Not only have I not finished any other books on my list, I’ve actually purchased more (yes, I have a problem) and therefore have more to add. I’ve been reading, but I’ve been reading library books.
I’m still in the middle of A Tale of Two Cities, and as much as I have been a cheerleader for Dickens in the past, I am finding it quite boring. Just being honest! And no one is more willing than me to suffer through Dickens’s paragraphs about poor orphans and saintly girls with golden locks in order to get to his flashes of brilliance: spontaneous combustion, houses that fall down around their occupants, Wemmick’s castle. The opening sentence of Two Cities, reproduced for your reading pleasure below, is, of course, wonderful, but the rest is slow going.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
But what a sentence! Right? Doesn’t that describe every era since the dawn of time? Isn’t that what we all think about our own times—that everything is terrible and confusing but also wonderful and new? There is no other writer quite like Dickens. And so I’ll keep going with A Tale of Two Cities (and, eventually, the other two Dickens books on my shelf… oh dear).
One thing I’ve been thinking about is how people encountered this novel originally. It was published in 1859 in weekly installments in the periodical All the Year Round, run by (of course) Dickens himself, who was a true control freak. In a sense, the fact that I keep putting it down and picking it up again a week or two later is really how it was intended to be read. (OK, I’m reaching a bit here, but it’s kind of true.) In some of Dickens’s other novels that were published serially, you can really see the mechanics at work—chapters end with cliffhangers, but in the next chapter, the narrative begins in a different place or with different characters, to keep you reading for the outcome of that earlier cliffhanger. Sort of like what George R.R. Martin does in Game of Thrones and its sequels, really. Or like watching a weekly drama series on TV, a comparison that other, smarter people have already made. People today who gather around the office water cooler to talk about last night’s shocking episode of Mad Men or Homeland could just as easily be Victorians chatting to their neighbours about that week’s surprising installment of Little Dorrit.
Dickens was a very market-savvy writer and knew exactly how to sell his own work, something that a lot of writers still aren’t very good at. (Fun fact: apparently A Tale of Two Cities is the bestselling novel of all time. I’m not sure if this is true—what about Harry Potter?—but it certainly could be true.) However, I’m having trouble tracing the marks of serialization in A Tale of Two Cities. So although I’m (sort of) encountering the novel the way that Victorian readers first did, I’m missing the sense of urgency and the typical structure, with lots of plot climaxes, that you’d find in a novel that was originally serialized. I wonder if it’s just my own disinterest in the subject matter and characters so far,* or whether Dickens had grown tired of relying on that same old serialization technique at this point in his career. I’m going to start paying closer attention to chapter openers and closers, to see if I can work this out.
* The novel is set in Paris and London during the build-up to the French Revolution. It’s one of two works of historical fiction by Dickens, all of his other novels being set in the period in which they were written or thereabouts. Two Cities also features fewer characters and plotlines than a typical Dickens novel. I love the sprawling narratives and dozens of characters you’ll find in something like Bleak House, so I’m finding it more difficult to get into a book focusing pretty closely on two families and their closest associates. Dickens is also often criticized for being something of a caricaturist, rather than developing characters who feel like real people. There’s some truth to this, but especially so in Two Cities so far, I think. Lucie is very innocent and very beautiful, and her father is very wronged and very damaged, and the Defarges are very inscrutable and very sinister. Everyone is very something-or-other. So far, Sydney Carton is my favourite—mainly because he’s sarcastic but has hidden depths. He feels the most like a real person to me.
Anyway, I’m still reading from my list! Just very slowly.
Kathleen Keenan 