Light and Momentary

Welcome to the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong!

Today is TAMDRAL day 1, my friends, and this year we are reading The Old Curiosity Shop.

Jump on in and read at a pace that works for you. I'm aiming to finish in about a month.

This book offers the most villainous villain in all of Dickens, as well as the scene most likely to cause accidental drownings in the bathos. 

Ready, set, TAMDRAL!

Favorites

Suzanne asked me which Dickens novel is my favorite, and that is a harder question than you might think. 

When I finished the Dickens novels in 2010, I would have grouped the books like this:

Short, very good	Excellent, long	Good, long	Bleh
Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities Oliver Twist	Pickwick Papers David Copperfield Bleak House	Our Mutual Friend Nicholas Nickleby Little Dorritt Barnaby Rudge	Dombey & Son Martin Chuzzlewit Old Curiosity Shop Hard Times

My ratings have changed over the course of the AMDRALs. I loved Our Mutual Friend the second time around, but the second time through I found the young women in both Bleak House and David Copperfield pretty grating. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed Martin Chuzzlewit in 2017. 

One of the trends I have observed is that my life circumstances often influence my enjoyment of a Dickens novel. When I went back to Pickwick for the 2018 AMDRAL, I had trouble enjoying it. It's the most playful of the novels, but I was teaching a fully online summer class for the first time and it wasn't going well. I wasn't feeling very playful. 

That's the reason I am very curious to revisit Dombey & Son. I read it for the first time in August/September of 2008, and my plate has rarely been fuller than it was then. I was being investigated by CPS, I was pregnant with my fifth child (and still throwing up in my third trimester), I was drafting the first half of my dissertation in preparation for a fall-semester prelim, and I had an absurdly long list of household tasks I wanted to complete before the baby arrived, like getting a new roof for the garage. Oh! And! in the first part of that window I was still closing out my early intervention caseload!

Not long after I finished Dombey & Son (grumpily, so grumpily), I read an article asserting that Dombey & Son is the Dickens novel most likely to be appreciated by people who think they don't like Dickens novels. At the time, I thought, "Are you kidding me? DOMBEY & SON?!" (I thought I remembered that this was Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker, but I can't find it in their archives and Google isn't turning it up elsewhere.) For that specific reason I am very curious about what it will be like to go back to that one -- it seems like an interesting place to land after so many years and so many re-assessments.

If pressed to pick a favorite-- wait, no, I can't pick just one.

Best short novel: Great Expectations
Most fun: Pickwick
Most skillfully crafted: Bleak House
The one I am most likely to pull of the shelf and read a chunk of, just because: Our Mutual Friend

TAMDRAL season approaches

This year will be the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, which means that we are nearing the end of the list of Dickens novels. Here's where we've been:

2024 Hard Times
2023 Great Expectations
2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

We have three left: Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dombey & Son. I think I want to save Dombey & Son for last, and I'm leaning toward Old Curiosity Shoppe for this year and Barnaby Rudge in 2026. Any opinions? We'll start a month from today, after I submit spring semester grades. 

Hard Times, come again no more

I finished Hard Times today. I'm glad I reread it; I'd still put it in the bottom tier of Dickens novels. 

I think my favorite thing about Dickens is his ability to spin up a complicated plot and tie up the loose ends in improbable but generally agreeable ways. Do I find the plot of Our Mutual Friend plausible? Absolutely not. Do I love it anyway? Yes, I do.

Hard Times offers a smaller canvas, and the ending feels hasty and forced to me. Dickens is the king of the useful coincidence, but the discovery of the missing person is just a leetle too much for me. I might be more tolerant if it contained more likable or amusing characters.

We have now AMDRAL-ed our way through 11 of the 14 completed Dickens novels. The three remaining are all doorstop-sized: Barnaby Rudge, Dombey & Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you have a vote for next May, let me know.

Deceivers, the deceived, agency, helplessness

As I've been reading Hard Times I've been observing the relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse with some dissatisfaction. Dashing deceivers are a thing for Dickens (and in plenty of other 19th-century fiction), but I was musing to myself about the contrast between Louisa and Lydia Bennet. Lydia seems to me to have more agency. Is it a terrible idea to elope with Wickham? Obviously. Is it a freely chosen terrible idea? I think so. Louisa, though, seems to be on a descending escalator rather than a staircase -- not so much choosing her own path as being pulled along it.

