The Pickwick Papers - My Charles Dickens #12in12

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836), Charles Dickens

The Posthumous Papers of thePickwick Club was the fictional publication that really made the name of Charles Dickens famous. After his reasonable success with descriptions and written sketches of London life (Sketches by Boz) in 1833-36, Dickens gained a popular following and the beginnings of a loyal audience thanks to the increasing success of The Pickwick Papers.

His publishers commissioned Dickens to provide the text for a picture novel about unsuccessful, bumbling sportsmen, with the pictures supplied by Robert Seymour. But rather than wait to be given illustrations to describe, Dickens began writing his descriptions before anything had been drawn and so, increasingly through The Pickwick Papers, his words took precedence over the illustrations. Seymour, who had originally proposed the idea of a series of illustrations of city-dwellers inexpertly hunting etc., shot himself before the second instalment's publication – though that probably wasn't just down to Dickens's increasing level of artistic control.

The collection of illustrations and story-captions detailing the exploits of the Pickwick Club eventually attracted a wide readership – and it's easy to see why. While not quite the soap opera of its day, The Pickwick Papers is a running light comedy, with each instalment dropping its increasingly familiar (dare I say predictable?) characters into fresh situations full of potential mishaps and fumbles.

Handily, the members of the Pickwick Club take copious notes of their bungled adventures and the mishaps they endure. A few select members, who seem to have unlimited reserves of money and free time, set out with Pickwick to discover curious things about England, people and life in general. The exception is Pickwick's manservant, Sam Weller, credited with much of the book's popular success – in part, no doubt, due to his down-to-earth worldliness, as compared with Pickwick's utter cluelessness. Think Jeeves and Wooster, but with a cockney Stephen Fry who doesn't have that smug, quietly superior face.

The Pickwick narrator's style is either naïve or sly, often telling us one thing and probably meaning quite another. Much of the comedy of the book lies in the discrepancy between, on one hand, the narrator's interpretation of the notes taken by the Pickwickians, and on the other hand, the likely reality of the situation. For example, while staying in the house of a regional newspaper editor, Pott, who spends the evening reading his editorials to Pickwick, Pickwick has his eyes closed in rapturous enjoyment of the prose...or has fallen asleep in boredom. Here is a narrator who, like the world of people he describes, seems to have fallen for the legend of Pickwick's intellect and popularity, interpreting his notes accordingly. In reality, Pickwick is a bumbling, inept man with more money and self-importance than sense.

Dickens' audience may have also fallen for Pickwick's charm, but either way the novel's popularity rose and made Dickens a household name. Not only that, but The Pickwick Papers gave Dickens his first experience of writing weekly instalments of novels – a pattern he followed for years afterward. It's a light read, quicker perhaps than some of Dickens' later work, but no weaker for it. While not so mature or impressive as, say, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers is a solid debut into long-form fiction.

Bleak House - My Charles Dickens #12in12

Bleak House (1852-3), Charles Dickens

Unlike previous entries in the #12in12 Charles Dickens project (The Chimes and Hard Times), March's (delayed) instalment is rather long. This month it's Bleak House, published in twenty monthly issues in 1852 – 1853 – in my defence, it took Dickens much longer to write it than it has taken me to read it.

Bleak House came just before Hard Times in Dickens' writing career, although it feels much more mature – like the achievement of a much more accomplished writer. Perhaps that's because any moral or ethical point Dickens is making with Bleak House is much more subtle than the hammer blows of Hard Times. This makes Bleak House a subtle, complicated and downright imposing book.

The house of the title, Bleak House in St Albans, is a warren of twisty, interconnected corridors, rooms heaped upon one another and obscure little windows. It's a convoluted jumble of a building, presided over by a pair of charmingly selfless characters – John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson – and is the ideal object for Dickens to use as a title. The house itself isn't all that miserable (in fact, it's usually quite pleasant, and the northern house named after it in later chapters is especially pleasant), but it is a perfect reflection of much the book's content.

The twisty corridors of Bleak House, which sounds like the sort of house where someone could easily wander about getting lost and going round in circles, are reflected in the goings-on of the Court of Chancery in London. Until 1875, the Court of Chancery was the part of the British justice system overseen by the Lord Chancellor and, in this case, often concerned not with criminal cases but with cases involving inheritance, commerce and land ownership. Complaints about the slow and drawn-out procedures of the Chancery Court had been common since Tudor times, and Dickens not only lambasts them in his introduction but also provides a mirror for them in not only the structure of the physical Bleak House, but in the structure of the novel Bleak House itself. It isn't without humour, and Dickens clearly takes delight in spinning out descriptions of just how long Chancery takes over resolving the now infamous case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce:

'Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made party to Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suits. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legions of bills in the suit have been transformed into bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.'

