Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

haha okay

also it was weird because david copperfield hates uriah heep basically from the moment he sees him, but heep doesn't actually do anything evil until much later in the book, so he basically just hates this guy because he's ugly and creepy for a long time.

i thought you meant the narration

wow, i was totally not expecting 10 years of concentrated dickens hate when i opened up this thread!

personally i've never actually read the guy, but my sister swears by him. but then she loves All Things Victorian so i'm not sure that actually means much

She loves corsets and not having the right to vote?

(first part of OMF dvd very true to book. only slight diff was the lamles - first veneering party, chapter 2, is their wedding in the dvd but is later in the book. grainy and murky though)

grew up 3 miles from an old coaching inn in tewkesbury that was mentioned in the pickwick papers. is now a wetherspoons...

http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-royal-hop-pole

Dickens Journals Online (djo.org.uk) was in the papers yesterday asking for help digitising all the issues of Dickens' weekly papers that he put out (they've been OCR'd, quite well in fact, they just need the odd OCR error fixing and hyphenations removed and dashes added and the odd foreign character). anyway, i signed up, did the first 3 pages of my 20 but the 4th timed out when i submitted it and the site hasn't responded since...

actually, they just put up a message. which is odd because i've just been reading about the cause on slashdot...

"Our hosting company experienced the most unfortunate hardware failure issue (thunder strike), and by there calculations we should be back on-line in, worst case scenario, 48 hours. If you are interested in the actual event, then please follow this link: http://status.aws.amazon.com/.";

ooh, this is neat to hear about! i signed up for the crowd-sourced transcription of jeremy bentham's papers last year, but the dude's indecipherable scrawl cowed me.

done my 20 pages - http://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-iii/10183.html

bit of a story by Charles James Lever (who?)
first person report of an ostrich hunt
a bit about london 500 years ago
William Gurney (a poem)
first person report of being stuck down a crevasse
and a short story called Goyon The Magnificent

and according to the stats they are now 0 uncorrected, 969 in progress, 43 waiting for approval and 87 complete

oddly, there are no credits on the stories, only "Conducted by Charles Dickens" on every spread.

Literary detective work -

Nearby, Richardson discovered the home of a sculptor derided by locals as a miser, the premises of two tradesmen named Goodge and Marney, and a local cheesemonger called Marley – "so suggestive of Scrooge and Marley", she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/charles-dickens-real-character-names

ended up doing 3 whole issues of those dickens periodicals mentioned above, none of which had a dickens story in them...

just finished Bleak House as well, which is full of locations around Chancery Lane. i should go and have a walk around.

Dickens brought up near a place called Black House, so suggestive of Bleak House.

used to do a paper round for his local newsagent The Cold Furiosity Shoppe iirc

I just finished Bleak House as well funnily enough, I work just across from Lincoln's Inn Fields and a lot of it has barely changed.

Loads of Dickensian bicentennial stuff going on at the moment. Anyone seen the Dickensian London exhibition at the Museum of London yet? Apparently the art and photography are fantastic.

I've never actually read a full Dickens, but I've watched umpteen adaptations. Think the BBC adaptation of Bleak House was a masterpiece in itself, as was Little Dorrit.

How does his writing compare to say, Wilkie Collins's Woman In White?

They're completely different, it would be a bizarre comparison to make.

only because they were contemporaries and collaborators... i heard Dickens's prose is more "old fashioned" than Collins's.

Dickens is rich and leisurely and darkly funny and then just dark. Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out. You have to enjoy his narrative voice and be comfortable with the fact that he doesn't really deal in Flaubertian realism. But I think you can work out after 50 or so pages whether you're gonna dig him or not, and if not, well nobody's making you. Unless you're at school or something.

"Old fashioned" is a nonsense btw, imo the great 18th century prose writers read less "old-fashioned" than yr high Victorians. Dickens feels like a meeting between the two eras to me.

He means "is it difficult to read?" Collins is a lot easier to read and also creepier, but Dickens isn't exactly difficult, although his prose is a lot more florid. Don't expect great psychological insight into most of his characters.

Stephen Fry (I think) was championing David Copperfield - is that a good starting point? You can assume I like Dickens's characters/storytelling/sentiments, but I'm a slow-and-steady but easily distracted reader. Woman In White was fairly easy to read though and I made it through the whole thing, so that's why I was making a comparison.

Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out.

Dombey and Son is lathered in the stuff.

i started with things i didn't know the stories of, hadn't seen the films of. Our Mutual Friend was recommended by people and was great, dark and with lots of depth. Tale Of Two Cities will be my 4th in under a year (the other two being Hard Times and Bleak House).

just pick one, read the first chapter online (gutenberg.org, multiple other places). then pick up the wordsworth edition from amazon (£1.99)

David Copperfield is as good a starting point as any, although it is very long it's more linear than, say, Bleak House, which goes all over the place.

(Dombey is probably after that, despite ledge's warnings)

What books haven't had any or many TV/film adaptions? "Martin Chuzzlewit"? "Barnaby Rudge"?

Can vaguely remember Tom Wilkinson as Mr Pecksniff in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. Or maybe I've got the books messed up.

the whole detective thing in BH struck me as a detour.

they do require a bit of an investment, time-wise. and i find it helps to bear in mind the episodic nature of their initial publication.

i think they've all had tv or film adaptations, multiple times for some of them. they've been around longer than tv and film...

