DICKENSMANIA!

Month of Chabon is over, and I consider it a great success. I read four great books—three new to me, and one reconfirmed as a favorite. I would have liked to revisit Wonder Boys (or at least rewatch the movie), but now I’ve got bigger fish to fry. 700-page-long fish, to be exact.

A brief history of my relationship with Dickens: My dad loves Dickens. He reads a Dickens novel every year, in order of publication. He’s being doing this as long as I can remember, and he’s restarting the cycle anew with The Pickwick Papers this year, so I figure he’s read each of the 14 novels at least two or three times, if not more. When I was a kid, he read me A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and The Pickwick Papers, and I adored them. (This amazes me a little now, because I picked up Pickwick a couple of years ago and could barely get through the first few chapters. That puppy is loooong and meandering. I figured Dad must have skipped some stuff to keep his 10-year-old audience interested, but he swears he read it to me the whole way through, every single word. I would be curious to know how long it took to read that entire book aloud, in 30-minute nightly increments.) I revisited Oliver Twist and Great Expectations a couple of times for assignments in high school and college, and added Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times to my repertoire during my English-major years, and each time I was reminded how much I enjoy reading Dickens (in contrast to my classmates, some of whom were less than thrilled about it). But I’ve never read Dickens for pleasure, under my own steam, until now.

I thought I’d kick things off by reading a Dickens biography to put things in context. I sought out the definitive bios, only to realize that—duh!—they’re thousands of pages long. Plan B: Jane Smiley’s 200-page Charles Dickens, part of the Penguin Lives series. While it’s got less trivia than I’d like (the only factoid I’ve picked up so far is that Dickens’s recreational daily strolls sometimes clocked in at 20 to 30 miles), it also dispenses with all the grindingly dull detail (I’ve read way too many bios that begin by profiling the subject’s parents, grandparents, or even more distant ancestors for 20 pages or more) and cuts right to what I need: a decent overview of Dickens’s life, organized more thematically than strictly chronologically, with emphasis on analyzing the novels. Smiley is affectionate without being overly reverent—she seems as annoyed as I am with the fact that Dickens seemed to blame his wife for their enormous quantity of children and her subsequent health problems and recurrent postpartum depression. Still, Smiley manages to be fair and insightful to both sides, succinctly summing up the troubled marriage as follows:

Victorians as a group believed in effort and in making one’s way by dint of personal force, especially masculine personal force. But even his fellow Victorians were exhausted by Dickens’s restless productivity. [To Dickens] a good life is a busy one; an idle life is boring and morally suspect. Rest is something ever sought, never found, only occasionally imposed by illness. If every marriage is a belief system, and if one spouse usually dictates the terms of the belief system, then the evidence was growing stronger that Catherine was unable to maintain her part in the Dickens family mythology. The reserves of energy that Charles could call upon at will, even when ill, were not available to Catherine, But it must be said that sustaining ten pregnancies and several miscarriages in sixteen years, along with many house movings, social engagements, and long trips, is a task that few modern women would even consider, much less be able to manage.”

For the novel itself, I’ve chosen Nicholas Nickleby as my assignment for February. About all I knew about the book before I started was that (1) It’s so long and dense that the Royal Shakespeare Company famously adapted it into a stage play lasting nine hours, and (2) I really enjoyed the 130-minute 2003 movie. I picked it because I was curious about all the stuff that must have been cut from the book to make the movie, and also because Smiley describes it as the “first wide-ranging ‘Dickensian’ novel,” “a lively and entertaining reading experience,” “ebullient,” “bright,” and “high-spirited.” Sounds like fun, right? Stay tuned for my thoughts on the first 150 pages later today.