Dickens in America with Claire Tomalin and John Mullan

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello i'm diana reich the artistic director of the charleston to charleston literary festival join the conversation and i'd like to welcome you from wherever you may be watching transforming the way that the festival is delivered from live appearances to an online version and offering an even stronger more diverse and plentiful series of events is a reflection of our belief that literature in the arts provide a catalyst for dialogue creativity empathy laughter and tears binding communities together we're enormously grateful to all our speakers who've dedicated their time and talents to the festival please buy their books as a way of enhancing the festival experience it's my pleasure to invite you on behalf of my colleagues and board as well as myself to join the conversation we hope that you'll do so in person next november if at all possible charleston in south carolina is a beautiful historic and hospitable town and the charleston to charleston literary festival will definitely be going from strength to strength i'm suzanne director of development for the charleston to charleston literary festival this year more than ever we are so grateful to our generous donors returning and new who've made it possible to offer free sessions to everyone everywhere building a truly international audience there's still time for you to become a donor we're taking donations throughout the month of november so if you would like to become a sponsor and we urge you to do so please contact me using my email on the website thank you good morning i'm diana reich artistic director of the charleston to charleston literary festival join the conversation i'm delighted to be introducing this event dickens in america featuring british authors claire tomlin and john mullen i'm talking to you from london which is of course inextricably linked with dickens's novels this year is the 150th anniversary of charles dickens's death which we felt should be mocked in the festival program despite the fact that dickens is synonymous with london he was frequently on the road appearing in amateur theatricals and giving public readings when he first visited the united states in 1842 he was treated like a rock star however his relationship with the country which he described in his travel book american notes was distinctly ambivalent there could be no two people better qualified to recreate dickens's tours of america and to assess the effect on him as well as the impact that he made on his adoring fans than his distinguished biographer claire tomlin and the renowned literary critic john mullen claire tomlin's definitive biography of charles dickens was an international bestseller her other highly acclaimed literary lives include thomas hardy samuel peeps and nelly turnen dickens's mysterious mistress who claire rescued from oblivion john mullen professor of modern english at university college london has lectured widely on dickens in the united states his forthcoming book the artful dickens explores dickens's eccentric genius in an entertaining manner that matches his subject he's also the author of what matters in jane austen i'd like to thank claire tomlin and john mullen for taking part in the charleston to charleston literary festival in this extraordinary year and i'd also like to welcome everyone who's joining the conversation hello um i'm very pleased to be talking to the charleston to charleston literary festival my name is john mullen and i'm going to be in conversation about dickens and dickens in america with claire tomlin um i haven't been to charleston south carolina but i'm uh i'm an habituae of the charleston festival in england and i hope one of these days i'll actually make the trip to charleston south carolina in more than a virtual way we're going to be talking about dickens in america dickens made uh two visits to america in his lifetime but 25 years apart and um i thought that we might sort of divide our conversation up like that and start by talking about the first of his visits um which happened when he was still a pretty young man um because his two trips to america were the two trips of two different dickenses as well as well as to a country that had changed quite a lot and he first went in 1842 um and i wondered claire you could tell us a bit about why he went and and what he expected to find well he went because he was a very enthusiastic republican dickens really was a republican he actually drank a toast on the anniversary of the execution of charles the first he was he felt as strongly as that against the monarchy so he wanted to see america as the republic of my imagination he said and he wanted to write a book dickens was very practical he knew he could write a book out of the trip and make some money um and he also wanted to raise the question of universal of of international copyright because his books were being sold in america and he wasn't getting any royalties from them and he was pretty fed up about that as you can imagine the americans were very keen on him coming because they saw him as the great republican of the literary world they knew he believed in democracy they knew that he thought ordinary people mattered probably more than rich people from reading his books they said his mind is american his soul is republican his heart is democratic so that was the on each side there was a lot of a lot of pleasure in the thought that they were going to come together he decided to take his wife catherine they had four very small children uh aged four three two and and under one and they knew they