Expectations

I always like revisionist takes on classic literature, and among various books I'm reading at present, I just read Ronald Frame's Havisham, which is a prequel and parallel text to Dickens' Great Expectations.

"Cabbages" and other parodies

Having been put off Thackeray at school, by being made to read Vanity Fair before I was able to appreciate its sharp social satire, I wish I'd read more of his works, which often go into outright parody. A reference in The Primrose Way brought me to a Thackeray piece I'd never encountered: Cabbages, a parody on Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Violets apparently written when he was 14.

A Christmas Carol: a rationale

I'd normally save this topic until Christmas, but it seems too good to waste. Last Sunday's Independent carried an interesting news story:

A Brazilian man recovering from a stroke has turned into a philanthropist after damage to parts of his brain changed his personality in a way previously unheard of by doctors.

The 49-year-old senior manager of a large corporation found that he could not stop giving away money and spending cash liberally on sweets, food and drinks for children he met in the street. His wife told doctors her husband’s generosity had led to significant family distress and almost bankrupted them.

The man, referred to as Mr A, suffered a stroke triggered by high blood pressure. This led to bleeding in his subcortical region, an area immediately below the cerebral cortex, associated with higher-level thinking and decision-making.

...

Mr A told doctors he was aware of his behaviour and no longer wanted to work because he had “seen death close up (and) wanted to enjoy life which is too short”.

- Businessman suffers stroke, then can’t stop giving his money away, Janet Tappin Coelho, Rio de Janeiro, The Independent, Sunday 08 September 2013

That would be a nice rationale for Ebenezer Scrooge's personality change, following an overnight epiphany about life and death, in A Christmas Carol. I'm not the first to think of this (though this is the first example I've heard of with symptoms and circumstances matching the Dickens story): a stroke is one of the possibilities covered by Lisa Sanders, MD, in her December 17, 2006 New York Times article, Diagnosing with Dickens, though she ultimately settles on Lewy body dementia.

- Ray

Who the Dickens?

The brilliance of the Internet is again demonstrated. For years, Clare and I have been trying to find the identity of the uncredited and charismatic actor who plays the roadblock official in Ralph Thomas's excellent 1958 adaption of A Tale of Two Cities.

I asked a while back on the Internet Movie Database forum for the film, and got an answer that it was Anton Diffring, but I've never been convinced of this. Finally, however, I spotted a better answer on the forum of Britmovie.co.uk, which has a number of threads in the category of Extras, including this post.

... I was convinced the gatekeeper was Anton Diffring before realizing it was Hubert Noel.
- Dave Wright, post #739, Sighted: Ah, There You Are!

Dave is undoubtedly correct. Born Hubert Paul Luis Nion in Le Havre in 1924, Hubert Noël (aka Hubert Noel) was a French actor with a long career as a stage actor and in French cinema (see the French Wikipedia and IMDb), but who tended to appear in bit parts in rather naff examples of English language cinema.

Right: Hubert Noël as the vampire Count Sinistre
in the 1965 Devils of Darkness (see review).

- Ray

The best of writers, the worst of writers ...

It would be remiss of me not to mention that today is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens on 7th February 1812. There's all you could possibly want about this at the Dickens 2012 celebration page. But personally, two angles on Dickens struck me today.

One was Sydney Padua's fine summation of Dickens at 2D Googles:

Many happy returns of the day, Mr. Dickens! I am sure we are all spending this bicentenary eating gruel, fitfully walking the streets at midnight, drinking punch, speaking in thousand-word paragraphs interrupted by semi-colons; constructing elaborate book-length metaphors winding like dark trash-strewn rivers through a metropolis of words; enduring unspeakable losses and delighting in the simple pleasures of life, encountering more silly pretty females than one quite likes, and generally marvelling that one pen could produce such a torrent of ink.
- Many Happy Returns of the Day, Mr. Dickens!

The other was the ain't-it-awful commentary from Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life:

Leading Charles Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin has said children are not being taught to read with the attention span necessary to appreciate the novelist's works.

