Book review

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1855-1857

I have finally finished this year’s Dickens, Little Dorrit, with what I am embarrassed to admit was a sense of relief! It took me around two months to complete it. As will be obvious, at no point in the nine hundred pages did the novel ever really engage me. There were some characters who were more interesting, but their stories frequently fizzled out and were incomplete. I found the main plot line mechanical and dull, and most of the peripheral characters were two-dimensional. There were one or two elements of the novel that were unexpected, which I will expand upon below, but despite this I found it flawed and disappointing. As is probably too often the case, I am going to devote the bulk of this review to working out why I found it so.

Taking a step back for a moment, why do we read Dickens? It can’t really be for his plots – they are drawn out, driven by the demands of publication by instalment. They usually include hackneyed and repetitive plot devices: profoundly unlikely coincidences, long lost relatives reappearing after decades, lost wills, hidden identities and sudden reversal of fortunes. Little Dorrit has all these tropes and more, assembled in a slightly random order. When the myriad plot lines are resolved at the end of the novel the explanation given is baffling complex and improbable – the reader could never in a million years have worked out what was really going on behind all the subterfuge. Nor, frankly, would they have cared. The events of Little Dorrit pivot (we eventually find out) on a codicil to a will that passes through many hands before ending in those of a blackmailer, but by the time the intentions of the deceased are revealed it has long since ceased to matter.

Or do we read Dickens for his characters? Here the case is stronger – many of his creations live on in popular culture: Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Sam Weller, Mr Micawber and so on. But I would struggle to make this claim for any of the characters in Little Dorrit. The heroine, Amy Dorrit, is a kind and loving daughter, but her relationship with Arthur Clennam, the novel’s hero, if he can be called such, is one of Dickens many rather creepy much older man/young woman relationships which are so problematic in the light of the author’s personal life. Throughout the novel Clennam refers to Amy as ‘my child’, ‘my daughter’, or variations on this idea, and even though their eventual marriage is one of the least surprising events of the novel, it still feels uncomfortable. Of the novel’s other principal characters, the villain, Rigaud, is an appalling caricature, with his satanic smirk and twirling moustache. He is introduced to the reader from the outset as a cynical murderer and he never once shows any redeeming features nor any sign that he is going to defy the role he is cast in. He flits in and out of the narrative occasionally without ever progressing the plot, only to finally re-emerge to meet a grisly if fitting end.

Some of the novel’s minor characters showed more promise. John, the lovelorn junior warden of the Marshalsea pines away for Amy Dorrit with surprising dignity. Daniel Doyce is an entrepreneur who invents a mechanism – we ever never told anything more about it than it is potentially very useful – which is throttled by the bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office. (In his essay on Dickens, to which I return every time I read anything by the latter, Orwell says “Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s “invention” in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, “of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures”, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the “invention” is!) Dickens is making a somewhat clumsy point about the dead hand of the Government service upon the spirit of industry and the absence of any effective intellectual property legislation. As the UK was at the height of the industrial revolution at this time, driven by innovation and enterprise, the satire barely lands a blow, despite the effort Dickens put into the portrait. Doyce eventually travels abroad – to Russia no less, which in the 1820’s (the novel’s setting) was not particularly problematic, but in the 1850’s the UK was at war with Russia in the Crimea – to find more rewarding work. There he prospers, only to finally return to London at the novel’s conclusion. We never really find out what happens to him, what his patent was for, whether it was granted, nor whether his new business succeeds (we can infer that it does).

Perhaps my favourite minor character was Flora Finching. Many years earlier she was engaged to be married to Arthur Clennam. His return from working in the far East finds her a widow. She cares for a truculent aunt of her late husband, nurtures a hope that her relationship with Arthur might be rekindled and speaks in a stream of consciousness that is one of the joys of the novel:

My Goodness Arthur! cried Flora, rising to give him a cordial reception, ‘Doyce and Clennam what a start and a surprise for though not far from the machinery and foundry business and surely might be taken sometimes if at no other time about midday when a glass of sherry and a humble sandwich of whatever cold meat in the larder might not come amiss nor taste the worse for being friendly for you know you buy it somewhere and wherever bought a profit must be made or they would never keep a place it stands to reason without a motive still never seen and learnt now not to be expected for as Mr F himself said if seeing is believing not seeing is believing too and when you don’t see you may fully believe you’re not remembered not that I expect you Arthur Doyce and Clennam to remember me why should I for the days are gone but bring another teacup here directly and tell her fresh toast and pray sit near the fire.”

Many reviewers accept that Little Dorrit is a sprawling mess, populated by thinly sketched characters and with a plot that manages to be both predictable and full of improbable coincidences. But “look at the social commentary” we are told. So let’s. The two main targets Dickens takes aim at in the novel are Government bureaucracy, in the form of the Circumlocution Office, and the practice of imprisoning people for debt, in this case in the very personal description of the Marshalsea debtor’s prison (Dickens’ father had served time in the Marshalsea and it clearly had a significant impact on Charles’s childhood. He was forced to leave school at the age of 12 to earn his keep).

The Circumlocution Office, Dickens’s attack on Government bureaucracy, is introduced in Chapter 10, ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government”:

“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.”

This is just a small part of the description of the operation of the Office – Dickens writes at considerable length about the inefficiency and bloody-mindedness of the people who run the Office purely as a means of lining their own pockets without any consideration for the wider interests of the country. Nepotism is the key driver of this form of government. Reading the descriptions and Clennam’s relentless efforts to navigate the system, first to find a way to have Mr Dorrit released from debtor’s prison, and subsequently to secure a patent for Doyce’s mysterious invention, no-one who has ever struggled with bureaucracy, who has ever been put on hold for hours on end, or who has written countless letters in pursuit of a simple reply, could fail to empathise with the frustration described. Dickens was pushing at an open door here. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report into the operation of Government business had been published in February 1854 and to this day remains the founding document of the British Civil Service, enshrining it with “core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer its loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next”. The report accepted that the administration of Government was being crippled “both in internal efficiency and in public estimation”. I am not convinced this is effective satire. It’s taking a swipe at an easy target where the problem has already been recognised and was being addressed. It’s powerfully done, more with a steamroller than a scalpel.

Imprisonment for debt is portrayed as an everyday part of life in Victorian England. You fall into debt, you suffer the consequences. For some that included a lifestyle better than that enjoyed outside the walls of the prison. The reader is left to decide for themselves whether this is a sensible method of collecting money from people who don’t have any. (It is not widely known that while the 1869 Debtors’ Act largely abolished prison as a sanction for non-payment of debt in the UK, the Judgment Summons procedure still exists and includes imprisonment as a possible if little used sanction available to the Court:

” A judgment summons is an application by a creditor under s 5 of the Debtors Act 1869 requiring the debtor to attend court in circumstances where payment is due under an outstanding debt. If the creditor can prove to the satisfaction of the court, beyond reasonable doubt, that (a) the debtor either has or has had since the date of the original order or judgment the means to pay the sum owing under the original order or judgment and (b) has refused or neglected to pay, or refuses or neglects to pay, the debtor may be committed to prison for a period of up to six weeks or until payment of the sum which is owing.”)

Did Dickens’ portrait of the Marshalsea lead to the passage of the Debtors Act (which largely removed imprisonment as a sanction for debt)? I think we take it for granted that the answer to the question is largely yes, even if the impact of Little Dorrit was more to create a general perception that debtors’ prisons were cruel and ineffective, rather than leading directly to the reform legislation itself. It’s worth noting incidentally that the Marshalsea had closed in 1842, long before Little Dorrit was published (as Dickens explicitly acknowledges). I think this might be worth a deep dive one day, because I fear the truth might be more complicated. We know Dickens hated debtors’ prisons, because of what happened to his family and the impact it had on the trajectory of his own life. But if you take that out of the equation, is the portrait of the Marshalsea that harsh? Is being locked up there as bad as being in a criminal prison? To be honest, life in the Marshalsea actually seems quite comfortable. The warders are polite to the prisoners and happy to run them errands, rather than brutalising them. Perhaps this needs a separate post – were Victorian debtors prisons really that bad? (And if they were, why does Dickens make them sounds so bearable?)

