Before we dive into Jennie’s thoughts for this week, let us point out that there was a Part II she shared with us last week, in case you didn’t catch its addition to Week 4’s Discussion Thread. All read up? We continue on-

Jennie Notices Much Confusion and Has Thoughts (about characters, about sentences and about a non-dead, dead guy…)

These chapters fly by with so much going on and so many shifts of scene between the rioters and the rest of our characters that it makes one’s head spin. I’ve read this portion of the book twice through and listened to it twice through on Audible – and I’m pretty sure I’m still confused.

It seems to me that Dickens intends us to be confused and overwhelmed. A couple moments make me think so, and I’m interested to hear whether others will agree. First, I think Dickens is being purposely unclear about characters who seem in some ways to be important but who aren’t clearly identified. There is, for instance, a man with only one arm who is in conversation with a serjeant (Dickens’ spelling!) outside Barnaby’s prison door at Newgate. The serjeant is unnamed but seems unimportant, except for the threat he poses to our poor protagonist who seems unaware of just what a terrible situation he’s now in. Barnaby has been captured protecting the rioters’ home base when the rioters, led by Hugh and Dennis, head off to ravage the Maypole and then later the Warren. This part of the plot is clear and shows how well Hugh knows Barnaby and how careful he is to find a way to leave him behind lest he fly to the defense of his old friends from home. Hugh explains to Dennis that if Barnaby thought Haredale and Willet were about to be attacked, Barnaby would abandon the rioters and protect Haredale et al.. So Hugh tells Barnaby that Barnaby’s being entrusted with a special job to guard the Boot and in particular to look after Hugh’s bed (under which he has stashed the golden valuables from the pillaging of the Catholic churches). Barnaby is captured as he patrols outside the rioters’ hideout and is hauled off to Newgate to await trial and probable hanging.

So far, no confusion. But then we are specifically given a scene between two no-name characters outside Barnaby’s prison door, one of whom, the serjeant, wants to take things into his own hands and just lay waste to the rioters and not bother with due process. I don’t think Dickens cares particularly about this serjeant. He just illustrates, I think, that all men are capable of equal cruelty whether they are a rioter like Dennis who itches to work off any and all or a man on the “right” side of the law like the serjeant. But it’s that one-armed, unidentified, man that captures Barnaby’s attention (who can see only his “form”, not his face) and therefore our attention. From his “form,” Barnaby surmises that he was a “gallant, manly, handsome fellow.” And our narrator speculates that it’s because he’s lost his left arm that Barnaby is more interested in him than in the serjeant. But the more we hear, the more we wonder. He’s “younger” than the serjeant and looks as though he could have been in the service. Who is he? When Barnaby fears that the serjeant is going to “put a final stopper on the bird, and his master too,” he briefly hopes that the one-armed man will help him. But the one-armed man, although he stops and listens to Barnaby, doesn’t turn around, and the narrator notes that Barnaby’s hopes have been “built on sand.”

This could be just another throwaway character added in for fun. Dickens certainly is generous with characters who appear only once. But did anyone else notice that another one-armed man turns up at the Boot to tell Hugh that Barnaby has been taken and is in a cell at Newgate? This one-armed man is badly bloodied and beaten up. Is he one of the rioters? Why is he taking Barnaby’s message to Hugh? He even tells Hugh that he had tried to help Barnaby, but, as a one-armed man, he couldn’t do much.

Is this the same one-armed guy as the one who is chatting with the serjeant at Newgate? Or are these two entirely separate, one-armed guys? Are we being thrown off by a single visually noticeable shared trait that makes us think that these are possibly the same man but they really aren’t? I doubt it.

Character confusion:

Then there is something that Dickens does brilliantly when he wants to communicate chaos. He writes a long, detailed, descriptive paragraph that is actually one single sentence that goes on and on with verbal phrase after verbal phrase and semi-colons sprinkled throughout just to remind us that he hasn’t entirely lost his punctuational mind. He does this twice in this reading. First, he describes the destruction of the Maypole on p. 450 in chapter 54. After a single word sentence – “Yes.” – he launches into a twenty-five line sentence constructed largely of concrete action participles. Here’s a sampling: darting, smashing, turning, drinking, sitting, cutting, hacking, hewing, breaking, putting, dividing, wasting, breaking, pulling, tearing, etc. etc. There are 33 participles, most of them present participles, in this sentence. Glorious. What’s the effect? Mega sentence that captures and fits the chaos that the rioters are perpetrating. We are exhausted by the leaping and the breaking, the yelling and the ringing. Most of the participles are physical actions, but many are also sound words – yelling, ringing, etc. As Dickens writes, “nothing quiet; nothing private: men everywhere – above, below, overhead, in the bedrooms, in the kitchen, in the yard, in the stables – clambering in at windows when there were doors wide open; dropping out of windows when the stairs were handy; leaping over the banisters into chasms of passages: new faces and figures presenting themselves every instant – some yelling, some singing, some fighting, some breaking glass and crockery, some laying the dust with the liquor they couldn’t drink…” I have to stop somewhere, but just look at how hard it is to stop when the sentence forbids it! Dickens uses the word “everywhere,” but then he illustrates “everywhere” by detailing every possible where that things could be going on from: above, below, overhead etc. etc. He provides us handy signposts that prepare us for whole new rooms of specificity. The word “some”, when repeated, creates a pattern we can happily follow. It’s a helpful trail of breadcrumbs we can follow. Notice, though, that he adds more details to vary the list so that it doesn’t get predictable and therefore dull. After single-word verbals: “some yelling, some singing, some fighting,” he’ll expand to a longer phrase to change the rhythm: “some laying the dust with the liquor they couldn’t drink, some ringing the bells till they pulled them down, others beating them with pokers till they beat them into fragments..”

The effect? Well, except that we aren’t lying on the floor in tatters like everything else, we have really experienced the chaos. It doesn’t stop. We go everywhere – and none of it makes sense. People are coming in windows when they could more easily go through open doorways. They are dropping out of windows instead of using the stairs. It’s brilliant. I don’t know anyone who does it better. (Well, Frederick Douglass is no slouch at the long, extended, descriptive paragraph, but his aren’t usually whimsical or funny.)

The second example of the un-ending single sentence to effect chaos is another 22-line extravaganza about the torching of the Warren in chapter 54 on p. 461. I won’t detail it here, but do take a look at it. They are parallel descriptive hurrahs: Maypole and Warren.

Single sentence confusion:

Finally, here’s one final bit of this week’s reading that confused me. Remember the moment when the nearly de-cerebrate John Willet weirdly asks, as he’s sitting almost catatonic in his destroyed Maypole, whether anyone has seen a coffin??? What? Is he just ranting? Haredale doesn’t think so. In fact, Haredale rushes off to find the coffin’s body, and we realize that one of our major mysteries may be about to be resolved.

Anyone else a little confused by the plot’s ins and outs? The unknown/known mystery characters? If it’s just my problem, ah well. I have read and reread. I’m interested to hear what questions are arising for the rest of us – or which ones are beginning to feel resolved!

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Jennie stands between the two halves of the novel, pondering the points of connection to be seen from here and what ultimate relationship they might work one upon the other.

Here we are at just about the dead center of this novel, and I’m thinking about what Dickens will do at this midpoint, given the title of the novel. The first half of the novel established the characters and their various personalities and conflicts within a small geographic area, largely the environs of the Maypole, the Warren and where the Rudges live. Dickens opens the novel with the Maypole and its location. Then he moves us to the people who live within the circle of this little local world that he will populate with the characters we will follow and begin to care about.. The Maypole world gives us our main characters: the Vardens, Rudges, Haredales, Willets, and Chesters, along with the mystery that surrounds the deaths of Haredale’s brother and of Barnaby’s father. Dickens expands upon this little world with developments that expose the tensions between masters and apprentices and the long-standing animosities between Haredale and Sir John Chester. These characters share a mystery that looks as though it will be the purpose of the novel to unveil: who killed Haredale’s brother (Emma’s father)?, and who killed Barnaby’s father, and why are Haredale and Sir John Chester such bitter enemies? (Barnaby, although the titular focus, seems more like local color and a useful foil to the intentionally wicked and manipulative contrivers.) So far so good. We have place, we have people, and we have interesting enough problems to explore and resolve.

But if chapter 37 is the midpoint of the novel, it seems to focus exclusively on the first half of the novel’s title, the Barnaby Rudge part. The Maypole is our landmark location and will host most of our people and the interactions that matter. Yet, the second half of the novel’s title is “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty.” Ch. 37’s coming at the midpoint suggests to me an addition to our focus that will include something historical and perhaps a new set of problems, mysteries and conflicts.

The opening paragraph of ch. 37 serves as a hinge between the two halves of Dickens’ title. It doesn’t sound like the beginnings of the other chapters thus far. Chapter 37 offers, instead, a statement of universal truth, i.e. a statement that Dickens claims is applicable to all of us universally. He argues that any monstrous or ridiculous cause can be made “irresistible” to the public if it’s coated with the elixir of mystery which will “invest it with a secret charm” that will make it “irresistible” to the general population. That’s the first sentence paraphrased, and the rest of the paragraph expands upon that idea. The reader knows exactly what Dickens thinks of the cause about to be promoted. Those who believe in “NO MORE POPERY!” are going to join all the other “falsities” Dickens lists: false priests, false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false prodigies of every kind. We mustn’t be hoodwinked by the “charm” of this falsity because it is both monstrous and ridiculous. And also powerful and irresistible. We need to believe in the power the Gordonites wield over large numbers of their peers if we are to follow what is about to happen and believe it.

This paragraph launches a new focus to show what happens when a desperately despicable and horrifying “cause” intoxicates the public into belief and support. The characters whose largely quiet little lives we’ve gotten to know in the first half of the novel are about to be swept up into “history.” Hugh succumbs first, and his joining in with Dennis and the rest of the blue-cockaded followers of Lord George shows the manipulative and powerful magic of this cause. Hugh doesn’t even understand what’s afoot. When he mishears, or misunderstands, the clarion call of the movement, mistaking “No more popery!’ for “No more property!”, we realize how ridiculous and how monstrous this alliance is going to prove.

Dickens’ task is to move us from a bucolic rural setting filled with memorable local characters into a fire pit of violence and chaos that Lord George and his wickedly intentional “servants” and followers create. How successful are these chapters in introducing a whole new purpose for the tale and for beginning to weave our Maypole characters into this new fabric? We’ll see. I’m already interested in the relationships between “masters” and “followers” or servants. Simon Tappertit and Miggs have nicely primed the pump. What interests you at this point?

Devils and Angels – Jennie’s Not Done with This Week

As I was happily reading along, I came upon ch. 41 which opens with the musical notes of Gabriel Varden as he pounds away at his trade, forging keys and other such ironmongery. Pages 337 and 338, the first two pages of this chapter, are purely descriptive of this man and his work, the two inseparable in the way Dickens describes them both as generous and beneficent. It might seem unlikely to describe ironmongery as “beneficent,” but Dickens insists upon it, personifying Varden’s work into a form of Varden himself: “The very locks that hung around had something jovial in their rust, and seemed like gouty gentlemen of hearty natures, disposed to joke upon their infirmities.” Surely no rusty old lock has ever been so cheerfully immortalized, but such is the power of Gabriel Varden. In the chapter’s opening paragraph, Dickens assures us that “No man who hammered on at a dull monotonous duty, could have brought such cheerful notes from steel and iron; none but a chirping, healthy, honest-hearted fellow, who made the best of everything, and felt kindly towards everybody, could have done it for an instant.” Gabriel is so “merry and good-humored” himself that the very pounding of intractable metals makes “quite pleasant music” and creates well-meaning locks and keys.

It’s hard not to smile when Gabriel Varden scenes begin. Even when his wife is skewering him with her ill-spirited sarcasm and Miggs is doing her best to exacerbate Martha’s irritability and nastiness to drive a wedge between the couple, Gabriel Vardon manages to avoid meanness and retaliation. God knows, a lesser mortal would succomb. Martha and Miggs could try an angel’s patience, but Gabriel seems to be possessed of uncommon forgiveness and tolerance. His Christian name can’t have come out of nowhere, perhaps!

But this description works beautifully in contrast to Dickens’ initial portrait of Dennis who appears on p. 310 in chapter 37. If Gabriel makes music out of unlikely and unlovely materials, the description of Dennis shows us Dickens’ most villainous portraits. Even before the nasty man speaks, even before we see him fixated on Hugh’s lovely neck (so ripe and ready for “stretching”), the man is visually as well as morally revolting:

“The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset personage, with a low retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose alone seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size. [oh help! He sounds like a combination of Quilp, Joe Sykes and Wackford Squeers.] A dingy handkerchief twisted like a cord about his neck, left its great veins exposed to view, and they were swoln and starting, as though with gulping down strong passions, malice, and ill-will.”

