Tag Archives: Dickens

The Enchantment of Books

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One day, when I was cursing a document, a co-worker told me not to be a “nervous Nellie.” I was startled but I liked this woman, who popped in every morning with a cup of tea or flowers from her garden. I was feeling tense, and she tried to cheer me up.  The phrase “nervous Nellie” wasn’t an insult.  And she was looking out for me.  During our down time, we confided about work stress.  On rebellious days, we defiantly read our library books.

As soon as I left the office, I forgot everything about it. Once home, once the door was closed behind me, I exhaled all my tension.  There I was, in my stocking feet, making a cup of tea and settling down with a good book.  After work, I often read classics: Pindar’s Odes, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Sigrid Undset, and, whenever possible, P. G. Wodehouse.

What is the ensorcellment of good books?  It is a drug with no equivalent.  It is perhaps a form of enchantment. Or is it nature’s way of making us pay attention to details we do not notice? We are transported to a world of euphonious words, especially if we read aloud.  And characters in novels become as real to us as our friends and frenemies.  But best of all is that feeling of tranquility.

I love that feeling of calm.  And I don’t imagine it. Studies show that reading books (it has to be books) can reduce stress and lower your heart rate. Another study claims that it also reduces mortality rates.   And Zoe Shaw, a psychotherapist and author of A Year of Self-Care: Daily Practices and Inspiration for Caring for Yourself, said that  “reading has been connected to meditation in terms of the way our brain processes our environment and our physiological state.”

The Oxford Illustrated Dickens hardback series

I’m all for meditation, of course, though I prefer a good book.  Another book-related practice that calms and delights is having nice copies of favorite books.  For example, The Oxford Illustrated Dickens hardcover series is perfect, as far as I’m concerned.  (Used copies abound.)  The books have introductions and the original illustrations by Phiz . (If you want footnotes, you need the Oxford paperback or a Penguin.)  The Oxford Illustrated Dickens is the perfect size for reading in bed or on the bus:  these hardcovers are only slightly larger than the Oxford World’s Classics paperbacks.  My copy of Dombey and Son was reissued in 1989, but this series has gone through several printings since 1959. I absolutely love these books.

It’s not Green Mansions! But it’s the only good pic I could find of the Great Illustrated Classics.

Here’s a set of oldies you may remember:  the Great Illustrated Classics.  There was a rack of them at the public library, but they weren’t very attractive. Still, I like them now! I have a  Great Illustrated Classics edition of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, published in 1949.  It looks as though it has been through a war of cocoa and dogeared pages, but I like the introduction by Edwin  Way Teal.  The list of books in this series (you can read it on the back cover) was immense and varied.  Should I try The Last Days of Pompeii or Quo Vadis? I can’t say these are collectibles. If you find one in good condition, you’re very lucky. But there is a nostalgia factor.

Have you seen the Vintage Quarter-Bound Classics? I have not, but they look very pretty in the pictures online. The remarkable thing is that the list of classics is untraditional. Instead of Jane Austen and Middlemarch,  we have  Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward,  Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.  Someday I’ll meet these “in person” at a bookstore and have a better idea of wha they’re like..

And now off to calm myself with a good book. It’s a form of self-care.

The Ziplock Dickens

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My dream job has been announced on Instagram.


The Charles Dickens Museum is hiring!
We’re delighted to announce this rare opportunity to join our museum as a curator. Working to maintain the museum as a high-profile heritage site, you’ll develop visitor-facing programs including displays and exhibitions, as well as undertaking key aspects of collections management and collections care tasks.

We’ve already metaphorically packed our bags and are ready to rush to London for the interview. On the way up the narrow scuffed stairs to the office, we will pause to admire Dickens’s beautiful reading desk, a velvet-flounced podium-style desk built to his specifications for book tours.

Dickens’ Reading Desk

I love Dickens, though of course am not an applicant for this job. My Dickens fandom is symbolized by a prop for the interview, a Ziplock bag containing the Dickens novel I’ve not yet read. Years ago John Irving, whose favorite author is Dickens, said in an interview that he had read all of Dickens’s books except one, and was saving it for old age. In the TV show Lost, the scriptwriters borrowed this trope: the character Desmond, a survivor of a plane crash on an unknown island, saves a Ziplock bag with the Dickens book he has not yet read.

Hence my Ziplock Dickens would be a homage to Dickens. Did Desmond on Lost finally read his bDickens?

