The Penguin Blog

Doing Dickens – Part 9

That’s it. Dickens has broken me. Not because Dombey and Son, the ninth in our attempt to read all of his novels, was too long, or too hard, but because it is so utterly, utterly heartbreaking.

Why is this novel not more famous or popular? Why? I’m baffled. It’s GREAT. During our readathon my unscientific calculation of a book’s quality has been the number of page corners I’ve turned over (sorry, yes, I’m a folder) because I’d found something amazing. By the end of Dombey I’d not only cried twice, but the book had virtually doubled in size from my fevered page-wrecking.

There’s so much I loved in this story of a dysfunctional family, ruled by a man for whom business is everything, yet who is a sad, damaged prisoner of his own pride and conventionality. There’s little Paul (the ‘son’ of the title), a perfect study of a thoughtful, wistful child, wise beyond his years, who sees animals in the wallpaper and sits ‘as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming’. There’s Dombey himself, freezing everyone he knows with his cold arrogance, shunning his daughter Florence for his son and heir, and yet whose repressed emotions are described with astounding subtlety. And, above all, there is Edith, Dombey’s second wife and a towering rebuttal of the charge that Dickens can’t do attractive women. She is beautiful yet brave, intelligent, strong and defiant: trapped in the ideal of Victorian womanhood that she has been groomed for, consumed by self-loathing, but eventually breaking free from her cage. She is mesmerising. The novel is deep and modern in its idea of people scarred by their upbringing; the writing is wonderfully vivid and heightened. I’d urge everyone to rectify Dombey’s inexplicable poor-relative status by reading this incredible book. And so would Sam:

‘I had to ask for this latest Dickens Club to be postponed by a couple of weeks so I could finish this huge tome, but boy, was it worth it. We all seemed equally baffled that Dombey and Son is not only not hailed as a masterpiece, but is also rarely heard of at all (the usual response seems to be, "Mmmm... I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is.") So here's what it is, in a nutshell: Brilliant. It's great. It's so clearly the twin of David Copperfield, which we all loved with a passion, but in many ways Dombey slightly tips the scales for me, in part for the female characters. Many people criticise Dickens, saying he can't write women, but with Edith Granger and Florence Dombey, I think this book proves those critics wrong. Yes, they are both beautiful, and yes, Florence can seem slightly wet, but only in a passing glance. She's actually an incredibly strong, intelligent and independent (eventually) young woman, ground down daily by the dysfunctional family she's clinging to. And Edith, an early (and I think better-written) version of Great Expectation's Estella, is fierce, bold and completely broken by the society she's born into. There are so many echoes between characters, parallels and repeats, and the book is filled with imagery of the sea: tides, waves, weather, plus Dickens is the best writer I know of children and childhood. Throw in old, old-fashioned Paul and Mrs Skewton, Captain Cuttle and master villain Carker and you've got my joint favourite Dickens ever. Please read it. A hearty, merry, insistent 9.4/10.’ Sam

 

Louise Willder

Conversations with A Twist

Oliver Twist is Cityread’s Dickens novel for April. London’s libraries launch the first ever Cityread London in partnership with Penguin Classics, focusing on Oliver Twist as part of Dickens 2012. Over 300 Cityread events will take place throughout April, across all 33 London boroughs, bringing Oliver Twist to life in libraries, cinemas and museums. From afternoon tea and Dickens at Kensington Palace, to Hip Hop Dickens workshops in libraries, there’s something for readers of all ages. You can take part in Cityread London by asking at your local library or visiting the Cityread Facebook group.

Here Cityread blogger Aoife Mannix attends the launch

of the ‘Conversations with A Twist’ exhibition at the Free Word Centre.  You can find out more about the exhibition and watch the accompanying short films here.

I arrive at the Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road just as they are finishing filming Professor Robert L. Patten’s series of short films on Oliver Twist.  It’s a place I’ve come to know well over the last couple of years as I’ve run writing workshops here as well as attending poetry readings and interesting talks on various aspects of freedom of expression and the role of the writer in society.
 
In addition to being the home of organisations such as English PEN, Free Word is launching an exhibition in conjunction with the Charles Dickens Museum.  ‘Conversations With A Twist’ examines Oliver Twist from the point of view of social justice.  I stand under a huge banner bearing one of the best known quotes in English literature ‘Please, Sir, I want some more’.  The illustration is from George Cruikshank’s series for the original serialisation of the book.  It shows a fat bald man in a white apron peering down at a scrawny boy.  Professor Patten, who is visiting scholar at the Charles Dickens museum, points out that this famous drawing has often since been reinterpreted as a political cartoon.  It’s a perfect way of representing a huge gap in power relations that dates back to the French Revolution.