So I was already grumbling to myself about female Dickens characters at the moment of crisis for Louisa. You should skip the last sentence in this paragraph if you haven't finished Part Two yet, but what does she do? (Here, I will turn the text yellow because it is an unexpected development. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) She throws herself helplessly at the feet of a different man, that's what.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

It's the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along!

Welcome to EAMDRAL, the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. AMDRALing is a spring tradition in these parts, and this will be the quickest one we've ever had. So far we are a small but mighty crew of 3 or 4, but this is the easiest-ever AMDRAL to catch up on if you need a little more Dickens in your life.

In the book's early chapters we meet Mr. Gradgrind, the fact-loving fancy-fearing father of offspring whose numbers include Adam Smith Gradgrind and Malthus Gradgrind. We are more focused on his daughter Louisa, though, whose first appearance in the story makes it clear to the reader that she finds her day-in-day-out diet of just-the-facts-ma'am to be a wearying existence.

We also meet Mr. Bounderby, who reminds me of my most difficult relative. He boasts the most and infers the worst, and he seems determined to keep it that way. When Mr. Gradgrind asks Sissy Jupe, "What's in the bottle you are carrying?" Mr. Bounderby answers immediately and falsely: gin. (Sissy is actually bringing a blend of soothing oils to her father, about whom more soon.)

Jump in and join us! 

It's AMDRAL season again

Finals week starts tomorrow, which means it's the time of year when a middle-aged mom's fancy lightly turns to nice fat Dickens novels. The first AMDRAL was in 2014, believe it or not. That means this year is the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are going to read Hard Times.

Hard Times is the shortest Dickens novel, clocking in at just over 100K words. If you want a nice little snacklet of a Dickens novel, this is your year. I haven't read it since 2009, but in my recollection he has a lot of Emphatic Thoughts about education. As I wind down a semester I'll remember for its student submissions bristling with AI-generated text, I am also having some Emphatic Thoughts about education. I guess I'll see how well our thoughts align.

I am going to dive in on May 15, which will give me time to get all the grades submitted and respond to the inevitable emails complaining about the grades. I'll aim to read two or three chapters a day and finish up in early June. Join me for the quickest-ever AMDRAL!

Great Expectations

Who wants to talk about Great Expectations? Melanie left a comment talking about her kids' enjoyment of Mr. Pumblechook's "May I? May I?" My Alex also thought that was hilarious when we read it together. It struck me this time through that Magwitch does the same thing when he returns and Pip finds it equally unpleasant. He doesn't seem to want anyone to take credit for the making of him.

Melanie also commented on the ending, which I love and she does not. I am glad Dickens listened to Wilkie Collins. I am not a fan of the original ending but I find the revised version to be a hard-earned flavor of hopeful. [Caution, spoilers ahead for this 162-year-old book.] I don't want to believe that Miss Havisham's bitterness blighted Estella in a permanent way.

Did you finish? Are you still reading? Tell us all about it.

Maybe we can have some TAMDRAL updates

I am way out of the blogging groove, but I intend to fix that. I have lots of things to tell you. Maybe it's a good time for a blogging streak, yeah?

I have totally neglected posting about Dickens in a year when more people than usual wanted to read along. So let's start there, shall we? Are you reading Great Expectations? Have you read it before? What part are you on and what do you think?

I had planned to finish the book by the end of the June but I have been flitting in fickle fashion from book to book instead. I am only on chapter 36, in which Pip has just returned from a funeral.

It's TAMDRAL time, friends

Today marks the beginning of the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, in which we will wind our way through Great Expectations at a leisurely pace. Join us! Great Expectations is short (for a Dickens novel) and it will draw you in from the get-go.

We meet our hero not long after he was still too small to say his own name properly, and we see right away that he is smart, timid, and lonely. When I first read this book in 1989 I was thoroughly creeped out by the escaped convict lurking in a graveyard, demanding a file (a metal one, for removing his leg-iron, not a paper one for contesting a will or what have you) and threatening Pip with a cannibal's revenge.

