The New Lifetime Reading Plan

With Tolstoy [88], Dickens is perhaps one of the two novel- ists who have been accepted by the whole world—and Dickens with the greater joy. Philosopher George Santayana, after list- ing ali of Dickens's defects, such as his insensibility to religion, science, politics, and art, concludes that he is "one of the best friends mankind has ever had." That is true. And possibly just because Dickens has been so overwhelmingly popular, it is only in recent years that he has been assessed, not as a beloved household fixture, but as a novelist almost of the stature of Dostoyevsky [87], with whose passionate, troubled imagination he has much in common.

I assume that in your youth you read at least David Copperfield and were probably forced to read A Tale of Two Cities, one of his worst novйis. When rereading him, I suggest you consider the following:

Dickens, though children love him, is not a writer only for children or the immature. He is enormously easy to read, yet is a serious artist. He is serious, even though one of his main methods of exposing life is that of high (or low) comedy. He is more than a creator of funny eccentrics. For example, see whether you can detect his constant and powerful use of sym- bolism, almost in the modern manner; the dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend furnish a good illustration.

Whatever the sentimentality in Dickens may have meant to his time, it is hogwash to us. An understanding of him as a whole will only be blocked if we try to be moved by his mechanical pathos, or indeed pay more than cursory attention to it. Everyone remembers Oscar Wilde's "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing."

If Dickens's characters are "caricatures," as some think, why do they stick in the mind and continue to move us so strongly?

Dickens was a passionate, unhappy man, who apparently never recovered from his miserable childhood (how many waifs and strays there are in his books!) and who failed sig- nally as husband and father. His passion and unhappiness are subtly reflected in his novйis, as is his sense of guilt. Thus as he aged his books grew in depth. Compare the light-hearted- ness in Pickwick (and yet there are those Fleet prison scenes) with the sense of suffering in Little Dorrнt or the dark, brood- ing atmosphere of The Mystery of Edwin Drood left unfin- ished at his death. The notion of Dickens as a kind of jolly lit- erary Kriss Kringle has stopped many readers from seeing ali there is in him.

If Dickens is merely a "popular" novelist, why is he still read, whereas Scott, who was just as popular in his day, is not?

I am merely hinting that, as with Shakespeare [39], it is best to abandon most of the notions derived from our childhood and high school experience with Dickens. There^ more in him than met the Victorian eye. It is there for us to find.

C.F.

78

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

1815-1882

The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography

Like many aspiring novelists toiling as waiters and taxi drivers in our own time, Anthony Trollope in his youth had to work in order to write. He was born into a marginal middle-class family presided over by an ineffectual father; there was enough money to send him to school, but not enough to allow him to be happy in the rigid public school social hierarchy. After leav- ing school he worked as a jъnior clerk in the Post Office Department. At work his energy and enterprise began to assert themselves; he was promoted to a better position in Ireland, and started writing in his spare time; his first novйis—juvenile work compared with his later confident style—have Irish set- tings. He rose high enough in the postal administration to make a small but important contribution to the comforts of life: He was the father of the mailbox. (Before Trollope you had to go to the Post Office to mail a letter.)

And always, he wrote: Every day before breakfast, at the prodigious rate of a thousand words an hour. (Of the writers recommended in this Plan, perhaps only Balzac [68] wrote with more manic concentration.) In 1855 he had his first real popular and financial success with The Warden; by 1859 he was doing well enough as a writer to resign from the civil ser­vice and devote himself entirely to his writing career, with time out, briefly, for a fling at running for public office. He died in 1882, and his last novel (Mr. Scarborough's Family) was pub- lished posthumously a year later, the final volume in a very long shelf of books comprising the complete works of Anthony Trollope.