were going to be leaving them for six months so that was quite a difficult thing for them to do and they were planning this 2000 mile journey and there was a great a farewell banquet um of turtle punch claret hot champagne and so on dickens was a drinker he liked his drink and his best friend foster was one of those who saw him off and foster gave him a present and the present he gave him was a small volume of the complete works of shakespeare which was lovely because meant dickens could read shakespeare throughout the trip well uh they decided to go on the first cunard wooden paddle steamer the britannia and it was mid-winter it seems to us quite bold to do it like that and they had the most terrible crossing the weather was frightful um they had a tiny cabin and when they tried to sit down they were all they all flung across and they were very brave about it they put up with it catherine had her maid with her and she showed great courage as she did throughout the trip and one of the interesting things about this trip is that it was pretty well the only time that dickens and his wife were alone together without the children enjoying themselves and what is remarkable is that she'd been perpetually pregnant from the time they got married and throughout this trip she does not become pregnant so i have assumed that dickens thought about this very hard and decided there was to be no sex it couldn't be a baby and they got on better i think than any other time in their marriage and he said she was an out-and-outer she was so she kept falling over she was a great fall over but she never complained she was a really good companion well that's just a gift that's really interesting i haven't heard that that thought before that um perhaps they got on particularly well during their american trip because they remained chased she didn't get pregnant yes well she didn't get pregnant i mean i wonder you know some both dickens's visits trips to america which as you're suggesting i mean that's quite a big thing to do to cross the atlantic in the in in the 1840s had a financial motive behind them to some extent um and you know i think afterwards with his because of the way he wrote about america afterwards um i think there were many who suggested that you know as it were he only came there to write about them he only went there as a sort of opportunity to to to write a book which would sell lots of copies and make him some more money i mean is that fair i don't think that's true no i think he really did have this passionate republican enthusiasm and i think it was very sad that he that the trip in a way disillusioned him about america and uh the things he saw in america although he liked he made a lot of friends particularly in boston he arrived they arrived in boston and he loved boston um people eat him here he was told you know he would come up and take little bits of snip bits of fur off his coat he was a celebrity the word celebrity hadn't yet didn't have time to come in but that's exactly what he was um and he worked very hard he visited schools he visited prisons he looked at everything he um he showed tremendous interest and the professor of greek cornelius felsen who became a lifelong friend said that he thought dickens's dickens rivaled shakespeare in his inventiveness so he felt he was appreciated and that's what i mean he was an incredible celebrity wasn't he and he's a he's also he's 30 years old he i think he has his birthday after some while he's there and he's 30 years old and he's written you know pick with papers oliver twist nicholas nickleby the old curiosity shop barnaby rudge and he's fated so why is he why is this trip best known for the sour version or of america that it produced or why did he dislike it so much if he's you know being treated like a pop star which he enjoyed well he had mixed feelings um i mean it was all too much in one sense he got to new york there was a buzz ball given for 3 000 people in the park theater 10 000 sandwiches 300 quarts of ice cream um after that dickens said that he was going to go to no more public dinners but also he appreciated it and then moving on he got he got to washington and there he really began to change his view the president was john tyler who was a substitute of a previous president died he was a nobody dickens turned down his dinner invitation can you imagine turning down president of the united states perhaps you can today [Laughter] and uh he's he's wrote to foster his friend best friend foster whom he wrote these wonderful letters to that he'd now moved into regions of slavery spittoons and senators all three evils as soon as he saw slavery he was absolutely appalled the spittoons are very interesting he saw in america that all the men chewed tobacco and they chewed it and chewed it and when they chewed it enough they spat it out and in some places there were spittoons and spit into but very often they simply spat it onto the floor into the carpet anywhere and he found this understandably i think totally revolting and it sort of dominated his picture of american men's behavior and i think his complaining about that caused defense presumably to every smoker in america at that point also he said to foster i think it impossible for any englishman to live here and be happy he said also i love england better now than when i left it being in america he began to really love england for all its faults um i wonder i mean the the spittoons we talked about and certainly in the accounts that he wrote he does talk about expectoration quite a lot doesn't it well i wonder if we could talk a bit about the other two the senators and the slavery i mean