The Very Mill of the Conventional

 "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have." 

-- Henry James, The Middle Years 

"The house had a name and a history..."* 

Page four in the Penguin paperback of The Portrait of a Lady and there it is: the longest sentence in Henry James -- at least according to the internet. I asked. Did not know. The funny part? I'd reread that sentence just about a month ago and I never noticed. Flowed right by in a perfectly pleasant way, as did ultimately the first hundred pages, almost before I'd looked up. That long sentence did not at the time seem a specially notable example of James' style or volubility. Turns out it's both. The words "architectural" and "labyrinthine" were used to describe it, also "masterful" and "clumsy." Fair enough. How did it not register as such?

Maybe I'm just used to the old boy. I've been reading Henry James since I first picked up The Turn of the Screw as horror obsessed kid so -- maybe fifty years now? Imagine. Hadn't thought about that until this very moment, honestly. Not a long list, authors I read fifty years ago who I'm still reading now. Longer than most people maybe, but I'm really not that fan who reads through all of the Anne of Green Gables books once a year. Basically I've read Tolkien twice and the second time was because of the Peter Jackson movies. I enjoyed my time with both of those authors, Lucy Maude and John Ronald Reuel, but I'm not a devotee. I do however have my favorites, writers I regularly reread, and Henry J. is definitely on my list. In fact, he's my favorite novelist, probably my favorite writer.

A few months ago I wrote a Staff Recommendation for  The Golden Bowl, by Henry James:

"This is my favorite novel. I've read it seven times. Why? Because it is beautiful and thrilling and I still don't understand why. Basically nothing happens. There's an engagement and shopping for a wedding present. It's perfect."

Then something shocking happened. Never would have predicted it. In three months we've sold seven copies. Seven!!! I'm not being fatuous or snippy. That may be more copies of that book than I've sold in all my nearly forty years of bookselling combined. My very un-Jamesian reaction when I saw the sales-sheet? "Holy shit, Henry! We're a hit!"

Normally I don't tell strangers that The Golden Bowl is my favorite book. If asked I'll own it, but I wouldn't lead with that unless I intended to end the conversation. Ol' HJ tends to shut that kind of giddy exchange of bookish enthusiasms right down. Nobody's fault. He just does not come up in this context that often. 

"Ohmahgawd, I love that book too! What's your favorite book ever?!"

"The Golden Bowl, by Henry James."

"... "

Most people who ask, "what's your favorite book?" are hoping to hear something they recognize if not endorse. We most of us want our opinions reflected flatteringly back in the shining, bespectacled faces of our fellow bibliophiles, readers. Reading is a solitary pursuit and yet for lots of people, myself included, it is the beginning of community. We want to like what other people read. We want other readers to like what we like. We want to like one another. So there's an allowance made for some variation -- some -- and an eagerness to hear about books and authors heretofore unknown to us, but you tell me your favorite book is Atlas Shrugged -- or come to that The Golden Bowl -- you aren't really looking for conversation, let alone community, so much as a platform or a soapbox. 

One tries not to be that guy. One really do.

Recently we had our semi-annual Employee Shopping Day. Our discount goes up ten percent on nearly everything. Back in the day we would all hoard up books to be purchased at the better price, but now most titles aren't stocked in a depth that allows for squirrelling away copies for weeks at a time. Fewer books. Fewer booksellers. Smaller stacks. The fact is that I am now too old to be bothered waiting for an extra 10%. Why wait? I could die. So come the day, instead of a cart, I carried my three books straight to the register. My purchases that day? Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, The Joyful Song of the Partridge, by Paulina Chiziane, and a very fancy, almost vulgar new hardcover of The Portrait of a Lady, (fancy fonts and shiny silver and pink filigree on maroon boards. Looks like the act curtain for a not entirely tasteful musical adaptation that will close faster than the premiere of Guy Domville.)** I'd read just enough of the first two novels to know I wanted to not just finish them but to own them. That last one? The Portrait of a Lady I needed like an extra thumb. Why on earth buy yet another copy of that novel? In addition to a volume in the Library of America James I've collected since that project was undertaken, I have somewhere a truly hideous academic hardcover of The New York edition of the same, and at least one ancient Oxford World Classic and or a Modern Library.

And yet I bought that tarted-up hardcover Portrait anyway. Started rereading it that same day. Forgot just how good it is. Took it with me to Pennsylvania on my annual trip back to see my elderly mother. Read just a little bit every night before bed. Before I'd even come back to Seattle I'd decided to make The Portrait of a Lady my next selection for Brad's Big Fat Book Club, my virtual monthly group chat. My selection, I'm pleased to say, was met with unexpected enthusiasm.  Good for us.

Truth is I'd never heretofore considered reading James in the Book Club. Unlike some of my other major enthusiasms like Dickens and Boswell, I hadn't much confidence in convincing even my friends to read Henry. I have been talked into a number of great books in my time and I have managed to persuade a number of otherwise perfectly indifferent and contented souls to read bits of Montaigne and Lamb and even the novels of Ivy Compton Burnett. So why should Henry J. be the one I couldn't sell for love or money?

The man has a reputation. It's mostly to do with those long sentences. In his autobiography G. K. Chesterton describes HJ's conversation as, "graceful groping." It's that, people's impatience at the idea of that. Henry James does many things exceedingly well and some, in my opinion, perfectly. He does not get on with it. For a lot of people that's a problem. 

If we are taught at all still to read English poetry, we hopefully learn first where and when to breath. Then emphasis, yes? (Verbs are good.) That's the trick of the whole business, isn't it? An actor's reading I admit but it has served me well. There are other ideas, other aesthetic considerations, but then I confess I've never really understood those even when they've been explained to me. Using words to do something other than mean what they're meant to has always seemed to me like having an elephant or a chimpanzee paint. I get that there's a novelty there, even some potential point to be made about... art? empathy? -- but ultimately it's like teaching a chicken to play the piano; not really the means to any end beyond that, is it?  

Prose literature is no different to me, at least in so far as to how I believe it's meant to work. What do Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joyce and Beckett -- hell, come to that add even a circus acrobat, in translation no less, like Laszlo Krasznahorkai to the merry band -- what do all great writers have in common? Read them aloud and see. Breath. Literature is as much breath as it is ideas or it isn't art, it's science and philosophy and polemic and agitprop, alphabet soup and graffiti. All but that last are legitimate uses of language I should think -- few things are as consistently banal, repetitive, and ugly as tagging -- but I personally need the sound of a recognizably human voice. Breath. A heart beat. Life. Sense.

Say what you will about the obscurity of James' vocabulary, the density of his language and his consistent modification and refinement of even the simplest declarations with all manner of dependent clauses, conditions, and contingencies, read his prose aloud and it breathes. Reading James, particularly late James like The Golden Bowl or for example his last unfinished memoir, The Middle Years, it would not be unreasonable to think, "Nobody talks like this. Nobody ever said these sentences aloud." But  you'd be wrong. James said them exactly this way. He dictated all his later books to a secretary -- with punctuation. This is then exactly how James talked, how he thought, the way his breath came. 

It is unlike the way we talk now, mostly. That's true. Increasingly we don't even want to talk if we can text. All to do with time, I should think. We seem to think there's less of it every day. Also? What we usually mean to convey isn't frankly very complicated. Kiss. Eggplant emoji. Shocked emoji. Laughing emoji. And ghost emoji. This isn't just something Henry James would not understand, it is the antithesis of everything he did and was and believed. Don't have to agree, but it is what makes reading him such a distinct pleasure; the time he takes, and the care is how he makes his meaning.

Also? He's funny. Honestly. People forget. Or they've never read The Portrait of a Lady.

But then there are the people who have read Henry James. Not always a good thing.

My generation had many great writers who were ruined for us by the indifferent teaching of usually their shortest novels. Length. Leave it to people answerable to lesson plans and semesters to reduce art to length. Poor Edith Wharton! Great writer. What did we read? The grim rural tragedy of Ethan Frome. George Elliot? The grim rural tragedy of Silas Marner. Charles Dickens? The grim urban tragedy of Hard Times. And our Henry? Did the man ever talk to children? The only examples we have, which may well be apocryphal, are all funny stories like Chesterton's again wherein James tries to give some urchins pennies to buy candy but then explains himself until they run away in confusion, much to his shock and disappointment. So, yeah, ask teenagers to read Henry James. Explain to most pimpled pubescents why The Turn of Screw is a masterpiece of ratcheting psychological horror or why Daisy Miller is a heartbreaking story of thwarted youth. Go on. Mention "thwarted youth." I'll wait.

It seems this sort of thing hardly happens anymore and I can't say that the world is any the worse for it. Those of us who love the great 19th Century novel tend to shake our shaggy gray heads sadly at the falling off of literacy and art. Rather our assignment now, shaking. The reality is that there have been at least two generations (three?) since my own who have come to maturity with a whole age-specific literature carefully calibrated to their every developmental requirement and they are every bit as indifferent to literature and art as were the majority of my contemporaries in my rural Pennsylvania high school, despite the theories of Education Majors and Library Scientists. (No one as endearingly confident in their evangelism, bless 'em, optimists all.) Bluntly readers read. Most don't. Most who do don't read Henry James. So what's worse really? Forced to read Silas Marner or never heard of Silas Marner? Same.

