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.