Walking down one of London's silent, cobbled streets after dark is one of the most atmospheric experiences of living or visiting this city. Away from the crowds of Oxford Street, the alleys and backstreets of London are like a step back in time to another era, and the history of London is one of the things that really attracts me to a city, and influenced my decision to move here. Anyone who has experienced London in the night-time knows the feeling, almost entirely different from that of the day-time. Everything feels more alive, more electric. This atmosphere is captured every now and again in art and in literature. Never more brilliantly than by Charles Dickens. A few months after I moved to London, after I had got to know the place a little, I decided to set myself a challenge: To read all (or most) of Dickens' novels and experience London in a different era. This started sometime in March this year, when I bought Oliver Twist, which was followed by almost the entire cannon and ending with Great Expectations, which I have just recently finished. Almost six months of nothing else, which allowed me to really get lost in that age of pre-Victorian London.
I don't want this to be some boring book review, so I will try to avoid falling into that trap, but since I tend to discuss recent experiences and opinions in my blog, Dickens seems an appropriate subject. As I have powered on through this catalogue of (mostly) enormous novels, it became more and more evident that I had found exactly what I look for in an author. I have recently had this huge sense of disillusionment with modern literature. The majority of it is bland, petulant and devoid of any meaningful ideas. I know there are exceptions, but I avoid looking at the bestseller list in book stores because frankly, it depresses me. The autobiography of some vapid, plastic celebrity like Katie Price is always somewhere on there, as is the most recent Twilight turd (or other vamprom shit), along with a handful of materialistic, brainless drivel along the lines of Confessions of a Shopoholic, or Heels, Bags, and Boyfriends. Around the time I finished university, my taste in literature became firmly planted in the Classics. Before university I hadn't really a great interest in them, but then I fell in love with the books that I was studying: To The Lighthouse, Paradise Lost, Dorian Grey... They all had something which modern literature rarely had. Arguably they are far better written, but perhaps it was because they were philosophical. Let's face it, there is nothing philosophical about teenage romcoms or celebrity biographies, but they sell thousands of copies. This is highly frustrating, snob as I am, which is why I retreat back to times when I felt literature was valuable; challenging the status quo rather than perpetuating it.
It still remains somewhat of a mystery to me how and why I lived my entire life up until the age of 22 without reading anything by Charles Dickens, other than extracts from Hard Times and Great Expectations in Secondary School. At that time, they seemed overly descriptive, bleak and boring, which I suppose is the natural feelings of a 15 year old towards classics. Education does seem to be intent on putting young people off. Tom Brown's Schooldays, Of Mice and Men, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare is what I remember from school. The first two are shit, and although Shakespeare is great, I don't see why it needs to be forced down our throats every single year from around birth to age 16. It's enough to put anyone off reading the classics. Back to the point, I had a bad impression of Dickens which stuck with me for many years. Once I graduated, I felt that reading more classics was something that I should have being doing for years, and chose Dickens as the place to start.
Now that I have completed the challenge that I set myself, I think it is safe to say that Charles Dickens has become one of, if not my favourite writer of all time. His best books are brilliantly written, almost making other pre-Victorian writers seem ineloquent. But that is not to say that there were no disappointments. Oliver Twist was a perfect introduction, and one which matched my expectations precisely: atmospheric, full of memorable characters, vivid descriptions and social criticism. But this wasn't the case with all of them. (It seems I have fallen into my favourite cliche of best of/worst of listings):
The Pickwick Papers, which I read after Oliver, was so far removed from my expectations that it could have been written by a different auther. No social criticism, no atmosphere, no plot. Just a set of vacuous toffs parading around and living their irritating toff lifestyles. Reading novels about characters who are a part of the aristocracy is only enjoyable when portrayed satirically, or otherwise in small doses, and since Pickwick is not small by any sense of the word, it was a trial. And I spent most of it trying to remember each of the 500 characters who are introduced with every chapter, only to disappear completely a couple of pages later. Dickens is known for his immense casts of characters, but usually they have some bearing on the narrative, which they didn't appear to here. Perhaps the random escapades of a group of rich idiots was popular subject matter in the 19th Century, but to a 21st Century reader it was, amongst other things, immensely irritating.
