I thought again of Dickens - Hope Jahren's science memoir Lab Girl

Through a mix of Twitter flattery and reverse psychology, influential biologist Hope Jahren tricked me into reading her memoir Lab Girl (2016).  It is an unusually good book.  (Other authors, please do not try this again – each spell works only once).

Jahren and her longtime lab manager Bill collect large samples of material – soil, moss, fossils – and run them through a mass spectrometer or some such machine.  Thus, the lab, her own lab, a series of labs that she and Bill have built from scratch and scraps.  The series of labs are one of the frames on which Jahren builds the book.

Another frame is a series of short chapters about tree biology.  All of the tree science is in these little chapters, but the trees are also clear-cut for metaphor.  Pulped for metaphor.  Jahren is as a rule good with metaphor – “The students spilled out of the van like an undone bag of marbles” (114) – but the tree chapters do something well beyond the single image.  Some of the extended metaphors are more obvious than others, but I am looking at the fascinating 2.3, about the symbiotic relationship between trees and certain fungi – “the best – and really only – friends that trees ever had” (104) – where her friend Bill is (also) the fungus.  “Why are they together, the tree and the fungus?”  It’s a dang allegory.

This is like that.  But I have written before about how scientists need metaphor as much as anyone in literature.

In Chapter 1.4, Jahren writes about her first science-like job, preparing intravenous medicine in a hospital pharmacy, a job that is not exactly David Copperfield’s child labor in the bottle-washing factory but with the empty bottles, labels and seals is like it, enough like it that Jahren interlards the chapter with direct quotations from the Dickens novel.

Lydia was magnificent at her workstation, possibly because she’d been doing this sixty hours a week for almost twenty years.  Watching her sort, clean, and inject was like watching a ballerina defy gravity.  I watched her hands fly and thought… in an easy amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me to know everything by heart), from chapter seven.  (44)

Lydia is a great character, one of those Dickensian creations that are called caricatures by readers who have limited acquaintance with the variety of humanity.   Here is another David Copperfield quotation, upon visiting the hospital psych ward:

What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeling.  (49)

Not only is the chapter full of David Copperfield quotations, but they all contain the word “heart.”  Jahren says she was working on a paper for her English class, making this a truly heroic feat of undergraduate recycling.  I suppose this could look like a gimmick; to me, it looked like a triumph.  The chapter could stand on its own as a short story.

The book is much funnier than I have suggested.  See the chapter with the trip to Monkey Jungle, a Florida tourist “attraction”:

Three Java Macaques that had been straining their brains over some problem that they could neither solve nor abandon propelled themselves toward us, supposing that we somehow represented an answer.  A white-handed gibbon was draped limply across our walkway, either asleep or dead or someplace in between…  A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer.  (116-7, the ellipses conceal a Beckett reference)

But the Dickens chapter was the only part of this fine book that I really wanted to write about, surprise surprise.

I stole the title of the post from a later chapter, p. 61.

Go before me, and show me all those dreadful places - Tom and Jo - a last bit of Bleak House

Just a bit more anthropomorphism from Bleak House.

The moon has eyed Tom with a dull cold stare, as admitting some puny emulation of herself in his desert region unfit for life and blasted by volcanic fires; but she has passed on and is gone…   and Tom is fast asleep.

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. (Ch. 46)

Tom is a slum, Tom-all-Alone’s.  The paragraphs that follow make it clear that Tom-all-Alone’s is also The Destitute Poor more generally.

There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of society up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.

This is Dickens invoking the other Tom, Thomas Carlyle, rhetoric that is pure Carlylese (“verily”), the kind of passage that reminds me that Hard Times will be the next Dickens novel.

I finally understood this time something of the place of Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House.  It is just a street, “a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people,” full of squatters in rotting, collapsing buildings – “the next crash in Tom-all-Alone’s may be expected to be a good one.”  The street has taken this turn because of the lawsuit that is the novel’s backdrop.  Dickens plainly says this a few pages into Chapter 16, but I did not understand it.  I did not understand that the winner of the lawsuit wins this, a poisonous tenement.

And Tom-all-Alone’s birthed, somehow, Jo the street sweep who “’don’t know nothink,’” one of the children Esther Summerson tries to save. 

Jo lives – that is to say, Jo has not yet died – in a ruinous place, known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone’s.

Because someone was kind to him poor Jo becomes an accidental instrument, almost a kind of connective tissue, of the novel’s complex plot, which will resume later in this chapter after Dickens lets Jo walk a round a bit, accompanied by a vagabond dog, “a terrific dog to sheep; ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their wool.”  What this dog is doing in London is likely a sad story.  But this line does explain why, in Chapter 25, “Jo has been standing on the spot where he woke up, ever picking his cap, and putting bits of fur in his mouth,” an odd habit that I now see he learned from that dog.

“‘Go before me, and show me all those dreadful places,’” another character says to Jo back to Chapter 16.  That’s Jo, and that’s Tom.

Because vacation and Best of the Year celebrations are upon me, I will have to put down Bleak House.  The next post would have been about Little Swills, the Comic Vocalist, who for many novelists would be the best character they ever invented, but for Dickens is just a recurring gag.

“Don't leave the cat there!” - Bleak House is alive

I mentioned a passage where Esther Summerson describes London as reflecting the sadness of her friend Ada by having “more funerals… than I had ever seen before.”  Bleak House must be among the most triumphant examples of the pathetic fallacy in literature, beginning with the extraordinary London fog in the first paragraph, the fog which has engulfed all of southeast England and is said to emanate from the law courts, and perhaps from one specific case, the one at the center, or just off of the center, of the novel.

The fog is not itself alive on that first page.  Or is it – “fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck”?  That is a malignant fog.  Aside from that, though, there are the gas lamps on the same page, the first real example of what I mean: “as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.”

The fog is left behind at the end of Chapter 5.  Three hundred pages later, back in London we have a “[w]intry morning” that “look[s] with dull eyes and sallow face” upon the city.  A couple of chapters later is a favorite of mine.  There are visitors at Sir Leicester’s country house, a series of dismal cousins, so the fires are roaring.  They “wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed.”  Bleak House temporarily becomes an eco-novel.  My real favorite is two pages later – same house, same fires: “Bedroom fires blaze brightly all over the house, raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and ceiling.”  As a metaphor for shadows, this is outstanding, but in this novel the suggestion that even the furniture is imbued with a soul is not so far-fetched.

