Why I love/hate Charles Dickens

I have a love-hate relationship with Charles Dickens.  The first novel I read of his was Nicholas Nickolby, which I enjoyed thoroughly.  It was dark and disturbing, shot through with savage satire.  It was long and at times heavy going, but I got through it, and looked forward to reading more of his work but not immediately.

I went on to read Bleak House, Domby and Son, and Oliver Twist – enjoyable all in their way.  However, also in their way is their author’s style that makes the experience rather heavy going. 

I would recommend Dickens to a reader but I would caution that he is an acquired taste.

If I were to suggest an introduction to Dickens from his work, I would probably recommend A Tale of Two Cities.  It was the first of his novels produced for weekly serialisation.  His earlier serial novels had been meandering monthly affairs in which he cultivated and indulged his distinctive narrative style.

A Tale of Two Cities remains distinctly Dickensian but there is less of it than usual.  Its length is less challenging than the customary triple deckers of the period, but more than that, Dickens displays an astonishing restraint in his awe-inspiring command of rhetoric, narrative devices and comic capers. 

Compared to the concise style of A Tale of Two Cities, his earlier works begin to look as if they are one-third story and two-thirds padding to fill the allotted magazine space for a monthly serial.

As I say, Dickens is an acquired taste.  He can spin a long and intriguing yarn.  If any young reader was thinking of dabbling in Dickens for a spot of recreational reading, I would suggest trying A Tale of Two Cities first.  One might say that along with Oliver Twist, it is the Dickens-lite of his novels. 

It is an historical romance set in the time of the French Revolution.  It has for its hero the brilliant Sidney Carton.  There is a noble sacrifice.  One could easily be seduced by Dickens deft hand and you may well find yourself hooked upon harder works such as Little Dorrit, possibly the most diabolically Dickensian novel of all.

A Dickens novel is not to be feared but it is something to remain wary of.  I can read only two or three of his novels a decade.

Do not get me wrong, I think Dickens deserves thoroughly his reputation as the greatest of Victorian writers.  His astonishing output was influential and far-reaching.  I acknowledge him as the godfather of pulp; I could probably sing his praises until kingdom come.

However, for all his command of rhetorical devices, narrative frames, campaigning crusades, social reform, and savage and sophisticated satire, I find his humour can be somewhat lowbrow and populist – particularly his odd and sometimes grotesque characters with their comic capers and idiosyncrasies.

If I had to choose between reading a novel by Dickens or by the similarly prolific Mary Braddon or Ellen Wood, I would most probably choose one of the female authors.

However, if it were a choice between Dickens and his tiresome protégé and sometime collaborator Wilkie Collins, then Dickens would win without a doubt.

On shaking hands

I dislike shaking hands.  People who shake hands should learn that not everyone is comfortable with the custom.

People cough and sneeze into their hands; they probe their nose, ears and other orifices.  From puberty to beyond pension age some men – if not most – experience an extreme difficulty in not fondling themselves frequently.  Not everyone washes his or her hands after using the toilet.  Some people bite their nails.  These and many other things are among the reasons why I dislike shaking hands.

When someone offers me their hand to shake, I simply explain that I do not shake hands and try not to be drawn into any arguments over it. 

However, some people who like to shake hands have a problem with people who do not.  They seem to think that the person offered a hand to shake is obliged to accept it.

It is just a friendly gesture, they say.  Quite so, I may observe, however, I do not shake hands.

They will take offence if I should refuse, they say, by which point I am already offended by the uncomfortable position they have just pressed me into. 

No offence is intended in my personal choice of not shaking hands.  It is a general policy.  If a person chooses to take offence by my preference not to shake hands, then so be it.  They are obviously quick to take offence and their so-called friendly gesture is but a shallow sham.

It is said that the handshake evolved out of European diplomacy around the time of the Tudors.  The gesture was to show that the envoys came without weapons in their hands, presumably daggers or poisons.

Before this, presumably, acts of supplication such as bowing and curtsying alone sufficed.

However, that was then and this is now, and I am reminded of a line from an Undisputed Truth track Smiling Faces Sometimes: ‘Beware of the handshake that hides a snake.’

As long as the person has not kicked up much of a fuss, I am more than happy to nod or bow one’s head as a common courtesy instead of shaking a hand, if they should desire.

Words such as ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ are as common in my vocabulary as ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ are for others, so common courtesy, tact and politeness has never been much of an issue for me.

One of the areas I am looking for work is in customer service where decorum is an essential.  There are not any supermarkets that I visit where the assistants expect me to shake their hands.  Nor is it practicable to shake hands with a customer service advisor who phones me unexpectedly or otherwise.

