Unexpected Dickens!
Dickens turns up everywhere - and in some very unexpected places.
Please send us any unexpected mentions of Dickens you come across in your reading. We will feature your best discoveries here. (Please send details to postbox, giving the quotation, title, author, and date of publication.)
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (winner Orange Prize for Fiction 2010), Faber and Faber Mrs Brown is on a war path. "Mr Shepherd, it's a character in your book that said that. Would they hang Charles Dickens for a thief because he made up the old fellow Fagin that told boys to go pick pockets?" Given the current climate, I told her, Charles Dickens is wise to be dead already. Which did not please her.
Charles Dickens captures all this brilliantly with his picture in Great Expectations of Wemmick retreating over the drawbridge to his little domestic arcadia away from the hurly-burly of market transactions. England displays that strange mixture of calculation and sentiment which marks so many modern societies. The Pinch, or How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back, David Willetts, Atlantic Books, 2010, p.11
‘As if she didn’t know, as if she wasn’t poor Reggie Chase, sister of the Artful Dodger. (As if she wasn’t all the poor unwanted girls, the Florences, the Esthers, the Cecilia Jupes.)’ When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson, Black Swan, 2009.
‘Are you still resolved not to return this cat to status quo?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Sam Weller would have done it like a shot to oblige Mr Pickwick.’
Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, P G Wodehouse, Penguin, 1974 p.88 (anonymous submission)
But you can never tell with country girls: they’re either hard as nails, wringing chickens’ necks and so on; or going off into fits, like Guster.
‘Roddie and I did that when the clock first broke.’ And the, seeing my puzzled expression: ‘Twenty to nine is the time Miss Havisham’s clocks are stopped at in Great Expectations….’
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters, Virago Press 2009, p.15, p.67.This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009. (found by Joan Dicks)
That is why Dickens has been anathematized by Marxists as a ‘bourgeois reformer’….. Dickens did not want anyone to be transformed, except in one respect: he wanted them to notice and understand the people they passed in the street. He wanted people not to make each other uncomfortable by applying moral labels, but to recognize that all their fellow humans – Dombey and Mrs Dombey, Anna and Karenin, K. and the Lord Chancellor – had a right to be understood.
Essays on Heidegger and Others, Richard Rorty, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp 66 -82, chapter on Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens (found by Henry Dicks)
Dickens, as a critic of statistics, gets a section to himself in The Triumph of Numbers by I Bernard Cohen, Norton & Co. New York 2005, pp.148-157. (Submitted by Derek Mortimer.)
"This picture of Keats as a 'hungry' reader is reminiscent of the way that 'hunger and fancy' combined in the young Colergidge - and also of David Copperfield, who in his heartless stepfather's house would read 'as if for life'." From Keats by Andrew Motion, Farrar, Straus and Girous, New York, Pub. 1998. p.37 (Submitted by Barbara Zimmerman and Anne McLeod.)
'You know, from my email address if nothing else, that I have a thing for Dickens - I'm reading his letters at the moment. There are twelve volumes of them, and each volume is several hundred pages long. If he'd only written letters, he'd have had a pretty productive life, but he didn't only write letters. There are four volumes of his journalism, too, big ones. He edited a couple of magazines, He squeezed in an unconventional love-life, and a few rich friendships. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah: a dozen of the greatest novels in the English language. So I'm beginning to wonder whether my infatuation is caused, in part at least, by him being the opposite of me. He's pretty much the one guy whose life you could look at and think, man, he didn't mess around.'
Tucker Crowe's judgment on Dickens in Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby, 2009
Tucker Crowe, who uses the email address Alfred Mantalini, is a former rock star from the US. He arranges to meet a woman he meets over the internet in London, outside 48 Doughty Street Nick Hornby is the best-selling author of About a Boy, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch
Barbara Zimmerman found an unexpected reference to a Dickens character in a biography of Keats:
"When Keats went back to Clarke's school after his brief summer holidays, his worry about his mother continued to galvanise (sic) him. He attacked his work with 'a new resolve', quickly transforming himself from a boy who had been distinctly 'not literary' into a voracious reader. Charles Cowden Clarke remembered that he began studying well before seven o'clock in the morning, when lessons began, had to be driven 'out of the classroom for exercise', and would even read during meals. (This picture of Keats as a 'hungry' reader is reminiscent of the way that 'hunger and fancy' combined in the young Coleridge- and also of David Copperfield, who in his heartless stepfather's house would read 'as if for life'.)" From Keats by Andrew Motion, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, published 1998 (page 37)
Barbara comments: "I found it curious that Motion refers to David Copperfield in the same breath as Coleridge, as if they were both flesh and blood -- a testament to Dickens' remarkable ability to create memorable characters."
Derek Mortimer alerts us to Unexpected Chapters on Dickens in a book entitled The Triumph of Numbers by I Bernard Cohen (Norton & Co, New York 2005)
In a book charting the inexorable rise in the importance of statistics in virtually every area of modern life, Cohen devotes a chapter to Critics of Statistics, which includes sections on 'Carlyle and Chartism', 'Dickens and Statistics', 'The Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything' (where the vice-president of the statistics section is 'Mr Ledbrain), 'Deaths' Ciperhing Book' (a Household Words article by Henry Morley), 'Corresponding Disdain' (comments on statistics in Dickens's letters); and 'Facts and Figures: The Message of Hard Times.'
