Charles Dickens - Classic Or Dud?

You get endless tour books and bus guides talking about little unspoiled pockets of Victorian London. Dickens would be appalled - after all his London was pretty much spoiled to start off with - that was partially what he was writing about. So we get little cobbled alleys with crap old shitester pubs down them being preserved instead of the march of progress which is what London is all about.

I dislike Dickens because of all of this baggage which has been dumped upon him and the fact that he was the pinicle of what my father told me to read as a child - which was rather dull to a nine year old. I like the ideas and themes within Dickens though, but I hate the idea of anyone defining London (unless that person is me).

However I think its thoroughly admirable that his face is on the back of a tenner - my favourite denomination of money.

And what's with this thing whereby you're either a Trollope fan or a Dickens fan? Kind of a Victorian Blur v Oasis, which I remember my mother and an unfortunate English teacher re-enacting one parent's day. Give me misery (Hardy) or lunacy (_Sartor Resartus_) any day.

I also didn't appreciate the fact that the awesome ending of _A Tale Of Two Cities_ was saddled with the oppressively boring first two- thirds of the book. It took me two and a half weeks to finish that book, and I read the last third in 45 minutes.

Charles Dickens = MASSIVE DUD. Give me someone witty (ie, Swift or Voltaire) any day.

I've got a whole list of "classic" authors who I think are garbage. The two biggest ones are Upton Sinclair and Joseph Conrad. I absolutely loathed both "Heart of Darkness" and "The Jungle".

(Ooh, NOW I've gone and done it!)

I've got to admit that Dickens is probably also my favourite 19th Century writer. Intensely evocative, well-written, descriptive, socially evocative, voluminous, picaresque ... all those adjectives of praise. I know what Chuck D *meant* when he wrote "Fuck you, Miss Havisham!" and I applaud his motivations of increasing knowledge of the self rather than simply an imposed official culture, but in that case he went way too far.

Yeah, classic rather than dud, without question.

Anyhow, Dickens is yucky IMO. Your mileage may vary, but I tend to hate these big sweepingly generalized class warfare "Ooh, we're so English" novels that came out of the Victorian era (and quite frankly have a tendency to come out today - what the hell? It's either overly self-concious "We're NOT so English!" stuff or very twee stuff that makes it over these shores with a big splash). Dickens is great if you read it for what it is: a glorified soap opera of the All My Children variety. Quite frankly, if I'm going to read a soap opera, I'll read VC Andrews, because at least then I wouldn't feel like I was pretending I was reading something dreadfully important. The fact that his stuff can be/has been easily made into musicals speaks greatly to why I dislike it.

And the names!!! Jesus.

As for this patience rubbish: so what you're saying is that an entire forum save apparently 3 people are attention deficit disorder victims? Nah. I've got 1,000 times the attention span of Fred, who wrote the "Is he kidding or is he not?" Dicken's Lover entry, and he will tell you so himself. He has no attention at all. So why is he the one posting he loves Dickens while I'm the one who hates him? Patience is irrelevant because I think Dickens is one of the easiest to read writers around; we aren't talking elliptical phrasing and complex structures, he wrote for the people. It's a matter of whether his particular ideas appeal to you.

Re: Influence. Influence can bite my ass. I don't care if someone inspired the greatest thing that ever occurred in my life time or anyone else's: if what you yourself write is slop, I don't care if someone else read it and got inspired to write something brilliant. All that means is you are slop and the other person is immensely talented. I feel the same way about any number of musicians and filmmakers whose work I feel is inferior. I don't care if they influenced my absolute favorite artist - and some of them have - I still think they're sloppy and overrated. Getting by on influence is like getting by on your husband's money: not a good idea.

Influence can bite my ass.

got some anxiety re influence?

He was classic before he moved to LA and started using session proof-readers. After that, Dud.

I remember having to read Great Expectations at school and it was a major slog - mainly due to teaching methods - until the plot twist and then OMGWTF!!!

heartened by how much the internet hates 'hard times' tbh.

just went looking for a quote i used in my leaving cert, along the lines of 'nothing can be as damaging to the reputation of a truly great author than to insist his worst work is amongst his best', but cant find it

Anyway, lol dickens, basically. I'd rather read a lifetime of douglas adams' shopping lists than another page of overstretched apostraphe-laden caricature from this lumpen hack

Maybe Hard Times is amongst his worst, idk I stopped reading after being seriously bummed out by the first chapter. Thoroughly enjoyed Great Expectations tho, Our Mutual Friend is all time yoga flame and am gonna reread soon, Bleak House and Sale of Two Titties on the to-do list. And having slogged through Dombey and Son I do know what bad Dickens is like.

Had to do Our Mutual Friend for A levels and couldn't be bothered with it, but ended up reading 5 or 6 of his novels in the Summer before starting uni and loved them. Overly sentimental but classic all the same.

hard times is the worst dickens novel i've read. he's not a hack; i'll kill you!

well i got an a+ in that exam so *somebody* agrees with me

"hard slog" as we used to call it in school. a terrible book esp. one to get students interested in literature. from what i remember it was unbearably dreary. i liked/like "great expectations" (and "oliver twist") though. his plots might be total soap opera but i cant deny that he writes really good charachters.

love love charles dickens, i've found something to enjoy in every one of the books i've read, even the ones that weren't my favorite (pickwick papers, nicholas nickleby). i don't remember much about hard times (read it in college) but i didn't dislike it. iirc his satiric and moralizing tendencies were more prominent in that one, maybe insultingly so? i can see why people might dislike it in that case.

still trying to reconcile why i hated fanny price in "mansfield park" but i love esther summerson in "bleak house." they have roughly the same personality type (victorian mary sues practically), though i guess fanny price is saddled with religiosity in a way that esther isn't.

also it probably helps that dickens has a wider range of characters and places to jump to in between esther's scenes, while austen's setting was basically the one house.

look, what we want is: facts. everything after that in HT is justified by the best opener in the world

dickens is pretty wonderful. the first two pages of 'bleak house' alone contain some of the most vivid descriptive writing in the english language.

