Cartoons in words
Back in February, I was taking a break during a work meeting when a colleague asked me what I was doing for Dickens's birthday. I replied that, coincidentally, I happened to be reading Nicholas Nickleby for the first time. As you might guess, his response was that he had just been making small talk and hadn't really expected a serious answer.
Nevertheless, Dickens's 200 birthday this year was a big event, with much coverage in the media and the production of a new dramatization of his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by the BBC.
Important anniversaries of deceased artistic figures are often occasions for adulatory and uncritical traetment of their legacies. This is particularly the case when, despite some astounding achievements, they also created much that was second-rate or their careers were controversial for other reasons. I recall the same with the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth (that's for another day).
In this regard, people (especially the English) have an affection for Dickens as a father figure in a way that they do not have for, say, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. Equally, though, he has his detractors. His novels are often criticised for being poorly structured and sentimental.
There are grounds for both of these criticisms. In this respect, the above-mentioned Nicholas Nickleby is a case in point. The story wanders up numerous blind alleys and it is, at times, insufferably mawkish. Smike, in particular, is hard for a modern reader to sympathise with (I breathed a sigh of relief when he croaked it!). The excuse, moreover, that it was an early work, ignores the fasc that his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, remains one of his best. Of course it also has structural weaknesses - indeed, it highlights a problem with all of the novels; that they were first written as serials.
One thing that Nicholas Nickleby did achieve, however, was the highlighting of the appalling conditions that prevailed in many private schools - in Yorkshire in particular. All of Dickens's books, to a greater or lesser extent, address social ills and were instrumental in remedying some of them - including public executions and debtors' prisons. This might not be a reason for reading them now (if anything it dates them).
However, the best of the books of his that I have read (and I have read 10 so far) display other fine qualities. They can be very funny, with the humour ranging from verbal slapstick to biting satire. But above all, it's Dickens's characters - or, rather, one might say "caricatures" - that really make the best of his books stand out. Micawber and Mister Dick in David Copperfield, Fagin in Oliver Twist, are well-know enxamples. However, my favourites are Inspector Bucket, the canny policeman of Bleak House (ably played in the BBC adaptation by Alun Armstrong), the open-hearted Noddy Boffin,in Our Mutual Friend, who proves to be nobody's fool (brought to life for the BBC again by Peter Vaughan), Sam Weller (of course!) in The Pickwick Papers who, likewise, hides a formidable brain behind a clownish exterior, and, above all, the loathsome but hilarious Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (again, Tom Wilkinson gave the performance of his life in this role for the BBC). None of these characters are realistic portrayals, though they all contain elements of real people. Rather, they are grotesques, caricatures or, as I would like to think, cartoons in words.
No other English writer combined Dickens's comic gift with his ability to create such memorable caricatures. One has to go to America (Mark Twain) or Russia (Nikolai Gogol) to find anything like the same humour combined with caricature and a sense of the picturesque. And for this Dickens deserves to be remembered.
Nevertheless, Dickens's 200 birthday this year was a big event, with much coverage in the media and the production of a new dramatization of his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by the BBC.
Important anniversaries of deceased artistic figures are often occasions for adulatory and uncritical traetment of their legacies. This is particularly the case when, despite some astounding achievements, they also created much that was second-rate or their careers were controversial for other reasons. I recall the same with the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth (that's for another day).
In this regard, people (especially the English) have an affection for Dickens as a father figure in a way that they do not have for, say, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. Equally, though, he has his detractors. His novels are often criticised for being poorly structured and sentimental.
There are grounds for both of these criticisms. In this respect, the above-mentioned Nicholas Nickleby is a case in point. The story wanders up numerous blind alleys and it is, at times, insufferably mawkish. Smike, in particular, is hard for a modern reader to sympathise with (I breathed a sigh of relief when he croaked it!). The excuse, moreover, that it was an early work, ignores the fasc that his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, remains one of his best. Of course it also has structural weaknesses - indeed, it highlights a problem with all of the novels; that they were first written as serials.
One thing that Nicholas Nickleby did achieve, however, was the highlighting of the appalling conditions that prevailed in many private schools - in Yorkshire in particular. All of Dickens's books, to a greater or lesser extent, address social ills and were instrumental in remedying some of them - including public executions and debtors' prisons. This might not be a reason for reading them now (if anything it dates them).
However, the best of the books of his that I have read (and I have read 10 so far) display other fine qualities. They can be very funny, with the humour ranging from verbal slapstick to biting satire. But above all, it's Dickens's characters - or, rather, one might say "caricatures" - that really make the best of his books stand out. Micawber and Mister Dick in David Copperfield, Fagin in Oliver Twist, are well-know enxamples. However, my favourites are Inspector Bucket, the canny policeman of Bleak House (ably played in the BBC adaptation by Alun Armstrong), the open-hearted Noddy Boffin,in Our Mutual Friend, who proves to be nobody's fool (brought to life for the BBC again by Peter Vaughan), Sam Weller (of course!) in The Pickwick Papers who, likewise, hides a formidable brain behind a clownish exterior, and, above all, the loathsome but hilarious Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (again, Tom Wilkinson gave the performance of his life in this role for the BBC). None of these characters are realistic portrayals, though they all contain elements of real people. Rather, they are grotesques, caricatures or, as I would like to think, cartoons in words.
No other English writer combined Dickens's comic gift with his ability to create such memorable caricatures. One has to go to America (Mark Twain) or Russia (Nikolai Gogol) to find anything like the same humour combined with caricature and a sense of the picturesque. And for this Dickens deserves to be remembered.
posted by Reluctant Irishman @ 4:07 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home