Oliver has had the misfortune to draw the short straw amongst the starving workhouse boys and thus he is the one who has to ask the cook if they can have more food.  Far from taking pity on him. the cook hits Oliver with his ladle and has him dragged before the board.  These good gentlemen are so shocked at the little boy’s audaciousness in complaining about slowly starving to death that they decide to imprison the nine year old in solitary confinement until they can find a trader to take him off their hands for a reward of five pounds.  They also confidently predict that rebellion at such a young age is a sure sign that Oliver is destined for the hangman.  By ending the first serialisation with this prediction, Dickens is giving us a damning indictment of Victorian society while at the same time leaving his readers anxious to find out if this will indeed be Oliver’s fate.
 
Cruikshank’s drawing shows the other workhouse boys with pale, twisted faces.  It’s a vivid, nightmarish image.  Patten argues that while the faces may look like caricatures, the boys were actually starving and shrunk from severe malnutrition. Also their heads had been shaved because of lice.  Thus the power of the image lies in its ability to capture a very real social phenomenon.

By mixing quotations from the book with illustrations, playbills and images from Dickens’s own life, ‘Conversations With A Twist’ demonstrates how this classic novel explores deep social and political themes that are still of huge relevance today.  Poverty, child labour, exploitation, abuse of power, crime, neglect of orphans, corruption and hypocrisy are all sadly still very much in existence in the world of the 21st century.  This exhibition, and the accompanying short films, encourages us to ask the same questions about the injustices of our society as Dickens did of his.

 

Aoife Mannix is the author of a novel, Heritage of Secrets, and four collections of poetry, The Trick of Foreign Words, The Elephant in the Corner, Growing Up an Alien and Turn the Clocks Upside Down. A regular on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live and on the festival scene, she was recently writer-in-residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has also toured countries as diverse as China, Nigeria and Norway on behalf of the British Council.

Follow Aoife on Twitter: @AoifeMannix
Click here to see Aoife's Facebook page
Click here to visit Aoife's website

 

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Jennifer McVeigh talks about the research behind her novel, The Fever Tree

The Fever Tree took me down a rabbit warren of research - a world of dust, diamonds and disease. I began with an idea: what was life like for the British on the diamond fields of South Africa? Who were the men and women who went out there? What kind of lives did they lead? And what moral codes were they bound by? My journey started in the British Library, reading books on the history of South Africa in the 19th Century. These were wonderful for giving me a general overview of the period - the politics of the time, and the people who were in power - but they couldn't bring that world to life. I needed real stories about ordinary people. I wanted to know what it smelt like to live in a tent in a diamond mining town, alongside 4,000 Europeans and 10,000 Africans, without sanitation or running water. I wanted to know what it was like to be shipped out to South Africa to work, by an emigration society which specialised in re-locating women. Using the bibliographies of the history books, I tracked down the primary sources from which much of their material was taken. I was drawn into the extraordinary world of the pioneer - men who travelled thousands of miles into the interior of South Africa with little more than the shirts on their backs. There was Barney Barnato, a Jewish boxer from Whitechapel who scraped a living as a comedian, and went on to become one of the richest men on the fields. There were cockney traders, flush with success - lighting cigars with five pound notes; there were men who made little and - after a bad turn at the gambling tables - shot themselves on the veldt. These were the stories which allowed me to see just as my characters would have done over a hundred years ago. I read guide books on the Cape published in 1880 and sifted through women’s magazines from the 1870s - turning over patterns for embroidered glove boxes and lace cushion covers - just as my character Frances might have done. I delved into manuals on social etiquette, cooking, botany, and what to bring on a hunting expedition to the Transvaal. There are books in the British Library which you simply couldn’t find in a lending library. Books that might have had a tiny print run, and aren’t useful to anyone but a handful of historians, which proved priceless for my research.

One afternoon, I was reading about African labour on the diamond fields, when I came across a reference to a smallpox epidemic which had ravaged the diamond mining town of Kimberley in the 1880s. I looked at the notes at the back of the book, and they cited the diary of a doctor called Hans Sauer. I tapped it into the British Library catalogue, and sure enough, they had a copy. In just over an hour Sauer’s diary was sitting on my desk, and it told the extraordinary story of a smallpox outbreak which had been covered up by Cecil Rhodes, the great statesman. The epidemic - which could have been easily contained with vaccination - ended up killing thousands. At the time it was reported as ‘the greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine’, but it has since been forgotten. Two of the doctors who were paid off to deny the presence of smallpox - Jameson and Matthews - went on to become Prime Minister and MP. This shocking story seemed to lie at the very heart of Britain's exploitation of the resources and people of South Africa under the banner of 'civilisation'. Here was a tale of adventure, greed and exploitation, of gambling dens and brothels, of men - one minute a pauper, the next a millionaire - scratching a living on the veldt looking for diamonds. After six months of research, I knew I had 'found' my story.