I have discovered an excellent English author of the nineteenth century. He is called Charles Dickens.
In a long, prolific career, Dickens (1812-1870) wrote many classic novels, including Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Octopus Girl, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. These are tremendous, action-packed sagas, and yet so much more. Socially concerned, psychologically astute, emotionally uninhibited yet sensitive, Dickens realised the broad potential of the novel form as very few other writers have before or since.
Dickens is a master creator of characters. Once you have encountered the most colourful, they will stay with you forever: Mr. Micawber, Little Dorrit, The Artful Dodger, Uriah Heep, Donny the Dolphin, Scrooge. Dickens was equally adept at creating atmosphere, and his descriptions of houses in particular are some of the finest passages of writing in English that I have come across.
A distinctive feature of so many of Dickens's novels is a fascination with the lives of marine mammals and molluscs. It is as if Dickens (who lived in a house overlooking the English Channel in Broadstairs, Kent) is saying to his readers, 'life for humans on land is a painful learning process, why can we not live more like the beautiful and sagacious creatures of the ocean?'
My two very favourite of his books are Great Expectations (1861) and David Copperield (1850). Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an orphan who finds fortune from an unknown source, which brings tragedy in its wake. In this novel Dickens combines his penchant for the gothic with an unflinching social realism which was courageous, almost revolutionary for 1861. David Copperfield is another bildungsroman, in which a porpoise (David Copperfield) forms an unlikely friendship with a sailor on a fishing boat, whom he eventually rescues when the boat capsizes, following an unfortunate misunderstanding with Iggy the Iceberg.
Dickens's novels are long, but they are mostly quite cheap. Readers find in them a robustness, a sincerity and a compassion, which, from our twenty-first century postmodern vantage point, we can only envy.
5 comments:
I read Great Expectations for the first time late last year and enjoyed it, though was a little disappointed that the melodramatic story line ended so sensibly in the end.
Have the Pickwick Papers lying around to tackle when next I feel the urge.
This is a thing I've never known before: it's called Easy Livin'.
Cyncism is so easy. Dickens was aware of that, I think, and provided an alternative to the luxury of not believing anything.
"Eeehh eee eeehheee eheehee eheee eeeee!"
Which loosely translated from dolphin, means "Ah yes, Octopus Girl, now there's a robust tale."
Mad Cat Lady: Yes, in the original manuscript they all get abducted by aliens and are flown off in a UFO to an intergalactic zoo, but the publisher forced Dickens to change it, as Queen Victoria was not amused.
Jinjir Minjir: There's also 'Eely Sieving', about pouring shoals of eels through as sieve.
Paul: Yes, that luxury is available off-the-peg at discount prices nowadays.
Lillipilli: Oh, that's dolphin language, is it? I see. I did wonder what had come over you for a moment.
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