At least the crows are normally living creatures, so this is not so strange, in fact it is observed crow behavior:

The rooks, swinging in their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with malcontents who won't admit it, now all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. (Ch. 12)

But that solitary crow is an unusual specimen.  “Drowsy,” why drowsy I wonder.  This is part of the crow theme, attaching Lady Dedlock and her home to particularly crow-like lawyer, one of the novel’s villains.  And it is part of the larger bird theme.

Countered, all too briefly, by the cat theme, or at least by the junkman Krook’s terrifying cat.  Esther, attentive to London’s ugliness, notices “the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept out rubbish for pins and other refuse” (Ch. 5).  She is foreshadowing Little Jo, but only a few pages later the cat is introduced: “The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.”  In a rag and bottle shop, this is not so odd, although given that a few pages earlier the bundle of rags was a person – well ,even this may not mean too much until we jump to Chapters 9 and 10, containing the death of the opium addict Nemo, where the repeated word is not “rags” but “ragged,” and as everyone else leaves the room:

“Don't leave the cat there!” says the surgeon; “that won't do!”  Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and she goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips. (Ch. 10)

Why won’t that do?  How does the surgeon know?  Who does that unnamed surgeon turn out to be anyways?  And is one of Miss Flite’s canaries named “Rags”? (Yes).

Now I think I know where I am going with this.

Fire, bells, murderous refuse - this connects to that - I did not write up the bird theme in Bleak House, but was tempted

The tightly planned, or brilliantly improvised, nature of Bleak House is evident throughout the novel, or in another sense not evident, since so much of the matter that makes up the planning is unlikely to be evident to the first-time reader, nor much of it to the second-time reader, and I doubt that I the third time was a complete charm for me, either.  Amazing that Dickens could keep track of it all.  I know, he had notes, but so did I.

So of course I did not pay particular attention, when I read the book twenty years, when the heroine dreams that she is “no one,” because I did not know that there was a character almost literally named No One; once I did know, having reached Chapter 10, of course I did not remember Esther’s words from way back in Chapter 4; even if somehow I did, I would not understand the significance.  More sneakily, Nemo is first mentioned in Chapter 5, but only as an incidental detail in an advertisement.

Even something as unsubtle as the constant association of the junkman Krook and fire – “the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire from within” (Ch. 5) – is almost invisible the first time through.  Unsubtle once you know what happens to Krook in a scene I might put in the ten greatest scenes in fiction if I thought in terms of Top 10 lists.  It is just more stuff in a novel crammed with stuff, and in that case a chapter that features twice as much stuff as usual because it is partly set in a junk shop.  “There were a great many ink bottles.”  I don’t think that is anything more than scene-setting, but I used to wrongly think that of so much else in the book.

This is Esther writing.  She is on her way to Bleak House.  It will be the seventh bleak house she has visited in less than fifty pages – another thing I counted this time – but the first one actually named Bleak House:

It was delightful to see the green landscape before us and the immense metropolis behind; and when a waggon with a train of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding bells, came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around.  (Ch. 6, first paragraph)

Now, the last line of the same chapter:

So I said to myself, “Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!” and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake that they sounded like little bells and rang me hopefully to bed.

As Edgar Allan Poe once said so memorably, “bells, bells, bells, bells, \ Bells, bells, bells.”  Maybe I should have been keeping track of a bell theme, but I believe it just serves as a lovely way to pull the beginning and end of this chapter together.

Here’s another one.  Lady Dedlock, “bored to death,” is vacationing in Paris, where “poor wretches” are “encompassing” the city “with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate” (Ch. 12) – what could that mean, with murderous refuse?  Just a few lines earlier, Lady Dedlock’s French maid was offhandedly mentioned.  Why would I think these details are connected?  All will be revealed, 590 pages later.

So much of this kind of thing, so much, everywhere in the novel.  All those ink bottles.

Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one. - Esther Summerson's prose

My impression is that Esther Summerson becomes a better, more confident writer as she writes her book, which is only reasonable, so reasonable that I have doubts whether it is true.  She does not just silently notice things, but sometimes, even early on, she writes something like

watching the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of spar, and the fields all smooth and white with last night's snow, and the sun, so red but yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like metal where the skaters and sliders had brushed the snow away (Ch. 3, her first)

None of which is remotely necessary to tell her story.  Young Esther is riding in a coach to her new boarding school, accompanied by a mysterious figure who we later know – and of course Esther, writing over ten years later knows – is her patron and guardian.  So no need for sun of any color or ice like anything, much less those trees.

The omniscient “Dickens” narrator writes stuff like that all the time, on some pages in every sentence, inventive beyond comprehension.  Summerson  is less inventive, relies more on dialogue, and has a more limited vocabulary, writing at a lower reading level.

But she seems to improve.  Thus the description of the ships in Chapter 45, “when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed,” a passage Nabokov picks out as especially good, or the fine variation on the pathetic fallacy in Chapter 51 when she, her friend at a low point, describes London as not just rainy, colorless, and smoky, but insists that “there were more funerals passing along the dismal pavements, than I had ever seen before.”

She is at her peak in Chapter 57, at the novel’s climax, or one climax, the only time a chapter of hers stands alone.  

It had set in snowing at daybreak, and it now snowed hard.  The air was so thick with the darkness of the day and the density of the fall that we could see but a very little way in any direction.  Although it was extremely cold, the snow was but partially frozen, and it churned – with a sound as if it were a beach of small shells – under the hoofs of the horses into mire and water.

Or a few pages later:

We were again upon the melancholy road by which we had come, tearing up the miry sleet and thawing snow as if they were torn up by a waterwheel.

Summerson is again in a carriage in the snow.  Now I understand the incidental detail over 700 pages earlier.  The narrator is linking, perhaps unconsciously, these two journeys, the most significant of her life.

I am at the point in the novel when the two halves finally join, when the detective character from the omniscient half figures out Esther’s role in the plot.  Esther always, with one ingenious exception,* narrates events she personally witnesses, while until this point the omniscient narrator only hints at her existence.  In another  kind of novel, this would be “suspicious,” as Scott Bailey says.  Maybe Esther does not exist (which in some sense is true).  Maybe Esther is the omniscient narrator.  Early on, she actually hints that she might be so (Esther is seated; a child is sleeping on her):

I began to lose the identity of the sleeper resting on me. Now it was Ada, now one of my old Reading friends from whom I could not believe I had so recently parted.  Now it was the little mad woman worn out with curtsying and smiling, now some one in authority at Bleak House.  Lastly, it was no one, and I was no one.  (Ch. 4)

Another passage that looks stranger the more I look at it.  “I was no one” of course proves to be a reference to – well, for twenty part 880 page serial novels, this is a tightly written book.