The Christmas Books were never going to be favourites of mine, but I wasn't expecting to hate them as much as I did. A Christmas Carol remains the best, but as I am not really a fan of Christmas indoctrination, I disagree with the concept. And really, there isn't much need to read it because the film adaptions are identical (I am shocked at myself for saying that but there it is). The character problem was even more evident here than inPickwick. Each time I thought I had finally remembered the horde of characters in one of the stories, it would end, and the process would start all over again. When short stories have the same amount of characters as a full length novel, it's tortuous to read, so eventually I gave up and skipped a few dozen pages. Needless to say, I don't regret it.
Hard Times was not so much bad, as woefully disappointing. I expected this to be the book in which industrialisation is attacked the most severely, in which the criticism is perhaps the most refined, in which descriptions and the atmosphere are vivid. But it fell rather flat. Industrialisation, though criticised, was more of a backdrop than a primary theme. The social criticism is refined, but somewhat overshadowed by other themes, and the descriptions are minimal compared to the descriptions in the other books. I didn't engage with the characters as much as I anticipated, and although this is the shortest of Dickens' novels, it seemed to drag on for much longer than some of the larger ones. I don't dislike Hard Times, but if I had to pick one of the well-known of his novels to advise people to avoid, this would have to be it.
With these three aside (and really, Hard Times was a push as it is still quite good), I can mention a few of the things that have shaped my opinion. Returning to my original point, Dickens is a part of London, and vice versa. The borough of Southwark in which I live, is full of streets named after characters from his novels, and in the course of his writing, there are descriptions of almost every part of the city. This in itself is a huge plus given my feelings towards London, especially the contrast between now and the time that Dickens was writing. Although there are still similarities, these are outweighed by the enormous differences. I don't consider 150 years a huge length of time, and yet London is so changed that it is almost unrecognisable from the images painted in 19th Century novels. Only the river, the tower, and the dome of St Paul's Cathedral as reminders that this is still the same place. Fog and smoke, which are fixtures of Victorian London, are now a rarity. The chimneys and wooden inns of the slums which made up the cityscape have been replaced by terraces and skyscrapers. As I mentioned before, the history of these books is one of their most valuable features, because so much has changed, and the London of the Victorian ages is almost completely gone. As well as the setting and the descriptions, there are the characters. Fagin, Lady Dedlock and Miss Havisham (and I couldn't think of a more appropriate actress to play this character than Helena Bonham Carter) are some of the most memorable in English Literature, and just three of the hundreds Dickens created in the course of his writing. And arguably most importantly of all is the social criticism of the times. The harsh and cutting critique of Victorian England; the living conditions of the poor, the ridiculousness of class divisions is perhaps what admire the most. Like every great writer, Dickens used his abilities to bring about change, draw attention to the massive social problems and injustices of the time, and one of the ways he did this was through vivid descriptions of the horror of industrialisation and the living conditions of the poor. And here I feel the need to quote one of my favourite extracts from The Old Curiosity Shop:
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. On every side, and as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed the tributary fires, begged upon the road, or scowled half naked from the doorless houses. Then came more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.
Unfortunately, this is a chance which most writers today throw out the window to appease these idiotic tendencies of consumer/celebrity culture. Forget about war, and government oppression, and the rise in unemployment, I'm going to write a book about losing my virginity. Or better yet, shoes! Because there just aren't enough authors writing books about shoes!
