luka

Well-known member
Started reading DC last night. I like it so far. Although it isn't as cartoonish and entertaining as Hard Times, it's very charming, and pointedly sensitive to the capacious capacity children have for imagining and observing things. I can see straightaway why Tolstoy loved it (apparently claiming it was the greatest novel ever written).
fucking hell he started 5 YEARS ago!!!!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
'And how do you think we are looking, Master Copperfield, - I should say, Mister?' fawned Uriah. 'Don't you find Mr. Wickfield blooming, sir? Years don't tell much in our firm, Master Copperfield, except in raising up the umble, namely, mother and self - and in developing,' he added, as an afterthought, 'the beautiful, namely, Miss Agnes.'

He jerked himself about, after this compliment, in such an intolerable manner, that my aunt, who had sat looking straight at him, lost all patience.

'Deuce take the man!' said my aunt, sternly, 'what's he about? Don't be galvanic, sir!'

'I ask your pardon, Miss Trotwood,' returned Uriah; 'I'm aware you're nervous.'

'Go along with you, sir!' said my aunt, anything but appeased. 'Don't presume to say so! I am nothing of the sort. If you're an eel, sir, conduct yourself like one. If you're a man, control your limbs, sir! Good God!' said my aunt, with great indignation, 'I am not going to be serpentined and corkscrewed out of my senses!'
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Uriah stopped short, put his hands between his great knobs of knees, and doubled himself up with laughter. With perfectly silent laughter. Not a sound escaped from him. I was so repelled by his odious behaviour, particularly by this concluding instance, that I turned away without any ceremony; and left him doubled up in the middle of the garden, like a scarecrow in want of support.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
his veneration for the Doctor was unbounded; and there is a subtlety of perception in real attachment, even when it is borne towards man by one of the lower animals, which leaves the highest intellect behind. To this mind of the heart, if I may call it so, in Mr Dick, some bright ray of the truth shot straight.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading Edmund Wilson's essay on Dickens, "The Two Scrooges"

On Dickens's fascination with murder (and hatred of society)
For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel. Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the rôles of both, and to continue up to his death to put into them all that was most passionate in his feeling.

...