*  Chapter 51, and the ingenious bit is that in retrospect we know who Summerson’s source is.

a story of goodness and generosity in others - Esther Summerson writes her book

With powerless heroines like Esther Summerson, I look for the places they exercise power, the places in the story where they direct their will outward.  When Fanny Price rescues her younger sister from her family, for example, and installs her in Mansfield Park.  Esther Summerson also saves children, or tries to save them and fails.  “The child died” (Ch. 8).  The number of failures Dickens allows in her story, especially the final one, at the climax when her portion intertwines with the omniscient narrator, is something I am still mulling over.

But other times she succeeds, she saves the children, one by one, extracting them from want or from their awful, unloving families.  The novel is perhaps even overstocked with bad parents – we get the point early, but they keep coming.  Introducing herself, Summerson says she always had “a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should understand it better” (Ch. 3), a novelist’s talent.  Much of what she notices is along the lines of her room at the Jellybys, where “the curtain to my window was fastened up with a fork” (Ch. 4).  At this point, the detail seems comic, and Summerson is polite enough, but as the novel goes along it becomes clear that that fork is a moral indictment.

Here Summerson is trying to save a child who has an infectious disease.  She is arguing with Skimpole, a comic figure, a clown, a child himself, as he often says:

“In the meantime," I ventured to observe, “he is getting worse.”

“In the meantime,” said Mr. Skimpole cheerfully, “as Miss Summerson, with her practical good sense, observes, he is getting worse.  Therefore I recommend your turning him out before he gets still worse.”

The amiable face with which he said it, I think I shall never forget.  (Ch. 31)

That last line is Summerson’s description of evil, an evil that only she could see.  She does not tease, like the narrators of Cranford or Villette.  She condemns.

No, that is wrong.  She also teases.  Thus all of the digs at Mrs. Woodcourt and her famous Welsh ancestor who “appeared to have passed his life in always getting up into mountains and fighting somebody; and a bard whose name sounded like Crumlinwallinwer had sung his praises in a piece which was called, as nearly as I could catch it, Mewlinnwillinwodd” (Ch. 17).  Of course it is not just, or even primarily, Mrs. Woodcourt who is being teased here, but rather her son.

Writing her book is Summerson’s most surprising positive act of will, is what I am saying.  She makes it her own; she makes it about herself.  She is actually writing “full seven happy years” (Ch. 64) after the events of the novel.  Occasionally, rarely, Summerson switches to the present tense, which is what the omniscient narrator uses, even though his present is years before hers. 

It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother's voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so new to me.  It matters little that… [more in this vein].  It is all, all over.  My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others.  I may well pass that little and go on.  (Ch. 43)

The repetition, some of which I omitted, is another rhetorical device of the omniscient narrator’s.  Esther, the orphan, had met her birth mother, an encounter so powerful that she can only write about not writing about it.

I doubt I noticed any of this the first couple of times I read Bleak House.

Tomorrow, since I brought it up here, maybe a little about Esther Summerson’s prose.

I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages - let's try to figure out what the narrator of Bleak House is doing

The first person narrator, Esther Summerson.  She is a nobody, an orphan, a housekeeper.  In the other half of the novel, all sorts of exciting things are going on: a convoluted lawsuit, blackmail, spontaneous combustion, a section that is the prototype of the murder mystery, featuring a candidate for the first detective in English literature with all of the usual nonsense – master of disguise, unflagging eye for detail, indefatigable etc.  He’s even a bit hard-boiled.

Why “Esther’s Narrative,” as many of her chapters are titled, exists is a little puzzle.  “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (Ch. 3) – that’s her first line.  Right away, difficulties appear.

Esther Summerson is in an English literary tradition that was a hundred years old at this point.  She stands in a line of heroines who are highly virtuous to the point of passivity and readerly aggravation.  I am dating them back to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, but the controversial Fanny Price from Mansfield Park is another example, as is Jeanie Deans from Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, and as are, although curiously they are rarely seen as such, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe.  The latter pair are sassy while the others are not at all like that.  All of these women are, because of their sex or social position or temperament, powerless, or so they seem to other characters.  They spend much of the novels in which they star saying “No,” often over and over again.  They are in reality unbreakable forces of will, more powerful than they appear.

Esther mostly says “Yes” in Bleak House, mostly because what she is offered is as good as she is: a home (more than once), purposeful work, love, friends.  Her will seems fairly domitable.  She says “Yes” to recounting her minor role in the crazy events mentioned above. “[M]y portion of these pages.”  I am not clear who asked her to write up her story, or why.  When Wilkie Collins borrows the device for A Woman in White and The Moonstone, someone is supposedly collecting documents for legal purposes.  Maybe that is the case here.

But then what attorney was expecting this woman to produce an autobiography filling 460 printed pages, a detailed account of her own life and opinions which occasionally brushes against other events. 

It seems so curious to me to be obliged to write all this about myself!  As if this narrative were the narrative of my life!  But my little body will soon fall into the background now.  (still in Ch. 3)

Esther also uses her book to describe every detail of her acquaintance with and courtship by her husband while, for most of the book, specifically denying that she is doing so, which is a fine device for looking evasive while drawing attention to the thing evaded.

I have omitted to mention in its place, that there was someone else at the family dinner party.  It was not a lady.  It was a gentleman.  It was a gentleman of a dark complexion – a young surgeon.  (Ch. 13)

To this point, Esther has been careful enough to only mention things in her place.  But this is a forgivable clumsiness by an inexperienced writer.  Curious how only one subject causes these slips.  No, easy to explain, since Summerson is more than clever and is a narrator of sophistication and talent.  She could always go back and revise her writing.  She wrote the text she wants someone to see.

What actually is curious is that Bleak House was completed in 1853, along with Villette and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, all books told by self-effacing women with surprisingly wicked wits.

I’ll stay with Esther tomorrow.  I have hardly gotten anywhere.  The quotations above are good for showing Esther as a simple and rather plain writer.  I will have to undo that.

Prose, prose, prosing about Bleak House

How about a week of Bleak House (1852-3)?  Now that I have reread Bleak House, and Great Expectations earlier in the year, I have not only read every Charles Dickens novel, but have read them all within the last ten years.  I doubt I will ever do that again, although it would be great fun do it over and over, every decade until I expire.  There are not many books I have read even three times.

I took more notes than usual, as many as I took earlier this year for Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, but I was going to be tested on that one.  This time I was mostly wallowing in the Dickens stench and breathing in the Dickens fog.  “Fog everywhere” (Ch. 1).

