Fragment 1112013

Dickens writes to his clock maker:

Dear Sir, 
Since my hall clock was sent to your establishment to be cleaned, it has gone (as indeed it always has) perfectly well, but has struck the hours with great reluctance, and after enduring internal agonies of a most distressing nature, it has now ceased striking altogether. Though a happy release for the clock, this is not convenient for the household. If you can send down any confidential person with whom the clock can confer, I think it may have something in its works that it would be glad to make a clean breast of. 
Faithfully yours,
September 14 1863

Even in his business correspondence Dickens reveals his queer imagination, which sees things as people and people as things. Compare the description of Mr Twemlow from Our Mutual Friend: 

There was an innocent piece of dinner furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable yard in Duke Street, St James's when not in use...The name of this article was Twemlow.

"A Christmas Carol" Charles Dickens

Cosy (adj) 1709

Cosily (adv)1721

Cosiness (nu) 1834

A cosy (nc) 1863

From Jane Eyre hiding behind her red curtain in the opening chapters of her novel, to the kitchen scenes in Wuthering Heights, cosiness is an important trope in 19^th century English lit.

Cosiness has two contrasting aspects: the enjoyment of a small interior space filled with warmth, dryness, light, and often food, set against a large space –usually exterior, but not necessarily- which is cold, wet, and dark. Cosiness exists in the creaturely enjoyment of one in the full consciousness of the other. Cosiness cannot be experienced unless the external environment is inhospitably cold, because more than anything, cosiness exists in the contrast between the two. There is no cosiness in the tropics.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours and all sorts of rooms was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking though and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn, to shut out cold and darkness...

A Christmas Carol is full of images of cosiness, but these images are not just included for the sake of atmospherics, but are a symbolic indicator of moral and human worth.

Scrooge's miserliness manifests itself symbolically as an inability to create cosiness. He has become permanently frozen: he carried his own low temperature always about with him, he iced his office in the dog days, and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas...  He denies cosiness to his clerk, who has to try to create it with the aid of one candle; and in his own rooms before the arrival of Marley's ghost, he sits huddled over an inadequate fire: nothing on such a bitter night. Darkness is cheap, reflects Scrooge as he stirs his gruel. From this condition he changes, through the images the Spirits show him, to a capacity for the creation and enjoyment of cosiness, spending Christmas at the end of the book in a cosy nook with his clerk: We will discuss your affairs...over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop. Bob! Make up the fires and buy another coal scuttle....

The text continuously suggests that the real evil of Scrooge and Marley's miserliness – symbolised by the clanking chains and money boxes the latter draws after him – is that it is the wrong use of money. Money should be used to create cosiness, not saved away in vaults. Though the creation and mutual enjoyment of cosiness, people can relate to each other and help each other on a creaturely level.

All his life Dickens waged war against systems: bureaucracy, the Law, the system of poor relief, Utilitarianism, the Church. He saw these systems as obscuring real human fellowship. In an essay called "Two Views of a Cheap Theatre" from the collection The Uncommercial Traveller, written in the 1860s, he castigated a preacher for continuously addressing his audience as 'fellow sinners', writing:  Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience continually as 'fellow sinners'? Is it not enough to be fellow creatures...? By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something better than ourselves... surely it is enough to be fellow creatures.

His emphasis on cosiness in A Christmas Carol is part of this: it is through shared creaturely comfort that we can arrive at true fellowship stronger than the necessary, imposed, artificial fellowship created by systems.

oooOOOooo

Cosiness in the text is also an important economic indicator. The emergence of a capitalist, consumerist society and the growth of the middle classes in 18^th and  19^th Century England is reflected in the history of the word 'cosy' and its derivations, starting in 1709, and culminating in the use of the word for a consumer commodity: a quilted cover for a teapot.  

In the emerging capitalist society that was Victorian Britain, the ability to create cosiness marked the difference between the middle classes – those who had the wherewithal to radically impact their immediate environment – and the indigent poor, who did not. This is the meaning of the wretched woman with the infant Scrooge sees in the court outside his window, the meaning also of the two children, Want and Ignorance the Ghost of Christmas Present hides beneath his cloak. These are all figures incapable of creating and experiencing cosiness, unless Scrooge can free up his money and use it to create it for them. Spreading the wealth, liquifying it in effect, allows more people to create cosiness, and it's in cosiness that good fellowship and sympathy flourish. Freezing up wealth in capital – another system - as Scrooge and Marley have done, limits the occasions for cosiness, and dehumanizes.

It's interesting how Dickens conflates in this text the two notions of Christmas and cosiness. He does this so successfully, and in terms of the wider culture, so ineluctably, that the two have become almost synonymous. Christmas is the archetypal expression now of cosiness, and every time cosiness is created, it's like a small echo of Christmas. A Christmas Carol, with its images of plenty, of lavish spending on food and light and gifts, with its emphasis on cosiness and its relationship to money, has done much to make it that way. As the literate middle class expanded, Dickens's Christmas books became more popular, even to the extent of becoming consumer commodities themselves. As family readings of the Carol became part of the traditional way of celebrating Christmas, the images of cosiness became something to aspire to, a lifestyle. The image became more important than its original meaning: cosiness as means for fellowship was replaced by cosiness as an aim in itself.

 The enduring image for this commodification of Christmas is the Ghost of Christmas Present. The second spirit depicts elements of the Roman god Saturn, with his sword, his cornucopia-like torch, the pagan elements embodied in the green and fur of his robe, his wreath of holly, his bared breast. At the same time he looks forward to the modern depiction of Santa Claus created in America by advertisers to sell another commodity – soft drinks- in which the original pagan elements have been replaced by the corporate colours red and white.

