Susan Hill on Dickens

I am halfway through Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing. A Year of Reading from Home and I am enjoying it enormously! It's so comforting to know that I am not the only one who has still so many books bought years ago and not yet read. The book by Hill itself is a very good example. I bought it in the summer of 2010, together with sixty-odd others, during my latest visit to England and it's only now that I am reading it. She's such an honest, non-prejudiced writer that it's a real pleasure reading about herself recording her reading experience. The book is the result of "a year reading from home"; that is, a year in which she travelled through the books in her home, those which she had read and wanted to re-read, those she forgot she had and those she had never before read. Delightful.

She devotes a chapter to Dickens, entitled "Great Expectations Behind the Sofa" in which she confesses that one of the reasons why she married her husband, Stanley Wells, because both of them had read, as children, Dickens behind a sofa. In the case of Wells, it was Pickwick Papers, which he read behind the sofa in his family house. For Hill, it was Great Expectations, which she read behind a sofa at her great-aunt's bungalow. I would love to quote here the whole of the chapter but I hope this entry makes you want to read the whole book, so I've just selected some parts. Enjoy!

I have just been down to the sitting room to look at that same set of Dickens, which my great-aung finally gave to me when I was twelve because, she said, I obviously got more out of it than she ever would. I have three other complete sets and now I read the Oxford, in hardback, because it has the original Boz and Phiz illustrations but rather better print. My great-aunt's set is bound in specked brown, the titles are in gold, and the pages have yellowed with age. the paper is of poor quality so that the print is unclear, and it is very small. I do not wear glasses for reading but the type is too small for me all the same. But sometimes I like to open Bleak House or The Old Curiosity Shop and leaf through a few pages because they still smell of my great-aunt's house and the warm den behind the sofa.

      I could spend my year of reading from home with Dickens alone - well, almost. In the silly game of which authors to throw overboard from the lifeboat and which one - just one - to save, I would always save Dickens. He is mighty. His flaws are huge but magnificent - and all of a piece with the whole. a perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one. Yes, he is sentimental, yes, he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes, some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has even been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breathtakin in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an Old Master, in vivid colour and richness of huge canvases. His prose is spacious, symphonic, infinitely flexible. He can portray evil and create a menacing atmosphere of malevolence better than any other writer - read Little Dorrit, read Our Mutual Friend, read Bleak House if you don't believe me. He is macabre, grotesque, moralistic, thunderous, funny, ridiculous, heartfelt. Nobody has written as he wrote about London, nobody has described the Essex Marshes so well, nobody has opened a book to such effect as he does in Bleak House. There is no area of life he does not illuminate, no concern or cause he does not make his own, no sentences, no descriptions, no exchanges, no sadness or tragedies or betrayals ...

Hill's account is not a panegyric, as it has been manifest at the beginning of the quote but, in case anyone doubts, she continues as follows:

   There are one or two of his novels that I never want to read again, A Tale of Two Cities being the first. I don't think he felt comfortable writing historical fiction, and it shows. Though I am glad to have read it, I am happy to leave David Copperfield on the shelf, in spite of Mr Micawber, and my husband is welcome to laugh at Pickwick because I never could ...