Most of my parents' and grandparents' generations read shit too, if they read at all. Harlequin romance and Don Pendleton, and before them Elinor Glyn and Owen Wister, and so on back through the annals of popular fiction, Philistinism, and the predictable disapproval of the rising generations by the passing. 

Even Henry James had a pretty dim view of his chances as a popular artist. 

"You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”

He knew.

Which is not to say that he isn't fun. He is. Never more so perhaps than in the book I've picked for the Club this time. Why I picked it, remember? I'd forgotten myself how well this one starts even as our heroine is orphaned! The charms and attraction of Isabel Archer are far more obvious than any to be found in The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver & Co. Isabel is one of literature's most appealing heroines, not least because her story is not altogether a happy one. Fresh and sharp and surprisingly determined to dictate her own terms with life to whatever extent she can, the Lady in James' Portrait is endearing in a way many of his major characters tend to be. She's young. She's intelligent. She's curious. The world is as it were all before her. Unlike so many of her contemporary fictional heroines, she's neither insipid nor dull nor moony with romance and sex. The people she meets are interesting if not always altogether what they seem, and isn't that always better for us too? When we involve ourselves then with Isabel Archer (somehow always both names in my head) we aren't simply interested in her, we want for her all she rather inchoately wants for herself. Her pleasures and fortune we share. Her disappointment hurts us too. She is real. She breathes.

“You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.”

Interesting to me that when I quote from this novel I seem to be quoting mostly older characters rather than our young leading lady. She says pithy things. People do, particularly in Henry James. But then very grown persons and very small children tend to the quotable more, don't you find? (Won't meet many toddlers in a Henry James novel and that is just as well. Their general level of conversation is not reliable.) Isabel thinks very well and says well what she means to, but really it is the author who speaks to us most directly. This is what makes Henry, so modern in so many ways from his psychology to his contempt for conventional romance, perhaps the last great practitioner of the novelist's direct address. Later very clever writers like Proust and Gunter Grass would find interesting ways 'round that by then quite dated convention, but Henry tells as much or more than he shows. He is therefore in direct line back to all the Victorians, to Fielding and Richardson, and on.

That is the joy of the thing, that Henry James has much to say. He has characters to say much of it and very well indeed. That is one of the conventions of his fiction. Even the least articulate character speaks to us in a characteristic rather than an eccentric or exaggerated way (see Dickens) because every character is of a class and a time to do so. Leisured people need not be particularly bright, or educated, but the writer who uses them has in them all the time in the world to put them into the society of others equally unoccupied by anything other than emotion and afternoon tea. We know that as a critic Henry James was the admirer of all sorts of writers who did not write about rich American bankers, art collectors, lords and ladies, country houses and rented villas in Italy. James chose to write about the people he chose to live among largely so that he might write the way he did -- and eat well at other people's tables more nights than not. He liked these people and the society of these people for the same reason he wrote about them: they talked and said or did not say what they meant but nearly always intentionally. What a thrilling departure that must have been from the bluestockings and New England Mandarins among whom he was raised. Those people meant every fucking word. Delicacy, irony, suggestion, nuance -- none of those are really American, are they? (Henry was from a family of great talkers and writers himself, come to that, but it's worth noting that his father and his brother and even his beloved if distinctly neurasthenic sister were all talkers at people. Henry listened more than he talked and wrote more than he generally did either. For all the spoofing of his talk and his style, no one ever suggested that the man was a bore. He might be boring occasionally, and trying in his syntax bless him, but his manners were perfect.)

“Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.”

And in the balance and mordancy of that sentence is nearly all of Henry James, for our purposes anyway. I intend for the Book Club that we should have a ball. It's right there to be had in nearly every lovely long paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, in every witty rejoinder, eventually every wicked deed, every mystery.

There are of course all sorts of interesting things to discuss in the fiction of Henry James and in his biography and times. We may well. I find him strangely irresistible, this rather virginal, obviously queer bachelor, scribbling away, then dictating some of the most complicated sentences in English prose. I like his barely disguised prurience and his hatred of vulgarity and cruelty and cant. I enjoy that he meant to reform no one and correct nothing but literature itself. I appreciate his preoccupation with the private thoughts of the passionately reserved English and their often bumptious but ever so slightly better intended American cousins.

That "mill of convention" by the way? He never tried to stop it. He was fascinated by the works. He never suggested it ought to be stopped turning. He watched, as he watched everything, with great sympathy and curiosity but with no thought to improve it's motion or question it's necessity. His intentions were, in their way, pure, as probably was his person. 

And really, no one ever made more books or better art from intentions than did dear Henry James. That is really where every book starts. What is the intention? What were her intentions? His? And no one ever had a sharper eye for the distance between “... the high brutality of good intentions ...” and the actual. That's where the man lived. Glad of the chance to spend some time there with le Maitre, and to bring friends. He loved company. Though I'm sure he would be shocked by our language and want of tact. 

And by how few buttons we all seem to require now. I'm quite sure he'd notice the brevity of our buttons.

*Here's the whole thing:

"The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain: bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real aesthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure."

** Guy Domville was James' 1895 theatrical flop. The author was jeered and booed. The show did not run.

First Off

Right off, the most memorable opening line in a novel? I would say "top of my head" but honestly I looked up a list. Familiar though, yes?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged..."

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else... "

"It was the best of times..."

"Call me Ishmael."

"Happy Families are all alike..."

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan..."

I've put them roughly in order by date from 1813 to 1922, that also roughly being THE great century of the novel. Great novels before and since, obviously. Still, another "truth universally acknowledged" (all but) would be that most would probably pick something from that period to put on a list of the best books -- evah. Well, most of the people I like would anyway. Bringing the memorable first lines forward as far as "I am an invisible man." or even this, from Waiting (1999) by Ha Jin, "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." -- and how can you not want to go on reading?! Isn't that the point?

My favorite opening line? 

"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." That is of course from The Towers of Trebizond, by dear Rose Macaulay.*

I've another:

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change when, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled."

That is a masterpiece, that sentence. Funny right off. That first joke still lands. Good. It is also quite strange of itself, that sentence as it is made of unlikely and unequal parts -- might almost be said shuffle and limp -- and yet it is as artfully assembled as a Debussy Cello Sonata. For a sentence made as late as 1934, the length and structure is more Latin than modern, and it even ends with a "dis" on a verb. (Though we learn not long after that this is meant to have been written in Greek, this "autobiography.") So this first sentence not only tells us a great deal and suggests even more of our narrator's appearance and character, it actually does this in what is actually a pretty brief space. No easy trick. Harder in it's way than some universal declaration about love, or life. There's the hero's name, just like the sailor and or the little Irish fella, but with more information and interest, so more like the offer of the camel then. And just to return briefly to the original point, how can you not want to go on reading once you've met dear ol' Clau-Clau-Claudius?

I honestly don't know how many times I have read Robert Graves' I, Claudius: from the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina. So many times. That puts it on my very short list of books I've read -- shall we say -- more than twice? Three times? 

Here's that list for curiosity's sake, this time it is right off the top of my greying bald head, and again in something like chronological order:

The OZ books of L. Frank Baum, all of which I borrowed from an older neighbor and read and reread time without number. My special favorites being Ozma of Oz, The Lost Princess of Oz, and probably Tik-Tok of Oz, with my favorite character probably being Scraps, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, but realistically, they were nearly all of them the very dearest friends of my early and sometimes lonely childhood.

Interview With a Vampire, by Anne Rice, the original mass market paperback of which I read and reread literally to tatters because it was, well, gay vampires, right? That sort of thing was much harder to come by in Western Pennsylvania in 1977. I decided when the lady died in 2021 to never open another book by her so long as I live. I read her right up to the precipice of her deeply weird re-conversion to Catholicism or whatever the fuck that was, and I've been sore tempted down the years to reread her vampires and or her witches, but  -- no. Of all my youthful enthusiasms, Anne Rice and "wine-coolers" are the two I think best left as fond memories of an earlier time and self.

Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield I've read more than any other Dickens and I've read and reread a lot o' Dickens. I could read either right this minute and enjoy the experience this time just as much as the last. All but the definition of a favorite I should think.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and The Essays of Montaigne. I group these together as they together constitute the nearest I've come in my adult life to serious study. I've read multiple translations of the latter, and all the supplemental and subsidiary biographies, studies, letters, essays, and poems of the former. Along with the Letters of Edward Fitzgerald and those of William Cowper, I could I think subsist in a cell with just these and Dickens. I should be unhappy, but I could do it.

The Essays of Elia, et al, including the letters, of Charles Lamb.

Probably without saying? Shakespeare and the 16th Century poets, plus Auden, Shelley, "This-that-and-the-other..."

And Claudius. Why?

When a TikTok meme revealed last year that men supposedly think about the Roman Empire every damned day, I simply could not understand it. Was this a serious thing? What on earth was the sample size? Who were these men?!