The festival has become a celebration of conspicuous consumption, rather than a festival of human fellowship, which is how Dickens saw it. The Christ Child has become the Great God of Capitalism; the festival of His Birth, a festival of Shopping.  

Charles Dickens submits the manuscript of 'Bleak House' to a modern publisher...

February 7th 

2012

Dear Mr Dickens,

Thank you for the submission of your manuscript 'Bleak House' to Simian and Shyster, America's Biggest and Best Books™. We are interested in your book, but feel that substantial changes will need to be made to make it fit our house style and to make it marketable. I list these changes below.

                                  

1. The title. This is puzzling. I don't think readers will see the relevance of the title to the rest of the text. Also, it is not grammatically correct, as it should be 'The Bleak House'. Popular titles for novels at the moment are rather longer and say a little bit more about the book. Suggestions based on titles which have proved popular might include 'Very Dirty and Terribly Important', or 'The Girl who Wondered Who She Was'. Please think about it.

2. The double narrative. I strongly recommend that you split these into two separate books. It should be quite easy to separate the two narratives, one of our interns could do it. Perhaps the Esther narrative could be published first, and then the other narrative later, as a second book? This would allow us to maximize our investment.

3. The prose style is far too overwrought and will not be popular with readers. To help you understand what I mean, I have notated the opening paragraph with suggestions for changes.

LONDON.

We've got a problem right here, as many of our readers will simply not know who or what or where London is. We suggest changing this to 'Milwaukee', as market research shows that this city is representative of our target audience.

Michaelmas Term lately over

Similarly, our readers will be asking, 'what is Michaelmas?' And 'term' is far too British. We suggest changing this to 'fall semester'.

and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

again, simply too British. We suggest changing this to an American position of equivalence. Perhaps City Council Member. Also, many readers will take exception to the association of Lincoln with an inn. Perhaps change this to the name of a President who is a bit more innocuous and likely to have been forgotten by most readers: Carter, perhaps?

Implacable November weather.

Can you change 'implacable'? I'm not sure our readers will know this word. Two syllable words maximum are best, as has been shown by market research many times. (If you hit F6 on your keyboard, you get a really useful thesaurus you can use to choose words more likely to be familiar to readers)

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had

Here at Simian and Shyster we pride ourselves on keeping metaphors out of our writers' work. Now, as this whole passage is one extended metaphor, getting rid of it will mean extensive rewriting. Mmm. In fact, come to think of it, the whole book is an extended metaphor isn't it? I'll check with our marketing department about how to proceed on this, and get back to you.

but newly retired from the face of the earth,

'but newly retired' is not being accepted by my grammar checker, it suggests 'only recently retired'. Are you ok with that?

and it would not be wonderful

Readers will not understand this. Avoid double negatives. Suggest: 'and it would be cool'

 to meet a Megalosaurus,

'Megalosaurus' is simply far too long. Market research shows that the most popular pet in the Milwaukee area is a dog, and this also ties in with our Frequent Word Recognition Program ™, which has been very helpful in keeping more than 50% of our books in the NYT Bestseller list for longer than one week, and which also suggests 'dog' here.

forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard

Oh dear, this is getting into a mixed metaphor isn't it. I suggest scrapping this altogether. Do try to keep your sentences as short as possible. Readers like to read short things.

up Holborn Hill.

'up' is far too strenuous. Market research shows that depictions of exertion or exercise fare badly with the Midwestern market. Readers there apparently feel guilty about their lifestyles if they read about exertion. I suggest 'down' the hill. Easier. Also, please use Google Earth to check if their really is such a street name in Milwaukee.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

This is showing as an 'incomplete fragment' on my grammar checker, so you will need to look at the grammar of this sentence. In fact, most of the manuscript shows up in red on my grammar checker, so you will really need to change your style. Avoid long sentences, and avoid complex sentences, compound ones are better. Here is an example of what I mean:

Smoke was lowering down from chimney-pots. It was making a soft black drizzle, and it had flakes of soot in it. These were as big as full-grown snow-flakes. A person watching (avoid 'one', it's so pretentious) might imagine that it had gone into mourning for the death of the sun.

The rest of the paragraph can simply be cut. You are merely adding more detail to reinforce your point, but actually you are not saying anything new. Readers will not understand it, and they will get tired of all the detail. The story does not move forward. Pace, pace, pace, keep it moving forward all the time, and keep your sentences as short as possible. Market research shows this is best.

I think we have a possible winner on our hands, but as I said above, the novel needs a lot of work before it is ready for publication. If you can agree to our suggested changes, I'll put together a team of staff writers and editors to work on it with you.

Thanks once again for submitting your manuscript, and I look forward to writing your book for you.

Eddie Torr

New Project Manager

Simian and Shyster

America's Biggest and Best Books™

" A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again" David Foster Wallace

And yet in the midst of these terrors, I was placed in a situation so exquisitely ridiculous that even then I had as strong a sense of its absurdity, as I have now; and could no more help laughing than I can at any other comical incident happening under circumstances the most favourable to its enjoyment.

American Notes
Charles Dickens


Charles Dickens and DFW shared more than a voyage at sea. While Dickens was describing his first trans-Atlantic crossing, in this title essay of the eponymous selection, DFW describes, on assignment from Harpers, a luxury Caribbean cruise. It is an opportunity ripe for beady eyed observations of social behaviour and the zeitgeist, and DFW rises to it with Dickensian aplomb, describing his fellow passengers and shipboard activities, organised or otherwise, with delicious laughter and thought-stopping insight.

Here he is on the Professional Smile.

You know this smile, the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement – the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee….Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair?...
And yet, the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Mahattan cigar store, or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows full well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers’ scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl. I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the countermans’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.

