Twenty years is nothing

And yet so many things have passed since I bought this Royal Mail Christmas 1993 Presentation Pack.

I was living in London for a term, on my first research stay for my Ph.D. and the letters I started receiving as Christmas was approaching bore stamps from Dickens's Christmas Carol. I was looking forward to going back home for Christmas with my family, but also sad for having to say goodbye to so many people I did not know if I would see again, and anxious about a new avenue in my life. I experienced my first London Christmas season; the first of many to come. I wanted to take home some of that Christmas flavour and this included my first ever Royal Mail Presentation Pack. I strongly remember my looking forward to seeing my Misi again. As I write this, Michi is next to me. Twenty years. Misi was then just one year old. He would have turned 21 this November, Michi is two and a half. Wow, so many things, so many days, so many friends. Who says that twenty years is nothing? It's a wealth of seconds, minutes, hours, days spent and shared. 20 Christmas.
Going through life implies having to learn to live with absences, which are more present than ever during the Christmas season, to remind us that they're not really gone. I have two absences to add this Christmas, and tears cannot really convey the pain this causes me, but I'm sure they're eager for me to know that they're just round the corner, so I won't allow my heart to grow too sad. I will celebrate the Christmas present and past and live in hope for the Christmas yet to come.
"And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"

A year and one day

Tempus fugit

367 days - 2012 was a leap year - since I wished Mr Charles Dickens a happy bicentenary and looked forward to celebrating the whole year reading him. Time really, really flies, Mr Dickens celebrated yesterday his 201st birthday and I am far, very far from accomplishing what I intended to do 367 days ago. As usual, time is always more elastic in my mind than it actually is and I tend to think that I can do all sorts of things in 24 hours. What was I thinking, I wonder? Was it too much to devote just half an hour a day to Dickens? Well, it turned out to be impossible some days and I was left with this sense of guilt for letting him down. What started as a celebration was dangerously becoming an obligation, so I decided to take it easy.
Still, I am deep into Bleak House, even if I cannot open its pages every day. I am sure it will accompany me into the spring, when I will have the opportunity of relishing that implacable November weather that I adore (possibly because here in Granada, is not so implacable).
Happy 201st birthday (and one day) Mr Dickens!!!

Bleak House

 

LONDON. 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.


I come back to this blog after a long absence, prompted by a wonderful gift from my even more wonderful friend Mauricio: a precious edition of Bleak House. Therefore, I am abandoning the original schedule, I am not going to read Dickens's works in chronological order but in the order that this gift demands. It's so fitting for this rainy November weather!

Poor little blog

Paul Cox's illustration, evoking the Summer Exhibition of 1888.
Homage to W.P. Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy (1881)

This poor little blog started with lots of energy but has been losing steam along the way. It's been a really hectic academic year, complicated by some disagreeable departmental problems and bureaucratic delays in virtually everything. It has left me exhausted but, paradoxically, stronger. It has taught me a lot about human nature (aren't we always learning about that?) and, although I have always believed that there's something good in virtually everyone, some really strong disappointments have taught me that, with some people, it's best to keep an educated distance. You don't want to be contaminated, you know?
So, my holidays start tomorrow. I am leaving for a couple of weeks and I am taking Dickens with me. I now know I have not achieved what I intended to do when I started this blog: reading Dickens for half an hour every day until I read the complete works. However, knowing that it would be an impossible task to do that in one single year, I also wrote that I would continue with this blog until I completed the whole bunch. So, that's what I will do. During the holidays I won't have internet access, so I will write about my reading when I'm back.
Happy holidays!

Still here, albeit embarrassed and apologetic

I am afraid keeping this blog updated on a daily basis has proved to be impossible. I have had tons of work in the last weeks and I am afraid I have abandoned - only temporarily - my daily intake of reading Dickens's and writing about it. I'll be back, though. I cannot promise when but I hope to write something in the upcoming week.

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 ...