Like the physical house, Bleak House the novel has two characters presiding over it: Esther Summerson and an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. The two of them take it in turns to tell the story and so we see Jarndyce and Jarndyce from the perspective of a ward of the court (apparently orphaned and abandoned Esther) and also from inside the court itself, as well as from wide-ranging perspectives outside – parties to the case and otherwise.

It's this wide-ranging perspective that I really admire about Dickens' writing here, especially in Bleak House. I've said before that his ability to write a striking character is his great strength, and in Bleak House Dickens has excelled himself. There are a great many characters, in a narrative that spans England geographically and socially – from Jo the crossing sweeper to high society's Lady Dedlock – and yet every one of those characters is sharply drawn and memorable. Even with a few words, Dickens creates a loving portrait of some person, and that person can be recognised when they return ten chapters later (as they have a habit of doing with this twisty, jumbled narrative) and appear just as fresh.

There's much more to Bleak House than the Court of Chancery and the social satire Dickens lays in with (Chancery isn't the only thing to be satirised; do-gooding philanthropists so focused on foreign shores they neglect their own offspring also take some flak) – though whether it really needs to be so long is another matter. The middle drags somewhat, and I hope Dickens won't mind me saying that the introduction of a detective late on smacks of an author needing to quickly tie up several lose plot ends with a character deliberately setting out to discover and expose the truth. Even so, the detective, Mr Bucket, must be one of the most finely-characterised plot devices in Western literature.

Like the physical house, the novel Bleak House has a dozen or more little compartments and rooms, all huddled up on top of one another, and connected by twisting corridors; the reader may get lost wandering the house, but Dickens as guide makes sure each room is beautifully decorated and somehow reminds the reader of the route back.

Book Review - A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, by Jenny Uglow

Charles II faced some hefty challenges when he officially become King in 1660. The country had just spent ten years ruled by parliament without any royal authority, the memory (and threat) of civil war was still fresh and Charles himself was returning from ten years of exile with a court keen for revenge and a restoration of their former lands and privilege.

After the execution of his father, King Charles I, in 1649, Charles II was more aware than most of our kings that ruling a nation is a balancing act between different parties. Push one of them too far, or refuse to give way enough, and the whole system can erupt in your face. Charles I found this to his cost, when parliament tried and executed him for crimes against his people. The idea of a king entering into a contract with his people, a two-way agreement, became current and much more accepted – there was currency in the idea that a king only ruled with the permission of his people, as represented by parliament, and after 1649 a king had increasingly limited power without his parliament.



This balancing act is explored by Jenny Uglow in her book covering the first decade of Charles II's reign (1660-1670), A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. The infamous Merry Monarch of folk legend is shown as a human being, made wary of others by his years traipsing around European courts. Uglow shows him as an expert poker player; inscrutable, calculating and forever keeping cards close to his chest despite his outward shows of merriment. It's a concept running through the book's design, with the six sections named The Deal, Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and The Clearance.

It is this gambler's calculation that Uglow strives to bring to the fore, highlighting Charles' secret deals or risk-taking again and again. In this story, the court's habit of gambling vast sums begins to look like a symptom of following an easygoing, faintly irresponsible king, and not the other way around. For all of Uglow's striving, though, her Charles never quite comes across as a consummate gambler; it's an interpretation that is valuable, certainly, but seems to be missing something.

That's not to say that Uglow makes Charles look carefree; quite the opposite. His merry-making and pleasure-taking is merely a diversion from the many hours he puts into the work of state. Uglow's Merry Monarch is a man seriously engaged and concerned with the running of his country, a genuine public servant, aware of the new importance of the parliament – and constantly feeling its purse strings like a noose. But he can also enjoy his life and can be seen to enjoy it (special attention is paid to several of Charles' mistresses, and the eldest of his illegitimate children, the Duke of Monmouth). He works hard and plays hard, sometimes using his play as a means to arrange secret treaties and affairs of state.

Charles' method of rule – that balancing act – was in contrast with that of his cousin, Louis XIV, who, during the course of this book, manages to establish an absolute monarchy over France and becomes the dominant power in Europe. Louis acts as a weight in the grand scales of Europe, to be weighed against Holland (including the future William III) and England, but also as an example of what the people and parliament of England fear – a tyrant on the throne, with no representatives of popular opinion. It's what the people fear, but also a leadership style preferred by Charles I, and Charles II's struggles with parliament (mostly over funding his costly wars with the Dutch) indicate how attractive the concept must also have been to him.

