Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist
© 1837 Charles Dickens
447 pages

"Please, sir, I want some more."   I had never read or otherwise encountered Oliver Twist before this month, but I immediately recognized that quote. Something about little Oliver sticks in the minds of other readers, just as it stuck in the mind of many characters who encountered him.  Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan who seems to escape and again from the clutches of uncaring or malicious adults, only to find himself right back in trouble. It was trouble that started before his birth, for as this narrative follows young Oliver's birth until he is about eleven or twelve,  its happenings eventually reveal a more elaborate family drama.  While Oliver is passing in and out of the hands of hostile adults -- first uncaring taskmasters, then criminals, who capture him after he escapes --  the arrival of a man with a mysterious past heightens the mortal danger to the boy, far beyond that of ordinary neglect and abuse.  The novel is replete with memorable characters, particularly Nancy --  a teenage girl associated with a gang of criminals, who helps them kidnap him for labor but regrets her actions, later laboring to atone for them.  Although this story is more grim than anything else I've read of Dickens, I appreciated the earn-your-happy-ending type conclusion, in which Oliver finally finds happiness but at the cost of a dear friend.

Dickens' Descent of Desertion

"...the great paradox of morality is that the very vilest sort of fault is exactly the most easy kind. We read in books and ballads about the wild fellow who might kill a man or smoke opium, but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or 'anything mean'. But for actual human beings opium and slaughter have only occasional charm; the permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean. The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss, and the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men commit grand sins; it makes its great men (such as David and St. Peter) commit small sins and behave like sneaks. 

Dickens has dealt with this easy descent of desertion, this silent treason, with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecisions of Pip."  

From p. 28 of Critical Essays on Charles Dicken's Great Expectations, G.K. Chesterton, quoting from GKC's Charles Dickens.   Another random discovery while poking about in the library's English literary criticism cases.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations
© 1861 Charles Dickens
544 pages

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

A chance encounter with a desperate and threatening convict in the dark marshes near his home, followed by an inexplicable invitation to a reclusive spinster's home, creates for young Pip an unexpected adolescence.  Pip is an orphan, a boy who lives with his weary and frequently abusive sister and her ironmonger-with-a-heart-of-gold husband, Joe.  The two events are not as random as they appear, with connections that will be exposed throughout this story of Pip's young life as he grows into a twenty-something with a lot of mistakes behind him.  More overtly pivotal is a third event, the arrival of a lawyer who announces to Pip that someone, somewhere, has taken an interest in him with the intention of making him into a gentleman. There is more to being gentle, however, than having money.

When I think of Dickens, I think of dirt -- of miserable hovels, filthy laborers,  dark streets filled with muck and offal, grimy oil lamps whose meager light masks even more despairing conditions. Great Expectations provides that amply, though not in the places to be expected. One of the more harrowing settings is the interior of a great house, Satis, which has been closed to the light and left to decay after a woman's heartbreak. When Pip meets the woman, Miss Havisham, she is much aged, more through anguish than time.  She is a woman utterly consumed by her grief, literally living in it: jilted by a fiance decades ago, she continues to wear a tattered bridal dress and lives in a room featuring the rotting remnant of her bridal feast. She proves to be a pivotal figure for Pip, not because she is the author of his (mis)fortune, but because she introduces him to someone who will be: her adopted daughter, Estella.  Estella she has raised to be the ruin of men, a siren whose rocky core breaks their hearts like flimsy ships. Pip, is literally starstruck and will spend the entire book pining for her -- accepting a mysterious fortune and reforming his manners and expectations to please her. For her, he will leave his sister and dear brother-in-law Joe behind; he will forget them entirely, ashamed of their tiny house and the dirty forge, their rough hands and woeful habit of referring to knaves as jacks within the card deck.

For all his being enraptured by Estella -- who, to her credit, does attempt to warn him off repeatedly --  Pip's eyes are not so clouded that he doesn't come to realize the mistakes he is making. Eventually the person who has been providing him this mysterious fortune appears, and there are complications -- creditors and men waiting at the gallows, desperate attempts at escape and plans foiled.  Pip will have to be rescued by some of the people he has left behind, and this time is properly ashamed -- not of them, but of his own cretinous behavior.  The ending doesn't have the resolution I would expect -- a man rescued, the girl gotten --  but it's truer for that, given that every thing has its cost.  Great Expectations was an utterly riveting story. I approached it with dread, having started it last year and then fallen off the track, but this year I couldn't put it down. I was ever surprised by Dickens' humor. I expect his work to be Very Serious dramas about the plight of orphans and the poor and such, but there's giggle-bits everywhere, from the characters to the narration. There's even a fart joke. (For shame, Dickens!) One bit of whimsy is a character directly and consistently referring to his senile father as The Aged Parent.  Expectations brims over with remarkable characters, most notably the haunted Havisham and  the extraordinary Magwitch,   Although I still have my sentimental attachment to A Christmas Carol, Expectations definitely deserves its status as Dickens' best.  Well over a century and a half after its publication, the story still resonates.

A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities
© 1859 Charles Dickens
353 pages

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree only. 