It is usually fairly obvious in what overall direction Dickens’ novels are heading. But I got one thing seriously wrong in my anticipation of the plot of Little Dorrit. At the end of the first book, Mr Dorrit, having been locked away in the Marshalsea for decades, is, through the efforts of Clennam and Mr Pancks, discovered to be heir to a large fortune. We are told no more about it than that – he is going to inherit lots of money. I thought at this point that fate would intervene to prevent him from ever receiving his inheritance – most likely that he would die just before the will passes Probate, delayed by the incompetence or malevolence of the Circumlocution Office. But surprisingly no, it all goes completely smoothly and he leaves the Marshalsea with his head held high, spending most of the rest of the novel with his family and a vast entourage in Venice and Rome, trying all the while to bury his ignominious past. He is haunted by any suggestion that he was once a debtor, and takes offence at the slightest imaginary suggestion of his former life. He is accepted into this new strata of society without hesitation – his money is as good as anyone’s. Dickens seems to suggest that a life of wealth has parallels with the Dorrit’s former life of poverty, constrained as both were by society’s expectations. I am not so sure this point lands – spending one’s life on holiday without any restrictions on what one can buy or do seems pretty nice compared to the Marshalsea of Bleeding Heart Yard.

The novel’s meandering predictable plot, its unlovable or unbelievable characters, its ineffective satire and loose threads, illuminated only occasionally by flashes of humour, probably explain why Little Dorrit ranks below many of Dickens great novels. At least in my totally unscientific ranking system anyway!

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1855-1857

Book review

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, 1846-1848

Any reader of Dombey and Son is presented with a puzzle – why isn’t it any good? I knew before I started it that the novel was one of Dickens’ ‘lesser’ works: not lesser in length, unfortunately – it runs to nearly 1000 pages – but poorly thought of, by both critics and general readers alike. It is not widely read any more (it has 1,000 reviews on Goodreads, but Great Expectations has 22,000!) doesn’t appear on many academic reading lists, and has never been filmed. Even Andrew Davies abandoned an attempt to turn it into a television series despite having made successes of less obvious material. So as I read I was looking out for the flaws or weaknesses that would explain this lack of popularity. I didn’t have to look far.

(Incidentally, I am aware that this might seem a very negative way of reading any novel. Surely it would be better to be positive, to look for the novel’s strength and good points? Of course. But I’d make two points about this: a) I can’t unknow what I know about the novel and b) I am simply being honest about my mindset – this blog is not about presenting myself as some kind of idealised reader, burning their way through the classics, but an honest description of the books I read and what I think about them. I did look for the positives in Dombey and Son – nothing would have given me more pleasure than to have discovered an overlooked Dickens masterpiece, but that isn’t what happened. Because it isn’t.)

The plot is very limited despite the novel’s length. Not much happens, and the small number of events that do occur are heavily telegraphed. For example: Walter, an office boy sent to work overseas by his company (Dombey and Son) goes missing when his ship capsizes in a storm. There can’t have been a reader on the planet who did not expect Walter to re-emerge – the only surprise was just how long it took Dickens to bring him back. Similarly when Walter first meets the novel’s proto-heroine, Florence, his uncle Sol and his uncle’s friend Captain Cuttle both predict what will happen – that one day Walter and Florence will marry. And guess what?

Everything you expect to find in a typical Dickens novel is present. A huge cast of characters (over 50), long rambling plot lines that are sewn together conveniently at the end, comic scenes of extreme behaviour, all set in a foggy London that is undergoing rapid change due to the arrival of the railways. In fact the parts of the novel describing the arrival of the railways are some of the most interesting in the book:

“The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.”

This is Dickens giving it both barrels, over-writing to the extreme, but just about getting away with it. Despite this characterisation of the railway as a destructive phenomenon, later descriptions show the positive benefits of the coming of rail – in particular the Toodles family prosper from its construction. Later still the railway is to have a decisive role in the fate of the novel’s principal villain, Mr Carker.

The plot centres on the hubris of the industrialist, financier and merchant Paul Dombey. Dombey wants a son to continue the family name and business. He is obsessed with this ambition and as a result neglects his daughter simply because her sex, particularly once his second child, a son, is born. However Paul junior is a weak and sickly child who eventually dies a characteristically Dickensian death, fading away slowly but inevitably. Having lost his wife in Paul’s birth Dombey disastrously remarries. His second wife, Edith, is effectively sold by her mother on the marriage market, and can’t stand her new husband, and refuses to make any pretence at doing so. We can safely assume their marriage is loveless and unconsummated. He uses Carker to act as a go-between between himself and his new wife, to disastrous effect. As a villain, Carker is a failure. He plots and schemes and positions himself at the heart of Dombey’s business, but then has no real plan other than adultery, and that fails miserably. If he is driven by passion rather than a Machiavellian cunning then there is no sign of it.

Dombey is a deeply unpleasant character, proud and arrogant, and devoid of any love or affection. He doesn’t have a convincing redemption story – he is eventually reconciled with his daughter, and is shown being affectionate towards his grandchildren, but for the reader this is far too little too late. His second wife, Edith, is equally proud and unrelenting, and her (step)maternal bond with Florence is all too brief. Both characters are brought low by their pride.

The novel’s principal sub-plot tells the story of Walter Gay and his uncle Solomon Gills, owner of a profoundly unsuccessful nautical instruments shop, and Sol’s friend, an old seaman named Captain Cuttle. Walter and family act largely as a counterpoint to the emotionally sterile Dombey household, but also provide most of the comedic scenes of the novel. There is another, lightly sketched and under-developed sub-plot involving Mr Carker’s older brother, his sister, and one of Carker junior’s former lovers. This sub-plot fizzles out with a resolution, of sort, but not one the reader feels in any way invested in. It is clearly intended as a counterpoint to the main Dombey/Edith storyline, but fails to do anything other than simply echo it.

Were there any redeeming features in the novel, anything to recommend it? The minor characters are entertaining, including those already mentioned, to which I would add the endearing Mr Toots and the indefatigable Susan Nipper, who almost alone amongst the novel’s characters is prepare to give Mr Dombey a piece of her mind. The railway descriptions are interesting records of the first flourishes of the age of steam. But that’s pretty much it. There are unquestionably many better Dickens’ novels and I can really only recommend Dombey for completists. Its reputation is unfortunately justified.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, 1846-1848

Book review

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, 1843

This year’s Dickens was an easy choice. Oliver Twist is the last of the major Dickens novel I had to (re)read, and it is such a familiar cultural artefact! The musical Oliver! is an important part of that feeling of course, and a comparison between the plot choices in the novel and the musical is illuminating. The characters Dickens created in this novel – Fagin, Sikes, the Artful Dodger and Oliver himself – are remarkably vivid and enduring.

I’ve written before about Dickens’s consistency as a novelist. It’s hard to believe that Oliver Twist was arguably his first ‘proper’ novel. The Pickwick Papers is now seen and published as a novel but at the time it was

written it was conceived and constructed as a very loose series of stories with no serious intention of publishing it as a single book. Oliver may have had a similar origin – it was published in instalments, as all Dickens’ s novels were, and there is every reason to believe that Dickens constructed all but the broadest elements of the plot as he went along, rather than having a master plan – but the final product is far more cohesive and carefully structured. It has a beginning a middle and an end, and a plot running through it joining all the parts, even if the plot is the weakest part of the whole. The publication history of Oliver is actually even more complex than I have suggested, because about two-thirds of the way of it being published in instalments Dickens fell out with the publisher and had it published in novel form as well. So the text was available as a novel before the instalments were all published.

