Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Curtain Falls: Mutt Ploughman on "Dickensfest V", Part II

"But I am thinking like a lover, or like an ass: which I suppose is pretty nearly the same." - Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

Having just knocked off this year's installment of my annual Dickensfest, I now take the time to post my second and concluding commentary on the novel Nicholas Nickleby and to reaffirm my faith in the worthiness and great aesthetic pleasures to be found in reading the work of the master novelist of the English language, Charles Dickens.

The above quote is a fine example of the humorous tone and recognizable insights into human folly that Charles Dickens laced throughout most of his novels, and certainly in Nickleby. This is one of the many qualities of his work that makes it a great joy to read. The comment above may have been written some time in the 1830s, but does anyone not recognize that it applies today, tomorrow, and to any other time in history? One of the great things about reading Dickens' great novels is to see how much does not change over the course of history or across the boundaries between different countries. I suppose one could get a greater sense of this by reading the literature of nations which are not as closely linked to our own as England was and still is, but there is no one who illuminates these things in quite the same way Dickens did in his novels, which is why they have always been popular throughout the world since they were written and published.

This novel was stronger than I thought it would be. As I mentioned before, there was something that made me slightly reluctant to try Nickleby because of the reference to its 'theatrical' qualities and the fact that it seemed to be a little more light-hearted than his later novels. For some reason, the older, darker and more cynical Dickens novels, written later in his career, have more appeal to me on the surface than some of his earlier and breezier works. And I would say that there is little in this novel which is very dark or even all that serious. Nonetheless, this did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm for the story and the characters once I got into the novel. Dickens remains unmatched for drawing long, complex, and stimulating plots and throwing in multiple twists and turns to keep the reader interested in all events. This novel was no exception. In fact, as I proceeded towards the end of the story, I got the sense that with this novel, Dickens' third, he must have been just coming into his own as a storyteller. You can almost feel his confidence as a novelist expanding as this long story unfolds. I wonder if that sense would be any less refined if I read, for example, his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Time will tell as I will get to that one too, one of these years.

The story more or less carries us through the adventures of the title character and his lovely sister and his mother as they try to make their fortunes in the world up against the negative forces of poverty, injustice and their ruthless and cold relative, Ralph Nickleby, Nicholas' uncle. Early in the novel Ralph ships off the young Nicholas to a boarding school run by the cruel Wackford Squeers in order to be rid of him, and sets up his sister and mother in an empty, run-down building he owns just to keep him out of his hair as well. Nicholas is miserable at the horrid school, where Squeers physically abuses the young boys and ridicules everyone else. After Nicholas witnesses a horrid act of violence against a slow-minded youth named Smike, he cracks, beats Squeers to within an inch of his life, and escapes from the school with Smike to pursue another future any way he can. This sets up the central conflict of the novel, which contrasts the youthful Nicholas' determination to make his way on his own terms and care for his new companion, Smike, no matter what happens, against the calculating, self-indulgent business practices of his older relative, whose only interest is making money for himself at the expense and neglect of all others.

Along the way, Nicholas works in an acting troupe, for a politician (briefly), and finally establishes himself as a clerk in the offices of two twin brothers who are also business partners, and who are kind-hearted and generous with Nicholas and his relations. Meanwhile, his sister Kate attempts to care for herself and her mother while working in a dress-maker's shop and fending off the unwanted attentions of higher-class gentlemen who she comes in contact with through her job and who think they can have their way with her because of her lower position in life. Both Nicholas and his sister suffer through numerous indignities and injustices as they attempt to preserve their dignity and protect those who are important to them in a world where they have been given very little. We see as the novel progresses the strength and determination of both characters, Kate through her quiet pride and physical and inner beauty, and Nicholas with his refusal to back down against seemingly more powerful men who try to push him around because of who he is and who he is not. Nicholas uses his brain and his fists in various episodes, but remains a kind-hearted soul, which is most clearly revealed in his life-long devotion to his doomed friend, Smike, who he saved from the boarding school, and through his love for his sister and his mother.

