DICKENSMANIA, PART 2

I finished the Dickens biography. Here are the remaining highlights:

• This is why I love the Victorians: “Torment is not uncommon in the lives of novelists and in the lives of nineteenth-century novelists seems to have been the rule rather than the exception. Thackeray’s wife was irredeemably insane; George Eliot lived out of wedlock with G.H. Lewes, whose wife continued to produce children with other men; Charlotte Bronte watched her sisters die of tuberculosis and her brother perish of alcoholism before herself dying in childbirth at forty-one; George Sand, Nikolai Gogol, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy all lived lives that to us seem dramatic, strenuous, and even traffic, beset in some cases by debt, in others by illness, madness, loss, grief, political imprisonment.” Good times!

• Scandal! “In October [1857], as a result of a dispute, Dickens told Catherine’s maid to erect a partition in their bedroom so that he could sleep separately from her.” Although I had heard about Dickens’s affair with actress Ellen Ternan before, somehow it had never occurred to me that he was divorced before that started, and the public messiness of it surprised me—Dickens behaved just plain badly, kicking Catherine out to live with her parents while keeping custody of the children (Catherine’s sister, Georgina, who had lived with the Dickenses and cared for the kids for many years, stayed with Charles and continued in her role), trying to alienate them from their mother, and severing contact with any of his friends who helped Catherine. Wild rumors flew, including one that Dickens had slept with Georgina and she was actually the mother of the Dickens children (Dickens refuted this by having poor Georgina examined by a doctor to prove she was a virgin)! Dickens then began living a double life, carrying on an 11-year affair with Ternan so secretively that modern scholars still have no idea what the exact nature of the relationship was—sexual or no? (There are hints that Ternan miscarried one or two children, and even that Dickens was with her when he died, contradicting the official story that he spoke his last words to Georgina, but no one knows for sure.)

• Charles Dickens, action hero! “On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge…and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens’s carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, buit Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died…. He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride…. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.”

• I like Smiley’s advice: “Newcomers to Dickens can do no better than to begin with a novel—my suggestion is David Copperfield, to be followed by Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend, in that order, light, dark, light, dark, light, a wonderful chiaroscuro of Dickens’s most characteristic and accessible work.” Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend had not previously been on my want-to-read list (though I’ll be doing Copperfield next month), but maybe I’ll have to add them.
  

Taking advantage of the holiday weekend, P and I spent all day Sunday watching the 7.5-hour 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House, and holy shit, we totally loved it! We hadn’t planned on watching the whole thing in one sitting, but as soon as we started at 11:30 a.m., we were hopelessly hooked, pausing only to walk to Whole Foods for lunch (nice veggie pizza, insanely expensive and delicious chocolates, and an intriguing gingerbread beer) and then Azeen’s Afghani for dinner with the menfolk. I must say, Bleak House makes Nicholas Nickleby seem tame by comparison—sure, NN has some child abuse, several carriage accidents, leering old men, and eventually a suicidal hanging, but it can hardly compete with what BH has to offer: A secret illegitimate child! (OK, technically NN has that.) Consumption! (Er, NN has that too.) Pneumonia! Opium (addiction and overdose)! Smallpox (with scarring)! A dwarf! A murder mystery (and one of the earliest detective characters in fiction)! A legal battle! Three different men vying for the hand of one woman! A homicidal Frenchwoman! And, of course, spontaneous human combustion! Awesome. It’ll definitely be the next Dickens novel I read (after this year’s Project is over).