Michael5000 v. Dickens: Oliver Twist

2012 Assessment: "I don't think I've read it, but was shown bits of Oliver! in high school.  It has such a broad cultural footprint that one feels like one has read it."

Current Reading: Simon & Schuster "Enriched Classic" Edition.  I read it in an informal "book group of two" with frequent Tournament voter Morgan.


What I have to say about Oliver Twist is very similar to what I had to say about Nicholas Nickleby five years back. But, even on the off chance you are reading this, you probably haven’t seen that earlier review, at least not recently, so I can probably get away with repeating myself quite a bit.

First of all, like Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist is very early Dickens. They are his third and second novels, respectively, although the first novel, The Pickwick Papers, is so picaresque that we almost wouldn't call it a novel, if we really cared to enforce a definition of "novel." And in none of these first three, nor in the two that followed (The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge) do we really get a satisfying, fully realized Dickens novel.

I've wondered about this a lot, because in our current literary-commercial regime one reads an awful lot of "first novels," and often times those turn out to be, as one finds after buying the sophomore effort, conspicuously the best novel that that writer had in them. It doesn't always feel like contemporary authors have had the chance to mature into the fullness of a mature style -- or so I often think. On the other hand, I suppose there are counterexamples (especially in writers of serial fiction) where you can go back and check out the rerelease of a favorite author's first few published works, and you say "wow, this early stuff kind of stinks." Yes, I realize I just said two completely contradictory things. I said I've wondered about this a lot, not that I've figured out any answers about this.

Anyway, back to Oliver Twist.

In the Nicholas Nickleby review, I said "Although he's not as stylistically daring as he will be later in his career, Dickens' voice is already in place. You've got the lovely, well-turned sentences, the ironic wit, and the tendency to go a bit overboard, by modern standards, on the flights of pathos. His concern for social justice and the plight of the folks at the bottom of the social ladder is very much in evidence as well." That's true in Oliver Twist as well.

Next, I moved on to this: "What's missing, though, is the big complex kaleidoscope of a fully realized Dickens plot. In my favorite of the novels, there will be several scores of characters who are all twined together through an elaborate tangle of circumstance and back-story. In Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, you'd be hard pressed even to identify a "main character," and three different people could each give you accurate plot synopses without it being obvious that they were talking about the same book. There's just a hell of a lot going on in these full-fledged Dickens masterpieces."

Whereas, Oliver Twist is another novel, like Nicholas Nickleby, that for the most part runs down a single narrative and chronological path. For the most part. To be fair, it is actually considerably more interesting than Nickleby, because we do see some characters take on lives of their own and have side adventures not directly related to the title character. But everything ultimately ties back to little Oliver and the mystery around his parentage, a mystery which is, alas, both overcomplicated and profoundly uninteresting.

I had a general idea of what would happen in Oliver Twist, but all of those things turned out to happen in the first few chapters. This is a common enough phenomenon with well-known, infrequently read books – a friend who saw me with the book in my hand mentioned that it is "set in an orphanage," which it is, but only for a couple of chapters. That whole "please sir, I want some more" business happens in Chapter 2, and there are 53 chapters. I suspect that, like me, most first time readers will find that the book they expected is contained in the first eight or nine chapters, after which the story keeps on going.

Like other Dickens title characters, Nick Nickleby and also David Copperfield, Oliver Twist as a title character is by far the least interesting person in his own book. We know, but only because we are told so and because of how some of the other characters react to him, that he is a child of remarkable (not to say improbable) attractiveness and virtue. That's about all we know, though, because he only ever opens his mouth to say something painfully sincere and virtuous. He is the star of the book only in that his existence gives other, more rounded and interesting characters a central point to revolve around.

True to the Dickens stereotype, Oliver Twist relies a bit too heavily on outlandishly convenient coincidence to lubricate the engine of its story. More than most Dickens, it also relies heavily on people doggedly failing to have obvious conversations with each other so that they can preserve misconceptions that are important to the plot.

Finally, to put it plainly, the biggest problem with Oliver Twist is just that it's kind of boring.



Current Dickens Score: I have now read 13/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.  The only ones left are Little Dorrit and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Second Opinion: Publisher's Weekly ranks it as the sixth-best Dickens novel:

With its larger-than-life villainies and its endless excitements, is the perfect book to begin with. Who will ever forget the supremely wicked Fagin who co-opts homeless boys into a life of crime, the murderous Bill Sikes, the brave young Oliver himself, however idealized? No wonder it had such an immense triumph as successor to the benign and lovable Pickwick!

Michael5000 vs. Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop

2012 Assessment: “I haven't read it. The title made me think maybe I had, but I was thinking of the rag and bone shop from Bleak House.”

Current Reading: I listened to a version from Naxos AudioBooks.

