pressure of meeting constant deadlines.

The initial idea that fired up Dickens’s imagination was to write a polemical satire - in fictional form - of the so-called “Yorkshire schools”. Following the success of Oliver Twist in bringing the issue of child abuse in parish workhouses to the general public’s attention, Dickens decided to court public opinion again – this time in regard to certain disreputable boarding schools in Yorkshire which were used as dumping grounds for illegitimate and unwanted children. Really, these schools were little more than juvenile prisons. The children were abandoned to horrible situations – suffering near-starvation diets and deplorable health conditions. Dickens had heard and read about these establishments in his childhood and they had been in the news again recently. He decided to investigate. He took his illustrator, Hablot Browne, up North with him and visited the Bowes Academy in Greta Bridge – near Barnard Castle in West Yorkshire. The place was run by a certain William Shaw. His apparent cruelty became the model for the vicious and dishonest Wackford Squeers – the entrepreneurial headmaster of the fictional Dotheboys Hall. Dickens succeeded in his plan; thanks to the lurid description of Dotheboys Hall in his new book, the twenty-or-so Yorkshire boarding schools were gone within a generation, victims of an outraged public.

The "internal economy" of Dotheboys Hall: brimstone and treacle served by Mrs. Squeers

A new element in Dickens’s technique in this new book was to create characters with physical deformities – used to embody their moral depravity and then exaggerated for comic effect. These characterizations often tend towards the grotesque, but Dickens is not essentially providing realistic portraits; the characters’ deformities are worn much like a mask – they represent an attitude, or a state of mind. The one-eyed Wackford Squeers, for example, is blind to his own wickedness. His obnoxious son is obese – and busy tormenting the half-starved waifs in his father’s “school”. But it’s not just the evil characters that are physically deformed – some of the good ones are too: Smike, the pathetic youth who has been oppressed by Squeers for many years in Dotheboys Hall, is lame and half-witted. Newman Noggs, Ralph Nickleby’s servant/assistant, is a bundle of deformities. The physical weaknesses here serve as a sharp contrast to their inner benevolence – emphasizing the cruelty they have suffered. 

Nicholas Nickleby is an uneasy blend of satire, picaresque comedy, romance and melodrama. As such, Dickens continues to exploit techniques and situations that had proved successful in his previous books. And the public seemed to love these epic stories in which Dickens mixes genres and alternates styles. After the early polemic against the Yorkshire schools, Dickens puts Nicholas on the road to Portsmouth, where he encounters a travelling acting-troupe under the jovial leadership of Vincent Crummles. This long episode, in which the young Nickleby takes on the role of playwright and leading-actor [Dickens had toyed with the idea of the theatre as a vocation], is a comic interlude in a story that is primarily a romantic melodrama. The romance involves Nicholas’s struggle to vindicate his self-image as a young gentleman in search of love, career prospects, and a fortune. He works to save his “princess” (the lovely Madeline Bray) from a forced marriage to a despicable old money-lender. Nicholas also struggles against the wicked machinations of his main antagonist - his depraved uncle, Ralph Nickleby. His uncle works throughout the novel to thwart his nephew's plans and to ruin the lives of his widowed sister-in-law and her two children, Nicholas and Kate.  

Fanny Squeers tries to interest Nicholas

It’s the character of Ralph Nickleby that keeps the book alive, because mid-way through the book, Nicholas comes under the paternal care of the unbelievably benevolent Cheeryble brothers, who run a successful business in the city of London and shower love and largesse on whomever catches their fancy. There is no more financial struggle for Nicholas and, like Oliver Twist before it (where Oliver lands safe, mid-novel, in the bosom of the Maylie family), the plot falters and the book goes soft. In another similarity with the previous book - which stretched out a convoluted plot-line to explain the mystery of Oliver’s parentage - this novel also creates a mystery about the secret parentage of Smike, and the people who abandoned the child to the cruel care of the Squeers family.

In a melodrama there is scant little character development - things happen, coincidences occur. And the author gets busy announcing what has happened, telling us what the characters think and feel, and moving his heroes and villains through each plot-point, and on to the inevitable conclusion, with young couples pairing up and ensconcing themselves safely in their comfy homes at the happy conclusion.

