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Jean's Charles Dickens challenge 2014-2015 (and maybe a little further ...)
from chapter 33 "One wintry evening, early in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty, a keen north wind arose as it grew dark, and night came on with black and dismal looks. A bitter storm of sleet, sharp, dense, and icy-cold, swept the wet streets, and rattled on the trembling windows."could describe today in the same location too!
Jean wrote: "from chapter 33 "One wintry evening, early in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty, a keen north wind arose as it grew dark, and night came on with black and dismal looks. A b..."It's actually a good description of today here!
Brrr! I've obviously got your climate completely wrong in my mind, Charbel :) Thanks for popping in ...
Jean wrote: "Brrr! I've obviously got your climate completely wrong in my mind, Charbel :) Thanks for popping in ..."We have cold days and warm days. What did you think it was like?
I suppose temperate, but generally warmer than us. Based on nothing, I hasten to add!
Jean wrote: "I suppose temperate, but generally warmer than us. Based on nothing, I hasten to add!"It's pretty much like that most of the year, but these three month can get very cold. And where I live we often get some pretty scary winds.
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Only in Sicily it is warm all year long; but they have their winters as well!
I suppose I was quite taken with the idea that I'm only a couple of miles down the road from these events, and although it's set well over 200 years ago, some things are the same ...
Jean wrote: "I suppose temperate, but generally warmer than us. Based on nothing, I hasten to add!"I had the same impression. Funny how mistaken impressions circulate (and yes, about Italy as well)!
Jean wrote: "I suppose I was quite taken with the idea that I'm only a couple of miles down the road from these events, and although it's set well over 200 years ago, some things are the same ..."I think that is totally understandable :)
Jean, I'm slowly making my way through the many personal book posting threads in this group, but I wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoy reading your informative posts (and seeing the pictures). Gives me a new perspective on Dickens and his writing. Thank you!
How lovely! Thank you so much for saying, Monica! And do feel free to join in with my Dickens reads any time. Nobody seems to be reading this one alongside me at the moment, but I know some of our group have read it very recently - and it's great when people do comment :)
(Ohhh, superstitious...couldn't leave your thread hanging on comment number 666!)Yes, I'll watch for when you begin a new book, and perhaps read along. (At any rate, I am enjoying the comments.) The story of Dickens's personal life that sticks with me from years ago is (various versions) of his "unfriending" Hans Christian Andersen. It would be so much simpler to do in these days of social media.
Oh yes - it's been the subject of a few dramatisations hasn't it? My best guess is that they were both rather odd individuals - and both very strong-minded too!LOL - we've passed the "dangerous" number now ;)
I commented elsewhere for Alannah, so should say here too that I am loving Barnaby Rudge! I can remember having previously said (maybe a year ago?) that I didn't feel historical novels were Dickens's forte - well I now wish I could take that back as the descriptions of the riots are so powerful and intense. Yet his quirky humour is present too, in all the eccentric characters and environments. I know of no other author who can do this quite so well. This is my second reading of the novel (first was audio) and I am savouring every word.There's a definite switch in the second part - it's far more savage, and now I realise Charles Dickens's inspired choice of a simple-minded man for his focus character - it points up the ridiculousness of both the warring factions - ie the situation itself. Not only has Lord George Gordon (who is in this story presented as a deranged leader of the rioters) been sadly misinformed by his henchmen, but just in case you missed that, we have what Dickens calls a "natural" at the head of the riots, and standing guard over the treasure, ready to carry the can for all misdemeanours. And Grip of course provides a perfect foil - someone for him to pour his heart out to - all his steadfastness and determination - all his hopes of making his mother proud of him. Now he and Grip are both in (view spoiler), and I want to weep for the deliberate manipulation and contrived destruction of such innocent joy in life.
Charles Dickens's original title for this novel was "Gabriel Varden - The Locksmith of London", but by altering the title itself - even if he did not include any more episodes about Barnaby - he has made his readers focus more on Barnaby Rudge. Just brilliant!
I definitely prefer the current title to the original one.I'm not a history buff so I couldn't comment on his historical novels, but Dickens does have a way of describing the social status of his time matched only, in my opinion, by Victor Hugo.
HI all!Jean, I just found this thread and am THRILLED ! I LOVE DICKENS but alas, haven't read as much as I would like, due to time and eagerness to read a large cross of anything.
My favourite is Bleak House, by a mile, of what I've read so far.