The biggest disappointment of The Old Curiosity Shop is that it has so very little to do with an old curiosity shop. This is simply not plain dealing. Using such a title lays out the promise that we readers will get to spend time lurking among oddities and knick-knacks considered quaint and queer even by people of the Victorian age, with all its massive trade surplus of old curiosities. But no, the shop in question is simply a location where things happen to happen (as it were) in the first few chapters, and for all the descriptions we are given it might as well be an old law office, or an old inn, or an old marine chandler’s shop, to choose three examples of businesses that Dickens made come to life far more vividly than he did this one.

Now, it may well be that Dickens’s original plan was more old-curiosity focused than the novel that actually got written. This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Like many novels of the day, this one was originally published as a serial. Unlike most of them – at least unlike most of them that are still read today, anyway – Old Curiosity Shop shows clear evidence of major rethinking after the first bits were already in print. The first few chapters are told in first person by a narrator who meets a charming young girl in the street and helps her find her way home to – wait for it! – an old curiosity shop, where she lives with her grandfather. While he’s there, they receive colorful visitors, and Dickens starts to have trouble figuring out where to put his narrator while he’s overhearing all of the plot-laden conversations. Eventually, he gives up, and the narrator says something like “look, I’m just going to tell the rest of this story in third person,” then vanishes without a trace. It’s quite something.

So, it’s not at all unlikely that there is an unwritten novel here in which the narrator character stuck around and became significant, and much was made of the old curiosity shop and its old curios. But it probably isn’t a very good unwritten novel, or else Dickens wouldn’t have gone through the embarrassment of abandoning it so conspicuously.

The charming young girl, by the by, is the famous Little Nell, and you might have two notions about her. One is the crowds who gathered on the pier in the United States, begging people arriving from across the Atlantic to tell them whether Little Nell survived. This is a great story, but common sense warns us to be suspicious of the scale of the phenomenon. The second is Oscar Wilde’s quip that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without dissolving into tears . . . of laughter.” This is a great line, but a bit vague in its application, since Little Nell dies offstage. Certainly, most modern readers will, I think, find Little Nell a fairly insubstantial fluff of virtue, sympathize with Wilde, and wonder why the Americans were so invested in her survival. For myself, I only felt that she went from remarkably robust pluck to feeble ill-health with surprisingly little transition, although I might be wrong about this. Missing key transitions is a constant risk when you read by ear.

Plot: Nell is in the care of her grandfather, who is in the grips of gambling addiction. When he can not pay back the money he has borrowed from an evil dwarf – you heard me, an evil dwarf – he and Nell take to the road for a new life of privation and grinding poverty. A variety of secondary characters begin looking for the vagabonds for a variety of reasons, scheming with and against each other for comic and tragic effect. A young wastrel named Dick Swiveler and a waif he calls The Marchioness form an unlikely relationship that is nevertheless rather charming. But meanwhile, Nell’s health takes a sudden turn for the worse.

Prognosis: Although it is not as episodic as some of the Dickens novels, I found that Old Curiosity Shop had sections and scenes that I found effective and entertaining, and others that bored me to tears. This was, for instance, the alternative means I found for shedding tears over Little Nell’s unfortunate exit. I don’t think we’d be reading this book today if its author hadn’t written his masterpieces. But if we happened on it by chance in that alternative universe, we might still decide it was “neglected.”

Second Opinion: In a 2011 Guardian poll, 1.2% of respondents listed The Old Curiosity Shop as their favorite Dickens novel, putting it third-to-last ahead of only Martin Chuzzlewit and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Current Dickens Score: I have now read 12/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels. On deck are Oliver Twist, Little Dorritt, and the Mystery of E

Michael5000 v. Dickens: David Copperfield

2012 Assessment: I don't believe I've had the pleasure.

Current Reading: I listened to an audio version, from Blackstone Audio I think.

You feel bad for the poor literature professors who have to try to pin down The Modern Novel, because whatever characteristics they try to tie to Modernism, the Victorians always got there first. Two Modern Novels I thought of while reading David Copperfield were, first, To the Lighthouse, which is notable for the way it handles the flow of time. The action in Woolf’s book takes place in two closely observed episodes, separated by a sudden rush of time in which much happens that we learn of only in telegraphic fragments. Copperfield has more episodes, they're more conventionally biographical, and the summarized gaps of time between them are less extreme, but the dilation of time is built into the story’s structure just the same.

Then of course there would have to be Ulysses, and the first of the many quirky things you learn about James Joyces’ tome is that it’s about a more or less ordinary guy going about his more or less ordinary life, with no immediately apparent traditional narrative arc. David Copperfield isn’t quite so free-form – it has several plot lines that progress through conflict to resolution, and has perhaps more denouement than is really good for it – but at the same time, it doesn’t really follow a traditional narrative arc. It’s difficult to say what the book is “about,” because it doesn’t have the central story line that most novels, of most periods, are built around. It’s really about a more or less ordinary guy going about his more or less ordinary life. It’s about David Copperfield.