What saves Nicholas Nickleby from being mere melodrama - as usual with Dickens - are some interesting and delightful characters. There is the foppish Mr. Mantalini, who is forever disappointing his practical and business-minded wife and blustering his way along with a stream of vapid endearments and alibis. There is the put-upon man-servant Newman Noggs, who seems weak and pathetic, but always turns up at key moments to save the day and thwart his evil employer. There is the vile Sir Mulberry Hawk, who engages in a long campaign of attempting to seduce Nicholas’s sister Kate - assisted by their uncle Ralph. And there is Ralph, himself – a relentlessly malevolent figure devoted to the pursuit of money and the exploitation of everyone within his sphere of influence. In some ways, the driving ambition of this character reveals unwittingly, perhaps, the inner disposition of his author – who wants us to identify him with the ardent and sensitive young Nicholas struggling to make his way in a corrupt world. But there is a lot of the relentless ambition and need for financial security in Ralph Nickleby’s character to be found in the secret world of Dickens’s troubled heart.

And, then, there is Mrs. Nickleby, Nicholas’s and Kate’s mother. She is a feckless woman and, at every key moment, comes to the wrong conclusion and makes a poor judgment about people. It is thought that there is a lot of Elizabeth Dickens, Charles Dickens’ mother, in this portrait of Mrs. Nickleby. She annoys us with her lack of insight and her gullibility at the hands of scoundrels. And she is forever rambling on about some memory from the past – and gets lost in a strange and tortuous string of associations, in which she always forgets what she is supposed to be remembering. But some of these long, rambling speeches of hers are droll and diverting – early examples, really, of stream-of-consciousness-thinking put into monologue form. 

In its day Nicholas Nickleby was immensely popular and consolidated Dickens’s hold on the public’s imagination and heart. If the book strikes us today as rather unshapely and overly-melodramatic, it still manages to compel us with its vigorous description, grotesque and comic characters, funny set-pieces, and drawn-out story-lines. And despite the transparencies seen in some of his techniques and stylistic flourishes, Dickens still draws you in, and leads you on, with the sheer exuberance of his imaginative power. But what is it that stays with you, once the book is back on the shelf? For me, it's those early chapters set in the Yorkshire school at Dotheboys Hall: Nicholas thrashing Wackford Squeers with his own cane and taking poor Smike to safety. He might veer too often towards pathos and sentiment, but Dickens truly knew how to touch the human heart and stir his readers’ sense of compassion.

Nicholas thrashes Squeers with his own school cane

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the fourth of a series.]



Next: The Old Curiosity Shop

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Nicholas Nickleby by John Carey (1993); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990) ]

Book Review: Charles Dickens 3 - "Oliver Twist"

Dickens in 1837 - a portrait by Samuel Lawrence

1836 had been an incredibly busy year for Charles Dickens.  In February the publisher John Macrone had released a two-volume collection of his Sketches by Boz. A second series was published in one-volume that August. Macrone was also waiting patiently for Dickens to get to work on a promised three-volume novel called “Gabriel Vardon” (which would emerge four years later as the re-titled Barnaby Rudge). By the autumn of 1836, Chapman & Hall had published eight monthly instalments of The Pickwick Papers, but there was still another year to go before its run was complete. Dickens had written a play, The Strange Gentleman, based on one of his sketches; it was running at the St. James Theatre. And he was hard at work writing the libretto for an operetta. In the midst of all of this, Dickens was approached by a third publisher, Richard Bentley, with a proposal to edit a new monthly magazine, to be called Bentley’s Miscellany. Amazingly, the overstretched author agreed to take on yet another project - not just writing, but editing a magazine. He considered himself now truly committed to a literary career,  and ready - finally - to give up his post as journalist at The Morning Chronicle.

In addition to editing the work of the other contributors to the magazine, Dickens would also write a piece of fiction for each instalment. And he would get pride of place, of course – the first piece in each issue. For the first edition of Bentley’s Miscellany - published in January 1837 - Dickens could only manage a farcical tale in the style of his Boz sketches. But then in mid-January, he informed Bentley that he’d hit upon a great idea for a novel. It would be a polemical story aimed at satirising the worst effects of the New Poor Law – a series of measures which had been introduced back in 1834, but whose social repercussions were only now starting to reveal themselves. In the planned novel, Oliver Twist, Dickens proposed to portray the harsh results of the new law by focusing on the life of an infant born in a parochial workhouse.