A hectic week

I have to admit it: I have abandoned Dickens this week. It's not just that I did not have time to write in this blog, but that I could not find the time to read a single letter written by him. I have carried my iPad everywhere with me to no avail. I had over 100 exams to correct plus twenty-something essays and the second semester has just started, with its new classes, new students, new timetables. I've been snowed under with work and just managed to find some time to attend yesterday's concert by the Granada Symphony Orchestra, watch Julius Cesar at the Retroback Film Festival on Wednesday, and the pre-release of Hugo, the latest film by Martin Scorsese, on Thursday.
So, yes, I abandoned Dickens but I found his traces in Scorsese's film. What a beautiful story! I spent all day yesterday telling everyone I met that they had to watch it. Very Dickensian in tone but particularly in the care with which every single character is introduced on screen until it becomes a full-bodied individual. The narrative is beautiful, the photography superb, with an elegant and intelligent use of the 3D, which does not look for the cheap effects that I particularly find so annoying. On top of that, a magnificent performance of Asa Butterfield, the boy with the big blue sad eyes which are, in fact, Hugo's. Scorsese plays homage to the beginnings of cinema, but the film is more than that: it's a story about loss, hope, faith, and the power of narratives to connect people's lives and to help us live our dreams. Beautiful, moving, elegant film. One of those which will remain lodged in my soul forever. Don't miss it!

Dickens's London

I know, I know. This is a bit cheap. I am supposed to be reading Dickens for an hour every day and then sharing my thoughts in this blog, but it's being a busy weekend and I'm afraid I haven't had much time to read... I promise to start afresh tomorrow. In the meantime, please allow me to share with you this map of Dickens's London, which I found at David Perdue's Charles Dickens's Page. Enjoy the last hours of this Sunday, have a good night and a wonderful week!

Who was Boz?

The pseudonym that Charles Dickens used to write these first sketches of daily life in early Victorian London, Boz, apparently came from the way Charles's younger brother, Augustus, pronounced the nickname the writer had given him: Moses. Dickens had taken the name from a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and his younger brother could only pronounce it through the nose. Therefore, Moses became Boses and Boses was shortened to Boz.
After I finish reading this delightful collection of impressions of life in Victorian England, I think I will buy this DVD, and possibly the book too. '''''''''''''''''' (This was Michi, agreeing with me, while he tried to open the bottle of brewer's yeast pills. He's addicted to them!).

Sketches by Boz (1836). Preface

Honest, direct and humble. In these terms, Dickens addressed the readers of his Sketches by Boz in the Preface. One can only imagine the apprehension he must have felt at seeing the work of his youth published, but also the honesty in not wanting to adulterate it. I
"The whole of these Sketches were written and published, one by one, when I was a very young man. They were collected and republished while I was still a very young man; and sent into the world with all their imperfections (a good many) on their heads.
They comprise my first attempts at authorship -with the exception of certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten, and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries. I am conscious of their often being extremely crude and ill-considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste and inexperience; particularly in that section of the present volume which is comprised under the general head of Tales.
But as this collection is not originated now, and was very leniently and favourably received when it was first made, I have not felt it right either t remodel or expunge, beyond a few words and phrases here and there". 

"The Election for Beadle" and a change of plans

Yes, I have decided that I am changing the order in which I am going to read the Sketches by Boz. After all, I was not alive when they were appearing in the different magazines, so I'd better read them as they are intended to be read by a 21st-century audience. I reached that decision today, after reading "The Election for Beadle" (SB 4), originally published as "Sketches of London No 16" in The Evening Chronicle on  14th July, 1835. Yesterday, when I read "The Four Sisters", I already had the feeling that I was treading on ground that was unknown to me but which Dickens's readers must have known beforehand. The parish of which the narrator talked about had already been the subject of other sketches. Given that the Delphi Classics edition only includes 25 sketches in the section "Original Published Order of the Sketches", something must be amiss. Today, in "The Election for Beadle", I had no doubt. Four paragraphs into the story, the narrator, having introduced one character, tells us that "His great opponent in public life is Captain Purday, the old naval officer on half-pay, to whom we have already introduced our readers." There! No Captain Purday has been introduced to me so far, so I presume he must have appeared in one of the first two sketches. Therefore, tomorrow I start reading the Sketches by Boz from the very beginning, with the section entitled "Our Parish". I'll revisit the beadle election and the four sisters but I am sure to meet many other characters which I should like to be acquainted with already.

Sketches by Boz 8. "The Four Sisters" (Originally, "Sketches of London Nº 14"

A jewel of a sketch, "The Four Sisters" (SB 3) tells the story of the four Miss Willises who, after having lived in the parish for thirteen years, suddenly get married. All four at once? All married to the same man, Mr. Robinson? No, only one of them becomes Mrs. Robinson but, since all of them behave in exactly the same way during the ceremony and all of them go on living together as before, speculation can only be a matter of course. Nature eventually follows its course and in duetime the mystery is solved.