What a difference from the way Dickens associates Varden with music, warmth, good will and comfort: “Cellars of beer and wine, rooms where there were fires, books, gossip, and cheering laughter – these were their proper spheres of action. [The “their” refers to the “innumerable keys” that seemed impossible to fit a “churlish strong-box of a prison-door.”] Places of distrust, and cruelty, and restraint, they would have left quadruple-locked for ever.” So closely knit are Varden and his work that the very iron works he makes cannot be used for any of the selfish or punitive purposes for which they were originally intended. Varden cannot make a key that locks a prison-door. In contrast, look at how Dickens draws our eye to Dennis’ broken nose and the dingy handkerchief that “twisted like a cord about his neck” – indeed, Dennis’ adornment reminds us of the working tools he uses: the hangman’s noose. The two men could not be farther apart in appearance, manner or character. Vardon has near him in his workshop a “sleek cat, purring and winking in the light” and equally ready to hand, his companionable “Toby,” his mug of brew, looks on “ from a tall bench near by” with “one beaming smile, from his broad nut-brown face down to the slack-baked buckles in his shoes.” Everything near Vardon seems, like the cat, ready to fall “every now and then into an idle doze from an excess of comfort.” (p. 338) In contrast, Dennis’ handkerchief twisted around his neck leaves “its great veins exposed to view, and they were swoln and starting…” This sounds as though he’s being grotesquely strangled by his own handkerchief (though we will later learn that he has acquired this handkerchief from one of his, ahem, clients.) If Vardon’s workshop is filled with warmth and comfort and ease, Dennis is associated with malice and ill-will and the foul odors of “the soils of many a stale debauch and reeking yet with pot-house odours.”

Yes, no one can fail to love Angel Gabriel and detest the despicable Dennis. Here is Dickens doing what he does so well. I shudder my way through the descriptions of Dennis and shrink from his interactions with other characters whereas I relax and lean back, ready to laugh, or at least grin widely, at the kindliness of honest Varden who, though he fears he is doomed to make women cry, is so far the most dependable source of kindness and comfort in this novel. Martha really doesn’t deserve him, does she!

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Jennie’s delight is all in villainy this week, searching out the words precise used to describe and delimit one such character and deeds:

I am tempted to indulge in an entire post on my favorite villain so far. In our latest Zoom discussion at the end of The Old Curiosity Shop, we got talking about Dickens’ villains and their similarities and differences. We did a fair amount of disagreeing! (Is Bill Sykes as bad as Quilp?) I may be alone in finding Bill Sykes a lesser villain whom I can revile but pity simultaneously, but I’m sure all of us will join a happy chorus of outrage over Sir John Chester who just doesn’t have anything good to recommend him and is adept at what we used to identify as “persuasion techniques” in Expository Writing. He can woo Miggs and Mrs. Varden while simultaneously plotting remorselessly against the goodies: Ned Chester, Joe Willet and Gabriel Varden. He’s a dastardly old bastard, arguably worse than even Quilp, because he violates that most sacred of beliefs that all parents love their children. But if Sir Chester “loves” his son Ned, it looks precious like self-serving, malevolent connivance to me. (He really can’t even use the word “love” when he talks with Haredale about his son.) Furthermore, his appearance makes him more dangerous. Quilp, after all, looked the part of Satan, slithering his grotesque self over the edge of little Nell’s bed. Chester is every inch a gentleman. Or so he appears.

And that brings me to one of my favorite transitions between chapters 24 and 25.

Chapter 24 closes with what Chester is thinking as he readies himself for sleep, content with himself and with his skillful management of Simon Tappertit and self-congratulatory in anticipating the ravages he himself is about to wreak through the “blunt tool” he is about to wield:

“That fellow,’ said Mr Chester, relaxing his face when he was fairly gone, ‘is good practice. I have some command of my features, beyond all doubt. He fully confirms what I suspected, though; and blunt tools are sometimes found of use, where sharper instruments would fail. I fear I may be obliged to make great havoc among these worthy people. A troublesome necessity! I quite feel for them.

With that he fell into a quiet slumber: – subsided into such a gentle, pleasant sleep, that it was quite infantine.

He is going to use Simon Tappertit, blunt tool that he is. And Chester is practicing his deceptive skills on Tappertit, an easy mark, keeping any trace of his real thoughts and intentions from his face and deportment and communicating nothing but what will flatter Tappertit into easy compliance.. Chester’s fearing that he will be “obliged” to “make great havoc” among “these worthy people” makes clear that he knows exactly that he’s the bad guy and they the “good.” The idea that he can say, even to himself, that he “quite feel[s] for them” is just the sort of joke he most enjoys. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He is reveling in the anticipation of the havoc and pain he’ll cause.

That Dickens uses the word “infantine” intrigues me. We think of the sleep of infants as utterly innocent and pure. Chester’s sleep will be anything but, so here Dickens is accentuating the wicked perversion of infantine sleep by attributing it to someone who can hardly be imagined ever to have been an innocent child.

And now we are ready to segue into chapter 25 with a backward glance at Chester, whom he’s left nodding off to golden sleep, and move to Barnaby and Mary Rudge – all in one glorious, long sentence:

Leaving the favoured, and well-received, and flattered of the world; him of the world most worldly, who never compromised himself by an ungentlemanly action and was never guilty of a manly one; to lie smilingly asleep – for even sleep, working but little change in his dissembling face, became with him a piece of cold, conventional hypocrisy – we follow in the steps of two slow travellers on foot, making towards Chigwell.

“Him of the world most worldly”? What could be worse in Dickens’ mind than to be the most worldly of one already “of the world”? It’s being called the most corrupt and fallen of the most corrupt and fallen. Then we get something that has the sound of a compliment “who never compromised himself” (that sounds like a good thing, being true to oneself?) “by an ungentlemanly action” (that still sounds good, doesn’t it? Who wants to be known for committing ungentlemanly actions?). But then, here’s the clincher: “and was never guilty of a manly one.” Uh oh. The jig is up. The mask is off. This favoured, flattered, well-received, never ungentlemanly, smiling-even-in-sleep individual is actually incapable of a single manly action. Oh dear. His face is “dissembling” so that even sleep becomes with him a “piece of cold, conventional hypocrisy.” There it is. No innocent “infantine” sleep here. Cold, conventional hypocrisy. Our “gentleman” is no gentle man. He’s another monster.

As Paul Krugman often signs off when he’s given us his views of the fresh terrors in the world, “Have a good day!”

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Jennie makes an inspection of our two marginalized young men and their animal familiars, muses on casting outcasts in romantic roles, causing us to perhaps consider the question of what determines a ‘hero’ to bear the burden of a novel?

Instead of going small and detailed, I’m going to share some bigger ideas about characters that are interesting me right now. Because I really don’t know this novel – this is my first time reading it – I’m not confident that I won’t turn out to have many things upside down.

But that can be fun too. It’s interesting to work with first impressions and initial connections as they occur to fresh eyes. So, after reading this week’s allotment, I could write about the young lover pairs – coquettish Dolly who believes that Enma is taking her love affair distressingly seriously. It would be more fun to have a handful of beaux to keep her main interest on his toes (Dolly’s approach we realize.) Or I could write about her friend Emma who is going to be the boring romantic figure (I suspect.)

But I’m not. I’m interested in two of Dickens’ marginalized men for the ways they appear so obviously different but actually seem to have some surprising similarities.

Barnaby and Hugh. Barnaby is an odd fellow, childlike and innocent in many ways, curiously other-worldly in the ways he sees figures and hears voices that no one else can see or hear. He dresses bizarrely but according to his own taste, quite joyfully. The most elaborately decorated parts of his clothes are the most worn. His hat is adorned with broken peacock feathers. He’s a kind of simple soul, a “fool,” a “child”, and a free spirit who is loved and safeguarded by his mother and by those who know him and treat him as the unusual fellow he is.

So far, not much like Hugh. But Hugh is also “different” and marginalized, not because he seems to be a simpleton but because his background is tragic and has resulted in his having no mother to love or care for him, no father that he knows of, and indeed no name other than “Hugh” that he knows of. But he’s an interesting fellow. On p. 98, chapter 11, we see both Barnaby and Hugh asleep at the Maypole, and John Willet tells us of Hugh’s background – the hanging of his mother who had passed forged bank notes – and of Hugh’s preference for animals over people. In fact, Willet tells the company that he thinks of Hugh as “a animal himself” (p. 98). Hugh is treated as an animal, thought of as an animal, and used as an animal. Mr. Chester will later refer to him repeatedly as his “centaur,” another dehumanizing characterization, half man and half beast.

But although Dickens emphasizes Barnaby’s empty gaze and evidently different intellectual gifts that make him more child than man, Dickens’ treatment of Hugh signals to us that Hugh is no animal and no child. Asleep at the Maypole, his form illuminated by the light shows all his “muscular and handsome proportions.” Unlike Barnaby who is sinewy and youthful, Hugh is a “...young man, of a hale and athletic figure, and a giant’s strength, whose sunburnt face and swarthy throat, overgrown with jet black hair, might have served a painter as a model.” (p. 98) We get the feeling that Hugh is what might be called a “fine figure of a man!” But of course, he is illiterate, unpolished and apparently morally bankrupt. He will tell Mr Chester that what has helped him survive his impoverished, orphaned childhood and what has made him a man is drink. It’s a paragraph that breaks my heart.

Both Barnaby and Hugh are young men who suffer from critical insufficiencies. John Willet hilariously opines that most young people lack “imagination”, “if their fathers haven’t drawn it out of them”, but nothing can be farther from the truth for either Barnaby or Hugh. Barnaby has an overactive, fanciful imagination, and Hugh is not lacking the imagination to lust after Dolly or to try to find creative ways to survive, animal that he may seem, in a pretty cruel and uncaring world. What Hugh lacks is what Barnaby has in abundance: love, attention, and caring.

Yet another thing I notice is that both these young men come with their animal sidekicks: Barnaby has Grip, Hugh has his dog. Grip is a character in his own right, and goodness knows what we’re to make of him or how he’s learned the specific phrases that pepper his “speech” and are sometimes freakishly and scarily apt. “Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea” might seem banal and even trite for a speaking bird, but Grip follows it with great pullings of corks and lots of “I’m a devils”, which, of course, make us wonder whether there isn’t something a tad demonic about him, especially when he is described as looking at things with more than usual human intelligence. Grip seems to have the preternatural intelligence that Barnaby lacks. Hugh’s dog is well, just a dog, but he’s also the only way we realize that Hugh might have a heart. His memory of an earlier dog’s being the only living thing other than himself who howled at his mother’s hanging tells us that animals matter to Hugh and their mattering to him reminds us that he is human. To go too far with the comparison, Barnaby’s Grip has what Barnaby lacks, and perhaps Hugh’s dog has what Hugh has lost, natural sympathy and loving loyalty.

So I’m interested in both these men – honestly more in Hugh than in Barnaby because Hugh is scary and sad and damaged and pitiable and possibly awful and violent, whereas Barnaby is wholesome, kind, good, innocent, loving, fanciful and loyal. And I do love a good villain. Hugh’s physical appearance and his tragic childhood both contribute to making him the sort of complicated figure that we might feel simultaneously sorry for and repelled by. Interesting. But here they both are, both dehumanized in different ways, both with animal sidekicks, both fatherless boys. (Though Mary Rudge makes a wonderfully loving and attentive single parent.)

I wonder whether anyone else sees these two as curiously paired? Other pairings certainly come to mind as we get to know Ned Chester and Joe Willet, but those pairings seem obvious. I’m going to watch the Barnaby/Hugh possibilities as the story develops. Will Barnaby continue to be infantilized? Will Hugh become a sexual predator?

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We now live in an age where if someone were to come across you reading a book they might ask not ‘what are you reading?’ but ‘why are you reading?’

Harumph. While there are benefits aplenty to list on The Value Of Reading after the manner of medicinal tonic labels, I would like to suggest that one stellar reason is that reading develops a delight in words which at some point might usher us to the animating life-force of language: poetry. As March is pushing us out the door for another year, dumping us onto April’s doorstep -National Poetry Month- perhaps we might fold a few poems into our regular reading. There are resources both delightful and educational, enough to perhaps tempt you to start your own poetry habit.