In chapter 2 we meet Pip's older sister and brother-in-law, along with Tickler, whose existence tells you most of what you need to know about Mrs. Joe Gargery. And even though it might seem a little early for Dickens to start talking about social ills, it's there if you've got your eyes open: prison overcrowding is bad, kids, and convicts deserve more humane treatment than the Hulks.

If you are looking for a free version, I suggest that you avoid Project Gutenberg, which inserts a seriously spoiler-y image with a seriously spoiler-y caption right before chapter 1. When I first read Anna Karenina, the back cover copy had apparently been written by an over-eager new grad: it connected the dots between the opening and closing railway safety incidents. They described the climax of the novel on the back cover! Who does that?! This image/caption combo is just as bad, so maybe find yourself a free Kindle version instead.

Next up, pork pie at dawn! This is the slowest-paced AMDRAL we've ever done, so maybe it's your year to jump on in.

TAMDRAL Time

This will be the tenth year in which I have hosted a Dickens read-along in this space after the end of the spring semester. Here's what we've read so far:

2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

For the Tenth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong this year I am thinking about reading either Great Expectations or The Old Curiosity Shop, starting on May 15 after grades are submitted. Want to join me? Any preference?

#NAMDRAL, the countdown

Okay, heads up! There are only four weeks -- 28 short days -- until the Ninth Annual May Dickens Read-Along commences. This year we are going to read Nicholas Nickleby. I am going to start on May 10, right after I submit grades. We will be overlapping with the Hardcore Dickens Club, which should be fun. (They are starting a week later and taking it more slowly, so the overlap is imperfect but will still mean lots of interesting conversations.)

If you haven't read Nicholas Nickleby, you should join us. It's a fun one -- lots of lighthearted bits, easy on the bathos. If you have already read Nicholas Nickleby -- well, OF COURSE you want to reread it, don't you? What better way to spend your leisure time in the merry month of May?

So if you have TBR lists that need adjusting or decks that need clearing or any of that kind of business to take care of, this is your cue to get rolling. If you might appreciate a little encouragement, I have two old posts on how to read Dickens and another on why.

Snails and Pattens

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?

I am the soul of temperance, it turns out

You guys, I have to tell you about a thing I found on the internet today. Have you ever thought to yourself, "That Jamie Gladly is kind of obsessed with the Victorians"? It turns out I am not obsessed at all! Not even a teeny bit.

Today I found a corner of the internet in which dozens of people -- dozens! (dozens as in 2 and a bit, but still: dozens, plural) -- are planning to read the major works of Dickens across the next two years.

That is a gobsmacking commitment to Dickens, my friends. That is SO MUCH DICKENS.

And maybe, possibly, I will take part of the ride with them.

For a while now I have wanted to read some portion of the Dickens I haven't yet read. The problems are that (a) there's so much Dickens and (b) I have found the quality variable in my few excursions beyond the novels. The Christmas novellas, for instance-- bathos! sentimentality! blargh!! 

The club members are reading in roughly chronological order, starting with Sketches by Boz, which I have never read. I love the exuberance and playfulness of early Dickens (Pickwick forever!), so that might be a good one to read with them. I'll sit out the next two on their list (Pickwick and Oliver Twist), since I've read both of those pretty recently, but they are going to be starting Nicholas Nickleby in May. Perfect timing for an #AMDRAL pick, and I haven't read that one since 2010, when I finished up my 10-year Dickens project.

I finished up Eustace Diamonds over lunch today and started Phineas Redux tonight. I don't think I've ever had a Dickens work and a Trollope novel on the go at the same time, but I guess I'll give it a whirl.

A few more thoughts about Little Dorrit

I found Little Dorrit unexpectedly painful to read, because the society scenes left me wincing every time. "Save yourselves!" I wanted to shout at the characters, but of course they could not hear me and would not have heeded me even if they could. It reminded me strongly of Our Mutual Friend -- I feel certain that the Veneerings would have frequented the Merdles' dinner parties.