I think his worst vices - sentimentality and overly caricatured characters - only get really toxic when in combination. Captain Ned et al in Dombey and Son a particularly bad example of this, Pip's father in Great Expectations kinda crosses the line too. WKIW any number of his pantomime villains though, since they have no interest in tugging at yr heartstrings.

xxp the opening of HT had me nodding in agreement, is the problem.....

xposts to ledge: can't really recommend Pail of Two Pities (like Hard Times, best used for beating high school students over the head with), but Bleak House is pretty crucial for an Our Mutual Friend fan. Check also Little Dorrit, starring yet another Victorian Mary Sue but redeemed by fuckloads of angst, scheming, and barely repressed rage on Dickens' part. Read all this in college with an unreconstructed old Freudian who helpfully pointed out all sorts of weird subtext--say, David Copperfield wanting to run Uriah Heep through "with a red hot poker"--that helpfully undercuts the treacle on the surface (well, when you're looking for it).

i have just read my first Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, and loved it. am about to watch the dvds starring her from Ashes to Ashes and her from Brookside.

have just bought two others (they are £2 each if you buy the wordsworth editions and free on the Kindle / web) - Bleak House and Hard Times.

(was trying to avoid things i knew the plots of, which ruled out a lot of the obvious. am hoping the above are going to be as dark as OMF was)

200th anniversary of his birth next year.

i'd go with bleak house if you liked our mutual friend

will move BH to the top of the list, chz (and to bentelec).

i just finished david copperfield, which seemed to take forever. parts of it are great (esp. the part where he has friends over for dinner, gets really drunk, falls down the stairs, and embarrasses himself at the theater) but my modern mind just has trouble with something that was so obviously written to be serialized. it's way too long and too repetitive. also suffers from a recurring character who's supposed to be overly verbose, which is theoretically funny until you have to read his intentionally overly verbose speeches and letters throughout the book. i read great expectations last year and liked it a lot more, still like the pickwick papers the best.

aw that's one of the best ones! i always recommend it to people; think it's more accessible than bleak house.

david copperfield i mean.

would read david copperfield's verbose speeches till the end of time

there's some crazy stuff in his wikipedia page, like how he was in some massive train accident where every train car except for the one he was in derailed off some train, and he got the people involved in the court case over the derailment not to call him to testify, because he had been traveling with his mistress and her mother.

i don't think i have a modern mind tbh

i wasn't referring to david copperfield as the overly verbose one, i was referring to mr. micawber

haha okay

also it was weird because david copperfield hates uriah heep basically from the moment he sees him, but heep doesn't actually do anything evil until much later in the book, so he basically just hates this guy because he's ugly and creepy for a long time.

i thought you meant the narration

wow, i was totally not expecting 10 years of concentrated dickens hate when i opened up this thread!

personally i've never actually read the guy, but my sister swears by him. but then she loves All Things Victorian so i'm not sure that actually means much

She loves corsets and not having the right to vote?

(first part of OMF dvd very true to book. only slight diff was the lamles - first veneering party, chapter 2, is their wedding in the dvd but is later in the book. grainy and murky though)

grew up 3 miles from an old coaching inn in tewkesbury that was mentioned in the pickwick papers. is now a wetherspoons...

http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/home/pubs/the-royal-hop-pole

Dickens Journals Online (djo.org.uk) was in the papers yesterday asking for help digitising all the issues of Dickens' weekly papers that he put out (they've been OCR'd, quite well in fact, they just need the odd OCR error fixing and hyphenations removed and dashes added and the odd foreign character). anyway, i signed up, did the first 3 pages of my 20 but the 4th timed out when i submitted it and the site hasn't responded since...

actually, they just put up a message. which is odd because i've just been reading about the cause on slashdot...

"Our hosting company experienced the most unfortunate hardware failure issue (thunder strike), and by there calculations we should be back on-line in, worst case scenario, 48 hours. If you are interested in the actual event, then please follow this link: http://status.aws.amazon.com/.";

ooh, this is neat to hear about! i signed up for the crowd-sourced transcription of jeremy bentham's papers last year, but the dude's indecipherable scrawl cowed me.

done my 20 pages - http://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-iii/10183.html

bit of a story by Charles James Lever (who?)
first person report of an ostrich hunt
a bit about london 500 years ago
William Gurney (a poem)
first person report of being stuck down a crevasse
and a short story called Goyon The Magnificent

and according to the stats they are now 0 uncorrected, 969 in progress, 43 waiting for approval and 87 complete

oddly, there are no credits on the stories, only "Conducted by Charles Dickens" on every spread.

Literary detective work -

Nearby, Richardson discovered the home of a sculptor derided by locals as a miser, the premises of two tradesmen named Goodge and Marney, and a local cheesemonger called Marley – "so suggestive of Scrooge and Marley", she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/01/charles-dickens-real-character-names

ended up doing 3 whole issues of those dickens periodicals mentioned above, none of which had a dickens story in them...

just finished Bleak House as well, which is full of locations around Chancery Lane. i should go and have a walk around.

Dickens brought up near a place called Black House, so suggestive of Bleak House.

used to do a paper round for his local newsagent The Cold Furiosity Shoppe iirc

I just finished Bleak House as well funnily enough, I work just across from Lincoln's Inn Fields and a lot of it has barely changed.

Loads of Dickensian bicentennial stuff going on at the moment. Anyone seen the Dickensian London exhibition at the Museum of London yet? Apparently the art and photography are fantastic.

I've never actually read a full Dickens, but I've watched umpteen adaptations. Think the BBC adaptation of Bleak House was a masterpiece in itself, as was Little Dorrit.

How does his writing compare to say, Wilkie Collins's Woman In White?

They're completely different, it would be a bizarre comparison to make.

only because they were contemporaries and collaborators... i heard Dickens's prose is more "old fashioned" than Collins's.

