John Mullan discusses The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist.

okay well good afternoon everybody this is patrick milliken from the poison penn bookstore and we're here with another of our virtual events today and i'm really delighted to to welcome john mullen to the program today we're going to be talking about his wonderful new book the artful dickens uh the tricks and ploys of the great novelist and um uh kate moss the wonderful novelist kate moss who was supposed to be joining us today unfortunately she had a bit of an emergency and so she's not able to join us but uh it's funny amusingly a couple weeks ago we had originally scheduled this and due to some sort of you know whatever happened john didn't get the memo on that and uh but barbara and kate had a nice little conversation in your absence uh about the book which we recorded and and viewers can go back and kind of watch that at the same time well well i can i go back and watch it sometime yeah let me let me just give you the the formal introduction that you deserve um let's see john mullen is lord nord northcliff professor of modern english literature at university college london he's published extensively on 18th and 19th century literature he's also a prolific broadcaster and journalist and writes on contemporary fiction for the guardian in 2009 he was one of the judges for the man booker prize uh did they send you just hundreds of novels that you had to wade through for that 134. blimey uh he's lectured widely on both jane austen and dickens in the uk and the u.s his his most recent book is what matters in jane austen he lives in london uh well welcome john it's great to have you thanks patrick and i'm really sorry about two weeks ago that was a cock-up corner these things happen yeah um but just to get into this this wonderful book you know reading it it struck me we were talking a little bit before we got started um just about i found it to be a real revelation reading reading it and and just to kind of learn even though i've you know like a lot of people watching you know knew a little bit about dickens not a lot but the basics uh just to realize how many of the conventions and templates and literary devices that we talk about all the time here at the bookstore with authors you know dickens just flat out invented um can you talk and these these tricks and ploys and this wonderful uh improvisatory thing that he had that maybe a lot of people don't realize yeah yeah i mean sure i mean you mentioned at the beginning that i actually once upon a time i was a judge for the man booker prize and that i i i write for newspapers sometimes about about contemporary fiction and um i mean one thing that slightly got me going on this book was how i started noticing um that some of these kind of devices that literary novelists use nowadays and that maybe people sort of think were sort of invented in the 1960s say um or maybe they were invented by james joyce in the 1920s or maybe they're you know or maybe they were invented by henry james in the 1890s but actually how dickens was as it were not getting his his due and that um that this was something to do with the way that we were all taught to see dickens and researching the book i think the way that people saw him from the word go that he's an entertainer you know he's a great entertainer he does these wonderful characters and as as as you know rival novelists have always said as if it's an easy thing oh yeah i admit he's funny he's quite funny as well he's funny as if that's easy but but but actually very rarely have people sort of pointed out um his sort of formal ingenuity i mean just to give you one little example of the kind of things i'm talking about um and you you kindly read read my book so you'll know about it but but um you know round about round about the 1960s uh british and american novelists started experimenting in writing novels in the present tense okay and this was kind of a really kind of cool and experimental thing to do and and it started off in france with the nouveau roman and people like muriel spark took it up and and then and then and and and then you go on and don delillo does it and and and um you know hillary mantell's thomas cromwell trilogy which famously won the man booker prize twice in britain he's all in the present tense um but actually dickens did this dickens did this strangely enough you know right back in the 1850s in in in first of all really thoroughly in in bleak house which is kind of divided up between chapters in the present tense and chapters in the past tense and the chapters in the present tense are told in the in the third person um impersonally as it were and the chapters in the past tense are told in the first person by the novel's heroine esther and these chapters are sort of interleaved and if you did it if somebody did it now they'd go oh yeah yeah we've got to put this on the man book a short list haven't we i mean this is terrific formal playfulness but the extraordinary thing is that when it was published in in the 1850s and it was a bestseller bleak house did very very well um i've looked at all the responses and nobody mentions it nobody mentions this most extraordinary thing about the novel and and um people say oh you know here's some more great wonderful gargoyle characters from mr dickens nobody nobody notices the sort of literary ingenuity so i mean that's just one example i've tried to find lots of examples but but that's the kind of thing that prompted me to to to write the book to try and see the writer that we we thought we know so well in a kind of slightly different way well it's interesting you should say that and since i'm always aware when i get when i'm doing these these programs of not giving spoilers but this isn't that kind of book because you it's you can dip in and dip out and so i'm just going to go to the very end of the book right when you talk about his perhaps his greatest trick of all which is uh the repetitiousness yes and and the sentence