Louis XIV wouldn't have tolerated the scheming and factionalism that is rife in Charles II's court. But this courtly intrigue, and its overspill into the parliament, makes A Gambling Man that much more fascinating – not only is this a biography of a king's reign, it's an insight into the politics of a decade, delving into the birth of modern party politics and the gradual demise of individual royal authority.

Uglow's book colourfully illustrates the the first decade of Charles II's reign, balancing the risks taken by a monarch holding onto power with documenting the rise of parliamentary politics and the gradual transfer of power.

Hard Times: For These Hard Times - my Charles Dickens 12in12

Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens

More commonly known simply as Hard Times, Charles Dickens' shortest novel, Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), seems an especially fitting novel for Britain in 2012. The themes and ideas of Dickens' most socially-aware work resonate with a nation in the grip of austerity measures and tough economic decisions, knowing that the times ahead are likely to be even harder.



If you've read or seen Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), you won't be surprised that both novels were published in weekly installments in Household Words – a serial edited by our own Charles Dickens – before being published in novel format. Hard Times came from earlier in the year (April to August), while Gaskell's story ran through the later months (September – January 1855). Both are set in fictional northern English towns; grime-smeared and smoke-obscured, heaving with the belches of industrial productivity, busy with the bustle of faceless hordes of generic workers. The one, Gaskell's Milton-Northern, probably based on Manchester; the other, Dickens' Coketown, most likely to be Preston – both with names indicating their lack of individual character, functional natures and industrial purposes.

Hard Times is very much about that functional nature and the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working people. From the very opening, the reader is accosted with the educational system (you'd call it a 'life philosophy', except that sounds a bit too fluffy and friendly) of Thomas Gradgrind Snr. This is a system he applies to his own children's upbringing, and to the children attending the school he pays for – a system perfectly suited to a town whose every movement is geared toward industrial manufacture and commerce, where people are expected to buy for the lowest price and sell elsewhere at the highest. It's a society that knows the price of everything, but has lost sight of the value of anything (sound familiar?): Gradgrind is ever-ready to 'weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to'.

Gradgrind's 'system' relies on fact: 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but facts!', a schoolboy is told. Fancy, imagination, wonder and other 'nonsense' are to be excluded from thought. Hard Times charts the failure of this system in two of Gradgrind's children – I say 'children', to him they're 'models of his system', but to anyone else they're his eldest son and daughter: Tom (Jnr) and Louisa.

Bustling around these children, and equally deprived of imagination, wonder and fancy, are the workers of Coketown. In referring to these people as 'Hands', Dickens simply highlights both the way the workers are regarded by their masters and the idea that the workers have lost any sense of individuality. In losing fancy (the sworn enemy of fact) to join the horde of workers, forced to work in order to live and scraping by on a wage thought too generous by their wealthy masters, they have lost that which made them human.

In writing Hard Times, Dickens didn't try very hard to make his point subtle or well-hidden. The cry for social reform and better treatment of the poor calls from every page, and readers should be left in no doubt as to the sorry state of the working class of Coketown. This is Dickens' sledgehammer to the dehumanising rock face of industrialisation and capitalism. Unlike the poor, the wealthy are individuals and their seemingly unbreakable influence over events (and the lives of the poor) is similarly under attack in Hard Times.

That's not to say Hard Times is unrelentingly bleak or, er, hard. Many of the characters have become hardened by circumstances, but humanity is not without redemption. There is at least one Hand, Rachel, who shines as a beacon of compassion and love – along with Sissy, one of the children from Gradgrind's school, she serves as the impossibly good-natured and loving women in an otherwise harsh, masculine world.

Josiah Bounderby - bully of humility and self-made man

On top of that, never let it be said that Dickens isn't funny. Hard Times has some wonderful moments of light and dry humour. Josiah Bounderby, the 'bully of humility', owner of banks and factories, is a case in point. He is the book's self-made man, a much-vaunted claim which Bounderby spends most of Hard Times vaunting, his pride at having improved himself from a situation far worse than that of the Hands is palpable and unbounded. It's also hilariously exposed as a lie, displaying and enhancing the disgraceful hypocrisy of the wealthy masters of industrialised Britain (and who says that ends in 1854?).

Hard Times is a plea for the human spirit, a warning against crushing the innate and vital spark of human existence. Even though it was written nearly 160 years ago, Hard Times: For These Hard Times is still pertinent, and has a perennial relevance to all post-Industrial Revolution societies.