Are you saving a last volume of Dickens in a “Ziplock”?

A Father’s Cruelty: Dickens’s “Dombey and Son”

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“My dear Paul! He’s quite a Dombey!”

I love Dickens’s seventh novel, Dombey and Son, an inter-class portrait of characters connected, however distantly, to Mr. Dombey, the rich, glacially-cold owner of Dombey and Son.

Dickens’ wit and satire radiate from the axis of Mr. Dombey’s draconian manners. Dombey is one of Dickens’s most misogynist characters, who ignores all but a privileged few, his chilliness offset by the lively affections of the lower-classes, among them the sharp-witted maid Susan Nipper, who speaks angrily on behalf of Dombey’s daughter, and Captain Cuttle, a retired sea captain who takes over his friend Sol Gill’s nautical shop without understanding the merchandise.

Dickens not only explores class differences and alliances but highlights Dombey’s contempt for women. Dombey may ignore the lower orders, but he regards women as his slaves.

The women most affected by his attitudes and actions are the first Mrs. Dombey, their daughter Florence, and the second Mrs. Dombey. Yet let us not forget Miss Tox, an impoverished gentlewoman who has a crush on Mr. Dombey and fantasizes about marrying him.

We are introduced briefly to the first Mrs. Dombey on her deathbed. As she lies there dying after giving birth, Mr. Dombey exults in his newborn son.

“The house will once again, Mrs. Dombey,” he said, “be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son: Dom-bey and Son!”

Dombey’s six-year-old daughter, Florence, runs to the bed where her mother is dying and “standing on tiptoe, the better to hide her face in her embrace, had clung about her with a desperate affection very much at variance with her years.”

This scene barely affects Dombey. In fact, he considers it “ill-advised and feverish.” Dickens writes,

But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more.

The upper-class women in Dombey and Son are submissive and maternal. Florence longs for her father’s love, but he ignores her. She continues blindly to love him. Florence is like a mother to her sickly brother Paul. When he is sent at far too young an age to Mr. Blimber’s classics “hothouse” school, she prepares the next week’s Latin ahead so she can teach Paul on the weekends. Many of Paul’s fellow students go slowly crazy because their heads are stuffed – or not! – with declensions, conjugations, and Cicero at too young an age.

An aside: The Dombeys’ Latin lessons must have influenced George Eliot in writing the scene in The Mill on the Floss (1860), in which Maggie Tulliver visits her brother Tom at school and is fascinated by his Latin book. Tom, who struggles to learn Latin or any other subject, is a Victorian sexist who tells her that women cannot learn Latin.

Mr. Dombey and Florence

Few writers describe a father’s hatred of his daughter as well as Dickens does. After Paul’s death, Mr. Dombey loathes Florence, the unwanted surviving child. Fortunately, Mr. Dombey’s second wife, Edith, loves Florence and is a second mother to her. But Edith, too, has a complicated relationship with Dombey. She married him for money, at the insistence of her mother. Elegant and beautiful, outwardly the perfect Victorian woman, Edith despises Dombey. She refuses to dress and act like a mannequin. I cannot help but think of Lady Dedlock in Bleak House. In a way, both of them are caricatures, but we especially empathize with rebellious Edith.

The first Mrs. Dombey, Florence, and Edith form a triangle of wronged women. Mrs. Dombey, dead in childbirth; Florence, daughter of a cruel father and surrogate mother of a brother who dies; and Edith, a feminist rebel. Mr. Dombey crushes the first two, though Edith survives and Florence is revived.

Edith pays the greatest price for survival.

One is happy in knowing that George Eliot would have written those scenes differently.

Reading in Covid Season:  Dickens’s “Bleak House”

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After the family reunion, we came down with Covid.  By “we,” I mean the whole family.  Ground zero: a picnic in a state park. I will always think of it as Covid State Park.

I dragged around the house for days in my nightgown, like an invalid in a Victorian novel. I carried a box of Kleenex from room to room. The Victorians would have used handherchiefs.

“We’re out of Kleenex again!” 

It is exhausting, painful, disturbing.  When you’ve got Covid, you think you want to curl up with Agatha Christie and other cozy mysteries.   You want to go strictly genre.  But the truth is, you spend so much of your time managing symptoms that it doesn’t matter what you read.

Eventually I escaped from Christie’s English vicarage to Victorian London in Bleak House.