The first thing to know about David Copperfield is that he’s a fellow who, like most men of sense, enjoys the company of women. Although he is not really aware of it, he is a guy with three girlfriends. And let’s be frank in our assessment: one of the girlfriends is toooo dumb, and one of the girlfriends is essentially toooo smart for her own good, as a Victorian woman; but, the third girlfriend is juuuust right! So you think you know what is going to happen, and then you get a bit of a shock when he goes and marries the numbskull. If you’ve read enough nineteenth century novels, you can recover from there and work out where things are heading.  If you haven’t, or if you were one of Dickens’ original readers, you might be on tenterhooks to figure out how the situation would be resolved. Or, you might not even recognize that there was a situation that needed resolving, due to that lack-of-an-immediately-apparent-traditional-narrative-arc thing I mentioned earlier.

David Copperfield is written (by Charles Dickens) as a first person account written by its subject, David Copperfield. Dickens is clearly in great sympathy with Copperfield – in the forward, Dickens calls Copperfield his "favourite child" – but it’s not always crystal clear whether the two of them are in perfect accord. This stood out for me in the case of Uriah Heep, ostensibly one of the villains of the piece. Heep is oily, low, scheming, and thoroughly disagreeable, and despite or perhaps because of this I found that I had a great deal of sympathy for his motives and respect for his cunning.

Copperfield does not share my partiality. Copperfield loathes Heep from the very moment he sets eyes on him, and hasn’t a kind word to say for him throughout. So the interesting question to me is, how did Charles Dickens feel about Uriah Heep? Was he enough in sympathy with his character David Copperfield that we can assume that Copperfield’s repulsion mirrors his own, the repulsion we are “supposed to” feel for Heep? Or, did Dickens intend for me to feel sympathy for Heep, and for me to regard Copperfield’s malice towards him as a humanizing character flaw in his hero?

I’d like to think the latter, as Copperfield could use a little humanizing. Like other Dickens novels that focus on the adventures of a single character, David Copperfield suffers a bit from looking at the world from the perspective of someone less colorfully drawn then everyone else in the story. In a novel populated by people with exaggerated mannerisms, vivid personalities, and axes to grind, Copperfield himself is a bit of a cypher: decent, earnest, capable, and bland. He’d be a good chap to have in your corner, but he's the least interesting guy in his own book. His inhibiting presence in every scene is probably what separates this very good Dickens novel from the real masterpieces.


Plot: David Copperfield is born, deals with an abusive stepfather, gets an education, makes friends, enters adulthood, and eventually sorts out his girlfriends.

Prognosis: Good stuff!

Current Dickens Score: I have now read 11/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.  On deck are Oliver Twist, Little Dorritt, The Old Curiosity Shop, and the Mystery of E

Second Opinion: The Guardian says it's the 15th best book in the English language.

Michael5000 v. Dickens: Hard Times

2012 Assessment: I'm pretty sure I have not read it. [I was right!]

Current Reading: Eye-read in a Penguin Classics that's been around the house for a decade or three.

Hard Times is, like most of Charles Dickens’ work, driven by a profoundly humane impulse. Here as ever, Dickens wants to tell stories that are emotionally and intellectually involving, but also to demonstrate that decency can prevail over apathy and villainy. He wants to show his middle-class Victorian readers something of the conditions of the working classes, to cast light on the intricate social, political, educational, medical, geographical, legal, and architectural systems by which the cards were thoroughly stacked against the urban poor, and against himself in his own tough childhood. He is one of the founders of the modern social conscience, bless his heart.

The broadest target in Hard Times is an educational system based solely on the rote learning of facts. Early on we meet Mr. Gradgrind, who demands that his students, including his own children, commit a random treasury of technical esoterica to memory. He strives to save them from the distractions of emotion, self-expression, and entertainment, and comes off as a Victorian Mr. Spock without the madcap sense of whimsy. The second broadest target is the Victorian industrialist; our real villain will prove to be Mr. Bounderby, a gasbag who prides himself on his humble origins and holds his labor force in contempt for not having pulled themselves up to be factory owners like himself. To be exploited to the hilt, he might bluster, is no more than they deserve for their lack of initiative.

Now to a modern eye, the caricatures that Dickens offers seem pretty darn broad, but as the editor of my 1969 edition (a charmingly Marxist professor of the old school) is at pains to point out, the satire is not nearly as over-the-top as it seems in retrospect. Mid-Victorian regimentation of factory labor and education did such a fine job of parodying itself that the social critic had to strain to take things one step further. (The editor is disappointed only that Dickens does not call for the reader to rise up and cast off the chains of capitalism, but reasonably concedes that for him to do so would have really cut into his sales.)