rhythm you mentioned james joyce a few minutes ago you quote this wonderful passage i believe it was from great expectations yeah which is meant you know as as you emphasize it's meant to be read aloud and i thought of james joyce i thought of you know being lost in ulysses somewhere with all those like 15 ands yeah can i could i could i give share it with your with the viewers because i have actually now this is a real test isn't it of my of my competence but i think that i can do this because i think i've got the very passage which you'll write it's right at the end of the book yeah um and it's kind of one of my favorite passages but it's very characteristic so you know i'm going to do this now and uh can you see that patrick i can yeah all right okay and then people should be able to see that and if you'll indulge me i'm going to read it out loud please because of course dickens wrote to be read about that you know this is one of the things about him and what you're saying just now is is a kind of reflection of the fact that you know that that he wrote for the voice as much as for the eye really um and so what's happening now it's quite important to sort of know so this is in a later part of the novel chapter 54 and and pip the narrator has been revisited by magwitch the escaped convict whom we met so memorably in the very first chapter of the novel and and it's a horrific re-meeting for the for the now adult young adult pit because he thought that his fortune was left to him by miss havisham but spoiler alert he discovers that it actually comes from the from the convict he's gone to australia and made money farming and so he's still got the taint of crime upon him pit fields anyway magwitch has to be smuggled out of the country because a transported convict was not allowed to return and it it it was a capital offense to return so his life is in danger and they they want to put him on a ship but they can't put him on a boat on the thames because all the kit the wolves have been watched so they decide pip and his friends they're going to row him down the thames and intercept the packet the packet boat which is going to hamburg and put him on board so they wrote down pip his friend herbert pocket and another friend called star top they row down out of london and into this into the estuary and here it's it's completely deserted it was like my own marsh country flat and monotonous 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 hood 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 i think you're right i think james joyce would have been would have been proud of it yeah yeah and it's you know wonderful all those i remember being told um when i was being taught to write when i was sort of six or seven years old don't never use more than one hand in a sentence you know all those muds you know all those muds and all those snakes stuck out of and stuck out of and it's kind of incantatron and i guess the one thing i'd add to what you summed it up very well but one thing i would add is that it's not just kind of fine writing for its own sake um it has a point because the point is that it's a novel great expectations all about a character who thinks he's sort of surging into the future making his destiny and he's all the time being sucked back into the past and when i look at this passage i sometimes wonder if f scott fitzgerald was thinking had this unconsciously in his mind when he wrote that amazing ending to the great gatsby because it's about being sucked back into the past so down on the thames estuary pip is taken back to his own marsh country so even the child's first rude imitation of the boat it's appropriate because he's entering a kind of reverie and you enter the reverie with him don't you when you read it or when you hear it read and in a way it's doing in just one little bit what the whole story does to pit which is to tell him that actually the past matters more than the future to him so i'm going to stop it pretty pretty remarkable yeah yeah um yeah and then you know in the forward to the book which is is really well done and sets up the uh sets up the book very nicely you know you talk about um i just wrote it down his special mix of unliterariness and formal daring can you can you kind of expand on that a little bit yeah sure i mean i suppose it's exemplified in what we've just looked at but but dickens was a great one i think for making creative virtues out of necessities and he he even made a creative virtue out of the fact that he was he was a kind of self-made writer so you know he had very very little schooling um a little bit of a little bit of us of dame school when he was tiny to teach him maybe to read and write but he after that he only had two years in school the wellington house academy whose headmaster he said characteristically was quite the most ignorant man it has ever been my pleasure to meet and so dickens was a kind of self created yeah an auto died act who learned lots of shakespeare from first of all from his father who is this mr micawber type figure who was very grand eloquent and used to sort of make speeches at supper to compensate for the fact that he hadn't got enough money to buy the food you know and and he also learned from going to the theater you know he dickens was addicted to the theater he's addicted to shakespeare um but also melodrama and fast and all that stuff and i think that it meant that you know nobody told him how to write polite english and it meant that he could make it up for himself and luckily for us but posterity he had not just the brilliance but the self-confidence incredible self-confidence to do that so that passage we've just looked at you know there were there were other great novelists in the 19th century but none of them would have could have would have written that george eliot wouldn't have written that henry james wouldn't have written that um all those ands all those stuck out have stuck out of and all that mud no they wouldn't have done that and over and over again you