the senators first the way he responded to his sort of uh spectate spectatorial view of american democratic politics doesn't it i i wonder if it doesn't show that his real problem with america wasn't america but his own extremely elevated expectations of it and blow me down american politicians were as as bad as politicians anywhere and and um you know that was a big sort of letdown to him wasn't it for themselves and uh and uh ready to put dickens down yes that's true um and and and that seems kind of the case wherever he goes in america that that he's he's sort of testing people out when he meets them by standards which they're quite unlikely to be able to live up to um it always strikes me and that and that produces sort of quite a um a sort of indignant an indignant uh reaction in him yes i think his what he really enjoyed was seeing the landscape and going from city to city and he writes so well about about the his journeys uh the mississippi river the beastless river in the world he says he went along was and went to the furthest west doesn't louis um dank swampy pestilential the slough of despond that was the mississippi river very insulting to america as proud of that river um and niagara he gets very very excited when he goes to niagara a wonderful description viagra stays there thinks that the spirit of his dead sister-in-law this is bit of dickens i find very hard to take must have often visited it christian spirit must have spent her time flying from one beauty spot in the world to another but dickens allows himself to that and what about the um his his quite sort of limited observation of of slavery he travels doesn't need to to be he doesn't get to charleston he decides not to go because he's what he's already seen has upset him so much um and i could just read a sentence or two um that he wrote which i think will interest us all today as much as when it was written um the ground most commonly taken by these better men among the advocates of slavery is this it is a bad system and for myself i would willingly get rid of it if i could most willingly but it is not as so bad as you in england take it to be you are deceived by the representations of the emancipationists the greater part of my slaves are much attached to me you will say that i do not allow them to be severely treated but i will put it to you whether you believe that it can be a general practice to treat them inhumanly when it would impair their value and would be obviously against the interests of their masters um and he says that they claim the public of opinion is in favor of slavery little of course it isn't in the slave state but he really he really was deeply deeply opposed to it and wrote in the strongest terms and that obviously made him unpopular with with the slave-earning state was the next time he went that was all right but one thing the thing i i think as many attitudes dickens had which uh which are sympathetic i i must admit i'm also quite sympathetic to his fury about the copyright which he was also afterwards um i think even at the time some americans said you shouldn't be talking about this while you're on a tour of our brave new nation because it must have been you don't have to be very materialistic to find it absolutely exasperating to be selling tens of thousands of copies of your hard labored book and not not really to get a penny for them yes absolutely no he was absolutely in the right and he was it was you're you are right that nobody took any notice the press took no notice none of none of the people the even the american writers seemed to support him so he he came up against a complete uh rejection and and that was enough to make anyone angry i think yeah and then sort of in a way two books came out of this trip didn't they i mean most obviously the one that he was he was rehearsing or gathering material for whilst he was traveling i said rehearsing because of course um i don't know if the viewers and listeners will know but he did what writers have often done i think in the past which is to write letters back home especially to his friend john foster but to others as well which were in a way his way of preserving and working up recollections weren't they of uh or observations what he saw a wonderful lesson yes and read them all i mean they're all printed now yes in some ways i prefer them to the actual book which was of course called american notes yes i do too i mean dickens's letters are all all worth reading uh absolutely wonderful um i think the book is is a is a bit heavy-going yes and and sorry i just don't want to be a bit rude about martin chaselet oh well we'll get on to martin chisel in just a second and i will make of the weak defense of it um um uh but just with american notes staying with it for a second i mean um it was quite it was seen as quite an antagonistic book when it appeared um although i note that oddly enough it sold quite well in america um but i think edgar allan poe who met dickens of course called it a suicidal book that's right absolutely suicidal and the new york herald called it course vulgar impotent and superficial yeah god good good but i mean it's interesting to bear in mind because when we come in a minute to to his second visit two and a half decades later you know he he might have in mind the fact that he's written this book which has sort of um you know held america up if not quite to scorn i mean to something quite close to it sometimes i think he felt he was objecting to the things he found objectionable um but he he did love a lot of america he loved cincinnati he loved boston he made real friends and friends who became friends for life i'm a long