Some folk, we know, find poetry intimidating. Think it exists behind a door marked ‘For Experts Only’, when all you have to do is remember back to all the everyday consumption of poetry you took in as a child to realize it is as easy as a skipping verse you chanted while jumping rope. One might even say poems open us to language when we are children, giving us confidence in our usage, speaking rhymes and verses serving almost as training wheels for us to gain our balance with words.

Before we could read we were reciting poetry - speaking it quietly to ourselves or yelling it to the clouds, we memorized all sorts of rhymes and passages, stories and songs, reveling in the sensation of the rhythm, the driving force that made the next word inevitable, over and over until they were all out and you were at the end. And then most likely you went right back to the beginning and said it all again, as children tend to. Poems were a full-body experience, words flying from our mouths, landing in our ears…

Here- here’s a small one to begin again with, brought to you from the pages of Jennie’s 2nd grade copying cahier, but delivered out loud from memory bright as the day she originally copied it down into her pages:

A beetle has too small an eye
to see a rainbow in the sky.
But in a raindrop, on a stone,
He sees a rainbow all his own.

Four little lines to contain & explain the physical universe! Its brilliance and sparkle reveal themselves over time, each time you recite it, something new can catch your attention, some particular word take on a different intonation, like the infinite variety of sparkle a cut gemstone gives in light.

Poems make excellent travel companions.

Of course as we grew up we learned that not all poems rhymed, and whole new galaxies formed in that expansion. Knopf Publishing Group celebrates those riches with their Poem-A-Day Program, which if you sign up for it will deliver a poem every day in April to your email inbox. You could start your survey of the poetic landscape with a 30-poem sample gathered by May - maybe you’ll even discover one you want to commit to memory and live in a while. (Note: the sign-up page is for all of their newsletters, so it’s a little confusing - but poetry is worth a little confusion, surely? You enter your email in the field at the top of the page, then you may need to scroll down a bit to see the box for the Poem-A-Day newsletter, which you click to check, and then go down to the bottom of the page for the ‘sign up’ button - click that and you’re done.)

The New York Times published a delightful little Poetry Challenge on their site in honor of the occasion last April which walks you through the process of memorizing a poem over a five-day period, each day’s installment also presenting the case for why you’d want to do such a thing at all, as well as pointing out some of the singular pleasures a memorized poem has to offer.

Staying with the nytimes.com, they also constructed an interactive exploration of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, where their poetry critic A.O Scott breaks down the scaffolding and the decorative embellishments in a scrolling performance that all of you here on our Grand Tour should enjoy immensely I’d wager.

We’d love you to fill the comments with mentions of your own favorite poems, how they’ve run through your life, or roles they’ve played. But most of all, we’d love to have you meet up with a poem new to you during this month that presses pause for you for a moment or two while it lights up sparkly new neurons in some part of your brain that has been waiting just for it.

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Jennie wonders what we may learn about the new novel by looking back where we’ve been and considering how each began in its turn:

The first sentence of this fifth novel differs from any of Dickens’ four preceding novels. Here’s a quick comparison just to refresh your memory.

Novel #1, The Pickwick Papers, plunged us immediately into the overly pretentious writing style typical of the notes and minutes of the Pickwick Club:

The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.

We know we’re being invited to laugh from the very start. This is a preposterously long-winded and pretentiously phrased opening to the novel. We are interested to know who these wordy, self-important club members are and what they’ll get up to. Where are they? Well, lots of place names are mentioned because these guys get around, but all the place names at the start, before they start their purposeful perambulations, seem to be in and around London. There’s even a dandy map of London offered at the end in Appendix C for those of us who want to check out locations more specifically. But the focus isn’t on setting, but on people, the various characters our Fabulous Foursome will encounter.

Novel #2, Oliver Twist, does locate us in space with a reference to the town of Mudfog, but our attention is drawn more to the workhouse in the very first sentence than to the town. As the editor’s notes point out, “Mudfog” could be located southeast of London in Chatham or 75 miles north of Barnet (itself northwest of London). In the first edition, Dickens observed that the location was a “certain town” to which “I will assign no fictitious name.” Clearly, where Oliver Twist is specifically located doesn’t really matter. The workhouse matters. The conditions matter. The name of the town doesn’t. In fact, the year doesn’t matter either. It isn’t mentioned.

Novel #3, Nicholas Nickleby, has a most conventional storybook opening that makes a breezy reference to the county of Devonshire but then gets to the heart of the matter, the “one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who…” We don’t worry about time and place. We must get the background of the Nickleby family. That’s what matters so that we’ll understand exactly who old Ralph Nickleby will be later on. This strikes me as the most conventional opener. Get us to a character who is going to matter, fast.

Novel #4, The Old Curiosity Shop, sounded equally unfussed about the where and the when. What matters is the nighttime walking habits of a narrator who will disappear by the end of chapter three. Where are we? Who knows! Somewhere where there might be crowds during the day but where, at night, our narrator can speculate about the handful of people he might pass on his strolls. Specific dates? No. Specific place? No.

Novel #5, Barnaby Rudge:

In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London – measuring from the Standard in Cornhill or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore – a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and sixty-six years ago a vast number of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that every English yeoman drew.

Does this sound blasé about time and place? I don’t think so. We get time twice, first with “in the year 1775” and then later with “sixty-six years ago.” We know that the novel was first published in 1841, and sixty-six years before that was, indeed, 1775. I think that this opening paragraph establishes that time and place, but maybe particularly time, is going to matter a great deal. And our narrator is publishing sixty-six years after the key year 1775, so he may well have access to more than just made-up imaginings about 1775.

If you’ve read anything at all about Barnaby Rudge, (I had not), you will hear almost immediately about the Gordon Riots. In fact, the subtitle of the novel “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty” refers to them. A quick google search yielded some very basic information about the anti-Catholic Gordon riots (named for Lord George Gordon). The introduction to our edition will tell you a lot more, but what also interested me is that, as I was poking around in the beginning pages of the introduction, I learned that the subtitle “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty” was chosen by Dickens after he discarded an earlier idea to call the novel ‘Gabriel Vardon: the Locksmith of London.’ I am always interested in novels whose authors consider more than one possible title. Dickens clearly weighed one against the other. That he went with Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty and not with Gabriel Vardon: the Locksmith of London, raises some interesting questions about what kind of novel he thought he might be writing. Was this to be about a single character? Gabriel Vardon who happened to be a locksmith in London? Or is this to be something a bit different? Actually, the subtitle “A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty” might be more important than the use of a character’s name. Given two titles possible, Dickens chose the latter, and that choice plus the introduction’s insistence on the dates of the opening of the novel underscores at least one of Dickens’ intentions. This novel is going to chronicle something that actually happened. Unlike the Pickwick Club, or the nighttime wanderings, or a workhouse, or the ancestry of a key character readily traced back in time, this story is going to treat specific historical events AND paint for us a tale about a “Barnaby Rudge.”

This sounds like a new kind of novel for Dickens. Based on its opening paragraph, I think so. We’ll see how it develops!

Jennie’s still lingering in chapter 4: lovely legs and a vanquishing gaze

Oh my, I am a sucker for Dickens’ funny guys. I suspect that this novel will provide plenty, but so far, Simon Tappertit is stepping up, on his pair of exquisite little legs..

In this chapter, Dickens describes Tappertit as Gabriel Varden quietly watches him perform his toilet, entirely unaware that he’s being watched. The scene plays out over pages 41 - 43. We share Vardon’s perspective, watching Tappertit as Vardon watches him. Layers of funny.

Here are just a few of the sentences that delighted me:

Sim, as he was called in the locksmith’s family, or Mr Simon Tappertit, as he called himself, and required all men to style him out of doors, on holidays, and Sundays out, – was an old-fashioned, thin-faced, sleek-haired, small-eyed little fellow, very little more than five feet high, and thoroughly convinced in his own mind that he was above the middle size; rather tall, in fact, than otherwise.

Nice opening description, Dickens! We get far more than just a lovely series of parallel, hyphenated adjectives here. We also see that Mr. Tappertit is a puffed up, vainglorious little bantam of a chap with a degree of self-delusion that will make him a promising character to follow. At work, he’s called “Sim.” Nothin’ fancy. “Out of doors,” when he’s not at work, he “require[s] all men to style him…Mr Simon Tappertit.” Perfect. He’s basically Gabriel Vardon’s employee Sim, but obviously,in his own mind, far more.

Of his figure, which was well enough formed, though somewhat of the leanest, he entertained the highest admiration; and with his legs, which in knee-breeches, were perfect curiosities of littleness, he was enraptured to a degree amounting to enthusiasm.

(I’m suddenly picturing Malvolio with his cross-gartered yellow stockings.) Simon’s legs are “perfect curiosities of littleness.” What a fine phrase! I am picturing them now… shapely little mini legs.

He also had some majestic, shadowy ideas, which had never been quite fathomed by his most intimate friends, concerning the power of his eye. Indeed he had been known to go so far as to boast that he could utterly quell and subdue the haughtiest beauty by a simple process, which he termed ‘eyeing her over…’

That’s terrific. Picture the haughtiest beauties succumbing to the power of his mighty eyeing over. Delicious.

But that’s not all! These powerful eyes are also capable of “vanquishing and beating down animals, even in a rabid state…”

Pages 41 and 42, just the first two pages of several dedicated to Mr Simon Tappertit, are funny and promise the reader, given Tappertit’s vanity and self-aggrandizement, more to come – more references to his shapely mini legs, more displays of powerful eye action. (Stay tuned on that front because shortly, Tappertit is going to level his Superman eyes in such a way as to prompt Gabriel Vardon to wonder what’s the matter with him…)

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This is the second novel in a row we’re encountering that neither Jennie nor Joan has previously read, so we have a little frisson coloring our anticipation. In other seconds, this is also the second book in a row that is shown with a more realistically illustrated cover image in color depending on where you look online -including the Penguin Random House’s own site- rather than the black & white excerpts from original interior pen & Ink drawings we’ve gotten used to. But once again, ordering our own books from opposite coasts, we still ended up with exactly the same covers, looking exactly like all the others in the series. So we reckon just like last time you too will all receive a copy with a cover matching one we’re showing you despite what you might see on the book’s sales page.

We are linking to the Penguin Classics site’s page for the novel (which again, displays a color illustration on the cover) as it has direct links to multiple online retailers -including Bookshop.org- so folks can have more options than we would be able to include here.

Jennie has yet again so kindly broken the reading down for us into seven sets of pages. We have the rest of this week ahead of us to finish up discussing The Old Curiosity Shop, plus our customary rest & recharge week after each novels lands us on March 30th to open our first discussion on Barnaby Rudge.

Speaking of Old Curiosity Shop-

We Are Having a Live Zoom Call to Finish Off The Old Curiosity Shop!

Friday the 20th of March at 7:30pm EDT/4:30pm PDT

RSVP here to leave an email address for us to send you the link

We return you to Barnaby Rudge-

The Schedule for Barnaby Rudge will be as follows:

• Week 1: Discussion will open on March 30th, on chapters 1-10

• Week 2: Discussion will open on Apr. 6th, on chapter 11-23

• Week 3: Discussion will open on Apr. 13th, on chapter 24-36

• Week 4: Discussion will open on Apr. 20th, on chapters 37-48

• Week 5: Discussion will open on Apr. 27th, on chapters 49-60

• Week 6: Discussion will open on May 4th, on chapters 61-72

• Week 7: Discussion will open on May 11th, on chapters 73-the end

• Week 8: Discussion will open on May 18th, for an overview on the book as a whole

As always, our travels through these novels is made ever so much more having all you intrepid and opinionated readers along for the journey. We are both of us quite excited for this one, and are looking forward to having you all along for the journey.

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Jennie examines the novel’s structure, hoping to find a single viewpoint to take in the whole of the story, rather than going through room by room as we have done with our weekly pages, …but first:

And now, here’s what Jennie made of it:

I’m always interested in how novels begin and how they end, and I look to see whether the beginnings and endings complement each other.

With this novel, I wondered whether the framing device that Dickens used for the first three chapters might possibly return. It does not. We hear the same, distanced, omniscient voice that we’ve heard during the rest of the novel.

But the last chapter of the novel does tie-up and tidy away all the characters that mattered most aside from Nell and Grandfather over whose sad ends Dickens has lingered and lingered. [Indeed, I think he began saying to goodbye to Nell in chapter 1. Grandfather asks Nell, when at last she gets home, what would become of him if he were to lose her! And even our narrator-for-a-minute wanders back to look at the old shop after he’s started to leave and sees it “black, cold and lifeless as before” (p. 19).]