Tomalin said Dickens's depiction of an unequal society was still "amazingly relevant", ahead of nationwide celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Children were now unable to appreciate this due to "being reared on dreadful television programmes", she said in an interview with the Press Association.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."
- Children lack ability for Dickens, says biographer Tomalin, BBC News, 5th February 2012.

What Ms Tomalin says may or may not be true: I don't know enough about current education to judge.  But Dickens in my view is a rotten data point. He's rightly viewed as great for many qualities, such as his superb portrayals of character and his social realism. But - and I say this as an avid reader of Victorian novels - his style is monstrously dense and verbose, even by the standards of books of his time. In part, he got away with it by packaging his novels in digestible chunks: readers would have been familiar with the serialised versions in advance of tackling the whole novels. Reading conventions were different too; commonly, novels would be read aloud with all the family together, allowing for pauses to gloss or recapitulate difficult sections.

So, I thoroughly agree with Nicholas Lezard in The Independent: Dickens always was a struggle. I really hadn't the capacity in childhood, or even teens, to grasp singlehanded the social and personal subtleties of a Dickens novel or many other complex works of the period. I used to feel ashamed of this - I felt stupid for my bafflement at the 'worthy' reading list we were given for English Literature O-Level (for example, A Tale of Two Cities and the unabridged versions of Moby Dick and The Water-Babies). Now I'm sure that feeling was misplaced: reading Victorian novels is a specialist task, and there's no discredit in not tackling them - however iconic they may be - until you're good and ready.

- Ray

Edwin Drood

A recommendation, if you didn't see it: the current BBC adaptation by Gwyneth Hughes of Charles Dickens's half-finished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, serialised in 1870 until its termination by the death of Dickens. (see the BBC feature Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens's last mystery finally solved? and the BBC2 microsite).

Due to previously-mentioned events over Christmas, I've only just seen the concluding part of the two-part series.

Read on - if you don't mind spoilers.

The first episode set the scene in Cloisterham (a thinly-disguised Rochester) where Drood, a slappably optimistic and fortunate young engineer, is visiting his fiance Rosa Bud (to whom he is betrothed via an arrangement in her late father's will) and his uncle John Jasper (an opium-addicted choirmaster). What Edwin doesn't know is that Jasper has the hots for Rosa, and has repeated opium dreams of throttling Edwin in the cathedral. A further tension is thrown into the mix by the arrival from Ceylon of the mixed-race orphan twins Neville and Helena Landless. The hot-blooded Neville too fancies Rosa, and immediately gets into an argument with Edwin over this. But what neither of Edwin's rivals know is that Edwin and Rosa aren't that into each other, and have more or less amicably agreed to break their engagement. Things come to a head on a dark and stormy night, when Edwin and Neville, apparently reconciled, visit the cathedral at night, and Jasper gets another especially vivid vision (maybe real - we don't know) of throttling Edwin. End of episode.

Judging by both the dramatisation and the novel text - there's a nice copy of the 1870 Chapman & Hall imprint on the Internet Archive (ID mysteryofedwindr00dickrich) - Dickens was doing something rather different from his usual fare. This is not a cast-of-thousands tranche of Victorian social commentary, but an economical and claustrophobic psychological mystery. The scenario reminds me a deal of a Maxwell Gray novel: there's a guilt-ridden ecclesiastical character, as in The Silence of Dean Maitland; and a young woman with three suitors, as in The Reproach of Annesley. Maybe the simplicity was down to Dickens losing his touch; he was exhausted by a tour of America, and had sufferered a minor stoke - a precursor to the one that permanently interrupted his work on the novel. Nevertheless, he's still on form with atmosphere and characterisation.

