I’m in the process right now of reading George Orwell’s mammoth (and unbelievably good) essay on Charles Dickens. It is dense, exciting – and it’s making me want to pick up all of those books again. I re-read Great Expectations a couple years ago – but the other ones it’s been a long long time. Orwell’s observations (especially as an Englishman) are invaluable. It’s serendiptous – because I opened up one of my favorite sites today – to find this as the first item on display. I used to have an illustrated Oliver Twist – with similar type drawings, but I have no idea where that book went.
I like Orwell’s observation about Dickens and children. Orwell was notoriously horribly treated (his essay Such, such were the joys is pretty much an indictment of the entire education system in England – ack – it’s painful to read) – but here he is on one of Dickens’ undeniable gifts – the ability to write from the perspective of a little kid:
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.
More great stuff, too, when Orwell basically takes down the Socialist writers who want to “claim” Dickens as one of “them”. Orwell basically says, “Uhm, no he’s not.”
I love that Orwell puts the smackdown in the Dickens-as-Socialist hypothesis. One of the things that frustrates me no end is when some group takes a well-loved artist of the past (who may have lived and worked before the group or its philosophy even really existed) and says, well, yeah, he’s one of OURS.
I haven’t read nearly enough Dickens. I have a lovely old set of his works that I found for a song at a small antiques shop. I read Great Expectations out of it and started Bleak House (but, got really busy with other stuff and lost the thread and never finished it). And I read David Copperfield YEARS ago, and of course A Christmas Carol. But yeah, Dickens is great! And it irks me when high school students who are made to read him sit around and complain about the books.
Well Orwell was a pretty serious Socialist, too- but – well, his whole journey is a really interesting one, philosophically – the dogma he accepted, and the dogma he rejected. He’s like Hitchens – an independent man. But Orwell really analyzes the whole Dickens thing in such a specific way – showing that even though everyone parrots “Dickens was a champion of the poor” – he kind of wasn’t, if you really look at it. Dickens did not write about the “proletariat”. They show up in his books peripherally – as servants, usually as comic figures. The real star of Dickens’ book is the up-and-coming middle class – the shopkeepers and clerks. The poor are not sentimentalized at ALL, like with most Socialist writers. Dickens sees poverty as something to get out of, and quickly.
It’s an excellent essay – it’s probably 50 pages long, so I’m making my way thru it slowly.
OH – and coincidentally – the book Possession (which people are still talking about in that comment thread below – wherever it is) is kind of about your first comment: scholars (with axes to grind – usually political or social) ‘CLAIM’ these writers for themselves – for ideological reasons.
Emily Dickinson is really Gloria Steinem in disguise.
Shakespeare was really a drag queen.
Etc. So many examples of this!!! Possession shows these two present-day scholars, who really believe that they ‘OWN’ these Victorian poets – but when they start to read the private letters, they begin to realize that … people don’t fit into nice ideological boxes. And definitely good writers don’t, either.
I remember reading and really liking Tale of Two Cities in high school – I HAD to read it, but I do remember liking it a LOT. For some reason, I have been reading Dickens since I was a little kid – maybe because of my obsession with the movie Oliver?? I think that might have been my ‘way in’ – I loved that movie so much that the books didn’t scare me or put me off. I got right into them.
“Oliver” as a gateway drug.
Ha ha ha ha. I like it.
I was never “made to read” any of the “Famous” high-school tomes; in junior high we did very little reading (which was sad). In high school, the teachers selected more oddball books and stories. (We read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” which I think is a TERRIFIC high-school book, and we read “The Awakening” which just made me mad at the protagonist, and we read stories like “Two Bottles of Relish,” which was creepy and wonderful. We read a lot of ancient Greek stuff, but it was cool, because the teachers brought out how very different the ideas of Honor and Glory were in that culture. I still want to make time to read the Fagles translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.)
I never read “Great Expectations” until I picked it up on my own. Stil haven’t read “Silas Marner” (another (in)famous school-read book) but have a copy on the shelf.
Wow – that sounds like a really interesting curriculum!!
Do not even get me started on the Awakening. I wanted her to drown herself in chapter 1.
Didn’t George say that Dickens’ social philosophy boiled down to “Everybody should be nicer”?