fellow and as i mentioned professor felson and um so he and then he was persuaded to go back for the second visit by a publisher he'd met as a young man on his first visit so there was actually a continuous uh touring and fraying of affectionate letters and visits for americans coming to england which was important and and perhaps we could say something about martin chuzzlewich which i discern is not your favorite dickens novel um because as a i mean some some of those uh watching this might know after he published american notes but then his first the next novel that he wrote martin chuzzlewick um starts off actually being set in in the cathedral cathedral city of salisbury but but then um in in it's i think six seconds of its monthly installments suddenly departs for america and and it is very sudden um and and evidently not planned when i think he started martin chuzzlewit and and and literally um uh martin martin the the sort of hero but the faulty hero of the novel has a um a quarrel with the ghastly but wonderfully entertaining hypocrite mr peck sniff um to whom he has been sort of articled as a trainee architect um and who for entire motives that are entirely apparitious um banishes martin from his home and and um uh they have this altercation um martin storms out of the house and and the virtuous tom pinch runs after him and says you know what are you going to do where are you going to go and and he literally says i don't know oh yes i do america and that's exactly how it happens and that's always seems to me like a sort of very direct transcription of what went through dickens's mind where are we going to go america yes yes but he doesn't say very long in america does he no but tell me tell me i mean you don't like martin chuzzlewick i mean you tell me you don't presumably like the american episodes in martin chuzzlewitz either i'm very interesting i i don't feel dickens is really engaged in that book yes the way he is in my favorite uh books um i feel it's a muddle so they're very there are very good scenes in london wonderful wonderful scenes in london it's true yeah i mean i must say i mean the american episode he goes he he he goes first of all to new york he he doesn't go to boston as if i think dickens is afraid that if he goes to if he sent his hero to the place he rather liked he would be forced to admit that he rather liked it so send him to new york and i mean it strikes me that the the bits of um the representations of the characters he meets in america are so one track um uh the even the kind of even the things which are potentially quite funny lose their sort of comic energy so for instance says there is quite a if you're i think if you're american or if you're british it's potentially quite a funny thing in new york about how these ladies he meets are terribly keen on the fact that they're very democratic and they feel very sorry for him becoming a country coming from a country which is class ridden and obsessed with hierarchy where you are condemned to your social station by your birth and you can't be whoever you want to be like in the brave new republic but they're also obsessed with gossiping news about the royal family in the british royal family and and the british aristocracy and it is downton abbey just absolutely and it could have been quite funny but it's just one more sort of nail in the coffin it seems to me of a kind of fairly unremitting picture of how disillusioning this grand republic is yes i think that's right yes and he and he goes off doesn't he too in the end for those who haven't read the novel i think the novel's got wonderful things in lots of wonderful terribly funny things any novel with mrs gampin is wonderful is one of the greatest he he used her forever afterwards in his meeting indeed he did but um anyway he goes off and those are interesting in the end he's sold a plot of land and a speculation called eden which is i believe everywhere i mean people argue about where it is but it's probably somewhere uh uh it's somewhere in the mississippi valley i'm told it's quite near palmyra missouri and it certainly would have tickled dickens's fancy but a slightly swampy place as it was then um by the mississippi could be called palmyra but anyway he calls it eden and of course it's all a big con and uh everybody's sort of dying of malaria and he and his companion mark get very very ill and it's one of those sort of moments in fiction where by getting ill the hero has to learn the error of his ways and come back a chastened and reform character well that's brilliant you make me think i must go back and and there's a great thing i will put in one line from this episode which is on its own you can see he he is able to to to to write satirically and amusingly it's just too a bit too um one track which is the man who's called general choke who encourages martin to spend all his remaining funds on this sort of plot of land in a swamp uh with a log cabin um in order to do it he says to him what are the great united states for sir pursue the general if not for the regeneration of man and of course actually he does regenerate although only through pain and suffering well i can see you've made a very very good case for myself but anyway um you know after right to christmas carol which was yes a great work yeah so and after american notes and martin chuzzlewitz it might be thought that dickens is some kind of americanophobe but of course as you say he still had lots of friends that he good friends that he corresponded with and then great slippage of time um 25 years later he goes back to america and i wonder if you could tell us why he goes back in his mid-50s