The four Brodie sisters, picture by Lewis Carroll

I see that this is part of a series of sketches which were published in the group "Our Parish" of Sketches by Boz. I am looking forward to reading them all. Its original title was "Sketches of London No.14) and it was published in The Evening Chronicle, on 18th June, 1935. Interesting anticipation of the description of Coketown in Hard Times, which would reach the press nineteen years later: "Everything was formal, still, and cold - so were the four Miss Willises. Not a single chair of the whole set was ever seen out of its place - not a single Miss Willis of the whole four was ever seen out of hers. There they always sat, in the same places, doing precisely the same things at the same hour". 


There are no illustrations in this sketch, so I looked for one.  I chose a photograph of Lilian, Margaret, Ida, and Ethel Brodie, daughters of Oxford Professor Benjamin Brodie, taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). You can access these and many others at http://mural.uv.es/carmapa2/arte8.html, a talk given by Edward Wakeling in various venues in 2003 after the publichation of Lewis Carroll, Photographer. There were, however, other options to illustrate this post. Pick your own:

 

To my lovely sister, Irene. Love you tons, sweetie!!!

Sketches by Boz 7. "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle". Chapter the Second

Well, well, well, it turns out that the second chapter of "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle" is not the longest of the Sketches after all. Rather, the edition I am reading is faulty and transfers the reader back in time just before Mr. Tottle is going to deliver Miss Lillerton's note to the clergyman Mr. Timson, so that one goes back to the debtor-prison and has once again the whole account of the young married couple, Mr. Gabriel Parsons's release of Mr. Tottle, the conditions he establishes, the dinner with the Parsons and Miss Lillerton, the confusing proposal and then goes back to the moment in which Mr. Timson's violoncello stops playing and the clergyman is about to enter the scene. Quite a bittersweet sketch this one, which includes a glimpse at life within a debtors' prison. I feel so sorry for poor Mr. Tottle. 

Sketches by Boz 7. "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle". Chapter the first

"A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle" (SB 54), appeared originally published as "Chapter the First" and "Chapter the Second" in two numbers of The Monthly Magazine, January and February, 1835. It was my intention to read the whole of this "Passage" but it just so happens that the second chapter is the longest of all the Sketches I've read up to know and I NEED to go to bed, so I'll just leave you, with Mr. Watkins Tottle, longing to get married, having finally met a prospective candidate, awaiting to make a deeper acquaintance. In the meantime, his good friend Mr. Gabriel Parsons has just told him the most extraordinary story about his courting his wife and the way they spent their wedding-night. Not in the way you would expect, really... Tomorrow, the denouement of this chapter in the life of Mr. Tottle.

Sketches by Boz 6. "The Steam Excursion"

HILARIOUS! ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS! As usual in the Sketches, Dickens maintains a tranquil narrative pace and mounts to a crescendo towards the end of the story. "The Steam Excursion" (SB 51), first published in the Monthly Magazine in October, 1834 had me laughing out loud seeing people unsuccessfully trying to keep their cool in the middle of a stormy boating excursion. Even poor Mr. Hardy gave up pretending and, like the rest of the passage, ended up on the deck, in a not very flattering position: "Mr. Hardy was observed, some hours afterwards, in an attitude which induced his friends to suppose that he was busily engaged in contemplating the beauties of the deep; they only regretted that his taste for the picturesque should lead him to remain so long in a position, very injurious at all times, but especially so, to an individual labouring under a tendency of blood to the head." Pricesless! The plates by Cruikshank summarise the two moods of the story and could very well be labelled "Before" and "After".

Sketches by Boz 5. "Sentiment"

Originally published in Bell's Weekly Magazine, on 7th June, 1934, "Sentiment" (SB47) presents us Dickens at its least sentimental.  If it's meant to be - the sketch seems to imply - it will be, although there doesn't seem to be much hope one way or another to Miss Lavinia Brook Dingwall/Mrs. Butler.

"Mr. and Mrs. Butler are at present rusticating in a small cottage at Ball's pond, pleasantly situated in the immediate vicinity of a brick-field. They have no family. Mr. Theodosius looks very important, and writes incessantly; but, in consequence of a gross combination on the part of publishers, none of his productions appear in print. His young wife begins to think that ideal misery is preferable to real unhappiness; and that a marriage, contracted in haste, and repented at leisure, is the cause of more substantial wretchedness than she ever anticipated."

