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When is the perfect time to read Great Expectations? I found it hard to read Charles Dickens when I was 14 and I don’t think I was the only one. There are a lot of words in a Dickens novel. And they are tiny. And many of them are very funny or very poignant, but it takes some maturity and patience to get through them all bit by bit. Even now.
My Grade 9 English class at Newmarket High School north of Toronto was located on the east side of a nondescript brick building. The windows faced a copse of trees, a soccer field and the west side of a fancy boarding school called Pickering College that looked like it might have been the house that starred in Gone With The Wind. If you stood on the road at the topmost peak of my brand new subdivision and glanced up you could see the columns of Pickering College overlooking the town. It looked gracious. You couldn’t see the dinky high school next door. It was the poor little sister to the grandness of Pickering College and didn’t matter as much. Except when you were in it.
My class was in the older part of the school and had big wooden windows that were quite mesmerizing to look out of. Especially if you are a sensitive artsy type of child (who has a touch of synesthesia and will one day become an installation artist who sews clothing for ghosts). For me, those windows provided a way out from boredom and the study of 19th-century novels no matter how good they really were. I was a daydreamer. And a boarding school full of mysterious wealthy boys was much more interesting to think about than forging my way through Great Expectations one tiny word at a time. Imagine, just a copse of trees and a soccer field was between my old school and a much more architecturally interesting building filled with children who slept over and could not possibly be as bored as I was as their parents paid exorbitant amounts for them to learn the same thing, only in more luxurious surroundings. Those large columns were expensive.
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My teacher was popular. She was single and middle-aged and had a reputation in the school for being good at instructing English. She had a feisty air about her that didn’t quite jive with my insecure, academically frightened and overtly creative persona. I didn’t really fit in. We were handed out ragged and stained copies of Great Expectations on our first or second day of class; brown covers with Newmarket High School stamped on the inside. I wonder now if the boys in the fancy and expensive school next door received brand new books with pretty covers? Covers are important, especially for 14 year olds who aren’t cognitively ready to ingest Charles Dickens.
I remember trying my best to read the beginning of my well-thumbed copy in my floral wallpapered bedroom in my brand new subdivision house. It was hard to concentrate. There were a lot of words. A boy named Pip. A convict of some sort. Wittles (what were wittles?) and a file. The man might have had something metal on his leg that was painful. The concept that I had to read this book whether I wanted to or not weighed on me. The secondary concept that my reading of this book would be measured and tested and discussed in the classroom that I enjoyed daydreaming in was another. It all felt out of step and was counterintuitive. Where was the enjoyment of reading?
I read more than the other kids in my class. I ate up books one after the other like candy. They just weren’t Charles Dickens books, yet. My brain wasn’t ready for Dickens. I would have done much better with watching The Simpsons “Great Expectations” episode, only it hadn’t been created yet. There is much to learn from that brilliant show and having a relaxed conversation about why Bart couldn’t handle reading Charles Dickens would have suited my Grade 9 class much more. Perhaps we could have watched Oliver Twist, the film? And not be tested about what we learned, but make a Super 8 film inspired by it?
The perfect time to really immerse oneself in Charles Dickens, apparently, was in the mid-1980s when you and your boyfriend are hanging out in a beachfront tent in Fiji and there are a few mouldy copies of Dickens books on the island and no TV or anything else beyond waves and sand and noodle soup packets for dinner. That is a good time to read Dickens. Aloud. No pressure. No adolescent kids snickering. No blushing. Just you and Charles Dickens and your boyfriend. A lovely threesome. Reading aloud punctuates the incredible bits that make up Dickens novels and makes them float into the air and sing. It is thoroughly enjoyable. And your brain is old enough to digest the wonderfulness. There is no testing. And there is no failing.
I’ve been thinking lately about how I failed my first high-school exam in English because I was reminded recently that “on this day” I was wandering through the Charles Dickens Museum in London. During that whirlwind trip with my son, one of the Top 10 things I had to do in London was visit Charles Dickens’ house. It was the first stop on our weekend tour. And it was marvelous.
That Grade 9 English class had nothing to do with my love of literature. My shocking failure on my first ever exam did provide a catalyst for a new friendship, however. Sitting near me in that dreaded classroom with the big windows was a bright eyed girl with strawberry blonde hair who looked just a little like Anne of Green Gables (which I could read). This girl also did not fare well on that exam. We bonded over our mutual horror of exams and English taught in classrooms that were a soccer field away from more fancy and expensive classrooms that taught English to kids our own age, only richer. I’m not sure those kids had an easier time. They probably had to read Great Expectations, too. And they too, although rich, didn’t get it.
Michele Karch-Ackerman lives in Buckhorn, Ont.
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