Now, other than my sexual orientation, to use that increasingly quaint phrase, I do look to be very much the demo for this obsession, to wit: old, white, middle-class (if only by marriage,) presumably literate, and not a complete yahoo. (The only empire the Trumpers generally dream of is probably either a vague notion of Kingdom Come, generalized white nostalgia, and or some sort of victory parade in that Call of Duty game. The oldest ones -- and they are mostly older than dirt -- may still remember gladiator pictures fondly I suppose.) When this whole Rome obsession was first announced in the mainstream media, I confess I did pursue it across the internet to every article that wasn't behind a paywall. A friend even gave me access to something in the (shiver) Wall Street Journal -- the paper of record for all the Americans most responsible for golf and other fiscal and environmental chicanery. I figured if anyone would have a handle on what seemed likely to be dickishness, it would be the WSJ.

Disappointing. Everyone seemed to agree that thinking about the Roman Empire was not good, mostly in the same way that thinking about porn every day might not be a great thing unless presumably one were in the business of, and nobody nowadays was really in the business of the Roman Empire. Other than a few popular historians like Adrian Goldsworthy and Mary Beard, and perhaps an historical mystery writer or two, nobody really makes a life any more from the shards and ruins of the Roman Empire. So, what then? Nostalgia for patriarchy? Check. Fantasies of socially acceptable, even ritualized violence? You betcha. All but overt sexual license to exploit the powerless? Sure. I would argue that there is also the same barely acknowledged homoeroticism of men digging thickly muscled dudes in tight leather gear and loose and revealing drapery that informs everything from Marvel comics to pro wrestling. How's your head (lock)? No complaints.

Let me just state unequivocally that I personally do not think about the Roman Empire every day, nor every other day. Neither do I think all that often about Napoleon, Attila, The Zhou Dynasty, or President Garfield. I can't say this has never happened and might not again, by I am by no means defined by any of it. (There are things I never think of like woodworking, table-tennis, lawn-care, industrial trucking, young adult anything including Zendaya, and gluten.) Yes, I did in fact take Latin in high school, but only because the teacher was older than God and it was a comparatively easier grade than French or Spanish. And yes, I have read more Roman history than say, Chinese, but this is a symptom I should guess of my general Anglophilia 'cause those old imperialists just loved imagining themselves as Horatius at the Bridge rather than what their ancestors and mine probably were, which was filthy Saxons grubbing peat and oats to keep from freezing to death over our cold porridge and mead. Also? Any gay boy who grew up anywhere near Summer Bible Camp has spent a disproportionate, even impious amount of time admiring those natty Roman governors of Judea etc. in the picture Bibles. Pontius Pilate's sense of style frankly put all those humble shepherds and silly high-priests in silly high hats to shame. (The villains often have the better dress sense, have you noticed?)

I was prepared to deny the whole fatuous business but then, as a lark, I put up a big display at the bookstore where I work. I titled the thing, "Rome Wasn't Read in a Day." Got a cute chalkboard sign made. Put up a selection of books by and about and thought little more about it. That was September of last year. Here we are months later and I have not been able to take that table down. Other, even better displays have come and gone, Rome endures. Why? Because I sell something off that damned thing every damned day. Seriously. Think about that. Not true of the new nonfiction table. Not true of the Mother's Day table I have up. Rome. Every day. Just like TikTok tried to tell me. That is nuts, right?

Ita sit.**

I've sold every Roman historian but Gibbon, oddly enough. Sold Ovid and Horace and Caesar and Cicero. Sold fiction off that table too. Sold Lindsey Davis and Steven Saylor mysteries, but also John Williams' Augustus, and Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and even dear old, utterly forgotten Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome. I loved all of those by the way, each in their own way and in their own time, though none so much as Claudius. 

And guess, other than Gibbon, what I hadn't sold off that Rome display?

That's right. Inexplicable. One of the best and most uniformly fun historical novels ever, one of the best novels of the 20th Century by more than one critical matrix and on more than one list of same, adapted into one of my favorite tv shows ever and the one most requested when the they asked the American public to pick one Masterpiece Theatre to rerun, and I could not sell Robert Graves' novel for amare nor pecunia. Why? I begin to think it may be for the same reason so many of these stiffs like dreaming about the Glory that was Rome. I may be overthinking this, but nearly everything about Graves (and Gibbon, come to that) is a pretty harsh burn on all that endears the Roman Empire to the fellas. Whatever good came from the Empire was no more obvious to most the people who actually had no choice but to live through it than it is to me, and not everyone benefited equally. That seems obvious, but remember, most of the men thinking about Rome are not thinking about being a Gaul, or a woman, or frankly, Claudius! Was it fun to be a Caesar? Sure. Heliogabalus probably had a blast. His dinner guests maybe not so much. Get the picture? Actually sitting through a Triumph sounds deadly dull to me, but I bet a lot of guys imagine their enemies paraded in chains before them and so on. Graves and Gibbon, admitting that the old Romans had their moments, actually spend most of their books talking about what useless, miserable, spineless, cucks and dirty, rotten bastards actually sat on Caesar's seat. 

Let me propose then that I, Claudius has, among its many virtues, the potential to correct at least some of the nostalgia that tempts these boys to dream of wearing caligae and swinging their short sharp gladius in front of perfectly indifferent, cautiously alarmed strangers in remotest Bithynia. 

 So now, goddamn it, it's my next selection for Brad's Big fat Book Club. We are going to read the fictional adventures of a Julio Claudian emperor, but not any of the ones those guys think are so cool. I'm betting we are going to like it for exactly the reasons they wouldn't. I'll do what I can to see that we do. Using the full titles should help, particularly the second book's which is wicked and delightful and suggests something of the irreverence with which the novelist treats that old whore that was ROME!

*If you don't know her, Rose Macaulay (1881 - 1958) was is in fact a direct descendent of the family of historians as well as being a treasure in her own right. She wrote a number of delightful and thoughtful novels, including Told by an Idiot (1923) as well as a wide variety of poetry and prose, including a brilliant nonfiction book on ruins, and much travel. Her letters to her priest/friend are worth reading even if one does not share their faith.

**"So be it" in Latin.

A Quick Announcement

Quick! Scribble something to decorate an online listing for the next selection of Brad's Big Fat Book Club! Done.

Dickens' Gift and Sidelines

In the book world, tchotchkes abound. Every couple of weeks promotional stuff arrives: lapel pins, fancy bookmarks, canvas bags, kids' games and little puzzles, etc. Can be a bit hard to keep track of it all. Some of it clearly made more sense in a marketing meeting than it does in a bookstore. Who wouldn't want an enameled pin of a crashing plane? No explanation. I guess you have to read the book. For reasons that remain unclear, we recently got quite a haul from a Buddhist press. Among the usual bookmarks and bags, there was, inexplicably a beautiful little embossed wooden thumb-drive in a wooden box. Downloading enlightenment? No idea. There's a lot of that. People do love a give-away, but this stuff goes stale like butter-based pastry. Booksellers are notorious for not wanting to throw away yesterday's promo. We like shiny stuff as much as the next magpie. Junk drawers in desks across the independent bookselling business are full of crunchy rubber-bands, old staff recommendations, dead pens, and promotional pins for books we have long since forgotten, most justly so.

Twenty years ago there was something of a renaissance in book-related "side-lines." (This is what booksellers call anything sold because of books -- but not a book.) Some of this is eternal, like Seussian stuffed animals and refrigerator magnets with quotes from Dorothy Parker. For a hot-minute there we also had finger-puppets of famous authors in felt, famous authors' mugs on mugs, multiple lines of famous authors on greeting cards, famous authors action figures, inexpensive book jewelry, famous author candles, book bumper-stickers, famous author Christmas ornaments. Couldn't swing a cat-book without hitting a Virginia Woolf stuffy or a Charles Dickens puppet. And then, as was ever the way of such things, all of that rather ran its course.

I was given various of the items mentioned above. Find I didn't keep much, or if I did I've no idea where they might be now. I was never much for the side-lines. Which isn't to say that I am not susceptible to collecting the book-adjacent, if only in a small way.  

Of my favorite Dickens collectibles I have just the two Royal Doulton figurines, for example. The Artful Dodger was a gift. Tony Weller I found in a junk shop. There was a moment when -- child of the seventies as I am -- I really aspired to "collect 'em all!" but that never happened. Too expensive, honestly. Saw Pickwick and The Fat Boy in a real antique shop when we first moved to Seattle. Well out of my price range. I also remember bidding for a complete set on eBay, more than once, back when I did that sort of thing. Never won the auction, and just as well probably. Each figurine stands no more than four inches high, but all together there were twenty-four Dickens characters depicted in the Royal Doulton series and that's rather a lot for a crowded personal library. (I don't even have room for all my books about Dickens, let alone collectible glassware.)

The potters Doulton & Co. started business in 1815 with the usual assortment of jugs, jars, mugs, and drain-pipes. (Dickens would have approved. He was a great champion of modern drainage.) The author was himself introduced to the world just three years earlier. He left it the most famous novelist in the world in 1857, well before the ceramics firm received their "Royal Warrant" in 1901 as a vendor to The Crown. Can't find any information about the designers of the figures, when they went into production, or how they selected the characters -- some seem less obvious than others. Only thing I do know is that the Dickens figurines were discontinued in 1983 or 1984 and prices went up accordingly.