find things in dickens that have a daring that only the self-made uh writer could have could have managed you know some of some of the people listening to this might know might know his most famous of short shorter fiction uh a christmas carol you know which starts have a look at the beginning of it it's really um outrageous it's got my favorite colon in english literature in it so the first sentence is marley was dead colon to begin with it's a great joke in the beginning sentence and to begin with is the thing somebody says at the beginning of a story they're telling you but of course it also means he's about to come back to life he's dead to begin with he's not going to be dead much longer and then he says yes everybody knows he was dead dead dead dead dead as a doornail you know but lesson two after not using too many ants when i was a kid was don't use cliches dick is because he loves a cliche and when he starts in the second paragraph unpacking it why should a door now be thought to be dead i think it should be a coffin nail isn't a coffin nail more dead than a doornail but still everybody says dead as a doornail so i better go on saying dead as a doornail i say emphatically marley was dead as a doornail and it's a very very conscious use of cliches very conscious and also very clever because what is a cliche but a dead bit of language and what is this story about it's a story about the dead coming back to life and he even brings dead words back and dead phrases back to life and i think that's a another example of what what you were talking about patrick that the fact that he is this you know um rule-breaking self-created jumped up nobody of a writer and do you think i mean i think i know i know what you're going to say but um for everybody watching a lot of this a lot of these sort of revelations about him perhaps have been eclipsed because of his popularity and you know he was a very commercial writer um you know perhaps of his time he was a best-selling commercial you know writer and as most people know he published serially um and can you talk a little bit about uh you know about how he wrote to the demands of serialization you know and everything you know by necessity would have had a very episodic feel to it yeah yeah indeed and and i could say he was he was uh the best-selling novelist of his age not just in not just in britain but you know in america as well um although he was very cross he didn't get most of the money from his sales in america um and throughout europe you know he was the most famous writer in the world at you know by by the middle of his career but also the one who sold the most copies and that was one of the reasons some of his contemporaries even some of his friends sort of were a bit snooty about him you know mr popular sentiment trollop called him um but again he did this extraordinary thing that he took this you'd serialization yeah in some ways he invented it because he invented with pickwick papers slightly by accident this uh form for fiction of monthly installments okay so all his novels as i'm sure are our listeners know all his novels were published first of all in serial form but some were weekly and somewhere monthly and the ones that were monthly you've got like a little paperback book really every month and uh except for his last novel the mystery of edwin drew they were always in 20 parts um so it's a good way of spreading the cost but also maximizing the for the purchaser but maximizing the sales and he developed an extraordinary ability to use the constraints of this form as in kind of creative ways um and i'm going to show one in a second but so what he if you think about it um i mean usually now if we watch tv serials are the best comparisons and you watch it on something like netflix and you can do it on demand you can binge watch as we i don't know if you say that in the states but we say yeah binge watch okay so in in on british tv the the most popular most watched tv serial of the last few years was a kind of basically a very complicated police procedural thing called line of duty very cleverly plotted very and very cleverly scripted and the big thing about it was that it was seven episodes i think the last series and you couldn't you had to watch them when they came out okay sunday night at nine o'clock i mean you could miss it and watch play again but you couldn't watch it in advance you had to wait and so suddenly there were kind of 13 million people doesn't sound much in the states but i mean that's a lot that's a quarter of the british population almost watch you know hanging on for every sunday at nine and of course you'd have the conventions at the beginning you'd have a little recap you know the thing yeah okay now imagine what dickens had to do his novels are really have really complicated plot some of them he his readers had to wait for a month and they had to do that 19 times and a month is quite a long time and when he came back with the next installment he had to be able immediately to revive people's memories and so he discovered these amazing ways i think of doing it the way people talked so every one of his you know there's a chapter in my book about the way people talk every one of his characters and we all know there are a lot of them yeah have their peculiar ways of talking and people's looks and gestures and the odd idiosyncratic things about them so that when we see them again or when we hear them again we immediately get them and and we get the associations that come with them and he even i'm gonna i'm just gonna show an example which i think is just a wonderful one from one of his weekly serials it's great expectations again he even used things like um smells right to do this so uh see if i can do this okay so can you see that okay patrick yeah that looks great okay so so this is great expectations and uh it's published weekly in his journal all year round so he's editing the journal so he's getting money from that and the sales of the journal depend quite a lot on its lead