Dickens did leave a sketch of  where he intended the story to go: essentially it came down to John Jasper having murdered Drood:

His first fancy for the tale was expressed in a letter in the middle of July. "What should you think of the idea of a story beginning in this way?--Two people, boy and girl, or very young, going apart from one another, pledged to be married after many years—at the end of the book. The interest to arise out of the tracing of their separate ways, and the impossibility of telling what will be done with that impending fate." This was laid aside; but it left a marked trace on the story as afterwards designed, in the position of Edwin Drood and his betrothed. I first heard of the later design in a letter dated "Friday the 6th of August 1869", in which after speaking, with the usual unstinted praise he bestowed always on what moved him in others, of a little tale he had received for his journal, he spoke of the change that had occurred to him for the new tale by himself. "I laid aside the fancy I told you of, and have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." The story, I learnt immediately afterward, was to be that of the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer's career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality of the crime and the man who committed it. So much was told to me before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer.

- Charles Dickens, letter to friend and biographer John Forster, published in John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1876, vol. 1

But the many authors who have picked up and run with the story - see Continuations, in the Wikipedia article - have varied in whether they took up this hint. The recent BBC adaptation doesn't entirely.

Spoiler warning again.

Episode 2 begins, as did Dickens, with general consternation after the night of the storm due to Drood's disappearance. Neville naturally falls under initial suspicion, with Jasper happy to fuel that suspicion, but no real evidence implicates him.

Meanwhile, Bazzard, the geeky assistant of Rosa's guardian, is doing some detective work, finding that Neville and Helena Landless are half-siblings of Edwin, and that their mutual father appears not to have died in military service in Egypt as supposed, and is in fact alive somewhere and picking up his pension. Jasper continues to be angst-ridden, but despite this pursues increasingly aggessive attempts to court Rosa. His mental state isn't helped by the revelation that his jealousy had become misplaced after Edwin and Rosa were no longer an item.

Ultimately Bazzard's trail leads to the discovery of an unexpected corpse in the Drood tomb, just as Jasper drags Rosa into the cathedral and confesses to Drood's murder. But, simultaneously, the corpse is found to be that of an older man, apparently dead for a year or so - and Edwin, fresh back from Egypt, walks into the cathedral wondering what's been going on. He'd left town in a huff after Rosa broke off the engagement, and that was why he hadn't written.

This turn of events so fazes Jasper that his story unravels. He and Edwin aren't uncle and nephew, but half-brothers - he was the illegitimate one - and he has for years been consumed with anger at their father's favouritism toward Edwin. A year previously he had killed their father when the latter arrived in Cloisterham and snubbed him yet again: the elder Drood is the corpse in the tomb. In Jasper's opium-addled mind, the murder of the elder Drood and the fantasy of murdering Edwin had become so conflated that he had come to believe he had actually murdered Edwin. Believing himself to be haunted by Edwin, he kills himself. In the slightly feelgood aftermath, his friends and family forgive him posthumously; Edwin and Neville depart for foreign climes as half-brothers, friends and business associates; and Helena Landless becomes engaged to the Rev. Mr. Crisparkle, the canon of Cloisterham.

While perhaps the web of family connections stretches coincidence a little too far, nevertheless I think Gwyneth Hughes did an extremely good job of completing a story where the resolution could have been a little too linear. In the novel as far as Dickens wrote it, everything (including his own guilt) points to Jasper having murdered Edwin. This adaptation nicely had it both ways, with that evidence being just as valid, except for another murder, while leaving the reappearance of Edwin thoroughly plausible. The motivation for the murder - intense anger at a parent's favouritism for one sibling, exacerbated by the favoured sibling's inability to perceive a problem - is psychologically plausible. Luckily I'm not in that situation, but I know people who have been, and it's highly toxic. So all in all, a rather good production.

If you're in the UK, both episodes are currently watchable online with BBC iPlayer at the BBC2 microsite The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

- Ray

"God bless us, every one!"

I'm in a bit of a "Bah, humbug" mood at the moment, having caught a rotten cold a few days ago. It's not quite flu, but it's causing a high enough fever to be distinctly hallucinogenic. I wrote the previous post in the middle of the night because I had to get up; every time I shut my eyes I got a continuation of a strange half-dream that I had to use some kind of Enigma or Turing Bombe machine to solve Kai's mirror puzzle from The Snow Queen (we watched the 2002 TV movie earlier in the week).

