Dickens and Dombey

I hated Dickens when I was a kid. I hated him because they forced us to read him in school. I hated him because his books were so long; because his sentences were so long. The stories were set in nineteenth century London, which could have been ancient Mesopotamia for all I cared. None of the characters seemed to resemble anyone I knew. Who cared what happened to David Copperfield?

Late in life, after I fell under the influence of Harold Bloom, I returned to Dickens. The reintroduction came through Great Expectations, which the boys had to read in Ms. Barrett’s sophomore year English class. As I recall, the boys and I all read it at about the same time. I followed that with Bleak House, which Bloom declares to be the definitive canonical novel, and then I was hooked. I went back to Dickens’ beginnings, read Pickwick, and have tried to work my way through the rest of his work, in rough chronological order.

For me at least, there is a tempo to reading Dickens. It often takes time to get fully involved, because you have to meet dozens of characters, and work through a number of often disconnected sub-plots. Finally, the story begins to fit together, and Dickens being a master of moving his readers from one chapter to the next, the pace of reading picks up. I’m drawn in as I feel more and more compelled to figure out what will happen to Esther, or Florence, or Pip. Soon, I have trouble putting the book down, and all the other reading gets neglected; I find myself submerged in Dickens’ world. Finally, once I can see where we’re headed, often about seventy pages from the end, I slow way down, and try to draw as much enjoyment as possible from the remaining chapters. Despite the length of these novels, I am always sorry when I’m done; I regret having no more to read.

I just finished Dombey & Son, thought by some to be Dickens’ first great novel. As always, it was astonishingly full of life, with its enormous variety of characters - rich and poor, virtuous and sinister, old and young, tragic and comic. The combination of melodrama, social criticism, comic relief and psychological insight is perhaps unmatched anywhere else in literature. Tolstoy, for example, is full of life, but there are few laughs in Anna Karenina. Dickens also, despite the passage of time, and the cultural differences, seems to portray humankind with more realism, more accuracy than almost anyone other than Shakespeare. His portrayal of Edith Dombey, beautiful but poor, paraded through life by an ambitious and calculating mother, who resents having been sold at auction to the richest bidder, and who then comes to hate her affluent and successful husband, is more powerful and moving and, again, more realistic, than all the polemic literature of today, most of which is simply boring, tedious, and intrusively didactic.

Dombey doesn’t yet represent the mature Dickens of Great Expectations, for even though he has to kill off a few favorite characters, it ends happily for most. (It reminded me in ways of Pickwick, Dickens’ first novel, which didn’t even start as a novel, but only as a collection of stories, but coalesced into a novel around the character of Sam Weller, the valet. Sam appears first as a caricature, like most of the other characters in those silly stories. But gradually, Sam comes to life; he becomes human on the page. And as Sam grows into a real character, his creator comes alive as a novelist. By the end of the book, not only Sam, but Pickwick and many others have come to life, and the story is no longer silly, but genuine and moving. Dickens has come into his own.) One of the reflections of Dickens’ growth is that he begins Dombey with the central plot and theme of the story, so you needn’t wait two hundred pages to know where you’re actually headed, but at the same time, begins to expand his narrative orbit, bringing in a host of other characters, and plots, without ever straying far from the central theme. And really, the final chapters of this book were as moving as anything I’d read in a long long time.

I can’t overlook Dickens’ unparalleled command of the language. His vocabulary is enormous; his syntax is complex, yet elegant; his imagery and metaphors fresh, often startling. It’s tough to go slowly in a book of 900 pages, but when I did slow down, when for one reason or another, I tried to read carefully and closely, as if I were reading a poem of only a few stanzas, I was always rewarded. I wrote earlier this week how no songwriter will ever match Dylan’s lyrical imagery, but the gulf between Dickens and today’s writers is so wide, it’s almost as if they’re from different civilizations. Unfortunately, the passage of time has not improved our civilization in this respect; on the contrary, it has become less expressive, less imaginative, less creative, dumber. Far dumber. I know that that we have moved from the textual media to the visual media; I know that we are more expressive in new and different ways, other than language. But really, can pictures on cell phones and video clips on YouTube capture and convey the same complexities and subtleties of life that are found on Dickens pages? Every time I hear some kid, or some politician, or some journalist, use the term ‘sad’, to describe human tragedy, or ‘mean’ to characterize some heinous evil, I want to go have electroshock treatments. Take me away! (Franny says she wants to go away also!)

I never read more than one Dickens in a year, but even at that pace, by now I’ve read most of his books; there are only a few more to go, before I have to start over. But by then, I’ll be ready to read about Pip again, and Estella, and Jaggers. (We all liked Jaggers the lawyer, even though Barrett said he was incomplete as a man, what with his odd relationship with the maid, Molly, a former client.) And if you care at all about any of this, be sure to put Dombey on your list as one of the essential Dickens novels. It’s really not to be missed.