Dickens’s masterpiece consists of (at least) three interwoven novels within a novel, which spiral out from Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a lawsuit that has ruined hundreds of lives, and driven one man to suicide. Ironically, this doomed lawsuit provides work for hundreds of lawyers, clerks, copyists, and journalists.  Dickens rages against the machine:  he bellows that there is no justice in Chancery. Chancery is a foggy nightmare, located a few blocks from Tom’s-all-alone, a plague-ridden alley where the homeless live and die.

In my favorite part of the novel, “Esther’s Narrative,” we meet Mr. John Jarndyce, a wealthy philanthropist who deplores Jarndyce and Jarndynce. This comical character, who is too eccentric to be a real hero – he frequently retires to the “growlery” when he feels “the East wind” – is the guardian of three young adults, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare, and Richard Carstone.  Esther is an orphan, no relation to Mr. Jarndyce, and hence not involved in the suit; but Ada and Richard, his distant relatives, have been raised with knowledge of the pending lawsuit.  Mr. Jarndyce patiently, grimly explains that the suit will never be settled. He emphasizes that all expectations will be disappointed, and that Richard will have to make a living.  Bright Ada understands, but Richard, unfortunately, becomes obsessed with Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

“Esther’s Narrative” is by far the best part of Bleak House:  honestly, she is my favorite of all Dickens’s characters, a charming, witty, observant young woman, beloved by a number of eccentric characters, including Miss Flite, a crazy old woman who haunts Chancery and plans to free her pet birds from their cages when her case is closed. Esther has a great affection for inky Caddy Jellyby, whose mother, Mrs Jellyby, dictates letters all day to Caddy regarding an obscure Borrioboola-Gha charity in Africa, and thus neglects her family.

Perhaps the darkest part of Bleak House is the satire of Lord and Lady Dedlock, who have a house in London and an estate in Lincolnshire. The elegant, disdainful Lady Dedlock is always “bored to death” and always on the move.  The Dedlocks are sketchily portrayed, because it more effective for Dickens to show them as cartoon silhouettes, who stand for a certain class and empty way of life. Since Lady Declock is also peripherally involved in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, her character is gradually revealed to us. She and Esther discover they are related. And partly because of this, she is persecuted by Mr. Tulkinghorn, a wealthy, truly evil lawyer, who likes to dig up dirt, and digs up quite a bit on Lady Dedlock.

Let me leave you with a passage from Dickens’ rant on Jarndyce and Jarncyce.

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man’s nature has been made better by it.

Rant on, Dickens! (And Kleenex, please! )

Girls and Their Fathers in Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend”

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In the opening chapter of Dickens’s dark novel, Our Mutual Friend,  Lizzie and her father, Jesse Hexam, are rowing in “a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance.” Her father’s business is sinister:  he trawls the Thames for dead bodies, which he sells for a small fee to the police, who try to identify the corpses.

There is real horror in this opening scene: the boat is “allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface,” as is this masterpiece. Lizzie is terrified of the corpses, but Hexam is proud of his skill, so much so that he keeps the placards describing the victims. Although he cannot read, he knows what each placard says, and remembers the circumstances under which each body was found. 

And he cannot understand Lizzie’s repulsion.  When she refuses to change places with him in the boat, because she cannot bear to be next to a corpse, he cannot understand her sensitivity.

“What hurt can it do you?”

“None, none.  But I cannot bear it.”

“It’s my belief that you hate the very sight of the river.”

“I -I do not like it, father. “

“As if it wasn’t your living!  As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!”

At these latter words, the girl shivered again…

Lizzie loves her father deeply, and we are spellbound by her loyalty, though it might seem  extreme to cynics, who consider Dickens’ women weak, compliant,  and stereotypical.   Lizzie makes compromises, but is surprisingly tough in a subtle, feminine way. This motherless girl has raised her younger brother, Charley, the only literate family member, because she has contrived secretly to send him to school .  He offers to teach Lizzie to read, but she refuses because it would alienate their father, who despises people of a higher class.  And she intends to stay with her father forever, because she believes he needs her.  And he does need her. In his way, he is a family man:  he drinks at a cozy bar after work, but is not a drunk, nor is he a womanizer.  Work and family (and an occasional drink) are everything to him.

