Two hundred years ago, on Feb. 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was born. Forty years ago, after reading all his novels, I finished a PhD dissertation on his work and more or less stopped reading him. It wasn’t that I was disaffected, but life took over and there was rarely enough time to reread a 900-page novel.
The 200th anniversary sounded like the right occasion to return to the man we graduate students described glibly as England’s greatest novelist and its second-greatest writer after Shakespeare.
Does he really deserve those slightly dusty laurels? How would he strike me now? I designated 2012 as my year of rereading Dickens. My first impulse was to begin at the beginning, with Sketches by Boz, and carry on to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was unfinished when Dickens died in 1870. But a few of the books I remembered with least pleasure – Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop – appeared at the start of his career, so that did not appeal. I toyed with the idea of reading backward from Edwin Drood, but dropped that too.
Finally, I decided that I would read where the spirit took me, in no particular order, guided only by pleasure. Each book, I assumed (and so far, correctly), would suggest the next one.
I began in the fall, to get a jump on things, and am progressing slowly, because the sentences as well as the books are long and complicated, and because you cannot have too many dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in a row. I read something contemporary between each Dickens, taking a break with the comparatively easy syntax of most 21st-century books. (But everything echoes Dickens. Charles Foran’s engrossing Mordecai reminded me that Mordecai Richler shared Dickens’s satirical bent, his anger at the stupidities of society, his versatility as a writer and the constant need to turn that versatility into money-making projects.)
My starting point was easy. I remembered Great Expectations as a masterpiece of psychological insight, moral exploration and obsessive love. It did not disappoint me. I followed it with another first-person account of childhood (and Freud’s favourite Dickens), David Copperfield. The 50-cent Signet paperback I was reading (so elderly the pages fell to the floor as I turned them, until my living room looked as if a particularly deliberate book vandal was at work) numbered more than 900 pages, so next I chose a shorter one, the unfinished Edwin Drood. Then I treated myself to Bleak House, among other things one of the first mystery stories and still an incomparable one.
So far, is this a new Dickens for me? The things I loved as a student still delight me. Exaggeration, obsession and mania were his natural modes, and the characters who go round and round in their private, deluded universes entertain me as much as ever. Often, there’s a moral component to their manias – as with Mrs. Jellyby, the philanthropist in Bleak House who neglects her family and focuses on the African poor; or Mr. Turveydrop, the dancing master in the same book who preens himself on his deportment while living off his son, But benign characters, like Peggotty, the faithful housekeeper who often bursts her buttons while hugging David in Copperfield, also enjoy their share of Dickensian eccentricity.