well he'd been wanting to go but there was the civil war going on so it was absolutely impossible and he wanted to he was pressed by james fields who he'd met in boston on the first trip who was a publisher fields heard him speak he visited he visited dickinson england in 1860 with his young wife annie who made many comments and wrote a good deal about dickens to persuade him to come um but there was a problem about going um and one of the problems was that dickens had now rid himself of his wife and he had nellie turner his mistress and the fields knew about her and were sympathetic and he wanted to take her with him and in fact she said she was ready to commit herself to the atlantic under the care of his manager dolby but the field said it was absolutely impossible that dickens could not possibly visit america with a young mistress so for nelly went off to italy where her sister was and um finally uh dickens made up his mind to go um there was a great farewell banquet 450 people gathered in london a hundred ladies in the gallery and these banquets it always amuses me that all the men were sitting down eating and drinking and all all the ladies were up in the gallery with nothing to eat or drink but just just enjoying the sight i suppose and after that he set off um with his valid and with dolby his manager who was who became a great friend very sympathetic very jolly and very helpful um they arrived in boston uh henry james was there the young henry james and he noted um that first of all he couldn't get any tickets and then when he did manage to squeeze in he'd talked about hard charmless readings and dickens's merciless military eye james was the only person to complain that everybody was in love with dickens dickens was as a real celebrity the word celebrity by now did exist and it absolutely applied to him um the the ticket sales were spectacular and during that trip dickens made twenty thousand pounds which is which is pretty amazing um but money was amazing but dickens's sufferings were amazing too he was already ill he had gout in one foot he never he would deny that it was god but it clearly was and he was uh a weak um and so um in march he wrote to a forster saying i am nearly used up and he kept going pretty well on rum sherry and champagne with a bit of beef tea and soup um and uh really really suffering all the time um he went to he got to chicago but he didn't go any further um and he got to washington and um it was very very difficult for him he was writing letters to nelly uh to wills who was editing his magazine and he said in one letter i would give three thousand pounds down and think it cheap if you could forward me for four and twenty hours only instead of a letter they are real expressions of love he also had a a wonderful moment when wills uh who was editing his magazine for him in england printed praise of queen victoria's book that she published about the highlands and dickens wrote to will is chiding him with his shameful lick spittle uh behavior and he said he'd read the read the book and it was absolute rubbish and you shouldn't be printing a favorable review um which pleased me because i thought that was pretty pretty good of him keeping up his republican feelings um the last readings um we're in boston and new york in all the time in snow and wind and difficult to do but there's one wonderful incident in this trip really the last romance in dickens's life when he had to take a train from portland where he'd been speaking back to boston and he got on the train and uh sat down and on the train was an 11 year old girl who very clever girl with a literary family who read all dickens she could lay her hands on and her mother had said the tickets were too expensive for her to go and hear dickens speak so she was very disappointed but when she got she she was traveling with her mother on the train too and when she saw that dickens was on the train her mother sat reading and uh kate uh walked along the train to the carriage where dickens was and sat nearby and looked at him and then the man his companion who went went to the smoking carriage and so she boldly snipped across and sat down in the seat next to and dickens sort of said next to what she says in her account the adored one and dickens was amazed and of course um god bless my soul where did you come from he said and she said i've read all the books all of your books that i can some of them six times except for the two that we're going to buy in boston and dickens said those long thick books and you such a slip of a thing and she said well i do skip some of the very dull parts not the parts but the long ones and his was completely enchanted said he wanted to hear about the long dull parts and he took out a notebook and he encouraged her to go on and he wrote it was not long before one of my hands she says one of my hands was in his and his arm was around my waist the delicious joy of snuggling up to genius nowadays people might be a little perturbed a middle-aged man putting an arm around completely strange 11 year old girl but it was a great success for both of them and um she she her memories were wonderful she remembered his clothes his face deeply lined face sparkling eyes a smile curved the corners of his mouth under his grizzled moustache um well uh he asked her which of his books she liked best he said of course david copperfield which was his favorite and then which was the second best great expectations um and dickens said did you want to go to my reading very much and she said yes more than tongue can tell and tears came into her eyes and tears came into dickens's eyes and at the end of the trip he