Podsnappery & the Sweat of an Honest Man’s Brow

I just finished two excellent chapters in Our Mutual Friend. The mood has definitely darkened; I can’t help but feel pinpricks of anxiety even though I’ve read the story before. Both of these chapters illustrate Dickens’s technique of stage-setting a scene before he lets his players enter and perform (he was interested in the theater throughout his life).

In “Podsnappery,” Dickens provides a more in-depth analysis of one of Veneering’s “oldest friends,” Mr. Podsnap, and his family:

The Podsnaps lived in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square. They were a kind of people certain to dwell in the shade, wherever they dwelt. Miss Podsnap’s life had been, from her first appearance on this planet, altogether of a shady order . . . Miss Podsnap’s early views of life being principally derived from the reflections of it in her father’s boots, and in the walnut and rosewood tables of the dim drawing- rooms, and in their swarthy giants of looking-glasses, were of a sombre cast; and it was not wonderful that now, when she was on most days solemnly tooled through the Park by the side of her mother in a great tall custard-coloured phaeton, she showed above the apron of that vehicle like a dejected young person sitting up in bed to take a startled look at things in general, and very strongly desiring to get her head under the counterpane again.

After this bleak introduction, we observe the newlywed Lammles—disappointed in each assuming the other was bringing wealth to the marriage—begin to cultivate the shy Georgiana Podsnap, with an eye toward making money.

In “The Sweat of an Honest Man’s Brow,” we experience London in the spring:

It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not gentle spring ethereally mild, as in Thomson’s Seasons, but nipping spring with an easterly wind, as in Johnson’s, Jackson’s, Dickson’s, Smith’s, and Jones’s Seasons. The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

In a moment, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn—fellow lawyers and old school friends—will be visited by Rogue Riderhood (echoes of Red Ridinghood?), a river rat who’s going to turn in fellow Thames denizen Gaffer Hexam for the death of John Harmon.

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend has long been my favorite Dickens novel—its high drama and low comedy, its social critiques and its series of remarkable yet satisfying coincidences. It was time for another reading; however, the paperback editions have such small print (causing premature drowsiness) and I wondered where I’d find a hardcover that wouldn’t be an inconvenient brick. Then I found the perfect solution: I’m reading it on my iPad. The font is easy to read, yet there’s no huge book to lug around.

This time around (my third?), I’m trying to focus on some of the novel’s more writerly aspects, rather than simply trying to keep track of the characters and the plot (which is, of course, a challenge in itself). Dickens seems so fully in control of his material here, in his final complete novel . The first chapter is drenched in moody realism, focused on the blasted lives of river rat Gaffer Hexam and his children, and the discovery of the drowned man. Yet in chapter two, Dickens introduces a completely different style for the Veneering sections—a hollow, distant tone that illuminates the empty, inauthentic lives of those who make their money on investment schemes and financial scams.

Here, we first meet the Veneerings:

Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.

As the Veneering plot moves forward, the tone gradually changes from merry to menacing: these are not merely people to laugh at.

I’ve just passed the 200 page mark: 1162 pages to go in the iPad edition.

Dickens vs. the playwright Marc Connelly

The birthday of playwright Marc Connelly is noted in the Dec. 13 edition of The Writer’s Almanac. I’d never heard of him, although I’m vaguely familiar with his collaborator George S. Kaufman. (Both were members of the Algonquin Round Table.) Apparently, Connelly was not a terribly productive author, which caused Kaufman to remark:

Charles Dickens, dead, writes more than Marc Connelly alive.

The Dickens Fair, San Francisco

I had no illusions that a longtime popular entertainment like San Francisco’s Dickens Fair would be a place of grand literary or historical seriousness. I expected healthy dollops of commercial humbug and theatrical claptrap. But I was still surprised to find the tiny Dickens family parlour only half-full as “Charles Dickens” prepared to read aloud from Stave Three of A Christmas Carol (featuring the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Cratchit family Christmas)—while hordes stood in line nearby to buy bangers and mash and others crowded into Mad Sal’s for bawdy songs of indeterminate vintage. But all the better to find a great seat for myself, willingly suspend my disbelief, and enjoy the reading as if I’d time-traveled back to the 1850s.