It takes a special kind of sensitivity and vision to be aware of the soul-destroying effect of the impact of customer service standards that lie at the heart of all anonymous social interactions in these high and heady days of late stage capitalism, driven as it is by the two gods of Marketing and Brand Building; how they have irredeemably soured the soul. Simple good old- fashioned 19th century manners are no longer enough. We need interactional behavioural competencies, and they need to be motivational and (above all) measurable. It takes writers of unusual calibre to both clearly see through the mores of their time to the essential unchanged humanity beneath them, and to describe them from inside, participating within them rather than just omnisciently describing them as an observer. Like Dickens, in DFW’s writing here, there is no sense of distance between the narrative voice and the subjects it describes, as there is, say, in DeLillo’s or Eliot’s.

DFW’s writing both reflects and shapes the consciousness of our times rather like Dickens's did his: his endlessly digressive style, the split concentration on what is being observed and how he is reacting to it, the short attention span coupled with the obsessive curiosity of the chronic browser/flaneur, the colloquial vocabulary and simplistic, end on end, syntax, the very generalised profanity reflecting a pervading sense of outrage, the funny names betraying an involuntary intoxication with language. The Greek Ship's Officer named Demetrios is renamed Dermatitis by the narrative voice in a what seems to me to be a very Dickensian way. Like Dickens's parodies of journalese, which caught the echoes of his times, the plethora of footnotes in DFW's prose echo the hyperlinks of the internet, causing the reader to mimic the reading style used for the internet. He slyly positions himself as one of us, a (chatroom or forum) buddy, and thereby makes us see what he sees and what before we had not.

Two hundred years from now, if Western Culture still exists, it will be DFW and Pynchon who will be the representatives of our times in the way that Dickens and Trollope are of theirs, I'll wager.

Dickens on laughter

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

Correspondence #9

Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is really unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books, all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives, and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.

Leon Feuchtwanger
Moscow

If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria…Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance.

Joseph Brodsky
Less than one

Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…

Dostoevsky
Poor Folk

Fragment 1412

Notes on Dickens 10

Dickens and Gogol shared the same metonymic use of language. When they stuck to their guns and remained true to their gift, their writing was its most powerful. For Gogol, the temptation, to which he finally succumbed, was the metaphorical. In Part 2 of Dead Souls, he tries to make his details, his language symbolize something, and his writing suffers as a result. For Dickens, the temptation was allegory. In parts of The Old Curiosity Shop, in Hard Times he tries to make his language exemplify something, and his writing suffers. Gogol, in his view of himself as a messianic saviour, was undone by metaphor, Dickens, in his view of himself as a teacher and social reformer, was almost undone by allegory. However, Dickens's gift was strong enough to survive this temptation.

Fragment 712

Notes on Dickens 9

Sinyavsky writes of Gogol: his language shifts from the object of speech to speech itself… that is why we perceive Gogol’s prose so distinctly as prose, and not even as a form of putting thoughts into words… it has its content and even if you wish, its subject in itself - this prose which steps forth in the free image of speech about facts worth mentioning, speech in a pure sense about nothing. Substitute Dickens for Gogol, and you have the most accurate description of Dickens’s language as any I have read.

Bayley writes comparing the two: Unlike Dickens’s, Gogol’s words are never interested in exploiting emotion or in their own luxuriant freedom and sentiment; they are much too absorbed in themselves. The Dickensian interest in exploiting the emotion of words (a contentious issue in itself) aside, Bayley puts up a false dichotomy between words' own luxuriant freedom and sentiment and their self-absorption: but to me these two qualities of words define each other, and they are the qualities that both writers share. What else is the self-absorption of Gogol’s words but a luxuriating in their freedom and sentiment/what else is the self-absorption of Dickens's words but a luxuriating in their freedom and sentiment?

Here is Dickens in 1836 describing the morning streets in Sketches by Boz:
Rough sleepy-looking animals of strange appearance, something between ostlers and hackney coachmen begin to take down the shutters of early public houses, and little deal tables, with the ordinary preparations for a street breakfast make their appearance at their customary stations. Numbers of men and women, (principally the latter), carrying on their heads heavy baskets of fruit, toil down the park side of Piccadilly, on their way to Covent Garden, and, following each other in rapid succession, form a long straggling line from thence to the turn of the road at Knightsbridge…

And here is Gogol in 1835, describing the morning streets in Nevsky Prospect:
At that time Nevsky Prospect is empty: the stout shop owners and their sales clerks are still asleep in their Holland nightshirts or are soaping their noble cheeks and drinking coffee; beggars gather near the pastry shops, where a sleepy Ganymede, who yesterday was flying about with chocolate like a fly, crawls out, tieless, broom in hand and tosses them stale cakes and leftovers. Down the streets trudge useful folk: Russian muzhaks pass by occasionally, hurrying to work, their boots crusted with lime that even the Ekaterininsky Canal, famous for its cleanliness, would be unable to wash off…

There is the same accumulation of very specific and digressive detail, the same energy in the telling and bustle in the seeing, the same metonymic use of a single swift gesture to delineate a character or an object, the same caricatured sharpness of vision, the same acute awareness of food and drink and their economic ramifications, the same urbanity and wit, the same ironic observations spoken to the side; those noble cheeks and the pastry boy flying about, are very Dickensian, very Gogolian…

" The Pickwick Papers" Charles Dickens

Pickwick begins with a ray of light illuminating the gloom, and ends in the blaze of the sunshine of the world. Throughout, this sunniest of Dickens’s works balances light and darkness, like the dappled shade of an English wood on a summer’s day. It is a trope in Dickens criticism to see a steady darkening of his mood throughout his career, and there is no doubt that Drood for example is darker than Pickwick. However, the darkness of his later works is foreshadowed in scenes and episodes in Pickwick. The climax of the book sees Pickwick and his faithful servant Sam Weller incarcerated in the Fleet prison, giving Dickens the first of his career-long opportunities to highlight the injustices of the legal system; a system which, in Dickens’s worldview, stands in metonymic relationship to all systems which dehumanize. The first of the inset stories features alcoholism, poverty, domestic abuse, squalor and death; and the other inset narratives all focus on the dark underbelly of life.