Dickens' side characters are numerous and multi-colored, and the subplots range from the hilarious to the intensely dramatic: one involves a man living next door to Nicholas and Kate's mother who develops an inexplicable fancy for her, and expresses this by chucking vegetables from his garden over the wall of his yard into theirs as his way of literally showering her with gifts; while another relates a bitter rivalry between two buffoonish upper-class lords who end up settling their dispute with pistols in an open field. Here we find hilarious and ridiculous dinner parties, colorful depictions of stage performances, dramatic death scenes, a terrible and dismal suicide, descriptions of urban squalor and lush country scenes, and warm, feel-good family reunions. And, of course, by the end of the novel, more than one wedding.

To illustrate Dickens' descriptive powers, I offer these two passages as examples. The first depicts the teeming, pre-electric streets of downtown London circa 1838:

"They rattled on through the noisy, bustling, crowded streets of London, now displaying long double-rows of brightly burning lamps, dotted here and there with the chemists' glaring lights, and illuminated besides with the brilliant flood that streamed through the windows of the shops, where sparkling jewelry, silks and velvets of the richest colors, the most inviting delicacies, and the most sumptuous articles of luxurious ornament, succeeded each other in rich and glittering profusion. Streams of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other in the crowd and then hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches that surrounded them on every side."

The second, here, is a very different tone, and describes a graveyard:

"He had to pass a poor, mean burial ground - a dismal place, raised a few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low parapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot, where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frowsy growth, to tell that they had sprung from paupers' bodies, and had struck their roots in the graves of men, sodden, while alive, in streaming courts and hungry drunken dens. And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two - lay thick and close - corrupting in body as they had in mind - a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek by jowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed there, every day, and piled high as their throats."

The hope here is that between these vivid descriptions and the account of the plot summarized above, anyone who reads this will be compelled to pay attention to the works of Charles Dickens, whose novels provide one of the high points of my reading year in and year out, and who will always remain important to readers and to novelists, both novice and veteran, as long as the English language stays alive and well on this Earth.

See you next year for Dickenfest VI!!!!!

3 comments:

Duke Altum said...

"The hope here is that between these vivid descriptions and the account of the plot summarized above, anyone who reads this will be compelled to pay attention to the works of Charles Dickens, whose novels provide one of the high points of my reading year in and year out, and who will always remain important to readers and to novelists, both novice and veteran, as long as the English language stays alive and well on this Earth."
-Mutt Ploughman, on the occasion of Dickenfest V

Your hope has been fulfilled, Mutt... those descriptions you selected (which in itself is no easy task considering the novel was probably something like 800 very dense pages long!) are quite remarkable indeed, and when I read them I thought, "writing like along that makes these novels worthwhile."

Man, Dickens really paints a vivid picture when he wants to. You really get a strong sense of what those pre-Victorian era streets must have been like, in London... doesn't always seem pretty but it certainly does seem colorful, as you said.

A fine synopsis and commentary (two-for-one bonus) on popular Dickens work... have you seen the recent made-for-TV film version?

Which would you say is your favorite Dickens novel so far? Our Mutual Friend, perhaps?

Mutt Ploughman said...

Hey Duke: read your own paragraph below to the end and see if you can do so without laughing:

Your hope has been fulfilled, Mutt... those descriptions you selected (which in itself is no easy task considering the novel was probably something like 800 very dense pages long!) are quite remarkable indeed, and when I read them I thought, "writing like along that makes these novels worthwhile."

Mutt Ploughman said...

To answer your question, by the way: even though i can't remember it all that well, my answer would probably be 'Bleak House'. Something abotu Dickens' zeal to uncover the evils of the legal system and the classic opening descriptions of London engulfed in a metaphorical fog seals it for me. There's one character in there who becomes a lawyer and gets so entangled in a never-ending legal case he kind of gets red-taped literally to death!!!