Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [17]
The passage always recalls to me my first run-in with the notion that Dickens was a bit of a blowhard. When I brought home Oliver Twist in my book bag, assigned to read it in seventh grade (a terrible idea, as though within our suburban, center-hall colonials we twelve-year-olds would naturally relate to the prepubescent Oliver as he was orphaned, lost, and steered toward a life of crime), my mother commiserated with me about the rigors of reading Dickens. “He describes every leaf on every tree in every street in every town,” she said.
This is a pretty fair assessment of the sort of detail the writer piles on (and which detractors assign to the fact that he was filling magazine pages, since many of his books were first serialized), but it so happened that I was a leaf-tree-street-town sort of person and, later, the same sort of writer. And there was something about the chapter I had read surreptitiously in the classroom, during (I’m pretty sure) a lesson on oblique and obtuse angles, that had simply gotten to me. It was the moment of the orphan’s birth: “There was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration.” It was a combination of the arch and the archaic that spoke to me. Perhaps it was all those years reading the simple serviceable prose of the New Testament in Catholic school; I was dying for something with some potatoes and two veg along with the meat.
From his perch in the comfortable Victorian starter house that has now become a museum to his genius—dining room, morning room, drawing room, dressing room, but not much room for servants—Dickens created an indelible London in novels that merged storytelling with social commentary. But the fog was the least of it. One word-picture of an area near St. Paul’s by the Thames in Little Dorrit describes “an old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square courtyard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots.” Oliver Twist finds himself living with Fagin in rooms in which “the mouldering shutters were fast closed: the bars which held them were screwed tight into the wood, the only light which was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top, which made the rooms more gloomy and filled them with strange shadows.” A visitor can take the Tube to London’s most notorious neighborhoods, and not see anything that approaches the dingy squalor of Dickens’s London. This is either a tribute to urban renewal or literary overstatement.
Charles Dickens during his visit to the United States in 1867-68
Unsurprisingly, many of the books grew out of autobiography. The Dickens who was put to work labeling bottles in a blacking factory is mirrored in David Copperfield. The boy whose father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with his entire family, grew up to reflect the experience in Little Dorrit. And the months he spent in the office of a firm of Gray’s Inn attorneys informed the intractable litigation Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the suit at the center of Bleak House that has made it the essential novel about the grinding inexorability of the self-perpetuating legal systems of all nations.
In the Doughty Street house there is a rather famous painting of Dickens by R. W. Buss, who was one of the original illustrators of The Pickwick Papers. It shows the familiar figure—for it is a measure of Dickens’s fame that unlike virtually every other novelist, his face with its long beard and poufs of hair is quite recognizable—surrounded by a succession of tiny figures representing the characters in his novels.
The painting was never finished, and most of the figures are in black and white, sketched in lightly, ghostly. They have a sort of bothersome swarmlike air to them, as though they are buzzing around his head with the annoying insistence of insects, and perhaps they were, not as fictional figures but as elements of Dickens