The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman’s axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall.  The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass.  The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud toward the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain.  (Ch. 2)

I fear this is what some readers are criticizing when they call Dickens “wordy,” as if the passage would be improved with fewer words, perhaps without “loppings” or “crackle” or “soft.”  The paragraph and page only improves as it continues – “the oaken pulpit breaks out in a cold sweat,” or “[t]he pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has passed along the old rooms, shutting up the shutters.”

The book has the most marvelous things for the reader interested in looking for them, so many that I find myself a bit paralyzed at the moment. 

In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the chairs, serves for cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man.  (Ch. 10)

That one just popped out as I randomly paged through the novel.

That method will not work everywhere in the novel because of its unique dual narration, with half of the novel written by the usual omniscient Dickens narrator, made unusual only the extraordinary rhetorical and artistic effects he achieves this time around, and the other half written in the first person by one of the characters in the novel, Esther Summerson, in terms of the omniscient narrator’s story a secondary character at best, but, given that she gets half of the actual 880 pages, the novel’s protagonist.  Summerson is an implausibly great writer, but not at the level of Charles Dickens.  She is comparable to David Copperfield, and he's a professional novelist, while this is Summerson's first book!

A little more than half, actually, 53%.  This time I counted pages.  The novel alternates from the omniscient to the first person narrator, not by any fixed rule.  I thought that perhaps I had imposed a false symmetry, but no.  The fluidity with which Dickens varies the length, pace and tone of the alternating narrators is a minor pleasure of its own, now that I know the book.

I have no idea why more writers have not used this device.  It solves so many problems; it creates so many opportunities.  Not so long after Dickens, fiction writers grew tired of the omniscient narrator, preferring to explore the limited third person brought to prominence by Flaubert, or messing around with all of the variations of the pure first person.  The Bleak House narrator is a griffin, no doubt about that, a fantastic beast created to tell a fairy tale.

Boy, if I keep going like this, I’ll be able to write about Bleak House for two weeks, or ten.   “I went on prose, prose, prosing, for a length of time,” says Esther (Ch. 23).  Tomorrow, I’ll try to focus.

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B - a scary Dickens ghost story

When I started Wuthering Expectations I had wondered what kind of schedule I could keep.  But I always knew I could just write about short stories, just read one and get writin’.  I swore, though, that I would only resort to such desperate measures when – no, I thought I would do it all the time.  I don’t know why I don’t do it more.  I had been planning to spend much of this week writing about Walter Pater, for pity's sake.  Random English short stories: much easier.

So I am still in A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories.  Long ago, I wrote a little post wondering about the dearth of famous 19th century English short stories.  Compared to U.S. literature at the same time, I mean – Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, those folks.  Or Russian, French, or German literature.  The English, like the Americans, had magazines, and those magazine published fictional stories of various lengths and qualities.  They published such stories by famous writers, famous then, or now, or both.  Yet the British stories have always had a lower status, kept off in the margins as if they are second-rate compared to the best novels, which, in my experience, they mostly are until Stevenson and especially Kipling came along in the 1880s.  I have read more of the relevant pool of stories since I wrote that old post, but I have not solved the puzzle.

I do not know if it is coincidence, but I believe Kipling’s “’Wireless’” is the most famous or studied story that Byatt, who is deliberately on the lookout for oddities and obscurities, includes in the Oxford book, unless “The Haunted House” (1859) by Charles Dickens counts.  “Today, ‘The Haunted House of 1859’ is one of the attractions at Dickens World in Chatham in Kent” – if that’s not fame, what is.

One of the bedrooms is haunted by the ghost of young Master B., who was done in because he rang the bell while the owl hooted (the house is also haunted by an “’ooded woman with a howl”).  The sensible narrator, assigned to that room, is “uneasy” about the initial.

I also carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of the deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he couldn’t have been Bald), was a boy of Brains, liked Books, was good at Bowling, had any skill as a Boxer, even in his Buoyant Boyhood Bathed from a Bathing-machine at Bognor, Bangor, Bournemouth, Brighton, or Broadstairs, like a Bounding Billiard Ball?

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B.  (34)

The ghost story, as readers of Wuthering Expectations are well aware, is an inherently comic genre.  This one takes a strange turn, though, into a genuinely sentimental childhood story, in which an elaborate schoolchild game based on The Arabian Nights is shattered by the intrusion of real death and poverty.  At the new (“cold, bare”) school

I never whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun or had had a Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the playground, which looked like the beer.  (42)

“The Haunted House” is part of a frame story for a separate anthology with contributions by Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell and others, at least one of whom may have written a story more appealing to true fans of ghost stories, in which the ghost is not just a metaphor for the losses we all suffer, but surely less appealing to me, so I will not check.

now dogs, now cats, now pigs, now men - a parade of unwritten posts about Great Expectations

Pip is writing Great Expectations long after its events, maybe thirty-five years from the first scenes and twenty years from the end of Chapter 58.  Some of this is explicit, some I am inferring.

Thus Pip’s ironic tone towards his own life story.  He has achieved some critical distance.

So many problems are solved by this device.  In many earlier novels, Dickens has trouble creating interesting, non-stereotypical heroines.  He has trouble with heroes, too, but it takes him longer to figure out what to do with idealized, too-virtuous women.

But when Pip idealizes the perfect, wise Biddy, I am learning something not about the limitations of Charles Dickens but about the psychology of Pip.  It makes sense for Pip to make Biddy perfect, or, in particular, to always make her sound like an adult even when she is nine years old.  Maybe that is how Pip remembers her.  Maybe that is how he wants to remember her.

Similarly for the idealized father-figure Joe, who admittedly also has a lot more personality; similarly for the idealized (quite differently idealized) Estella.  Pip is telling the story his way.  And see that quotation about Biddy and the black-currant leaf, just the kind of action that gives the illusion that the character has a life outside the book.

Dickens writes a character a certain way in the third person and it is a flaw.  He writes her the exact same way in the first person and it is clever.  Yes, that’s right.

A new problem is created: why is Pip such a good writer?  Like the other Dickens first person narrators, David Copperfield and Bleak House’s Esther Summerson, Pip is not quite as good a writer as Charles Dickens, but he is still awfully good.  Scott Bailey has been writing about the case of Bleak House, where he works on the difference between Esther and “Dickens.”  This is the one place in Great Expectations where I really have to suspend my disbelief.  But it is a familiar problem.

