Book Review: Charles Dickens 1 - "Sketches by Boz"

Charles Dickens began to write in the summer of 1833, at the age of twenty-one. He had been working as a parliamentary reporter for several newspapers and periodicals, but now he set about the serious intention of becoming a writer of fiction.

A portrait of Dickens by George Cruikshank in 1836

One evening that autumn he submitted the manuscript for a fictional sketch called “A Sunday Out of Town” to the Monthly Magazine. As he recalled it later, he had “dropped it stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court [Johnson Court] in Fleet Street.” When he returned to the same address some time later, in order to buy the magazine’s next issue, he was amazed to find that his piece had been printed - the title changed to “A Dinner at Poplar Walk”. He was not paid for the sketch and he got no credit or by-line, but he was overjoyed to see his work in print: “I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there.”

Dickens was invited to submit more work, and over the next few months about ten more sketches were published by the Monthly Magazine. And as his work began to be noticed and appreciated, it got picked up by other periodicals.

And then in August of 1834 a funny story called “The Boarding House” was finally attributed to its young author, but under the pseudonym of ‘Boz’. Boz was a nickname that Dickens had come up with for his younger brother Augustus. It began actually as Moses – after a character from Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield. Soon the nickname came to be delivered facetiously in a nasal tone – instead of Moses, it became “Boses”. And in time, Boses became shortened to “Boz”. So, although most people pronounce Charles Dickens’s early pseudonym so that it rhymes with ‘was’, it is really supposed to rhyme with ‘nose’.

Dickens continued to write sketches as Boz for a couple of years. Eventually, they were published in a two-volume set by John Macrone on February 7th, 1836 – Dickens’s twenty-fourth birthday. A “second series” was released in one volume in August 1838. The volumes were called Sketches by Boz. The book collection was also published in installments by Chapman and Hall from 1837-1839; these usually included two black-and-white illustrations by artist George Cruikshank – wood engravings or metal etchings. The release of the first book of the sketches brought its author instant celebrity. About a month later he was commissioned by Chapman and Hall to write his first serialized novel. It was to be about a men’s sporting club – an idea that Dickens turned into The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Dickens’s authorship was shown on the title pages as “Edited by Boz.” Six weeks after the first edition of the Sketches of Boz, the first installment of The Pickwick Papers was issued. Dickens rapidly shot to fame – especially after he introduced the character of cockney Sam Weller as Pickwick’s valet in Chapter 10. But he continued to write and submit sketches even as he was focused on writing his first novel.

The full title of Dickens’s collection of early sketches was Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-Day Life And Every-Day People. The final version of the work consisted of 56 sketches in four groups: “Our Parish”, “Scenes”, “Characters”, and “Tales”. The best writing here is in the sketches, where he writes with a wry attention to detail and a sense of ironic humour; in the tales of the final section, he often relies on dramatic and melodramatic cliches.

The title-page of the Second Series (1838)

 The book is an interesting collection for those who want to see how Dickens developed as a writer and a social thinker. It’s a wildly uneven enterprise, though: as Dickens admitted himself, “They comprise my first attempts at authorship. I am conscious of their often being extremely crude and ill-considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste and inexperience.”

I found it difficult to plough through the book. Unlike other very long works of his, which can often be read through in a week (once you get hooked by the plot and attached to the characters), this can be heavy-going. And there is no plot-arc to pull you along. Some of the drama is over-the-top melodrama (“The Black Veil”). Some of the satire is heavy-handed. Much of the writing is poorly done – heavy with modifiers and full of stereotypes and clichés: “He wiped off the concentrated essence of cowardice that was oozing fast down his forehead” (“The Great Winglebury Duel”).

But if you’re a real fan, and you’re a completist who wants to read all of Dickens’s major work, then you’ll want to get through this. All juvenilia is interesting - at least - for offering a glimpse of an author’s themes and style in their embryonic state. So you’ll be willing to forgive the weakness of much of the writing, in order to observe Dickens developing his characteristic humour and ironic tone. And in the midst of a series of rather tedious sentences, he’ll come up with a fresh image like this: “Mr. Cymon Tuggs sighed like a gust of wind through a forest of gooseberry bushes” (“The Tuggses at Ramsgate”). And in the same tale, he has this: “There were some male beaux doing the sentimental in whispers, and others doing the ferocious in moustache.” You can overlook the tendency to rely on pathos and sentimentality, when he strikes a genuine chord of real human sympathy. The melodrama in “The Hospital Patient” is too much: a dying woman who protects her husband from the police, even though he has beaten her severely. But then he stirs your sympathy in a sketch about a couple of women embarrassed to be reduced to pawning a few trinkets (“The Pawnbroker’s Shop”). And he does some serious social-realism that is free of any heavy-handed sentiment, like his description of Newgate Prison (“A Visit to Newgate”). Finally, one has to admire the imaginative gifts he brings to characterisation and situation. He describes a visit to a second-hand clothing shop (“Meditations in Monmouth Street”) with a wonderful conceit. He mentions various pieces of clothing on display, and then imagines the owners who might have lived inside them: “We dressed, from the same shop window in an instant, half a dozen boys of from fifteen to twenty; and putting cigars into their mouths, and their hands into their pockets, watched them as they saunted down the street, and lingered at the corner, with the obscene jest, and the oft-repeated oath.”