walked with her gave her back to her mother well it's an extraordinary story it's a very touching story and she grew up to become a successful writer she wrote rebecca of sunnybrook farm and in 1923 the dickens fellowship in england invited her to come over and she did and she died in england so it's i i think that's that's a story that i find very very moving um another thing that happened on that trip was that he lost his diary in new york and that's terribly important for all of us who've tried to write about dickens um i spent i decided when i went to new york i wouldn't ask them to photocopied i didn't think they would it's too precious so i spent several days copying every single day of the diary into my notebook and it tells us a very a great deal about one year in dickens's life up to the loss of the diary the way his life was divided between london between god's hill his country house and between slaugh where nelly lived and you can see how carefully he organized his life yeah that's fantastic isn't it uh lucky and he and he had such diaries for other years which which were then destroyed did he i don't think any other diaries i think they were beginning there are a few early very very early ones yes just notes but i i don't think any other complete one like that is known i wonder if we could just talk a bit more about about the readings these incredible readings which probably lots of people listening will know a bit about but um you know clearly all as you described really vividly he it you know he was um homesick exhausted ill but by all accounts his readings were still pretty good his performances were still pretty good and it's worth i think just sort of um emphasizing how much he would perform i mean even sort of um you know um fleetwood mac on tour would respect the frequency of his dates i think he he did i looked it up just before our conversation and he did 75 performances in america and and in his lifetime apparently 472 sort of gigs as it were which is an extraordinary number given the amount of energy and sort of dramatic voltage that he put into each one well i think you say in your brilliant book that he wrote really to to read i mean that his writing is at its best being read and he doesn't on the whole describe his characters he gives us their voices and and so the readings meant that he was actually giving the best of what he'd written um wilson said there was a strain of ham of the ham in the hints but my goodness it was anyone who's described dickens readings they were always absolutely overcome by them yeah and and um it's funny isn't it because sort of i don't know about in america but in britain in in my lifetime um or perhaps only really very much in the last kind of couple of decades we've seen sort of literary culture particularly through things like literary festivals slightly recover this sort of pleasure in hearing an author read their own work which um has become a sort of a feature for novelists now they have to be performers almost don't they um or it helps them and it pleases their publishers if they are um but it was a real sort of novel thing in dickens's day yes and i think at first foster thought it was rather a vulgar idea and wasn't much in favor of it and he had to overcome that but as soon as he started doing it it people it was extraordinary uh how people responded yeah and i think also you know um sort of i'm used to making defenses of dickens's obsession with kind of earning money and i i think maybe you could talk in a second about why he need why he thought he needed in in 1867 to to earn plenty of money what his expenses were but i i also think that quite apart from his outgoings and all the people he was having to support that it was for him a sort of index of how much the readers loved him as it were so it's it wasn't a cynical thing i feel with dickens his obsession with reader readerships audiences his public appeal it was as if his um his takings were a measure of his ability to hold his readers i think that's true i think that's absolutely true um he i mean even though he was republican he was very pleased when the prince of wales came to one of his readings he made it in that sense um could you tell us a bit about what he was also also what was he was having to spend the money on in the sort of by this stage of his career what the arrangements were the who who he was having to support because he did also feel he got a lot of drains on his income didn't he yes he helped his sister and he and his old mother until her death i mean he had god's hill and the house his dreams which was well maintained and he was always improving it he built on rooms he he spent a lot of money on it um and then he would he had his office um in london which was also a flat and he had a housekeeper uh living in that same building so there was it was that and he would give huge uh wonderful dinners for all his young men friends memorable dinners he would invent certain dishes sort of lamb stuff fish or something i don't know um and then he was he was supporting nelly for whatever wherever she was i mean whether she was out staying in italy with her sister who was married to trollop's brother or whether she was on holiday somewhere in england so um and he was very charitable too [Music] so he had a if you look in his cellar he spent a great deal on drink and his fellow absolutely full of alcohol he really went in for that um yeah you were saying that um he supported himself he kept him himself going when he was flagging with them with with booze a bit and and i i remember martin chuzzlewit i think almost the only nice things he says about he allows martin to