But it is not the setting and situation that makes Hard Times a bad novel; it is the paper-thin characters that inhabit its mechanical contrivance of a plot. Most people know the principle of fiction writing that an author should “show, not tell.” In Hard Times, Dickens gets it backwards. He tells and does not show.

Let me show you what I mean. (See what I did there?) Here are three examples on facing pages 60 and 61, where I opened the book at random:

“Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me. They were right; they had no business to do anything else. I was a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest. I know that very well.”

His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.

In the first paragraph, we hear Mr. Bounderby blustering about his childhood. This is fine and good. In the second paragraph, Dickens essentially inserts a footnote explaining what the dialog was meant to convey about his character. This is tedious, and just a little insulting.

Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks. He frowned impatiently.

Here, Dickens somewhat pompously tells us about how his character reacted, or “seemed” to react, before grudgingly giving us three words that show us what actually happened. The sad thing is that those three words, if left to their work, could have carried the weight of the passage very effectively on their own. They needed no introduction.

‘Go and be somethingological directly,’ [said Mrs. Gradgrind]. Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific character, and usually dismissed her children to their studies with this general injunction to choose their pursuit.

Here we go again: Mrs. Gradgrind makes an amusing malapropism that shows she isn’t well-educated. This is good character writing – and it is immediately ruined by a long, dull sentence that explains, and therefore ruins, the joke.

This constant barrage of explanation is, I assure you, not limited to pages 60 and 61. Throughout Hard Times, Dickens relentlessly explains his own jokes, heckles his own villains, and swoons over the virtues of his own heroes. The effect, as you would expect, is painfully tedious – “like having the intended message(s) hammered into you by a journeyman carpenter” as Maddy, who was book-clubbing the reading with me, put it.

When you are required to read a bad book, even if only by your own stubbornness, there is an unfortunate kind of literary relativity in which – because it is so untempting to pick up and so easy to put back down – the time required to plow through it can stretch out for weeks. Hard Times is actually one of Dickens’ shortest novels, but it took me an age to read. Well, 16 days. But it felt like an age.

In reviewing Barnaby Rudge, I said that “in reviewing Martin Chuzzlewit, I said that ‘Second-rank Dickens is better than the first rank of most authors.’ I'll stand by that. Third-rank Dickens might however be given a miss.”

In Hard Times, we have arrived at Fourth-rank Dickens.


Current Dickens Score: I have now read 10/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels. Still on deck: Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Second Opinion: It's Michael Faber's favorite!  He talked all about it in a Guardian article that seems to have disappeared from the internet.

Michael5000 vs. Dickens: "A Child's History of England"

2012 Assessment: None -- it's not on the novels list.

Current Reading: Eye-read in a cheapish ~80 year old edition.

Dickens’ A Child’s History of England isn’t a novel, but just what the title claims: a history of England, pitched at the level of a bright child, often with the kind of jolly bluster you might aim at a somewhat dim child. My copy, an orphan from a complete hardcover set of Dickens – undated, but I’ll guess 1930ish – has a strikingly tepid introduction. “Forster remarks that he ‘cannot be said to have quite hit the mark with it,’” reports the anonymous editor, “yet it seems that to demand anything much better of its kind and for its purpose would be to demand more than is humanly possible.” Right on! Something hardly worth reading, that even Dickens’ buddy and biographer John Forster found mediocre! Way to sell the book, anonymous editor!

A review I noticed online said that the vocabulary was way too tough for any child, and that you better have your dictionary beside you when you read it. This is simply not true. The vocabulary would never challenge any middle school student who would choose to read the book. Dickens does not seem to have put much effort into simplifying sentence structure, however, and I reckon that this is what makes the text seem difficult to some readers.

I actually found it surprisingly entertaining reading. I kept it as bedside reading for a couple of weeks, and it fit that niche beautifully. It was pleasant enough to look forward to, and just dull enough to facilitate the drifting-off process. Dickens’ patent anti-Catholicism is unseemly, but mitigated by his honest disgust at the strain of anti-Catholicism in English history. We are full of contradictions, all of us.

I said at the beginning that A Child’s History of England is a history of England, but that’s not quite right. It is a history of the people who held and contended for the English crown. That’s the way that history used to be conceived, of course, and the most interesting thing about reading Dickens’ take is seeing a prime example of how blinkered the traditional school of “Great Man History” really was. A chapter with a title like “England Under Henry the Third,” for instance, says absolutely nothing about what was happening in England during the reign of Henry III – only what happened to Henry III. England itself – its population, economy, laws, culture, towns, transportation network, crops, the whole green and pleasant land – does not really make an appearance in this book. Here is the English intellectual tradition:

That reign (of Elizabeth I) had been a glorious one, and is made forever memorable by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart from the great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom it produced, the names of Bacon, Spenser, and Shakespeare, will always be remembered with pride and veneration by the civilized world, and will always impart (though with no great reason, perhaps) some portion of their lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself.