The first two chapters of Oliver Twist appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany in February 1837, accompanied by George Cruikshank’s steel etching showing “Oliver asking for more”. Dickens had trouble, at first, with the new format. The first instalment was too short. But he soon had the work under control. The problem was that for the first time ever a major novelist was writing and publishing two different novels simultaneously in monthly instalments. And the two novels were not only of a very different style and theme, they were also written to different lengths. By February 1838, The Pickwick Papers was into its twelfth issue (Chapters 32-33). There were seven instalments to come. So, for seven months, Dickens would begin the month writing two chapters of Oliver Twist in 9,000 words; and then switch to an instalment of The Pickwick Papers which was twice as long - 19,000 words. He would write up to the last week of the month, when both novels would be quickly published in the last few days of the month. He would start the month deep in lurid melodrama, and finish with the satiric good-humour of picaresque adventure. And he managed to juggle these opposite assignments with ease. Ideas poured out of him: incidents, characters, and plot-lines. He was digging deep into his imagination.

But suddenly he was thrown off course. On May 7, Mary Hogarth, his wife Catherine’s younger sister, who was living with the family in their new home on Doughty Street, suddenly took ill one evening after they had returned from the theatre. Mary's condition declined rapidly overnight, and she died in Dickens’ arms the next day. He was devastated. She had assumed a special importance in his life. He was thrown into an extended period of grief – revealing later that he dreamed about her every night for nine months! After the funeral, he and Catherine took a two-week country retreat in Hampstead. And, for the first and only time in his writing life - a 34-year career of fourteen novels written in monthly instalments - he missed a deadline. In June there was no new issue for either The Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist. He was back into the swing of things in July, taking up again the story of Fagin and his gang (Chapter 9); but the tone and focus of Oliver Twist would change significantly. 

The sub-title Dickens gave to Oliver Twist was “the Parish Boy’s Progress”.  As such, it was clearly intended to provoke comparisons with both John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress - an allegorical tale of Christian, the protagonist, and his spiritual tribulations in search of the Celestial City - and two William Hogarth moralizing picture-books - A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, which depicted in just a handful of engravings the physical and moral decline of its subjects into sin and debauchery. So what would Oliver’s tale amount to – an uplifting account of spiritual survival, or a depressing slide into depravity?

Oliver Twist is likely the first novel in English which features a child as its central character. In doing this, Dickens was combining the roles of novelist and journalist. There had been recent news of an inquiry into the deaths of workhouse children, who had been “farmed out” into the care of women in private homes. Dickens presents Oliver as representative of these workhouse orphans. Oliver, too, is farmed out, and the treatment he receives from his guardian, Mrs. Mann, is not much better than that he had suffered at the workhouse. The first section of the novel (seven brief, but vivid, chapters) depicts the oppressive treatment Oliver suffers at a parochial workhouse. Dickens writes here with brutal realism, but the polemics are made more effective through the use of dramatic exaggeration and an often savage sarcasm.  Unlike many of his books, which tend toward the prolix, this one moves along briskly.  After famously asking for more food - not just for himself, but also for his fellow starving inmates - he is “sold” to the local undertaker. Again he suffers abuse. He runs away, and walks all the way to London. Arriving in the capital, exhausted and hungry, he is taken in hand by Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, who brings him back to the squalid lair of Fagin, “the Respectable Old Gentleman” – who trains and controls a small team of children working as pickpockets in the London streets.

The opening chapters, focused on the workhouse, have Oliver serving as a tool for Dickens’ polemic. But once the scene shifts to the London underworld, Dickens’ imagination starts to invest the story of his title-character with elements of his own childhood experience. Throughout the novel, Oliver is a passive pawn in the hands of fate. In the workhouse, he merely suffers abuse and neglect. But in the hands of Fagin, he is in a much more dangerous situation. It is not just the threat to his physical survival that faces him now; it is the danger of social and moral degradation. There were perhaps only a very few people in Dickens’ immediate circle who knew how Dickens was drawing on his own childhood experience. When his father was consigned to the Marshalsea debtors’ prison - his mother and siblings would later join his father - Charles was sent to work at the Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. Dickens was left to fend for himself and he found the whole situation a great humiliation. There was a friendly young man at Warren’s, named Bob Fagin, who took Charles under his wing. But Dickens came to see this intervention as a kind of threat – in some sense, he thought Bob was encouraging him to accept his social degradation. And the figure of Fagin in Oliver Twist represents that same danger – he tries to entice Oliver to accept the twisted morals of this criminal gang. He attempts to seduce the boy into accepting life as a thief. Some of the author’s deepest anxieties are reflected in Oliver’s struggle to survive. His protagonist is portrayed as a boy with a deep instinct for human goodness and feeling. It always serves to protect him from the abuse of the uncaring and the machinations of the wicked.