Dickens is rich and leisurely and darkly funny and then just dark. Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out. You have to enjoy his narrative voice and be comfortable with the fact that he doesn't really deal in Flaubertian realism. But I think you can work out after 50 or so pages whether you're gonna dig him or not, and if not, well nobody's making you. Unless you're at school or something.

"Old fashioned" is a nonsense btw, imo the great 18th century prose writers read less "old-fashioned" than yr high Victorians. Dickens feels like a meeting between the two eras to me.

He means "is it difficult to read?" Collins is a lot easier to read and also creepier, but Dickens isn't exactly difficult, although his prose is a lot more florid. Don't expect great psychological insight into most of his characters.

Stephen Fry (I think) was championing David Copperfield - is that a good starting point? You can assume I like Dickens's characters/storytelling/sentiments, but I'm a slow-and-steady but easily distracted reader. Woman In White was fairly easy to read though and I made it through the whole thing, so that's why I was making a comparison.

Sometimes sentimental but not as much as people make out.

Dombey and Son is lathered in the stuff.

i started with things i didn't know the stories of, hadn't seen the films of. Our Mutual Friend was recommended by people and was great, dark and with lots of depth. Tale Of Two Cities will be my 4th in under a year (the other two being Hard Times and Bleak House).

just pick one, read the first chapter online (gutenberg.org, multiple other places). then pick up the wordsworth edition from amazon (£1.99)

David Copperfield is as good a starting point as any, although it is very long it's more linear than, say, Bleak House, which goes all over the place.

(Dombey is probably after that, despite ledge's warnings)

What books haven't had any or many TV/film adaptions? "Martin Chuzzlewit"? "Barnaby Rudge"?

Can vaguely remember Tom Wilkinson as Mr Pecksniff in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. Or maybe I've got the books messed up.

the whole detective thing in BH struck me as a detour.

they do require a bit of an investment, time-wise. and i find it helps to bear in mind the episodic nature of their initial publication.

i think they've all had tv or film adaptations, multiple times for some of them. they've been around longer than tv and film...

Can't remember too much of the plots of most of the Dickens. Just mainly remember and love the minor characters/grotesques ie Wackford Squeers and Mrs Squeers, Dick Swiveller(yes really) and The Marchioness etc

The relationship in between Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop is nauseatingly sentimental at times (even to many contemporaries, who had a high tolerance for this sort of thing), but then again, you've got the retired carnival giants, serving the retired carnival dwarves in their caravans, you've got the character who has spent his whole life staring into the fires in a forge, you've got the punch and judy show etc etc. It's these sort of things for which I love Dickens.

David Copperfield becomes a bit interminable towards the end imo. Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist - all good starting places. I really like Our Mutual Friend as well but it's so late and consequently somewhat idiosyncratic that it's not necessarily a great starting point.

Can vaguely remember Tom Wilkinson as Mr Pecksniff in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'. Or maybe I've got the books messed up.

It's possible. Having checked the list of his novels, I can remember seeing adaptations of all of them but Chuzzlewit + Rudge.

There was a Chuzzlewit adaptation in the 90s, definitely.

Chuzzlewit = adapted into a television mini series of the same name in 1994
Rudge = rarely been adapted for film or television (the last attempt was a 1960 BBC production; prior to that, a silent film was made in 1915).

So Rudge is teh rubbish, I assume

> you've got the punch and judy show

punch and judy's 350th anniversary this year too...

NV otm as per. Just read Martin Chuzzlewit, & I'm back to thinking him maybe my favourite English novelist (Fielding aside, maybe). I find myself really moved by him; most novels can't do that to me, & I think it's the positive side of the sentimentality - emotional and moral force.

iirc 2/3rds of David Copperfield is great, but it falls apart a bit towards the end (Dickens at his worst whenever one of his angelic women steps up); I think if I were going for a first-person one, it would be Great Expectations.

Might try to go that Museum of London thing. Visited the Dickens Museum (research for a 'London Dickens walk' piece), & I wouldn't bother unless you're really really nuts for him.

wait, what? is this coming from... commedia dell'arte?

Great representations of punch and judy in lit.

MR James - The Story of an Appearance and Disappearance
Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop
Julian MacLaren-Ross - Memoirs
Wyndham Lewis - the Bailiff in The Childermass (where punch becomes a sort of philosophical figure).

Any more? Something I've been vaguely interested in for a while.

xpost

agree that Our Mutual Friend is great but a bit idiosyncratic.

Old Curiosity Shop (a) Peter Ackroyd favourite I think – between him & Fizzles I am intrigued.

Not fiction, but there's very good stuff on P&J men in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.

this morning they mentioned that the first mention in england(?) was in pepys diaries

http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1662/05/09/

"Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants."

^ P&J talk, not dickens

P & J = confusing because of that mysterious Pazz & Jop thing Americans on ILM are wont to discuss

Thanks koogs/woof. Vill inwestigate < Sam Weller. xpost

yeah, used P&J initially, looked at it, deleted it, for that very reason.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002042/

imdb link for dickens. 324 titles...

I'm about 1/4th of the way through David Copperfield and loving it. Great Expectations we read as a class in 9th grade and it broke my brain in the best possible way. Bleak House is my faves that I've finished. I was actually going to sleep last night thinking of getting a tattoo of Guppy even though he is kind of a creeper.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/csl4953l.jpg

This cartoon reminded me that Bleak House is always cited by MYSTERIES OF THE UNEXPLAINED-type books as a valid source on spontaneous human combustion. That's another thing that makes it great ––– two or three introductions really trying to sell the veracity of this phenomenon before the story of yet another sad orphan begins.

Bleak House is my favourite I think, tho I maintain the last 100 or so pages is a v. unfortunate consequence of episodic publishing. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations are also in my front row. I can't help but like the big multi-charactered epics more than the focused novels.

Suspect Barnaby Rudge is largely unfilmed cos of its unDickensian setting? plus it feels a bit pro Sectarian violence iirc

You know those mix albums from, like, Fabric or whoever, where the DJ spends ages and ages slowly and painstakingly building things up until the point when they're amazing, and they're amazing for such a frustratingly short period of time before he starts winding down again? That's Bleak House.