Dickens understands the psychology of father-daughter relationships. Whether good or bad, the father is the first man in a girl’s life, and even if she is not proud of him, she tries to please him.  Lizzie is torn between her coarse father, who “resembles a… bird of prey,” and her bright brother, who has a chance to climb the ladder of class through education.  Early on, Lizzie tells  Charley to  run away to his school, because their father has become hostile to him, and he is not safe at home anymore. Lizzie is both mother and a non-sexual surrogate wife. These roles are impossible to balance.

The darkness of Dickens’s vision dominates this novel: a young crippled girl, known as the doll’s dressmaker, financially supports her alcoholic father; an impecunious “mature young woman” and a”mature young man” get married because each has been told the other has a fortune; a vicious man with a wooden leg becomes obsessed with cheating his employers, who have inherited the fortune of the Golden Dustman. There are, of course, admirable characters, charming characters, and comic characters, but in Dickens’s magnum opus fortune-hunters abound.

What the Dickens? The Funniest Annotation Ever on Juvenal & Indecipherable Travel Notes

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We have duplicate copies of Dickens’s novels.  If it exists, we would like to  donate them to the  What the Dickens? bookshop

My husband points out that the name What the Dickens? would be a PR disaster.  For one thing,  people no longer say, “What the Dickens?” For another, the average person, unless he or she is shopping at Barnes & Noble,  prefers  to frequent bookshops with simple names containing the word ”books.”   And it is true that every independent bookshop in the state (except one) is called [Something] Books or the [Something] Bookshop.

The phrase “What the Dickens?” is obsolete in the 21st century, of course. It was not thriving in the 20th century, either. “What the Dickens are you doing?” my mother occasionally said. The phrase was  a polite reprimand for any number of silly, annoying things:  burning incense (it stank), wearing an Army jacket (we were citizens co-opting an army jacket as an anti-war protest tactic), or pinning a Frodo Lives! button on  a good sweater.

And it turns out that the expression What the Dickens? has nothing to do with Dickens. When  I looked it up in an old Webster’s dictionary I learned that  “dickens” means “devil” or “demon,” and is “used in exclamations or as a mild imprecation.” It is related to the proper names, Dick and Dicken, and was first seen 1590-1600, the lexicographer believes.

One shouldn’t even capitalize Dickens. What the dickens?

More on Annotation & a Comic Note on Juvenal’s Satires

Journal, 2015-2017

I have gently mocked the personal annotation trend and recommended keeping books pristine.

I am a notebook fan when it comes to note-taking. Today I came across an orange Moleskine notebook, which I dedicated to a variety of purposes from 2015 to 2017.

It is mostly a traditional book journal, with a few jottings and quotes. And t wrote what is probably the funniest modern annotation  on  Juvenal’s Satire VI (p. 40, in the Foiio Society edition). Juvenal in English is not for prudes, but his satires are more obscene in Latin, and like all Roman satirists, he is a misogynist. (The gentle Horace is even more misogynistic in his satires.) It is a genre thing. You have to accept it. Like Lenny Bruce.

Juvenal’s derision of women who fit the profile of groupies is so sharp and funny and true that I noted in response:   “Monica Lewinsky.”

Juvenal writes, “Others in winter, when the theaters are closed…/ will yearningly fondle souvenirs of their favorite actor,/their tragedy king-  his mask, his thyrsis, his jock-strap.”

My illegible travel writing is less successful. I observed on one trip,  “It is a [something] culture.” But what kind of culture? i can make out an “s.t”  Stream?  Street?  Steampunk?  Stylish? Stodgy? Stunning?

At the time the notes meant something [Something?].

Dickens’s Darkest Novel, “Barnaby Rudge”

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Dickens’s dark historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, is not necessarily for Dickens fans.  It is not that Dickens isn’t  dark:  there are some very dark scenes in Our Mutual Friend, which begins with a man and his daughter rowing on the Thames in search of a corpse.  Dickens’ wit and humor usually offset the darkness, but the dark iniquity is almost unremitting in Barnaby Rudge. 

In this tense, fast-paced novel, anti-Catholic feeling culminates in the Gordon Riots of 1780, the result of a movement led by the Scottish aristocrat, George Gordon. On a nine-day spree from June 2-10, rioters terrorized London, looting, committing murders and arson.  Terrified Londoners posted NO POPERY signs on their doors to avert the looters.