In my last post about the book I said I must have skipped over a 5-page chunk of text inadvertently in my hugely pregnant state, but it was actually a bigger block than that. There are two chapters that I do not remember at all, not in the slightest. And they're important chapters. The good news is that I finished the book with far fewer questions this time around, but the bad news is that I'm still scratching my head about what happened in 2002. Maybe I moved the bookmark to my target page, nodded off in the first of the two forgotten chapters, and thought the next day that I should start reading at the bookmark? Maybe I was so tired at the end of one day that my eyes passed over the words but my oh-so-pregnant brain failed to comprehend them? I will never know, I guess. But! I'm glad I filled in those gaps! Sometimes Dickens is elliptical, but two chapters' worth of big revelations would be a lot to elide.

I found the book's portrayal of the costs of wealth to be unexpectedly timely. We still don't believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, right? Maybe we ask ourselves: who could help loving money? Money buys freedom! I still shudder a little, though, thinking about the the ways that money imprisons some of the Little Dorrit characters. After I finished the book I felt an urgent need to catch up on charitable giving for the year. I got everything all squared away through the end of May and still felt unsettled, so I proceeded with the June giving as well.

Generally I've found that I uncover more to enjoy in a Dickens novel the second time through. Even though I'm glad I read Little Dorrit last month, I wouldn't really say that I enjoyed it. Lots to think about, less to delight in. Not my favorite May Dickens Read-Along, but at least I know now what Mr. Clennam wanted to remember!

One mystery revealed

Near the end of Little Dorrit there is an unusually long chapter in which some of the secrets that have puzzled us from the beginning are uncovered. And you guys, I don't know exactly what happened when I read this book in 2002, but I seem to have skipped over a key 5-page section. I must have thought I was on p. 757 when I heaved my hugely pregnant self up to resolve that poorly-timed sibling squabble, but I was actually on p. 752. "This looks right," I must have said to myself when I sat back down later that day, but it was NOT RIGHT, not at all.

I remember finishing the book and thinking, "Huh, there are a lot of things that still seem unclear here," because I DIDN'T READ pp. 752-757!

The more Dickens I have read, the more I have seen that his books reward careful attention. I have been meticulous this time through -- when did Character A talk to Character B? How does Character C know Character D? I didn't want to get to the end and feel uncertain this time. But I didn't need to be taking notes on their offhand conversations in 2021 -- I just needed a bookmark in 2002!

To the list of tips I have shared in the past for enjoying Dickens, I can now add another: it's better if you read all of the pages. So helpful, I know.

Biting my nails on page 568

Do you ever re-read a book and ask yourself, "Did I notice that before?" This is happening to me with Little Dorrit.

Dickens is making a particular point, it seems to me, of saying that you don't have to be incarcerated to be imprisoned: age and debility are their own prison for Mrs. Clennam; unforgiveness, ditto, for Mrs. C and for Miss Wade. The "surfaces" that Mrs. General implores Little Dorrit to create will become a cage, if she succeeds in heeding her companion's advice; we see it in every society scene. Even Mr. Merdle looks in vain for a place in his home to be out of the butler-warden's view. But I am not sure I connected those dots last time.

I joked in my first post about the first chapter's warning regarding Blandois/Rigaud's villainy, but it seems to me this time through that Dickens is pulling out all of the stops: this guy is a really-for-real seriously bad dude, he says. Beware, gentle reader! I am certain I did not have as much sympathy for Gowan's dog on my first reading, but this time through I am making horrified faces even as I remember enough to write this post.

"Why are you making that face?" Joe asked me as I was reading earlier this evening, and it was another horrified sympathy face. I did not remember how many of our friends were drawn into the scam that will shortly be exposed. I am already anticipating the shock and the loss that they will experience. Perhaps this time it is more resonant because there is such a prominent real-world example in recent memory.

Little Dorrit is the Dickens novel which left me with the most questions, but I did not go searching for answers because I was 7,654,238 months pregnant when I finished it and greatly distracted by the sensation of having accidentally swallowed a hippopotamus bent on kicking his way out of my abdomen. I'm curious about whether this time through will leave me with a clearer sense of where he was trying to take us. I'll let you know if I have more insight this time around. Or if I accidentally swallow a hippopotamus.