The build up to the Tulkinghorn murder is so meticulous and the chapters leading up to it are incredible and then the resolution is just ridiculously quick and a bit shoddy. And then there are a load of chapters where every character no matter how minor has to be given a point of departure. I think it's actually quite badly-paced even though there's enjoyable and thought-provoking stuff throughout.

I mean I know I'm looking at it through the prism of 150+ years of mystery fiction but come on, prolong the mystery a bit longer ffs.

I thing I love and find mildly maddening about his stuff is the effect of the serial form –– something deeply dramatic happens at the end of each chapter. "Oh crap I went blind!" When I read Hard Times the ever-escalating cliffhangers started to grate on me as I read the whole thing in two afternoons and not several weeks. I guess it's like spending a day watching a whole season of Dexter on DVD now, a process I also find exhausting.

TBH I forgot there was even a murder in Bleak House. That book has everything. The main parts I liked: the protracted will case/young shiftless man made malignant by money (and iirc dying of it? or his wife does ––– I love the melodrama of a slow didactic death, it makes me want to read Clarissa, which I know is a bad idea); the whole story around poor Jo (total sucker for 19th c Britishes railings against kids with a rotten lot); the fact that the female narrator's love interest was just kind of kept at sea until she needed a non-Guppy/non-Jardyce guy to marry.

JARNDYCE himself is a badass, too. I think about this book far more than any other I've read int he past 3 years.

Have to get to Dorrit, Chuzzlewit, Pickwick one of these years. Old Curiosity Shop not so much.

There's a piece in the February Sight & Sound discussing the paucity of cinema adaptations of Dickens. Several TV adaptations of course, maybe his work is just too sprawling to fit comfortably into a two hour adaptation.

there were a ton of em in the 30s and 40s.

the iMdB associates him with 324 productions -- admittedly most of them after the mid '50s are TV.

the sprawling novels are probably better served by TV, but then Oliver Twist is pretty sprawling and still condenses well to movie length. Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities work well at that length but are both more focused books. Wd imagine Hard Times wouldn't be a great film even tho it's as condensed as any of the books. The poor quality sequences of the 1940s (?) Pickwick Papers I've seen make me want to see the whole thing, even tho filming it is a terrible idea.

there was a nice BBC4 documentary the other week that intercut different adaptations of the novels together, wd also love a more fleshed-out version of that concept

oh Abbott david copperfield is so great! now i wish i were reading it, too.

Like the idea of the silent shorts, just do the good bits:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215705/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1499626/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285750/

Quilp! How could I forget about Quilp! Quilp IS the subject of The Old Curiosity Shop. Arthur Machen said the chapter where he dies describes "a city transformed into the very mystery of terror".

Great proto-Metamorphosis moment when Quilp wakes up -

“The first sound that met his ears in the morning - as he half opened his eye, and, finding himself so unusually near the ceiling, entertained a drowsy idea that he must have been transformed into a fly or blue-bottle in the course of the night, - was that of a stifled sobbing and weeping in the room.”

so many ideas per page in Dickens, just thrown away, in the sense that they're not followed up. Condtant sense of an over abundance of creative energy. No imaginative cheese paring: he disliked misers of all types (and hated their counterpart debt).

yeah, the abundance is just ridiculous. I like the way he'll sometimes just ramp it the fk up and throw out a few pages of borderline visionary prose to distract you from a stupid coincidence that's coming.

& re kafka, I read this on wiki earlier today, did not know:

Franz Kafka called his own first novel Amerika "sheer imitation" of David Copperfield.

That's very interesting! I still haven't read Amerika yet, despite the fairly constant suggestions to do so by a friend.

I did think when I read that bit in The Old Curiosity Shop "C'mon, it's not that unlikely Kafka would ha read this - not outside the borders of likelihood it provided the germ".

Happy Birthday big man.

We'll always remember you as inspiration for the Bleak Old Shop of Stuff.

had the misfortune to see 90 seconds of that :(

It was like that Blackadder version of Scrooge, with none of the laughs.

saw ten minutes, decided against spending two and half hours watching R Webb + 'amusing' character names.

WC Fields was born to play Micawber

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=058M-5S5qJM

If I taught American history, I'd be sure to assign American Notes.

so has anyone seen The Invisible Woman, Ralph Fiennes' film about CD and his mistress? I was hopeful cuz I liked his Coriolanus, but reviews v mixed at best on this one.

^i thought it was great

well a christams carol was just a pot boiler but people lvoed taht shit!!

reading David Copperfield this christmas, am 2/3rds of the way through. feels as though something is missing though. doesn't seem as involving as the others i've read. seems to be a lack of villians in it as well. (ok, Uriah and his step-Father / step-Aunt). Great Expectations was better.

saw Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time since reading the book and hadn't realised that a lot of the dialogue is verbatim and the designs of ghosts are spot on taken from the books.

To enjoy an author you have to effect some meeting of minds and the vehicle within which you and the author must travel together from start to finish is the writing style. I never seem to engage with Dickens' style as I can with most other authors of his period.

It isn't so much that his books are histrionic as that the particular flavor of his histrionics has no appeal for me. Consequently, his books miss their mark, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and I can't wring any enjoyment out of them. I consider this to be a mere accident that says little of importance about Dickens or about me.

so, in april it was Old Curiosity Shop which had very little actual Shop in it (was hoping for something like the description of the taxidermists in OMF). but i enjoyed the trek to wolverhampton.

now: barnaby rudge. published same year as OCS so potentially written in parallel. not far enough into it yet though.

