Our contemporary, and not

By ch 43 or so, the portrait of the whore Nancy's love for and complete subjection to Sykes, her pimp, her lover, and the animal whose shameless violent attacks may yet kill her, is full.

Oliver Twist.

Reading Oliver Twist

I think I have read this before, but it was a long time ago and I really don't remember any of it as I now read along.

I am a couple of dozen pages in and I must say that from his birth onward, whenever Oliver has been onstage (so to speak) so far, he has always bawled his eyes out.

The lad cannot get a moment's peace.

Oh, no. You are so wrong.

Jill Muller's 2003 introduction to the Barnes and Noble Oliver Twist.

The myth of "gentility" as an inborn trait may have helped the author to come to terms with the social humiliations of his youth, but it severely undermines the effectiveness of Oliver Twist as social criticism.

If Oliver is to arouse readers' indignation at the plight of children in workhouses, it is essential that they view him not as a specimen of unique virtue and sensitivity, but as a typical case.

Pshaw.

Her introduction is intelligent and helpful but marred, here and there, with twaddle.

Dickens winding up

A happy ending, of course, for Barnaby Rudge, with betrothals previously prevented now arranged.

Hugh and the hangman are hanged while the legs of the treacherous 'prentice, his greatest pride, are crushed irremediably.

Haredale declaims, "Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honor, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone."

Barnaby is rescued and the treacherous Miggs, attempting to resume her job at the Vardens', is cast out.

Interestingly, D found it good for Haredale to kill Sir John Chester in the penultimate chapter.

Rounding out the happy endings.

Except that Gordon, surely guilty, ought not to have been acquitted in his trial for High Treason.

Dickens v. the rabble

In the later chapters of Barnaby Rudge, D repeatedly portrays the rioters as violent, murderous criminals bent more on limitless destruction and anarchy than any real political goal.

Their actions repeatedly stem from hatred of the authorities and the haves - however little or much they have - , and it is these latter, persons with property, who have his undivided and wholly unabashed sympathy and loyalty.

Along with defenders of property, order, and authority.

Dickens a socialist?

Not on your life.

Which is not at all to deny his endless, heartfelt, and sincere sympathy for the deserving poor or his support for both private charity and state action aimed at relief within the context of a wholly undisturbed capitalism.

Who was it, which converted red, wrote that the entire red plague of the 20th Century was based on blind hatred of the bourgeoisie?

Oh, yes.

Francois Furet.

Though he was certainly not alone in that.

Of course, that plague was over by 1990.

A whole generation of adults was born and came to maturity after that.

Barnaby Rudge

By the end of Chapter 32 the romantic, marital prospects of the two young men, Joe Willet and Ned Chester, and of the objects of their respective loves, Dolly Varden and Emma Haredale, are in ruins, brought about by lies told to fools by one of their fathers, Sir John Chester.

With Chapter 33 the narrative leaps forward 5 years.

In the next few chapters, D introduces us to George Gordon, not Lord Byron, and the movement of Protestant reaction he led, whose disquiet eventually led to the Gordon Riots.

Readers of D always find new occasions to pause and consider whether he might agree with J. S. Mill's public declaration, "The poor, in the lump, are bad," though perhaps tempted to extend the observation beyond that class without a specified limit.

And how near a man can come to combining personal misanthropy and personal humanitarianism.

Contempt for the rabble and support for democratic reform.

And the like.

D's Gordon seems a gentleman more than half sincere, but partly a crank not entirely taken in by himself.

His El Segundo, Gashford, seems a better educated and even more fraudulent Gantry playing Rasputin to Gordon's Czar.

A public intellectual

A longtime friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle had a widespread audience, a widespread influence in the Britain of his age.

A personal acquaintance of J. S. Mill - whose maid burned the only manuscript of C's history of the French Revolution - , Dickens read him as research for both his only two historical novels.

For his treatment of the Gordon Riots, D was influenced by C's essay on Chartism.

Chapter I is full of bombastic clichés appealing to smug, middle class moralism and assurance of class superiority.

Class moral superiority.

The perfect tone for a public intellectual.

Wikipedia says C was a Scottish philosopher, but never in my academic career was he even mention by anyone in philosophy.

It is perhaps worth noting that in a quarrel over Negro slavery C and Mill were on opposite sides, and regarding the handling of a rebellion in Jamaica, Mill and some others argued the governor of the colony ought to be hanged for the bloody suppression he ordered, while Carlyle and some others defended the governor.

Dickens, no admirer of the mob or the rabble, was on Carlyle's side in the Jamaica dispute, though the sympathy his novels display for the innocent and best among the lower orders has led some to try to claim him as a socialist, though he never said he was that or wrote in its favor, or against capitalism per se.