Anyway, to the novel itself. Critics have long argued (see Orwell’s wonderful essay on Dickens for example) that Dickens’s experience of being taken out of school and sent to work in a factory at an early age was so traumatic an experience that it threw a shadow over most of his writing. Certainly there are echoes here of this experience – Oliver is left an orphan from birth and suffers at the hands of an uncaring welfare system. He survives, somehow, where many do not and is sent to work at a very early age as an undertaker’s assistant. He is bullied remorselessly in this post and to avoid having to return to the workhouse runs away to London. Here he is quickly picked up by the Artful Dodger (and the lesser remembered Charley Bates) and taken back to Fagin’s hideout, where he is trained to be a pickpocket. It is important to note that as soon as he realises what is happening – and it takes quite some time, because he is very naïve – Oliver refuses to consider any criminality at all. This is important for Dickens – he wants to keep Oliver’s conscience clear, and avoid any suggestion that criminality is an inevitable consequence of poverty. Oliver is nevertheless arrested on suspicion of picking the pocket of an elderly gentleman who is buying some books. This it turns out is Mr Brownlow, a kindly gentleman who takes Oliver in from the street and nurses him back to good health. The kindly old gentleman who helps out unfortunate children is one of those literary stereotypes that seems to have been around forever, but I am not sure there are many examples before Dickens.

Of course there are good archetypes and bad, and Fagin, consistently referred to as ‘the Jew’ in most editions (although some are sanitised) is a chilling portrait of the racist, anti-Semitic image that was largely accepted in Victorian England. When we first meet Fagin he is described as a “very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair”. There’s no escaping the poisonous nature of this caricature, and the only thing that can be said in Dickens’s defence is that when subsequently challenged on the portrait he made attempts to apologies by writing more positive Jewish characters in his later novels. While Fagin’s Jewishness is portrayed as the source of all his character flaws, he remains a fascinating portrait of evil. The gang of child thieves shown in the stage and film musical and still consistently referred to in reference works, don’t appear in the novel – it’s just Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, which hints at various other associates currently spending time at His Majesty’s pleasure, or even having previously paid the ultimate price. Dickens is very clear that criminality is a highly dangerous, unattractive, and not very well rewarded career choice.

Nancy is another fascinating character. Dickens never uses the word prostitute to describe her, nor any other of a thousand synonyms, but he may as well because there is no doubt whatsoever of her profession. Her’s is a sympathetic, almost affectionate portrait, and her murder is one of the most dramatic and traumatic scenes Dickens ever wrote, terrible in its domesticity and mundaneness, tragic in Nancy’s refusal to take the escape offered her time and again, and chilling in its description first by an omniscient narrator:

“It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.”

then once the murder is committed, the perspective switches to Bill’s:

Once he threw a rug over it; but it was worse to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving towards him, than to see them glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling. He had plucked it off again. And there was the body—mere flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh, and so much blood! He struck a light, kindled a fire, and thrust the club into it. There was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder, and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney. Even that frightened him, sturdy as he was;

Notice that Nancy’s body becomes ‘it’, not ‘her’.

The only criminal character who Dickens seems unconcerned to paint as having a bad character and to be destined for the gallows or worse is the Artful Dodger. While his associate Charley Bates is so appalled by Nancy’s murder that he ‘shops’ Sikes and eventually gives up crime entirely, we last see Jack Dawkins controlling the courtroom where he is being committed (some have claimed Dodger is sentenced to transcription to Australia, but this was not at all clear in the Penguin Classics edition I read – possibly Dickens tidied things up in later editions. Dodger’s refusal to be cowed by the criminal justice system is quite magnificent:

‘No,’ replied the Dodger, ‘not here, for this ain’t the shop for justice: besides which, my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning with the Wice President of the House of Commons; but I shall have something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous and ‘spectable circle of acquaintance as’ll make them beaks wish they’d never been born, or that they’d got their footmen to hang ‘em up to their own hat-pegs, afore they let ‘em come out this morning to try it on upon me. I’ll—’

‘There! He’s fully committed!’ interposed the clerk. ‘Take him away.’ ‘Come on,’ said the jailer.

‘Oh ah! I’ll come on,’ replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. ‘Ah! (to the Bench) it’s no use your looking frightened; I won’t show you no mercy, not a ha’porth of it. You’ll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something! I wouldn’t go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison! Take me away!’ With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it; and then grinning in the officer’s face, with great glee and self-approval.

(I think this is clear – Dodger is ‘fully committed’ i.e. sent for trial, not sentenced (the clerk couldn’t sentence him anyway), and after this point we do not hear from Dodger again – he is conspicuously absent from the author’s final ‘what happened next to everyone’ chapter.

It has to be said that the novel’s plot is repetitive and dull. Oliver is first kidnapped by Fagin, innocently involved in an attempted crime by two of Fagin’s associates (Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger, who both run away) rescued by kind Mr Brownlow and nursed back to health. Then the whole cycle starts again. He is (re)kidnapped by Bill and Nancy, innocently involved in the attempted burglary and rescued again by the intended victims, Mrs Maylie and her ward, Rose while his erstwhile criminal associates, Bill Sikes and Toby Crackit, run away. Each rescue is followed by a long period of recuperation and lots of Victorian charity and kindliness. Each intended victim is remarkably closely connected to Oliver’s and at the time totally unknown real family. And each time Oliver is suspected of involvement in the crime but protected by his kindly saviours. All the while ‘Monks’ lurks in the background of the plot with obvious sinister intent, although I suspect almost all readers will not care in the slightest what he is up to. All but the broadest detail of the secret inheritances, half brothers, lockets and nonsense used to tie things up and rescue Oliver from poverty and worse the curse of being working class is eminently forgettable, and it is hardly surprising that this was all excised from the musical adaptation without any impact of the story’s impact. But none of that really matters, because we still have a host of vivid characters and wonderful, haunting writing in chapters such as ‘Fagin’s Last Night‘ to savour and remember.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, 1843

Book review

This incredibly authoritative not to say weighty biography of Britain’s greatest novelist left me with a renewed respect for Dickens the author, but some of the revelations left me equally disappointed with Dickens the husband and father.

Slater’s biography follows the traditional format of all such works. Dickens’s early life is recorded in detail elsewhere, not least by Dickens himself in an autobiographical fragment published soon after his death by his close friend and first biographer, John Forster. Slater claims that the period when Dickens’s family went through hard financial times and had to withdraw him from school and send him to work, aged 14, in a blacking factory, was a key turning point in his life. It, Slater argues, haunted him for the rest of his life, and he constantly returns to it in his work, letters, and personal life. That point felt overstated, although I obviously defer to the author’s infinitely more detailed knowledge of Dickens’s life and work. Once these years are over, the text is focussed on composition of Dickens’s 14 novels which provide a structure for the text, although there is a vast amount of other works to be included, recorded, referenced and analysed.

Even if you know Dickens well this book will probably contain some surprises. I didn’t know for example that his early novels – including Pickwick, Oliver Twist, & Nicholas Nickleby – were essentially improvisational. While writing them Dickens had no clear plan where the plot was going, nor in the case of Pickwick whether the text was ever going to be printed as a novel at all, rather than remain as a serial, comparable to modern-day soap-operas. The idea of turning this series of stories with a common theme into a novel seems to have occurred to Dickens quite late in the day. As his work matured Dickens planned his novels more carefully with detailed notes on characters and plot-lines, but he rarely wrote more than a few weeks ahead of publication, sometimes cutting things very close indeed. Publishing his work in this way had an important impact on his plotting decisions. Any large scale editing is virtually impossible. Novelists who prepare their whole work prior to publication (i.e. virtually all of them today) can make substantial changes up until the last minute, deleting characters, going back to the beginning of the novel to provide subtle clues to the outcome, etc. While Dickens could fine tune his choice of words when the novels were published in volume form, major plot changes were impossible. (Authors who publish series of novels face a similar challenge – J K Rowling must surely have wanted to be able to go back to Philosopher’s Stone and add some more clues about Harry’s scar or tidy up the messy timeline of the first chapter, The Boy Who Lived?). This feature of his way of working imposed a discipline on Dickens’ plotting which he never seems to have worried about, but it would be interesting to read the novels in this light and look at his technique for avoiding painting himself into too many corners. One example which Slater points out is the strange opening to The Old Curiosity Shop, which begins in the voice of an unnamed first person narrator (“Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking” who quickly fades out of the text to be replaced by an omniscient narrator. According to Slater this is because the story started as a magazine sketch intended for only one or two editions, and when Dickens decided to adapt it as a longer form novel the switch in narrator was made at that point. The reader doesn’t really notice this switch in voice, but in retrospect is does appear unusual.

