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Unread 02-08-2012, 04:46 AM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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Default Charles Dickens (of course)

This must be the only literary website in the world that doesn't have a space devoted somewhere on it to our great bicentenarian. (Yes, there's been the great limerick thread on D&A but no specific tribute.) One can imagine that if he were alive today he would be the greatest of bloggers - alongside writing and directing the films of his novels, producing his own podcasts and audio-books, Tweeting and Texting... He would have had great fun with the language of the web.

So he wasn't a poet. It's just about the only thing he wasn't. He was certainly the cause of poetry in others. Eliot was going to name The Waste Land from a phrase taken from Our Mutual Friend. And I don't think any poet writing about the city since can fail to be influenced by him: just think of that fog in "Prufrock". Or think of Peter Reading's urban wastes.

Anyway, let me kick off with a wonderful passage from Dombey and Son, describing the christening of Paul Dombey. Nobody sets a scene or establishes a mood better:

Quote:
'Please to bring the child in quick out of the air there,' whispered the beadle, holding open the inner door of the church.

Little Paul might have asked with Hamlet 'into my grave?' so chill and earthy was the place. The tall shrouded pulpit and reading desk; the dreary perspective of empty pews stretching away under the galleries, and empty benches mounting to the roof and lost in the shadow of the great grim organ; the dusty matting and cold stone slabs; the grisly free seats' in the aisles; and the damp corner by the bell-rope, where the black trestles used for funerals were stowed away, along with some shovels and baskets, and a coil or two of deadly-looking rope; the strange, unusual, uncomfortable smell, and the cadaverous light; were all in unison. It was a cold and dismal scene.

'There's a wedding just on, Sir,' said the beadle, 'but it'll be over directly, if you'll walk into the westry here.

Before he turned again to lead the way, he gave Mr Dombey a bow and a half smile of recognition, importing that he (the beadle) remembered to have had the pleasure of attending on him when he buried his wife, and hoped he had enjoyed himself since.

The very wedding looked dismal as they passed in front of the altar. The bride was too old and the bridegroom too young, and a superannuated beau with one eye and an eyeglass stuck in its blank companion, was giving away the lady, while the friends were shivering. In the vestry the fire was smoking; and an over-aged and over-worked and under-paid attorney's clerk, 'making a search,' was running his forefinger down the parchment pages of an immense register (one of a long series of similar volumes) gorged with burials. Over the fireplace was a ground-plan of the vaults underneath the church; and Mr Chick, skimming the literary portion of it aloud, by way of enlivening the company, read the reference to Mrs Dombey's tomb in full, before he could stop himself.

After another cold interval, a wheezy little pew-opener afflicted with an asthma, appropriate to the churchyard, if not to the church, summoned them to the font - a rigid marble basin which seemed to have been playing a churchyard game at cup and ball with its matter of fact pedestal, and to have been just that moment caught on the top of it. Here they waited some little time while the marriage party enrolled themselves; and meanwhile the wheezy little pew-opener - partly in consequence of her infirmity, and partly that the marriage party might not forget her - went about the building coughing like a grampus.

Presently the clerk (the only cheerful-looking object there, and he was an undertaker) came up with a jug of warm water, and said something, as he poured it into the font, about taking the chill off; which millions of gallons boiling hot could not have done for the occasion. Then the clergyman, an amiable and mild-looking young curate, but obviously afraid of the baby, appeared like the principal character in a ghost-story, 'a tall figure all in white;' at sight of whom Paul rent the air with his cries, and never left off again till he was taken out black in the face.

Even when that event had happened, to the great relief of everybody, he was heard under the portico, during the rest of the ceremony, now fainter, now louder, now hushed, now bursting forth again with an irrepressible sense of his wrongs. This so distracted the attention of the two ladies, that Mrs Chick was constantly deploying into the centre aisle, to send out messages by the pew-opener, while Miss Tox kept her Prayer-book open at the Gunpowder Plot, and occasionally read responses from that service.

During the whole of these proceedings, Mr Dombey remained as impassive and gentlemanly as ever, and perhaps assisted in making it so cold, that the young curate smoked at the mouth as he read. The only time that he unbent his visage in the least, was when the clergyman, in delivering (very unaffectedly and simply) the closing exhortation, relative to the future examination of the child by the sponsors, happened to rest his eye on Mr Chick; and then Mr Dombey might have been seen to express by a majestic look, that he would like to catch him at it.
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Unread 02-08-2012, 06:03 AM
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Susan d.S. Susan d.S. is offline
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Ok, here's an excerpt from Pickwick, a fine list poem in itself:

"'Ah! fine place,' said the stranger, 'glorious pile--frowning walls--tottering arches--dark nooks--crumbling staircases--Old cathedral too--earthy smell--pilgrims' feet worn away the old steps--little Saxon doors--confessionals like money-takers' boxes at theatres--queer customers those monks--Popes, and Lord Treasurers, and all sorts of old fellows, with great red faces, and broken noses, turning up every day--buff jerkins too-- matchlocks--Sarcophagus--fine place--old legends too--strange stories: capital' and the stranger continued to soliloquize until they reached the Bull Inn, in the High Street, where the coach stopped."
(Alfred Jingle in Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837)

Yes, it is truly terrifying to consider how he might have harnassed all that energy with modern technology.
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Unread 02-08-2012, 08:22 AM
Sharon Fish Mooney Sharon Fish Mooney is offline
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And art too....Van Gogh saw Dickens both as "a poet and an artist" who inspired his own art --he has over 40 references to him in the 100's of letters he wrote to friends and relations, e.g. "I have my books on perspective here, and a few volumes of Dickens, including Edwin Drood; there is perspective in Dickens, too. Good God, what an artist! There's no one like him." In his portrait-- L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) 1890...the books on her table are Dickens Christmas Tales and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Without Dickens we would be missing a goodly number of van Gogh's, including, I suspect, his two empty chairs.
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Unread 02-08-2012, 09:02 AM
Lance Levens Lance Levens is offline
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Greg,

Dombey is one of my favorites. The opening chapter shows the pompous patriarch Dombey, his dying wife and the just born infant (whose birth will result in the wife's death) all before a cozy fire and all depicted in such elaborate detail that the arch of the novel unfolds right there in the first scene.
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Unread 02-08-2012, 09:20 AM
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Janice D. Soderling Janice D. Soderling is offline
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Oh, I am so delighted that this Dickens thread appeared. He is absolutely one of my favorite writers, I return to his work again and again, to laugh, to cry, to be astounded by his modernity. And not least to be entertained.

I recently completed "Our Mutual Friend", and kept wondering how on earth could he tie it up so nicely if he was writing an espisode a week. I have always believed that he did not have a complete version at hand when he started the serialization. Does anyone know?

BTW, when I was in London last, I visited his home/musuem which I fortuitously stumbled on http://www.dickensmuseum.com/about/
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Unread 02-08-2012, 12:55 PM
Cally Conan-Davies Cally Conan-Davies is offline
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Nothing and no-one has touched my life like Dickens. For the personal and deepest joy and sadness and love it gave me, 'David Copperfield' - indelible. For the experience of, I would strenuously argue, the greatest novel, artistically speaking, 'Great Expectations'.

He is, for me, equal to Shakespeare. The second tier is under them. And also, he gave us two things I love almost as much: Dostoevsky (whose debt to Dickens is immense); and Christmas (not the debt part - the pretty part, the part I loved with my whole soul when I was a child).

Barkus is willin'

What larks, eh Pip?
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