Looking at how Dickens does the wrapping up is interesting. First, we get a conventional paragraph at the beginning that tells us that our “magic reel” is now played out in front of the “goal,” so our “pursuit is at an end.” Very good. (Titling the last chapter “Chapter The Last” suggested as much.) The next paragraph, though, invites us to feel a little sorrow that our “journey” is at an end. Using first person plural, the narrator includes us as participants on the journey that he has guided us along. He will “dismiss the leaders of the little crowd who have borne us company along the road,” but we have been part of this journey. We followed step by aching step. In novels today, this breaking of the third wall to include the reader feels very old-fashioned, but I think Dickens’ readers were glad to know that Chapter The Last would tie up the various loose ends and not leave readers wondering.

Once Dickens finishes dramatizing the sad fate of Nell and her poor old grandfather, he has to decide how he’ll arrange the novel’s final curtain call.

He begins with the baddies, four paragraphs on Sampson Brass (that’s a lot as you’ll see by the breakdown that follows), then a single paragraph on Sally followed by a paragraph and a half on Quilp. I say a half because paragraph nine uses the disposal of Quilp’s body as a segué into Tom Scott, his faithful servant, who actually gets equal time - a paragraph and a half, just like Quilp. Here, though, we realize that Tom is a crossover character, one who was a “baddie” for his loyalty to Quilp, but one who, without Quilp, will become what he always was meant to be, a tumbler, a profession dedicated to entertaining and encouraging folks to laugh. Next comes Mrs. Quilp who gets her own paragraph, and she continues with the momentum of Tom’s shifting us towards the goodies because she too, though yoked to Quilp miserably in marriage, is now a goody once she’s on her own enjoying the wealth she’s inherited. (Luckily Quilp died intestate before he could deprive her of any inheritance at all). We are delighted that she finds someone to her liking and consults only herself in her second choice.

Having moved us from the baddie list to what’s now the goodie list, it’s an easy hop from paragraph 11 to paragraph 12 about the Garlands and Abel. They share a paragraph as happily as they share everything else.

Now here’s a delicious development. Paragraph 13 and part of paragraph 14 belong to that champion of ponies, Whiskers, who, like Mrs. Quilp, now enjoys free rein to choose his favorites as he likes. And he does. He selects the “good bachelor” aka “single gentleman” aka Grandfather’s younger brother as his special friend. Oh, hallelujah. If Dickens had left out Whiskers in his summary, I’d have been disappointed. I never cared much about poor Nell’s caged bird, no matter how loyally Kit took care of it and hauled it around the countryside, but Whiskers is a pony for the ages.

Here, we begin to realize that Dickens cannot have just started writing about characters randomly as they happened to come to mind. The amount of airtime each gets matters. The location of where a character is mentioned in the final “unreeling” of his “leaders of the little crowd” matters too. Dickens seems to be grouping them, first by baddies, then by victims, then by goodies, and so it is that we come to four paragraphs on Swiveller and his Marchioness. FOUR paragraphs! Swiveller gets as much space as Sampson Brass and more than Quilp got. Interesting. But Swiveller is also, importantly, in the section of the last chapter dedicated to the goodies, despite his early alliance with Fred Trent and Quilp.

Nonetheless, after the Swiveller paragraphs (15-18), we skip back to a bouquet of baddies in paragraph 19 : Isaac List, Jowl and James Grove who were apprehended because of their association with Frederick Trent (little Nell’s rotten brother). Trent gets all of paragraph 20 to himself. Why? Why didn’t Dickens cover these readily forgotten names much earlier? Well, one reason could be that they were only tangentially connected to Quilp, or, maybe more likely, they create the contrast that Dickens often uses to pick up the momentum and rekindle reader interest. Or, was Dickens building a bridge to Nell’s bad brother Frederick who gets paragraph 20?

Paragraphs 21 and 22 bring us back to the goodies with a paragraph dedicated to Grandfather’s brother, aka the bachelor, the single gentleman, etc, who spreads gladness and generosity to the other lesser goodies including the two sisters, Mrs. Jarley, Codlin and Short.

Finally, we end with Kit who brings down the curtain with the remaining three full paragraphs. That’s a lot of space for Kit! We hear not only about him, but also about his winning Barbara and then about his children who seem to be named for the people he loves best: Barbara for his wife Barbara, Jacob for his little oyster-eating brother Jacob, Abel for Abel Garland, and even a Dick for Dick Swiveller. This populating of the next generation with namesakes from the previous one suggests that the paragraph about Kit is our conduit into the future – what will happen in the years to come. Yet, as years go by, the past fades, even the important past. Kit can no longer be sure of the old spot where the shop stood when he tries to tell his children where Nell lived. So much has changed, and so much has “passed away.” I am reminded of Nell’s own sorrow when she reflects on the tombstones at the end of the novel and decides against planting special flowers for the dead because she’s understood that those graves had been neglected and the flowers had died when those that had loved them died and disappeared themselves. Nothing is forever. (Well, except Nell who has achieved a kind of special immortality as an angel.)

The novel concludes with a final single-sentence paragraph at the very end: “Such are the changes which a few years bring about, and so do things pass away, like a tale that is told.” Dickens ends with nostalgia for things that have passed.

How did you feel about the novel? How about the ending? Were you glad to know that Quilp came to a violent and terrible end and that the Marchioness and Dick lived happily ever after? I confess that this one probably won’t make my top ten list, but I’m glad to have read it, and I’m excited for Barnaby Rudge, another novel I haven’t read before!

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“But first, a word for the lawyers, if I may,” says Jennie, side-stepping the quick-rising body-count for a meditation on the part the law & its practitioners play in Dickens’ novel.

Dickens has no great love for the legal profession. In chapter 63, he shows us a number of the snares his legal eagles use to trap folks into testifying against the innocent. I really enjoyed the way poor Swiveller, whose heart is in the right place but is out of his depth at a hearing, is forced to admit to having dined with the brother of the accused. I’m no lawyer, but it struck me that the verbal highjinks of “Mr Brass’s gentleman” who makes Swiveller limit himself to either “Yes or No” is what I’ve seen in countless T.V. courtrooms. The jury is encouraged to believe that if Swiveller has treated the defendant’s own brother to lunch, Swiveller must be in league with the defendant and therefore any testimony he might hope to offer in defense of that defendant will be suspect.

But the reader knows that these legal types are no better than carrion crows in Dickens’ mind because Dickens cares only about defending the innocent and identifying the actual truth, not about impressive legal manipulation. Thus, when we hear that Brass’s gentleman (the prosecutor who seeks to prove that poor Kit stole the 5 pound note) is in good spirits because he had, “...in the last trial, very nearly procured the acquittal of a young gentleman who had had the misfortune to murder his father,” we know that the lawyer and his client are both scoundrels. I guess the lawyers among us would rightly point out that the lawyer’s job is do the best he can either to acquit his client or prosecute the accused, with nary a concern for whether the accused is guilty or whether the defendant is not.. Fair enough. But Dickens makes clear how he feels about it; it’s a dirty business if someone as good and innocent as Kit can be condemned for something he didn’t do by someone who’s feeling pumped about nearly getting an acquittal for a beast who actually murdered his father! The murder was a “misfortune,” not a dastardly deed. The lawyer wants credit for very nearly having gotten him off.

The beer keg imagery used to describe Brass’s testimony “drawn off” him “bit by bit” and with “great discretion too” so the “evidence” is made to “run quite clear and bright in the eyes of all present” works beautifully. Dickens has turned Brass’s testimony into pub scene, keg ready and available for easy and pleasurable tapping. This interests me because it makes me remember the way alcohol loosened Dick Swiveller’s tongue under the gentle encouragement of Quilp. Swiveller was drinking in part because his work at the law office was so “dry.” Does alcohol and the law always go so sweetly together?

In any event, awful as Brass is and foolish as Swiveller can be, both will get their just deserts at the end of the book. I’m guessing after we’ve suffered through the death of little Nell and her aged grandfather, we’re all ready to hear that Brass gets his due appropriately and that Swiveller ends up with 150 pounds per annum and the Marchioness.

(But whoa, did anyone else realize that the Marchioness was only 13 when we first meet her? If Swiveller pays for six years of schooling for her before she’s 19 – and suitable to marry – she must have been 13?! And oh dear, we then learn that, after marrying her, Dick jokes in years to come that “there had been a young lady saving up for him after all.” Someone else can write about the rampant sexism and chauvinism dancing through these pages – this is just one example, but how about the way Dick renames her? “Marchioness” which is humorously ironic initially when he’s playing superior savior to her and then Sophronia Sphynx? We never learn her real name. Hmm. I’m not going to write more about the implications of education and class. It’s obvious.)

I’d love to hear commentary from lawyers amongst our readership about Dickens’ portrait of the law in this novel. Is he knowledgeable ? Is he unfairly attacking the profession?

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Note: Before we get into what Jennie made of this week’s reading, we want to mention that we’ve added some further thoughts she’s shared on last week’s reading back on the Week 4 Discussion post, anticipating a bit on this week’s close-up on contrasts. Enjoy!

We have arrived at the farthest reaches of Jennie’s tolerance of Dickens’ morose mopings, turning to his contrasts in practice and presumption for subject:

The paragraph a page or so before the end of chapter 53 (p. 401) starts off well enough. That opening declaration, “Everything in our lives, whether of good or evil, affects us most by contrast”, is an idea that Dickens has illustrated effectively throughout. We’ve seen his contrasts at work in all four of the novels we’ve read now. We’ve watched him move from the dark to the light, from the dreadful to the delightful, from the serious to the frivolous. He’s a good man with contrasts.

This paragraph, however, takes his willing readers, even his most sympathetic and heart-sensitive ones, right over the edge. Unless I am alone with my irritation with this paragraph? Sentence #2 is fair enough. I like the “if the peace of the simple village had moved the child more strongly, because of the dark and troubled ways that lay beyond and through which she had journeyed with such failing feet, what was the deep impression of finding herself…” Thus far, I’m fine. But what follows is like following the old sexton down into the crypt – more and more laden with death imagery and misery. But if I’m going to dislike it, at least I have to look at it and say why:

…what was the deep impression of finding herself alone in that solemn building; where the very light, coming through sunken windows, seemed old and grey; and the air, redolent of earth and mould, seemed laden with decay, purified by time of all its grosser particles, and sighed through arch and aisle (I like arch and aisle), and clustered pillars, like the breath of ages gone! (nope, don’t like the breath of ages gone, and the exclamation point warns me that Dickens is now taking a deep dive. Open parachute because what comes next is going to become well and truly too much.) Here was the broken pavement, worn so long ago by pious feet, that Time, stealing on the pilgrims’ steps, had trodden out their track, and left but crumbling stones. Here were the rotten beam, the sinking arch, the sapped and mouldering wall, the lowly trench of earth, the stately tomb on which no epitaph remained, – all, –the marble, stone, iron, wood and dust, one common monument of ruin. The best work and the worst (Dickens will do much better with his best/worst pairing a few novels from now…), the plainest and the richest, the stateliest and the least imposing – both of Heaven’s work and Man’s – all found one common level here, and told one common tale.”

This is a passage that would be fun to parody. The tools are so evident, so obvious, nay so simple! – here is the repetition of a key word! – here is the contrivance of the well-placed participle, here delicately inserted, here obviously added, here before its noun – oh rotten beam! Oh sinking arch! –here conjoined with yet another participle – oh sapped and mouldering wall. Here, the signs of upcoming summary: all – the elements of life and death, of inanimate – alas never to be animate – Mineral – Marble! Stone! Iron! – and now of life – alas of life – wood and dust, those dualities of decay, those princes of the past. All. all. All one common, too-belabored point: all have perished, one common monument of ruin, be it plain or rich, stately or unimposing, of God’s making or our own. Alas, alas. One common tale.

Phooey. I cannot applaud this paragraph. It’s fun to laugh at, but it was a tedious one to trudge through. Don’t get me wrong. I love Dickens, but here’s another instance of the truth of contrasts. Sometimes he’s great. Sometimes he’s not. This paragraph, for me, the impatient purveyor of this present page, is not.

If you want a bit of fun, pick a line or two and write your own parody. Pick a line you love! Pick a line that you don’t. But pick one where Dickens has really let himself rip. It’s more fun.

and yet more fun again if you would post it in the comments!

But hark- Swiveller to the rescue! (chapter 56)

Having just excoriated Dickens for being melodramatic and maudlin, we come to Dick Swiveller, who is delightfully cheerful under the saddest of life’s turns, and, fantastically, Dickens allows Swiveller to take his own swipe at purple prose on the subject of loss and decay.