These dark episodes notwithstanding, the book is hilariously enchanting and a source of continual delight in its depiction of innocence at large. Pickwick and his chums are in fact children lost in an adult world. The adventures they have are often the result of misreading the world, in the way that children do. They are taken in by the worldly Jingles; Pickwick is unaware of the reason why Mrs Bardell is behaving so strangely. In their relations with women, they exist in a pre-sexual innocence. Although he is retired, we never know what line of business Pickwick was in, or anything of his former life: he exists in a perpetually unfolding present, without a personal history, in the way that children do. The same is true of Snodgrass, Winkle and Tupman. The function of Sam Weller is to follow behind like a patient adult or a long suffering guardian angel, and get Mr Pickwick out of scrapes. In a key scene when Mr Pickwick has been wandering lost in the dark midnight corridors of the great White Horse Inn, he is found by Sam and taken back to bed and tucked in.

'But of this I am determined, Sam,' said Mr. Pickwick; 'that if I were to stop in this house for six months, I would never trust myself about it, alone, again.'
'That's the wery prudentest resolution as you could come to, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller. 'You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin'.'
'What do you mean by that, Sam?' said Mr. Pickwick. He raised himself in bed, and extended his hand, as if he were about to say something more; but suddenly checking himself, turned round, and bade his valet 'Good-night.'
'Good-night, Sir,' replied Mr. Weller. He paused when he got outside the door--shook his head--walked on--stopped-- snuffed the candle--shook his head again--and finally proceeded slowly to his chamber, apparently buried in the profoundest meditation.

The main threats to the Pickwickians’ innocence are the loss of a childhood independence through marriage, and the guile and adult unscrupulousness of the law. It’s significant that the grounds for the action of Bardell versus Pickwick are laid in the same chapter that Sam Weller is hired as Pickwick’s servant: the main threat to Pickwick, and his chief protection against it arrive in the story at the same time. The situation of Tony Weller structurally foreshadows the threat to Pickwick: both of them under threat from a widow, a threat that has been put into motion by the machinations of the law. Notwithstanding the happy wedding celebrations, and the hilarious wooings of Winkle, Snodgrass and Tupman, the text is full of anxieties about marriage. 'Ven you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now'. and most of the marriages portrayed are unhappy or unwanted. ‘Mr Vinkle stops at home now’, rejoined Sam. ‘He’s married.’ ‘Married!’ exclaimed Pott, with frightful vehemence. He stopped, smiled darkly, and added in a low, vindictive tone, “It serves him right!’ It’s all too easy to read into this Dickens’s anxieties over his own perhaps too hastily enjoined marriage to Catherine Hogarth, in the year Pickwick was started, especially in view of his later desertion of her. The law is accompanied by images of dirt and filth whenever it makes an appearance, like the mud symbolism in the famous opening paragraph of Bleak House, another sustained attack on the legal system.

The book is characterised by a kind of largesse. Images of largeness abound, with a host of fat characters: Tupman, the fat boy, Wardle, and of course Pickwick himself, who threatens often to burst from his waistcoat when he is indignant or angry. This fatness is not restricted to the characters, but also infects the language and even the structure of the book. The second chapter was overwritten and the justly famous Christmas chapters had to be renumbered for the same reason. The main plot of the novel is fattened with subsidiary narratives: inset stories and manuscripts, anecdotes told by the characters to each other. Part of this largeness resides in Dickens’ peculiar metonymic imagination, in which parts stand for the whole, in which the whole picture, the whole emotion is often unreachable, beyond language: [Mr Pickwick] smiling on his partner all the while with a blandness of demeanour that baffles all description.

This metonymic strategy is nowhere more apparent in Dickens’s creation of character, in which the line, the gesture, the external description of body, clothing, action and speech stands for psychological motivation, for descriptions of the internal working of the mind. In two characters in particular in this early novel, the metonymic use of language is especially pronounced and hilarious. Mr Jingles speaks a kind of telegraphese, in which most of the subsidiary language is stripped away leaving the key word partnerships to stand for the whole sentence in the mind of the reader, and also in the mind of Jingles’s listener: Here, No. 924, take your fare, and take yourself off—respectable gentleman—know him well—none of your nonsense—this way, sir—where’s your friends?—all a mistake, I see—never mind—accidents will happen—best regulated families—never say die—down upon your luck—Pull him up—Put that in his pipe—like the flavour—damned rascals.’
Sam Weller, on the other hand, is in the habit of facetiously adding little set-phrases: …as the X said when… to the most innocuous of replies. Severe weather, Sam,’ observed Mr. Pickwick.‘Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,’ replied Mr. Weller.
‘What do I mean,’ retorted Sam; ‘come, Sir, this is rayther too rich, as the young lady said when she remonstrated with the pastry–cook, arter he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside. These, rather like Feneon’s Three Line Novels, create little eddies, little vortexes of narratives, in which the set-phrase stands for a larger narrative known only to Sam. They are usually ignored by the other characters, and seem to please only Sam (and the reader) himself. A collection of these set-phrases of Sam’s would make a nice little anthology of miniatures, and would reveal Sam’s gallows sense of humour.