That’s it. Really, that is the sum total that Dickens dedicates to the arts and sciences. And along with an occasional mention that a king’s reign was troubled by the plague or the Great Fire of London, it’s as close as the book ever gets to the history of England as a country, as opposed to England as a crown. It seems like a bit of a train wreck if you’ve never been exposed to seriously old school historiography, but in the 1850s the monomaniacal focus probably didn’t raise an eyebrow. That’s just what history was.

Despite that Dickens only took history up to the Cromwell years, which were as remote in time to him as the American Civil War is to us today, we have it (although not on terrific authority) that his Child’s History of England was widely used in British schools for 90 years, right up to the second world war. Today, it is hardly read at all, except by myself.

Plot: Various powerful people struggle for even more power, but even when they get it, it doesn't usually make them happy.  The ones that you'd want to hang out with aren't necessarily the most effective, but on the other hand the real bastards are always big trouble.

Prognosis: More interesting as historical artifact than as history.

Current Dickens Score: Unchanged, as this was not on the novels list. I have still read 9/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.

Second Opinion: There are abundant editions available in every conceivable online format, because it is a public-domain work by a popular author.  Since no one actually reads it, however, there's not much online conversation about it.

Michael5000 vs. Dickens: "The Pickwick Papers"

2012 Assessment: " I haven't read it, and don't know a thing about it."

Current Reading: Ear-read on audiobook.

The Pickwick Papers is Dickens' first novel, to the extent that it is a novel.

Plot: Here's the story: Mr. Pickwick, having retired from business quite wealthy, decides to go out traveling and exploring the world.  He cobbles together a few pals as "The Pickwick Club," and off they go into the wilds, although they never really get very far from London.  The Pickwick Club is something of a send-up of the learned societies of the age, and the cumulative joke is that the narrator speaks about this little group of buddies in the overblown language usually reserved for people and events of great importance.  I actually like this kind of humor, but in the lack of robust supporting content it wears a little thin over the length of a fairly hefty book.

Pickwick's travels are a framework for a picaresque grab-bag of stories, kind of like The Canterbury Tales in prose or an unsexy version of the Decameron.  The boys are forever telling each other stories, or listening to someone else's story, or picking up a book and reading a story, and we of course always get the whole story.  It's an old-fashioned device -- reasonable of course in an 180 year old book -- and boy oh boy are the stories themselves old-fashioned.  Love stories, comic stories, ghost stories, most of them were surely chestnuts even as Dickens was writing them down.  But, since Dickens was writing for a fairly newish periodical form and a fairly newish literate public, he might have been the first to get them written down in a venue that lots of people could enjoy.  For whatever reason, The Pickwick Papers was a runaway hit, and after it took off not even Barnaby Rudge would slow down Dickens' career much.  However, friends, there's not really much to recommend these dusty old stories today, to sophisticates like me and you.

The third quarter of the book is the best.  Like a fight at a hockey game, a novel suddenly breaks out and generates some real excitement.  Mr. Pickwick gets sued over a misunderstanding, and over several chapters gets dragged through the courts and debtors' prison, and Dickens makes gleeful satire of what he saw (and hey, I'm not arguing with him) as the unjust, absurd, and often cruel aspects of these institutions.  The firm story line, and Dickens taking on the kind of material that would later be the stuff and substance of his best work, makes this section really tower over the rest of the book.  Mr. Pickwick, who otherwise (like his interchangeable traveling buddies) has almost no dimensionality whatsoever, has to make some tough moral choices.  Solutions having been found, however, there is still quite a bit of book left to go and not a lot of compelling material to fill it.

There are two characters who are a bit more rounded than the principles. Once is Sam Weller, a savvy servant who befriends Mr. Pickwick and repeatedly saves his rather naive bacon.  Weller was much beloved by the original readers, and it was apparently his character that made The Pickwick Papers such a hit.  The character I liked myself was Mr. Jingles, an amiable confidence man who speaks in distinctively clipped, telegraphic sentences.  I thought he was a hoot.


Prognosis: It's more interesting historically than it is interesting as a piece of fiction to sit down and enjoy.  I wouldn't recommend this one to anyone who didn't already love Dickens.

Current Dickens Score: I have now read 9/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.

Second Opinion: Mr. Pickwick is The Telegraph's 18th favorite Dickens character!

Michael5000 vs. Dickens: "Barnaby Rudge"

2012 Assessment: I definitely haven't read it.

Current Reading: Eye-read in a cheapish ~100 year old edition.