This chapter begins with Dick’s decking himself out to proclaim his heartbroken state over having lost the lovely Sophy. He’s affixing a band of black crape around his hat. That done, he puts the hat on and arranges it, “very much over one eye, to increase the mournfulness of the effect.” Good old Dick. He knows exactly what he’s doing and so does Dickens. Dick is dramatizing visually and symbolically, not participially.

The next paragraph is hilarious. Dick dips into his store of remembered lines from poems and songs to pull up one of Thomas Moore’s to fit his mood. “It has always been the same with me…always. ’Twas ever thus – from childhood’s hour I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay, I never loved a tree or flower but ‘twas the first to fade away. I never nursed a dear Gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardner.” Dick is offering us a brilliant counterpoint in tone to Dickens’ heavy long, didactic flourishes about loss and death. The idea is the same: in life, you can’t always get what you want, and what you want is either going to die or marry a market-gardener. Ha! Very funny and a delicious contrast to Dickens’ earlier laments. (notice the clever way Dickens shows us how Dick explodes the maudlin at the end. “It was sure to marry a market-gardner” breaks the rhythm and the expected rhyme), But we shouldn’t be surprised or credit Dick with a better grip on his emotions than Dickens has, because, of course, this is Dickens too. Dick IS Dickens, Dick’s quick wit, his dark humor, his ability to laugh at himself by creating his own hilarious dirge and dressing it up with a crepe band on a hat tipped dramatically (and humorously) over one eye are entirely thanks to Dickens’ having crawled back up out of the crypt of his own over-writing to prove, once again, that on all subjects, contrast works well!

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Jennie on Dickens The Moralist: laying out the heart of the matter.

In chapter 38 Dickens delivers what in a later novel he will call the “keynote,” the critical idea that helps shape and govern this story. On p. 289, Dickens pauses his narrative to state his moral belief. It is a belief that we must share or be condemned as inadequate human beings. He tells us that the poor are, in their poverty, more capable of true generous love and family affection than the rich are. In back-to-back paragraphs, he lays out his argument that while

“...the ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, …those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of Heaven.”

Those who have not, have all – at least in the sense of heavenly, god-given goodness. That money corrupts is an idea that Dickens has proven to us over and over again. Even dreaming of having money can corrupt. Nell’s grandfather, who hopes to win big at cards only to serve Nell so that her future will be comfortable and secure, fails to understand that his hunger for money, the lucre of “success,” is blinding him to the possibility of a far “richer” life in poverty. He spurns what Nell tries to offer: a simple, modest, poor life that could nonetheless give them both years of contentment and joy both in each other’s company and in the delight of the natural world around them.

Over and over we witness that the truly “good” in Dickens’ eyes are those who don’t exult in their good fortune but rather share it openly and generously with others less fortunate. Thus John Browdie in Nicholas dreams of spending all that he has on feeding up the poor starving boys of Dotheboys School in Yorkshire. Poor little Miss LaCreevy opens her heart, her door and whatever else she has to Kate and Nicholas. Nicholas willingly shares his warmer clothes with Smike. Poor doting Nancy gives Bill Sykes all that she has and dies at his hands. Good people give and rejoice in giving, whether they are main characters or lesser ones.

In contrast, money has a mostly corrosive effect on the human spirit. A few who are well off manage to escape the poison of affluence, but they avoid it by being determinedly generous and giving, like the Cheerybles and Mr. and Mrs. Garland and arguably Samuel Pickwick. The decidedly poor, like Kit’s poor mother, the old schoolmaster who gives Nell and her grandfather the best of what he has and Nancy in Oliver, are rich in love and heart and kindness. In contrast, Ralph Nickleby who beneath his frozen exterior does have a heart that yearns for companionship – at least for a minute or two – condemns himself by caring more about his money. Ditto Quilp. Ditto Brass. Ditto all the wretched, money-pinching money cravers.

These chapters in our fourth week of reading lay out for us the necessities for a “good” life: caring and serving others; living in peaceful accord with the natural world; and finally, being able to feel the pain and suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. Dickens’ “goodies” may not start off good, but if they achieve moments of genuine, human goodwill towards others (or even towards simple creatures like the animals in their environment), they will eclipse all those with far more to boast of, whether in bank account, birth, or education.

The second paragraph of Dickens’ pair of keynote paragraphs in chapter 37 (p. 289) ends with a rhetorical question which Dickens has already amply answered:

In love of home, the love of country has its rise; and who are truer patriots or the best in time of need – those who venerate the land, owning its wood, and stream and earth, all that they produce? Or those who love their country, boasting not a foot of ground in all its wide domain?

Here we learn that the goodness expressed by the poor elevates them to the stature of “true patriots.” What does he mean by true patriots? the best in time of need. Being a wealthy landowner is nothing in comparison with the wealth of those who love their country, even if they own not a single patch of earth.

Dickens leaves no room for doubt or for argument. This is the way he sees the world, and this is the way he lays it out for us. His poor, good, loving and beloved characters “bear the stamp of Heaven.” The rest of us? Well, we know what befalls the Ralph Nicklebys of the world, and it’s pretty dreadful.

Joan asks if perhaps Dickens considered another way it might have gone for Ralph?

If I may spend a word in defense of poor Ralph Nickleby- Ralph felt himself less-preferred from a small child, and hurt folk naturally look to insulate and shore up protective armor. Ralph I don’t think began with a great love of money, but as a wounded person in search of safe harbor, looked around and found nothing as powerful as money, and since he had such a successful command of making it even as a child, it would not seem that he misunderstood life’s reality. He himself in his interior dialogue often dismisses threats to himself by saying that this or that person clearly did not properly understand the strength of money, so he would just make sure that they were positioned to be *made* to see it/understand it the way that Ralph himself did.

Dickens gives us access to his interior dialogue, and I don’t for a moment think that’s by accident, as he does it for Scrooge as well, but alas there were no interceding spirits to carry Ralph over the last mile to a completed redemption.

Ralph’s true sin was not the love of money above all, but the fear of what lack of money might make him vulnerable to.

Thus Dickens gets to show us the power to corrupt money posses, as well as villains born & bred. Perhaps the Cheerybles were not of such superior nature to Ralph as much as not having been wounded young and healed wrong? It is easier to be generous of heart (and money) when that heart was not broken as a formatting experience.

chapter 48 – Nothing heavy, just my personal delight in the way Dickens describes the effects of intoxication.

At the bottom of p.364, about four pages into the chapter, Dickens does what I think he does best. He sets the scene for the exchange between Quilp and Swiveller when Quilp is preparing to extract critical information from the loosened lips of Dick Swiveller.

“Dropping in at Mr Sampson Brass’s office on the previous evening, in the absence of that gentleman and his learned sister, he had lighted upon Mr Swiveller, who chanced at the moment to be sprinkling a glass of warm gin and water on the dust of the law, and to be moistening his clay, as the phrase goes, rather copiously.”

The language is light and frolicsome. Even the loathsome toad Quilp who has just been relieving his face from the expressive restraint he’s recently put on it by “twisting it into all imaginable varieties of ugliness”, is now “dropping in at” and “lighting upon” poor, unsuspecting Swiveller. “Dropping in at” and “lighting upon” are participial phrases that could suggest an insect landing on a victim – – but here the landing suggests lightness, nothing heavy or oppressive or potentially painful.

Quilp lights upon “Mr Swiveller who chanced at the moment”, and that word choice extends the lightness. “Chancing” is what Swiveller just so happens to be doing at this moment – nothing scheduled or schemed or carefully set up. (Here I’m smiling because, King of Contrasts, Dickens is probably about to have fun with the difference between Swiveller’s relaxed, unsuspecting state and Quilp’s darkly purposeful one). The main subject of the sentence is still Quilp. “Swiveller” is no more than the object of the preposition “upon.” (Isn’t that kind of great too? What’s about to happen is that Quilp is going to pump Swiveller and Swiveller is going to betray the goodies, but look how Dickens makes Swiveller into just a guy enjoying a well-earned brew at the end of the day…) Swiveller seems of secondary, even tertiary, importance because he’s just an object of a preposition, almost an innocent bystander, really just an object himself!

But, ah ha! Here comes a long adjectival clause that sketches in what innocent Swiveller is actually doing. Into this simple end-of-a-tedious-work-day description, Dickens weaves one of his glorious extended metaphors which will camouflage just how serious the effect of Swiveller’s carefree drinking is going to be. Swiveller is “chanc[ing]at the moment to be sprinkling a glass of warm gin and water on the dust of the law, and to be moistening his clay, as the phrase goes, rather copiously.” If “chancing” feels light, so does “sprinkling.” And isn’t there something friendly and comforting about a warm beverage? Furthermore, who wouldn’t want to moisten “dust,” which is, by definition, overly dry and in need of moistening? But, alas, what’s really getting moistened isn’t the dust but the clay of Swiveller himself and the moistening isn’t a sprinkling at all; it’s a ruddy great downpour because “Mr Swiveller’s clay, having imbibed a considerable quantity of moisture, was in a very loose and slippery state, insomuch that the various ideas impressed upon it were fast losing their distinctive character, and running into each other.”

And there we have it. We don’t stop reading, but we’ve just been cheerfully guided by this vivid and transformative metaphor into knowing exactly what will happen next. Swiveller’s too, too sullied flesh will not melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew but will simply lose all “prudence and sagacity” and lead him to revealing information that the villain can use.

I love a good extended metaphor. And this one fills the bill. Dickens shows us Swiveller’s weakness, Quilp’s wilyness and law’s dustiness, neatly offered in a warm and welcoming gin and water. Cheers.

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Chapters 24-25

These two early chapters and my own recollection of the number of child deaths I’ve encountered in other literature of that century, even literature written for children, led me to Google child mortality in Dickens’ time. Indeed, AI (alas) notes that the death rate ranged from 25 - 50% for children under the age of 5. Certainly the living conditions of the poor, particularly the urban poor, alone must have contributed to early mortality, but another significant factor must have been the nearly ubiquitous contagious diseases, diptheria and tuberculosis. Even what we call the “common cold” was understandably feared (remember how worried Lizzy Bennet was when she learned Jane had caught cold in Pride and Prejudice?), for colds led to pneumonia and pneumonia to death. Given inadequate heating and diet and exposure to lots of ailments without antibiotics for treatment, no wonder so many died young. Keats. Helen Burns, Jane’s only friend in Jane Eyre, whom Jane finds lying dead next to her in bed. Oliver Twist’s young mother. Smike. One of the most popular Victorian children’s novels serialized in 1868, was George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, which seems to have been written to help prepare young readers for the normalcy of childhood death, either their own or a sibling’s.

Aware of how many children starved to death or caught terrible diseases or got mangled in machinery or came to some other wretched, untimely end, Dickens does not spare his readers the misery. In chapter 25 the victim is the old schoolmaster’s beloved, best student, the bright eyes a common marker of tuberculosis. I wonder whether we, as 21st century readers, find the “sad” scenes a bit “over the top” as Tyler Knowles used to lament of over- written, sentimental language. Does the description of the “poor schoolmaster…holding the small cold hand in his and chafing it” feel excessive to us? Is this Dickens’ going too far to pull at our heart strings? I suspect that if we feel so – and I certainly do at times –, we are not remembering how extraordinarily common it was for parents to lose their children, sometimes one after another. Would anyone in those days not have been touched by the grief that the death of a child creates?

I have to remind myself that the descriptions that feel “OTT” to me today might not have felt OTT eighty-five years ago. Maybe Dickens is using his writerly power to ensure that even the most hardened of his era (think Ebenezer Scrooge, maybe, or Squeers), can be moved by a child’s death. I think so because we know that he used his writing not merely to entertain but to promote and direct social change. Perhaps leaning into the misery and woe is part of the plan.

Chapters 27-32 More unbearable pain…more woe…then delight!

Alas! The pain of the old schoolmaster’s losing the fine, bright scholar is followed by the extraordinary wretchedness of poor Nell’s discovery that her grandfather’s gambling addiction has allowed him first to steal all the money Nell has carefully been saving for an emergency and then to lie about it. Woe. I can’t even. It was during these chapters that I really wondered whether I could go on.