The image of Josiah Bounderby comes from this site, which features a few comic extracts from Dickens' work.

The Chimes - my Charles Dickens 12in12

The Chimes (1844), Charles Dickens

You've probably heard of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens; it's among his most famous works, and one of the most adapted. So even if you haven't read it, you probably know what happens. Just in case you don't, here's the basic story...in poor cartoon form.



This isn't a chance for me to write about A Christmas Carol – instead I'm going to write about Dickens' second Christmas story: the lesser-known The Chimes. Dickens wrote five short stories for the festive period, between 1843 and 1848, with A Christmas Carol being only the first. The Chimes is the second (1844), and although they aren't connected, it has some features in common with A Christmas Carol.

There are no ghosts, such a significant part of A Christmas Carol – and haven't ghosts always been an important part of Christmas? But even though it isn't the dead returning to life, The Chimes does involve some supernatural interference in the lives of mortals, and if that's not Christmas-y, I don't know what is. Rather like the earlier book, Dickens uses supernatural intervention to alter the attitudes of humans who've got the wrong idea about something. You can call it a cheap trick if you like, a failure to find sufficient psychological reason for his characters' actions, I'm saying nothing.

Our central character in The Chimes, Trotty Veck, unlike Carol's Scrooge, is poor and fairly sympathetic. He's a porter, who hangs around outside a church waiting for work carrying things – anything, really, but mostly boxes and messages. His two comforts while waiting and being bashed about by the wind are the friendly chimes of the bells and the thought that his daughter will be bringing his lunch later.

Already – nothing much has happened yet – Dickens has made his sympathies pretty clear. Here's a working-class, widower father struggling to claw together enough money for himself and his daughter, in contrast with the money-hoarding, bachelor Scrooge of Carol. What follows is hardly a hymn to the working classes, nor an outright attack on those wealthier than them, but instead something rather more subtle. More subtle and, of course, more supernatural.

The first two chapters (or Quarters, as Dickens names them) read as a satire of an upper-middle class that believes it knows both the working class and what is good for that class. The paternalistic (and, by modern standards, patronising) MP declares himself a 'Friend and Father of the Poor', while agreeing a harsh jail sentence for a poor man caught stealing bread for his infant daughter. The Alderman lists the things he is in favour of 'putting down', including the 'cant in vogue about Starvation'. He doesn't want to 'put down' starvation, of course, but the nonsense that the poor are anywhere near starving. These are powerful men, keen to show that they understand the sort of people they are dealing with, and have the power/ability to solve the problems of their lives. Alderman Cute is even at pains to appear to speak to the poor in their own language, or at least in a vernacular to which he has special access among the privileged classes. The MP (a baronet) criticises Trotty for owing a small sum at his local shop – it being bad form to owe debts into the New Year – while he goes about paying off his own rather larger debts. Both men make themselves increasingly ridiculous with their self-importance (accompanied by a failure to make a beneficial difference to any poor person's life).

In fact, 'the poor' take a bit of a battering in The Chimes, with Trotty left bewildered and confused by fast-talking rich men, and persuaded (by them) of his and his class' inferiority. He spends most of the book being told off by somebody, poor bloke. Here's something that I suspect is going to crop up fairly often in this 12in12 project; Dickens' support for the working classes and social reform, using his writing as his most powerful weapon.

Dickens' final two chapters/Quarters begin with that Christmas supernatural intervention, when the spirits of the church bells appear to Trotty and also tell him off. Trotty's failing is that he's lost faith in humanity and questioned Nature (by wondering what the point was in life, if people were so hopeless as he has been led to believe).

The lesson he has learnt – a little different to Scrooge's 'I should enjoy Christmas' – is:

'I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.'

I can't help finding this message problematic. As he says this, Trotty is seeing his daughter standing by the Thames, ready to throw herself and/or her infant child into the murky waters and end their suffering. Trotty has been forced to watch this by the Spirits of the Chimes, to teach him a lesson for questioning Nature. But the lesson he's learnt seems to be much the same as the message handed down by Alderman Cute and his set: listen to us, don't question us and do as we instruct you. The Chimes are giving Trotty an injunction to keep quiet and accept the difficulties life throws at him, to acquiesce in his own oppression. That they have forced him, an old man, to his knees, weeping, to say this while seeing the suffering of his daughter and granddaughter is far more brutal than anything Alderman Cute says or does.