Barnaby Rudge is ultimately a historical novel about the Gordon Riots of 1780. Writing 50 to 60 years after the fact, Dickens had access to people who remembered this period of London unrest first-hand. This immediacy, along with his overstated but basically sound analysis of mob behavior, makes the riot scenes the most vivid and interesting in the book. But there is, I’m afraid, not a lot of competition for this honor.

I am composing this writeup on with paper and pen, believe it or not, as I am away from the various machines for the nonce. That puts me in the unheard-of situation of not being able to instantly call up the chronology of Dickens’ novels. But, Barnaby Rudge pretty much has to be one of the first ones, one written while he was still learning his craft. It’s definitely by Charles Dickens – all of his signature characteristics are here. It’s just that Barnaby Rudge isn’t very, you know, good. Actually, it’s more what you might call “kinda bad.”

Any Dickens is going to have some aspects that seem like flaws to We Moderns, of course. They rely on Amazing Coincidence. They are sentimental. They have characters that are one-dimensional caricatures. The good guys are often too good to be true, and the bad guys are sometimes too bad to be true. In Barnaby Rudge, though, all of these flaws are turned up to – well, not up to “eleven,” really, not if you’ve read other Victorian authors. But up to six or seven, anyway, which is high enough to break the pain threshold for sensitive readers. The Amazing Coincidences are ludicrous, the sentimentality is maudlin, and the only characters who aren’t all virtue or all wickedness are a pair who are suffering from mental disabilities.

What is good in Dickens is his prose, his ability to analyze or lampoon the manners of his times, and his keen understanding of human behavior. The prose of Barnaby Rudge, though, is middlin’ to sometimes awful, with great walls of exposition where Dickens tells us what we could reasonably expect him to show us. The pacing is all wrong too, and we are marched through a not-especially-interesting 400 pages or so of character development before we really even know what the book is going to be about. There are some gothic touches – an unavenged murder! Perhaps a ghost! – that are periodically picked up, dusted off, and put back in storage, without ever becoming important or interesting. And where are the sharp, nuanced portrayals of behavior and society? In Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House, that’s where.

Plot: By extension from the logic of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, you might expect this one to be the story of Barnaby Rudge. But he’s actually pretty far down the cast list, and it is one of the mysteries of the book for me why he gets title billing. He’s an unusual character for a Victorian to take on, a mentally retarded young man accompanied everywhere by his best friend, a trained raven. Dickens is not entirely up to the task of writing Barnaby, however, and the character's level of comprehension and his vocabulary is constantly shifting to fit the current needs of the story.

So anyway, plot: there’s this innkeeper who is stifling his son, who is in love with the daughter of the locksmith, whose wife’s petty, manipulative maid has a thing for his sullen apprentice; oh, and down the road there’s a manor house, the lord of which has a daughter who is in love with… oh, the hell with it. There are some 20 to 30 people, some of whom hate each other and others of whom love each other, and all of them will eventually get caught up in the Gordon Riots of 1780, and some Amazing Coincidences will occur.

..and when I have internet access again, I’ll find out whether Barnaby Rudge is generally considered lesser Dickens by other humans, or if I’m just a big grump this week.

INTERNET ACCESS AGAIN: Well! It turns out that this is the fifth novel that Dickens published. It was however the first he started, and he picked it up and put it down for a number of years, which may have something to do with the pacing problems. After a run of four hits, Barnaby Rudge was Dickens’ first flop, ultimately selling only a third as many copies as its immediate predecessor, The Old Curiosity Shop. "Barnaby Rudge met with little favour in its day,” says the Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens, “and (with notable exceptions) that judgment persists. Its modern bibliographer, Thomas Rice, calls it 'the least loved and the least read' of Dicken's books." A recent and fairly high-profile appraisal in the Guardian calls it “one of Dickens's most neglected, but most rewarding, novels,” which is clear additional evidence that it is generally considered a real dog.

Obviously, I feel like I got the answer right. You may praise me for my discernment, or damn me for my conventional tastes.


Prognosis: In reviewing Martin Chuzzlewit, I said that "Second-rank Dickens is better than the first rank of most authors." I'll stand by that. Third-rank Dickens might however be given a miss.

Current Dickens Score: I have now read 8/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.

Second Opinion: This guy is a little more sympathetic.

Michael5000 vs. Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit

2012 Assessment: Martin Chuzzlewit. YES! This is the second Dickens novel I read, quite a long time ago. I remember the American bits rather clearly, and also remember quite enjoying it. Ripe for rereading.

Current Reading: Ear-read on audiobook.

Martin Chuzzlewit is best known to readers in the United States of America as “the one in which some of the characters go to the United States of America.” Dickens, who was fond of America but also a satirist by trade, portrays a country where people are ignorant of but also dismissive of the rest of the world, where fraudulent and semi-fraudulent real estate speculation is rife, where intellectual life is considered irrelevant on one side and twisted into semi-mystical mumbo-jumbo on the other, and where people of all social classes fervently declare that the United States of America has transcended social classes. Thank goodness we have outgrown that crude stage of our national development.

