The Penguin Blog

Doing Dickens - Part 13

Crying while reading Dickens's novels is getting to be a regular thing with me. Maybe it's because I know we're getting near to the end of our mission to read all his novels, or maybe it's because number 13, A Tale of Two Cities, is such and exciting and moving yarn. For sheer storytelling brio, this is up there with the best.

You may well know the set-up: two men, one woman, blood on the streets of revolutionary Paris and, of course, LA GUILLOTINE (as well as terrible family secrets, baby-killing aristocrats and lashings of revenge).

The set pieces are sensational: a cask of wine breaks and everyone laps it up from the streets, mothers squeezing it from handkerchiefs into babies' mouths. The murderous crowd sharpen their weapons on a huge grinder, whipping themselves up into a frenzy of bloodlust. So much blood is spilt that it poisons the water supply (apparently this is true!). There's even a fantastic bitch fight between the devilish knitter Madame Defarge and a doughty Englishwoman. As if these treats aren't enough, A Tale of Two Cities also features one of my favourite heroes, the lawyer Sydney Carton: worn-down, world-weary, drunk, despairing, tortured by what he could have been, made noble by unrequited love.

If you took away the boring bits from Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s other historical novel (also featuring plentiful mob violence) you might come near this for excitement, but not for the emotional intensity of Carton’s heartbreaking story.
 
As Becky says:

I loved A Tale of Two Cities. Sydney Carton, the dissolute lawyer, is one of my favourite Dickens characters (along with David Copperfield from David Copperfield and the horse from The Old Curiosity Shop). Not all the characters in this book have that much depth, but who cares when there is such an excellent narrative arc, and so much galloping, and so many rivers of blood. A great adventure story, but also a book that should be read by anyone who's planning on starting a revolution to overthrow an evil dictatorship, just to make sure they've thought it through.

Next time, there will definitely be more weeping as we move on to Great Expectations. I'm filling up at the thought of it.

Louise Willder, Copywriter

The Anna Karenina Challenge: Part 2

“Each of us has skeletons in his soul, as the English say.”

Hello fellow challengers. Well, if you’re anything like us, you’ll have had a busy few weeks, and reluctantly experienced a little bit of a lull in your reading because of it. But don’t worry – we set ourselves plenty of time for this challenge precisely to allow for a set back or two.

So a quick look at what’s been happening up to now (we’re only up to page 250 but what we have managed to read has been eventful to say the least!)…

Kitty’s health has been failing since her humiliating rejection by Vronsky, and she is advised to go abroad to recover.

Meanwhile, in Saint Petersburg, Vronsky continues to pursue Anna, who, despite an initial attempt to reject him, eventually gives in to his attention. The narrative jumps forward a few months, to a point at which their relationship has been consummated, and Anna is pregnant with Vronsky’s child.

When Vronsky falls from his horse during a race, Anna is unable to hide her distress and when Karenin reminds her of the impropriety of paying too much attention to Vronsky in public, which is fast becoming the subject of gossip, Anna confesses all.

Recounting it like this, it seems pretty simple, doesn’t it: Anna and Vronksy have committed adultery and done a terrible thing? But what’s struck us most in these last few chapters is that morality for Tolstoy isn’t that clear cut...

His narration is such that at no point amid all of the gossip, guilt and lying around their affair is judgment passed on any one character. In fact the narrative, which shifts from character to character in attention and focus, seems engineered precisely to generate opposing views - even Anna herself describes the sensation of loving Vronsky as a “criminal joy”.

Linked to this is the idea of emotional self-knowledge, the conflict between inner and outer lives - something we picked up on at the very beginning of the novel, and something that’s kept coming up since.

Anna and Levin represent the extremes of self-knowledge. Vronksy explains their predicament with absolute resignation: “Whatever our fate is or will be, we have made it.” As a result of this they seem (whether we consider it shameful or not) very public with their affair - so much so that when Vronsky falls from his horse during his race, the strength of Anna’s feelings for him make it physically impossible for her to hide her horror.

In fact, it’s the public nature of their affair seems to bother Karenin more than Anna’s adultery itself, and Tolstoy’s portrayal of him is very much as her cold, restrained counterpart; “not a man, [but] a machine” – someone who believes that “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that might have lain unnoticed” and who finds his own feelings “illogical” and “senseless.”