4 to go and i still find it hard to pick a favourite.

took me a long time to get around to liking dickens; surprised i don't complain about him on this thread

3 years ago:
"Like the idea of the silent shorts"

there was a BFI dvd in fopp a month ago that had a few.

http://shop.bfi.org.uk/dickens-before-sound-dvd-bluray.html

Disc one (90 min)

Gabriel Grub (date unknown) (8 min)
Scrooge; or, Marley's Ghost (W R Booth, UK, 1901, 4 min)
The Cricket on the Hearth (D W Griffith, USA, 1909, 14 min)
Oliver Twist (J Stuart Blackton, USA, 1909, 9 min)
The Boy and the Convict (David Aylott, UK, 1909, 12 min)
Nicholas Nickleby (George O Nichols, USA, 1912, 20 min)
The Pickwick Papers – The Honourable Event (Larry Trimble, UK/USA, 1913, 15 min)
David Copperfield (Thomas Bentley, UK, 1913, 8 min extracts)

Disc Two (98 min)

Oliver Twist (Frank Lloyd, USA, 1922, 74 min)
Dickens' London (Frank Miller and Harry B Parkinson, UK, 1924, 12 min)
Grandfather Smallweed (Hugh Croise, UK, date unknown, 12 min)

The only thing I remember about Old Curiosity Shop is Quilp flogging the figurehead - haven't ever had the courage to try to parse what's going on there.

Some pretty lol reactions both pro and con per Wiki:

Probably the most widely repeated criticism of Dickens is the remark reputedly made by Oscar Wilde that 'One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter.' (Nell's deathbed is not actually described, however.) Of a similar opinion was the poet Algernon Swinburne, who called Nell "a monster as inhuman as a baby with two heads."[6]

The Irish leader Daniel O'Connell famously burst into tears at the finale, and threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was travelling.[7]

The hype surrounding the conclusion of the series was unprecedented; Dickens fans were reported to have stormed the piers in New York City, shouting to arriving sailors (who might have already read the final chapters in the United Kingdom), "Is Little Nell alive?" In 2007, many newspapers claimed that the excitement at the release of the last instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop was the only historical comparison that could be made to the excitement at the release of the last Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.[8]

The Norwegian author Ingeborg Refling Hagen is said to have buried a copy of the book in her youth, stating that nobody deserved to read about Nell, because nobody would ever understand her pain. She compared herself to Nell, because of her own miserable situation at the time.

The burial was much more moving, I thought, the way they hid the truth from the old man.

Didn't know Dickens was mad.

Here's Dickens personal plans for all 350 million Indians alive at the same time as he was pic.twitter.com/7e9guOFM4s

— Shiv Ramdas Traing To Rite Buk (@nameshiv) February 7, 2023

Love Great Expectations & Christmas Carol, didn’t mind Nicolas Nickleby but otherwise haven’t read a ton. Started Tale of Two Cities for the bookclub i do with my friend, looking forward to…a long bookclub i guess

Was completely baffled by the first chapter
all that mail carriage stuff —but once I got used to the serialization structure (describe describe describe aaaand PLOT; describe describe describe aaaand PLOT; etc) i’m now enjoying it. Definitely settling into the soapy mystery of it all.

Sometimes though i get impatient like
Yep ok it’s a room with a dormer window no yes i know what those look like no I get how they open I can absolutely picture the window perfectly thank you OMG can you please get to the point now (cries)

*bump*

Tale of Two Cities - my final verdict is the last few chapters made the rest of it worthwhile

but he had this thing with using violent out of context French Revolution scenes without ever really ~dealing- with the Revolution except as handwavey bloothirsty “godlessness”
almost pointless having it be the Revolution at all tbh?

and omg the drawn out mystery of the Doctor drove me IN. SANE.

want to read that one again

recently reread David Copperfield, a lovely sentimental book, and now I want to read Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead

DC is a favorite. Just starting OMF and really digging it.

first time in about 10 years that I've not read any Dickens in April. usually April, August and December. the recent bbc thing has made me want to read Expectations again though.

that and Omf and Two Cities probably my favourites

Never sure why OMF begins with a Nick Hornby essay about why OMF is rubbish

two different versions of david copperfield on tv on sunday

daniel radcliffe version on bbc4 at 22:00
recent film on ch4 at midnight

(didn't really rate the book)

recent Iannucci film v.bad. Not seen the Radcliffe, don't remember it at the time

xps context-free handwaving about bloodthirsty godlessness was the standard british interpretation of the revolution afaict (other interpretations could be dangerous)

Charles D's politics were for shit, the OG melt

but i love his work

and tbf Tale of Two Cities is no more about the Revolution than Casablanca is about the war

i liked the iannuchi film. sue me.

heard hornby on Front Row (a while ago) talking about Dickens and Prince. but i think your problem is that you bought the wrong edition (iirc the vintage editions also don't have the footnotes)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dnbl

my problem is that Nick Hornby is a useless cunt

that LRB takedown of his Dickens/Prince book was pretty funny

I think there should be a moratorium on British TV adaptations of Great Expectations, feels like there's new one every few years.

yeah it's the laziest possible choice

it seemed Hornby's one dimensional autistic boy character became the template for all subsequent British autistic characters for years. To the point where some people might assume autism only affects extremely middle class, charmingly winsome white males. I'm not blaming him for that, but he's still shite!

Never sure why OMF begins with a Nick Hornby essay about why OMF is rubbish

It's the Vintage edition - you can read the intro in the Amazon excerpt

Great Expectations is classic but I agree I don’t need any more adaptations of it.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

but he had this thing with using violent out of context French Revolution scenes without ever really ~dealing- with the Revolution except as handwavey bloothirsty “godlessness”
almost pointless having it be the Revolution at all tbh?

Yeah he was politically a simpleton. Orwell argues in his essay “Charles Dickens” was that his blindness to so many things about the world allowed him certain other insights relating to human personality. His limitations enabled his greatness. This is one of many proto-deconstructive insights Orwell had — his literary criticism weirdly does not fit into the “blunt truth teller” mythos that had grown up around him and which he himself cultivated.

Orwell like Dickens is a victim of a nasty irony, that his biggest boosters nowadays really don't get him and misuse his work

Great Expectations is classic but I agree I don’t need any more adaptations of it.