Since I have listed my three least favourite Dickens books, I should now list the three I consider to be the best. Although my favourite is unswerving, I am a bit unsure of the third, though I have come to the decision of David Copperfield, one reason being that it is far broader in scale than Great Expectations. Ever since I started reading Dickens, there were a few that I was most looking forward to. I read all the books in chronological order, so David Copperfield was the first one I reached of the few that I most anticipated. Leo Tolstoy said of David Copperfield, "The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists", and Dickens himself said of the book, "Like so many fond parents, I have in my heart a favourite child". So it is superfluous to mention that I had high aspirations. This was my first experience of Dickens as a first person narrator, and thus it was very different to the previous novels. It seemed to mark a transition in style from the more haphazard plots of the early novels to a much more structured and mature style of writing. And it is brilliant in it's fluidity. At the end, it leaves you feeling as though you have been on some great journey, which is exactly what a great novel should do.
A Tale of Two Cities is one of the only two historical novels that Dickens wrote, the other being Barnaby Rudge. This meant that many of the characteristics present in the rest of his novels were changed to present a more realistic picture. The humourous caricatures are replaced by a more serious cast, and the use of dialogue as character development is replaced somewhat by long descriptive extracts. As much as I enjoy the comical portraits that are present in most of Dickens' works, I was intrigued to see how he approached a much more serious plot. He definitely succeeded in doing so. This book stands out amongst all the others because it is so completely different. Darker, more chilling, more disturbing in that the massacres described were reality and not just fiction. Snow, blood, fog, love and hatred, London and Paris, the clash of two opposing classes; the events play out to make it the most gripping of Dickens' narratives. He has a knack for portraying the capabilities of human nature, both good and evil; the capability to love as well as the capability to torture and murder. The last few chapters are possibly the most emotional chapters in the entire Dickens catalogue, and by the end I wasn't sure whether I was uplifted or distraught, which is what makes it so brilliant.
This is the book that I was looking forward to the most from the moment I started reading Dickens. The magnum opus (IMHO). Bleak House is definitely, without a doubt, my favourite. From the first first sentence: "London." And from the first mesmerising description of London fog, I fell in love with it, and it never slipped throughout the 1000+ pages. It was much more complex than the previous books, with a new angle of the haunting Jarndyce and Jarndye court case. The pace of Bleak House was definitely unexpected. Being the longest books, I anticipated it being slow, but from the minute Esther steps off the coach in London, into the fog, the crowds, the noise, the oppressively fast-paced atmosphere never slips. More threads, more characters, more tragedies are introduced, travelling deeper into the depths of the narrative. Questions are raised which remain a mystery for hundreds of pages, characters are introduced and then disappear for ages... Like the Bleak House in the book, it is easy to get lost in the maze of rooms and corridors (thank God for Sparknotes). The bleak, foggy London cityscape, the cold, hollow court rooms, the rain and quagmire of Chesney Wold in the early chapters, the brightness and vibrancy of Chesney Wold in later chapters, the chaos of the Jellyby house and the comfortable tidiness of Bleak House, the harsh winter countryside and the industrial wastes of Yorkshire certainly don't disappoint my soft spot for atmospheric imagery. By the time I reached Bleak House, I had become accustomed to Dickens' social criticism, but the satire of this is quite different. It is focused more on institutions themselves rather than society: The greed and immorality of lawyers, the inefficiency and bureaucracy of the law system, the needless expense of court cases. I still find this very relevant today, and this focused critique of the law system is one of the factors that I admire the most. Beautifully written, expertly woven, one of the best books ever written.
As much as I could go one about how much I love Dickens for reams, I fear I have fallen into boring review territory which I was hoping to avoid. However, as I stated at the beginning, since I write entries about things that I feel strongly about, these books definitely fit that category. Perhaps my distaste of modern culture is what makes me retreat back to past eras. Perhaps I seek a knowledge of history. Perhaps I am just a snob. Whatever the reason, I really do love the classics. I'm not saying that I can only appreciate books written over 100 years ago. Some of my favourite books of all time are modern: Lord of the Rings, Trainspotting, Brave New World, 1984 (Okay most of them aren't that modern). But there is still the common factor that these books are political. I like the classics because over 100 years ago writing as political and social commentary was the norm. Now it is a rarity.
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