As in a lot of the Dickens novels, the central theme of Martin Chuzzlewit is the pernicious power of greed and the expectation of wealth to distort a person’s character. In the Chuzzlewit family, and all jockeying for the Chuzzlewit fortune, we will meet a ghastly hypocrite, a young man wasting his talents and abilities, an openly wicked schemer, a foolish young woman with a vast sense of entitlement and none of of responsibility, an angry and bitter young woman ditto, and an odd-lot of various crooks and dodgers. Some will rehabilitate themselves, some will not, and some will of course meet sad fates laden with great pathos. It ain’t Dickens if it doesn’t have a squalid but tearful death here and an inspiring show of redemption there.

In terms of overall awesomeness, Martin Chuzzlewit falls short of Bleak House, Great Expectations, or Our Mutual Friend. Even its primary characters are a bit one-dimensional, and the central premise – that the head of the Chuzzlewit family conducts elaborate, misguided social experiments on his potential heirs, using his fortune as carrot and stick – is a bit too cut and dried. People with lots of money use their wealth to manipulate potential heirs all the time in real life, of course, but the elder Martin Chuzzlewit messes with his family in ways that are at once elaborately covert, rigorously systematic, duplicitous, patriarchal, and yet altruistic. As a plot device, it’s a bit like those stories (Cosi fan Tutte, Cymbeline, etc.) where guys dare other guys to try to sleep with their girlfriends; it gets the story going, but also makes it feel a little other than true-to-life.

On the other hand, Martin Chuzzlewit is a big step up from Nicholas Nickleby. Where that novel flops around episodically with no apparent plan, rhyme, or reason, Martin Chuzzlewit is a much more crafted creation with a clear narrative arc. The parts of the novel mesh together better, and a larger cast is kept more meaningfully in action. And if the characters are not as fully fleshed out as they might be, there are multiple central protagonists (particularly Martin Sr., Martin Jr., and likeable Tom Pinch) who, compared with the shapeless title character of Nicholas Nickleby, have defined personalities and coherent patterns of action. It is hard, too, not to enjoy the supporting character of Mark Tapley, an inveterate optimist who can’t help being “jolly” and so is constantly trying to find difficult situations that will be more of a challenge to his eternal good mood.

Prognosis: Second-rank Dickens is better than the first rank of most authors. Martin Chuzzlewit is a bit didactic, but we can all use a refresher course in Dickens’ classroom from time to time.

Current Dickens Score: Unchanged: I have still read 7/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.

Michael5000 vs. Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby

When I took my inventory of Dickens consumption last November, here's what I had to say about Nicholas Nickleby:

Nicholas Nickleby.  I definitely haven't read it.

That has now changed.  Well, depending.  I ear-read it, which is to say I listened to it on audiobook, so you'll have to decide whether I get full credit for "reading" it.  I'm a pretty close listener, though.

Prognosis: This is not my favorite Dickens.

It's an early novel, and although he's not as stylistically daring as he will be later in his career, Dickens' voice is already in place.  You've got the lovely, well-turned sentences, the ironic wit, and the tendency to go a bit overboard, by modern standards, on the flights of pathos.  His concern for social justice and the plight of the folks at the bottom of the social ladder is very much in evidence as well.  (It occurred to me as I read/listened that Charles Dickens was a major figure in the evolution of the concept of Human Rights -- indeed, that you could probably sustain a pretty good argument that he was pretty much the lead architect.  As always, if you write a dissertation around one of these little notions of mine, please just list me in the acknowledgements.  But I digress.)

What's missing, though, is the big complex kaleidoscope of a fully realized Dickens plot.  In my favorite of the novels, there will be several scores of characters (not the paltry three dozen deployed here!) who are all twined together through an elaborate tangle of circumstance and back-story.  In Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, to pick examples I've had my nose in fairly recently, you'd be hard pressed even to identify a "main character" out of half a dozen legitimate contenders, and three different people could each give you accurate plot synopses without it being obvious that they were talking about the same book.  There's just a hell of a lot going on in these full-fledged Dickens masterpieces.

Nicholas Nickleby, on the other hand, runs pretty much on a single rail.  It's an episodic novel, and the various episodes aren't very well integrated.  The best-known bit has our hero Nicholas at a hellish Yorkshire boarding school, the cheerfully named "Dotheboys Hall."  Escaping his job there -- he is a teacher, not a student -- he effortlessly and somewhat randomly becomes a minor star in a regional theater company. After the first scenario has been milked for tears and the second for laughs, Nick is headhunted off the London street for his obvious qualities of nobility and intelligence, and made the clerk, protege, and pet project of two saintly and vastly rich wholesalers. Elements of the first two scenarios reappear and are resolved in the within the third, but the construction of the whole is fairly slapdash.