So, no deeply meaningful meditations on Christmas: just a repeat recommendation of Louis Bayard's 2004 novel Mr Timothy, a fine Dickens pastiche that brings Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol into early manhood, now cured except for an occasionally painful leg and slight limp. Scrooge's new-found benevolence hasn't been entirely a positive influence in Tim's life; the philanthropy has been omnipresent to the point where Tim is at a loose end, resenting his lack of financial independence. The book finds him trying to escape this heritage, after the death of his father Bob Cratchit, by disappearing into the London underworld. He finds lodgings in a brothel, in exchange for teaching the mistress to read and write; and finds work with the cheerful Captain Gully who plies the Mayhew-esque trade of fishing corpses from the Thames to recover the contents of their pockets. The story takes an even darker turn with the discovery of the corpses of two 10-year-old girls branded with a "G", and Tim finds himself on the dangerous trail of high-society conspiracy and serial murder.

It's definitely worth checking out: the crime mystery runs parallel to the more existential story of the problem of breaking away from the roles we're assigned in childhood, in Tim's case that of the wimpy little crippled boy who says "God bless us, every one!" There's an online January Magazine review by David Abrams - Tiny Tim Sings a New Christmas Carol - and Google Books has a preview of the novel: Mr Timothy.

And best wishes of the season to all readers of JSBlog!
except the comment spammers who think I won't spot the Japanese spamlinks at the end of any number of "ooh, how interesting" comments

- Ray

The dust-heap of history

The Great Dust Heap, Kings Cross
EH Dixon, watercolour, 1837. Wellcome Library.
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License

From Mark Liberman at Language Log: The what of history?, an interesting analysis of US and UK variants on the "dustbin of history", to which defunct institutions are rhetorically consigned.

The context is kind of interesting, in that the British terms dustbin" (a domestic refuse bin), "dustman" (a refuse collector) and "dustcart" (a refuse collection vehicle) - the latter two folksy names persist despite decades of rebranding - preserve an archaic meaning of "dust", meaning "refuse". It's not merely a euphemism; as indicated by the largely archaic warning embossed on plastic dustbins - "no hot ashes" - domestic refuse consisted, historically, in large part of dust: ashes and cinders from the fire (see Bins and the history of waste relations). Dustbins are a relatively recent invention - early 1900s - and mid-Victorian houses had a room, a "dusthole", where ashes and refuse were stored (see p111, Magazine of Domestic Economy, 1837) and whose contents were regularly carted away to the local dust-heap.

The dust-heap was the scene of, by modern standards, heroic recycling.

A Dust-heap of this kind is often worth thousands of pounds. The present one was very large and very valuable. It was in fact a large hill, and being in the vicinity of small suburb cottages, it rose above them like a great black mountain. Thistles, groundsel, and rank grass grew in knots on small parts which had remained for a long time undisturbed; crows often alighted on its top, and seemed to put on their spectacles and become very busy and serious; flocks of sparrows often made predatory descents upon it; an old goose and gander might sometimes he seen following each other up its side, nearly midway; pigs rooted around its base,--and now and then, one bolder than the rest would venture some way up, attracted by the mixed odors of some hidden marrow-bone enveloped in a decayed cabbage-leaf--a rare event, both of these articles being unusual oversights of the Searchers below.

The principal ingredient of all these Dust-heaps is fine cinders and ashes; but as they are accumulated from the contents of all the dust-holes and bins of the vicinity, and as many more as possible, the fresh arrivals in their original state present very heterogeneous materials. We cannot better describe them than by presenting a brief sketch of the different departments of the Searchers and Sorters, who are assembled below to busy themselves upon the mass of original matters which are shot out from the carts of the dustmen.

The bits of coal, the pretty numerous results of accident and servants' carelessness, are picked out, to be sold forthwith; the largest and best of the cinders are also selected, by another party, who sell them to laundresses, or to braziers (for whose purposes coke would do as well;) and the next sort of cinders, called the breeze, because it is left after the wind has blown the finer cinders through an upright sieve, is sold to the brick-makers.