If one were to be fortunate enough to be invited to a job interview, one would explain immediately ‘Sir or madam, I prefer not to shake hands’, and hope they have understanding enough not to press me deeply on the issue.

However, if I were pressed I would allude briefly to the hygienic reasons given above and suggest that I was mildly OCD about it.

As with bowing and curtseying to royalty, outside of diplomatic circles, I think handshaking should be left to the discretion of the individual and not an obligation. 

And now that I have that off my chest, I wash my hands of the issue.

The Battle of the School tie

I do not wear ties.  I find it more comfortable to wear an open neck shirt.  I think there may have been a couple of occasions in my youth when my mum insisted I wear a tie, but in general, the clothing accessory was never an essential for my daily wardrobe.

I am now cringing at the memory of having worn in early youth a faux bow on a thin piece of elastic that was pulled over the head and worn around the neck.  I could not have been more than four or five years of age. 

However, when I achieved secondary school age a tie formed part of my daily uniform.  Although it was in no way an essential item of clothing unlike shoes or trousers, for instance, it was deemed by the school as a necessity to be worn on all occasions - physical exercise and sport excepted.

I may have taken to wearing ties, perhaps, if one’s teachers had not been insistent upon wearing it knotted at the collar with one’s top button fastened.  I would bite off a button or two from the top of my shirts and leave my tie at home.

A tie would be presented to me each morning during form registration and a battle of wills would commence.  Their position was that a tie was part of the school uniform and must be worn by all pupils as it made the individual and the body of students look smart and orderly.  The school tie, it was claimed, helped to maintain a smart, orderly and disciplined uniformed identity.

My position, with the greatest respect, was that I found wearing a tie restrictive and uncomfortable.  My schooldays were far from the best days of my life (my days away from school were far better).  I attended with a reluctance just to keep my mother happy.  My teachers were aware fully of the torments I suffered. 

By my presence daily, they could see how willing I was to attend.  I was happy to attend school tieless and participate in the lessons; or I would be less than happy to attend school, forced to wear a tie and sit idle in either classroom or hall. 

Wearing a tie, I would do no work, remaining idle and possibly ignorant; without a tie, my behaviour improves immediately and I become an active and productive participant. 

As a compromise, as long as I could wear an open necked shirt, with time, the wearing of a tie could become a daily delight.

The compromise was accepted.  The battle of the school tie was settled without bloodshed and a moral victory for both parties.  Time may be a great healer; however, it never made the wearing of a tie a daily delight for me.

It may be a form of post-traumatic stress or it may be just an old man being silly but on occasions, usually in the warmer months but not exclusively, I still get flashbacks of that conflict whenever I see office workers with their top button fastened and tie knotted at the collar.

I have not worn a tie since my long gone schooldays and I hope I am never called upon to do so.

How Greta Garbo helped me to be left alone

I had a stressful and sometimes traumatic childhood.  I was bullied until I left school.  School was something of an ordeal for me and I could not wait to leave. 

Home life was less than ideal and perhaps I should have left home to search for gold on the pavements of London, but I presumed that in larger cities my life experiences to date would increase exponentially.  To move to a smaller town was likewise out of the question for the same reasons ironically. 

So I decided to brave it out on my native heath.

As a child, I was somewhat nervous.  As well as other speech impediments, particularly sounding as if every uttered syllable was soaked in saliva and showering whoever and whatever was within spitting distance when I spoke, I developed a stammer due to all the taunts and ridicule I endured.  It was a rather frustrating period in one’s life.

My secondary school arranged for me to receive speech therapy, which took care of my speech impediments.  My nervous stammer remained which worsened the more frustrated and nervous I became.

One continued with one’s breathing exercises and trying to remain calm if provoked.  One was advised to walk away rather than stand one’s ground if dragged into disputes with one’s peers.  One should rise above them and not react to their intelligence insulting taunts and jeers.  Excellent advice, easier said than done.

When travelling down to Dorset or up to London by car, I had to endure my stepbrother’s musical tastes.  He had a penchant for classical music and opera.  On such occasions, I would amuse myself by gazing out of the back window and into the following car, trying hard not to blink or smile. 

It became a favourite pastime of mine.  I would think of Greta Garbo at the end of Queen Christina, and away I would gaze.  Sometimes I would call to mind the various poems and speeches contained in the Bell’s Elocution that I used as part of my speech therapy, and mouth them silently or quietly.