They are uniformly charming and beautifully made. Most are immediately recognizable to any reader of Dickens. A few, like Oliver Twist and David Copperfield may seem a bit generic. Other obvious candidates for reproduction in small, like Betsey Trotwood  and Mr. Dick seem not to have made the cut.

Full disclosure, I do have in my library three framed Dickens illustrations by Joseph Clayton Clarke, better known by his pseudonym "Kyd." He made a good living producing mostly cigarette cards and watercolor illustrations, many of Dickens characters, specifically to sell to collectors. I have prints of  Mr. Bumble, Sairey Gamp, and Trotty Veck from The Chimes. I also have salt and pepper shakers of the McCawber and Sairey -- a distinctly odd couple, may I say. I have a small ceramic flask depicting a seated figure of Fagin with a cork in his hat, and I have a genuine curiosity in a small ceramic figure of Dickens giving a public reading at his famous lectern, though it is actually a portrait of the great Emlyn Williams as Dickens in the actor's storied one-man-show, making it all the more interesting and obscure.

Important to remember that Dickens was very much of his time, and as a Victorian, and something of a dandy, he liked fine things and what we might see now as an excess of  bold checks, rich color, lace, fine china, watch-fobs, rings, furniture, and decoration.  Kept a charming white porcelain monkey-- still extant -- on his writing desk, for example. He was always fond of collecting things, people, pets. He loved crowds and crowded interiors. (The most alien aspect of Victorian taste may well be their mania for filling every available surface with pattern and detail and things upon things; Turkey carpets and on them more furniture than would fit and antimacassars on it all, cabbage-roses on the wallpaper and pictures to the ceiling and domed wax flowers and china cupboards and brass fittings and stuffed dogs and stuff, stuff, stuff, stuffed everywhere. Maybe it kept the rooms warmer? It was as if the highest aspiration of the rising middle class was to live inside one of Mary Todd Lincoln's over-decorated dresses.)

Dickens was also the English speaking world's first real celebrity, at least the first person famous for accomplishing something that didn't require conquest, theft, inherited title, or physical deformity. (You will find a convincing argument for this in Jane Smiley's short biography of Dickens published in 2002 as part of the lamentably ended series of Penguin Brief Lives.) As such his image, his characters, and his books were reproduced in all sorts of unlikely offerings ranging from pirated editions and unapproved dramatic adaptations -- some of which premiered before he'd finished writing or publishing the novels from which the stories were taken -- to unauthorized advertisements on sidings and packaging for wares as various as tea-tins, cigar boxes, pill bottles, pins, hats, toys, and all manner of whatnot. Copyright being a battle yet to be really won, and modern branding and licensing still yet to be dreamt of, Dickens made nothing from most of this. (He did occasionally try to approve and or improve some of the stage-adaptations, but it was a losing battle.) From nearly the moment the Pickwick Club first took to the road, images of that venerable gentleman began to appear stuck to soaps and cigars, advertisements and handbills. So it would be throughout the writer's life and long after. More than anyone before him, including Sir Walter Scott, Dickens' characters became part of the visual landscape of his time. Some, like Scrooge and Pecksniff, would settle in the dictionary as well. Shakespeare just here is the only real point of comparison. Other writers of Dickens day may now have a house museum and a statue, may even have a grave in the Abbey, and while they may have created a ubiquitous character like Lochinvar or Jane Eyre, none saw their invention everywhere quite like Dickens. (The best point of comparison would probably be later examples in popular film culture like Mickey Mouse or Charlie Chaplin's little tramp.)

Charles Dickens was unafraid of popularity, to say the least. Not for him the aristocratic reserve of Sir Walter Scott that kept his name off the Waverley Novels until near the end of his run and his money. It was all very well for a gentleman to be a poet and collector of quaint Scottish Ballads, but a vulgar writer of popular Romances? (Meant in the poetic sense -- his being historical fiction, not the modern pop genre of courting stories.) Dickens rose in the world by his pen, and only his pen. To be noticed, and published, and paid, to be recognized on the street and addressed by his nom de plume "Boz," meant Dickens could be somebody. To be somebody was not a guarantee. Lots of somebodies either lost everything and reverted to being nobodies, or they simply ceased to matter. Dickens knew the bitter experience of his father's failure to keep his family out of the Marshalsea Prison for debt. Dickens knew poverty and all the rest of his life he kept the smell of it somewhere about him, and the secret of his family's shame. He fought to dispel the corrosive myth of gentility, and the brutal conditions of the urban poor. He knew. He remembered, and reminded himself nearly every day as he walked the length and breadth of London, often at night, looking in at every dark doorway, up every alley, listening and watching and walking as if into the dark to tame it and make himself it's master and avenger. Fame meant money, and the public's affection, and the kind of respect that meant more than respectability. What he wanted and what he got was power.

George Orwell famously said, "Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody." Even a glancing review of English satire, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Dryden, Pope and Swift, even to Dickens' immediate predecessors like Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, will show a predictably savage response from the satirized. Power resists puncture. Insults to assumed or inherited dignity, perceived or intended, can have grave consequences, particularly in a country whose Constitution was not so much written as gradually accumulated over time, more philology than philosophy. Enemies have always been easily made on the page and few writers in the history of the language filled more pages than Dickens. His output was prodigious, even by the extraordinary standard of his day, his published books containing thousands upon thousands of words. He wrote hundreds of letters, gave hundreds of speeches and public remarks. His recognized journalism, only recently collected, runs to many mighty volumes of nearly equal, perhaps even greater weight than all his published books. (I have bravely restrained myself from trying to buy these new volumes of Dickens' nonfiction.) He wrote to eat, to live, and he wrote constantly. In nearly everything he wrote he sought not only to entertain and enlighten but to damn, blast, and shame the devil. How could he not make enemies?

The answer is he did. Of course he did, and not a few well after he'd died. But Dickens -- better than any writer before him, again save Shakespeare -- had the trick of making no man a hero, including himself. Dickens is always on the reader's side, he is with us and we are, most of us, an unheroic lot. Virtue may triumph, as I'm sure Dickens believed it should and eventually might, but usually this happens only in small acts of bravery, often performed by unlikely, much compromised, put down or put upon people. Rarely is a protagonist, however good, saved in Dickens but by others. Dickens believed in us all, individually, believed that we might yet prove to be better than we might be. And he spared no one. He begins his most autobiographical novel with a question. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." David Copperfield's answer, and Dickens' own answer is a resounding no. There are no heroes. There is help. Even the snobs and the critics, the rivals who might have resented him, even his avowed enemies were more often than not disarmed by this instinctive appeal to our collective better nature, even as he mocked the lot of us for our cowardice, snobbery, greed, and stupidity. His humor was as universal as his faith was deep if unorthodox and individual. God helps or he doesn't much. We may help ourselves, but we need other people. Hard not to blush. Perhaps it's too simple, but it is true. It is also hard to deny. It strikes me as a very English problem, hating Dickens. Must have been deuced difficult, going against the man who made Queen Victoria laugh aloud. What has he ultimately called for but kindness? Argue against that and you will look a git. Also? It's one thing to claim slander, but quite another to admit to being the butt of a joke that set a whole nation laughing. Fight that. Find a jury that won't grin. 

The fact is they'd never seen his like before. The most popular writers in the whole history of English had never had so big an audience. If everyone could be said to know him by the time he was thirty, it was because nearly everyone could afford to read him, and did, or had him read to them because of the revolution in serial publication and cheap editions. The industrial revolution was as much the triumph of print as of the piston and steam. More though. He didn't speak for the English, but to them. He still speaks to us.

Our author was also very careful of institutional targets. It is a truism as old at least as Rome that nobody loves a lawyer. In Bleak House he savages the Court of Chancery, but not the Law. As early as Serjeant Buzfuz and Pickwick's time in the dock for breach of promise, Dickens damns lawyers, but not the Law. Mrs. Jellyby is ridiculous, but Charity is not. Nickleby's theatricals are ridiculous, but Theatre is a noble thing. Bankers are invariably low-minded men, but The Bank of England is let stand. Capitalists are heartless, but Business is good. the Circumlocution Office is a den of boobies, but Her Majesty's Government, for all its sins, is not without its uses. Clergymen may be less than good Christians, but Christianity is God's gift. The list goes on. 

This respect for larger social abstracts, Dickens' sometimes too simple faith in his own England, and his own God, lent themselves to serious criticism even in Dickens' day. He was no radical in his politics and feared revolutions as much as the next self-made man with a mortgage on far too large a house. Later still when academia and the critics took to wearing new Party livery, Dickens, still popular in the Russian Soviets to the end of the last century, came in for a serious drubbing himself, and not without cause. He could never quite accept the idea of collective action. People should help one another, but not The People. That abstraction was dangerously ill-defined. Didn't trust it. Later still he was quite rightly taken to task for unthinking antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism typical of his time. And yet, unlike nearly all his contemporaries, and all of his critics, and some who were probably better people if not such great writers, Dickens survives. 