I’ve wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities for a long time, not for its reputation as a classic so much as its setting: the French revolution fascinates me, and as this is “the” novel of the French Revolution, it surely merits my attention. According to the introduction of my copy, Dickens regarded this as his best and favorite work, and he wrote it in a hurry -- dispensing with his usual wordiness.  I can’t speak for that, as A Tale of Two Cities is as florid as any work of the Victorian period I’ve yet read. Although I approached the novel thinking it to be chiefly about the French Revolution,  Dickens keeps his focus on a few varied characters living in England for most of the book: Charles Darnay, a French nobleman who renounced his title to support himself in England;  Dr. Alexander Manette, a physician long imprisoned whose release at the outset of the book starts the plot; Sidney Carton, an alcoholic lawyer’s associate in England who believes he will never amount to anything;  Lucie Manette, the doctor’s daughter who has been raised in England during her father’s captivity; and Jarvis Lorry, a kindly old banker.

The story is told in three parts, the first being set nearly a decade before the revolution begins. After introducing the primary characters, Dickens slowly works toward the uprising that began the French revolution, ultimately having them ensnared by it through no fault of his own. He plainly expects his audience to know what the French revolution was and why it occurred: modern audiences who are more distant from its context would do well to peruse information on the subject before diving in. While Dickens writes the book to comment on the horrors of violent revolutions -- specifically, the inhumanity they unleash --  his main characters also give the reader a story of love and redemption.  The book was not as I expected in being wholly about the revolution, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I particularly enjoyed Dickens' use of foreshadowing at the outset of the book, when a comic writes the word "BLOOD" on the walls of a local shop using spilled red wine: Dickens comments that the day would soon come that 'that' wine, too, would soon spill and stain the streets.

  Being such a classic, it's almost pointless for me to "recommend" this: I'm certain most readers are familiar with its reputation. I considered it worth my while.

An illustration from my edition.(© 1942 Halbot K. Browne)

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens

For a number of years now, I have made a tradition of watching A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart. I do not recall the first time I watched the movie, but it became an instant favorite. I will go so far as to say that the movie changed my life for the better in that through it I was able to gain the will to redeem my own self. I watched it during a troubled time in my life where I needed it. It is to me a powerful story about the ability of human beings to change themselves for the better. Although I have watched movie numberless times -- through several Christmases and during the year, even when Christmas was far away -- I have never read the story that inspired it. I decided to amend that this year.

The story is a familiar one: I would wager most people in the west have heard of it. They have at least heard the name Scrooge, and many people might remember that he was visited by ghosts and realized the "true meaning" of Christmas (as if there's only one). I remember as a child that Dickens "A Christmas Ghost Story" did spook me as a ghost story -- what with its doorknobs changing into the howling faces of dead people and spirits wandering about. During this past Thanksgiving break, I sat down and read the story -- and oh, what a story!


Old Marley was as dead a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for.

A Christmas Carol is the story of one Ebeneezer Scrooge, the partner of the late Jacob Marley and something of a miser. Dickens writes that his heart was so cold that the winter wind did not bother him and the summer sun didn't warm him up -- so cold that everyone around him avoided his company. John Irving introduced the story in the copy I had, and he writes that although we see Scrooge as a caricature that Dickens was attempting to convey an accurate depiction of Dickensian England's heartless "robber barons". Scrooge likes profit -- so much that he doesn't bother repainting his firm's sign after the death of Marley, and snaps at his clerk (Bob Crachit) for attempting to burn coal.

Having introduced Scrooge as a selfish, spiteful old miser, Dickens begins his "Christmas ghost story" with peculiar things happening to him. A spectre of a hearse goes before him; his door-knob changes into the face of his late partner, howling at him; the portraits on his fireplace change into portraits of Marley. Finally a ghost appears -- the image of Marley, transparent and clothed in his funeral apparel -- but with additional elements, that of cash-boxes and money registers trained to him. Scrooge is at first skeptical, maintaining that he could be seeing things -- his senses could be fooled by undercooked food -- "A blot of mustard, a bit of moldy cheese...there's more of gravy than grave about you, friend".

Marley (after convincing Scrooge of his existence) warns Scrooge that unless his heart changes, he is in for a fate like Marley's -- to roam the Earth without rest as punishment for his selfishness. "It is required of every man," the ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death." Scoorge is perplexed that Marley is being punished -- he was a good businessman. Marley replies (in one of my favorite lines) "Business! Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business!"

Marley informs Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts as part of his reclamation. The next three parts of the story concern the visits of the three ghosts -- the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come. Each ghost takes Scrooge places and forces him to examine his life and the consequences of the decisions he has made. The Ghost of Christmas Past particularly upsets Scrooge. Bit by bit, we see Scrooge being slowly changed -- his heart slowly thawing. By the time he is visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come, he is determined to not let certain things happen.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge, "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!" cries Scrooge as he and the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come approach a grave. Upon seeing his own name, Scrooge insists that he is not the man he once was -- "I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall shrive within me! I will not shut out the lessons that they teach! Oh, tell me that I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

With those words, Scrooge finds himself in his bed -- alive -- on Christmas day, and begins to live with the spirit of Christmas for the first time, making amends to his fellow human beings. It is to be a wonderful story of human redemption -- of the power of the human will to change one's self for the better, to rise above that selfishness that comes to easily and to reach out to one another. Dickens' prose is marvelous, as is his use of symbolism. I highly recommend the story to you -- it's only a little over a hundred pages -- and declare it this week's Pick of the Week.

One quotation -- this from Scrooge's nephew Fred in response to Scrooge calling Christmas a humbug.

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say, " returned the nephew [of Scrooge]: "Christmas, among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round [...] as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open up their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe it has done me good and will do me good, and I say God bless it!"