The pivotal trial scene prefigures the later trails of Kafka, Hitchcock and Camus. The humour aside, the situation takes on the character of a nightmare in which every insignificant detail of daily life is presented as evidence for a crime Pickwick doesn’t even know he has committed: not only is the breach of promise unproved, but the promise itself has never even been made or intended. The texture of everyday life is on trial, and the innocence of the quotidian is turned around and made sinister by the law:
…letters that must be viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.”

Fragment 1611

The Collected Sayings of Mr Samuel Weller

1. Reg’lar rotation’, as Jack Ketch said, ven he tied the men up.
2. What the devil do you want with me’, as the man said, wen he see the ghost?
3. Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.
4. No one else ‘ll do, as the devil’s private secretary said ven he fetched avay Doctor Faustus.
5. There’s nothin’ so refreshen’ as sleep, sir, as the servant girl said afore she drank the egg–cupful of laudanum.
6. If you walley my precious life don’t upset me, as the gen’l’m’n said to the driver when they was a–carryin’ him to Tyburn.
7. I think he’s the wictim o’ connubiality, as Blue Beard’s domestic chaplain said, vith a tear of pity, ven he buried him.
8. It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.
9. Hope our acquaintance may be a long ’un, as the gen’l’m’n said to the fi’ pun’ note.
10. Wery sorry to ‘casion any personal inconwenience, ma’am, as the housebreaker said to the old lady when he put her on the fire.
11. There; now we look compact and comfortable, as the father said ven he cut his little boy’s head off, to cure him o’ squintin’.
12. Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,
13. Oh, quite enough to get, Sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes.
14. Hooroar for the principle, as the money–lender said ven he vouldn’t renew the bill.
15. Come, Sir, this is rayther too rich, as the young lady said when she remonstrated with the pastry–cook, arter he’d sold her a pork pie as had got nothin’ but fat inside.
16. Allow me to express a hope as you won’t reduce me to extremities; in saying wich, I merely quote wot the nobleman said to the fractious pennywinkle, ven he vouldn’t come out of his shell by means of a pin, and he conseqvently began to be afeered that he should be obliged to crack him in the parlour door.
17. Nothin’ less than a nat’ral conwulsion, as the young gen’l’m’n observed ven he wos took with fits.
18. If this don’t beat cock–fightin’ nothin’ never vill, as the lord mayor said, ven the chief secretary o’ state proposed his missis’s health arter dinner.
19. I leave all that ‘ere to you. It’s a great deal more in your way than mine, as the gen’l’m’n on the right side o’ the garden vall said to the man on the wrong un, ven the mad bull vos a–comin’ up the lane.
20. P’raps if vun of us wos to brush, without troubling the man, it ’ud be more agreeable for all parties, as the schoolmaster said when the young gentleman objected to being flogged by the butler
21. Anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.
22. He’s a malicious, bad–disposed, vorldly–minded, spiteful, windictive creetur, with a hard heart as there ain’t no soft’nin’, as the wirtuous clergyman remarked of the old gen’l’m’n with the dropsy, ven he said, that upon the whole he thought he’d rayther leave his property to his vife than build a chapel vith it.
23. Avay vith melincholly, as the little boy said ven his schoolmissus died.
24. This is rayther a change for the worse, Mr. Trotter, as the gen’l’m’n said, wen he got two doubtful shillin’s and sixpenn’orth o’ pocket–pieces for a good half–crown.
25. If you know’d who was near, sir, I rayther think you’d change your note; as the hawk remarked to himself vith a cheerful laugh, ven he heerd the robin–redbreast a–singin’ round the corner.
26. I only assisted natur, ma’am; as the doctor said to the boy’s mother, after he’d bled him to death.
27. Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sveetly remarked ven they put him down in the pension list ‘cos his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a portable tinder box.

And two from his father, Mr Tony Weller
1. Vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much, to learn so little, as the charity boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter of taste.
2. It’s all for my own good; vich is the reflection vith which the penitent schoolboy comforted his feelin’s ven they flogged him.

Fragment 728

Notes on Dickens 8

Class mobility: Dickens is full of class mobility and characters who are on the make, both minor characters: Bailey, Guppy, Bradley Headstone; and major ones, whose class mobility mirrors the narrative trajectory of their respective novels: Pip, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby. In the Sketches especially, we see the emerging urban middle classes creating routines of pleasure for themselves: Mr Augustus Cooper joining the dance academy, Miss Amelia Martin taking part in amateur concerts, the whole family enjoying themselves at Astley’s. Class mobility is always hugely precarious in Dickens, both materially and spiritually. Economic forces may pull a man down just as surely as they can lift him up in the rapidly expanding economy of the city (How well he knew this from his own childhood experiences!): Is there any man who has mixed much with society… who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, was a respectable tradesman, or a clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit with good prospects and decent means…?
On the other hand, economic success can have dire consequences for the soul, stifling all warm human feeling as middle class responsibilities (respectability, Sabbatarianism, temperance) replace working class pleasures: puffed up conceit is not dignity. Snarling at the little pleasures they were once glad to enjoy, because they would rather forget the times when they were of a lower station render [such people] the objects of contempt and ridicule.
This social mobility also effected Dickens personally, and could be seen in Dickens’s dress. The notorious bright fancy waistcoats of his youth were gradually replaced by the uniform black of the Mid-Victorian gentleman, as the dandy evolved into the paterfamilias and the respectable figure of society.

Dickens on puritanism

I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of all its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave: that odious spirit, which, if it could have had full scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power of raising up enduring images before their fellow creatures yet unborn, no better than the beast…

Correspondence #5

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

T.S.Eliot
The Wasteland

Fragment 528

Notes on Dickens 7

Tolstoy's answer to the problem of how to deal with the gross injustices of his time and place was to focus on those immediately around you and to help those you can, personally and immediately according to the demands of your conscience, eschewing systematic attempts at social and political reform, which he saw as at best useless, and at worst iniquitous.