If everybody then read him and knew him, and so many loved him, it was also because he wrote nearly everybody into his books. If you can read Dickens and not meet therein your aunts, your neighbors, your clergyman, your boss, your elected representative, your dog, and your dad, if you can read through Dickens and never see yourself, I fear you may have missed not just the point but your own portrait (the gallery, it must be said, is crowded.) We are meant to recognize ourselves in even our enemies. There but. And he meant it. And nearly all his victims knew. The gentlemen of the Circumlocution Office knew who they were. They might very well resent the man's impudence and did, but what could they do? Does one admit to being a Barnacle? Even so dim a light as a Sparkler probably had the sense not to call himself so without smiling. 

In Dickens, particularly in the later novels, the sign of a genuine villain is not that he is unaware, or even unconfessed, but incapable of change. Miss Wade may be justified in at least some of her suspicions, but Miss Wade is immoveable, poor soul. Mr. Merdle leaves only ruin after him. No way to change. It's too late. It should be enough to know that Henry Gowan beats his dog, and it is. No coming back from that. Mrs. Clenham has faith, but very little charity. Let her sit with that, ultimately silent as the tomb. Flintwich remains as twisted as his neck and cravat. Riguard? A house could fall on him and he'd still be a devil to the end. But only the very worst people reject their salvation. In Dickens' theology redemption requires acts, and often as not small ones at that. God can even forgive, at least a little, so vocal a Christian as poor Arthur's mother, if she will just do a selfless thing. (Dickens need not forgive her, but Jesus might.) The novelist is free to punish or to pass over. Some escape. Most do not. The God of Charles Dickens is relentless mostly in his mercy, but not indefatigable. 

As the French landlady in Little Dorrit says, not knowing that among those she's addressing sits a murderer, "... there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them -- none."

Dickens reserves his deepest sympathy, always, for the broken. The most virtuous people may suffer, but their virtue is to some extent it's own reward. God may yet see to them (or at least the novelist probably will in the last chapter, if they survive.) But spirits can be crushed, minds wander, hearts may be broken beyond repair. One's circumstances may be cornered so tightly as to allow little room for righteousness. And yet, small rebellions may change the world. Poverty precludes all but the slightest charity, but generosity counts all the more for empty pockets. A clerk may do a kindness as well as a great lady, and it's likelier. Silly women may be good. Men may be mad, may mumble and maunder and still make sane men better by the truth. Nowhere is the faith of Charles Dickens, his own simple and thus peculiar Christianity, more evident than when he speaks, in the phrase from the Gospel of Matthew, for "the least of these." As close as the author comes to collective responsibility, the hopeless and the helpless must be cared for. Up to us. Close as he gets to grace may be in innocence. 

Didactic as some of this now strikes the eye of the modern reader, I would argue that not only is this always intended to good purpose, but also leavened by Dickens' delight in his language. He may thunder, he may lament, he may weep too loudly for any brightly lit, tastefully appointed classroom we are likely now to be in, but he does not bore and there is beauty even in his excess. We may not like it any better now than cabbage roses on our wallpaper or fussy embroidery, but that is a matter of taste. His was not invariably good. Doesn't mean there wasn't craft in the making of it, or art of its kind in the way it was made. His pity, like his humor is prodigious, almost inhuman and he has the vocabulary for both. We may simply have lost habit of such conspicuous, such noises joy and voluble grief. Not so the Victorians. The Victorians, whatever you may think you know about them, wept easily and often. For God's sake, the man made Gladstone weep over the fate of fictional children, and of sterner stuff few Britishers were ever made. Carlyle too! The most emotionally scotched of Scotsmen. 

Important to keep a point of geography in mind too. The whole tradition of the English comic novel -- itself nearly as great a contribution to the world's treasure as English poetry, and more easily translated -- had before Dickens and continuing well after him always tended to satire. Whatever it's pretentions to empire and the devastating harm done by that enterprise throughout the wider world, England is no more than an Island, and a not a specially big one at that. The English have no national epic, no written language to really call their own until Chaucer. (Personal prejudice, but this has always seemed to me a good thing. Better to find one's voice when there's something original to be said.) The language has never been beholden, never entirely settled and the better for it. So too, from the get, English fiction, and the novel in particular. By the time novels became really popular, far and away the most successful English novels tended to be as funny as the language. (What other language in history has gathered up so many delightful if unnecessary words? What other language best expresses itself in such dizzying variety and avoidance of direct address? What other language makes modernist revolutions as different as Hemingway and Joyce?) Yes, there were always the usual romances and heroics, fainting ladies and sturdy young juveniles, etc., but a language overabundant in curiosities and crotchets is better at being funny for being funny. Mutts are funnier, and dearer usually. Doesn't mean they mayn't bite of course. And when Dickens is plain, has anyone ever been so angry, so moving? More devastatingly direct? Only Hardy could make a declarative statement hurt as hard as Dickens.

Being every bit as pious as any of its more Catholic neighbors, The Church of England somehow managed to embrace the Reformation without abandoning any of the pomposity of its elder sister. (The point of the English Reformation was twofold, to obtain a divorce, and to make the liturgy just as dull in English as it could ever have been in Latin.) I suspect Dickens adamancy that he be buried in a simple plot by his beloved little sister-in-law (that perfect, pure, long dead child) had as much to do with his disinclination to Church, cathedrals, Bishops, and funereal pomp as it had to do with his devotion to that forever young lady's memory. (Of course, inevitably, they -- the nation, Bishops, Deacons, Deans, and politicians -- insisted and into the Abbey he went, his wishes be damned. Quite right too.) Yet Charles Dickens without English Protestantism is as impossible as a Catholic Bunyan. He believed much as Bunyan did. He professed and he protested much as Bunyan had, if not always with the same sunny earnestness, the surety of mercy or eagerness for martyrdom. Like Bunyan, he was loved and read by people who wouldn't have cared to see an Archbishop anywhere but at the end of a rope or kicked in the ass. Unlike Bunyan, Dickens could also make an Archbishop of Canterbury laugh. Quite a trick for someone who avoided priests and rewrote the Gospels for his children. Unlike Bunyan to one side and Swift at the other, Dickens walked with the crowd for the pleasure of it (save when they are blood-thirsty, though for a man who hated hanging, he went to not a few. A writer must have research and a journalist a story.) He may have been more comfortable talking to a sweep or a drudge, but he could manage a minute for the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Dickens is the first truly democratic genius in English letters, not for want of snobbery but for need of company. He might love The Lord Our God, or his Son anyway, and he might be flattered to dine with a Duke, he certainly was happy to kiss the chubby little hand of his Sovereign, but he wanted most to be loved, and needed to be loved as we all might require Grace, in abundance. Come one come all.

Why this furor to be loved? He was pretty confident that he had Jesus on his side. His children loved him even when he was impossible, even when he so cruelly turned their dim, dull, dear mother out. In later life he felt he needed, perhaps pathetically if not pathologically a young actress named Ellen Terran. He needed all of his friends, his contributors, his proteges, his sponsors. Above all, he needed his readers. More, he needed all of them to love him, not just his books. He read to them. He read himself to death for them, so that he might receive their love without the intercession of print. (He might have been happy being Homer, if one can imagine Homer in a loud, checked suit.) He was not always easy in his affections though, and his need was as great as his gift. 

The easiest explanation of this relentless need to be loved is in that autobiographical fragment he shared only with his wife and his friend Forster. In it he told the story of his father's bankruptcy and imprisonment for debt. He described, aged twelve, being put out to work in a blacking factory, pasting labels on bottles in an unheated basement, surrounded by other grubby, hungry, hostile boys. His schooling, such as it had been, ended. And when his father's finances sufficiently recovered to escape the Marshalsea Prison, it was Charles' mother who insisted her son be kept working. Rough. So why did he abandon the memoir? Why conceal it from all but his nearest and dearest? I suspect that beyond the revelation of his family's fall from middleclass respectability, his personal sense of rejection may have been too deep a wound to expose. That was the real secret. He had not been loved, at least not enough. To write the truth of that he would have had to admit to having been abandoned, the small wages he earned of more value to his family than he was. Knowing poverty made him ambitious and uniquely empathetic to the poor, but to have been forsaken? To be less than Boz the Beloved of the English Speaking World? Too hard to admit. He was proud of what he'd made of himself. That he'd come from nearly nothing makes us admire him the more. Not necessarily so to him. Instead Dickens hid this earlier, shameful episode, and his own history as the unloved boy. The memory persisted though and it takes no literary detective to catch him letting that grubby, miserable little boy peep out here and there in the person of innumerable orphans and lonely children. He came nearest to telling the truth in the early chapters of David Copperfield. (His father famously appears therein as Wilkins McCawber. There is also more than a bitter hint of Charlie's old man in Mr. William Dorrit, among other fools and failures, fabulists, bankrupts, and weaklings. And of weak, greedy, distant, dead, or careless mothers there was no end. Dickens hardly ever spoke or wrote of his own mother by name.) The abandoned boy became the gentleman who would save them all or at least shame those who left children in want and ignorance.

