I've told you before that one of the things I love about a long-haul in-depth reading project is the opportunity to get thoroughly acquainted with an author's voice: the snails in Shakespeare, the echoes across Dickens novels. I was reading Sketches by Boz when I said to myself, "Hey, wait a minute, that sounds like Sairey Gamp!" The midwife who comes to attend a birth is described as "a fat old woman, in a cloak and night-cap, with a bundle in one hand, and a pair of pattens in the other, who looked as if she had been suddenly knocked up out of bed for some very special purpose."
Yesterday I looked it up and sure enough, Sairey Gamp, on her first appearance in Martin Chuzzlewit, is described as "a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp." When she emerged after Mr. Pecksniff knocked on her window, Dickens says, she "had a large bundle with her, a pair of pattens, and a species of gig umbrella." I didn't know what pattens were until I encountered them in Dickens, but the description is evocative -- a woman preparing herself to trudge across mud and sewage without tracking them into a home that will be welcoming a new baby.
In Sketches Dickens describes himself as a young bachelor, uncertain about the import of the fat old woman's arrival. He was only 24 when it was published. I wonder how much she is based on an actual 1830s London midwife, awakened by a midnight knock, hurrying out with her hands full. I wonder too how much Dickens based his description on the anti-midwifery stereotypes that were brewing even then -- I don't think I'd want Sairey Gamp as a birth attendant, personally.
I remember reading an interview with Liz Phair in which she talked about her first recordings as a library. "I go in there and rip stuff off," she said. I am curious about whether Sketches is something similar -- an early exploration of characters and ideas that will resurface in later works. It might be a little weird to compare the person who wrote Supernova with a person who couldn't bring himself to write the word "childbirth*," but maybe it's true that the creative process works in similar ways regardless of what's being created.
*Check out this piece of circumlocution: "Mrs Gamp had been up all the previous night, in attendance upon a ceremony to which the usage of gossips has given that name which expresses, in two syllables, the curse pronounced on Adam." It's got to be childbirth, right? What else could it be?
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