Do you have an ongoing read currently...I'd love to join in, if I could.
Charbel, I'm sorry, but I, too, thought it was quite warm at your end of the rainbow, unless the weather currently in most of Canada and parts of the US - I LOVE the WIND as my favourite weather temperate, are yours cold? warm? wet? dry, I'm sincerely curious...thanks!
Cold during the winter and incredibly brutal, warm in the spring but quite pleasant in the mornings. The summers are hot, but it can get very cloudy and dark, and it sometimes rains. Autumn is generally warm. However, because of climate change, we are expected to have shorter winters and longer summers, as well as a significant increase in droughts. Generally it's temperate but often unpredictable.
Wow, I didn't know --- where exactly are you?
Janice - I'm part way through Barnaby Rudge and discussions on this one start at comment 628. You are very welcome to join in! :) Or if you prefer, then the next one will be Martin Chuzzlewit, as I'm reading them in order, and which I'll probably be starting in March or April. The loose plan is in comment 1.Charbel - I really must read Victor Hugo - I remember you making this comparison before. Charles Dickens only ever wrote two historical novels - this one and A Tale of Two Cities - which was much later. And by then he'd learnt his lesson, and did a lot of prior research, spending a lot of time with Thomas Carlyle discussing the French Revolution as well as borrowing many of Carlyle's books on the subject. This was because Barnaby Rudge had been criticised for having some details wrong. For example two of the characters in this one - Lord Gordon and Gashford - talk of the Catholic Relief Bill as though it was still under discussion, but it had already been passed as a law 2 years earlier in 1778, and the Gordon Riots were in fact a reaction to it.
That's not his real focus of interest though, nor mine! And the broad outline is correct. Individual characters spring to life, their idiosyncracies, vagaries and (in this novel) manipulative behaviour - what makes them tick - it's all there. The descriptions of mob mentality are spot-on - very detailed, grim and chilling. He really makes you see what is happening in your mind's eye:
"Covered with soot, and dirt, and dust, and lime; their garments torn to rags; their hair hanging wildly about them; their hands and faces jagged and bleeding with the wounds of rusty nails; Barnaby, Hugh, and Dennis hurried on before them all, like hideous madmen. After them, the dense throng came fighting on: some singing; some shouting in triumph; some quarrelling among themselves; some menacing the spectators as they passed; some with great wooden fragments, on which they spent their rage as if they had been alive, rending them limb from limb, and hurling the scattered morsels high into the air; some in a drunken state, unconscious of the hurts they had received from falling bricks, and stones, and beams; one borne upon a shutter, in the very midst, covered with a dingy cloth, a senseless, ghastly heap. Thus — a vision of coarse faces, with here and there a blot of flaring, smoky light; a dream of demon heads and savage eyes, and sticks and iron bars uplifted in the air, and whirled about; a bewildering horror, in which so much was seen, and yet so little, which seemed so long, and yet so short, in which there were so many phantoms, not to be forgotten all through life, and yet so many things that could not be observed in one distracting glimpse — it flitted onward, and was gone."
A glimpse straight from Dickens's imagination shooting into ours. I could choose many descriptions, but these next bits have a truly nightmarish quality for me:
"The more the fire crackled and raged, the wilder and more cruel the men grew; as though moving in that element they became fiends, and changed their earthly nature for the qualities that give delight in hell...
On the skull of one drunken lad — not twenty, by his looks — who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax. When the scattered parties were collected, men — living yet, but singed as with hot irons — were plucked out of the cellars, and carried off upon the shoulders of others, who strove to wake them as they went along, with ribald jokes, and left them, dead, in the passages of hospitals. But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted."
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Have you read anything by Thomas Carlyle Jean? He's always struck me as a very odd duck. Sartor Resartus for instance was perhaps one of the most bizarre, internally inconsistent, and disordered philosophical books I've ever read, but it had flashes of genius. I've read that he and Dickens were friends and shared a great mutual respect, but looking at their work, I find it all very puzzling. They seem so different in both philosophy and temperament. Perhaps if I read more of their work, I'd be able to get my head around it.
I haven't Greg, no. Perhaps it is the mark of a great artist when they can admire and respect one with a completely different outlook and perception. Or perhaps after all that is down to personality.
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Janice wrote: "Wow, I didn't know --- where exactly are you?"North Lebanon. Sorry Jean for turning your thread into the weather channel.