He identified himself readily with the thief, and even more readily with the murderer. The man of powerful will who finds himself opposed to society must, if he cannot upset it or if his impulse to do so is blocked, feel a compulsion to commit what society regards as one of the capital crimes against itself. With the anti-social heroes of Dostoevsky, this crime is usually murder or rape; with Dickens, it is usually murder.
On Dickens's view of politicians
In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real. It is one of the great purposes of Dickens to show you these human actualities who figure for Parliament as strategical counters and for Political Economy as statistics; who can as a rule appear only even in histories in a generalized or idealized form.
On Dickens's portrayal of the emergence of a moralizing middle class
Dickens had at first imagined that he was pillorying abstract faults in the manner of the comedy of humours: Selfishness in Chuzzlewit, Pride in Dombey. But the truth was that he had already begun an indictment against a specific society: the self-important and moralizing middle class who had been making such rapid progress in England and coming down like a damper on the bright fires of English life—that is, on the spontaneity and gaiety, the frankness and independence, the instinctive human virtues, which Dickens admired and trusted. The new age had brought a new kind of virtues to cover up the flourishing vices of cold avarice and harsh exploitation; and Dickens detested these virtues.
On Dickens's isolation, his 'social maladjustment', in Victorian society—and compared to Dostoevsky's similar early experience of savage social estarnagement... (Wilson says that Dickens is Dostoevsky's 'father')
To be caught between two social classes in a society of strict stratifications—like being caught between two civilizations, as James was, or between two racial groups, like Proust—is an excellent thing for a novelist from the point of view of his art, because it enables him to dramatize contrasts and to study interrelations which the dweller in one world cannot know. Perhaps something of the sort was true even of Shakespeare, between the provincial bourgeoisie and the Court. Dostoevsky, who had a good deal in common with Dickens and whose career somewhat parallels his, is a conspicuous example of a writer who owes his dramatic scope at least partly to a social maladjustment. The elder Dostoevsky was a doctor and his family origins were obscure, so that his social position was poor in a Russia still predominantly feudal; yet he bought a country estate and sent his sons to a school for the children of the nobility. But the family went to pieces after the mother’s death: the father took to drink and was murdered by his serfs for his cruelty. Dostoevsky was left with almost nothing, and he slipped down into that foul and stagnant underworld of the Raskólnikovs and Stavrógins of his novels. Dickens’ case had been equally anomalous: he had grown up in an uncomfortable position between the upper and the lower middle-classes, with a dip into the proletariat and a glimpse of the aristocracy through their trusted upper servants.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On Scrooge's transformation, and it reflecting Dickens's (again, Dostoevskyian) instability
Yet Scrooge represents a principle fundamental to the dynamics of Dickens’ world and derived from his own emotional constitution. It was not merely that his passion for the theatre had given him a taste for melodramatic contrasts; it was rather that the lack of balance between the opposite impulses of his nature had stimulated an appetite for melodrama. For emotionally Dickens was unstable. Allowing for the English restraint, which masks what the Russian expressiveness indulges and perhaps over-expresses, and for the pretences of English biographers, he seems almost as unstable as Dostoevsky.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Something to look out for
Dickens admitted that he found it difficult, whenever he became particularly serious, to refrain from falling into blank verse; and though his prose, like everything else in his art, underwent a remarkable development, tightening up and becoming cleaner, he never quite got rid of this tendency.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On the 'obsessive hallucinations' Dickens shared with his lunatics
Certainly the murder of Nancy had taken on something of the nature of an obsessive hallucination. Dickens’ imagination had always been subject to a tendency of this kind. It had been pointed out by Taine that the fantasies and monomanias of his lunatics only exaggerate characteristics which are apparent in Dickens’ whole work—the concentration on and reiteration of some isolated aspect or detail of a person or a place, as Mr. Dick in David Copperfield was haunted by King Charles’s head. In one of the sketches of The Uncommercial Traveller, written during these later years, Dickens tells of being obsessed by the image of a drowned and bloated corpse that he had seen in the Paris morgue, which for days kept popping up among the people and things he encountered and sometimes compelled him to leave public places, though it eventually drove him back to the morgue.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Comparing Dickens and Dostoevsky, specifically Edwin Drood and Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky, who owed so much to Dickens and who was probably influenced by the murder in Chuzzlewit, had produced in 1866 a masterpiece on the theme at which Dickens is only just arriving in 1869. Raskólnikov_____raskólnik means dissenter—combines in his single person the two anti-social types of the deliberate criminal and the rebel, which since Hugh in Barnaby Rudge have always been kept distinct by Dickens. Dostoevsky, with the courage of his insight, has studied the states of mind which are the results of a secession from society: the contemptuous will to spurn and to crush confused with the impulse toward human brotherhood, the desire to be loved twisted tragically with the desire to destroy and to kill. But the English Dickens with his middle-class audience would not be able to tell such a story even if he dared to imagine it. In order to stage the ‘war in the members’, he must contrive a whole machinery of mystification: of drugs, of telepathic powers, of remote oriental cults.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Wilson's account of dickens, how Dickens was influenced by stage drama and how he has a bad tendency to write stagey melodramatic scenes, I thought of last night reading (skimming really) the tedious scene where tedious Doctor Strong's tedious young wife gives a big speech to him and we're meant to cry I suppose

Notable though that like David and Dora, Dr Strong and Alice(?) have a marriage which seems entirely sexless, in which the wife is compared to a child. Wilson talks about Dickens obsession with innocent young women (girls, really). He was apparently quite obsessed with his wife's younger sister, who died young.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I bet you don't remember a single thing about it though

I read with my whole spirit, I live it, in a sense I am David and Dickens and Heep writing a new Copperfield with every word I imbibe
 
Top