Dickens liked establishing a character's character, good and bad, in just a line or two as they walk on. Amy Dorrit, for example "...so little and light, so noiseless and shy," etc. The reader is meant to know these people as soon as introduced, and remember them. Everyone is meant to be memorable even without being given their names straight-away -- "his nose came down and his mustaches curled up." This has made for much criticism down the years, of Dickens "grotesques," his effects and affectations, and the supposed unreality of his crowded fiction. When psychology was coined well after Dickens left the scene, he did not get high marks from his professional and professorial readers. Such critics, I always argue, do not take public transportation or they world know better. The wider one's acquaintance in the working world the less need of exaggeration. Perhaps now that we find ourselves in an age of political caricature and supremely inarticulate representation, an age of bullies and bosses and vociferous yahoos, of shockingly powerful charlatans and electable goons, we might be better prepared to accept Dickens' quicker insights and sharp definitions as truer than modern psychology's insistence on mystery. Beyond his remarkable ear and superhuman curiosity, beyond his obvious pleasure in the technical exercise of description, there is an underlying determination to summarize individual character by describing who we are by the way we are. Was he wrong? All very well for example to call oneself good (or a gentleman, or humble, or a patriot, or sensitive, or a Christian, or honest) but quite another to do good, which is after all Dickens' definition. 

Reading Little Dorrit is to read Dickens at full cry. Good people do good, and not just to one another but even to those who may be undeserving. People may only seem to be benevolent because they look to be. Such fakes must be confronted and exposed. Silly people may tell the truth. Bad people can't always be made better. Some must be crushed. Some will escape. We must all be brave enough to do what we can to make things better where we can. Happiness is not guaranteed even to those who give it away, but the possibility of it is real. Only sentimental novelists are prepared to put all things right, bless 'em. The rest of us had better do better, damn it, particularly by the poor. 

And everywhere in Dickens' big book, as in all of Dickens, there is English not only as, incredibly she is or was spoke, but also as only Dickens might write it; as rich in words and usage as Shakespeare, as righteous as Bunyan, as powerful as Hardy, and as funny as anyone who ever wrote in any language. His is a style that can be as beautiful as fine porcelain and as delicate, and as ample as a sturdy drainpipe. To not read and reread Dickens is to leave the language, our language, mine, to the stingy and the stupid and the lazy and the bad. They've enough of everything else, they've taken enough from the rest of us. They'll not have this. In the end all we need of him are his words. That's the gift. The rest is sidelines. 

A Gift

 This is a gift from my friend Henry Wallenfels, aged eight. 

Brethren

                                                         "These be the great Twin Brethren
                                                         To whom the Dorians pray."                                                                                                                         -- Thomas Babbington Macaulay, The Lays of Ancient Rome

On his second trip to England in 1861 Tolstoy did not meet Dickens. He might have done, but he didn't. Though he'd only published a handful of novellas at that point, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy at thirty-three was already becoming an important contributor to the rising Russian literature. He was also a world traveler by the standard of the day and a genuine aristocrat. This meant rather more then than now, and more to other people than it ever did to Tolstoy. Still, entrée. For example, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who happened to also be Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, wrote the master of Yasnaya Polyana a letter of introduction to study English educational methods. (It pays to know people who know people and or to be of noble birth.) Tolstoy is on record as having a great admiration of the English novel, and of Dickens in particular. Big fan. Given the opportunity to see Dickens perform one of his famous public readings, Tolstoy jumped at the chance. It might have been an even more memorable night had anyone offered the Russian a chance to go backstage and meet the great man, but it seems no one did. At 49, Dickens was still in full flush, but already tearing himself to tatters on the podium, so he was not always eager for company after anyway. And then there was what might have been a language barrier. Of course Tolstoy read English, but wrote and spoke it less well. Presumably on his grand European tours, he spoke mostly French, just as his whole class did at home. Charles Dickens taught himself what might charitably be described as tourist French and Italian. Can't imagine that the shy Count and the cockney wizard could have had much of a chat. Doesn't matter. Much as we might like the idea, whatever might have been wasn't. They never met.*

It is perfectly natural that we might wish they had. It's an irresistible impulse to speculate what brilliant folk might have said to one another at a dinner party, etc. Knowing that in 1891 Conrad took Henry James out to a long lunch conjures all sorts of fascinating possibilities. But experience tells us they probably just complained about royalties and the fish being cold. The idea of such meetings is almost always better than the reality, it seems. So why do we wish otherwise? Maybe it's a Hope and Crosby thing. Yeah, we love them both, but together? That's gotta be good, right? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Yes: Road to Morocco, no: golf.

There is a recording online of something called "Dickens vs Tolstoy" which is an opportunity to hear actors reading work from both writers. It is also an entirely pointless debate as to which of the great novelists is somehow greater than the other. I know of this event only because one the actors hired to participate was the dreamy Tom Hiddleston, a man I would watch pick his teeth and think myself lucky. The premise of the event offends me, but I watched it anyway (oh, Tom.) I can't now tell you much of anything else about it. Tom looked terribly good. Watch it if you want. Childish nonsense, this business of ranking art and treating novelists like contestants on a talent show. Is anyone in the audience going to be persuaded? Presumably if they were present they were already fans of either or both writers -- or they just came to creep on Tom Hiddleston because that's a thing perfectly respectable people do. Was anyone taking sides before that evening? Was anyone persuaded to switch? Did anyone show up waiting to see who won in order to decide which to read?! It's moronic, but all too human. Tell me what to read. Tell me why. Tell me which one's better. Should I never eat prime-rib again because I like lamb better? What's good here? How's the coffee?

The only reason any of this can be made to matter, this imaginary handshake between titans, speculating about what one might have thought of or said to the other, who one should read in preference to the other, or read next, is because reading one is actually quite unlike reading the other and yet one rather hopes for a similar experience from both. Real readers chase that high, am I right? Can't read books again for the first time. How to keep it fresh then? Personally, I like all the incidentals; biographies, letters, anecdotes, gossip. And for the big fat ones, it turns out I like company and chat far more than I ever thought I would. So, moving the chat along...

Hard to remember, but they were contemporaries. That must mean something, surely? Quite the time it was! Giants roamed the earth, etc. Setting them side by side, or end to end come to that, means thinking about them together as well as apart. That's where we are and I think that that's the place to start. If it's silly to say which one is better, and it is, and pointless to wonder what they might have had to say if they'd met, which they didn't, I don't think it is quite such a waste of time to think about them in their own time and in the vanished world in which, for a time they both lived.

Obviously Dickens was the elder man. He was also perhaps the world's first international celebrity, in that he neither founded a religion, conquered territory, nor killed any but imaginary people who probably deserved it. (And no, I don't mean Little Nell, you big meanie.) Tolstoy loved Dickens. It's hardly an exaggeration to say again that everybody did. Like most people and certainly most writers then, Tolstoy read and reread Dickens' novels throughout his long life. As a reward for having finally finished the very long struggle that constituted the writing of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reread Dickens. Even the writers who saw Dickens as a rival, or an upstart, or a clown, read Dickens. All the Russians then busily making Russian literature from scratch, read Dickens, and so did their sisters, and their cousins, and their aunts. On the other hand, there's no evidence that Dickens had heard of let alone read anything of Tolstoy. Perhaps had Dickens not died so young? Again, opportunity never arose. Shame. Also? Dickens was not a man of much leisure. His fortune was earned by almost endless toil. Not a Count, don't you know, nor did he ever own anything so grand as four thousand acres. He read enormously, but really this was more a part of his professional life as the editor of more than one magazine. Tolstoy read fiction in multiple languages for pleasure, yes, but also as a student of literature. Both of these were then, and sadly seem again to be, activities for the leisured classes. In short, Tolstoy had the time for that sort of thing -- you know, when he wasn't trying to teach peasants the Russian alphabet, write a new fiction, reform education, found hospitals, and rewrite Orthodox Christianity. (Being a certain sort of reform-minded aristocrat, or at least being Leo Tolstoy turns out to be nearly as labor-intensive as making a fortune in England by the pen. Still, the A for effort I think has to go to the most famous Englishman of the 19th Century. Still not a contest.)

Dickens was a direct and acknowledged influence on Tolstoy the novelist. And unlike his opinion of even his nearest and dearest contemporaries, Tolstoy's admiration of the English novelist seems never to have wavered. Tolstoy was notorious for walking out on meetings with other writers, bluntly rejecting books and authors he might once have admired, being more than once unkind even to the writers who sought to help and promote him, like Turgenev. Dickens the great editor was not above a rejection or an unsolicited rewrite, but there is little evidence of any grudge other than a personal one involving Thackeray, and they made up before Dickens died. He seems always to have been in the business of bringing as many good writers as he could find up the ladder after him. Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Gaskell come first to mind. This encouragement and enthusiasm was a practical matter; the editor of Household Words, etc. needed good copy. Had they met, I like to think Dickens would have been as encouraging to the young Tolstoy. (See? Hard not to.)

Obviously there are things they had in common despite their very different styles, ages and biographies. Indignation comes first to mind, and a fervor for reform. Neither thought much of the established religions of their respective countries. Both could be quite funny and are often remembered laughing. (The requirements of early photography  prevent us seeing either  smile much, but they did, just not when sitting for photographers and painters.) Both Dickens and Tolstoy were impatient and ambitious men. As they got older, neither was very nice to their respective, long-suffering wives. Most obviously, both were great novelists, geniuses, but very different writers.