Illustration for "Gin Shops" by George Cruikshank

And familiar Dickensian scenes and situations emerge: late-night or early-morning strolls through the streets of London; boat cruises down the Thames to the northern-coast of Kent; lonely spinsters and ineffectual bachelors looking for love and marriage prospects; social gatherings full of pomposity and disaster. You can see how Dickens is seizing on everything he observes and experiences – using his imaginative power to turn it into fiction full of observed-detail and sympathetic characterisation.

Sketches by Boz is not for a newcomer to the work of Charles Dickens. If you’ve never read a Dickens novel and want to try one of his early works, pick up Oliver Twist - if you want drama and story – or The Pickwick Papers, if you’re looking for humour and picaresque adventure. I would only recommend Sketches by Boz to those who want to read everything of his, or to those keen to witness the creation of a style, the development of a voice, and the emergence of a social conscience.

[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 first of a series.]



[Next – The Pickwick Papers]

Film Review: Scorsese's latest - "Hugo"

 A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I took the kids to see the new Martin Scorsese film Hugo. I had heard some good things about it; it was said to be an intelligent film – not the usual slick stuff from Disney, or Hollywood.

I have to admit I was wary about this outing. The film was being shown at a nearby “multiplex” cinema complex. The last time I went to one of those, we saw March of the Penguins. It was a good nature documentary, but the screening of the film was appalling – the image on the screen was very grainy. And when we got in line for Hugo, I noticed on the marquee that it was actually being shown in 3-D, which meant an extra $3.50 for each ticket. So the cost for our family – just to see the film - was $58.00. Man, am I out of touch! Anyway,3-D; would the special glasses work properly?

No to worry, though. The image was high-definition perfection. The 3-D effects, although not always effective, were very impressive most of the time. And wearing the 3-D glasses over the top of my own glasses was no problem.

Asa Butterfield as Hugo, keeping time at Montparnasse Train Station in Paris

Hugo is based on a children’s book called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick - released in 2007. It’s a 526-page illustrated novel – an amalgam, really, of novel, picture book, graphic novel, and flip-book. It tells the story of Hugo, a 12-year-old orphan who lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station in Montparnasse in 1930. He works as a clock keeper. In order to survive, he steals food from local shops. He has also been stealing small clockwork toys from a toy shop in the train station run by a morose old man. He needs parts of the inner workings of these toys in order to repair an automaton his father had been fixing just before his death. He is befriended by Isabelle - also an orphan - who lives with the toy-shop owner, her godfather. The first half of the film gives an account of their adventures.

It turns out that Isabelle’s godfather is none other than Georges Méliès, the great French illusionist and filmmaker. Méliès made 531 films between 1896 and 1913 (some only a minute long, others stretching out to forty minutes). He introduced many technical and narrative innovations to the making of films. He pioneered the use of multiple exposures, time-lapse filming, dissolves between scenes and hand-colouring of film-stock. Many of his films mixed fantasy and science-fiction. His most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), was inspired by Jules Verne’s science-fiction classic From the Earth to the Moon (1865). You’ve probably seen that familiar scene from the film – a spaceship is shot from a gigantic cannon at the moon. When it arrives at its target, we see it hit the eye in the man on the moon.

A famous image from Georges Méliès's film A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Martin Scorsese is an avid historian of early films. He champions the work of key figures he loves - a good example is his promotion of the films of the little-known, but brilliant, English filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Buy any of their films on DVD and you’ll probably find Scorsese talking about the film and its makers in the one of the DVD’s bonus features.

And the second-half of Hugo turns into an homage to Georges Méliès. There is a fascinating, extended sequence depicting the filmmaking process in the film studio he built on his property in Montreuil, just outside of Paris. It shows him using a substitution shot (“stop trick”). This account of Méliès’s life – the glories of his artistic peak and the sadness of his decline - is suffused with ardour and melancholy. It really turns into a meditation on art, illusion, magic, filmmaking and time. Not really a children’s film, eh? In this second half of the movie, I expect younger children will start to yawn and squirm. But I found it the most captivating part of the story – and, surely, Scorsese’s real motive in making the film.