Two other departments, called the "soft-ware" and the "hard-ware," are very important. The former includes all vegetable and animal matters--everything that will decompose. These are selected and bagged at once, and carried off as soon as possible, to be sold as manure for plowed land, wheat, barley, &c. Under this head, also, the dead cats are comprised. They are generally the perquisites of the women searchers. Dealers come to the wharf, or dust-field, every evening; they give sixpence for a white cat, fourpence for a colored cat, and for a black one according to her quality. The "hard-ware" includes all broken pottery pans, crockery, earthenware, oyster-shells, &c., which are sold to make new roads.

The bones are selected with care, and sold to the soap-boiler. He boils out the fat and marrow first, for special use, and the bones are then crushed and sold for manure.

Of rags, the woollen rags are bagged and sent off for hop-manure; the white linen rags are washed, and sold to make paper, &c.

The "tin things" are collected and put into an oven with a grating at the bottom, so that the solder which unites the parts melts, and runs through into a receiver. This is sold separately; the detached pieces of tin are then sold to be melted up with old iron, &c.

Bits of old brass, lead, &c., are sold to be molted up separately, or in the mixture of ores.

All broken glass vessels, as cruets, mustard-pots, tumblers, wine-glasses, bottles, &c., are sold to the old-glass shops.

As for any articles of jewelry, silver spoons, forks, thimbles, or other plate and valuables, they are pocketed off-hand by the first finder. Coins of gold and silver are often found, and many "coppers."

Meantime, everybody is hard at work near the base of the great Dust-heap. A certain number of cart-loads having been raked and searched for all the different things just described, the whole of it now undergoes the process of sifting. The men throw up the stuff, and the women sift it.

- Dust: or Ugliness Redeemed, pp379-384, Household Words, A Weekly Journal, conducted by Charles Dickens,  No. 16, July 13, 1850.

Of the Dustmen of London, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, volume 2, gives a similar account. It recalls the rag-pickers of Dharavi; a striking example of how Victorian London resembled a modern Third World megalopolis. The Household Words article is uncredited, but it's very likely by Dickens himself, as it strongly recalls a central theme of his 1864 Our Mutual Friend, in which Nicodemus Boffin has acquired the nickname The Golden Dustman because he has inherited a fortune acquired from dust.

'The man,' Mortimer goes on, addressing Eugene, 'whose name is Harmon, was only son of a tremendous old rascal who made his money by Dust.'

'Red velveteens and a bell?' the gloomy Eugene inquires.

'And a ladder and basket if you like. By which means, or by others, he grew rich as a Dust Contractor, and lived in a hollow in a hilly country entirely composed of Dust. On his own small estate the growling old vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its geological formation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust,—all manner of Dust.'

An article in the Eclectic Review, 1865 - Mr Dickens's Romance of a Dust Heap, a review of Our Mutual Friend - noted the connection, mentioning another account.

... Mr Dickens has now, to our knowledge, for sixteen years been haunted by a great Dust-heap.
...
Following Mr Dickens's observant eye and rapid foot, other visitors have traversed and circumambulated these extraordinary mounds. In that excellent and arousing little book, The Missing Link, there is a chapter entitled 'The Bible Woman among the Dustheaps;' and many facts recited in that interesting little chapter go to confirm the more imaginative settings of the great social novelist.

Sorting a dust-heap at a County Council depot
from London's Toilet, PF William Ryan, in Living London, George Robert Sims, 1902

As Dickens described, the owners of commercial dust-heaps could become very wealthy, and occasionally even the workers made a good living, since a perk of the job was being allowed to keep any high-value items they found. For the majority, however, it was a disgusting drudge.

