I've mentioned before that one of the things I love about my long-haul read-the-complete-works projects is the way they acquaint me with an author's habits of thought. I still think about Shakespeare when I encounter snails easing their way through the world. One of the fun things about rereading Dickens is seeing the connections I couldn't have seen the first time through. For instance: I first read Martin Chuzzlewit before I read Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit. I didn't know, when I first read about spontaneous combustion as a possible fate for the Misses Pecksniff in 2001, that Dickens would revisit the idea nine years later to glorious effect. I hadn't met Sloppy back then, so I couldn't appreciate Mr. Nadgett's buttons, gleaming like eyes. I couldn't see the similarities between Mr. Bucket and Mr. Nadgett (ferreting out the truth is good work, says Dickens, but also lonely work), or between Mr. Montague/Tigg and Mr. Merdle (moving other people's money around is a parasitic way to make a living, says Dickens, and leads to (spoiler alert!) gory death).
For all my fan-girling, there are aspects of Dickens' writing that consistently annoy me. He seems, on the one hand, to say that we are who we are: we can smooth off some of our rough edges and get clearer on what matters, but we don't change in our essentials. But both this year and last year, I read books in which central characters spend big chunks of the plot engaged in an elaborate charade. Here I am, looking skeptically over the tops of my glasses at that idea. Which is it, Mr. Dickens? Are we destined to be the people we are, or can we pretend persuasively to be very different sorts of people? I am also permanently irked by his female characters, for whom timidity and meekness seem to be the cardinal virtues.
These are small annoyances, though, and they are more than offset by the pleasures of the big novels. There are the thematic delights-- he writes about a world in which justice prevails and capital-T Truth, too potent to be hidden, works through multiple characters to make itself known. There are the fingerprints of craftsmanship-- I'm thinking especially about the opening and closing family gatherings in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which we can see plainly the perils of pettiness.
My 14yo is reading Tale of Two Cities (a decision that made me say "My work here is done"), and I told him a couple of weeks ago that I'd read it along with him when I finished Martin Chuzzlewit. "I'm going to be sad when it ends," I said. A Dickens chapter a day might not keep the doctor away, but perhaps it keeps away tolerance of injustice and sub-par writing.
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