Dickens’s prodigious work ethic is another prominent feature of this biography. There was no point in his adult life when Dickens wasn’t working virtually flat out, at several points writing two novels at once. His novels are only a small part of his output: his collected journalism and letters run to many volumes, and he seems to take on major new projects even when he is completely overwhelmed with work. His was also a prodigious travellers, criss-crossing the country for his readings and popping over to France to see his young lady friend several times a month. In addition of course he also managed two major tours of the USA.

The weak copyright laws of the time meant that Dickens was openly plagiarised throughout his career, most typically in the form of stage adaptations. Slater tells us that “between March and December 1838 no less than five unauthorised adaptations of Oliver appeared in the London theatres.” (121 – for context, Oliver Twist was published in monthly instalments between February 1837 and January 1839). This issue only got worse – “no fewer than seventeen different stage versions (of his Christmas story The Cricket and the Hearth) appeared in London within a month of the book’s publication.“(239). There was an ironic twist to this plagiarism. In the rush to copy his work theatres would put on productions of his work before their serialisation had finished, forcing them to anticipate the novels’ endings. There is some evidence that Dickens used these versions of his works to give him ideas on how to end them – Slater cites evidence that in his composition of Little Dorrit Dickens “looked back for help with the plotting of an unauthorised dramatisation of the first part of the novel”.

This is an extraordinarily thorough account of Dickens’s life. Slater chooses to structure his text around his subject’s literary life, which his personal life less of a focus. His early romances, his marriage and ten children are all mentioned, as is the end of his marriage and his late romance with Ellen Ternan, but there is a sense of restraint in the narrative, a lack of speculation and a focus on the literary output and Dickens’s creative life. I did wonder whether the biography, structured as it is around the construction of the 14 principal novels, would have been such a compelling read if the reader was not familiar with Dickens’ work? But I guess no-one tackles a 600+ page biography without at least a certain familiarity with the novels.

I have written elsewhere about Dickens’ extraordinary consistency as a novelist. That comment was about his style – he seems to have landed on a discursive, dramatic and comic style of writing early on in his career and it remained with him largely unchanged throughout. My contention was that unless you knew the chronological sequence of his novels you would be hard pressed to tell, based on the writing alone, whether his work was early, middle or late period Dickens. But there is another way in which he was consistent, and that was in the length of his novels. All his novels were published in instalments – either weekly or monthly. The earlier novels did not have a predetermined plot nor number of instalments they were intended to fill, so their length varies significantly – Pickwick is almost twice as long as Oliver Twist. But once the format and number of instalments was settled down, the consistency of the length of the novels is extraordinary. Look at this list:

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)#

Yes, David Copperfield and Dombey and Son are almost identical lengths, to within 5 words in a total of over a third of a million. That’s an insane level of accuracy. Copperfield was published in 19 monthly one-shilling instalments, containing 32 pages of text and two illustrations, with the last instalment being a double-number (in other words, twenty instalments). Dombey followed the same pattern – 19 + 1 instalments, 32 pages, 2 illustrations. So it’s not surprising they are around the same length. But identical? The <10% variance in the top seven novels in this list can be explained by the length of the monthly instalments and the number of illustrations rather than any variation in Dickens’s plots or characterisations. Other authors were published in the same instalment formats as Dickens, indeed many of them in his magazines (Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, to name but two) and I would imagine their word length would be similar given the circumstances. But I confess I haven’t checked in any detail. (A quick look at the number of pages shown on Collins’s Goodreads page gives a range of 528 pages for The Moonstone to 672 pages for The Woman in White and 748 pages for No Name). There must surely be a strong case for arguing that no other author would have had Dickens’ discipline, to produce content week after week, month after month across almost all his adult life, to such a precise degree of accuracy.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I came away from this book feeling a little disappointed with Dickens the man. He discarded his wife with whom he had ten children, and ‘took up with’ a woman twenty years younger than him. We can’t be certain about the precise nature of this latter relationship but we can have a pretty good guess! He estranged his children from his wife, characterising her as a bad mother, and disrespected her in his will. His politics, particularly in relation to the trade union movement and issues of race, were not as progressive as they are often characterised. Slater is very open on this point – he doesn’t try to sugar-coat Dickens’s weak-spots, but neither does he over-emphasise them. Dickens was capable of change, and his approach to the way Fagin is characterised in Oliver Twist is a good case in point. He goes from being an openly hostile anti-Semitic caricature to in later editions a much more nuanced portrait, with far less emphasis on his race.

I’ve some way to go before I can claim to have read all of his novels, but this biography has given me a renewed appetite for continuing my tradition of an annual Dickens.

#(I found these statistics on the internet, and I haven’t separately verified them. I did a spot check of Copperfield and the word count was very close, with a small variation explainable by how you count the index, chapter headings, etc. )

Charles Dickens, by Michael Slater, 2009

Book review

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am currently reading Michael Slater’s very detailed biography of Charles Dickens. One of my main ‘take-aways’ from the work thus far is that Dickens was so much more than a novelist, even if that is what he is predominantly remembered for today. He wrote an extraordinary volume of work, and no genre was beyond his reach – plays, poetry, short stories, journalism, writing for children, travelogues, and essays, as well as an amazing number of letters. This has encouraged me to explore some of his work outside his novels, which led me to The Chimes.

Following the success of A Christmas Carol (1843) Dickens wrote four further annual Christmas stories. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, (1844) is the second in the series (The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) complete the list).

The book was written during Dickens’s year-long visit to Italy. Its title is from Faust’s line in Henry 4th part 2 “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow!” in which he reminisces about their adventures in their youth. There’s a tone of regret for days past in the line which forms a backdrop to the story. As with virtually all Dickens’s work there is also a campaigning purpose to the text, of sorts, as we shall see.

The story opens on New Year’s Eve. Trotty Veck, an ageing messenger (this is before the days of postmen) is cold and hungry, but cannot leave his post until he has earned something for his family. His work is casual and unpredictable – the gig economy is nothing new. He shelters in the shadow of the local church and his day is measured out by the sounding of the church bells, the chimes. His daughter Meg brings him some food, and announces that she and her fiancé Richard have decided to wait no longer and are to marry the next day. Their happiness is disrupted by the intrusion of the appalling Alderman Cute and his friends who make Meg and Richard feel that being poor they have no right to marry.

Trotty carries a letter for Cute to Sir Joseph Bowley MP. Bowley is spending the last hours of the year settling any debts to ensure a clean start to the new year, and advises Trotty to do the same. When the MP hears that he owes rent and other debts he berates him, showing no understanding of the position of the working poor. Again, sounds familiar? Trotty however tends to agree with him, indoctrinated as he is into thinking that the behaviour of the poor is the problem rather than their condition and circumstances. On his way home Trotty meets Will Fern, an impoverished agricultural worker, and his orphaned niece, Lilian. He kindly takes them home with him and shares what little food he has, in a genuine act of charity.

The midnight chimes are no occasion for celebration in this starving household. Instead they call to Trotty, who in a dreamlike state goes to the church and climbs the belltower. There he sees the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants. This is an hallucinatory vision from something out of Dante or Bosch: these goblins are not bankers (a la Rowling) nor engineers (a la Pratchett) but menacing, supernatural figures who chastise Trotty for his lack of faith in mankind. It slowly becomes apparent that Trotty is now dead, having fallen from the belltower years before. The reader is left to wonder whether this vision is part of his eternal torture, or, as with A Christmas Carol, more in the way of a warning?

In a series of visions very similar to those shown by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Trotty is shown how the lives of his family play out in the future. Despite their best efforts to make a good life, Richard becomes an alcoholic, Will is unable to earn a living because of his earlier criminal convictions, which lock him into a cycle of imprisonment and brief release, and, in the absence of a loving family around her, Lilian becomes a prostitute. Meg is driven to the murder of her child and suicide, but is rescued at the last minute by Trotty’s ghostly intervention.