novel which is serialized every week and and i mean it's a classic dickens story he had the the the sales of his journal were going down because the lead item the novel the serial novel written by a friend of his called charles lever just wasn't very good and people were losing interest so you had this new novel he was planning which was going to be a monthly serial great expectations and he said no no all right i've got an emergency i've got to repurpose it and but i mean he's repurposing he's only just started writing it because that's the other thing about serialization he's only writing a few weeks or a couple of months ahead of you know the last installment so he's really committed he can't write the whole thing get it all organized and then divide it up he's got to see the end in the beginning so this is just a little example so this is great expectations pip's second visit to miss havisham's house many people will remember miss havisham's house and pip is about and i put there uh the chapter but i've also put the date of the original installment right january the 12th 1861 and how old pip is at the time he's aged eight and he encounters a man groping his way down a dark staircase of course miss havisham's house the light is shut out all the time and this man grabs him he grabs him by the throat and he's a frightening man and we never get we don't find out what he's called or anything and he just says to pip boy of the neighborhood behave yourself i have a pretty large experience of boys and you're a bad set of fellows now mind said he biting the side of his great forefinger as he frowned at me you behave yourself with those words he released me which i was glad of for his hand smelled of scented soap and went his way downstairs i wondered whether he could be a doctor but no i thought he couldn't be a doctor or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner there was not much time to consider the subject but we were soon in miss havisham's room where she and everything else were just as i'd left them so the sort of most disturbing thing about this man really is a smell because he's a burly rather brutal character he's got the smell of scented soap is he a doctor what is he and so there we go the episode ends and then ten years later one month later in the life of the novel so uh uh five installments later we meet him again and pit this time is in the local with with his uh with with joe gargery the blacksmith he's in um the three jolly bargemen the local inn and this stranger arrives you have an apprentice pursued the stranger commonly known as pip is he here i am here i cried the stranger did not recognize me but i recognized him as the gentleman i'd met on the stairs on the occasion of my second visit to miss havisham i had known him the moment i saw him looking over the settle and now that i stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder i checked off again in detail his large head his dark complexion his deep set eyes his bushy black eyebrows his large watch chain his strong black dots of beard and whisker and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand and so we're recognized we're encountering him again and pip is and he finds out he's called mr jaggers he's the lawyer he's the guy who tells pip he's got great expectations and dispenses money to him and then over another month later pip only a year older he's in london and he visits mr jaggers uh at his his uh his chambers and he's a lawyer he deals mostly with criminals um sometimes he gets them off sometimes i hanged and he his premises are just next to newgate prison near smithfield meat market i embraced this opportunity of remarking that he washed his clients off as if he were a surgeon or a dentist he had a closet in his room fitted up for the purpose which smelled of the scented soap like a perfumer shop it had an unusually large jack towel on a roller inside the door and he would wash his hands and wipe them and dry them all over this towel whenever he came in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room and so he's like he's kind of like lady macbeth isn't he washing his clients off and so when the smell activates the memory as smells do you know how it is for all of us you smell something and that's that's more memory activating than almost anything else so dickens is using that but also you can see when he was writing that early installment he already knew about this later one which he hadn't written which hadn't happened it just was existing in his imagination he already and and it's just a little example of how he's making the necessity to connect across time all the time it took to actually publish his novel in installments but he's making that sort of part of the novel really the way things are connected across time and the way that a smell here years later suddenly we understand it don't we well it's funny because in uh in so many uh you know books about creative writing you know you hear that they talk about the importance of employing you know all five sentence senses and particularly smell you know that that's uh is that what they don't know is that yeah that's a that's a that's a thing is it incredible writing yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah well i think anybody who wants to do that could learn i mean there's a chapter on on smelling things in my in my book because uh i think you can learn so much from the way that dickens does it and you know people at the time like there was this man i can't remember his name now who was a a kind of office clerk he was a boy really working for dickens on this on this journal and he years later as an old man in his 80s in the early 20th century he dictated his memories of dickens and he says he remembered him going around london sniffing you know like a kind of like a cocker spaniel or something you know that that smells where the smells were as distinctive as sight sounds everything else for him yeah you know what occurred to me also by by reading your book um is just