I do not remember third-person Dickens spending too much time with the dreams of his characters, but both Pip and Copperfield (also writing in distant retrospect) report their own.  Here is fourteen year old Pip on the eve of leaving his family to be educated in London:

All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong places instead of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now pigs, now men – never horses.  Fantastic failures of journeys occupied me until the day dawned and the birds were singing.  Then, I got up and partly dressed, and sat at the window to take a last look out, and in taking it fell asleep.   (Ch. 19)

Pretty strange, like a Breughel painting.  At the end of Chapter 31, Pip dreams that he has to “play Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it.”  There are some other examples.  This might have made a good blog post.

Here is the core of another post I thought about writing: Great Expectations is a straightforward parody of the “benevolent patron” device that Dickens has leaned on since The Pickwick Papers (1836), where a jolly rich fellow swoops in and fixes whatever can be fixed at the novel’s end.  Dickens has been undermining his own device since Bleak House, where he is more subtle about it, but by the time of Great Expectations the mine has apparently been dug and it is time to fill it with gunpowder  and demolish the benevolent patron for good.

I guess I will wait to write that post after the next time I read Bleak House.  For this one, the credit goes to Dickens, not Pip. 

how strange it was - the Dickens sleight of hand

An English merchant living and working in Egypt, likely in the mummy export business, although he never specifies,  writes the strange story of how he was subject as a child to not just one but three conspiracies.  This is substance of Great Expectations.  We are all victimized by one conspiracy, the one where so-called grown-ups manipulate our lives – force us to go to school, prevent us from doing whatever we want whenever we want – for secret reasons of their own.  But Pip, the narrator, was by bad luck the target of two additional conspiracies that almost ruined him.

As a result of the conspiracies Pip is elevated in social class and has romantic troubles.  He also becomes monstrously self-absorbed, but that is perhaps an ordinary result of adolescence.  Eventually the conspiracies, all three, collapse in on themselves.  The usual childhood conspiracy is escaped by becoming an adult; the others end in rather more exciting ways.  A thrilling boat chase!  What is it with Victorian novelists and boat chases.

The narration of the central mysteries of the novels involves some of the most skillful sleight-of-hand moves I have ever read, invisible upon the first reading, obvious on the second.  Pip never cheats.  But of course he is writing from the distance of many years and knows how the story goes.  He knows the solutions to the mysteries.

See, for example, the penultimate paragraph to Chapter 32.  Young Pip has just visited fragrant Newgate Prison and is about to meet cold, beautiful Estella, the source of his romantic troubles.  At this point, Pip believes that there is only one unusual conspiracy at work.  Yet this is what the older Pip writes:

I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.

Here Pip, and I suppose Dickens, is, a little past the halfway point, directly declaring the solution to the mystery plot but in a way that the first-time reader likely just nods along with Pip – “Yes, that is strange.”  Now, Great Expectations is not actually a mystery novel, meaning that the solution to the mystery will be handed over to the first-time reader two-thirds of the way into the novel, just seven chapters later, since the mystery itself is not all that important.

Still, here we have just one reason that a reread of Great Expectations is so much fun.  The magician is so skilled.

The last paragraph of that chapter is just one line.  It remains mysterious, even on rereading:

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?

It is a mystery to the fictional author.  It is the reason he is writing the book.

soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped, and harrowed, and rasped - the hygiene theme in Great Expectations

I will go one more day pretending everyone knows what happens in Great Expectations, perhaps because they read an extended summary of it in 10th grade.  An orphan, a convict, Miss Havisham, the Aged Personage, etc.  And the defense attorney Jaggers, who “smelt of scented soap” (Ch. 11).

Dolce Bellezza put a bar of soap atop her Great Expectations post, accompanied by a description of Jaggers washing himself: “he would wash his hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room” (Ch. 26).   The narrator Pip identifies Jaggers with “the halo of scented soap which encircled his presence,” mentioning it the first two times Pip meets Jaggers, in Chapters 11 and 18, long before he actually sees him wash.  Dickens is planning his book in advance, finally.

Jaggers’s compulsive washing is very close to psychology, the only evidence that his life in a world of thieves, murderers and liars has any effect on him.  I have been told that Dickens characters are flat, are caricatures.

Pip, as a young boy, gets a taste of soap himself, when he is first cleaned up to visit Miss Havisham – “I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped, and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself” (Ch. 7).  His sister attempts to wash Pip’s life at the blacksmith’s forge, like Jaggers’s among the criminals, right off of him.  She is just about as effective.

Dickens ingeniously includes a scene with the same action but the opposite meaning.  Joe is Pip’s salt o’ the earth brother-in-law, the idealized Biddy a childhood confidante.  Pip, elevated to gentility, is being a snob about Joe:

“O, his manners! won't his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a black-currant leaf.

“My dear Biddy, they do very well here – “

“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the leaf in her hand.

[skipping some leaf-free lines]

Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands, – and the smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane, – said, “Have you never considered that he may be proud?”  (Ch. 19)

Pip is sensitive to odors.  From “the quantity of people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the trials were on” (Ch. 20).  Inside, some prisoners “went out chewing the fragments of herb they had taken from the sweet herbs lying about” (Ch. 56), herbs brought in by onlookers to cover the horrible stench.  Pip has described the odors earlier, “that curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone, which attends the convict presence” (Ch. 26), and again when he visits Newgate Prison in Ch. 32 (“I beat the prison dust off my feet…  I exhaled its air from my lungs”).  Simple association with criminals, or prison, is contaminating.  Pip can always smell it.

A lot of the odors in Great Expectations are not so tied to the thematic center of the novel, or I do not see how they are.  Just a page after that last quote, Pip takes his dreamgirl Estella out for a hideous tea in an inn room where “the air of this chamber, in its strong combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department” (Ch. 33).

I believe that is embellishment rather than melody, but perhaps there is a running soup or horse or gelatin theme I missed.  I have been told that Dickens is wordy.  What abridgment would improve that description?

a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a wager - or butchering Great Expectations

The problem I have with Great Expectations is that it was the first Dickens novel I read and yet it was not.  A mangled carcass identified as Great Expectations was mummified inside the 10th grade reader used in my high school.  What unthinkable horrors the editing vivisectionist committed against the innocent text, which must have been amputated fore and aft and middle for length and also, even worse, much worse, for reading level.  Fortunately, I have repressed most of my memories of my encounter with this freak, aside from a cartoonish illustration of an old lady burning to death, but I now – I still – read Great Expectations with the sense that I am brushing against the ghosts of murdered passages.

The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.  An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.  (Ch. 11)

This cannot possibly have survived the censors – epergne! – and I fear that everything interesting was whacked, everything but the spiders.  They must have kept the spiders.