Despite the grim reality, at least two poets managed to find enlightening metaphorical symbolism in dust-heaps. In 1851, George Washington Dewey wrote in Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art:

The dust-heap has a poetry — a hieroglyphic art,
An eloquence as sacred as the Pyramids impart!
The relics which are gathered from the hot and noisy way,
Are laden with the memories of many a summer day.
...
Familiar objects catch your eye among the rubbish there;
You recognize some fragments of your boyhood's " wear and tear " —
Some buckle, strap, or button — or bobbin apron string.
Which held you in the leash of home, ere youth had taken wing!
There is no fancy striving for a counterfeit of truth —
The dust-heap on the common was the crucible of youth!
And Time is yet the Alchymist all metals to assay; —
Then be thine age the purer — for the dross shall melt away.

And in 1863 Alfred Saxelby West, in his anthology Poems of an Interval, wrote Lines on a Dust-Heap, which found uplighting symbolism about mortality in the not infrequent possibility of finding something of value in a dust-heap.

Yea, e'en the naked dust is nature's child,
And not to be accounted dross ; she rears it
For future form, a fair and pleasing thing.
And am not I — nay, are we not all dust?
And shall we not be so again ere long?
But does no treasure mingle with the mass?
Aye ! One shall find, and snatch the shining jewel
From out the putrid heap, to deck His realms,
To stud heaven's fields with spangled treasures fair;
Poor dust below, but shining dew-drops there!

For further reading: Dusty Bob: a cultural history of dustmen, 1780-1870 (Brian Maidment, Manchester University Press, 2007) looks worth finding:

Why did dustmen exercise an extended hold over the imagination of many Regency and Victorian artists and writers, including George Cruikshank, Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens as well as numerous little known dramatists, caricaturists, print makers, journalists and novelists? This book, the first study of the cultural representation of the dust trade, provides many varied answers to this question by showing the ways in which London dustmen were associated with ideas of contamination, dirt, noise, violence, wealth, consumerism and threat. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, including plays, novels, reportage and, especially, visual culture, Dusty Bob describes the ways in which dustmen were perceived and mythologized in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century.

See also the previous post John Petty: The Face, which looks at the autobiography of a modern scavenger.

- Ray

Dickensian Christmases lesser known

Whatever his social messages, Charles Dickens was a solidly commercial writer, and followed up on the success 1 of the 1843 A Christmas Carol, he followed up with a series of titles with a similar mix of social campaigning and good cheer. As the Christmas Books page at David Perdue's Charles Dickens site says:

Although subsequent Christmas books sold well at the time of their initial release, they have not enjoyed the staying power of A Christmas Carol.

They were: The Chimes: a goblin story of some bells that rang an old year out and a new year in (1844); The Cricket on the Hearth: a fairy tale of home (1845); The Battle of Life: a love story (1846); and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848).  Dickens stopped the series at that point, but continued to produce shorter-format Christmas works for magazines: see Project Gutenberg for the collection Some Christmas Stories, which includes A Christmas tree, What Christmas is as we grow older, The poor relation's story, The child's story, The schoolboy's story and Nobody's story.

1. One should say qualified success; as Why A Christmas Carol was a flop for Dickens explains, it was popular and sold well, but his demanding requirements for the binding and artwork consumed most of the profits.

A Devonshire Christmas

Best wishes of the season to all our readers.

Click to enlarge - Scrooge's third visitor, John Leech illustration for 1843 first edition of Dicken's A Christmas Carol. I don't think I'll have that pudding at the back, that's been in contact with a dead pig and someone's foot.

A Devonshire Christmas

I

How goes it, Father Christmas?—
Oh picking—picking—along!
But give me a piece of crumple-cheese
And you shall hear my song.
Ay, settle your chestnuts down to roast,.
And fill me a cup of ale;
Then kiss the girl that you fancy most,
And you shall hear my tale.

Chorus

Froth him a cup of the home-brewed
That is both old and strong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?—
Oh picking—picking—along.

II

From Adam and Eve to the Magi,
The ghosts of the old time fade;
And I, myself, would be laid on the shelf
If it weren't for the mirth I've made :
And yet, tho' our youth in Paradise
Be a fable past recall,
We have seen the glory of sinless eyes,
And we have watched the Fall.

Chorus

So fables may be fancies,
And yet not very far wrong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?
Oh picking—picking—along!