I think Dickens's aim was similar. He wanted his readers to open their eyes and hearts to what was happening around them. I think he hoped that by moving his readers to tears or laughter or anger he would arouse their human conscience, provoking a practical personal response in them. This response, multiplied among thousands, would eventually amount to an irresistible pressure for social change.

This is why he focuses on the creation of character rather than launching a critique of systems or putting forward alternative ideas. His characters as individuals speak to his readers as individuals, and it’s this connection which spurs the reader to action. In this, Dickens is one of the supreme humanists of his age: the human individual always comes before the system, whether the system is legal, religious or moral.

However, the rage the individual feels as he suffers at the hands of the system is quite modern, and in many ways prefigures Kafka’s battles against nightmare bureaucracies: ‘The System! I am told on all hands. It’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into court, and say, ‘My Lord. I beg to know this from you –is this right or wrong? Have you the face to tell me I have received justice, and therefore am dismissed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer the system.

In Dickens, the system dehumanizes both those who suffer under it and those who administer it, the first by removing their freedom, the second by removing their conscience.

Fragment 515

Notes on Dickens 6

When Dickens is writing from the heart, reaching for an emotional power of expression in his own voice, and succeeding in avoiding the baleful influence of Carlyle, his writing takes on a splendid power of rhythm. Here he is on the clock of St Paul’s:

Heart of London, there is a moral in thy every stroke! As I look on
at thy indomitable working, which neither death, nor press of life,
nor grief, nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot, I seem
to hear a voice within thee which sinks into my heart, bidding me,
as I elbow my way among the crowd, have some thought for the
meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with
scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape.

It’s in moments like this that Dickens is at his most Shakespearean. Look at this:

Heart of London,
There is a moral in thy every stroke!
As I look on at thy indomitable working,
Which neither death, nor press of life,
nor grief,
Nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot,
I seem to hear a voice within thee which
Sinks into my heart, bidding me,
As I elbow my way among the crowd,
Have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes,
And, being a man, to turn away
With scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape.

It’s iambic blank verse, generally pentameter, but occasionally alternating with tetrameter or hexameter: the rhythm of Shakespeare. It’s as if Dickens has absorbed Shakespeare’s influence to an extent where it seeps unnoticed into his writing.

Iambic pentameter is also the rhythm of natural spoken English. We produce iambic pentameter all the time without realizing it. Oliver has just said the following sentences as I write: I think I’ll just pop out and by some fags. I’m going to clean the bathroom after this.

Both writers employ the same means: at moments of specific power, they reach down into the natural rhythms of the language, the rhythms based on the breath and pulse of the spoken word.

Fragment 2304

Notes on Dickens 5

During his career, in addition to writing the 15 major novels, managing and organizing amateur theatricals for charity, campaigning for political causes, touring the country giving readings and generally just living, Dickens also was involved in four magazines as an occasional writer, and as chief editor and shareholder. These magazines give us a fascinating glimpse into the development of the entrepreneurial side of Dickens the professional writer, his uncanny business sense of what the public wanted; and how he was creative not only in the imaginative space between mind and hand as he wrote at his desk, but also in the public space of the market for literature.

The first of these magazines was Bentley’s Miscellany.

During the summer of 1836, when Dickens was 24, barely out adolescence, flush from the wild successes of The Sketches by Boz and Pickwick especially, he was approached by the 40-year-old experienced publisher Bentley, who exploited Dickens’s youth and inexperience. The terms he agreed with Bentley were these: for £20 a month to produce (edit, manage, arrange contributions) a monthly magazine for one year (with a three year renewable option), including a long piece by him to appear in each issue, for which he was paid an additional £20 per month. He was also contracted to write two three-decker novels. He was forbidden to undertake any other work for any other publisher. Bentley had him tied down.
It’s easy to attribute these unfavorable terms to Dickens’s anxiety over money, an anxiety which stemmed from his childhood experiences, and which was never to leave him, even in his maturity, when he was the biggest selling and richest professional writer in the country. At the same time, we can see his burgeoning business acumen: his awareness of the need to build on his recent success by seizing opportunities as soon as they presented themselves. The unfavourable terms can be attributed to the still uncertain sense of his own worth as a bankable commodity. Moreover, with a wife and new son, the contract gave him what he most needed at that time: a regular salary. The job lasted for roughly 18 months and then Dickens resigned in exasperation at how the terms were tying him down. His writing for this magazine has the easy charm and gently satirical freshness of the Sketches and Pickwick: The Public Life of Mr Tulrumble being a good example.

The second magazine was Master Humphrey’s Clock.