The story ends with Trotty waking up as the bells ring in the New Year. All he has seen has been a vision of a possible future, one which is not pre-ordained. Another future, in which Meg and Richard marry and in which his family and friends prosper is open to him, although how he will achieve that future without changes within wider society is unclear. The Chimes seems to suggest Trotty and his family, indeed his class, are masters of their own destiny; the goblins and the spirits of the chimes focus on his sins of condemning the fallen and poor:

‘Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good—grasping in their fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still when bruised and dying in the gulf below; does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity. And you have done that wrong!’

Has he, or is it more Cute and Bowley, representatives of the judiciary and the legislature, that have failed the fallen and disfigured?

It’s hardly surprising that a story of such sinister ambiguity has not prospered compared to its predecessor. Although highly popular in its time – five different productions of The Chimes were on stage within weeks of publication and it sold 20,000 copies in the first three months – the story’s goblins are no longer part of our cultural landscape and have no Christmassy connotations whatsoever. The reader will be happy that Trotty and his family have survived another year, but their problems are as deep-rooted as ever and there’s no suggestion that Alderman Cute or Bowley MP are going to help them any more than they have previously – if help is going to come it needs to come from Trotty and family themselves. The fact that Trotty helps William Fern escape prosecution and offers him shelter offers some hope that by working together they can avoid the worst that Cute and Bowley can throw at them, but this is scant consolation in lives marked by cold, hunger and want.

I am not sure this is more than a curiosity rather than a representative of Dickens’ shorter form of writing – I will need to read more of that to make a call on that – but it’s not a story I could honestly recommend as being either heart-warming or particularly chilling. It has its moment, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts. At least Dickens wasn’t on auto-pilot here, just serving up generic Christmas related stories of poor people over-coming the odds – he genuinely tries to do something very different, although I suspect it may not have seemed as strange to mid-nineteenth century readers as it does to us today.

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens, 1844

Book review

Before you start to read any novel you have a set of expectations (sorry) about what it is going to be like, both in terms of the broad plot outline and some of the likely features. These ideas are informed by other novels and works you may have read by the author, the novel’s representation in popular culture, and smaller details such as the cover illustrations and comments on the blurb. You may also have read reviews and commentary on the text. All this adds up to a picture before you even start reading, and for classic novels such as Great Expectations that picture is fairly detailed. My perception of Great Expectations was something like this: I knew that the novel started with the central character, Pip, meeting an escaped convict in an isolated churchyard (the name Abel Magwitch is pretty unforgettable). I knew that the novel features a Miss Havisham who lives among the ruins of her wedding feast. I also knew that at some point Pip moves up in the world and becomes a young gentleman, presuming this to be related to his great expectations. Beyond that things were a bit hazier. I assumed, given that this was Dickens, that there would be long-lost relatives reunited with siblings or children at some point, evil villains plotting the downfall of the innocent hero or heroine, and that fortunes would be inherited and marriages arranged at the end of the novel to end with a happily-ever-after finale. Finally, I also assumed Pip would probably be the novel’s hero, and would exemplify all the positive virtues we expect of such a hero – kindness, loyalty, honesty etc. In short, I suspected the novel would be a reworking of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

Of course I was quite wrong. Pip is a flawed character who ends the novel with a redemption, of sorts, but spends much of it being disloyal and unkind to his relatives. At one point he receives a letter telling him he is going to receive a visit from his brother-in-law, the ever amiable blacksmith Joe Gargery. Pip is brutally honest about his reaction to this news:

“Let me confess exactly with what feelings I looked forward to Joe’s coming. Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.”

This is not the reaction of a hero – but it is intensely human of Pip to admit to these feelings. Unlike the conventional plot of a traditional Victorian novel the hero here doesn’t inherit a fortune, he loses one (arguably two). The romance at the heart of the novel is painful and unrequited, as far from a traditional love story as it is possible to be. In other words this is a novel that confounds the readers expectations – the title becomes not a promise but almost a taunt. Pip’s expectations as to how his life is to develop may be great, but they are not realised. His life is not conventionally tragic but he is not really the hero of his own story, and his realisation that his life is not going to take the trajectory he anticipated is far from what the reader will have come to expect from Dickens. I once argued that Dickens an extremely consistent if not predictable novelist, and that it was hard to see much progression in his work. Great Expectations confounds that theory – it is clearly the work of a mature novelist who knows that some novels need more than a happy-ever-after ending in which all the loose ends are tidied away.

Pip’s redemption is the core concept of the novel, but it is also very much an adventure story. Dickens brilliantly captures the reader’s attention in the opening pages by diving straight into the novel’s key scene. Magwitch has Pip by the throat almost before Pip has had time to introduce himself:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip….

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir.”

Notice how Magwitch appears to Pip almost as if risen from the dead. The sense of place evoked in these lines is extraordinary.

The novel is constructed in three parts, all three books being narrated by Pip from some distant point in his future. In book one Pip is a seven year old orphan living with his older sister and her blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the coastal marshland of Kent. On Christmas Eve Pip meets Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict in the scene shown above. Magwitch scares Pip into stealing a file (to remove his chains) and some food and drink. Magwitch is swiftly recaptured, along with another convict with whom he has been fighting. This is an almost dream-like memory for Pip who has no idea of the significance it is going to have for his later life.

The other key childhood memory for Pip occurs when Miss Havisham, she of jilted at the altar fame, asks neighbour Mr Pumblechook to find a boy to visit her. (Out of context this seems a strange request – she takes little pleasure from Pip’s visits and instructs him simply to ‘play’. Pip sees nothing particularly unusual because he is a child and has yet to develop a sense of what is and isn’t strange. He is unphased by the fact that she still wears her old wedding dress and is surrounded by the detritus of her wedding day. Pip is smitten by Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. Estella has been brought up by Miss Havisham to be hostile to all men, as a perverse form of revenge on the male sex. The regular visits to Satis House eventually end when Pip becomes as an apprentice blacksmith in Joe’s smithy. The final turning point of this stage of Pip’s life, and this book of the novel, comes when Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, tells Pip that he has been given a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor, allowing him to leave the forge and become a gentleman.

The second book of the novel follows Pip’s experiences in London. He lives with Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor, a cousin of Miss Havisham. Pip is convinced Miss Havisham is the source of his good fortune. He learns more about her story which cements that conviction. He sees little of Estella and even less of his sister and her husband. Despite his generous allowance he builds up some serious debts. For me this section of the novel lagged. Pip seems to waste most of his time trying to become a gentleman, although the precise nature of his tuition with Mr Pocket is never described (nor barely mentioned). Fortunately this period of his life comes to an end when he finally learns that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Abel Magwitch, who has made his fortune (we are never told how) in Australia. Pip is traumatised by this news – he feels any money he receives from Magwitch is compromised and must be returned. As Orwell rightly points out in his classic essay on Dickens, ‘Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust…not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. But Pip’s sense of revulsion towards Magwitch slowly changes as he comes to realise that the convict may be a criminal but his instincts and intentions are far from evil.

The final book of the novel draws these threads together as everyone is given an ending suitable to their character. There are some dramatic incidents in which fate intervenes to ensure justice is served, and some long-lost secrets are revealed. I am as you can see trying to avoid too many spoilers. Pip matures significantly once he learns that his chance meeting with Magwitch in the churchyard all those years ago was the source of his great expectations. This seems to lead him to be determined to do the right thing regardless of the personal cost. He eventually comes to see Magwitch in a loving, dedicated way (feelings surely more due to Joe) and he dedicates himself to caring for the convict at the end.

While this is not a typical Dickens novel neither is it short on the things we expect and love from his work. The central characters are convincingly realised, even when they are eccentric or downright unpleasant. The plot is more compact and less byzantine than usual, and the cast of minor characters with strange names and idiosyncratic personalities – while still very much present – is shorter than in many of his earlier novels. The humour is often subdued – there aren’t many laugh out loud moments, although I did enjoy this description of a Saturday night at the Three Jolly Bargemen:

There was a group assembled round the fire … attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud…. A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cosy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.