Sketches by Boz 4. "The Bloomsbury Christening" and "The Boarding House" (1934)

Great Russell Square, Bloomsbury... the names take me back in time, to the British Library and all the research I carried out there, for my doctoral dissertation. Tempus fugit. "The Bloomsbury Christening" (SB 55), first published in the Monthly Magazine in April, 1834, introduces the misanthropist Mr. Nicodemus Dumps, a pre-Scrooge figure with none of the latter's redeeming features. The narrator describes him as someone who "was never happy but when he was miserable; and always miserable when he had the best reason to be happy" and, certainly, he does succeed in spoiling the most joyous of celebrations: his godson's christening. Don't you think Garbage's "Only happy when it rains" suits him? I love that song, and I love the rain, but ... God forbid I ever turn into a Mr. Dumps!

As for "The Boarding House" (SB 45), it was originally published in the Monthly Magazine in May and August, 1834 (two chapters) and was the first of Dickens's stories signed by "Boz". This is my favourite sketch up to now, which I have read with Michi - my youngest kitty, whom I found seven months ago today - and had to interrupt for a while so that he could play "Cat Fishing" in my iPad. Of course he won. He's a winner (and a poser, as you can see).


Back to Dickens and "The Boarding House", setting the action in a boarding house allows Dickens to explore all sorts of different character traits, create brilliant dialogues while managing to keep out of the reader's eyes the entanglement which surfaces at the end of each of the two episodes. I wonder if it was ever adapted for the stage. It would have worked wonderfully. Also, I love the cheeky intrusive narrator! Superb, by the way, Cruishank's illustrations for the Sketches.

Charles Dickens in Literatur im Foyer (SWR Fernsehen)

Last night, after writing my entry on this blog, I caught the last minutes of the TV program Literature Im Foyer, dedicated this week to Charles Dickens. Fortunately, in this day an age almost everything can be found on the web. So, here it is:

http://www.swr.de/literatur-im-foyer/-/id=122518/did=9254654/pv=video/nid=122518/zmu3pj/index.html

Sketches by Boz 3. "Mrs. Joseph Porter, Over the Way" and "Horatio Sparkins" (1834)

The Kindle edition that I am using in this adventure (Delphi Classics) mercifully decided to include a separate table of contents including the sketches in their originally published order, together with the dates and magazine titles each piece appeared in. This is exactly what I intend to do: read all of Dickens's works in the order in which they were published, and having them arranged like that in this edition saves me from doing the work myself.
After "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", in January 1834, the Monthly Magazine published "Mrs. Joseph Porter, Over the Way" (SB 53), a very amusing piece of literature of local customs and manners - indeed, what these sketches are meant to be - which reminded me a little bit of Mariano José de Larra's "El castellano viejo". On this occasion, however, rather than a disastrous birthday dinner, the focus of the satire is an amateur performance of Othello. A Iago on Wellington boots, a prompter without spectacles, among many other disasters, turned Shakespeare's tragedy into an impossible comedy. "The audience went home at four o'clock in the mornign, exhausted with laughter, suffering from severe headaches, and smelling terribly of brimstone and gunpowder [you'll have to read why]. The Messrs. Gattleton, senior and junior, retired to rest, with the vague idea of emigrating to Swan River early in the ensuing week". 


Rather more bitter is the next sketch to be published, "Horatio Sparkins" (SB 49), which appeared also in the Monthly Magazine in February, 1834. Reminiscent of Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett, the Maldertons, anxious to mingle exclusively in any society above their own, are intrigued about a Horatio Sparkins which everyone takes to be a sort of Mr Darcy. A prospect candidate for one of their daughters, they invite him to dinner and find him to be an excellent, learned, intelligent young man, so they can only imagine that he must be a barrister. They try by all means to prevent him from learning that Mrs Malderton's brother - Mr. Jacob Barton, who had invited himself to meet the young man - is a grocer. The reader feels that this Mr. Sparkins is not exactly what everyone expects him to be and, certainly, the surprise is served just at the very end. Needless to say, none of the you Malderton girls got married, or, as the narrator had it: "The daisies have thrice bloomed on Camberwell-green; the sparrows have thrice repeated their vernal chirps in Camberwell-grove; but the Miss Maldertons are still unmated. Miss Teresa's case is more desperate than ever; but Flamwell is yet in the zenith of his reputation; and the family have the same predilection for aristocratic personages, with an increased aversion to anything low". 


One cannot say that things have changed that much, can one? Vanitas vanitatis.

Sketches by Boz 2. "Mrs. Joseph Porter" (tomorrow)

Just got home and I am exhausted. It was a very busy day and I could only read "Mrs Joseph Porter". I am really loving these sketches but... in order to write fairly about them, I need to do it when I am awake. Tomorrow, then, "Mrs. Joseph Porter" and all the other sketches that manage to come along. I'll have so much more time to read tomorrow. Looking forward to it. Till then, good night!