Little Dorrit, Day 1

You know how you can tell Monsieur Rigaud is a villain and not an innocent wrongly imprisoned? His hair is streaked with red, that's how. Redheads in Dickens are nothing but trouble. Beware the redhead! [says the redhead]

I do not remember anything at all about Miss Ware from my first reading of Little Dorrit, but I will bet you twenty American dollars that we see her again. She's too tormented and angsty to fade into the background. (Now I'm wondering if I ought to have remembered her. Anything I missed on my first trip through Little Dorrit I will blame on sharing my body with an enormous baby the whole time I was reading it. Joe was 9#12 when he was born, so I'm fairly sure every part of me, including my brain, had to squish into less space than it was accustomed to in order to make room for him.)

We also meet Pet Meagles in chapter 2; she is the anti-Miss Ware. Dickens says of her: "there was in Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and pleasant could have been without." I'm thinking Dickens would not have voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary -- how about you?

#EAMDRAL, the PLAN

All righty, friends, it's going to be fairly painful here for the next few days. The thing about grading big batches of student writing is that there's always plagiarism somewhere. I thought I had been SO careful about making sure I wouldn't be dealing with plagiarism in finals week, but it seems to be inevitable. So! When you are being walloped in the face with the very worst part of your job, do you say to yourself, "a nice fat Dickens novel would make me feel so much better right now"? Because I do.

Let's read Little Dorrit together!

We can go to the south of France in fiction, even if we can't go there in reality. We can discuss whether Little Dorrit is a believable character or not, and why Dickens was so determined that his female lead characters would be mostly meek. We can also talk about the least meek mother in all of Dickens, and the 19th-century fictional predecessor of a 21st-century criminal who just appeared in the obit pages. We can return to the Marshalsea debtors' prison, which we haven't visited since we read Pickwick a few years ago.

I am going to start on Monday and read about 40 pages a day. If you get a free Kindle version, take a careful look at the first paragraph before you dive in. It should say, "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since." I am telling you this because I downloaded a free Kindle version of Oliver Twist last year and I wondered briefly if I had slid into Looking Glass World. I think someone must have plugged the Project Gutenberg version into some kind of translation software twice -- so that it was rendered automatically into Dutch (or something) and then back into English -- and uploaded the resulting bowl of not-quite-word-salad to the Kindle store. 

I have been reading Cal Newport's A World Without Email for weeks now, and the ratio of interesting to dull is less than favorable. It's partly that there's too much business-speak for my taste, and partly that the changes he is suggesting seem likely to meet with a lot of resistance and I'm tired right now. But I am going to FINISH IT, because Little Dorrit awaits. I have also been reading This is Happiness, which I am finding pleasant but not especially riveting. I am going to FINISH IT TOO, because Little Dorrit awaits.

Wouldn't you like to escape into Victorian England for a little while? Join me!

May 16

Who else is reading Oliver Twist with me, or planning to start it? I am a little past the one-third mark. Oliver and Bill Sykes have just set out on their mysterious expedition. Bill has a loaded pistol in his pocket, and Oliver has been warned that he faces death at Bill's hands if he speaks a word.

The relationship between Bill and Nancy is striking me this time through the book. Nancy is an interesting character: more intelligent and more perceptive than a lot of Dickens women, but also thoroughly mired in her underworld life. How did she wind up with Bill? Was he less repulsive, once upon a time? Maybe human trafficking hasn't changed much across the last 150 years.

If Nicole the Victorian literature scholar is reading this, maybe she'll chime in: I'm intrigued but also annoyed by Dickens' apparent conviction that good blood trumps good breeding. I posted a bit about this when we read Bleak House -- I just don't find Esther's goodness persuasive. How could she be such a sunshiny kid after such a terrible upbringing? The same thing is true for Oliver. How would he know what's right? Why would he be motivated to do the right thing in these circumstances? Dickens seems to be saying "We must have pity on the poor! Let's send them some kids from rich families to show them how to be better."

Tell me what you're enjoying, or what you're annoyed by! If you haven't started, jump on in. Oliver Twist is shorter and faster-paced than the other AMDRAL novels have been, so there's plenty of time to finish it before June. Or if you're reading something else because Dickens isn't your cup of tea (I'm looking at you, Tracy!), tell me what's on your bedside table these days.