Here, though, we recall how Dickens brilliantly moves us from woe to hilarity, using the picaresque traveling motif to relieve and refresh us. Dickens’ introductions of new characters via their physical features, their clothing, their vocabularies and narrative styles save us when we need it most. Just as we are agonizing over Nell and her grandfather, we meet Mrs. Jarley and her entourage, the equivalent of the Crummels of Nicholas Nickleby. The wax-works provides immediate levity, when we learn how quickly the savvy Mrs. Jarley can, by clever adjustments in costuming, wigs and mechanical engineering, transform a figure into an entirely different character so as to “stimulate the popular taste” (p. 248) when the “classical market” no longer draws a crowd. How delightful that Mrs. Jarley transforms some of her waxwork figures to look like various of the schoolgirls’ teachers? Great idea! Hilarious parody! A fitting retaliation against prim, disapproving Miss Monflathers. Mrs. Jarley also shows us how philosophical acceptance of certain unpleasant truths allows her to move on to survive another day. Her rage against Monflathers loses its edge when she pulls out the liquid refreshments for others and indulges in them liberally herself.

Mrs. Jarley is a smart businesswoman and knows a good thing when she sees one, but she is not one of the “baddies” for taking advantage of Nell’s innocence and prettiness because Nell desperately needs a job, food and lodging. Furthermore, Mrs. Jarley genuinely cares about Nell. The help is mutual, serving both. Again, I notice Dickens elevates capable women who work for themselves and are not taken advantage of by more overpowering men.

Chapters 33-36 Joy, joy, joy! More delight! A dragon...a bear...a swiveller

These chapters return us to the simpler pleasures that Pickwick delivered. The scenes at the Brass’s establishment where evilness incarnate Quilp has installed flibbertigibbet Dick Swiveller as clerk to Brass are entirely to my taste. I find Miss Brass delicious in her horribleness (and she succumbs to her attraction to Dick Swiveller), and I find Dick utterly hilarious. The scene in which Dick is encouraged to help the Brasses get the “single gentleman” out of bed (unless he’s dead and therefore not answering) by going down the chimney into his room (Dick’s own idea, but not one he plans to execute), is delectable. I love that the Brasses, she-dragon included, both vanish as soon as the single gentleman emerges, snarling like a prematurely awakened winter bear, whereas there stands our Dick, on a stool, armed with a ruler, willing to demonstrate the way he personally contributed to the noise and mayhem.

Is it any wonder that the awakened bear, so unwilling to interact with the awful Brasses, takes instantly to our Dick? Or that our Dick actually perpetuates the notion that he has managed to tame the beast and befriend him? What a lovely example of symbiosis. Dick advances his own cause by putting himself forward as the only one able to deal with the bear, and the bear advances his own cause by using Dick to forestall having to interact with the Brasses. It all works out brilliantly. Demned entertaining.

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Jennie’s giving us a multipart excavation this week, so enjoy Part 1 immediately below, and remember to check back here through the week to catch all three parts to be shared-

Jennie idles in chapter 11, Part 1 (digging deep into the first two paragraphs):

This week I’m interested in looking at a couple of paragraphs in chapter eleven to admire how Dickens organizes his narrative, sets up his contrasts, develops his characters and manages to create such a focused and orderly job of it. Today, just the first two paragraphs!

The first paragraph arguably “introduces” the scope and thematic point of the chapter. His opening sentence readies us for a significant change in the emotional atmosphere of the narrative: “Quiet and solitude were destined to hold uninterrupted rule no longer, beneath the roof that sheltered the child.” Notice how dramatically Dickens lets us know that we’re now moving to the old shop itself, home of Nell and her fast-aging grandfather. Chapter 10 ended with the focus on Kit’s devastation over learning that he is no longer to visit Nell because the old man believes that Kit has betrayed him. Very sad, we’re entirely in Kit’s camp. He no longer is being portrayed as an empty-headed, quasi imbecile. But now Dickens needs to shift gears and put Kit aside for a moment because now things are about to happen and our feelings are on alert. “Quiet and Solitude” will no longer “rule.” The word presages what the rest of the chapter will describe. There’s a new boss in town, Quilp, and he will “rule” in a way that entirely overturns anything that previously might have offered solace.

The second sentence stokes the flames of our anxious anticipations – and “flames” fits because the old man is in a “raging fever” and his very life is imperiled for “many weeks” as he lies there half-dead. We feel very sorry for the old man, but we are terrified for Nell. Never has her grandfather been an A+ protector of her, not even a B- protector, truly, but now we realize she cannot depend on him for anything.

Sentence three increases the tension because “there was watching enough now,” but we hear that this watching is not being done by a loving and worried grandchild, but by “strangers who made of it a greedy trade, and who, in the intervals of their attendance upon the sick man, huddled together with a ghastly good-fellowship, and ate and drank and made merry; for disease and death were their ordinary household gods.” This sentence initially misleads us into imagining that these strangers are there to watch over the old man, but clearly that is purposeful misdirection. These “watchers” aren’t really safe-guarding the old man at all. They’re watching Quilp who now rules. Further, as we thought about goodies and baddies last week, phrases like “greedy trade” and “ghastly good-fellowship” are clear signposts of wickedness, avarice, cruelty and self-interest. While Nell and her grandfather are fading before our eyes in their hopeless, penurious state (Quilp has now stripped them of everything and the work of the chapter will be to prepare us for their flight), these watchers are eating, drinking and making merry. The last clause of the paragraph spells it out explicitly. These invaders of the shop thrive on disease and death; indeed, disease and death are their “household gods.” Yikes.

This look at the first paragraph gives us the bread and butter of Dickens’ narrative engine: contrasts. Against “quiet and solitude” we now have “disease and death.” Against the love and loyalty of Nell and her grandfather, we’ll have the harpy and his followers who are watching and waiting, ready to strip the meat off the old man’s bones, starting with inventorying every item in his shop.

The second paragraph drives home this contrast because we move from the ordinary “household gods of death and disease” back to poor Nell, with a focus on her loneliness. The house is about to become crowded with Quilp’s minions, smoking away, and under his orders forbidden to stop. Meanwhile, little Nell has never been lonelier. Kit is forbidden. Grandfather has lost it or is losing it, and Dickens, in just over 7 lines, gives us four “alones” and three “stills.” We get it. Could anyone be more alone than poor Nell? Yet the “still” means that some things don’t change. Nell is an angel of loyalty and silent suffering. She stays by her grandfather’s pillow “still”; she anticipates his every want “still” and listens to his fevered repetitions of her name “still.” “Still” gives us both the idea of unending persistence, something still happening despite counter forces, but it also underscores Nell’s silence. Her “quiet and solitude” had been restorative when she lived there alone with her grandfather. This “stillness” is the stillness, the silence, of being alone. There isn’t anyone for her to talk to.

Jennie idles in chapter 11, Part 2 (the next few paragraphs):

[If this kind of slow, slow looking at small pieces bores you, please skip.]

Paragraph 3 gives us background facts: how Quilp has taken over the premises. Not a paragraph I want to dwell on, save to point out the language of legalese: he’s brought in a “co-adjutor” as “an assertion of his claim against all comers.” This guy is going to bolster his assault with legal back-up, his own, carefully chosen minion who certainly seems capable of wielding a knock-out blow – so much for legal recourse - “against all comers.” (Once again Dickens speaks to us in our own times…)

Paragraph 4 describes how Quilp infiltrates the house and makes it his own by selecting the most comfortable furniture for himself, the least accommodating and most hideous for his henchman, and all such arrangements as far from the old man as possible. But aside from these housekeeping details, what compels our attention for the rest of page 91 and most of 92 is the smoking. Quilp seems to be forcing his llad to serve as a human chimney, and he demands that his minion, Brass – a name Dickens’ delightfully suggests is “melodious” sounding – smoke too. Not just a little. Continuously. Not continually. Continuously. One pipe after another.

Poor old Brass is clearly a “baddie,” but he’s really more a baddie’s sidekick and victim than a powerhouse purveyor of wickedness himself. But, as usual, suffering prompts at least a little empathy in me, even when the sufferer has a “nose like a wen” and a “protruding forehead and retreating eyes” (look at that play with contrasts, the one feature protrudes, the other retreats.) Poor old Brass suffers. Later he’ll stagger out for a few minutes of respite, but during this scene, Quilp makes non-stop smoking a condition of continued life, both because, as Quilp explains, the smoke will stave off fever and because, as he further threatens, if the poor guy stops, Quilp will force the pipe down his throat. (Note that I am holding back from saying anything about Quilp’s calling Brass a dog because, unless you’re bored, I think this chapter deserves a whole post about animals in this book so far.)

Smoking. Literal, obviously. But given the way Dickens has been developing Quilp’s character, in particular his nasty way of binding people to him and sucking their very souls (think poor Dick Swiveller a little later in this reading…or Brass…or later still, Fred Trent himself), we realize that Quilp is a very devil. In this chapter, he is the source of unending smoke, not to stave off disease at all but to torture. Quilp is designing his very own hellscape inside the old man’s innocent curio shop. Smoke and suffering. If for a moment, Joan, you disagree, take a look at the second to last paragraph of this chapter when Quilp “coil[s] himself once more in the child’s little bed” (p.98). Quilp is a devilish fine temptor, is he not? Like the serpent who brings about Adam’s fall, Quilp is a “coiler” and a coiler in NELL’S LITTLE BED! Oh yucketty yuck. The addition of “little” to “bed” is another of Dickens’ favorite signposts: Nell is our little angel, and her little bed is being defiled by the presence of this great wad of disgustingness. How private and innocent is a child’s little bed, but in this novel, it’s not a wolf dressed in Grandma’s nightdress who’ll jump out to eat her up but a misshapen devil in a serpentine coil.

Part 3: Oh those wonderful animals!

I am being drawn into how rich this novel is with animals, and I’m developing some ideas about how to characterize the many references.

Let’s begin with where we left off with the wretched, rotten Quilp who calls his underlings “dog” to belittle them and to assert his own dominance. “Smoke away, you dog” is repeated twice, once for the boy and once for Brass. (p. 92) Using an animal epithet like “dog” or in our times, “piggy,” is designed to command obedience and to dehumanize. Both are affronts to humanity and independence. Both seem to explode from the speakers’ mouths in a threatening display of force.

When Quilp is presented with a dog tied up and unable to retaliate, he displays just how vile he is by taunting and teasing the animal until he whips him into a frenzy of impotent rage. Quilp loves every minute of it because Quilp is a bully and just loves to watch living things, human or canine, suffer.(p. 170) I’m reminded of the hilarious scene in Wuthering Heights when the narrator makes faces at the dogs in the kitchen while Heathcliff is away getting a beverage for them both. The narrator nearly gets eviscerated when the dogs, not as dumb and unconscious as he supposes, come after him.

But Dickens seems to love animals. Yes, many of the animals in this novel are clearly under the thumb of their human owners and remind us of human power and dominance, but even while we pity the poor dog who messed up in his earlier performance and therefore will not be called by name to receive a morsel of food, we see, not thoughtless cruelty, but a working partnership. This is not a pet dog; this is a trained animal whose completion of his job requires that he perform as trained. These working dogs who do what’s expected are rewarded and cared for fairly and in order. Is it exploitative of animals to use them in circus acts? Not a question that I think needs exploring here. In this world, these working animals are part of their masters’ professional survival. We readers get it, and the dogs get it too. The dog being punished grinds away at the organ, howling over his lack of food, but I doubt he’s missed the connection between his poor stage performance and its consequence.

Furthermore, trained animals develop fierce loyalties to their masters. Dickens illustrates this when the “Tobey”, evidently the dog sidekick of traditional Punch and Judy acts, is reunited briefly with his old owner and recognizes him excitedly. (remember Odysseus’ return? And the only living soul that recognizes him?) Dickens’ animals are not mere automatons. They have affections and connections that are carefully developed and nurtured and then never subsequently destroyed.

Furthermore, even though we are shown rural animals who have not had their lives reshaped into performance animals, they are not actually necessarily the “lucky” ones. While Dickens clearly romanticizes rural scenery and even, to a large extent, rural poverty (this could be a separate entry because Dickens had many thoughts about what the Industrial Revolution was doing to the rural poor who abandoned their rural lives of poverty for urban lives of poverty, imagining that life would be better, only to starve and die in far greater agony than what the labor of being agricultural workers had done to them working other people’s land), the rural animals are…well, kinda dumb and bored. Take a look at Dickens’ description in ch. 15 of the animals Nell and her grandfather encounter at the thriving farm (p. 125):

Occasionally they came upon a cluster of poor cottages, some with a chair or low board put across the open door to keep scrambling children from the road, others shut up close while all the family were working in the fields. These were often the commencement of a little village: and after an interval came a wheelwright’s shed or perhaps a blacksmith’s forge; then a thriving farm with sleepy cows lying about the yard, and horses peering over the low wall and scampering away when harnessed horses passed upon the road, as though in triumph at their freedom. There were dull pigs too, turning up the ground in search of dainty food, and grunting their monotonous grumblings as they prowled about, or crossed each other in their quest; plump pigeons skimming round the roof or strutting on the eaves; and ducks and geese, far more graceful in their own conceit, waddling awkwardly about the edges of the pond or sailing glibly on its surface.