The title character is certainly the "main" character, but he is the least fleshed-out person in the book.  We know of him that he is smart, capable, kind, and a little volatile, but that's about the extent of his personality.  Maybe Dickens intended that we readers would imagine ourselves into his place, but my own feeling was that he was an empty suit whose adventures it was hard to get too worked up about.  His incorporation in the theater company, for instance -- we had no previous suggestion that he might have theatrical talent, and he shows no particular interest in things theatrical, so when he is suddenly up there performing on the Portsmouth stage, it feels more like an authorial contrivance than a natural flow of events.  Dickens is of course not best known for a relentless pursuit of plausibility, but in his better work the improbabilities are at least the germ of the story -- the remarkable things that make the tale worth telling -- rather than just a clumsy way of keeping the action moving forward.

Current Dickens Score: I have now read 7/14.5 of the non-Christmassy Dickens novels.

Need a second opinion on Nicholas Nickleby?  Sure you do!  The blog post from which I helped myself to the title page image is a somewhat more coherent review.

Michael5000 vs. Charles Dickens

Happy Labor Day!! 

 ...to my fellow UnitedStatsians. Those of you living elsewhere may know that here the United States, home county of Infinite Art Tournament, it amuses us to celebrate an alternative Labor Day that is not in line with the global standard.  And we celebrate it in inches and feet.


It is the five year anniversary of Labor Day 2007, the day on which the official Michael5000 Reading List was unveiled (one more year, I think, ought to wrap it up).  And it is the one-week anniversary of a personal inventory on my Shakespeare reading.  So, it being such a bookish date, I felt inspired to do another personal inventory, checking into something I've been curious about -- how much have I read of Charles Dickens?

The Dickens

I've been awfully fond of Dickens ever since I started into the first chapter of Our Mutual Friend, in -- of all places -- a tent in the Alaska wilderness, in the summer of 1989.  I decided on the spot that I would thereafter read a Dickens novel every year, a resolution that I have never made any particular effort to keep.

Nor am I renewing that vow now; I'm just taking stock of what I've read and what I haven't, with a general intent of finishing 'em off.  Why finish 'em off?  Well, because I have a collector's impulse, of course.  But also because, Sir or Madam, I am damned fond of them!

(Another reason to do an inventory, incidentally, is that Dickens' novels are so thick with characters, plots, and subplots galore, and so often similar in theme, that it can get a little tricky to remember which is which.  No shame in admitting that.)

It seems that Dickens produced 14 1/2 novels, not including the five "Christmas novels" (which I am not including, because I don't want to).  Here they are:


The Pickwick Papers. I haven't read it, and don't know a thing about it.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist.  I don't think I've read it, but was shown bits of Oliver! in high school.  It has such a broad cultural footprint that one feels like one has read it.

Nicholas Nickleby.  I definitely haven't read it.

The Old Curiosity Shop.  I haven't read it.  The title made me think maybe I had, but I was thinking of the rag and bone shop from Bleak House.

Barnaby Rudge.  I definitely haven't read it.  I'm now 0-5, and it must seem peculiar that I'm making an inventory of an author whose works I have never read.  But wait!

Martin Chuzzlewit.  YES!  This is the second Dickens novel I read, quite a long time ago.  I remember the American bits rather clearly, and also remember quite enjoying it.  Ripe for rereading.

Dombey and Son.  I read this one about 13 or 14 years ago.  Quite liked it.  Ripe for rereading, perhaps in audiobook.

David Copperfield.  I don't believe I've had the pleasure.

Bleak House.  The great legal satire and handbook of practical money management!  I read this one just before me and Mrs.5000 got married -- almost 10 years, now(!) -- and ear-read it earlier this year.

Hard Times.  I'm pretty sure I have not read it.

Little Dorrit.  Frankly, I didn't know that this was the name of a novel.  I thought it was the name of a character.

A Tale of Two Cities.  A historical novel of the French Revolution!  And a pretty good one.  I listened to it on audiobook last summer.

Great Expectations.  Pip!  Joe!  Miss Havisham!  The hilarious notion of Charles Dickens taking literary advice (he changed the ending) from Edward Bulwer-Lyton!  I listened to it on audiobook the year before last.

Our Mutual Friend.  An amusing romance about money and the way it makes people misbehave.  My first Dickens, which I may (or may not) have read again in the late nineties.  I listened to it on audiobook about 2 years ago and then again, as an experiment, again this summer.  It did not suffer from the repetition.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  The one he didn't finish.  Ordinarily, I wouldn't consider reading half a book that there was no hope of finishing, but this is Dickens we're talking about here.


Heavens, I've only read 6/14.5ths of the Dickens body of work!   I had no idea I was so behind the ball.  But... lucky me, I've got lots of fresh Dickens left in front of me.