In an ingenious, if slightly rambling buildup, Dickens subtly sets up the religious conflict by depicting its role in a forbidden love affair.  Religion is an obstacle between two young lovers, Emma Haredale, a Catholic, and Edward Chester, a Protestant, who want to marry.  Emma’s uncle, Sir Geoffrey Haredale, and Edward’s manipulative father, Sir John Chesterly, veto the relationship – Sir John, who needs his son to marry money so he himself can live comfortably, uses the religion card to persuade Sir Geoffrey to help squelch the affair.  The two men are enemies – but Sir Geoffrey is spellbound – as is everyone else – by Sir John’s arguments.

We hoped for a bright note when, on the opening pages, we visited the Maypole, a seemingly jolly Dickensian inn located 12 miles from London.  The innkeeper, John Willett, “a burly, large-headed man with a fat face,” and his son, Joe, “a broad-shouldered strapping young man of twenty,” are humorous, kindly folk, who wish the two thwarted lovers well – Emma is their neighbor.  And Joe has encountered obstacles in romance himself:  he is in love with a locksmith’s daughter, the alluring Dolly, who is beautiful and flirtatious, but not ready to settle down.  Even the Maypole is not a haven for rural wits or starstruck lovers;  it attracts a menacing stranger, who turns out to be a highwayman and murderer.  


What, you may ask, of the titular character, Barnaby Rudd, who is the idiot son of Mary Rudd?  For the first third of the novel, he is a minor character. He lives a carefree life, partly because he forgets everything that happens, and he wins everyone’s affections with his sweetness and generosity.  He has a pet talking crow named Grip, and takes the neighbors’ dogs for long runs in the woods.  But Mary, terrified when her husband, a murderer, tracks her down and shakes her down for money, moves twice to get away and to protect Barnaby.

But no mother can protect her son forever. The second time they run away from Mary’s husband, she and Barnaby travel to London during the riots.   And poor Barnaby is victimized by the mob: as a joke he is  lured by Hugh, one of the working-class leaders, to join them.  Barnaby fights by Hugh’s side and fantasizes  that he is a hero fighting injustice.  To do him justice, Hugh does take care of Barnaby. But Barnaby wants to talk to his mother and can’t quite understand why she isn’t there.  It is a heartbreaking situation. 

It is so suspenseful and edgy that I felt as overwhelmed as I did reading  the Russian writer Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. These two books are not otherwise comparable, but both depict the depths of human suffering.   Because I love the character Barnaby, and hoped he would get out alive -though it seemed unlikely at one point – I read to the end.  

Dickens will break your heart, but this is an underrated novel.

The Jarndyce Estate:  “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens

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At the center of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is a never-ending lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce,  which has ruined the lives of generations of a family.  It has become a joke in court.  When a lawyer observes that some event might happen “when the sky rains potatoes,”  the Lord Chancellor says, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  

But of course the litigious society in  Dickens’ 19th-century England is not a joke to the members of the family, nor to Dickens.  Some of the characters in Bleak House resist the siren song of the lawsuit over the Jarndyce estate, others are seduced by the prospect of money.  Among the resisters is John Jarndyce, the eccentric owner of Bleak House,  who bowed out decades ago because of the effect on his skirmishing family members.  He has little contact with his family; instead, he has selected his own extended family, which includes his two adult wards, Ada and Richard,  their companion, Esther Summerson, and several friends, one of them definitely corrupt, the witty Mr. Skimpole, who claims he is a “child about money,”

In other words, the case affects nearly every character in the novel, some of whom lurk around court, sure that one day the case will be settled and they will get rich.

Dickens’s brilliant rhetorical sentences describe the consequences of the deplorable lawsuit.  He writes,

This scarecrow of a case has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means….   The little plaintiff or dependent, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has given up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.  Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors have come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perennially hopeless.

Dickens manages to be serious, sad, and comical as he presents characters whose lives have been ruined by lawsuits.  Miss Flite, a little old lady who is not as mad as people think, has spent her life in court.  When she invites Ada and Richard, whom she regards as celebrities due to their involvement with Jarndyce and Jarndyce, along with Esther, one of the central characters, to her room, which is filled with cages of birds, she explains she will free the birds when her case is settled.  But “They die in prison, though.  Their lives, poor silly things,  are so short in comparison with Chancery proceedings, that, one by one, the whole collection has died over and over again.”