Mill was a longtime opponent of slavery, serfdom, and what he called "the subjection of women", and a defender of what we today call democracy, a misnomer for representative government.

Carlyle was on the opposite side of all of that, denigrating the black race, defending slavery and serfdom, and urging some sort of aristocracy in the sense of "the rule of the best".

The windup

Clennam and Little Dorrit?

Really?

And the house collapsing on Blandois?

So much for the wicked witch, eh?

Reaping the Whirlwind

Part 2, Chapter 26, Little Dorrit.

People as ships, the entire first paragraph on the damage done by the economic collapse and literal suicide of Merdle.

His bank and many ventures rest, it seems, on forgery and fraud.

Highly expressive.

Business failures everywhere.

In the same chapter Arthur Clennam enters the Marshalsea as a prisoner for debt, having invested everything on the urging of Pancks in Merdle enterprises.

The History of a Self-Tormentor

Part 2, ch 21, Little Dorrit.

Miss Wade is quite the little psycho.

The Purpose Driven Life

Part 2, ch 14.

Fanny tells Amy she could be a thorn in the side of Mrs. Merdle if she married her son.

And that she is better fitted for such a life than any other.

"I would oppose her in everything, and compete with her. I would make it the business of my life."

What is it with this persistent metaphor of people as boats of different types?

Little Dorrit.

A dialect of the poor?

Part 2, chapter 11, Little Dorrit's second letter to Clennam.

She writes like, well, Dickens.

In fact, she and her family, and indeed all characters, speak equally well. Or nearly.

We are far from Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, who needed to learn English nearly from scratch to impersonate a lady.

CD does love a windfall

Chapters 35 and 36.

Dorritt pere is as disappointing faced with sudden, unearned, and gratuitous riches as he was in his rather more deserved poverty.

Reading Little Dorritt.

Tattycoram's rebellion

is CD's own.

Ch 17, Little Dorrit.

The inmates of Marshalsea

Dickens is endlessly sympathetic to the downtrodden who are, in his eyes, decent, responsible, enterprising, and upright - though only less so toward persons of like character who are not at all, or not much, downtrodden.

Even if and after they become extraordinarily rich by one sort of windfall or another, legally and respectably, and take up lives of leisure.

And he jeers at and satirizes not only the villains of his works but also those deficient in character in lesser degree, regardless of their social station.

In his works he makes sure to show us characters of both sorts all over the social map.

The contrast is stark, for example, between his attitude toward and treatment of Little Dorrit and his attitude toward and treatment of her father and the rest of her family, as well as the denizens of Marshalsea of whom most are their admirers and supporters.

I can see many reasons why some people might think of this as perhaps his finest book.

Not the least is the quality of the writing, itself.

And though some, it is said, find it rather darker than much else of his, it is all the same quite funny in many places.

Journal of the Plague Year

I have abandoned this book out of boredom and irritation at the narrator's annoying, though entirely believable and appropriate to the time and place, rather Calvinist Protestant Christian piety.

I have turned to a volume of Dickens, whose books, Pickwick Papers aside, have never bored me and whose first person narrators have never displayed annoying forms of piety.

Chapter 65

What?

You needn't be a philosopher to be happy?

Amazing.

Oh, but you do need a large inheritance.

In a pinch, it can settle on your intended, or your wife.

But you must marry for love, all the same, as do all the good folks at the end of this book.

A happy ending.

Nickleby.

John Bowdie's rescue

From Squeers's school, is to feed the boys and turn them loose in the fields of winter.

It is, after all, 1839, and the world is such hell that that seems like rescue.

Nickleby, chapter 64.

The fate of humanity

Reading Nickleby, I have been stricken with admiration for the enormous talent and sympathetic knowledge of humanity in an author so young.

And then I thought of novels written by machines, by computers, by AIs.

And I thought mankind might die of despair, humiliated by its inferiority to its own creations.

No need for any "rise of the machines" or Cylon wars.

Nicholas Nickleby, Chapter 55

What?

No one has murdered Mrs. Nickleby?

Oh, in a book chock full of fortune hunters of all kinds, including Miss Bray, Nicholas seems the first, maybe the only, person to feel this is shameful.

He overdoes it to the point of being a barrier to natural happiness.

So much so that he urges his mother not to encourage the feelings of Kate and Frank Cheeryble for each other, she being poor and he being so rich.

Even the idea of such a marriage, brought to the attention of the C brothers, would expose them to only too understandable suspicion of fortune hunting, he thinks, he and Kate and their mother.

And the shame he feels at the bare thought of that suspicion is too much for him.

Reading Nickleby.