III

I walked last night on Dartmoor,
The wind was bitterly cold,
My crimson cloak was a thread-bare joke,
And my bones were brittle and old.
I had forgotten the world's desire
And all the stars were dead,
When I sank right up to my knees in mire,
At the door of a cattle-shed.

Chorus

I saw the oldest oxen
That ever knew goad or thong;
Their sweet breath smoked in the frosty light
Of the lanthorn that I swung.

IV

I saw those oxen kneeling,
So gentle and dumb and wise,
By a child that lay in the straw and smiled
At their big dark shining eyes !
While a woman breathed "lullay, lullay,"
The Magi need not roam
So long ago, so far away,
When heaven is born at home.

Chorus

Then all my heart sang "Gloria"
I lacked no angel throng,
As over the lonely moor I went I
Picking, picking along.

And over the farm on the whistling fells
I saw the great star glide;
And "Peace on earth" rang Modbury bells,
And Ermington bells replied.
How goes it, Father Christmas?
Was the burden of all their song;
And what could a Devonshire pedlar say
But "Picking—picking along."

Chorus

He needs a cloak and a pair of shoes,
But his heart is young and strong!
How goes it, Father Christmas?
Oh picking—picking—along.

This comes from the anthology The elfin artist and other poems (c. 1920) by Alfred Noyes (1880 – 1958). Although he had no particular connection with Devon - he was born in Wolverhampton, spent much of his working life in the USA, and lived his final years in the Isle of Wight - Noyes wrote a number of poems on Devon themes, including A Devonshire Christmas, A Devonshire Ditty, A Devonshire Folk Song ("about Drake and his Tavistock lass"), A Devonshire Song, and Drake, an English epic. He was a highly prolific poet, and many of his works are online at the Internet Archive.
- Ray

Medical and Dickensian: 2008

As last year, I recommend the British Medical Journal's Christmas issue for its usual combination of the strange and mildly morbid. This year, for instance, we have Festive medical myths, a Frankincense: systematic review, Rugby (the religion of Wales) and its influence on the Catholic church: should Pope Benedict XVI be worried?, Churchill’s flu poem, Reappraising Florence Nightingale, A symphony of maladies (occupational diseases of musicians), Fantastic feeding funnels (a look at a rather specialist motif in art, such as that of Bosch and Kahlo), and Please, sir, I want some more (a look at the dietetics of Oliver Twist in the workhouse).

The last piece is nicely revisionist. Rather as hostile commentators like "Jack Nastyface" - Jack Tar: book launch - exaggerated the ghastliness of shipboard food, it appears that Dickens, angry about his own deprived childhood, exaggerated the poverty of diet in the workhouse. He perhaps wasn't even so traumatised by working in a blacking factory, if the story that he wrote advertising jingles for Warren's Jet Blacking is true (see A twist in the tale, Guardian, 1 November 2003). It's not the only example of Dickens' misinformation about social evils: for instance, John Sutherland has commented about the the older Magwitch in Great Expectations - a model capitalist at that - being under threat of death at a point some years after the real-world abolition of the death penalty for returning transportees. This brings me to Scrooge – the Sequel (1) ("Ebenezer Scrooge has been transformed into a kind and charitable man. But can it last?"): this is the first episode of John Sutherland's ongoing story in the Guardian. A Christmas Carol sequels have been done before - see the addendum to Noir and the North Kent Marshes - but given Sutherland's background in witty and deeply informed academic litcrit, his Guardian version looks worth following. I'll link to installments as they're added.

Scrooge: the Sequel (1)
Scrooge: the Sequel (2)
Scrooge: the Sequel (3)

On a medical-meets-Dickensian theme still, the Dec 23 episode of the BBC's Holby City hospital drama was, interestingly, also based on A Christmas Carol.