Reading them out of chronological order as it were will I think make for an interesting point of comparison for our book club. We just finished Anna Karenina, published in 1877. War and Peace was published a decade before that, and Little Dorrit, our next book for the club, 1857. (Dickens died, aged only 58, in 1870, roughly fifteen years before Tolstoy's first great masterpiece ever saw its way into English.) In one way, Tolstoy was not just of a new generation, but of an entirely different era. Both might fairly be described as Victorians, but besides being Russian rather than English, that designation rests even less comfortably on Tolstoy than it does Dickens. How to put this delicately? Tolstoy had a wider experience, shall we say, but interestingly, was I think more of a prude than Dickens. Dickens was tortured by many things, but not I think by either sexual incontinence or religious guilt. There is that. But Tolstoy was very much the new man and even as his politics and ideas went well beyond anything Dickens might have espoused or possibly even understood, so too Tolstoy all but invented a new way to write in his language; embracing both a distinctly accessible and un-decorated style, and a new psychology of character. For Tolstoy, the novel was a way to explore his conscience and question his ideas. There had frankly never been anything quite like him before, in oh, so many ways. Dickens knew what he believed from an early age and found a way to say it, a way that captivated, entertained, delighted, inspired, and shamed his readers. If Dickens chafed at the restrictions of that famous Victorian decorousness, and had to find inventive ways to write around the rules of what then could and could not be discussed in polite society and popular fiction, Tolstoy simply ignored many of the social and literary conventions** of his time and place. For example he made of the already rather exhausted historical novel something new; a novel of ideas. He might deny it later when he was the sage courted by actual revolutionaries, but Tolstoy was something of bomb-thrower in his way, even as he became the wise old pacifist of Yasnaya Polyana. Dickens did not reinvent the English comic novel. It was a tradition he loved, understood and studied. In his troubled childhood, it was where he went for wonder and magic. Instead of reinventing it he gave it new purpose, redirecting its humor and anger and energy at contemporary targets. He gave it new and dynamic life and drove it into the crowded streets and down dark alleys. He rode it roughshod over the enemies of progress and humility. He invested it with  his own manic energy, and with his conscience. He gave it a greater heart, a wider sympathy, and more readers than any English novelist before or since, save possibly dear old Dame Agatha Christie. (If you can't see the humor in the old girl's deviously overcomplicated cases, you may be missing the point.)

Tolstoy's protagonists all tend to work out on his behalf aspects of his own personality and opinions. Pierre, Levin, even Anna, think aloud Tolstoy's thoughts. He thinks through them. Their questions are his, or rather they were created to think things through at the author's behest. This is what makes him modern, not his answers but his questions, how he asked them, and the need to keep asking. Tolstoy pursues philosophical ends by means of brilliant fictions. At times Tolstoy does not seem to remember why he's asking the question he is, let alone what the answer might be. If he is occasionally boring it is because he was more than occasionally bored, because life can be boring, because boredom might interest him, because frankly the man himself could be didactic and even a bit tedious. Tolstoy created characters to see what would happen to them. I don't know that Dickens was bored a day in his life. In Dickens, character is visible: kindness shines, greed hardens, joy laughs and dances, cruelty grins, and envy twitches and fawns. In Dickens, character tells. As in almost everything the man ever did or wrote or said aloud, Dickens knows just what he means to say and says it, often as not in his own voice, in case we missed the point in a story. Tolstoy notoriously paused the action of War and Peace to teach history or give sermons (good history and great sermons.) Everything Dickens wrote was a sermon, if miraculously the funniest and most touching sermons in English.  He is regularly distracted by the fun he is obviously having, and by his dizzying capacity for invention. Dickens revels in all the conventions of melodrama and comedy -- and sets himself traps out of which he does not always get gracefully. No matter. Point invariably taken and a (mostly) good time had by all.

While both writers were masterful technicians, nobody before or since wrote better scenes than these two, or used language more individually and well, both men were ruled by emotion. It's all very well to talk or write about injustice or poverty, love and death, but can we the readers be made to feel the effects of these things on other, imaginary people? Will we be put in mind of our own lives? More importantly, can we be made to look beyond ourselves to the world and humanity around us? Whatever one may think of Tolstoy's grinding philosophical journey or Dickens' increasingly threadbare optimism, we do not now read them for their ideas anymore than one reads Immanuel Kant for love or Arthur Schopenhauer for joy. Nowhere is the novel's capacity to convey emotion in a way usually reserved for poetry better represented than in these two whiskered old parties. Yes, they wrote wonderful weather and remarkable rooms, thrilling rides and wars, revolutions, deaths sentimental and real. Both watched and listened and studied humanity with the intense concentration usually reserved for the entomologist, and named the people all around them like giddy botanists. Beyond all their other dazzling gifts, Tolstoy and Dickens felt passionately and could not understand the world but in terms of that fervor. They might admire reserve, Victorians after all, but were devoted, addicted to feeling. Its absence was a kind of death for both of them, and its dangers they found exhilarating. Neither ever really understood tranquility nor put much stock in relaxation. For two such famously Christian gentlemen, to be in the world but not of it was unthinkable, impossible, wrong.

Tolstoy had to know how everything felt in order to understand whatever it was he described. He understood better than any of his contemporaries how we might best be drawn into whatever problem he was parsing. One had to feel one's foot in the wet boot, the suicide's despair, the love of a plain woman. For Dickens, emotion allows for and sometimes betrays but does not dictate intension; to kill for example in a rage like Bill Sykes excuses nothing, people do as their natures direct. Tolstoy wished to understand everything; people, war, agriculture, politics, infidelity. Dickens wanted change. We must see the good to want it ourselves. We must know evil and see it vanquished, or failing that, comfort and raise up it's casualties. Whatever his distaste for religion and orthodoxy, Dickens maintains a fundamental faith in Grace and the gifts of redemption. Tolstoy doubts. Dickens believes.

Maybe that's the real point of connection. Both writers were fundamentally conservatives with a little "c." For all their pursuit of progress and philanthropy, neither really trusted the political abstractions in which the 20th Century was to mire itself. For example neither had much truck with "the people." Anyone claiming to act on behalf of, or claiming to derive their power from such a theoretical population was to be distrusted. Neither writer thought much of a mob -- that lingering bugaboo from the days at least of the French Revolution. The single thing that tethers both gents to the 19th Century is their faith not in God, but in humanity. That is what dates them. That is also why we return to them after more than a century with the anticipation of comfort. We may not believe as they did, or put the stock they did in what they believed, but we want to return and linger there, in that last, great gasp of the enlightenment, if just for the length of a long novel.

People who read epic fantasy, or cozy mysteries, or Bridgerton books are all of them indulging in nostalgia; the longing for what never was: heroes vanquishing villains, romance in bright brocades, history as puppet theater. Are we any better, reading 19th Century novels chockablock with noble virgins and ignoble schemers? No, not better, but perhaps knowing better. It takes an act of will nowadays to see humanity's biggest problem as dragons. Much was made in the last mid-century of Dickens caricatures, his sentimentalism, his lack of psychological depth. Faddish as yesterdays critical norms come all too quickly to be (Freud?! Please, might as well be phrenology,) even the worst of yesterday's academic bullies had to concede that whatever Dickens wasn't according to their bone-dry notions of seriousness, he was more than a popular entertainer. Dickens never wrote down to his audience. His language is rich as Lamb's with the antique and the odd. His ear is as good as Faulkner or Lawrence. His powers of physical description are the equal of Hardy, and funny. Much of what makes Dickens funny is commentary, not comedy. (This is the irreparable loss in film and tv adaptation. The comedy can actually be improved by great actors, but the voice of Dickens is missing and that is everything.) He is a writer of verbal flights and prose fancies. He decorates and dresses up and he dances on the page. He does everything that genre storytellers do badly or without. He glories in his English, and the English, and in Dickens we get the best of both. 

Tolstoy was no fool. He might have been reading Thackeray, or Trollope -- pretty sure he did -- but Dickens stirred his soul and his imagination and it was to Dickens he looked for a model and a guide. If the only Dickens we knew was Dickens as Tolstoy read him, we would not be much off the mark. Tolstoy didn't need to meet the man. He knew him. Brother novelists in the struggle, as it were, connected at the soul, very different men, and Christians, but of the same communion, no? And that is why we read them still, is it not? Genius, yes, but also great heart. I can't think of a better reason to pick up Dickens having just put down Tolstoy. 

*A charming tale describing a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky turns out to have been cut from whole cloth, sadly. Also? When the Englishman returned to America on his last tour, Mark Twain  went to see Dickens read. Mr. Clemens was not impressed. Maybe it was a bad night, or maybe the American expected too much. Twain loved Dickens just as Tolstoy did, just as most people did and many people still do. For Tolstoy's and Twain's generation, he was an idol. Sadly, Twain was disappointed by his idol's reading that night. He wrote to more than one friend describing Dickens' performance as a poor job; sometime inaudible, weary to look at, and yet cheered to the rafters by Twain's fellow citizens. Just as well then that they didn't meet that night or thereafter. I don't hold with the old saw of "never meet your idols." Some of mine have been lovely. Some of them, including some truly great writers gave truly terrible readings. It happens.