Great Expectations is commonly considered one of Dickens’s greatest works. It was ranked above Bleak House, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities in the BBC Big Read survey back in 2003. I am not sure it merits that status – it goes without saying it is a great novel, but for me it didn’t have the depth of some of the others mentioned here. The fact that he changed the novel’s ending to allow readers the hope of a reconciliation between Pip and Estella suggests Dickens may have had his doubts as well.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1860-61

Book review

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens,1852-53

I am not sure which was more daunting – reading the near 1000 pages of Bleak House, or trying to summarise the experience in a few paragraphs for this post. Where to begin? This could be the complete English novel. Pride and Prejudice is a more perfect romance, Wuthering Heights a more dramatic melodrama, The Big Sleep a better detective story, and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist a more devastating social critique. But Bleak House is all of the above and so much more. It’s a dazzling display of literary technique, without ever being showy; it is a masterful exhibition of characterisation (of which more later) and the use of themes and motifs is extraordinary. So I ask again, where to begin?

Perhaps a brief plot summary, although to do justice to the byzantine complexity of this novel is quite a challenge in itself. As you may know, Bleak House revolves around the long-running Chancery suit of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a dispute about a series of wills and the associated inheritances. Trapped in this case are two wards of court, who go to live with their uncle, John Jarndyce, in the novel’s title location, Bleak House. Also involved in the litigation is Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife Lady Dedlock. There is clearly an element of mystery about Lady Dedlock’s background – as early as the second chapter it is established that she has secrets. While consulting with the family solicitor, Mr Tulkinghorn, she recognises the handwriting on one of his documents.

“My Lady, changing her position, sees the paper on the table – looks at them nearer – looks at them nearer still – asks impulsively “Who copied that?”

Mr Tulkinghorn notices this reaction, and quickly finds out that the copywriter, “Nemo”, has recently died. The only person who can identify him is the crossing sweeper Jo, who lives in Tom-All-Alone’s, a slum in the poorest part of the City (Tom-All-Alone’s was very nearly the novel’s title).

The novel’s second narrator, Esther Summerson now takes over the tale. This alternating narrative structure, with one a named character, the other unnamed and omniscient, is unusual if not unique. It works well in varying the narrative voice. Esther is naive and reluctant to show her feelings about some close to home topics such as her feelings for Mr Woodcourt, whereas the omniscient narrator is more revealing. Esther starts her narrative by telling the reader about her childhood. She was raised by a Miss Barbary, who denied her affection and told her:

“Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers“.

She is obviously illegitimate, but beyond that knows little about her parents or family. After Miss Barbary dies, Esther becomes the ward of Mr Jarndyce, one of the litigants in the long-running case. She eventually moves in with him along with two other wards in the Jarndyce case, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare.

These parallel storylines – the Jarndyce wards and the Dedlock mystery – intertwine. The mystery of Esther’s parentage is slowly revealed. Along the way Dickens takes any number of diversions, introducing a multitude of characters and sub-plots, all of whom contribute to the development of the novel.

In earlier Dickens novels the villains are often somewhat one dimensional with little to say for them in mitigation. Great characters, but not very nuanced. Bleak House doesn’t really have anyone in this role – in fact it is the law itself which is the real villain of the piece. Many of the other characters while without question fallible have a complexity that allows us to like them even when we disagree with their actions. Lord Dedlock is originally established as the stuffy aristocrat permanently at war with his neighbours and over-bearing to family and servants, but he becomes an almost endearing character by the end of the novel, loving and faithful to the memory of his wife. Tulkinghorn may initially be cast as the scheming lawyer out to fleece his clients of everything he can get his hands on, but as the picture emerges he does seem to be genuinely trying to protect the best interests of his clients, and he doesn’t deserve the fate that befalls him. The aloof Lady Dedlock finds redemption in sacrifice. Inspector Bucket, cruel towards Jo and sinister when he appears as if a ghost in his early scenes, ends up heroically trying to rescue Lady Dedlock and being thoughtful and considerate towards Esther.

Keeping track of the cast of eccentrics in the novel is part of the challenge. I counted over 60 named characters, and there’s no doubt that it is easy to forget who is who unless you are reading the novel with particular care. Inevitably some of the minor characters are a little one-dimensional, but Dickens creates a vivid cast of grotesques, such as the appalling Mr Skimpole, eternally sponging off his friends while maintaining a pretence of his own childishness. Speaking of himself he confesses to

two of the oldest infirmities in the world: one was, that he had no idea of time; the other, that he had no idea of money. In consequence of which he never kept an appointment, never could transact any business, and never knew the value of anything! . . . He was very fond of reading the papers, very fond of making fancy sketches with a pencil, very fond of nature, very fond of art. All he asked of society, was to let him live. That wasn’t much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more. He was a mere child in the world, but he didn’t cry for the moon.

There is a complexity to Dickens’s writing that is easy to overlook. His ear for the way people speak is acute. To give just one example, the lawyer’s formal phrase “I beg your Lordship’s pardon” is rendered “begludship’s pardon” (chapter 1) which as well as capturing the clipped tones of the courtroom also speaks to the incomprehensibility of the proceedings. Later a relative of Lord Dedlock speaks in a similar almost incomprehensible manner:

‘The debilitated cousin holds that it’s sort of thing that’s sure tapn slongs votes—giv’n—Mob.”

(“It is the sort of thing that is sure to happen so long as votes are given to the mob” – in other words a casual condemnation of increasing the popular franchise.)

Modern readers will find the relationship between Esther and her guardian, John Jarndyce, inappropriate if not abusive. It creeped me out every time she refers to him as her loving Guardian after they were engaged. My concern is not so much the substantial age gap but the power imbalance – she is his ward, legally his responsibility and therefore completely off limits. Dickens thankfully swerves at the last minute and allows Esther a more traditional marriage to the eminently suitable Allan Woodcourt.

I know the novel’s famous opening has been analysed to death but I did want to acknowledge Dickens’s audacity as a novelist to open with the one-word sentence – “London” – throwing out all the rules we have ever been taught about sentence structure, and then following it with a series of incomplete sentences:

“Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

It’s not until the fourth paragraph that a traditionally complete sentence appears, (“The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar” This sentence stands out and draws the reader’s attention precisely because it is complete). If one wanted, a whole essay could be constructed around Dickens’ use of this motif of mud, dirt and dust in the novel. Often the words are used euphemistically – for example where the author writes of the “stagnant channel of mud which is the main street of Tom-all-Alone’s,” That’s not mud really is it? The critic and academic John Sutherland has fun with “the laundered quality of Victorian literary language” in his article in the London Review of Books,

“Assuming, for instance, that the dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend are what Humphry House claimed, urban mountains of shit, is Dickens’s ‘dust’, the modesty of the novel, or the modesty of a man of Dickens’s class and time? One knows that Jo, in Bleak House, is a crossing-sweeper: but why are we never told what it is he is employed to sweep out of the way? (Horse dust, presumably.)

Dust also brings to mind ashes, (one of Miss Flite’s birds is named Ashes) and the inevitable association with fire and death.

Another example of Dickens’s ability to imbue minor incidents or characters with significance to the whole novel is the involvement of the brick-builders. These are impoverished labourers and their families, who we first meet when Esther is dragged off to dispense charity to them by Mrs Pardiggle. While they are there one of the babies, malnourished and sick, dies abruptly. Esther deals with the situation as best she can, and wraps the baby in one of her handkerchiefs. In a nod to Othello this handkerchief is later recognised by Lady Dedlock and is an important clue in her realisation that her long-lost daughter is really alive. The baby’s death is not just a plot-device – the handkerchief could have been left behind for any number of reasons – but also a reminder of the proximity of sudden death for the labouring classes in nineteenth century England. Later the brick-builders appear in London at Tom’s-All-Alone, and then at the novel’s climax in the chase to find Lady Dedlock. As well as playing an important role in the novel’s plot, the brick-builders represent the people who are transforming the country through their labour but sharing no part in the benefits of industrialisation. The working classes are in no way romantised though – the men are alcoholics and beat their wives, who stoically bear it all and join the men in drinking.

