Three more big Dickens
(Spoilers for Dombey and Son below)
Some time ago, I began reading straight through Dickens, having long avoided this great writer due to my preference for other Victorians and the whole sentimentality thing that is hung (not entirely unwarrantedly) around his neck.
The first four novels I ranked as follows:
- Pickwick Papers (sublime)
- Nickleby (fun, a full serving)
- Old Curiosity Shop (slow start but won me over)
- Oliver Twist (loved much of it but found it thin gruel in places - but a sublime ending)
I’ve continued on to the next three and will add them below, with some thoughts. I stopped after the first four to read some other stuff as a mental cleanser, and then breezed through Barnaby - but hit a hard wall with ol Chuz. Indeed I abandoned Martin Chuzzlewit long enough to read about thirty novels by the great Jack Vance. Once I finally tired of Vance’s irreverence, I returned to Chuzzlewit and enjoyed it, and then spend the past million years in Dombey and Son. The beginning of that book has many absolutely brilliant and hilarious turns of phrase, but it became a trial in places - still, it never lost me, and having just finished it I wanted to share some thoughts.
Dombey and Son
- Strange and endless novel that nevertheless kept me on the hook. It carries the mark of being written in sections for an audience to whom Dickens is very responsive, like a TV series veering from season to season to keep the audience guessing. The first part, about young Paul, fades from memory by the end and seems to be from some other story. The narrative climaxes a good hundred pages before ending. The first chapters had more humor and more of those perfect Dickensian lines than the rest, which were often overwritten - like today’s “fan-service”, it must have been his attempt to lean into the elements that his readers were responding to at the time, at the expense of the effect of the novel as a whole.
- The train motif is much more understated than I expected.
- If we lacked the scene between Edith and Carker, the final scene between Edith and Florence would be so much more powerful. It would place us in Florence’s position, forced to weigh our cynicism against our faith - and it would allow us to see Florence’s exceptional faith more clearly.
- The major flaw in Dickens’s representation of the human experience is his treatment of death. Characters die of nothing and commit themselves unwaveringly to attitudes that we are compelled to believe will never change - Edith will move to Italy and never see Florence again, even if both life another 30 years. Such events are forced by the narrative and let us peer behind the veil of Dickens’s thought to see the manipulation of the text.
- Nevertheless, Dombey and Son is the first novel by Dickens where I was impressed by his brilliance as an observer of inner life rather than as a parodist of behavior. Some of his choices for Paul, Edith, and Mr Dombey ring very true to me about the idiosyncrasies of human nature, although there are many characters who feel rather hollow - particularly the blandly good characters like Carker Jr, Florence, and Walter.
My updated list:
- Pickwick Papers (sublime)
- Dombey and Son (huge, digressive, but frequently brilliant and a really serious engagement with some well-observed paradoxes of human nature)
- Nickleby (fun, a full serving)
- Martin Chuzzlewit (long and foolish, often ringing hollow, but the big central conceit won me over - a jumbo jet that wobbles but he sticks the landing).
- Barnaby Rudge (harsh, cruel, pitiless but also compelling and impactful. Enraging at times to read as it captures collective idiocy and injustice all too well).
- Old Curiosity Shop (slow start but won me over)
- Oliver Twist (loved much of it but found it thin gruel in places - but a sublime ending)
I apologize for the banality of the above, but I felt compelled to share these thoughts.