Can't remember too much of the plots of most of the Dickens. Just mainly remember and love the minor characters/grotesques ie Wackford Squeers and Mrs Squeers, Dick Swiveller(yes really) and The Marchioness etc

The relationship in between Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop is nauseatingly sentimental at times (even to many contemporaries, who had a high tolerance for this sort of thing), but then again, you've got the retired carnival giants, serving the retired carnival dwarves in their caravans, you've got the character who has spent his whole life staring into the fires in a forge, you've got the punch and judy show etc etc. It's these sort of things for which I love Dickens.

David Copperfield becomes a bit interminable towards the end imo. Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist - all good starting places. I really like Our Mutual Friend as well but it's so late and consequently somewhat idiosyncratic that it's not necessarily a great starting point.

Can vaguely remember Tom Wilkinson as Mr Pecksniff in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. Or maybe I've got the books messed up.

It's possible. Having checked the list of his novels, I can remember seeing adaptations of all of them but Chuzzlewit + Rudge.

There was a Chuzzlewit adaptation in the 90s, definitely.

Chuzzlewit = adapted into a television mini series of the same name in 1994
Rudge = rarely been adapted for film or television (the last attempt was a 1960 BBC production; prior to that, a silent film was made in 1915).

So Rudge is teh rubbish, I assume

> you've got the punch and judy show

punch and judy's 350th anniversary this year too...

NV otm as per. Just read Martin Chuzzlewit, & I'm back to thinking him maybe my favourite English novelist (Fielding aside, maybe). I find myself really moved by him; most novels can't do that to me, & I think it's the positive side of the sentimentality - emotional and moral force.

iirc 2/3rds of David Copperfield is great, but it falls apart a bit towards the end (Dickens at his worst whenever one of his angelic women steps up); I think if I were going for a first-person one, it would be Great Expectations.

Might try to go that Museum of London thing. Visited the Dickens Museum (research for a 'London Dickens walk' piece), & I wouldn't bother unless you're really really nuts for him.

wait, what? is this coming from... commedia dell'arte?

Great representations of punch and judy in lit.

MR James - The Story of an Appearance and Disappearance
Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop
Julian MacLaren-Ross - Memoirs
Wyndham Lewis - the Bailiff in The Childermass (where punch becomes a sort of philosophical figure).

Any more? Something I've been vaguely interested in for a while.

xpost

agree that Our Mutual Friend is great but a bit idiosyncratic.

Old Curiosity Shop (a) Peter Ackroyd favourite I think – between him & Fizzles I am intrigued.

Not fiction, but there's very good stuff on P&J men in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.

this morning they mentioned that the first mention in england(?) was in pepys diaries

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1662/05/09/

"Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants."

^ P&J talk, not dickens

P & J = confusing because of that mysterious Pazz & Jop thing Americans on ILM are wont to discuss

Thanks koogs/woof. Vill inwestigate < Sam Weller. xpost

yeah, used P&J initially, looked at it, deleted it, for that very reason.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002042/

imdb link for dickens. 324 titles...

I'm about 1/4th of the way through David Copperfield and loving it. Great Expectations we read as a class in 9th grade and it broke my brain in the best possible way. Bleak House is my faves that I've finished. I was actually going to sleep last night thinking of getting a tattoo of Guppy even though he is kind of a creeper.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/csl4953l.jpg

This cartoon reminded me that Bleak House is always cited by MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED-type books as a valid source on spontaneous human combustion. That's another thing that makes it great ––– two or three introductions really trying to sell the veracity of this phenomenon before the story of yet another sad orphan begins.

Bleak House is my favourite I think, tho I maintain the last 100 or so pages is a v. unfortunate consequence of episodic publishing. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations are also in my front row. I can't help but like the big multi-charactered epics more than the focused novels.

Suspect Barnaby Rudge is largely unfilmed cos of its unDickensian setting? plus it feels a bit pro Sectarian violence iirc

You know those mix albums from, like, Fabric or whoever, where the DJ spends ages and ages slowly and painstakingly building things up until the point when they're amazing, and they're amazing for such a frustratingly short period of time before he starts winding down again? That's Bleak House.

The build up to the Tulkinghorn murder is so meticulous and the chapters leading up to it are incredible and then the resolution is just ridiculously quick and a bit shoddy. And then there are a load of chapters where every character no matter how minor has to be given a point of departure. I think it's actually quite badly-paced even though there's enjoyable and thought-provoking stuff throughout.

I mean I know I'm looking at it through the prism of 150+ years of mystery fiction but come on, prolong the mystery a bit longer ffs.

I thing I love and find mildly maddening about his stuff is the effect of the serial form –– something deeply dramatic happens at the end of each chapter. "Oh crap I went blind!" When I read Hard Times the ever-escalating cliffhangers started to grate on me as I read the whole thing in two afternoons and not several weeks. I guess it's like spending a day watching a whole season of Dexter on DVD now, a process I also find exhausting.

Has anyone seen the Great Expectations adaptation with Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson.

never heard of it! when was it released?

in other news my friend & are trying to read The Chimes for xmas bookclub but god it is a slog. Incredibly waffly.

2012

Dickens is incredibly or maybe not so incredibly uneven.

Like all too often he really needed an editor.

yeah apparently he liked The Chimes more than Christmas Carol & it was more popular at thd time idk … i’m finding it pretty bloody impenetrable myself

that 2011 GE was the bbc's 3-parter for the 200th anniversary. it is solid, iirc, unlike the 2023 version (colman as haversham) with the added gunfights.

there's also a 2012 film with Helena bonham carter which i don't think I've seen.

havisham

I've seen the BBC one, don't remember too much about it but it was good, iirc also.

(the 2023 was also bbc. peaky blinders remix)