I would argue that the description, seemingly bucolic, paints rural animals as a tad dull and trite. The descriptions of the animals subvert with often a single word the supposed luckiness of their easy lives. The cows are sleepy. Tick. The horses are “peering” – as though they either have vision problems or are so similarly bored that they seek a more active scene to look at. Yet they scamper away when harnessed horses pass on the road. Well, “scamper” is a pretty funny word for horses. Small children and little animals scamper. I think these barnyard horses are getting laughed at here. Furthermore, they think themselves superior in their “freedom” to the harnessed horses who are shackled by their harnesses. Hmm. Really? The harnessed horses are doing a job and they get to be out and about while doing it. On it goes. The pigs are dull and they grunt monotonous grumblings (dissatisfied with the tedium of their lives?) as they prowl about. I’m seeing prowl as a corollary of the horses’ peering. The fowl aren’t much better off. The pigeons are marginally less ridiculous than the ducks and geese, but only marginally because the skewer word is “strut” and that’s actually a visually perfect descriptor for pigeons. The ducks and geese, however, waddle awkwardly and, worse still, they think themselves more graceful than the pigeons, but that’s just in their own conceit. Dickens says they’re waddling. Waddling is not graceful. In fact, Dickens says they are doing their waddling awkwardly. Arguably their swimming is pretty good, but, wait, it’s “glib”? They are sailing glibly on the surface? Hmm. Skewered again.

And Finally, Jennie’s Challenge:

I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to write all the things I’m thinking about Whiskers, my favorite animal thus far – but instead, I invite YOU all to weigh in on what Dickens has in mind. He is, hands down, my favorite critter so far. What do you think?

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Jennie gambols off from her usual gambit, giving o’er examining the writing for a deep delve into the writer, both reflecting and reflected in his pages.

I’m going to depart from my usual gambit of looking closely at the way this novel opens. Yes, I thought I’d write about that, about Dickens’ initial decision to use a first person narrator whose voice, I have to say, I found quite interesting right from the start, but I saw clearly that the 1st person narrator was going to cause too many problems to continue with. Just how was he going to “witness” and relay the ongoing story? Find a diary? Participate in a séance? It seemed like a mistake. So Dickens ducked out at the end of chapter 3, gracefully explaining why it wasn’t going to work in his last paragraph of chapter 3:

And now that I have carried this history so far in my own character and introduced these personages to the reader, I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.

Deftly done, no? If I had been Dickens (oh, be still my heart! Just imagine!), I would have ditched the first three chapters and started again, but they were pretty good chapters and Dickens was in the business of writing and writing fast, so maybe ditching three chapters would have been an expensive solution to a narrative difficulty. Nonetheless, I commend his smooth extraction of that really interesting narrator who does most of his city walking at night time mostly so that he can “favour [his] infirmity” and get a “greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and consequences of those who fill the streets.” I like this night wanderer who feeds an already active imagination with night wanderings and then sketches for us just a few of the human beings whose sufferings and situations he finds himself imagining in paragraph 2. But it will not serve. By the end of chapter 3 that narrator is gone, he and his insomnia and thirst for subjects.

Instead, I’m now thinking, not of the cast of characters the first ten chapters introduces us to, but of the connection between the beginning of this novel and what I am coming to think about Dickens as a human being. But not as seen through my novel-reading eyes but through those eyes that just read and thought about David Brooks’ most recent piece in the New York Times in which he announces his departure from the NYT and sounds the call for what he comes to describe, as he has before, as “humanism”. He talks about going to “New Haven” where he believes he can contribute to one of the few positive effects of Trump’s invasion of academia, where, Brooks hopes, he can join a movement encouraging a return to morality and values. I’m not going to rage about what we think of the current political situation or the constraints put on our most prestigious institutions to change their curricula. But I find Brooks’ article a truly compelling portrait of what I think Dickens cares about. And what I hope others of us care about too. Brooks calls it “humanism.”

I am thinking a lot about the goodies and the baddies of Dickens’ writing, and I’m realizing that, as we begin a new novel, we have a perfect opportunity to note the ways he first lets us know what we should think about his characters. How is it that we read character so easily with Dickens? Well, I think he plants well-positioned signposts that even the least experienced reader cannot fail to heed. Take, for instance, our first experience of little Nell whom we immediately see as one of our heroines and one of the “goodies.” The language that our first person narrator uses to describe her accords with Dickensian portraits of the good. Her immediate attributes, aside from her physical littleness and youth, are her innocence and purity. When our narrator challenges her about why she asked him for directions when she realized she was lost, he is planting a seed of doubt, of radar, that wise parents plant in their children to keep them safe: don’t talk to strangers, don’t get into a car with anyone you don’t know, don’t just naturally trust that an adult will be your friend. But little Nell, although she admits that she’s a “little frightened” of having lost her way, readily assures the narrator that he would never tell her wrong because, “I am sure you will not do that … you are such a very old gentleman, and walk so slow yourself.” (p. 11) Our narrator’s reaction to this extraordinary response instantly silences our alarm bells when he says, “I cannot describe how much I was impressed by this appeal and the energy with which it was made, which brought a tear into the child’s clear eye, and made her slight frame tremble as she looked up into my face.” (p. 11). A character who is moved by a child’s innocence and notes her tear, her slight tremble and her looking into his face is not going to turn out to be a predator. We already believe in the absolute goodness/purity of Nell, so the narrator’s being moved in a non-predatory sort of way establishes his own goodness. Compare this with the way Quilp practically salivates over Nell. Dickens captures Quilp as being as close to a cannibal as our narrator is to being an adoptive father. Quilp would like to eat her alive, sucking out the delicate marrow of each delicious little bone and pawing her little face with his disgusting claws. Oh yuck, cubed.

Dickens is setting us up for a morality tale. We will know the goodies and the baddies clearly from their words, from their appearance, from their behaviors, from their companions or lack of companions, and from their own responses to the touchstones DIckens will drop in order to register purity and goodness: Nature, beauty, truth, trust, and kindness. We might encounter a character whom we have initial misgivings about (I actually did with the narrator briefly – who is this guy to speak so suspiciously to Nell’s grandfather?), but Dickens is going to tell us a riveting story and just as we knew Nicholas Nickleby, even when he was being a bit of an ass, and Ralph Nickleby, even when he was showing a small slice of his own deeply buried humanity, we will know these characters and come away from this novel with our moral compasses clearly steered toward the rightful and the good. It may not be happy, but we will know where we are.

Why read Dickens? Maybe right now in our world, an old-fashioned morality tale that reassures us that our own gut instincts about good and bad are right is a sweet salve to our souls. I think Dickens’ stories offer that to mine. I look forward to laughing with and at his ridiculous characters (oh please, who will replace the delicious Mantalini for me? You’ll see…) I relish watching what will happen to the utterly odious Quilp who already makes my skin crawl, and I’m steeling myself against what might befall Nell because sometimes being too good to be true is too good to last.

David Brooks longs for a world set right and for a shift toward hopefulness, not cynicism. I hope he’ll join us on our Tour. I think he’d like what he finds. Welcome everyone to The Old Curiosity Shop!

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We began at the beginning (some of us earlier still with The Introduction) and read all the way through to the The End; we have discussed and contemplated all the many, many, (many) plots, sub-plots, plot-twists, and even the odd cemetery plot; we have observed character arcs large and small, villainous and heroic, comedic and tragic, comedic-tragical and tragical-comedic. What more could there possibly be to glean from Dickens’ third novel?

I don’t know—I don’t know that there is, but I do know that there is a kind of camera obscura experience available to anyone watching the incandescent adaptation of the novel the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) did back in the 1980’s starring Roger Rees as the 19-year old titular character, the actor himself closing on 40. The magic of theatre!

There are countless film adaptations of Dickens but this stands apart from all of those by being a stage production done in the presence of a real audience, in a real theatre, into which they brought cameras and captured it on film. Filmed rather than adapted for film if you will, and as opposite from a film adaptation I think as one could get- this is The Novel set upon the stage and given the use of the incredibly talented cast of 40 actors to present itself, in its own words. You will hear the novel direct, as the narration is tossed from actor to actor, each keeping the flow of the story aloft as our named characters come forward in their turn to perform their scenes before receding into the constantly moving population of London teeming before us.

It is the novel, not through a mirror darkly for all that it is happening inside a theatre’s black box, but rather with all its colors displayed as if delineated and refracted by the chandelier crystals, isolating and emphasizing different elements of the familiar material.

The original staging was eight and a half hours, performed in two parts. For broadcast it was broken into four segments which are currently available to view on YouTube. There still exists a DVD set that can be found occasionally for purchase (used) on Amazon (nine-discs), and is surprisingly also available for digital purchase to stream via Amazon Prime Video for $19.99.

The caveat to all of this is that it was filmed back before TVs were HD, so all of these sources are all in Standard Definition (SD). Other than that I can think of no reason not to put it on your must-see watchlist. We would love to hear what you think of it if you do, and what (if anything) you think it offered that the novel did not.

Phew, that was whirlwind of a novel, what? Hard to cast one’s mind all the way back to those early chapters before we knew Nicholas or Kate, Mrs. Nickleby or Ralph- and then the enormous cast of characters on parade through our narrative! The Crummles alone should have filled an entire book themselves, no? Let’s take a minute to take in the view as a whole, if we can, and see what we might make of it all.

Jennie made an off-hand comment last week about one of the few characters who made any growth, and that has stuck like peanut butter to the roof of my brain as I consider whether or not I can agree, and I would love to hear your thoughts about these characters so extremely detailed- were most of them one-note players, or did you find the arcs of their characters developing like a Polaroid over each half-page, depositing them in different states of mind as well as situation by the end?

Ralph for example, one could easily say he began a villain and ended a villain, so there was no growth there, but would that be the truth of him? Ralph is one of the few characters Dickens gives us access to their thoughts and interior dialogue, and though he may appear as a solid sheet of ice, there is wave after wave crashing underneath that surface and a war being waged between the desires for an open heart and the wounds that stifle that heart from ever beating fully. For Ralph, meeting his niece and nephew catalyzes an endgame seemingly inevitable that we can see building over the whole of the novel, but I wonder if Dickens himself knew how it would resolve right up until he wrote its ending?

Let us know what the major engines are you see working through the novel- were there character arcs you were watching closely or was it all improbable plot lines and plain villainy? What do you take away from our time with Nicholas Nickleby?

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From the frenzied pace of Nicholas we’ll shift gears and settle into doing a bit of window shopping with Little Nell and her grandfather. This will be the first novel on The Grand Tour that neither Jennie nor Joan have read before, so we are excited to have that new-car smell perfuming the air as we prepare for the journey.

This is also the first of the Penguin Classic editions to feature a full-color illustration on the cover instead of the black & white snippets from the original illustrations Or So We Thought…but when our copies arrived we were both surprised to find we had editions with covers matching our previous books. Thus we are mentioning this to you, our faithful readers, lest you find yourself being shown other covers online and become confused. We each ordered our copies from opposite coasts, yet both received the version displayed above, so we reckon you all will also receive the matching cover we’re showing you despite what you might see on the book’s sales page.

We are linking to the Penguin Classics site’s page for the novel (which displays the color illustration on the cover) as it has direct links to multiple online retailers -including Bookshop.org- so folks can have more options than we would be able to include here.

Jennie has kindly once again broken the reading down for us, into six sets of pages. We still have another week ahead of us to finish up discussing Nicholas, plus our customary rest & recharge week after each novels lands us on February 2nd to open our first discussion on The Old Curiosity Shop. We believe this will be our most leisurely paced read thus far based on pages per week, so please let us know how it works for you.

The Schedule for The Old Curiosity Shop will be as follows:

• Week 1: Discussion will open on Feb. 2nd, on chapters 1-10

• Week 2: Discussion will open on Feb. 9th, on chapter 11-23

• Week 3: Discussion will open on Feb. 16th, on chapter 24-36

• Week 4: Discussion will open on Feb. 23rd, on chapters 37-49

• Week 5: Discussion will open on March 2nd, on chapters 50-62

• Week 6: Discussion will open on March 9th, on chapters 63-73

• Week 7: Discussion will open on March 16th, for an overview on the book as a whole

As always, our travels through these novels is made ever so much more having all you intrepid and opinionated readers along for the journey. We are with this one finally out of the starting lineup and are looking forward to seeing how it develops as he steps fully away from his initial round of Pickwick, Oliver and Nicholas!