This was a weekly magazine of 16 pages produced by the publishers of Pickwick and Oliver Twist: Chapman and Hall, which started in spring 1840. Dickens was editor, manager and contributor, doing much the same kind of work that previously he had done for Bentley. His motivation for getting involved in this project seems to have been much the same as the reasons why he became involved in Bentley’s project; but this time, the publishers offered him much better terms: in addition to a weekly salary he was given a 50% share of the profits.
The idea was to include stories linked by a framing device of an old man -Master Humphrey- , and his companions, (one of whom is our old friend Pickwick) sitting by the fireside. The stories are culled from manuscripts discovered in the base of an old clock.
A lot of the writing has a padded feel to it. It seems flat and lifeless, without spark or energy. It’s what I suppose we would call ‘puff’: written to fill space in a magazine, not necessarily to be read. But two things are noteworthy about it. First, I find it interesting that at the age of 28, in all the flush of his growing success, with Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby already under his belt, Dickens takes on the persona of an old man, Gerontion by the fire, withdrawn from the world and living in his imagination only. Secondly, out of this chthonic soup of language occasionally there rise up bubbles of ideas which later become the full blown characters and plots of his great novels: Bred to a profession 
for which he never qualified himself, and reared in the expectation 
of a fortune he has never inherited, he has undergone every vicissitude of which such an existence is capable. (seeds of Richard Carstone’s story in Bleak House) He and his younger brother, both orphans from their childhood, were educated by a wealthy relative, who taught them to expect an equal division 
of his property; but too indolent to court, and too honest to 
flatter, the elder gradually lost ground in the affections of a 
capricious old man, (seeds of the relationship between the Martins in Chuzzlewit) and the younger, who did not fail to improve 
his opportunity, now triumphs in the possession of enormous wealth. 
His triumph is to hoard it in solitary wretchedness, and probably 
to feel with the expenditure of every shilling a greater pang than 
the loss of his whole inheritance ever cost his brother. (Seeds of Scrooge and Jonas Chuzzlewit) Tone and image are also prefigured in this early work:
It is night. Calm and unmoved amidst the scenes that darkness 
favours, the great heart of London throbs in its Giant breast. (It is night in Lincoln's Inn-perplexed and troublous valley of the 
shadow of the law… Bleak House). 
Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue, guilt and innocence, repletion 
and the direst hunger, (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, 
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…, Tale of Two Cities) all treading on each other and crowding together, are gathered round it.
Readers did not respond well to Master Humphrey’s wandering old voice, however, and sales fell rapidly. Dickens responded characteristically swiftly, and developed a short story he had started in the magazine into The Old Curiosity Shop. After the next novel, Barnaby Rudge, the magazine folded.

The third magazine was Household Words.

This magazine was produced by his new publishers Bradbury and Evans, who were also the owners and producers of Punch. The idea was to produce a sister magazine to Punch, which would be slightly more serious. Dickens was chief editor, commissioning editor, manager and occasional contributor. He had a 50% stake in the magazine’s profits, received an annual salary of £500 for his editing duties, as well as additional payments for his own contributions. The demands of producing his huge novels were overwhelming, but magazine production offered a way to maintain a steady income through writing without the immense strain and concentrated effort of perpetually writing novels to stringent deadlines
A weekly, the first number appeared early in 1850 and it folded in 1859. It had an average circulation of 38,000 which more than doubled during the famous Christmas numbers, in which such classics as A Christmas Carol and The Chimes appeared.
It was to become the chief literary organ of the decade, including literature in the form of poetry and serialized novels by Dickens and his contemporaries, social comment and criticism, of both domestic and foreign issues, investigative reporting, and letters. It soon became a platform for Dickens’s views on some of the most important social problems of the day, including sanitary reform, public education and the bungled mismanagement of the Crimean War. In tune with the socially conscientious tone of the magazine, the only novel that Dickens published in its pages is the didactic and highly allegorical Hard Times, perhaps the weakest of all his novels.
Contributors to the journal included Bulwer-Lytton, John Forster, Wilkie Collins, Coventry Patmore, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Adelaide Anne Procter, William Blanchard Jerrold, Harriet Martineau, George Meredith, Leigh Hunt, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Lever, Eliza Lynn and two well known colonial journalists John Capper and John Lang Linton -in short, a who’s who of Mid-Victorian letters.
Dickens’s right hand man on this project was Mr. Wills, who was in effect the operational manager of the magazine.
At the end of 1859, Dickens, in the process of effecting a separation from his wife, and trying to manage the resulting scandal, had a row with his partners in the magazine, Bradbury and Evans. After a Chancery court case, which Dickens won, he effectively bought up the magazine and closed it down.

The fourth magazine was All The Year Round.

This was started some months before the acrimonious demise of Household Words, and for a while the two magazines were published concurrently, competing in an increasingly competitive market. Taxes on printed matter, paper and advertising had recently been lifted, and the market was suddenly adrift with publications, as publishers and proprietors, many of them inspired by Dickens’s success with Household Words leapt to take advantage of an avidly growing readership. The magazine continued to be published for 20 years after Dickens’s death.
Under Dickens’s guiding hand, micro-managed editorial skills and bankable name, and the astute business management of the indefatigably loyal Wills the magazine had an astonishing circulation: 100,000 for normal numbers, 300,00 for the Christmas numbers. Dickens took 75% of the profits, and Wills 25%. Profits were an immense £2,750 - £3,000 per year on average
Wills was an astute business manager. He used the new company WHSmith, who had outlets all over the country in railway stations, as a distributor. He also employed nifty advertising campaigns, announcing forthcoming numbers. As Dickens’s other career, that of highly emotional public reader of his own works, began to absorb most of the remaining energies of the author, Wills was left more and more in charge of the running of the magazine.
Contents of the journal focused on the serialization of long novels, either by Dickens himself or by other novelists, starting on page one, in double columns of closely spaced writing, with no illustrations. (Can you imagine how well such a venture would do today?) However, it also included more articles on foreign affairs (the unification of Italy and the American Civil War were just two of the burning international issues of the day) but much less commentary on domestic social matters than Household Words had contained. Perhaps the most memorable issue was the one in which Dickens finished A Tale of Two Cities, and Collins began The Woman in White: two Mid-Victorian masterpieces appearing side by side. Among the most famous novels serialized in its pages were Great Expectations, No Name, and The Moonstone.
Contributors included Wilkie Collins, Bulwer-Lytton, Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope, whose contributions were solicited and edited by Dickens. For many of the Christmas numbers, many of these authors worked together to produce stories such as Mrs. Lirriper and The Haunted House.
We can see Dickens the business manager and magazine proprietor at work in the story of his negotiations with George Eliot.
While Collins’s The Woman in White was appearing, Dickens, looking ahead as any good manager should, began to look for another novel to serialise once The Woman in White should end. The aim, as always, was to maintain the current high readership and to increase it, or at least not to allow a lull in story telling cause a decline in sales. He approached George Eliot through his friend and Eliot’s partner, Lewes. Eliot had already completed Scenes From A Clerical Life and Adam Bede, both of which had been highly praised by Dickens. Eliot was hesitant, and despite Dickens’s assurances that money would be no object in her remuneration, she eventually declined. Many reasons have been put forward for this. Perhaps she feared the rigorous demands of weekly serialization. Eliot was not a fast, disciplined professional, writing set numbers of words to exacting editors and deadlines, in the way that Collins and Dickens were. Perhaps she feared the exposure of her unconventional private life that publication in such a highly successful magazine might bring. Perhaps she was also motivated by the faint intellectual snobbery in which she and Lewes held the hugely successful and popular Dickens. In the end, Eliot published her fiction in The Cornhill, a magazine edited by Thackeray, which was the main competitor to All The Year Round. Dickens still had his problem of who to ask to fill the gap after the conclusion of The Woman in White. Gaskell also declined, scared off by the weekly deadlines; a novel provided by Charles Lever failed to spark interest. In the end Dickens decided to fill the space himself and began work on Great Expectations.