Stepping back in time

It’s the chance to step back in time—no matter the bizarre historical and literary mashups!—that draws such a variety of people to the Dickens Fair. “Naughty and nice” the billboards announce, but all with at least a passing glance back at the nineteenth century.

When my husband and I arrived at the Cow Palace—the enormous Quonset-hut-shaped building that houses the fair for four weekends before Christmas—the line of ticket holders was already snaking around the parking lot. A number of men, women, and children were in costume, from carefully assembled period dress to Halloween holdovers. The man in front of us sported a Nightmare-Before-Christmas stovetop hat and a lei of outsized Christmas ornaments. One woman wore a spangled cocktail dress; many others took the opportunity to don corsets, net stockings, and all manner of bonnets and bows.

A band of chimney sweeps—plus waifs, urchins, bawds, costermongers, and other Victorian types—greeted us as we transitioned from sunny California to sooty London. The atmosphere was actually quite (ahem) Dickensian: dark, gritty, crowded, raucous. Some actors portrayed Dickens characters while others enacted typical or historical figures: thus, a soap seller on one corner and Jules Verne on another. What with all the costumed attendees, it was hard to tell the performers from the audience.

Perusing the fares

We tried to sample a bit of everything. There were shops selling all sorts of unusual items, from harps to old-fashioned hats. Father Christmas was competing with a Punch-and-Judy show for the attention of children and their parents. (Punch was winning when we ventured by.) We met a woman at Mad Sal’s Alehouse Theater who assured us that it was well worth waiting for the “naughty” Can-Can dancers—so we did, but found we liked an earlier act, the Morris dancers, much more. More waiting: in line for mediocre roast beef sandwiches—probably more like Victorian fare both in quality and costliness than the Fair’s management would like to admit.

After a full day, we finally had to acknowledge the twenty-first century need to seek transportation back to our hotel. The crowds and the lines had been a bit daunting, and I wish we’d had more time to enjoy other enactments such as the Adventurer’s Club—so perhaps we’ll try to return another year.

Another Atkinson reference

In Started Early, Took My Dog, Kate Atkinson’s private investigator Jackson Brodie examines the folder he’s just stolen from social worker Linda Pallister’s desk and remembers:

the Dickensian piles of papers and files in her messy office. You could hide a small child—or a dog—in there and not notice it for days.

Atkinson, I suppose, wants to invoke the frightful mounds of paperwork generated by ineffectual or malevolent court officials—as described in Bleak House and other Dickens novels. But it’s surprising that Jackson would describe anything (to himself) as “Dickensian,” because he’s not very well-read; a big breakthrough is his new-found admiration for Emily Dickinson. So obviously the author is intruding here, with such a literary reference.

In looking up “Dickensian,” I found an article by Matthew Pearl, written in 2009 as a tie-in to his novel The Last Dickens. (Great book!) Pearl notes: “Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word Dickensian could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.” I like Pearl’s suggestion to readers: use the word “Dickensian” in a sentence to see how people will react—will they take the reference for granted?

Have you seen something Dickensian today?

I’d rather have a Dickens paper doll

Literary Greats Paper Dolls

My friend Nicole B. posted info about this book on her Facebook page. Dickens as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Who really wrote Dickens?

From “Who Really Wrote Shakepeare?” a piece by Eric Idle in The New Yorker:

…two men and a cat wrote most of Charles Dickens, with the exception of “A Tale of Two Cities,” which Napoleon wrote while visiting St. Helena…

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/11/21/111121sh_shouts_idle#ixzz1e0li3ejV

Dickens in Atkinson

Just read this in When Will There Be Good News, by Kate Atkinson:

Reggie’s block of flats showed no sign of either up or coming. The close always smelled unpleasant, and Reggie was the only one who ever cleaned the stair. The tenement was in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of which brooded an abandoned bonded warehouse, its black-barred windows as a grim as anything in Dickens.