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Jennie here gives us an unanalyzed bunch of personal reactions, in no particular order (which Joan reacts to with her own pass at understanding)

Why would the saintly Cheeryble brothers (who seem a truly odd couple, despite their extraordinary goodness and generosity) actually set Nicholas up to think that abdicating his love for Madeline is, in fact, an honorable and good thing and what they would have expected no less from him? They play him. Why?

(To be fair to the Cheerybles, they are not the source of that particular conundrum, i.e., the only ones worthy of marrying up are those that are willing to walk away in order to prove the gaining of wealth or position plays no part in their motives. Nicholas has just had that very same conversation with Kate himself right before he goes in to confess all to Charles Cheeryble, admonishing her as if she herself hasn’t already refused Frank! And back in ch.55 has the almost same conversation with his mother -where perhaps the only time I confess I was in agreement with Mrs. Nickleby (p. 686), crying that “poverty is not a crime”. It does seem to be an accepted societal truth and the Cheerybles merely voicing agreement with Nicholas’ own argument.)

If the Cheerybles are so, so good, kind, thoughtful, and modest, what do we think of the elaborate staging of the dinner party at which lovers vowing not to love each other are purposely and publicly brought together to vow eternal love? Is this just fun for the Cheerybles? Does Dickens think his readers will be particularly charmed by this staging? Is Dickens indulging his love of dramaturgy?

(I myself am not so bothered by the clearly staged dinner as I am by the unbelievable denseness of both Nicholas and Kate, having not one clue as to what will unfurl, indeed we are once again given Mrs. Nickleby as the accurate prognosticator (p.755), asking them immediately upon receiving the invitation what the Cheerybles mean by the dinner, its intentions and object:

‘And that’s all you conclude it is, my dear?’

‘I have not yet arrived at anything deeper, mother.’

‘Then I’ll just tell you one thing,’ said Mrs Nickleby, you’ll find yourself a little surprised; that’s all. You may depend upon it that this means something besides dinner.’

‘Tea and supper, perhaps,’ suggested Nicholas.

‘I wouldn’t be absurd, my dear, if I were you,’ replied Mrs Nickleby, in a lofty manner, ‘because it’s not by any means becoming, and doesn’t suit you at all. What I mean to say is, that the Mr Cheerybles don’t ask us to dinner with all this ceremony for nothing. Never mind; wait and see. You won’t believe anything I say, of course. It’s much better to wait; a great deal better; it’s satisfactory to all parties, and there can be no disputing. All I say is, remember what I say now, and when I say I said so, don’t say I didn’t.’

Rich indeed, to wait for this late in the novel to have Mrs. Nickleby be the one who can accurately read a room!)

Why does Miss La Creevy go to TIm Linkinwater (and note that it feels so contrived that “go to” seems acceptable) and not to Newman Noggs, who is the richer, more dimensional, more suffering and therefore more beloved character? (note the bias here. Maybe others are charmed by Tim Linkinwater. To me, he becomes the third of a very odd ménage à trois with the Cheeryble brothers, though evidently a future with Miss La Creevy was his own idea and breaks up the threesome.)

Once again, we have Dickens’ well-crafted, too well-crafted, tying up of loose ends – every suitable lover sorted, every villain/ess punished. (Shout out to Mrs. Nickleby who is indignant over Tim’s choosing Miss La Creevy because he should have chosen Mrs. Nickleby. Of course.) It reminds me of the ending of Oliver Twist, when the last paragraph here is given to the grave of poor old Smike whom we now picture resting beneath a flower-strewn grave whilst future young Nickleby progeny dance in the sweet air above, never forgetting the wonderful fellow whom they never knew. Hmm. Well, okay. Those without a taste for the saccharine are allowed a glance back at tragedy, though this is tragedy no more but rather a romanticized imagining of a future sanctifying of a truly downtrodden and miserable victim. Arguably, Smike’s “happy” death offers balance to the wrenching image of Ralph, dangling from a hook in the very garret that Smike was confined to as a child, Ralph, with no one to mourn him at all. (I am clearly a dark reader of Dickens; the horrible fates of his baddies like Sykes and Fagin and Ralph capture my imagination and feelings far more than the happy, happy, oh-too-happy of the picture-perfect young’uns, who after pitiful self-sacrifice and suffering get every blessing and joy they deserve. Fine. But they don’t stay in my mind or heart. I had to ask Joan the name of the sweet young thing that Oliver ends up with. She registered not at all.)

It now occurs to me that if there’s a parallel contrast between Smike and Ralph – the good and the evil, there’s also an interesting parallel contrast between Ralph and the Cheerybles in terms of their staging of climactic scenes! The Cheerybles invite everyone to their party. Ralph invites a smaller group to his final scene, not at a specific hour like the Cheerybles’ invitation, but at any hour because “all times will be alike to me” (p. 753) Isn’t that a bone-chilling line? We know how this will end.

Now, in Dickensian fashion, a dramatic change to the hilarious: Joining Mrs. Nickleby, whom we’ve laughed at over her irritation with Tim and Miss La Creevy, is my beloved Mantalini who pops up at the end as a bought servant now working at a mangle, no longer the prancing, effete husband of a woman who runs a fashionable couturier’s shop. But however great the fall, his signature style has survived: “Oh! What a demd savage lamb!...I will never break its heart, I will be a good boy, and never do so any more; I will never be naughty again; I beg its little pardon. It is all up with its handsome friend, he has gone to the demnition bow-wows. It will have pity? It will not scratch and claw, but pet and comfort? Oh, demmit.” It’s vintage Mantalini, but hasn’t Dickens also managed to draw back in the mad old gentleman who transfers his passion for Mrs. Nickleby to Miss La Creevy? The mad old gentleman spurns Mrs. Nickleby with cat talk. Mr. Mantalini’s borrowing of the same seems a brilliant reminder of another of the novel’s most comic moments.

(I was not an immediate fan of Mr. Mantilini, playing his wife so poorly, but here in reversed circumstances his particular vernacular charms my ear a bit easier, so outré and unique I feel we’re getting insight into the core of the man, who cannot change when by change met, but remains a distracting charmer in the way of a lap dog. It’s not a trick, it’s his nature -this is not a dog that can leap off his dainty cushion and pull the sled to save the day. He is in earnest when asking (p. 767) “It will have pity? It will not scratch and claw, but pet and comfort?”, but has only captivating endearments to offer in exchange: “Now my soul, my gentle, captivating, bewitching, and most demnebly enslaving chick-a-biddy, be calm,’ said Mr Mantalini, humbly.”)

Finally, some like it, some do not, but I am usually delighted by the sudden plot surprises that Dickens saves for his speed-of-light endings. New characters pop up hundreds and hundreds of pages into the tale first to create a new twist and tension but ultimately to help with the dramatic unwinding and resolution at the end. Here we have Mr. Brooker, and he serves very well. Furthermore, Dickens has anticipated his eventual appearance through Smike whose distant, confused memories of a figure…of a room… of something on the ceiling, all come together at the end when Brooker reveals who Smike really is. Ta-da!

There are a million other moments I purred over, and I hope you have too – and I hope you’ll share some. One of my joys is hearing what others “really liked” or “really hated” without taking the time to lay out a rationale for those likes and dislikes. I’ve given you my short list. What’s yours?

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Jennie Concludes Her Study of the Ardent Gentleman Suitor in his Small Clothes Next-Door with Ch. 49, which might also be called:

Mrs. Nickleby vs. her mad suitor, the end of the match

Just when I was bemoaning how tedious the mad old gentleman can become when given too many lines, we encounter a scene that opens with slapstick humor and moves to ironic reversal. In chapter 49 we are treated to the mad neighbor’s final effort to win the simpering, hard-to-get Mrs. Nickleby. His entrance down the chimney leaves us laughing and ready to see how those observing his dangling legs will proceed. Linkinwater applies the fire tongs to those legs a few times and then gives up, clapping the tongs uselessly. We wait for more action.

Very funny physical comedy ensues. Mrs. Nickleby beseeches that the old gentleman whom she identifies by his small-clothes and gray worsted stockings have not a hair of his head hurt (no head or hair visible at this point) as Frank Cheeryble pulls the old gentleman into the fireplace. After wishing that Frank and Tim would interest themselves in righting the wrongs that have been done to her mad wooer, Mrs. Nickleby controls the narrative by asserting once again that she is “...obliged to him, very much obliged to him, but I cannot listen to his addresses for a moment. It’s quite impossible.” (611). The scene is funny, but so far there are no surprises, aside from the chimney entrance perhaps. We’ve heard Mrs. Nickleby’s protestations before.

But now the drama takes an unexpected and delicious turn when the mad gentleman, yanked out of the fireplace, catches sight of Miss La Creevy and redirects his passion to her. Here is fresh comedic material, Shakespearean, perhaps. Dickens wisely skips Miss La Creevy’s reaction and gives us how nimbly Mrs. Nickleby improvises. She pivots admirably and accounts for the mad gentleman’s error by assuring the company that, although someone else has never been mistaken for her before, she has indeed “several times been mistaken” for her daughter Kate. (Mrs. Nickleby’s narcissism to the rescue! We are not to focus on the mad gentleman’s disloyalty but on Mrs. Nickleby’s youthful beauty.)

Yet delightfully, the scene doesn’t end here because the mad gentleman doesn’t accept the gentle course correction. Instead of awakening, Titania-like, to see the ass’s head for what it is, the mad gentleman gazes upon Mrs Nickleby as an imposter. “Avaunt – Cat!” he replies in loud and sonorous tones. Poor Mrs. Nickleby! Though she rallies with a faint objection, he persists with a whole volley of nursery and literary synonyms: “Cat!... Puss, Kit, Tit, Grimalkin, Tabby, Brindle – Whoosh!”

Mrs Nickleby, bested, resorts to her one remaining option and faints dead away.

Well done, mad gentleman! Game and Set. If this is the last we see of the mad gentlemen, he certainly had a good run of it. I defy even Crummles to do better. And Mrs. Nickleby, overthrown to be sure, nonetheless grabs what attention she can get with no further words wasted.

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In This Darkest Part of the Year We Are Thankful

As the Earth is quieting down for Winter’s rest here in our hemisphere, we ourselves, ever contrarian, are mostly in a full-out sprint getting through all the holidays and their corresponding customs and traditions. Some of the best loved of these is music (as well as some of the most dreaded, yes, we know) but the thought came that we might share a few songs to mark the season in a less frenzied manner, with your preferred glass of cheer before we charge back into business as usual. (we will provide the songs, you will need to provide the glass full of cheer)

First up is a song not about Christmas, but rather set on Christmas, and tells a tale of one Arthur McBride and his cousin taking a Christmas ramble and meeting with a recruitment party of His Majesty’s army. The Recruiting Sergeant would have been a familiar sight to Dickens’ audience. The delights here are many, starting with it being a tale of delight at all, as few such encounters tended to end well for those being recruited.

The version linked to is performed by James Linden Hogg, a young American musician and historian.

Next up has to be Auld Lang Syne, as one of our oldest traditions of the turning of the year, although we’ll have to wait for David Copperfield for a direct mention of it from Dickens. Here sung in the Scots-language Robert Burns wrote it in, although he noted to his publisher that it was already an old song, very old, just not written down anywhere.

Performed here by Mairi Campbell & Dave Francis, a Scottish duo known as The Cast, from their album The Winnowing

Auld Lang Syne should by rights be the ending song, but if your indulgence might stretch to a third, let’s stay with Robert Burns in spirit as we turn towards the light of the new year. The year we leave behind put us all to the test and we could maybe use hearing a a call welcoming us in from the cold.

The multi-talented singer/songwriter Karine Polwart based her song Come Away In on a snip of a poem by Burns called The Wren’s Nest, saying “I love this idea of the robin coming to the wren’s door and asking if he has space and the wren saying I would never leave you lying outside for as long as I’ve got an old cloth to wrap you up in.” Sentiments Dickens certainly took upon himself in his work. Performed here by Karine and Dave Milligan on piano.

The Wren's Nest by Robert Burns

The robin cam tae the wren’s nest

And keekit in, and keekit in

Oh weel’s me on yer auld pow

Wad ye be in? Wad ye be in?

Ye’se ne’er get leave tae lie without

An I within, an I within

Sae lang’s I hae an auld clout

tae row ye in, tae row ye in

May we all find the new year as a warming fire next to a table with room to welcome all into the house.