Bill Sikes and his dog, Bulls Eye

And with the sudden death of Mary Hogarth, and the grief that followed, the focus of the book shifts again; it becomes less satirical and more personal. Once Oliver has been rescued from the clutches of Bill Sikes by the Maylie family, his story is pretty much complete. What Dickens gives us now is a kind of parable about the triumph of good over evil; innocence is vindicated in its struggle against moral corruption. Dickens seems to lose interest in the topical and polemical elements of the early section, and focuses instead on the domestic themes of home, childhood and early death. The character of Rose Maylie is introduced as an idealised portrait of the deceased Mary Hogarth - but in this fictional world of wish-fulfilment she survives a serious illness that brings her to the brink of death. And Dickens constructs a complicated - and rather tedious - mystery about the true identity of Oliver’s mother and her family. The concern here is to establish the fact that Oliver deserves his happy fate, because he is not really a waif; he is the child of middle-class parentage. 

Many contemporary critics of the book missed this social conservatism; they were shocked by the lurid depiction of the London underworld. By the 1840s, Dickens’ book was lumped in with the so-called “Newgate novels”, which included William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram. These books were condemned. They were accused of depraving and corrupting their readers by glamorizing the lives of thieves and prostitutes. Dickens was indignant with this sort of criticism – especially the fierce attack of William Thackeray who ridiculed the genre in general, but Oliver Twist specifically. As Dickens points out, though, his criminal characters are not glamorized: Bill Sikes is an unrepentant thug, with no redeeming features; Fagin is sympathetic only in the gross exaggeration of his comic depiction; and Nancy regrets her life of crime, and takes action to save the innocent Oliver. Nonetheless, Dickens did revel to some extent in the melodramatic excess of some of this sordid detail. Famously, in later life, he would give public readings from his novels; and the description of Bill Sikes’ murder of Nancy was one of his favourite choices. It always left the audience emotionally drained, and Dickens physically exhausted.

Fagin awaits execution in Newgate Prison

The depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist, unfortunately, is tainted by its anti-semitism – typical of its period. Not only does Dickens describe Fagin physically as a repulsive human being – almost bestial, but he refers over and over to this character as “the Jew”. It’s well known, of course, that the prejudice of the time denied Jews access to many areas of social and business life. Those Jewish entrepreneurs interested in business and money were excluded from most elements of finance, and were reduced to the role of money-lender, pawnbroker and usurer – or criminal activities like theft and the fencing of stolen property. The latter activities, of course, were Fagin’s modus operandi. Dickens spares no chance in depicting him as a loathsome individual. Eliza Davis wrote to Dickens to criticise his portrayal of Fagin. She argued that he "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew" - and that had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. At first Dickens reacted defensively to her letter, but he then halted a later edition of Oliver Twist, and changed the text for the parts of the book that had not yet been set - which is why Fagin is called "the Jew" 257 times in the first 38 chapters, but barely at all in the next 179 references to him – where he’s called simply Fagin.

Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’ most popular novels. Because it was published monthly in Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine that featured a host of other contributors, he adopted the melodramatic, adventurous style typical of those sorts of compendia. Readers respond instinctively to the plight of the innocent young orphan struggling against a host of hypocritical, cruel adults – depicted with trenchant sarcasm and sly humour. It’s also one of his shortest novels – a plus for those daunted by the 800-page length of most of his discursive epics. And the characters of Oliver (the boy who dared ask for more), Mr. Bumble (the parochial beadle who uttered the immortal line: “If the law supposes that, then the law is a ass, a idiot!”), Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy have become some of the most-widely recognized fictional characters in the English language. Despite the didactic intention of the novel, Oliver Twist is a surprisingly poetic work. Dickens’ response to the traumatic death of Mary Hogarth gives much of the second-half of the book a dreamlike intensity: full of mystery, visions, and romance. Oliver emerges unscathed from the almost metaphysical struggle between Fagin’s world of seductive wickedness and the secure goodness found in the world of the Maylies and Mr. Brownlow. And if you don’t find it a most captivating read, I’ll eat my head.

Mr. Bumble, the Beadle: "The law is a ass, a idiot".

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 


These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Charles Dickens was to start again, read through all 14 of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. I'll give it a try, anyway! So this is the third of a series.]


Next - Nicholas Nickleby