Not bad, as Dickens allusions go—not too lazy. But, really, not everything is grim in Dickens, is it? Or why would anyone want to go to a Dickens Fair?

(I had to look up what a bonded warehouse is: a customs-controlled warehouse for holding imported goods until the duty is paid. This passage is written from sixteen-year old Reggie’s point of view, but I’m not sure how or why she’d know that the warehouse was a bonded one—unless perhaps it was printed on the side of the building in faded letters; my guess is that it just sounds great with “abandoned.”)

More about my reading Atkinson

Dickens Fair

Did I mention I’m going to the Dickens Fair in San Francisco, after all?

http://www.dickensfair.com/

Here’s the description:

A holiday adventure into Victorian London, partying with hundreds of costumed players in over 120,000 square feet of theatrically-lit music halls, pubs, dance parties and Christmas shops on winding lanes. It’s a twilight evening in Charles Dickens’ London Town – a city filled with lively and colorful characters from both literature and history. Enticing aromas of roasted chestnuts and hearty foods fill the air. Cries of street vendors hawking their wares ring out above the bustling crowd. Dozens of lamplit shops are filled to overflowing with Christmas presents.

Apparently, regular fair-goers get into the spirit by dressing in Victorian garb—but I don’t think I’ll have room in my suitcase for a long gown.

I don’t know whether to “bone up” by reading A Christmas Carol, one of the new biographies, or an old favorite like Our Mutual Friend. Or to let the whole thing just wash over me when I get there.

State of Dickens

Dickens looms over my literary landscape like no other—even when I’m not on the hunt for him. Whenever I cast my eyes on a book or a magazine, I manage to reel in Dickens.

I just finished State of Wonder  (for example), in which Ann Patchett places a “complete set of hardbacked Dickens” in an isolated Amazon research camp. The books—“wrapped separately in heavy pieces of plastic tarp and tied with twine”—are a significant source of entertainment, even consolation, for the marooned scientists, after a day of work in their lab.

There are also old New Yorkers in Patchett’s imagined lab, “but invariably something had eaten through the most interesting paragraphs.” In my own recent (and intact) issue of the New Yorker, Jonathan Rosen reviews a new biography of Wilkie Collins by Melisa Klimaszewski; inevitably, Dickens turns up—he was, after all, Collins’ “friend, mentor, editor, and sometime rival.” Meeting Dickens in 1851 was “the turning point” in Collins’ career, and in 1859  Collins’ The Woman in White was serialized in Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round to resounding success.

Comparing Collins to Dickens, Rosen writes:

“. . . Collins could not have done what Dickens did. The strange animating magic of Dickens’s prose, which makes objects appear to stand up and stroll away, like teapots in a Disney film, was not his strength. He had a painterly eye but not a transformative one. Dickens, when writing at a white heat, literally broke into blank verse. Collins was a writer of prose. But Collins’ pared-down prose at its best can feel fresher, more seductive, and more psychologically astute than Dickens’s endless periods—and in many ways more modern. This is not to say that Collins rivals Dickens’s protean genius. Dickens is a universe, Collins is a planet.”

“Wilkie Collins’s double lives.” The New Yorker, July 25, 2011. 75-79

I’ve read Collins’ classics The Woman in White and The Moonstone twice—tripping over them again in later life after having first discovered them in the years right after college. Both have mysterious, engrossing plots; weird, exotic characters; and lots of gothic touches: real page turners.

Thinking of mysteries: I have the strangest sense that when I don’t have a Dickens book in rotation (I’m trying to decide what to read next after the marathon of Nicholas Nickleby), I’m presented with a host of Dickens references elsewhere in my reading. A subtle reminder from beyond?