Esther Summerson’s narrative takes up about one-third of the novel:  she is an intelligent, sympathetic character who takes good care of her fast friends, Ada and Richard.  With depth and wit, she describes life at Bleak House, the kindness of their guardian, and their meetings with his eccentric friends, among them Mrs. Jellyby, who works days and night to help some cause in Africa, while neglecting her family; and Mr. Boythorn, a gruff, loud, but gentle friend who walks around with a pet bird on his head (more birds!), and is suing his neighbor, Lord Dedlock, about an easement.  Lord Dedlock is suing Mr. Boythorn about the same. Esther’s humorous, very personal chapters are my favorite in the book

This novel is so brilliant in every way that I recommend you cozily sit down with a cup of coffee and the book.  It will keep you happy for a month.

And may we all be free of lawsuits!  

Why Readers & Actors Love “Nicholas Nickleby”

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Imagine an idealistic couple just out of graduate school, dazed by long years of performing arcane tasks like translating the Gettysburg Address into ancient Greek, and distressed by the discovery that their degrees have prepared them for only the lowest-paid jobs: teaching, writing for non-profits, or working as a paralegal.

It seemed that one minute we were reading the pre-Socratics and scanning the odes of Horace, and the next we were living in a dowdy dump and recovering from our commutes by attending exercise classes and binge-reading Henry Fielding.

One weekend we left our seedy digs to splurge on the eight-and-a-half hour play, Nicholas Nickleby. This adaptation of Dickens’s novel was charming, but I wished I had brought a pillow. I still remember the opening scene: enthusiastic actor/muffin vendors roamed the aisles and tossed muffins at the audience – which we never caught, unfortunately. We enjoyed ourselves but so exhausted by sitting that we left after four hours. “We could have read the book faster,” my mate murmured.

Roger Rees (Nicholas Nickleby) and David Threlfall (Smike) in the Royal Shakespeare Company production

Having just read Nicholas Nickleby for the third time, I am charmed by Dickens’s vibrant characters, bewitched by his hyperbole, thrilled by his witty dialogue, and grieved by the death of a favorite character. I see why it is perfect for the stage. For one thing, many of the characters are actors, and we see them both on- and off-stage. Nicholas Nickleby and his sidekick, Smike, fall in with a traveling theater: at an inn, they meet Mr. Vincent Crummles, who is directing his two sons in stage swordplay. And Mr. Crummles, always plotting new prospects for his theater troupe, hires Nicholas to write a play, and suggests Smike might be a good actor.

I love the adorable Mr. Crummles.

…Mr. Crummles looked, from time to time, with great interest at Smike, with whom he had appeared considerably struck from the first. He had now fallen asleep, and was nodding in his chair.

“Excuse my saying so,” said the manager, leaning over to Nicholas, and sinking his voice, “but what a capital countenance your friend has got!”

“Poor fellow!” said Nicholas, with a half smile, “I wish it were a little more plump, and less haggard.”

“Plump!” exclaimed the manager, quite horrified, “you’d spoil it for ever.”

“Do you think so?”

“Think so, sir! Why, as he is now,” said the manager, striking his knee emphatically; “without a pad upon his body, and hardly a touch of paint upon his face, he’d make such an actor for the starved business as was never seen in this country. Only let him be tolerably well up in the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet with the slightest possible dab of red on the tip of his nose, and he’d be certain of three rounds the moment he put his head out of the practicable door in the front grooves O. P.”

“You view him with a professional eye,” said Nicholas, laughing.

“And well I may,” rejoined the manager. “I never saw a young fellow so regularly cut out for that line, since I’ve been in the profession. …”

This novel is really about family, biological families and found families, and eventually the Nicklebys have a large extended family of kind-hearted friends not related by blood. How else can an impoverished Dickensian family survive ? Nicholas, his mother Mrs. Nickleby, and his sister Kate go to London after their father’s death to seek help from Uncle Ralph Nickleby. He wants to be rid of them – and wants to kill off Nicholas.

Ralph acts on the “divide-and-conquer” strategy. He sends Nicholas to teach at a horror factory of a school directed by the sadistic Wackford Squeers. Nicholas rebels, whacks Wackford for beating his students, and is followed by the adoring Smike, a simpleton who has worked at the school for years as a slave. Meanwhile, back in London, Kate first works for a milliner (it doesn’t work out), then as a companion. Unfortunately, she is sexually harassed by friends of Ralph and is actually in danger .