This is a different kind of film for director Martin Scorsese. The script was written by Josh Logan and it is very faithful to Selznick’s book. The juvenile leads are played by Asa Butterfield (Hugo) and Chloe Grace Moretz. There is a small sub-plot at the train station involving Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths. Sacha Baron Cohen does a comic turn as the cruel Station Inspector. But the best acting performances come from Ben Kingsley, as Georges Méliès, and the lovely Helen McCrory, as his wife, Mama Jeanne. These are not complex character-treatments, but they certainly hit all the right notes. Christopher Lee is in a few scenes, as a Parisian bookshop owner. And Scorsese appears in cameo, just for a moment.

Martin Scorsese, the director, does a brief cameo in his new film Hugo.

This is a wonderful entertainment. And a good introduction to modern 3-D films. Some of the sequences are breath-taking. I’m not sure that all children will be captivated by it – perhaps, the first twenty minutes, or so, will grab their interest. But it’s the focus on Méliès that is the human core of this story. I was thoroughly engaged. Might even go back for a second look!

Humour: In Their Cups!

(published in The Hamilton Spectator, January 25th., 2012)

Tim Horton’s switch coffee sizes, but keep the same names.


Who would have thought that cup sizes could get so interesting, so controversial, so confusing. No, I’m not talking bras, here - I’m talking about the drink options available at your local coffee shop. How much is enough? How much in a cup - and what do you call it? And why do the sizes keep changing? Ask Tim Horton’s; they are adding even more confusion to your day.

You would think that cup sizes are standard, right? Wrong. A medium coffee at Second Cup gets you sixteen fluid ounces; at Tim Horton’s it’s fourteen. Starbucks, on the other hand, don’t have a “medium” coffee. You’ll have to decide between a “tall” (12 fl. oz.) and a “grande” (16 fl. oz.) Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not playing that particular game. I’m not using their upscale, yuppy terminology. The names for Starbucks’ five coffee-sizes, if you’re never been, have the following pretentious tags: short, tall, grande, venti, and trenta. These are coffee sizes? They sound like shirt options to me. I’ll ask for a medium and let them translate.

What about those pompous names, anyway? Does Starbucks think they can charge more for their coffee just because customers get a frisson (along with that caffeine jolt) from their up-scale shopping experience. You are ordering some of those cup sizes in Italian, after all - grande means large, venti means twenty (fl.oz.) and trenta means thirty. Italians know their coffee, don’t they? So, we’ll pay more for our coffee because we feel more sophisticated than your average caffeine-imbiber?

Speaking of non-standard sizes, your small, medium, and large Second Cup hot drinks have four fluid ounces less than the small, medium and large cold drinks. Is it to do with the ice? Can we not standardise hot with cold?

Confused? No, because like me you avoid all this trendy nonsense and stick to Tim Horton’s. In their franchises you only have to deal with commonsensical nomenclature: small, medium, large and extra-large. Right? Well, up until recently, that is. But now - five years after Second Cup changed its coffee sizes - Tim Horton’s have decided to join the brave-new world of market standardisation, and, in the process, expand the legions of the confused and the irritable. Wasn’t caffeine supposed to make you less irritable?

Back in 2006, by the way, when Second Cup made its switch, PR spokeswoman Rachel Douglas explained that their old sizes (small, medium, large and jumbo) were an apparent problem:

“It made ordering confusing,” she said, “because some people would want small and say medium, or want medium and say large." Say what? The former options included small and medium, but some people who wanted small would say medium? Well, this thing is more confusing than we actually thought.

So, here we are; Tim Horton’s have decided to add a new, even larger cup of coffee to their menu – it holds 24 fluid ounces. Good idea? Well, OK, if they had been smart enough – actually, they didn’t have to be smart, just rational – to come up with a fresh tag for the newest size. How about “humungous”, or “gigantic”, or “titanic”? No, they have actually decided to call it “extra-large”. Not a problem, you say? Well, it is - not only because it will challenge even the most-disciplined bladder on its daily commute, but because of the name. They already have an “extra-large” size, you see. Instead of adding one name, they’re shifting one, and changing four different sizes. So the current extra-large is going to be called “large” from now on. The large will be medium; the medium will be small; and the small will be extra small. Got that?

Who came up with this idea? Not a customer, I’m willing to bet, or an employee who actually works in one of their franchises; these people will have to deal with the fallout. No, this decision would have been made by a market researcher. And nobody’s going to be confused or annoyed; they know that because they’ve done “market research” with their loyal customers. Does it make sense to you? Think about it.

“I’ll have a medium double-double and a dutchie, please,” says the half-asleep customer at his local Tim’s, early on a work-day morning.

“The old medium, sir, or the new medium?”

“What?”

“The new medium is the old large; the old medium is the new small.”

“Sorry?”

“The medium is now small. If you really want your old medium, it’s actually gonna be a large.”