** Keeping in mind, there was nearly no such thing as Russian literature before Pushkin. Tolstoy was one of the people who invented it, using Western European forms to arrive at a very modern, and Russian, result.

This Refection of Oysters

 

Abundance of choice, it ain't always a good thing. There can be too much on the menu, a lesson learned from of all people, shoutin' chef Gordon Ramsay. He used to do those television horror shows where he went to filthy restaurants operated by horrible people and then blew them up. When he was done, every restaurant of whatever kind was transformed into something he called a "gastro pub." It was all delightfully savage, not unlike those hoarding programs but with overly elaborate burgers in the last act. One of the mistakes made in every episode was the twenty page menu. Have to assume this is because everyone opening a restaurant in America has spent happy days in The Cheesecake Factory and Denny's. Get it? Sandwiches, pizza, sushi, deli, pancakes, waffles, suckling pig; in other words trying to do too many things and in the end doing nothing well. They all do it and it never succeeds, just like karaoke singers who select Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. 

Ambition rather needs to be particular to succeed, don't you think? Lots of eight-year-olds want to grow up to be doctors. The wise twenty-three-year-old has already settled on proctology, or thoracic surgery, or puppeteering. (I knew a guy. Hey, things change.) My own ambitions tend to the small and practical: find the remote, dust today, go back to sleep after I get up to pee, or to the large and vague: write, remember, finish things. Maybe I lack the requisite fire.

Also, work. Real ambition requires real work. I enjoy reading cookbooks. That doesn't make me a cook, does it? I am not that ambitious. I will never work hard enough to acquire the necessary knife-skills for fancy stuff like butchery or uniformly slivered things. Not going to happen. I know this in part from reading cookbooks. I have a few rules: 1) The phrase "season to taste" is a red flag. If that's all the direction you get, it's not a recipe, it's kitchen gossip; a conversation between cooks and I am eavesdropping. (Also? All they are usually talking about is salt, but how rude not to say so.) 2) "One simply must use tubular turmeric, not angular turmeric, which is fine for more common Indian dishes, and at all costs avoid ovoid turmeric..." 3) Mandolins in the kitchen are either distractingly folksy if musical (rest in peace, Dash Crofts) or deadly when slicing while on blood-thinners. 4) No good comes of "mulling." That last is really more cocktails I suppose, but like good middle eastern food, charcuterie, and flower arranging, the whole point of living in a civilized community is that there are professionals to do that sort of thing. Also? Marry a good cook if you can. I did. Simplifies things. Yes, I will dice those onions for you, and then you will make the stove-magic, and I shall toss a simple green salad and feel very good about myself indeed. Know what you're willing to do to make dinner. That's another of my long-term relationship tips. Or, we could order in again.

Which rather gets us back to overabundance, doesn't it?

Before we've finished reading the current selection for my Big Fat Book Club I am already be thinking about the next, naturally. Gotta keep making the donuts. Also, deciding which book to read is hard, even given the stated framework of only reading books of substantial length and established reputation. Got in a bit of a pickle with the last but one when I decided to read a well reviewed contemporary novel that I had not first read the whole way through myself. Turned out, nope. Lesson learned. So for the foreseeable future I plan to stick to established classics. So far we've read three that were very familiar to me, all by authors I love, and Bob's your uncle. I knew who I wanted to do next so the question was only which.

In my head, Dickens is by now one book. I own three uniform sets, two pretty, one practical, as well as individual volumes of this and that. I have letters and journalism and biographies and criticism and the scripts for his public readings. I have celebratory editions and reproductions of  firsts. All together this is Dickens. There is a famous unfinished portrait of the author, titled "Dickens' Dream," painted five years after the writer's death by Robert William Buss*. In it we see Dickens drifting in his favorite chair, surrounded by a great cloud of his characters. So it is I think of the work: Sairey Gamp at the elbow of Tony Weller, Little Nell's deathbed hard by Lady Dedlock's foggy end, Mr. Peggotty higgledy-piggledy with Pecksniffs. It's not so much that I can't keep them all straight as it is that they are all of 'em now a part of the big show. Yes, I've read them all at least once, the novels. (Notoriously, I have described in detail very moving scenes that I ascribed to the wrong novel. It happens.) Dickens is abundance above all others. 

Plot, plots, virgins, villains, disabilities, and dull men, small arts, large themes, the city, poverty and excess, the weather, education, economics, funny walks, funny faces, funny -- it might be easier to name what isn't in him as so very much is. He lacks for nothing as I read him. However impatient I may become, it is never with what he withholds intentionally -- he does like a twist more than may suit me -- but rather with what even he couldn't say outright and continue the most popular author in English. Had he said just what he meant, he might not even have been publishable. Victoria's was notoriously a more seemly era. Watching Dickens get around restrictions of language and subject is one of the real pleasures of reading him in middle age. He wants very much to tell. There is much to say. He usually finds a way, but the way isn't always straight. Even his contemporaries, nearly all of whom loved and envied him, often found him excessive. Many thought him vulgar. Not a few since think him slap-dash and have even questioned his sanity. To my mind, the faults in Charles Dickens, the writer not the man, are so much a part of the pleasure to be had of him as to be hardly worth the teasing out and ticking off. Yes, he crowds. He nudges. He goes on. He weeps like a paid Greek mourner. He laughs and roars and isn't always as funny or effective as he intends. But who else ever meant more to so many and deservedly so? Who else rewards rereading more? Short of The Bible and Shakespeare, was there ever one man who made so many memorable names, and scenes, who else broke so many hearts? (And more of his jokes land than Will's now, and require less deadly explanation.) 

So all of this, the good and the muddle, make it all the harder to choose. For example, on rereading I have become an unlikely defender of The Old Curiosity Shop. I am not an allegory guy. I've read the mockers and heard Oscar's famous joke. I am now prepared to defend the novel as superior to its critical reputation and among the greatest sermons Dickens or anyone else ever preached. A friend recently participated in what from all reports was a most satisfactory online book club reading of David Copperfield with a paid host. As with Dickens himself, Copperfield is perhaps the dearest to me of his novels. I understand the famous host's selection entirely, but am a little undone by the idea of competing even in a very small way with that great crowd of already satisfied and paying readers. Our Mutual Friend was the book I had most recently reread myself. My shelf quite literally teamed with volunteers.

Then I picked. Not but a day after I had, we had our second virtual meeting for our current book and of all things, Bleak House came up in the course of the conversation. The minute it was mentioned, a light began to flash in my head warning me that my decision, not yet announced, was wrong. It should be Bleak House, surely? So after the meeting and for the next two days I reread bits of Bleak House. But so many people will already have read Bleak House, if they've read anything at all beyond A Tale of Two Cities or Hard Times. (The short ones used to be assigned in high school. Are they still?) 

Should I have had the fish? Now I look again at the elaborate menu, maybe I should order the suckling pig?! Hot punch and syllabub?! 

Little Dorrit it is. 

In the first place I did not remember the opening chapter or the characters in it at all. It has been a long time since I read it last, and two good dramatic adaptations in the mix as well, to confuse me further. I was encouraged by the unfamiliarity. This will be fun. Then there was the weirdness. I like Dickens when he's weird; dreams and doubles and old dark houses and a gloriously furious tantrum, and then there was Mrs. Clennam's stoically self-denied lunch and that decided me again. "This refection of oysters" is a delicious archaism and quite perfect in context. And it ought to be the title of something, ought it not? And so now it is and I am happy again in my choice.

Fewer members are likely to have read Little Dorrit, or reread it recently, myself it seems included. It is late enough in the canon to be rich and dark in just the way that has brought so many moderns to the side of Bleak House, but it is not yet so far as that from the hullabaloo of the earlier comedies -- and less time spent in Chancery the better, I think. Instead we have the Marshalsea, the equally terrifying if much less complicated Hell of debtor's prison, and a fascinating setting for some of Dickens' most acid observations on money and class. Little Dorrit also sports one who for my money is Dickens' best male protagonist in Arthur Clennam, and of all the choir of Dickens' angel-virgins, in many ways the most immediately sympathetic and strong we find in the titular character. The great noise of crowded characters penned together, the eccentricities of speech and surprising description, the sheer force of Dickens at the very height of his powers, all contribute to the soundness of my choice. Shall we read a Dickens next? We shall, and this one among the many, I've decided. 

As to why we would read Dickens, might as well ask why we should read. If you don't, or won't, or can't I am frankly inclined to have no truck with you. I don't say you are a bad person or in any way inferior to those who do, only that I am full of sorrow to think that anyone, for any reason should turn away from such a feast. Self-denial? The avoidance of richness? How very Squeers. But again, I am letting characters in from the wrong book. Apologies. 

*When he was a younger man, Buss was briefly employed as one of the illustrators of The Pickwick Papers. The original illustrator, Robert Seymour, infamously killed himself after an argument with the author who had rejected some of the illustrations. Buss hadn't any experience with etching on steel plates and so when his drawings were eventually reproduced even he admitted they weren't very lively. At the time Pickwick was already a blockbuster in serial publication. He was replaced in turn by Phiz, aka Hablot Knight Browne. No hard feelings this time. Buss remained devoted to Dickens, ultimately producing the great, unfinished "Dream" after Dickens' death.