I thought I was just killing time with an amusing game of blink with the driver of whatever vehicle happened to be behind our car during otherwise tiresome journeys.  However, I discovered that hours of gazing dreamily into the eyes of the general public brought with it some benefits.  I developed a look of general indifference that I could change into one of extreme ennui in a nano-second.  A look of ‘dumb insolence’ as one teacher expressed it.

One day I found myself in a position from which I could not walk away.  The big bad wolves were huffing and puffing, chest beating and giving it large.  I followed parental advice as much as I could and bit my tongue rather than choke on the words I would be unable to get out.  I took deep, slow breaths and struggled to keep calm.  My eyes I cast downwards.  Cicero’s In Catiline came to mind.  I raised my head and eyes slowly and gave my tormentors the full silent, silver screen goddess treatment.  Eventually I had enough of all the huffing and puffing, and very calmly cracked a quip with such insouciance that my tongue suddenly struck confusion and fear into the hearts of the big bad wolves that they withdrew to lick their wounds.

From then on, slowly life began to become less traumatic.

A load on Trollope

I have a nasty cold coming on – possibly flu.  I set myself the task of writing a one thousand-word essay today but I doubt if I will accomplish it.

Earlier in the year, I read Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Towers.  In between reading the two novels, I dipped into his autobiography in which he revealed his disciplined writing method.

When deciding upon a second career as a novelist with the purpose of making a living, Trollope devised for himself a strict regime of writing daily, and kept a record of his progress in a diary for the purpose.  Usually he write an average of ten thousand words per week.

He worked for the Post Office, and had to travel around Ireland and England writing reports for his superiors.  At first he travelled by horseback until the advent of the steam age, when naturally he took the train.

It occurred to him that he could turn the time he travelled idly to some account, so he made himself a ‘tablet’ (from which the word tabloid is derived) and used this a form of writing desk.  At first, he felt conscious of his literary pretensions in front of his fellow travellers (apparently farm workers) but soon got over this realising that he could write legibly.

Here in his own words is his account of his method:

.  I had previously to this arranged a system of task-work for myself, which I would strongly recommend to those who feel as I have felt, that labour, when not made absolutely obligatory by the circumstances of the hour, should never be allowed to become spasmodic.  There was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office.  I was free to be idle if I pleased.  But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession, I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.  When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work.  In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.  According to the circumstances of the time,--whether my other business might be then heavy or light, or whether the book which I was writing was or was not wanted with speed,--I have allotted myself so many pages a week.  The average number has been about 40.  It has been placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112.  And as a page is an ambiguous term, my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.  In the bargains I have made with publishers I have,--not, of course, with their knowledge, but in my own mind,--undertaken always to supply them with so many words, and I have never put a book out of hand short of the number by a single word.  I may also say that the excess has been very small.  I have prided myself on completing my work exactly within the proposed dimensions.  But I have prided myself especially in completing it within the proposed time,--and I have always done so.  There has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.

Although I have no plans to churn out intriguing romances for serialisation in the magazines of the day, I found Trollope’s prudent and sagacious words an inspiration.  I am now writing six 500-word essays and one 1000-word essay a week – just for the exercise and much needed practice.

I began on Michaelmas Day, proposing to practice daily until Lady Day next year.  Each month that passes, I intend to increase my output by a thousand or two words.  Actually, I tend to write more than the minimum words per week I allot myself with extracurricular miscellaneous essays.

This project of practice essays I call The Novice Papers or less grandly The Novice, in a nod to that great essayist of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, who produced a series of satirical papers called The Adventurer, The Rambler and The Idler.

Come Lady Day, when my apprenticeship will be over, I will possibly embark upon another project of literary endeavours, this time with an eye on publication.  So in the New Year I will have to find the money for magazine subscriptions and find out what this twenty-first century is all about.

I tend to read nineteenth century pulp and eighteenth century poetry, so I have only a rough idea what modern journalists write about – celebrity cellulite, sunbathing royals, reality programmes, dodgy politicians and even dodgier journalists, newspaper editors and proprietors.

Anyway, thanks to Anthony Trollope, it looks like I have managed to find something to write about in one thousand words.  Admittedly four hundred and twenty-three of them were Trollope’s own words, but I have flu and I am desperate not to let myself down despite my ailment.

As I have now less than a hundred words to go, I am gazing at the brandy bottle, and thinking of the honey and hot lemon I will have before I climb into bed.

I am wondering what I might read tomorrow and what I might write.  Whatever it is I write it is only going to be five hundred words, unless I am carried away with the topic and myself.

Good night.