“Whatever … just give me my regular, OK?”

“You want regular? You mean one cream/one sugar? Or a small?”

“No! Double-double. And medium.”

And so on.

And while we’re at it, they’re now calling the 8 fluid ounce cup an “extra small”. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Extra large almost sounds right as a name; but how can the smallest cup be an “extra” size. Wouldn’t “smallest” be better? Or “teeny-weeny”? Or “caffeine-for-wimps”?

Tim Horton’s has announced that the cup-size changes are good because it brings their sizes more in line with competitors - including Starbucks, Second Cup and McDonald's. The standardisation argument. The American way. More beans for your buck. The price of the coffee stays the same; it’s the names that change. What’s in a name? Confusion and contention, I say. And the sizes are still different; unlike Second Cup and Starbucks, Timmies do ten-ounce and fourteen-ounce sizes, instead of twelve and sixteen. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même Jo.

Maybe it’s time to switch to Timothy’s World Coffee; they have good-old cup sizes: small, regular, medium and large. No - wait a minute – why do they have that regular size in between the small and the medium? Isn’t regular the same as small? It ought to be quite simple, shouldn’t it? It may seem like a small thing to you. But for Tim Horton’s, I predict - at least in the medium term - this could turn out to be a large problem. Maybe even extra large? The price, I’d say, for their double-double-think.

Book Review: "Charles Dickens: A Life" by Claire Tomalin

Twenty years ago biographer Claire Tomalin put out a book about the relationship between Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens. It was called The Invisible Woman (1991). That book focused on the love affair between the young actress Nelly Ternan (she was eighteen when they met in 1857), and the middle-aged author (he was forty-five).

Charles Dickens at the age of 49 by the London portrait photographer George Herbert Watkins.

Her new book, Charles Dickens: A Life, gives us the whole story of his remarkable life. It is a modest account. Ms. Tomalin doesn’t attempt to be exhaustive in her account of this very busy public-figure; her book clocks in at just over 400 pages.

But it’s a comprehensive book, despite the size. In addition to the 420 pages of text, it includes a set of maps, a “Cast List”, three sets of photographs, full notes and a detailed index. The maps show Gad’s Hill and its Rochester environs, and detailed maps of central London and North London, which show the many houses that Dickens and his family lived in, and other buildings important in the writer’s life. Four pages of notes provide information about the maps. The three eight-page sections of photographs are spread through the book and there is a detailed set of notes providing the sources of each image. And the “cast list” contains mini biographies (three or four lines each) about 150 main figures in Dickens’s life. Surprising omissions, though, are a bibliography of Dickens’s works and a chronology, or time-line, of his life. So, the book is well organized, handsomely designed and put together – and it has an impressive photographic image of Dickens filling the front cover.

And what of the text inside? It’s an interesting read. Of course, it’s hard not be readable when you’re writing about a man who is so brilliant and compelling. One is staggered by the on-going energy and drive of the man. In that white-hot phase of the first five years of his writing success, he wrote five large novels, writing and publishing usually in twenty monthly parts – and for most of that five years he was writing two novels simultaneously.

Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life

Ms. Tomalin writes well and she adopts a measured, tolerant view of her subject. She is good at providing an interesting balance between the story of his life and the treatment of his writings. Her critiques of the books are reasonable and I found myself agreeing with most of her critical judgments (I’ve read nine of his fourteen novels, so far). And she doesn't ignore the negative aspects of Dickens's character - and the disaster that was his classic mid-life crisis.

What stands out for me in this book is the important relationship between Dickens and his friend John Forster (who went on to write a seminal, three-volume biography of Dickens's life). They were very close for all of Dickens's professional life. Forster received drafts of most of Dickens writing - before they went to print - and offered helpful and encouraging advice.

This is a book I heartily recommend. I learned a lot about Dickens and enjoyed the three days I was immersed again in the life of one of England’s greatest novelists. And , as should be, the experience impells me to read more Dickens. And so, I will!

[Next – Sketches by Boz]

My First Blog Post

Well, here we go - my first attempt at a blog. It's the first day of the new year (2012). It's my sixtieth year. I'm going to use this blog as a journal to keep tabs on my book-reading, music-listening, and film-watching during the year ahead.

I have lots of books, as always, on my to-read list. And many films that I plan to get to eventually.

Today I began a recently-released biography of Charles Dickens - it's called Charles Dickens: A Life, written by Claire Tomalin. I heard her interviewed on a CBC podcast and a BBC podcast talking about the book.

It's not the first book I've read about Dickens. And probably not the last (I still have the huge Peter Ackroyd biography upstairs on a bookshelf - read a few chapters when I first found it in a second-hand bookstore about five years ago). Dickens is a favourite author of mine and I am endlessly fascinated by his life and times - and his novels, of course.

So, on with the show!