Established actresses who fancy hamming it up as Miss Havisham seem to need them. This latest one has Olivia Colman (of course) and I think the last one had Gillian Anderson.

the previous (bbc) one was for the 200th anniversary so that'll be >10 years ago now (and, yes, anderson).

The most recent one, with Colman, really nailed the filthy, creepy vibe of the opening chapters

Unfortunately in every other respect it was unwatchable

doing a grimdark Dickens is stupid af

and GE is probably the grimmest, darkest, in some respects

but if you make everything unrelenting then you diminish evil imo

Our Mutual Friend is the best! It just has an infuriating ending, but that's standard with Dickens.

'Now, Mortimer,' says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand - which is particularly rich in knuckles, 'I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about the man from Jamaica.'

'Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the man who was a brother,' replies Mortimer.

'Tobago, then.'

'Nor yet from Tobago.'

'Except,' Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady, who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out of his way: 'except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo.'

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again.

Reading group in about to finish Book the First of OMF. So far so good.

“Is”even.

Also couldn’t recall why I had remembered that “isinglass” bit;)

i watched Peaky Expectations but, spoilers, it wasn't great

haversham doesn't die, the best bit in the book. there is no steamboat. there are more guns. wemmick lives in hammersmith. it ends with pip marrying biddy and estella dancing with jaggers.

i wonder how much of that was for budgetry reasons?

anyway, it has made me want to read the book and rewatch the david lean version so maybe some good has come of it.

actually, bits of it were ok. it certainly looked good.

In the second half of the second book of OMF. So far so good.

JUst reading about annoying end on OMF. Isn't that book based around an actual court case that did only stop when it ran out of reason to continue because there was nothing left to fight over.

Not clicking to expand that, but have been amusing myself to think of which possible bad ending it could be, especially since one by-now-obvious but still big reveal just happened.

Stevo is thinking of Bleak House anyway

Facebook reminds me it's 12 years since reading omf for the first time and i enjoyed it enough to go on and read everything else by him (with varying levels of success). have Great Expectations reread lined up for august.

Stevo is thinking of Bleak House anyway

as far as I can tell, no-one has done an adaptation of The Pickwick Papers since 1985, which is odd, you'd think getting some comedy actors together to do that would have obvious appeal

Aretha Franklin’s will situation straight out of OMF if not Bleak House.

As promised, end of OMF is OMG.

I can't remember the very end but this bit has stayed with me - excellently done in the bbc adaptation:

Let go!’ said Riderhood. ‘Stop! What are you trying at? You can’t drown Me. Ain’t I told you that the man as has come through drowning can never be drowned? I can’t be drowned.’

‘I can be!’ returned Bradley, in a desperate, clenched voice. ‘I am resolved to be. I’ll hold you living, and I’ll hold you dead. Come down!’

a re-read is in order.

one of the aus women footballers just then was called 'tulkinghorn'...

re-reading Great Expectations and the various adaptations never go beyond the broad strokes of it, often actually padding out the miss haversham / estella bits, but missing the details, like the single shoe, and the castle and the pockets.

Heh, as I just said on the other thread, just friend three interesting posts on Medium about OMF by none other than Adam Roberts, who is apparently writing a book on Dickens.#onethread

That scene ledge mentions seems to be the key to the whole thing, at least to one kind of reader such as myself.

It’s far and away the best part of the ending, at least

OMF in the rearview mirror, now onto NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.

WACKFORD SQUEERS!!!!

being possessed of one eye when the general prejudice was towards two

^yes, love that!

Read David Olusoga talking about Dickens giving a friend a copy of The Narrative of Frederick Douglas. He wanted them to read about the experience of slavery which he thought a negative that needed to be dealt with. To ensure sympathy he removed the picture of Douglas attached to the book that was too ugly to leave a good impression. Douglass is one of the best looking guys I've seen both when he was young and powerful looking and older white haired and dignified.
Hadn't realised Dickens was so racist.
Seems to be a widespread thing people thinking abolition was the only moral choice while still viewing those enslaved as not fully human.

NN is by far the most boring Dickens I've read but I am eager to hear your thoughts

having said that I'm not some kind of authority either

The Infant Phenomenon has arrived!

Also, this Alex Jennings audiobook is really a cut above.

I've just been listening to Jennings do Susan Cooper's "Over Sea and Under Stone" and haven't thought much of either the book or the narrator, i'm not sure how to apportion the blame for that.

it's been putting me off wastng an Audible credit on the complete Barchester Chronicles which he reads together with the unimpeachable Anna Massey - but it sounds like he is good with 19th century prose?

That’s a BBC adaptation, but looks good.

He also did the audiobook of Claire Tomalin’s Dickens biography, I just noticed.

Oh hi, found a good batch of Dickens audiobooks that are public domain, for any Bad Boffin miser types that may be out there.

Here

You can also stream from some of the usual suspects.

I'm sure I have mentioned this elsewhere on ILX but I can't find the post currently so I may as well give it another plug here -

depending on
(1) your appetite to spend money on what is undoubtedly a pretty niche streaming service; and
(2) your tolerance for unvarnished straight readings of the classics (usually by the standard crew of minor character actors / RSC types (Anton Lesser, Juliet Stevenson Neville Jason, David Timson, Emma Fielding, Martin Jarvis etc feature heavily) but with occasional appearances from a "star turn": your Derek Jacobis, your Michael Sheens and so on))

...then you may be interested in the Naxos Spoken Word Library subscription service.
https://www.naxosspokenwordlibrary.com/home.asp

rather than paying for each book individually your subscription price gets you access to the catalogue. the catalogue is deep.
https://naxosaudiobooks.com/category/products/

it looks pretty unwieldy and old internet to start with but it's pretty easy to use. they have an app and everything.

there is a an awful lot of Dickens, just to stay broadly on topic.

Ha, thanks, I recognize all of those names.

Just watched David Lean’s Oliver Twist for the first time, maybe I should finally get around to reading the book.

the film's good, love the depiction of Victorian London skyline. the book is more violent, specifically Nancy and Bill.