Before I end this post, let me mention the magnificent Mrs. Nickleby, mother of Nicholas and Kate. She is one of Dickens’s stock characters, the silly middle-aged woman who, always confused, makes coy or absent-minded remarks which, in Dickens’s view, are more appropriate for a younger woman. Think of Flora Finching in Little Dorritt. I do not agree with his view of middle-aged women, and yet they are comic, brilliantly-drawn.

This is one of Dickens’s brilliant early books.

How to Read Dickens without Reading about How to Read Dickens

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Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of “Hard Times”

I often read Victorian novels without reading about the Victorian novel first. I love a good Penguin, but I eschew the introduction and footnotes. You don’t want to interrupt the spell of Dickens’s charming  novel, Hard Times, with  a footnote on St. Giles’s Church, London. Not that it wasn’t a great note:

Chapter 4. Note 3. “St. Giles’s was a notoriously poor area of London. See Dickens’s piece, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field,’ Household Words, III (14 June 1851), pp. 265-70.”

I read the note fondly (the introduction and footnotes in the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition are by Kate Flint), but it is  too much in hot mid-July.  I do recommend Peter Ackroyd’s exhaustive 1990 biography, Dickens, though.

I picture myself at the British Library.

After years of reading Dickens and about Dickens, I would love to discover some area of Dickens studies that scholars haven’t done to death. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sit with pencil and notebook at the British Library or the Dickens Museum or the Bodleian Library or the Harvard Library or the University of Texas at Austin library or God knows what other library and read musty old papers and discover a detail that changes Dickens studies? With the pandemic raging, that is unlikely to happen. I wonder if I’ll ever see London again.  Austin, Texas, maybe.

This week, I was fascinated by my third reading of  Dickens’s Hard Times. It almost seems like a new book, because I haven’t read it to shreds as I have, say, Our Mutual Friend. Published in 1854, Hard Times is a charming little book, and a good introduction for Victorian newbies who do not embrace 900-page books. Like Bleak House (1853), Dickens’s previous novel, Hard Times begins with a stylish repetition of the same word in successive sentences; note facts and principles in the first paragraph.  And the repetition of the word facts occurs throughout the first chapter.

“Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle upon which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children!”

Fans of Dickens’s elegant whimsy realize immediately that he is satirizing education whimsically–again! Dickens thought poorly of the schools.  The character Thomas Gradgrind, who depends on facts, math, and a philosophy of self-interest for the system of education at his model school, detests whimsy and imagination. His unfortunate children, Louisa and Tom, are not the better for their facts:  they are not allowed to go to the circus, and are admonished for peeking through a gap in the tent.  A circus is not a pastime for reasonable people.

Ironically, they become connected to the circus when the pupil Sissy Jupe, known as “Girl Number Twenty,” is abandoned by her father, a circus clown.  Thomas kindly takes her into their home. Sissy’s sunny personality improves the outlook of his youngest daughter, Jane, but it is too late for Louisa and  Tom. Louisa is married off to Mr. Bounderby, a boastful middle-aged owner of a factory and a bank, to whom marriage is certainly a hell, and Tom becomes a dishonest clerk at Bounderby’s bank who begs Louisa to pay his gambling debts and other debauchery.

The education of the Gradgrinds has not served them well.  In some ways, Dickens is more sympathetic to the uneducated factory workers than to the Gradgrinds, though some of them are also frankly awful, too.  One thread of the novel is spun around the hard life of 40-year-old Stephen Blackpool, a weaver stuck in a loveless marriage to an alcoholic, and in love with kind, sweet Rachael, whom he can never marry. When he asks Mr. Bounderby about the laws of divorce, Mr. Bounderby says they are not for the lower class. There is one law for the rich, and another for the poor, as Stephen discovers.  And yet Stephen has paid his alcoholic wife to go away several times, and she always returns down-and-out, and sells the furniture for drink while he is at work.

The workers are poor and have no rights; but a dishonest union organizer turns on Stephen when he says he believes in the principles but doesn’t agree with the manner and will not join because he needs the money so badly. And so a campaign of ostracism against him begins.

Dickens loves to write about social issues, and I thought of other industrial novels, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) and Mary Barton (1848), and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849). Such issue-driven novels were “in the air” at that time. I wonder, Is anyone writing novels about labor and unions these days? Or does that belong to an earlier time?

Hard Times is such a brilliant read! It is satiric, elegantly written, and Louisa is an especially vivid character.  Parts are sentimental, but Dickens can get away with it.  In fact, where would we be without sentimentality?