Also, as a voracious Dickens reader (Copperfield 5 times, once aloud to an audience of one) and admirer of the hilarious and fitting names he invented, I nominate Prince Turveydrop to head the list (not a prince, no, his given name is Prince!) Wait, no, Wackford Squeers, no, I mean Mr. Guppy ,no , I mean … I give up. When you get right down to it, Ebenezer Scrooge ain’t bad.
Steve – yes, that’s just what Orwell said! “Everything would work just fine in this world – education, industrialization, politics, law – if everyone would just be nicer!!”
and i totally agree about the names. They’re all so JUICY.
that is one of the things I love about Dickens…having a little private chuckle as I read about those NAMES. Those wonderful, ludicrous names.
And you know? I agree with Dickens’ social philosophy. The world would be a better place if people made the effort to be nicer. And it would be an EASIER place. I’m not saying it would cause world peace and end poverty and all that – I’m not a hippie – but I do think a lot of people would be happier, that there would be fewer of the “grind your face in it” miseries of every day life.
because from where I stand (sit?) there seem to be a lot of instances of people just screwing with other people because they can, or because it gives them a sick sense of power, or whatever.
ricki – hahaha I know! I think Dickens is onto something. Orwell talks a lot about how he ISN’T a revolutionary – he has a horror of mob violence (uhm Tale of 2 Cities? It’s hard to believe that those revolutionary Marxists would read Dickens and think he would approve of what they were trying to do) … Dickens didn’t think the structures were sick and twisted – even child labor laws – He just thought that those in power should just be NICER with their power. Ebenezer Scrooge was not BAD for being rich … he was BAD for being an old meanie. hahaha
I should say – the LACK of child labor laws.
I am so glad other people didn’t like the Awakening. My teacher would go on and on about how she was being so noble and true to herself and didn’t have a choice and it made me mad, because she could have chosen to suck it up and not abandon her family. Really, she was whiny and annoying. Abdicating responsibility is not a virtue! Man, I was an English major, but my classes always upset me so much because I would be the only one to disagree with the teacher, at least out loud. I’m shy in real life, I have no idea why I’d speak up in class. Obviously, I feel very strongly about books.
And that has nothing to do with Dickens. Uh, I’m a fan! Actually, I just got the miniseries of Our Mutual Friend for my birthday recently, and I reread the book often.
“Abdicating responsibility is not a virtue!”
Actually, from what I’ve seen, in some people’s worlds it is. Or rather, being “true” to what you think you are is a greater virtue, and so throwing over everything you’ve agreed to do – even if that means hurting people like your CHILDREN – is okay and even laudable because, you know, you are “fulfilling your destiny.”
I don’t know. I’m all for following one’s bliss but I’ve seen waaaaaaaaay too many situations where someone figures out that their “bliss” is to drop out of society and be a beachcomber, or run off with a person 20 years their junior, or something like that – leaving the family they already had in the lurch.
Maybe I’m bitterer about this than I should be – because I live alone, I have no husband, no family and it ticks me off to see people throwing what is often a good thing away for some untested thing. (ANd I’m also bitterer about it than I might be because there have been a few instances of where I’ve been called upon to pick up some of the dropped work- or volunteer-responsibilities of someone who decided it was their “bliss” to only do the things they absolutely WANTED to…)
gah…this has gone really far afield. But even as a fairly self-absorbed teenager (I actually LIKED “Catcher in the Rye.” My 37 year old self looks at my 16 year old self and shakes her head and says, how could you have thought of Holden as some sort of hero?) I was really, really annoyed at the woman in The Awakening.
Sheila – used to read TOTC every summer throughout highschool. Also read Nicholas Nickleby after seeing Roger Rees in the PBS broadcast of the live-production. But TOTC is my absolute fav book as well.
My obsession went so far as to compelling me to write a fanfiction story for it…although at the time, I had no idea that what I was writing was fanfiction. Managed to get it published by a small press in Pennsylvania (no money though, of course, as is right).
Have you seen the Masterpiece Theatre version of TOTC? The one with James Wilby in it? Wilby is one of my favorite actor crushes. Unabashedly British and has been in many Ivory Merchant films. If you saw Howards End, he was Hopkin’s oldest son, Charles, who ends up…well, I wont spoil the ending.