Thanks. I hadn’t quite realized that he directed Great Expectations BEFORE Oliver Twist.

his GE is the best GE also, the miss havisham death scene adds things that weren't in the book iirc - using the curtain as a fire blanket and letting the light in for the first time since the failed wedding (in the book it's the table cloth)

Good point.

The novel has some secret that it is added at the end as almost an afterthought.
Estella is Magwitch’s daughter

Similar kind of secret in Nicholas Nickleby.
Smike is Ralph Nickleby’s son

That Naxos thing actually makes a lot of sense to me. Not going to sign up myself this very second though.

Pretty happy with the three versions of Nicholas Nickleby I have access to at the moment by Alex Jennings, Simon Vance and Mil Nicholson.

Do you guys know the name of Dickens’s doctor?

Your list leaves out Sean Barrett and Frederick Davidson aka David Case.

The latter who eventually lost his voice because…well you can read about it or just guess.

He might be pre-Naxos though

Love this from Robert Newton’s Wikipedia page:
Known for his hard-living lifestyle, he was cited as a role model by the actor Oliver Reed and the Who's drummer Keith Moon.

Especially since both he and Oliver Reed played Bill Sikes.

Trying to find the Morbius post where he says Lean’s film of Oliver Twist is much better than Dicken’s novel. Can’t really opine not having read the novel (yet), much as I’d like to.

Watching GE again for the first time in ages.

Feel like everything about it is great, except for John Mills that is.

Alec Guinness is awesome though

Don’t care about Valerie Hobson as grown Estella. Much prefer the younger version played by Jean Simmons which was her breakout, star-making role. Don’t know what happened to the young Pip actor, Anthony Wager, who I also liked.

Jean Simmons played Miss Havisham in a later version!

i feel exactly the same about Valerie Hobson

Seems like Jean Simmons’s next role but one was in Black Narcissus!

i feel exactly the same about Valerie Hobson

Seems Valerie Hobson was also in the 1934 version but her scenes were cut.

I just found out today that Francis L. Sullivan was in it too, also playing Mr. Jaggers!

He’s the only actor from GE also in Lean’s OT, although Kay Walsh who played Nancy, at the time Lean’s wife, worked on both in a writing capacity.

Unless I missed something.

Finlay Currie’s Magwitch just dropped in from NSW it’s like a…um,er… breath of fresh air.

Wonder if I am wrong to assume that this stuff was on the telly all the time when you were coming up.

Here’s something else interesting: Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness had originally played their roles a in stage adaption by Guinness which inspired David Lean to make the movie.

Torin Thatcher’s Bentley Drummle also steals every scene he is in.

Valerie Hobson also plays Molly, uncredited.

Ha, I like the way IMDb mentions this.

They also put forward some alleged other casting choices for grownup Estella but I haven’t seen them elsewhere.

Hobson is too bland, not cruel enough i think

the film as a whole is wonderfully dreamlike in places

Yes to both.

Hobson didn’t like her own performance either and had major issues with Lean’s direction.

Also TIL that Chad is the UK version of Kilroy.

And that there was a pre-Code US version of Oliver Twist starring Dickie Moore.

And that Carol Reed was Oliver Reed’s uncle.

lol at this from Wikipedia:

but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the adding: "Reed had assumed 's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian".

Aargh, vanishing links. Need to c+p from different app, sorry.

but from the mid-1970s his alcoholism began affecting his career, with the BFI adding: "Reed had assumed Robert Newton's mantle as Britain's thirstiest thespian

Robert Donat wanted to play Bill Sikes!

The same guy who did Alec Guinness’s Fagin makeup did the makeup for Chewbacca, Yoda and everybody else is Star Wars: The Original Trilogy.

I guess people might already know about John Howard Davies.

TIL that Notting Hill Gate used to be called Kensington Gravel Pits.

In the US you can also get audiobooks from your library through the apps Libby and Hoopla.

The BBC Radio Drama Collection seem like a pretty enjoyable in-between length from a two hour movie and the whole unabridged books. Listening to the adaption of Great Expectations right now and digging it, Pip is making up what happened at Satis House for Uncle Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe.

Here’s a nice obsolete term from NN I think deserves a comeback: cartel of defiance.

One of the audiobook readers does the voice of Fagin in a way that sounds like Gollum. I am wondering how intentional this is and if it’s kind of circular since Gollum might be based a bit on Fagin.

Using various libraries and non-Naxos subscriptions I can easily listen to multiple audiobooks of NN for each week’s reading which may say seem like overkill but I actually find helpful for absorbing.

Dickens really was a (nick)name-generating machine. It’s fun to know that before the hotblooded OMF schoolmaster was Bradley Headstone he was Amos Deadstone. He gave his kids nicknames like Lucifer Box, Chickenstalker, Ocean Spectre, Sampson Brass and Plorn.

Ocean Spectre was also Hoshen Peck and finally Little Admiral.

Sampson Brass was also Skittles

Forgot about Mild Glo’ster.

And Young Skull.

Master Floby

Plorn had many longer variations.

Plornishghenter.

Plornish-Maroon, with or without hyphen, the same way Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who Plorn was named after) used a hyphen but his estranged wife, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, didn’t.

Plornishmaroontigoonter

https://daily.jstor.org/charles-dickens-minor-characters/

Master Floby

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n15/tim-parks/how-does-he-come-to-be-mine

Whole lot of Tim Linkinwater right now

Being for the benefit of Mr Vincent Crummles

Finished NN and then watched two of the four film adaptations, which was a pretty interesting exercise.

Wait there were a couple of BBC adaptations I wasna aware of.

wasna
Heh, must have been thinking of Kevin McKidd and his appearance as John Browdie in the 2002 film version.

