Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

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.

TBH I forgot there was even a murder in Bleak House. That book has everything. The main parts I liked: the protracted will case/young shiftless man made malignant by money (and iirc dying of it? or his wife does ––– I love the melodrama of a slow didactic death, it makes me want to read Clarissa, which I know is a bad idea); the whole story around poor Jo (total sucker for 19th c Britishes railings against kids with a rotten lot); the fact that the female narrator's love interest was just kind of kept at sea until she needed a non-Guppy/non-Jardyce guy to marry.

JARNDYCE himself is a badass, too. I think about this book far more than any other I've read int he past 3 years.

Have to get to Dorrit, Chuzzlewit, Pickwick one of these years. Old Curiosity Shop not so much.

There's a piece in the February Sight & Sound discussing the paucity of cinema adaptations of Dickens. Several TV adaptations of course, maybe his work is just too sprawling to fit comfortably into a two hour adaptation.

there were a ton of em in the 30s and 40s.

the iMdB associates him with 324 productions -- admittedly most of them after the mid '50s are TV.

the sprawling novels are probably better served by TV, but then Oliver Twist is pretty sprawling and still condenses well to movie length. Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities work well at that length but are both more focused books. Wd imagine Hard Times wouldn't be a great film even tho it's as condensed as any of the books. The poor quality sequences of the 1940s (?) Pickwick Papers I've seen make me want to see the whole thing, even tho filming it is a terrible idea.

there was a nice BBC4 documentary the other week that intercut different adaptations of the novels together, wd also love a more fleshed-out version of that concept

oh Abbott david copperfield is so great! now i wish i were reading it, too.

Like the idea of the silent shorts, just do the good bits:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215705/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1499626/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285750/

Quilp! How could I forget about Quilp! Quilp IS the subject of The Old Curiosity Shop. Arthur Machen said the chapter where he dies describes "a city transformed into the very mystery of terror".

Great proto-Metamorphosis moment when Quilp wakes up -

“The first sound that met his ears in the morning - as he half opened his eye, and, finding himself so unusually near the ceiling, entertained a drowsy idea that he must have been transformed into a fly or blue-bottle in the course of the night, - was that of a stifled sobbing and weeping in the room.”

so many ideas per page in Dickens, just thrown away, in the sense that they're not followed up. Condtant sense of an over abundance of creative energy. No imaginative cheese paring: he disliked misers of all types (and hated their counterpart debt).

yeah, the abundance is just ridiculous. I like the way he'll sometimes just ramp it the fk up and throw out a few pages of borderline visionary prose to distract you from a stupid coincidence that's coming.

& re kafka, I read this on wiki earlier today, did not know:

Franz Kafka called his own first novel Amerika "sheer imitation" of David Copperfield.

That's very interesting! I still haven't read Amerika yet, despite the fairly constant suggestions to do so by a friend.

I did think when I read that bit in The Old Curiosity Shop "C'mon, it's not that unlikely Kafka would ha read this - not outside the borders of likelihood it provided the germ".

Happy Birthday big man.

We'll always remember you as inspiration for the Bleak Old Shop of Stuff.