Winter nights with Dickens and Dumas

An unpleasant day at the Fagin residence

Every year or so I reach back into the mists of time and find a famous classic book I’ve not yet read. There are an embarrassing number of those. So, since December, I’ve finished “A Tale of Two Cities,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Great Expectations,” and just yesterday, “Oliver Twist.” 

Three Dickens and one Dumas: Probably enough Victorian literature for a while. But until now I’d read no Dumas books and only two by Dickens (“A Christmas Carol,” of course, and “Hard Times”). I thought the long winter nights might be a good time to catch up. 

As most of you already know, Dumas and Dickens tend to write long. Like, really long. Their books seem even longer when read on a Kindle and you can’t judge your progress by the thickness of the remaining pages. You proceed on faith alone, taking one chapter at a time until sleep arrives. And then repeat.

The dialog can be surprisingly sharp and witty; Dickens in particular had a keen sense of humor. Still, both these writers often veer into florid jungles of clauses and commas – windy declarations of vengeance and sacrifice and undying love. In those passages I’d usually kick into scan mode and pick up the narrative further down the line. 

Also, from the distance of 180 years, major characters can seem a bit mono-dimensional: either really saintly or almost demonic, and not a lot of nuance in between. Oliver Twist, for example, is so angelic that he’s easily the least-interesting figure in the book, little more than a MacGuffin. I was greatly cheered the one time he got mad and punched the kid who was slagging his mother.

It sounds like I didn’t enjoy these weighty tomes, but I did. They are free tickets back to another time — the time in which they were actually written. It’s nice not to stumble over careless anachronisms.  Remember, it was contemporary fiction then, not historical.

And you can’t fairly judge 19th-century writing by the fraught standards of the 21st.  Today’s tropes were yesterday’s avant garde. Dumas and Dickens were not copying a style, but inventing it.  And they were writing in a time when the general public had few better ways to pass a northern night. Netflix doesn’t exist, baby! The more pages the better!

 I did get one unintended chuckle out of “Oliver Twist.” The character of young Charlie Bates is often referred to as “Master Bates.” Heh heh. Charles Dickens was a legendary author, but he could not foresee the puerile sensibility of Beavis and Butthead. Sorry. I’ll show myself out.