Maybe it was not as bad as I fail to remember.  I do remember discovering, when I read the real book, that everything resembling a joke had been killed off as inessential to the plot.  No way that last bit about the spider community survived.  So we poor, helpless, little ignoramuses were given a Dickens who was not funny, as if the design were to poison any further interest in Dickens, or literature, or printed texts of any sort.

So much of the pleasure and art of Dickens is in the unnecessary aside, the spider community, Wemmick discarding his white gloves in the church font (Ch.  55), the Gogolian funeral attendant “(a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a wager)” (Ch. 35), that last fellow only mentioned that once, as far as I can tell a marvelous example of pure play by Dickens.  Someone should write a 500 page neo-Victorian novel about that fellow.  And someone else should create a children’s picture book about the spiders and beetles who live in Miss Havisham’s old fruitcake.

I have been meaning to reread Great Expectations ever since I named the book blog, but instead read thousands of other pages of Dickens.  Dolce Bellezza gave me the shove I needed.  She decided to write about the cleanlinessand soap theme.  So that is what I will write about tomorrow.   Or maybe dirt and bad smells, because why else would Dickens need soap?

A review of Francine Prose's review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch - "Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?"

Today I review a review of a book I have not read.  So many good ideas in one place.

The book is current sensation The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, an author I have never read; the review is by novelist Francine Prose in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 2014, pp. 10-12 (unfortunately subscriber-only).  The review is entirely negative.  Prose is dismayed by Tartt’s novel.

Because I have an ideally equable critical temperament, if I were to read The Goldfinch, which given its 2013 publication date and 771 pages is unlikely, I would surely enjoy its pleasures and wince at its faults.  Prose’s review is 100% wincing.

Come to think of it, I have never read any of Prose’s books either.  I would probably like them, too.  What is easier than liking a book?  All sorts of people do it every day.

Prose’s review is useful for the way it pins down an approach to literature.  I share a lot of her assumptions.  Prose begins her piece with an overview of the word “Dickensian,” misapplied to this novel she thinks (this part is available at the link).  Does the word mean “long” or “lots of characters” or “orphans” – and Tartt is Dickensian in this sense – or does it mean “the depth and breadth of his powers of observation, his cadenced, graceful language”  and a long list of other attributes which can be packed into one word, “style.”  All of us, Prose and I who are thinking of style, and others who are referring to content, mean “in the manner of Dickens.”

The Goldfinch is about an orphan who falls in with a bad crowd, a bit like Oliver Twist, including a version of the Artful Dodger.  He is not actually an orphan, but has a father who is utterly useless – if this is not in the manner of Dickens, nothing is.  Unlike Oliver Twist, the entire big book is in the first person, so a grown-up Oliver is telling his own story, making the book a lot more like Great Expectations.  A painting and a lot of stuff about fine art is in the novel, too, about as un-Dickensian a subject as there is.

I am picking this up from reviews, that of Prose and others.  But as I paw through the book (a library copy), I come across bits like “The night was a dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening” (468) and

The other section of Honors English was reading Great Expectations.  Mine was reading Walden; and I hid myself in the coolness and silence of the book, a refuge from the sheet-metal glare of the desert.  (234)

Cute, right, the presence of the absence of Dickens.  But I have not read the novel, so perhaps there are as many parallels with and references to Henry David Thoreau.

Neither of those fragments sounds the least bit like Dickens.  Prose goes after Tartt for “sections that seem like the sort of passages a novelist employs as placeholders, hastily sketched-in paragraphs to which the writer intends to go back,” generic descriptive lists, and the frequency of clichés, although Prose is wrong about this point, since the character should actually be using far more clichés.  This is, after all, his first book, and he is writing a memoir, not a novel.  I assume this problem is explained away early in the novel.  Perhaps Theo Decker murdered someone.  “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”  The narrator’s name is, yes, Theodicy.

Near the end of the review Prose invokes Great Expectations herself, the paragraph describing Mrs. Havisham’s bridal banquet, which is cheating – of course The Goldfinch has no sentences that good – and a bit of Edward St. Aubyn’s druggy Bad News in order to highlight Tartt’s “careless and pedestrian language” and demonstrate “why I found it difficult to respond when strangers assumed I was ‘loving’ Tartt’s novel as much as they were…  Reading The Goldfinch, I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’”

A cry from the heart after my own heart, since I care about little else, but why should everyone else care about what Francine Prose and I care about?  I hope a book blogger who loves The Goldfinch is working on a five-part rebuttal to Prose right now – The Goldfinch in fact is well-written and ingeniously constructed, full of traps for unsuspectingly narrow readers like Francine Prose, and here is how Tartt did it.  I would love to read that.

Dickens at the races - the quick dropping of all the pins out of their places

“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” ends with a report on the annual horse races of Doncaster.  It is less a narrative about or even employing the characters than a Sketch by Boz twenty years later.  Dickens reporting live from the scene.  The pure stuff.

I want to do nothing but quote from it:

Reaction also apparent at the Guildhall opposite, whence certain pickpockets come out handcuffed together, with that peculiar walk which is never seen under any other circumstances – a walk expressive of going to jail, game, but still of jails being in bad taste and arbitrary, and how would YOU like it if it was you instead of me, as it ought to be!

The pickpockets raise a good point.  I wouldn’t like it at all.

One of the apprentices finally makes it to the racetrack:

Francis much delights to be, not in the Grand Stand, but where he can see it, rising against the sky with its vast tiers of little white dots of faces, and its last high rows and corners of people, looking like pins stuck into an enormous pincushion – not quite so symmetrically as his orderly eye could wish, when people change or go away.  When the race is nearly run out, it is as good as the race to him to see the flutter among the pins, and the change in them from dark to light, as hats are taken off and waved.  Not less full of interest, the loud anticipation of the winner's name, the swelling, and the final, roar; then, the quick dropping of all the pins out of their places, the revelation of the shape of the bare pincushion, and the closing-in of the whole host of Lunatics and Keepers, in the rear of the three horses with bright-coloured riders, who have not yet quite subdued their gallop though the contest is over.

Most of the greatest prose writers of human history would have been satisfied with coming up with the “grandstand as pincushion.”  Very few would think to start moving the pins around.  Dickens keep the metaphor going as the days of the races pass:

The course as pretty as ever; the great pincushion as like a pincushion, but not nearly so full of pins; whole rows of pins wanting.

The ordinary activities of the town are replaced with drinking, gambling, talk of “’t’harses and Joon Scott,’” the consumption of “modest daily meal[s] of turtle, venison, and wine.”  But eventually the races end (“No turtle and venison ordinary this evening; that is all over”), the crowds wander off, the citizens of Doncaster return to their own homes, which they had let to gamblers for exorbitant sums, and Doncaster sweeps up.