When Anna does confess, we feel that surely it’s is a truth he can’t ignore? But his response is only that she must maintain the status quo until he can find a suitable solution, ensuring that her admission, her attempts at truth (which is fast becoming the currency of morality in the novel), change nothing about her situation. Meanwhile we see Karenin, whose conscience is theoretically clear of any social wrong, as guilty of a preference for deceit.

That’s quite a cliff hanger to end on so we’re dying to read on! Expect more from us next week and until then happy reading.

Doing Dickens – Part 12

Well knock me down with a weighty tome, we are officially three-quarters of the way through our mammoth attempt to read all of Dickens! I can’t quite believe so many words have gone into my brain. Our latest is the ironically-titled ‘Little’ Dorrit, a monster at 860 pages. It’s the third in Dickens’s ‘condition of England’ novels (after Bleak House and Hard Times) and, in our group’s view, easily the best.

Set partly in the notorious Marshalsea debtors’ prison (which, fact fans, you can still go and see the remains of), the story of pint-sized Amy Dorrit, her imprisoned father and their family’s rapidly changing fortunes has all the darkness, dirt, mystery, meatiness and obsession with money of Bleak House, but combined with the humour and memorable characters of earlier novels. It’s gone straight into my top five so far. These are just some of the reasons why:

• It has proper, complicated, psychologically damaged characters with rich interior lives. Arthur Clenham, ostensibly the hero, seems indelibly scarred by his miserable upbringing. Amy, while unfeasibly good and wise (and whose childlike appearance is somewhat icky), had a serenity that made her very moving to me. Even Flora Finching, Arthur’s ex, once a coquettish beauty and now a faded embarrassment, could have been grotesque, but is portrayed with subtlety and humanity.

• It made me snort with laughter on several occasions, particularly at Mrs Plornish of Bleeding Heart Yard, who convinces herself she can speak Italian in the same way I ‘spoke’ Danish after watching The Killing.

• It has one of the strangest, most unnerving and ambiguous chapters I’ve read in Dickens’s novels – ‘The History of a Self Tormentor’, where an emotionally disturbed woman tells us how she got that way.

• It has an utterly fantastic death scene. I won’t give too much away, but the description of a body in a bath, the ‘white marble veined with red’, is surpassed only by the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist.

• It has one of the loveliest, most moving last lines of a book, ever. I defy you to read it and not get choked up.

Next, we race on to the blood-stained streets of revolutionary Paris and A Tale of Two Cities …

What is the city but the people?

In 2012, as the world’s gaze turned on London for the Olympic year, the British Museum explored this capital city from a slightly different viewpoint – by trying to get inside the heads of the people who lived here over 400 years ago.

In Shakespeare’s Restless World, a series presented on BBC Radio 4 earlier this year and now accompanied by the book (released 27th September), we explored the stories of 20 objects – some grand, some everyday things – that help us imagine what the world looked like to the groundlings inside the Globe theatre around 1600.

I talked to Shakespeare scholars, historians and experts on the fascinating issues these 20 objects raised – everything from exploration and discovery abroad to entertainment, monarchy and even the deadly threat of plague closer to home.

As well as objects from the British Museum, many are from collections across the UK. I have travelled across Britain to get a closer look at what these objects, such as a fork found on the site of the Rose Theatre, a book of royal murder plots, and sunken treasure from Morocco, can reveal to us about daily life, national politics and global economics at the turn of the 16th century.

Throughout the book, there is something else that allows us to picture these turbulent times so vividly: the works of William Shakespeare himself. In the chapters, we delve into his plots and characters, his speeches and soliloquies, to seek glimpses of the uncertain times in which he lived.

Right now, the British Museum is presenting a major exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world, bringing together a vast and eclectic array of Elizabethan and Jacobean objects, including the 20 featured in the radio series and book. This exhibition provides a unique insight into the emerging role of London as a world city four hundred years ago, interpreted through the innovative perspective of Shakespeare’s plays. Featured alongside these objects are digital media and performance created in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

 

Neil MacGregor

Director of the British Museum
Author of Shakespeare’s Restless World
(accompanying the BBC Radio 4 series - Shakespeare’s Restless World)

 

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