say or martin to experience about america is discovering the existence of cocktails and this is and dickens cocktails were wonderful so he allows martin chuzzlewitz the young martin chuzzlewit the eponymous character in the novel to taste a cherry cobbler i think it is a sherry cobbler for the first time so this is fantastic it's almost worth crossing the atlantic for this so he did he did think of it as the great land of cocktails didn't he yes yes and of course after he died his son charlie went to america and did more readings um people tried to keep up the tradition when he died longfellow who was very very attached to him said dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die i never knew an author's death to cause such general mourning the whole country is stricken with grief and that was the whole country of america was stricken angry of course in england people queued for days to book flowers in his grave in westminster abbey i wondered i wondered if i might get a slightly opportunistic claire but if i might just slip in a very short sort of extract from from one of the dickens novels we mentioned not martin chuzzlewick because i thinking about this this these readings and this last great tour of america does it does seem to me that it's sort of the habit of reading out loud became such um uh an essential experience for dickens that it's not just there in the readings he actually um tailored for these events but all right through his prose as if he's the the great novelist who sort of captures the energies of the talking but the speaking voice that's how one way i think of him so i'm gonna i'm gonna test this out on you so this is a little bit of great expectations okay quite near elating great expectations when pip and herbert pocket have taken magwitch down the river down to the town down the thames estuary to try and intercept the packet boat going to hamburg to slip him on board to escape britain and um and i always think one of the great things about how dickens writes is is repetition lots and lots of repetition so it's a kind of rhythmical thing which which sort of more polite and polished authors would would never do so if you bear with me it's just very short um and it's pit suddenly realizes that this terrain is very like his own where he comes from where we are in right at the beginning of the novel it was like my own marsh country flat and monotonous and with a dim horizon while the winding river turned and turned and the great floating boys upon it turned and turned and everything else seemed stranded and still for now the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed and the last green barge straw laden with a brown sail had followed and some ballast lighters shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat lay low in the mud and a little squat shoal lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud and slimy stones stuck out of the mud and red landmarks and tide marks stuck out of the mud and an old landing stage and an old ruthless building slipped into the mud and all about us was stagnation and mud and i just think if it's sort of if if you had got a a handbook it would have disobeyed almost every precept in that book and yet isn't it absolutely wonderful yes yes it's a great it is one of the greatest of his books isn't it which is greater david copperfield or that well perhaps we're i mean i think we're drawing to a close so maybe you can tell us maybe you can tell us what uh because i'm sure that the the viewers would like to know which is your favorite dickens novel well obviously it's david copperfield it's the first i've ever read and um i'm just like kate and i like dickens himself it was his favorite book and i suppose my second is great expectations um they they make a wonderful contrast to each other yeah i must admit for me it is great expectations and and partly which end do you like which end oh i i like i like i regret the loss of the original ending i'm sure lots of people listening will know that dickens wrote um a brilliant unhappy ending and and and was persuaded by his friends to to change it and and the thing i like about the unhappy ending most is he encounters a stellar in the street in london in the ending that he scrapped and she sees him with little pip who is actually the child of biddy and joe gargery and um as stella mistakes it for his own child think and therefore thinks presumably this is all implied it's remarkably subtle for where writers accused of squeezing every bit of sentiment out of his his books and she she clearly infers that it's his child and must be thinking something like oh so he's had a happy ending he's had a marriage he's had a job and pit does not correct her mistake and i just think it's a wonderful such an audacious misunderstanding to end on and such a pity that he was persuaded to write still a very good ending but not quite as melancholy and his good and indispensable friend foster preserved the unhappy ending uh because he knew it was the right one yeah well that's a that's a happy ending i think for us to come to um i'm sure you'd all like me to thank claire very much um shall we just hold up yes there he is just after his first visit to america handsome yes so claire's shown us her pin up and uh we're very grateful to her for for talking to me and to you and um it's very nice for me to have met you in this strange one-way virtual manner goodbye bye you

Channel: Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival

Views: 629

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 7nDxBB--foA

Length: 53min 44sec (3224 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020