[The Course] is quite deserted; heaps of broken crockery and bottles are raised to its memory; and correct cards and other fragments of paper are blowing about it, as the regulation little paper-books, carried by the French soldiers in their breasts, were seen, soon after the battle was fought, blowing idly about the plains of Waterloo.

The chapter is I suppose of some historical cultural interest, but really is just good writing for its own sake.  It ends Christmas Stories because it had to go somewhere.

Dickens and Collins trade ghost stories

The Dickens-Collins team gave us a well-made, amusing little murder story in the 1867 “No Thoroughfare.”  In an earlier collaboration, the 1857* “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices,” they abandoned any attempt at structure or sense and just let each author do his thing.  What things they do.

Following familiar types, Francis Goodchild thinks idleness means mountain climbing, scuba diving, and other vigorous non-productive activities, while Thomas Idle just wants to sit on the beach all day, or even better to sit by the hotel pool, since the beach is so far away, or best of all, why leave your room at all?  These two wander around northwest England.  That is more or less the frame.

Goodchild is sort of Dickens and Idle is kind of Collins.  They really did go on a tour of that region.  The division of labor is that Dickens writes the Goodchild parts and Collins writes the Idle parts.  Dickens writes about the characters climbing a mountain, much against Idle’s desires, while Collins writes about them coming down the mountain, giving Idle a terrible strain, his punishment for doing anything active, or else his gift since now he no longer has to climb any more mountains.

Dickens writes a ghost story, a good silly one, in which a hanged man tells of his crimes.  Here he is, just before Goodchild figures out he is a ghost (the reader will likely be way ahead of him):

His cravat appeared to trouble him.   He put his hand to his throat, and moved his neck from side to side.   He was an old man of a swollen character of face, and his nose was immovably hitched up on one side, as if by a little hook inserted in that nostril.   Mr. Goodchild felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and began to think the night was hot, and not cold.  (Ch. IV)

Collins has his own ghost story, although, following his Sensational method, there is in the end no ghost.  A man spends the night in a hotel room with a corpse.  I wonder if at some point it will seem to move:

When he looked at the bed, now, he saw, hanging over the side of it, a long white hand.
It lay perfectly motionless, midway on the side of the bed, where the curtain at the head and the curtain at the foot met.  Nothing more was visible.  The clinging curtains hid everything but the long white hand.

And so on.  Not bad.

My favorite Collins bit is midway through Chapter III, when we learn why Idle is so idle.  He reflects on three “disasters” in his life, three times when he made “the mistake of having attempted to be industrious” and was met with nothing but suffering.  “He had forfeited the comfortable reputation of being the one lazy member of the youthful community whom it was quite hopeless to punish.”  Poor fellow.  The few pages could be made into an Idler’s Manifesto if that did not take so much effort.

One last thing tomorrow, a bit of prime Dickens.

*  Yesterday I for some unknown reason put the story in 1868.  It comes last in the Oxford Christmas Stories book.  Maybe that confused me.

A Christmas murder from Dickens and Collins - All the lesser London churches strain their metallic throats

The year-end magazine stories of Charles Dickens were collected in 1871, just after his death, under the comical title Christmas Stories.  At first I was reading them for the sake of completeness and curiosity, but as the years passed (Dickens's years, not mine) they become more interesting.  The last one, “No Thoroughfare” (1867) (along with the 1857 “The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices”), is co-written with Wilkie Collins.  The "Lazy Tour" is a picaresque ragbag, "No Thoroughfare" a short novel.  Both are good.  This was a period not just of Peak Dickens, but of Peak Collins – The Moonstone was published in 1868.

The title of “No Thoroughfare” is not so good.  I will stick with that one today.

“No Thoroughfare” is a kind of murder mystery.  Part of it is set in an orphanage.  A little bit of sensation, a little bit of tear-jerking.  It hits a lot of Dickens and\or Collins buttons.  They are recycling, but Dickens always recycled, that is how he moved forward.  A dangerous trip across a snow-filled Alpine pass is something new to Dickens.

The editor of the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition has identified who wrote what, although I could mostly tell.  I want to save that for “The Lazy Tour,” though, where she does not say but I could always tell.

The mystery as such is not bad.  It is centered on a love triangle, and what else, I ask, given that the murder (attempted) in Our Mutual Friend (1864) and murder (completed, probably) in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) are caused by love triangles, with the man who cannot possibly win the woman becoming twisted and evil from frustration and jealousy – likely more from the latter.  Dickens had become occupied with the idea of evil, and this is how he explored it.  If the exploration is not so profound in “No Thoroughfare” it is still surprisingly interesting as a bridge between the two novels.

I would like to quote from the eventful and even exciting murder scene, but I am not sure the keenest touches make much sense without the context.  How about the very beginning, then:

Day of the month and year, November the thirtieth, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-five.  London Time by the great clock of Saint Paul’s, ten at night.  All the lesser London churches strain their metallic throats.  Some, flippantly begin before the heavy bell of the great cathedral; some, tardily begin three, four, half-a-dozen, strokes behind it; all are in sufficiently near accord, to leave a resonance in the air, as if the winged father who devours his children, had made a sounding sweep with his gigantic scythe in flying over the city.

It may not be the muddy megalosaurus that introduces Bleak House, but it is pure, clear Dickens.  It is another bit of recycling, too, evoking his little 1844 Christmas book The Chimes.  Those excessive commas are a guide to whoever is reading the passage aloud.  There is one more chime lagging, “lower than most of the rest,” that belongs to the orphanage and pulls me down from the steeples to the ground where a veiled lady “flutters to and fro,” about to launch the mystery.

"Mugby Junction" - shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear - a Dickens railroad Christmas

“Mugby Junction” is the 1866 Charles Dickens Christmas story, or actually three stories, or in some sense seven.  The “extra Christmas number of All the Year Round” included four otherstories by other authors all in the same railroad junction setting.  One of the contributors was a popular writer of children’s books calling herself Hesba Stretton.  I am just noting the name “Hesba.”

I didn’t read those, just the Dickens, more good ones:  a decent ghost story featuring a haunted signalman, a hilarious sort of boast from “the boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction…  what’s proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being”; and a longer story about a sad man adrift in the world but who finds meaning through the usual Dickensian stuff.

It would be easy to become distracted by the Refreshment boy (“It’s only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which of course I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is so effective, so ’olesome, so constitutional a check upon the public”), clearly the author’s carefully nursed revenge upon a life of railway station indignities.  But the long story, that is the interesting one.