- Ray

Noir and the North Kent Marshes

The references to Kent in Riddley Walker reminded me of another website I visited recently, Literature and Place. This is the website of a joint project (between the School of English, University of Kent, and the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, Dunkirk) to develop a database of literature relating to the Transmanche region - as the map interface shows, Kent and Nord Pas-de-Calais. Although it could be developed further (for instance, Hoban's Riddley Walker isn't there, and a lot more could be said about locations in Russell Thorndike's Dr Syn saga - see The Life and Times of the Rev. Doctor Christopher Syn, Parson, Smuggler, and Sometime Pirate) it's surprising how many authors have connections in this area.

The prime example is probably Charles Dickens, who spent part of his childhood in Chatham and knew the Hoo Peninsula well (he spent his honeymoon at Chalk and later lived at Gadshill): Cooling Churchyard was the prime inspiration for the churchyard with the graves of Pip's siblings where Pip first meets Magwitch in Great Expectations amid the generally desolate background of the North Kent Marshes. This area, due to nature conservancy initiatives, still retains a deal of its characteristic landscape.

Dickens, one could imagine, might well have liked the 1952 film The Long Memory (based on Howard Clewes' 1951 novel of the same name). It contains a number of Dickensian melodramatic elements: false imprisonment, obsessed and wronged hero, interesting mix of characters (both respectable and low-life, with good and bad found among both), and settings that would have been familiar to Dickens. See it if you can; the overall critical view these days is that it's a much under-rated classic of the narrow genre of English film noir, with particular acclaim for its "exceptional use of landscape", moving between the North Kent Marshes and a distinctly Dickensian post-WW2 London (the now-Yuppified Shad Thames - adjacent in Dickens' time to the Jacob's Island of Oliver Twist - and long-gone seedy streets in Northfleet - see Reel Streets - whose limeworks Dickens mentions in Our Mutual Friend). See the critique in British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (Ian Duncan MacKillop, Neil Sinyard, Manchester University Press, 2003, ISBN 0719064899) and the review at Ferdy on Films.

Peter Brown, by the way, is co-editor of Literature and Place, 1800-2000 (Peter Brown, Michael Irwin, Peter Lang Publishing, Incorporated, 2006, ISBN 0820450782) which looks rather interesting: "Ten original essays examine the transactions between real places and the literary imagination, including the reinvention of real places in literary form, from 1800 to the present day". Check out, similarly, the Bookpaths blog, that explores such connections worldwide.
- Ray

Addendum
Some Dickens bits and pieces. What the Dickens do they think they're doing? - The Telegraph's Max Davidson on the DickensWorld theme park. The Dickens Project at the University of California: lots of material here, such as Charles Dickens' involvement in the Staplehurst Disaster. And Mr Timothy (Louis Bayard, John Murray, 2005, ISBN 0719567025) - a very good sequel to A Christmas Carol featuring the grown-up Tiny Tim; see Tiny Tim Sings a New Christmas Carol and Towering Timothy for reviews. Ever wonder what happened to Scrooge? So have these authors, an article on A Christmas Carol sequels, by Matt McHugh, who has himself written Scrooge & Cratchit, in which we find Scrooge's new benevolence is not without its downside.

Addendum 2
I've expanded the brief account of The Long Memory into a review of both the film and the Howard Clewes novel; see The Long Memory.

- Ray

Fathoming Dickens, and more

Via the collective weblog MetaFilter: I just ran into Charles Dickens: The Life of the Author, an extremely readable six-part seminar by Kenneth Benson of the New York Public Library. This is part of Fathom, a large archive of free content developed by various US and UK libraries and musuems; although the aim is educational, it's not in the least dumbed down or didactic.
      Just skimming the start of the list, I found the following. American Film Institute: Modern Film Adaptations of Shakespeare and Movie scientists: before their time. The British Library: Patricia Lovett on Calligraphy, Heraldry and Illumination; Michael Twyman on The Encyclopedia of Ephemera; and the rise to fame and downfall of Oscar Wilde. Or the British Museum: Agath Christie and archaeology; and Early Collectors. Cambridge University Press: Shakespeare, Films and the Marketplace; How to read Joyce; and Committing Shakespeare to print.
      You could spend hours reading this; I haven't even got started on the Victoria & Albert, Natural History and Science Museum lists. - Ray