Turns out the Cavalcanti adaption of Nicholas Nickleby has got some excellent stuff in it t and has been unjustly dismissed (including by David Lean himself!) for being “no Great Expectations”

did you ever read and watch Little Dorrit?

suddenly want to see this - always enjoy the Cavalcanti option in Dead of Night. xpost

Do it!

did you ever read and watch _Little Dorrit_?

1987 Christine Edzard version with Derek Jacobi and all the other names in the giant cast is easily available and I think it has a good reputation.

And a Verdi soundtrack!

no it's kinda terrible

Started re-reading Bleak House this week. It's my favorite of his (though I haven't read them all).

the book is good, the christine edzard movie is not good

What about the 2008 version?

not seen, lots of ppl i generally like in the cast, starting w/claire foy

(i mean ugh eddie marsan but he is more or less unavoidable in prestige TV and if you are unacquainted w/his online antics will be fine)

There seems to be a good audio book of Little Dorrit by Juliet Stevenson, who is convincing opposite Jim Broadbent in her role as Mrs. Squeers in the 2002 NN, which is pretty good, if ultimately cloying. Christopher Plummer is definitely a more human Ralph Nickleby than Cedric Hardwicke.

Cavalanti is kind of an undersung or overlooked and mostly unseen director, although the ones I have seen including the aforementioned Dead of Night along with Went the Day Well? and They Made Me a Fugitive have all been very good. Never saw any of his French stuff never mind Brazil, although it’s all supposedly important. Even his overall contributions at the GPO, it is said that he co-directed Night Mail, and at Ealing, where apparently Michael Balcon considered him some kind of partner, are hard to gauge.

What, you've never seen Champagne Charlie?

... that's a joke, I liked it though.

Heh, I’d like to. Stanley Holloway, who he also employed effectively in Nicholas Nickleby as Mr. Crummles.

TIL that Tracy Reed, Sir Carol Reed’s stepdaughter, was once married to Edward Fox, who played Sir Mulberry Hawk in the 2002 Nicholas Nickleby.

And that she played Buck Turgidson’s girlfriend in Dr. Strangelove.

And that Sir Carol was the second filmmaker knighted, Sir Alexander Korda being the first.

Off to a good start with DOMBEY AND SON.

his longest book? the penguin classics edition says nearly 1400 pages (not all of it the actual book). certainly looks thicker than the others.

it has some good railway bits in it, but other than that i remember very little of it

iirc the trifecta of sentimentality, whimsy, and coincidence form a particularly toxic combination.

Ha, I already carefully read your earlier posts. First four chapters were good though.

Still enjoying this

the '47 film of Nick Nick was on film 4 the other day. only caught the last hour but it looked decent

oh, that's the Cavalcanti version you were all talking about

Yes indeed

End of it is the best part actually

Starting around when they go to the theater

Nobody could have seen that coming

Dombey still going strong.

Complaining about sentiment in a Dickens novel is like complaining about falsetto in a Beach Boys song.

Sometimes it works

I'm thinking of Dombey or Martin Fuckwit or whatever.

dombey has some nice railway stuff in it, but not much. it's also the thickest of his books by some way.

chuzzlewit is the least filmed of his books (and historical, set in 1780s rather than the 1800s. the only other is Two Cities).

Dumbey was right there!

> chuzzlewit is the least filmed of his books (and historical, set in 1780s rather than the 1800s. the only other is Two Cities).

what i've done there is confusing martin chuzzlewit with barnaby rudge. ignore.

13th anniversary of me finishing Our Mutual Friend for the first time, according to Facebook.

Y'all are deluded about Dombey. It's really good, mostly.

i'm finally on the homestretch of Little Dorrit. it's been a gas so far, and i'm trying to enjoy myself as things are starting to fall into place and there's finally some pay off after 700 pages of insinuation and anticipation. but i can't help but feel that, at this newly brisk pace, Dickens has fumbled on one or two plot points. i feel sort of ambivalent about the book overall, although like i said it's been quite fun to read

the first few chapters were the most "i am getting paid by the word" Dickens i've read so far, but happily that sense went away before too long

i need to re-read this, and a few more. the first half is amongst my favourites.

(i walked from bleeding heart yard to the marshalsea one April, although there's nothing much of the prison left, but some of the roads around there are named after the characters)

was only today 30+ years after I first read it that I realised that I had been internally pronouncing the name of the school in nn incorrectly. I had been reading it to rhyme with Sotheby's the auction house when of course it's do-the-boys!! why this only clicked on my 3rd reading I dunno.

Have been trying to get through Our Mutual Friend for some time, with lots of stops and starts. I love Dickens but have found it less enjoyable than I was expecting...

Need to go back to Pickwick Papers, which I read every few years and thoroughly enjoy each time.

OMF is probably my favourite out of the five or six I've read (OMF, GE, DC, D&S, AToTC, maybe OT.) I want to read more, and re-read at least two of those but so many books, so little time...

OMF his last and best, apart from his most autobiographical, DC, although I haven't read them all

But it can often be a hard trek from beginning to end with plenty of longueurs along the way. Not as bad as Tolkien though

OMF also my desert island dickens, thick enough to keep you busy for a while and also not something you already know from films.

Except I saw the (excellent) BBC adaptation before I read it, and the bit where (spoilers since someone in the thread is still reading it) Bradley drowns Riderhood, saying "I'll hold you living, and I'll hold you dead" is often in my thoughts.

i'm looking to read Hard Times next (appealing because it's his shortest) or the Old Curiosity Shop (i've read his first three so it seems natural to read #4). on the other hand, i'm tempted to re-read PP before starting either of those

PP and Sketches would be the only two of the lot i don't think I'd enjoy rereading

the only major thing i think i haven't read is his children's history of England, which might actually be useful.

I recently tried to reread PP, which I had enjoyed the first time, but just didn't care enough

Hard Times is fine. Being shorter than the others has exactly the upsides and downsides that you might expect.

OMF also my desert island dickens, thick enough to keep you busy for a while and also not something you already know from films.

ledge, is the BBC adaption from 1982?

mine is the one from 1998 with anna friel and keeley hawes

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0144727/

yep that one.