The sad man is Barbox Brothers, the label on his luggage, his only souvenir from his business, “some offshoot or public branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree,” successful enough but meaningless.  We meet him soon after he has given it up.  Earlier in his life, “the only woman he had ever loved” deceived him with “the only friend he had ever made.”  Purposeless, he takes a random train, exits at a random station, and finds renewed meaning by encountering random people. including the young daughter of the woman who dumped him.

Now, what is interesting about this business is that it is an exploration of one of the greatest weaknesses of Dickens, the temptation to have a wealthy, benevolent bachelor solve the problems of his plots.  The device goes back to the beginning, to The Pickwick Papers, or at least to Nicholas Nickleby.  In “Mugby Junction” Dickens creates a plausible psychology for the bachelor’s benevolence based on a life of personal trauma.  Dickens had worked on the problem before, in A Christmas Carol and Bleak House and Little Dorrit – with a great deal of irony in the latter two – but never in such a low key, or on such a small canvas, or some other metaphor borrowed from some other art.

The other interesting thing about the story is of course the prose.  Much of the best stuff is about the railroad:

Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end.  Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back.  Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering.

Etc.  Plenty more of this.  And when it is over, there is that monstrous boy in the Refreshment Room.

A so-called Christmas story from Charles Dickens, out of season, replete with animal food

The Charles Dickens pieces collected as Christmas Stories (1871) have been a ragbag.  They vary in length, tone, quality, and purpose.  Some are co-written, often with Wilkie Collins.  Dickens wrote enough great books that it is worthwhile to scrounge around in his scraps, as I have over the last few years, but I acknowledge that some of these stories have not been too valuable.  I just check them off the Dickens list.

One might ask why I am reading Christmas stories in September.  I had to read 400 pages of them before it sunk in that they have nothing to do with Christmas.  The two I read recently do have ghost stories, so they have that connection to English Christmas.

These two, “Doctor Marigold” (1865) and “Mugby Junction” (1866),like the two “Mrs. Lirriper” stories of  1863 and 1864, are actually quite good.  Dickens was on a little roll.  All four are easy to recommend as minor but genuinely pleasurable Dickens.

In “Doctor Marigold” the pleasure is all in the voice, just as with the “Mrs. Lirriper” stories.  The “Doctor” is actually a traveling dealer in used goods (”a Cheap Jack”)– Doctor is his first name.  The story is inconsequential as fiction, sweet and sentimental as a moral tale.  A child dies in her father’s arms in an affecting scene; a deaf and dumb girl replaces the lost daughter.  That is all fine.  But this is the good part:

I am at present a middle-aged man of a broadish build, in cords, leggings, and a sleeved waistcoat the strings of which is always gone behind.  Repair them how you will, they go like fiddle-strings.  You have been to the theatre, and you have seen one of the wiolin-players screw up his wiolin, after listening to it as if it had been whispering the secret to him that it feared it was out of order, and then you have heard it snap.  That's as exactly similar to my waistcoat as a waistcoat and a wiolin can be like one another.

Now that is literature, making a waistcoat and a wiolin as like one another as possible.  Marigold’s Cockney accent, as you can hear, reaches thirty years back to the great Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers (1836).  Perhaps Dickens was giving himself an anniversary present.

Marigold amusingly compares himself to a politician on the hustings.  He sells from his cart a watch, a pair of razors, and “a frying-pan artificially flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got for the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you are replete with animal food,” while the politician from his cart promises “abolition of more malt tax, no malt tax, universal education to the highest mark, or uniwersal ignorance to the lowest, total abolition of flogging in the army or a dozen for every private once a month all round, Wrongs of Men or Rights of Women--only say which it shall be, take 'em or leave 'em, and I'm of your opinion altogether, and the lot's your own on your own terms.”

Marigold, or perhaps his creator, is a natural satirist, always showing how “the Cheap Jack customs pervade society.”  He is a lot of fun to read, regardless of his subject.

The story has four short chapters.  The third is the ghost story, completely unconnected to Doctor Marigold’s tale, narrated by the foreman of a haunted jury.  Don’t ask me.  It’s not bad.

Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches: Pigs also possessed attractions for me

Little Women and its sequel Good Wives are on the horizon.  I am in theory reading along with Dolce Bellezza, as are, I hope, many people, although I will be on vacation the week following Christmas, just when DB plans to write about the novels.  I will catch up, I promise, at least if whoever is hogging the library copy, probably some ten year old who can hardly appreciate the book the way I will and should surrender it for the greater good of book blogging, ever returns the dang thing.  So it will likely not be until January that I write about who I think Jo should marry and which of the characters I most want to slap, which I understand are the key interpretive difficulties of the novels.

In preparation, I read Louisa May Alcott’s earlier little memoir Hospital Sketches (1863), a surprisingly humorous account of her one month as an army nurse (she contracted typhoid and had to abandon her service).  Rob Velella, proprietor of The American Literary Blog, twittered that Hospital Sketches is a better book than Little Women.  I don’t remember Little Women well enough to say, but Hospital Sketches is a good book.

A sample of Alcott’s humor, from a Chapter V, “Off Duty,” where we get to see a little bit of wartime Washington, D. C., including the new Capitol building, the statuary (“rather wearying to examine”), the army mules, and the free-range pigs:

Pigs also possessed attractions for me, never having had an opportunity of observing their graces of mind and manner, till I came to Washington, whose porcine citizens appeared to enjoy a larger liberty than many of its human ones. Stout, sedate looking pigs, hurried by each morning to their places of business, with a preoccupied air, and sonorous greeting to their friends. Genteel pigs, with an extra curl to their tails, promenaded in pairs, lunching here and there, like gentlemen of leisure…  Maternal pigs, with their interesting families, strolled by in the sun; and often the pink, baby-like squealers lay down for a nap, with a trust in Providence worthy of human imitation. (V, 71-2)

Although Alcott often reminded me of Mark Twain (this is before Twain had published anything of significance), her model is Charles Dickens.  Hospital Sketches is packed with references to Dickens.  I in fact concealed one of them in the ellipses above, where young pigs are not only compared to Mrs. Peerybingle from The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) but Alcott actually includes a close paraphrase of a Dickens passage about neat stockings.  Not only is the tone that of Dickens, but so is some of the language.

Hospital Sketches, in the edition I read (Belknap, 1960), is only 84 pages long.  The editor, Bessie Z. Jones, fills it out with a fascinating essay on military nursing before and during the Civil War.  That is the heart of the novel, of course, Alcott’s work as a nurse.  I should write something about that.  Dickens is again relevant.