LOL don't worry, Charbel! The internet is nothing if not discursive - and I did start the theme off after all.It's just that with this book, being set in the small area where I'm living, everything seems to be more immediate. Things have moved on, and it just seems a very ordinary sort of place. Comment 638 shows what "The Maypole Inn", where a lot of it was set, looks like now. But the weather is the same! And people don't change much, just adapt to the mores of the society they're living in.
So when I think that just over 200 years ago this was a wild area at the mercy of desperate highwaymen, and those riots although maybe not correct in every detail did really happen, and the descriptions are of actual events, it seems very close to home. The horror feels very real. Whereas if I read a novel by Steven King, its a different sort of horror and not as intense. He once said, if he couldn't scare people then he tried to disgust them. Charles Dickens's descriptions of mob behaviour in Barnaby Rudge may not be gross as King's, but they are every bit as explicit in places, hair-raising and horrific. I'm sure that living where you do Charbel, you are very sensitive to this.
On the other hand, Dickens is a dab hand at the discursiveness I was talking about, and just when I think I can't take any more of this he has me laughing out loud with some ridiculous episode, description of an eccentric character - or just an observation in passing such as this:
“"It’s as plain", returned Solomon, "as the nose on Parkes’s face" – Mr Parkes, who had a large nose, rubbed it, and looked as if he considered this a personal allusion.”
Yes, I think he knows people inside out, Greg, although to a certain extent he is constrained by the times he lives in, as are we all. We have more opportunities than ever now to look at different ways of seeing the world, but sadly not all people open up their minds.
As I scrolled through my Kindle I noticed one Dickens book written not by Charles, but by Mamie: My Father as I Recall Him (from Project Gutenberg). I enjoyed her perspective. Clearly she loved her father. Have you read it?
No I haven't, Monica, although I have heard of it. Would you recommend it? Mamie Dickens did indeed love Charles Dickens very dearly, and some now think she sanitised quite a lot of her writing about him. She was Dickens's second child, and called after Mary Hogarth, his sister-in-law, with whom he was besotted. Mamie never married and stayed with Dickens until his death. She helped to edit her father's letters and as well as the book you have, My Father as I Recall Him (1896), she also published an earlier one about him entitled, Charles Dickens, By His Eldest Daughter (1885).
Yes Jean, I do recommend it. His daugter provided some insight into his writing process; the creation of some of his characters, and his deep connection to them. She also wrote about the death of Mary Hogarth, saying: "The shock of her sudden death so affected and prostrated him that the publication of "Pickwick" was interrupted for two months."
It is a short book (by comparison); less than 200 pages. (Something else for you to add to your very long reading list.) I enjoyed the glimpse into his personal life through her eyes. It has some nice illustrations as well. I'd be curious to see if you would discover anything new in it, or perhaps a different version of a story you had read elsewhere. Keep it in mind for a time when you have nothing better to do ;-)
Monica - Yes, I first mentioned that (it was May 1837) in comment 53, when I'd first noticed it myself, and went on to investigate why. He actually missed one issue. Here's part of my comment 77, "coming up to the part where Dickens missed deadlines for the only time in his life, in June 1837. In May 1837 his wife (Catherine)'s sister Mary Hogarth had died, and he was grieving for her. (It's thought by many that he was closer to her than to his wife.) Monthly issues of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist were not published. That's at the end of chapter 39, just before the one that starts:
"Introduces Mr Pickwick to a new and not uninteresting Scene in the great Drama of Life.""
And we went on to discuss how different the story was after that point. He got a lot more subdued and described scenes in the prison, rather than the comic scenes we had had so far.
I reproduced the schedule for the publication of The Pickwick Papers is in my comment 42.
And here is my review of The Pickwick Papers.
Thanks for commenting, Monica - I'll definitely add it to my list! The illustrations are tempting me too ... Perhaps I'll read her first one first though.
And if you are interested in exploring the idea of Dickens's connection to his characters, I've recently read (and reviewed link here) an excellent and most entertaining book by the actor Simon Callow, entitled Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, where he talks about Dickens's psychology - as an actor who secondarily wrote.
Happy Birthday Charles Dickens!
