Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

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.

had the misfortune to see 90 seconds of that :(

It was like that Blackadder version of Scrooge, with none of the laughs.

saw ten minutes, decided against spending two and half hours watching R Webb + 'amusing' character names.

WC Fields was born to play Micawber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=058M-5S5qJM

If I taught American history, I'd be sure to assign American Notes.

so has anyone seen The Invisible Woman, Ralph Fiennes' film about CD and his mistress? I was hopeful cuz I liked his Coriolanus, but reviews v mixed at best on this one.

^i thought it was great

well a christams carol was just a pot boiler but people lvoed taht shit!!

reading David Copperfield this christmas, am 2/3rds of the way through. feels as though something is missing though. doesn't seem as involving as the others i've read. seems to be a lack of villians in it as well. (ok, Uriah and his step-Father / step-Aunt). Great Expectations was better.

saw Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time since reading the book and hadn't realised that a lot of the dialogue is verbatim and the designs of ghosts are spot on taken from the books.

To enjoy an author you have to effect some meeting of minds and the vehicle within which you and the author must travel together from start to finish is the writing style. I never seem to engage with Dickens' style as I can with most other authors of his period.

It isn't so much that his books are histrionic as that the particular flavor of his histrionics has no appeal for me. Consequently, his books miss their mark, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and I can't wring any enjoyment out of them. I consider this to be a mere accident that says little of importance about Dickens or about me.

so, in april it was Old Curiosity Shop which had very little actual Shop in it (was hoping for something like the description of the taxidermists in OMF). but i enjoyed the trek to wolverhampton.

now: barnaby rudge. published same year as OCS so potentially written in parallel. not far enough into it yet though.

4 to go and i still find it hard to pick a favourite.

took me a long time to get around to liking dickens; surprised i don't complain about him on this thread

3 years ago:
"Like the idea of the silent shorts"

there was a BFI dvd in fopp a month ago that had a few.

http://shop.bfi.org.uk/dickens-before-sound-dvd-bluray.html

Disc one (90 min)

Gabriel Grub (date unknown) (8 min)
Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost (W R Booth, UK, 1901, 4 min)
The Cricket on the Hearth (D W Griffith, USA, 1909, 14 min)
Oliver Twist (J Stuart Blackton, USA, 1909, 9 min)
The Boy and the Convict (David Aylott, UK, 1909, 12 min)
Nicholas Nickleby (George O Nichols, USA, 1912, 20 min)
The Pickwick Papers – The Honourable Event (Larry Trimble, UK/USA, 1913, 15 min)
David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley, UK, 1913, 8 min extracts)

Disc Two (98 min)

Oliver Twist (Frank Lloyd, USA, 1922, 74 min)
Dickens' London (Frank Miller and Harry B Parkinson, UK, 1924, 12 min)
Grandfather Smallweed (Hugh Croise, UK, date unknown, 12 min)

The only thing I remember about Old Curiosity Shop is Quilp flogging the figurehead - haven't ever had the courage to try to parse what's going on there.

Some pretty lol reactions both pro and con per Wiki:

Probably the most widely repeated criticism of Dickens is the remark reputedly made by Oscar Wilde that 'One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter.' (Nell's deathbed is not actually described, however.) Of a similar opinion was the poet Algernon Swinburne, who called Nell "a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads."[6]

The Irish leader Daniel O'Connell famously burst into tears at the finale, and threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was travelling.[7]

The hype surrounding the conclusion of the series was unprecedented; Dickens fans were reported to have stormed the piers in New York City, shouting to arriving sailors (who might have already read the final chapters in the United Kingdom), "Is Little Nell alive?" In 2007, many newspapers claimed that the excitement at the release of the last instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop was the only historical comparison that could be made to the excitement at the release of the last Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.[8]

The Norwegian author Ingeborg Refling Hagen is said to have buried a copy of the book in her youth, stating that nobody deserved to read about Nell, because nobody would ever understand her pain. She compared herself to Nell, because of her own miserable situation at the time.

The burial was much more moving, I thought, the way they hid the truth from the old man.

Didn't know Dickens was mad.

Here's Dickens personal plans for all 350 million Indians alive at the same time as he was pic.twitter.com/7e9guOFM4s

— Shiv Ramdas Traing To Rite Buk (@nameshiv) February 7, 2023

Love Great Expectations & Christmas Carol, didn’t mind Nicolas Nickleby but otherwise haven’t read a ton. Started Tale of Two Cities for the bookclub i do with my friend, looking forward to…a long bookclub i guess

Was completely baffled by the first chapter
all that mail carriage stuff —but once I got used to the serialization structure (describe describe describe aaaand PLOT; describe describe describe aaaand PLOT; etc) i’m now enjoying it. Definitely settling into the soapy mystery of it all.

Sometimes though i get impatient like
Yep ok it’s a room with a dormer window no yes i know what those look like no I get how they open I can absolutely picture the window perfectly thank you OMG can you please get to the point now (cries)

*bump*

Tale of Two Cities - my final verdict is the last few chapters made the rest of it worthwhile

but he had this thing with using violent out of context French Revolution scenes without ever really ~dealing- with the Revolution except as handwavey bloothirsty “godlessness”
almost pointless having it be the Revolution at all tbh?

and omg the drawn out mystery of the Doctor drove me IN. SANE.

want to read that one again

recently reread David Copperfield, a lovely sentimental book, and now I want to read Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead

DC is a favorite. Just starting OMF and really digging it.

first time in about 10 years that I've not read any Dickens in April. usually April, August and December. the recent bbc thing has made me want to read Expectations again though.

that and Omf and Two Cities probably my favourites

Never sure why OMF begins with a Nick Hornby essay about why OMF is rubbish