I’ve only really scratched the surface in looking at some of Dickens’ techniques in constructing Bleak House. It is a novel that can be read and reread time and again, and analysed from many different perspectives. Apart from its length it is not a difficult read. Sharing the monthly instalments when it was first published in the 1850’s must have been an amazing collective experience, very different from the ‘all in one go’ way of reading the novel one uses today. This was my one-a-year reread of Dickens, and although there is admittedly a sense of having ticked off another reading target for 2021 I am really glad I chose to revisit this epic of Victorian literature.

Book review

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, 1859

A while back I decided to copy Susan Hill‘s excellent idea of reading one Dickens novel a year. The volume of his work is such that it can be daunting knowing where to begin, (and thus never actually starting), whereas one novel a year is eminently achievable, and quickly builds up into a decent list. I read most of Dickens whilst at university, so I am making a point this time round of catching up with the ones I never got round to, of which the most prominent remaining is (or rather was) A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

There are very few better openings lines to a novel than this. When I bought the copy of A Tale of Two Cities for this read, the shop assistant, (who was otherwise perfectly pleasant), took the opportunity to tell me how she ‘couldn’t stand’ Dickens. It’s not an uncommon reaction. Why do so many people feel this way? Dickens is often given to children as young as 10 or 11 to read. I can only imagine that this is done on the misguided basis that his works are considered accessible to the younger reader. But they clearly are not, on the basis of length and complexity alone. That might be one reason. The case against Dickens as a writer for adults is that his novels are slow-paced and overlong, his characters are two-dimensional, and his plots improbable. There is a lot in this. His novels are usually very long (possibly even too long, although how you could measure that I can’t imagine). The plots meander and take an age to develop. His characters are caricatures. Stupid characters are really stupid. Villains have not a single redeeming feature. Heroines are – well, you’ve got the picture. His plots, when they do finally reach a conclusion, depend massively on coincidence. His writing can be overblown and over the top. For all these reasons and more people struggle to appreciate Dickens. Which is a pity, because I think he is one of our greatest writers, and if evidence of this were required I give you the opening paragraph above. It is poetry in prose.

The case for the defence doesn’t just stand on this opening paragraph of course, but it is quoted in part as evidence of the strength of Dickens’ writing. While his characters may be two-dimensional, they are unquestionably memorable – Uriah Heep, Mr Micawber, Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and many others are known by people who would not come within a mile of one of his novels. They may be long, but reading isn’t a race. His plots wander, yes, but the wandering is the point, rather than the resolution. But all this would be as naught if he wasn’t a wonderful writer, and he is.

You will know the plot of A Tale even if you haven’t read a page of Dickens – and doesn’t that on its own tell you something about his abilities as a storyteller? Set in the time of the French Revolution, it follows the intertwined tales of an aristocrat refugee, Charles Evermonde (now known as Darnay), and the dissolute English lawyer, Sydney Carton. Dickens takes his time setting the scene, providing elements of the backstory that he will return to at the novel’s climax. In a vivid opening chapter the nightly mail-coach on route from London to Dover is flagged down by a messenger for Tellson’s Bank with the cryptic message “Recalled to Life.” We later learn that this refers to the release from the Bastille of a Dr Manette after 18 years inside. It is only at the end of the novel that we learn the reasons for his imprisonment. A reunion between the profoundly traumatised Dr Manette and his long lost daughter follows. The next chapters of the novel jump forward to 1780: Darnay is on trial for treason against the British Crown. Two spies claim that Darnay gave information about British troops in North America (where of course the American Revolutionary war was underway) to the French. Under cross-examination it is pointed out that fellow lawyer Sydney Carton bears a strong resemblance to Darnay. This coincidence is to play a key part in the novel’s resolution. Darnay is of course acquitted.

The novel’s focus then shifts to Paris, where Dickens shows the depravity of the aristocracy. The carriage of the evil Marquis St. Evrémonde runs over and kills a child. The Marquis casually tosses a coin to the parents as compensation. The Marquis is the uncle of Charles Darnay, who is also his heir, even though he has disavowed the family name. The die is thus cast – all the pieces are in place, and they fall domino-like, with the French Revolution leading swiftly to the reign of terror. At the height of the revolution Darnay suicidally travels to Paris where he is arrested as an emigrant and an aristocrat. In the novel’s least plausible development his wife, Lucie Manette, travels to try to secure his release. Bizarrely she takes an entourage with her – her father, Dr. Manette, her daughter, and two servants/travelling companions. Somehow they manage to live for over a year in the tumult of revolutionary Paris, a household of English people protected only by Dr Manette’s status as a former prisoner of the Bastille. I won’t spoil the novel’s ending for you, which you probably know anyway. I found it surprisingly moving, with that famous, resonant last line.

It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Dickens’ perspective on the revolution is crystal clear – the terror is a direct result of the appalling way the French working classes were treated by the aristocracy.

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

This isn’t just a historical observation, but a pressing political point. The warning to the British ruling class is inescapable – abuse the working class and you will pay the price in blood. An academic analysis of the novel would talk at length about this being a work of opposites, a theme established clearly in that opening paragraph and indeed even in the novel’s title. I’m not going to dwell on that because it is so obvious. Instead I wonder what it would have been like reading this novel in those monthly installments in the 1850’s. In particular, would I have worked out what was going to happen, what was going to be the significance of the similarity between Darnay and Carton, and how the early promise of sacrifice by Carton was going to play out?

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you.

The repetition of “dear to you” is in hindsight something of a clunking clue, but it comes fairly early on in the novel and would have been easy to forget. I’d like to think I would have worked it out sooner rather than later, but of course you can never be sure.

There are some weaknesses in the novel, admittedly. The heroine Lucie is a blank canvas, with nothing much in the way of personality. Not all Dickens’ female characters are so bland – Madame Defarge is a bloodthirsty monster, although even she, when her backstory is finally revealed, is not without some sympathy. The cast of secondary characters is less expansive that many Dickens novels, and they don’t play a significant role. The revolutionaries are all labelled Jacques One, Two etc – no need to differentiate the huddled masses there. Jerry Cruncher the part-time resurrection man, and Mrs Pross, Lucie’s maid, are wheeled on and off the stage at the plot’s convenience and left in storage off-stage when not required. Dickens may have hoped that the improbability of their extended stay in revolutionary Paris would not have been noticed given the focus on the main characters, but it seemed an unnecessary lack of realism to me.

These are minor quibbles. This is Dickens near his best, and is thoroughly recommended.

Book review

The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens, 1841

The Old Curiosity Shop tells the story of Nell Trent, an orphan, cared for by her grandfather in his antique (old curiosity) shop. Unfortunately the old man has a gambling addiction, which quickly drives them into poverty. He borrows money to fund his habit from the deliciously evil Daniel Quilp, a hunchbacked dwarf who has to be one of Dickens’ finest, funniest, most grotesque villains. Quilp repossess the shop and contents, leaving Nell and her grandfather on the streets. They embrace this as a freedom from oppression, and go on a long aimless journey that essentially lasts the rest of the novel. The shop is quietly forgotten as a motif or location in the novel – this must be one of Dickens’ most inappropriately named works!

Written as most if not all of Dickens’s novels were, in serial form, the structure of the novel is of necessity rambling, and therefore well suited to both the ‘on the road’ format of Nell and her grandfather’s journey, and the many other threads of the story that Dickens weaves into the rest of the narrative.

Probably the best known feature of this novel, and therefore not constituting a spoiler, is Nell’s eventual tragic death, succumbing to the mysterious wasting illness that ends so many young lives in nineteenth century novels. The story of people waiting at the New York docks and calling out to ask the sailors whether Nell lives is probably apocryphal, but it is a great story nonetheless, and demonstrates Dickens’ superstar status at the time. In fact Dickens signposts Nell’s fate throughout the novel, so much so that when one knows the outcome it seems a little heavy handed – lots of meditations on death, a preoccupation with the graves of younger children, several other deaths of children featuring, and so on – but Dickens obviously had to soften the blow. It was still a bold choice – he could easily have saved Nell and was under pressure to do so – but held his nerve. So perhaps not all that sentimental after all?