Indeed Terri! I've plastered it all all over the place - and forgotten here! So thank you :)
This is a quotation from chapter 68, which is incredibly graphic and horrible. I do not want to lose it,"But there was a worse spectacle than this - worse by far than fire and smoke, or even the rabble's unappeasable and maniac rage. The gutters of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, overflowed the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into which the people dropped down dead by dozens. They lay in heaps all round this fearful pond, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, women with children in their arms and babies at their breasts, and drank until they died. While some stooped with their lips to the brink and never raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation, until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed them. Nor was even this the worst or most appalling kind of death that happened on this fatal night. From the burning cellars, where they drank out of hats, pails, buckets, tubs, and shoes, some men were drawn, alive, but all alight from head to foot; who, in their unendurable anguish and suffering, making for anything that had the look of water, rolled, hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed up liquid fire which lapped in all it met with as it ran along the surface, and neither spared the living nor the dead."
Thanks, Jean. I've added Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World to my reading list.Yes, Happy Birthday to Charles Dickens!
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Yes indeed Monica! Happy Birthday to a great writer!
I've never read a Dickens novel and don't read too many classics. Can you suggest a Dickens to start off with?
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I've written this title down. I'll have a go at it sooner or later
Jean - you asked me to copy this to you.A Dickens of a list
For some time now I've been wanting to know what the comparative lengths are of Dickens's novels. Your guess is as good as mine as to why I've been wanting to know this, but yesterday, thanks to @DickensDaily on Twitter, I was made aware of the ranking by word count that I reproduce below:
1. David Copperfield: 357,489
2. Dombey and Son: 357,484
3. Bleak House: 355,936
4. Little Dorrit: 339,870
5. Martin Chuzzlewit: 338,077
6. Our Mutual Friend: 327,727
7. Nicholas Nickleby: 323,722
8. The Pickwick Papers: 302,190
9. Barnaby Rudge: 255,229
10. The Old Curiosity Shop: 218,538
11. Great Expectations: 186,339
12. Oliver Twist: 158,631
13. A Tale of Two Cities: 137,000
14. Hard Times: 104,821
15. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 96,178 (first 6 of 12 parts only)
Thank you very much John :)I shall be starting my next Dickens read Martin Chuzzlewit, or as everybody thinks of it, "The American One" in about a week's time.
I'm starting to read all of Dickens's novels (I'm on Oliver Twist now). Is The Mystery of Edwin Drood worth reading, even though it is incomplete?
Benjamin wrote: "I'm starting to read all of Dickens's novels (I'm on Oliver Twist now). Is The Mystery of Edwin Drood worth reading, even though it is incomplete?"I think so, though the unfinished bit bothered me quite a bit.
Benjamin - Sometimes I thought it was like reading notes, but yes, I agree with Charbel - I'd say it is worth reading, eventually. It is the last thing he ever wrote though and his middle novels are much better! It has a different feel too, and is quite a bit shorter. Some people have written endings, I gather, but Dickens didn't leave enough information for any authentic ending.
Wow, \I LOVE DICKENS, Bleak House is my favourite but thank you John, I'll copy this to my word doc and start reading book by book, shld take me about 2 years, I would think - my new project as there are some that I've not yet read due to time required.thanks again!
Hi Janice - hope you see this - and call back and comment whenever you are reading one. I do agree about Bleak House. But in case you haven't noticed, the list John posted is by word count, so I'm sure he will agree is a bit of an oddity, and not at all an "approved" order to read them in!The actual personal challenge which I set for myself, is to read all of the novels of Charles Dickens in order of publication. The list for this is in the first message in this thread, along with my explanation, and a note of where to find all the comments on each novel so far.
I love people to drop in and out of this, and you can see that many have already, so you are very welcome to do so:)
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Yet he still is essentially Dickens. Within all that darkness he'll sometimes pop a quirky character, or a droll episode, the description of which makes me laugh out loud. It's still very episodic although there's more direction.
I did find Dolly tiresome at the beginning, but very funny from the beginning. Parts like these,
"Dolly's eyes, by one of those strange accidents for which there is no accounting, wandered to the glass again"
"To make one's sweetheart miserable is well enough and quite right, but to be made miserable one's self is a little too much!"
show a keen eye for the vanity of youth by Dickens. One feels he is somehow in love with his coquettish character yet if she existed in real life she'd be unbearable!
She's improving a little now though, and we see an inner astuteness coming out, when she remarks of the manipulative smooth-talker (view spoiler)[Mr Chester (hide spoiler)],
"I'm pretty sure he was making game of us, more than once."
I didn't expect such a little cutie to be quite so acute.