It's the poor taking a battering again; Trotty is as guilty of these wrongs as Alderman Cute and his set – in fact, he only fell into them because of Alderman Cute in the first place. And it's no wonder Trotty is so easily swayed, when he comes up against Baronets telling him that they will do the thinking for him. By rights, the Spirits of the Chimes should be going after the Aldermen and MPs with their warnings to stop harkening back to a supposed Golden Age.

Perhaps this serves to show us the wickedness of human actions in the story – they aren't as bad as the spirits' actions, but they could still be modified. That's what the MPs, Baronets, judges and Aldermen should be taking from Dickens' writing: modify your actions, and be more forgiving of the poor among us.

But Dickens' world was a world favouring the wealthy, the influential, over the hard-pressed, ill-educated and underfed. Can we really say that the world two hundred years later is much better?

12in12 - My Charles Dickens Birthday Project

Charles Dickens' books have been adapted so often we don't need to read them any more. Discuss.

Next month, February 2012, is a big birthday for Charles Dickens. How big? Two hundred. Two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens. He won't be around for it, of course; he's been dead for most of those two hundred years. So we'll have celebrate the day without him (again). It's February 7th, since you ask.



Dickens has spent nearly two hundred years as one of Britain's foremost writers, Well, one of the English-speaking world's foremost writers, certainly of those last two hundred years. That's quite an achievement, and he's left a wide-ranging legacy, second only really to Shakespeare in the English language. What makes it more impressive is that Dickens wrote in so many genres, not just the novels he's famous for: short stories, travel writing, journalism, plays, poetry and general non-fiction.

His work has been adapted and reworked over and over again, working its way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world, again rather like Shakespeare. Dickens' Christmas stories have come to define the Victorian Christmas for those of us too young to remember the reality, made the festive season the popular holiday it now is, and still strongly influences our modern perception of Christmas. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol abound toward the end of every year, and Scrooge has come to be a widely-recognised term for someone like Dickens' infamous character.

Even before the BBC started rummaging through the Dickensian back catalogue for their current season of work devoted to Charles (or Boz, as he sometimes preferred), he was frequently the subject of adaptations. Not only have Dickens' books been adapted, but he himself often appears for public readings (as the man himself did while still alive) – the most famous perhaps being Simon Callow's portrayal alongside Christopher Eccleston in the new Doctor Who.

In fact, Dickens seems to have been adapted so often that it seems we don't really need to read his books any more. I've certainly seen A Christmas Carol on stage enough times that I know the story and characters as well as if I'd read it. And that's the curse of the writer of 'classics', of members of the canon of 'great' writers; people don't actually read their books any more. As Mark Twain quoted a Professor Winchester: a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Mind you, I'm always wary of Mark Twain quotes; they're prone to being greatly exaggerated.

I thought I'd celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth by actually reading some of these books that made his name and legacy. My birthday present to him will be to read twelve of Dickens' books in a year (I'm aiming for one in each month, of course). That's roughly eleven more Dickens books than I've managed to read in my life to date (1988-2011). For someone with an English Literature degree, I consider that a pretty poor effort.



To kick off my Dickensian effort (see what I mean? Dickens is sufficiently well-established that we have an adjective for him and his work which immediately conjours up a certain type of character and location, usually something Victorian and in London), I'll be starting with a Christmas short story: The Chimes.

So, welcome to my Dickensian sort-of extravaganza (can an extravaganza take place over twelve months? is that over doing it?). I call it 12in12, and I hope you stick around until the (bitter?) end.

So far I've covered:
January - The Chimes
February - Hard Times: For These Hard Times
March - Bleak House
April - The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
May - American Notes for General Circulation(coming soon...)

Thanks to Will Clayton for the birthday cake image.

The other images depict Dickens at a reading of his own, and Fringe Festival stalwart Pip Utton playing Dickens.

Then we've got the cover of the Complete Dickens Kindle edition, 99p from Amazon.

Book Review - Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, by Michael Wilding

Michael Wilding's opening sentence sets the scene early on – a reference to a cannonball from the seventeenth century Civil War Battle of Worcester makes it clear that Wilding's brand of criticism is going to be rooted in the events surrounding Milton, Browne, Butler and Marvell. Having told us that critics like T S Eliot have dehistoricised and depoliticised Milton, Wilding aims to restore the poet to his rightful place. He does this by re-examining Milton's poetry through the filter of his earlier, pre-Republic, prose. By re-applying the historical and political contexts to Milton, a political radical very much of his time, Wilding fulfils the brief of his final chapter heading and reclaims the radical Milton.