The real star of the show however is the demonic Quilp

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature.”
Quilp is hunting for the runaways and at the same time pursuing a vendetta against Kit, their former assistant, who is saved by the evidence of Dick Swiveller and ‘the Marchioness’ – their relationship forming some of the most touching scenes in the novel.

Just a few perhaps somewhat random thoughts about the novel. First, I don’t think it can be a coincidence that Dickens tells us that Nell is “not quite fourteen”. Juliet is almost exactly the same age, just two weeks short of fourteen, and Dickens, whether subconsciously or not, is inviting the reader to compare and link the two characters – Juliet also suffers a tragically early tragic death of course, another hint that this is to be Nell’s fate as well. But it also reminds the reader that Nell, while invariably described as a girl, is also seen by several men in the novel as on the cusp of becoming a young woman. She is spoken of at several points in sexualised terms. Early on her brother looks to marry her off to Richard Swiveller:

“You saw my sister Nell?’

‘What about her?’ returned Dick.

‘She has a pretty face, has she not?’

‘Why, certainly,’ replied Dick. ‘I must say for her that there’s not any very strong family likeness between her and you.’

‘Has she a pretty face,’ repeated his friend impatiently.

‘Yes,’ said Dick, ‘she has a pretty face, a very pretty face. What of that?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ returned his friend. ‘It’s very plain that the old man and I will remain at daggers drawn to the end of our lives, and that I have nothing to expect from him. You see that, I suppose?’

‘A bat might see that, with the sun shining,’ said Dick.

‘It’s equally plain that the money which the old flint—rot him—first taught me to expect that I should share with her at his death, will all be hers, is it not?’

‘I should said it was,’ replied Dick; ‘unless the way in which I put the case to him, made an impression. It may have done so. It was powerful, Fred. ‘Here is a jolly old grandfather’—that was strong, I thought—very friendly and natural. Did it strike you in that way?’

‘It didn’t strike him,’ returned the other, ‘so we needn’t discuss it. Now look here. Nell is nearly fourteen.’

‘Fine girl of her age, but small,’ observed Richard Swiveller parenthetically.

‘If I am to go on, be quiet for one minute,’ returned Trent, fretting at the slight interest the other appeared to take in the conversation. ‘Now I’m coming to the point.’

‘That’s right,’ said Dick.

‘The girl has strong affections, and brought up as she has been, may, at her age, be easily influenced and persuaded. If I take her in hand, I will be bound by a very little coaxing and threatening to bend her to my will. Not to beat about the bush (for the advantages of the scheme would take a week to tell) what’s to prevent your marrying her?’

To his credit, Dick is shocked

“‘And she “nearly fourteen”!’ cried Dick.”

Incidentally I love the way Dick is casually rude to Fred here.

The odious Quilp also plans to marry Nell when he has arranged an unfortunate accident for his first wife, and is constantly drawing attention to her attractiveness in a sexualised way:

‘Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud, neighbour,’ said Quilp, nursing his short leg, and making his eyes twinkle very much; ‘such a chubby, rosy, cosy, little Nell!’ . ‘so small, so compact, so beautifully modelled, so fair, with such blue veins and such a transparent skin, and such little feet, and such winning ways”

Dickens’s issues with much younger women have been well covered elsewhere. I appreciate that he is believed to have been working through his grief at the sudden death of his 17 year old sister-in-law when writing about Nell, but these scenes are unquestionably uncomfortable, and it is a relief when the focus moves off this aspect of the character.

Another significant feature of The Old Curiosity Shop that I noticed during this read is the frequency with which characters are anonymised. I don’t think we are ever told the name of Nell’s grandfather or great-uncle, who are known as the old man and the single man respectively. The Marchioness doesn’t know her own name, or possibly doesn’t have one, representing the depths of her abuse by the Brasses; the gentleman who offers Nell shelter at the end of the novel is referred to by all as ‘the bachelor’; even the man who offers Nell a place by his furnace is left unnamed. Why Dickens does this is unclear – in an industrial society people are often stripped of their identity as part of their reduction into the working components of their body – hence the way the term “hands” is used to describe factory workers for example – but some of the more affluent characters in the novel are treated in the same way.

Dickens is an extraordinary novelist, and despite his unquestioned status amongst English writers it could be argued he still doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Yes his characters can be two dimensional – but many are much more rounded and complex than this characterisation would suggest, Quilp being an excellent example. Yes his story lines can meander, but the way he controls his plots despite sometimes writing two novels for weekly publication at the same time is little short of amazing. He may have had issues with the sexualisation of younger women, but he created a huge range of believable and strong women characters. His writing can often be innovative and highly sophisticated, even though it was written for mass consumption. And not least, his support for the poor and down-trodden of Victorian England was authentic – he is the best advocate for social reform the working classes could have wanted:

“If they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found … and [those who rule] strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk … In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years.”

“

Book review

Comment – Charles Dickens, our most consistent novelist?

Here’s a challenge for you – which was written first, ‘Oliver Twist‘ or ‘Great Expectations’? And for a bonus point, how many years were there between these two great novels being published? dickens

The answer is in the list below – Oliver Twist was published over 20 years before Great Expectations. Other than looking it up, I can’t think of another way of working that out. There’s little in the texts by way of a clue. This question was prompted by my reading of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, this year’s Dickens. I was not sure what period of Dickens’ life and work the novel came from. Its much criticised sentimentality might suggest the work of a younger writer not yet ready to confront the complexities of human character, but many other aspects of the novel suggest a more mature author, not afraid to kill off a central character, controlling a complex plot with considerable skill, and written in a style extraordinarily rich with characterisation and descriptions.

Normally it is not that difficult to work out from which period of an author’s life a text comes. ‘The Tempest’ is so obviously late Shakespeare, reflexive and mature; ;Titus Andronicus‘ is equally obviously an immature work, derivative and clumsy; ‘Hamlet; and ‘King Lear‘ come from that intense period of creativity around the turn of the century when his powers were at their most intense. Taking another example, ‘Northanger Abbey’ is quite obviously early Austen – lighter in tone, and the jokes are not that funny; ‘Pride and Prejudice‘ and ‘Emma‘ are Austen at her best; Persuasion is late Austen, again more reflexive and mature, where happy ever after isn’t the simple solution to everyone’s problems.

With Dickens I don’t think you can make such classifications. His most striking feature as a novelist is his consistency. There is obviously a distinctive Dickensian style, and the method of publication drove the novels’ length and structure. but that was established early on and didn’t seem to change over the years. His themes ranged from the Gordon Riots of 1780 (Barnaby Rudge) to the French Revolution (A Tale of Two Cities) but always returning to the state of industrial/Victorian England and in particular a compassionate interest in the lives of the working classes. Pick a Dickens novel at random, and try and tell from its themes, structure, style or composition when it dates from, in relation to the rest of his work. I don’t think you can – can you?

Dickens novels in chronological order

‘Pickwick Papers’ (full title ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’) – monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837

‘Oliver Twist’ (full title ‘Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress’) – monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839

The Old Curiosity Shop – weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 25 April 1840 to 6 February 1841

‘Barnaby Rudge’ (full title ‘Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty’ – weekly serial in ‘Master Humphrey’s Clock’, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841

‘The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit’ – monthly serial, December 1842 to July 1844

‘Dombey and Son’ (full title ‘Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation’) – monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848

‘David Copperfield’ (full title ‘The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery’) monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850

‘Bleak House’ – monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853

‘Hard Times’ (full title Hard Times: For These Times) – weekly serial in ‘Household Words’, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854

‘Little Dorrit’ – monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857

A Tale of Two Cities’ – weekly serial in ‘All the Year Round’, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859

‘Great Expectations’ – weekly serial in ‘All the Year Round’, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861

‘Our Mutual Friend’ – Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865

‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’ – monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. (unfinished)

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The Reading Bug

A blog about reading, books, and language.

Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens, 1855-1857

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, 1846-1848

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, 1843

Charles Dickens, by Michael Slater, 2009

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens, 1844

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 1860-61

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens,1852-53

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, 1859

The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens, 1841

Comment – Charles Dickens, our most consistent novelist?