In these four magazines, from the early days of Bentley’s Miscellany in the first few decades of the century, a highly risky and almost amateur effort, to the High-Victorian All The Year Round, with its carefully plotted business strategy, immense wealth and status, we see the birth and flourishing of a uniquely Victorian phenomenon: the literary periodical, a phenomenon whose importance and success is greatly attributable to Dickens’s own gifts as artist and entrepreneur. It is Dickens perhaps more than any other writer in the culture who did more in his lifetime to establish the writer of fiction as a respectable professional occupation, a status that it enjoys to this day thanks to his vision and energy.

Inadvertent Obscenity #4

The sound in my ears was not the sound of Mr Creakle giving it to Traddles, but the sound of the coachman touching up the horses.

Charles Dickens David Copperfield

Fragment 904

Notes on Dickens 4
Dickens’s voice is of course formed on the spoken word. The rolling rhythms of his sentences are oratorical and reflect three influences: the reading of his childhood and youth: Goldsmith, Sheridan and Shakespeare; the theatre during the last golden age of the barnstormers: MacReady and Keane; and his training and experience as a parliamentary reporter during the orotund debates over the reform bills of ’32 and ‘37.
These last in particular, Dickens likes to satirize. Here he is in Sketches abusing one of the standard tricks of political oratory, the rhetorical question:
Why have they been swamped by cabs and omnibuses? …why should people be allowed to ride quickly for eighteenpence a mile…. We pause for a reply, and having no chance of getting one, begin a fresh paragraph. And of course this from Mr Chadband in Bleak House
Now my young friends, what is this Terewth then? Firstly, (in a spirit, of love), what is the common sort of Terewth?- the working clothes –the everyday wear, my young friends? Is it deception?...

Fragment 404

Notes on Dickens 3

Dickens’s first chapters contain much of his best writing. Immediately arresting, full of matter, and almost Joycean in their use of exciting linguistic novelties, they establish at once, in a very short space, the mood of the novel and the voice of its narrator: at once dark, cynical, ironic, and yet fundamentally ludic, irresistibly dragging the reader in to the Dickensian world. In his later more carefully plotted and structured works, they contain the seeds of themes that grow throughout the rest of the book.
Their effect and purpose was to establish the novel firmly in the imagination of his reader, so that they would come back for more, thus ensuring the commercial success of the weekly or monthly serialisation. In their concentration of vision and voice, Dickens’s first chapters demonstrate the skills of a master craftsman who was born to write.
Their potency and power must come surely from the agony of indecision and writer’s block that accompanied the start of every new novel. At first, ideas start to cluster around him, motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older growth. Soon, he is in a wandering-unsettled-restless uncontrollable state of being... I sit down to work, do nothing get up, walk about a dozen miles, come back and sit down again next day, again do nothing and get up, go down a Railroad, find a place where I resolve to stay for a month, come home next morning, go strolling about for hours and hours, reject all engagements to have time to myself, get tired of myself and yet can’t come out of myself to be pleasant to anybody else…
Eventually, after all this suppression, like a geyser, the novel arrives in a kind of spurt of language, and he’s at his desk for 9 hours a day writing madly.

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together; but, saving in the country, I seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living.

As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can possibly sympathise with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the agricultural interest.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor 
sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As 
much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from 
the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a 
Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine 
lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, 
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as 
full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for 
the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, 
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, 
jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill 
temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of 
thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding 
since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits 
to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points 
tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. 

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in 
southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. 
Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the 
fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had 
become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance 
by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white 
streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which 
verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly 
staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of 
grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air 
barely moved their faint leaves.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, 
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, 
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, 
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, 
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, 
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, 
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct 
the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present 
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its 
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree 
of comparison only.

Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great 
arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little 
basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in 
front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown 
while he was very new. 


The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts 
into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier 
history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would 
appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following 
entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor 
of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his 
readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, 
and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious 
documents confided to him has been conducted.

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English 
Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower 
of its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of 
rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of 
the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has 
set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the 
impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for 
cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long 
procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and 
thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow 
white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and 
infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises 
in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure 
is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the 
rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has 
tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be 
devoted to the consideration of this possibility.