how how modern he seems in so many different ways uh i can picture him looking at his amazon reviews uh or looking at his goodreads page uh you make the point that this is really interesting um you know how these these uh weekly monthly serials came out he was able to kind of gauge reader reaction by the sales figures uh and that fascinated me because that's i thought wow that's very contemporary sounding yeah yeah did you find evidence that he he uh tweaked his material accordingly well yes there is evidence i mean absolutely there is um in a way his first big success is the best example of that which is with the pickwick papers um and this he was looking at the sales he's a very young man you know and he's writing the pickwick papers and you know about a third of the way through it i fred i fear i've forgotten which which number installment it is he brings in this character sam weller who the slightly unworldly um and you know lovably foolish mr pickwick meets in the courtyard of a coaching inn in london in but off borough high street street where where um sam weller is cleaning everybody's boots he's a he's a boot shiner and and sam weller and pickwick get kind of paired up he employs some weller who gets him out of a scrape and then spends the rest of the novel getting him out of further scrapes and as soon as samuela came in the sales just went and dickens you know all the evidences dickens had he was just going to be another character mr pickwick met but as soon as dickens saw that sam weather became if not the central character but you know one of those servants who is i mean like jeeves or something you know it's a great comic tradition that the servant is always cleverer than the master i mean that's essential to all comedy and um and and dickens saw that and immediately knew he was onto something and in some ways he never looked back because after samuel came in pickwick just sold massively and dickens gave dickens huge confidence that he sort of he could feel what people liked you know so um i mean the the other side of it though patrick is that dickens is early novels uh you know oliver twist nicholas nickleby um barnaby rudge to some extent martin chuzzlewitz the old curiosity shop so that's the kind of first third of his career he is planning them a bit but he's also [Music] making stuff up as he goes along and then you get to this the novel zombie and son which is the one before uh david copperfield and [Music] he's so successful he can do what he wants and the book sellers will take it you know they'll agree to whatever he wants to do and that's the first novel i think which is where he's planned the whole thing and where he is therefore committed and he can't just change stuff yeah he can't just uh so he cares a lot about how it's selling and he can adapt by putting in maybe a bit more you know a little comic interlude to try and raise the spirits but he can no longer do what he did with pickwick and just follow the readership he's decided what he's going to do um and so and we know that because he left us um his mems as he called them which are his plans for all his novels from zombie and son of aft onwards and he left them to his friend john forster who then left them to the victorian albert museum basically and i think he left them partly because i mean he knew that they were valuable but he also wanted posterity to see but he was planning this stuff he wasn't just making it up as he went along is that museum right by the royal albert hall um uh it's not far from the role yeah it's a bit south of there there's an area where there's lots of museums the science museum it's next to the natural history museum which is uh perhaps the most famous one because it's a very beautiful victorian gothic building and it's just the other side of the road and inside the victorian albert museum there's something called the national art library which has um not all but the great majority of dickens's manuscripts to dickens's novels there's one or two in the states but they're mostly in the victorian albert museum and the amazing thing is you can you know you've got to arrange it you've got to ask in advance you've got to present your credentials but you go in and sit down and see him at it i mean it's like watching him do it that would be just incredible i'd love to do that yeah well you should you should because dickens manuscripts are unlike any other literary manuscripts i've ever seen in that he doesn't make fair copies or second drafts okay so everything is the first draft everything that went and that was what went to the princess however that makes him sound like he's just improvising all the time but when you look at the sections of your book by the way oh thank you thank you talk about his his uh meticulous self editing and yes every sentence pretty much so what he does is and they're really difficult to read because his writing's very tiny and he when he crosses something out he inks it out so that it can't be read you know so the guys at the print shop can't make a mistake about what reading he means i mean he writes in changes in even tinier writing and so you can get these a lot of these manuscripts online but however well pixelated your screen is you you won't be able to read them and if you look at them in the flesh you can sometimes make him out and it's as if he sets off on a sentence and when he changes his mind changes his mind changes his mind but once he's nailed that sentence then he's on to the next one and what he doesn't do is come back and rewrite a whole section or so it on the one hand he's writing on the wing with this tremendous sense of speed and invention but on the other hand he's minutely editing and changing all the time and it's completely wrong to think of him you know as a careless writer he's a minutely careful one but just not in the way that other writers are well in that way he seems very contemporary because i'm assuming that a lot of that was uh dictated by the the demands of deadlines you know yeah absolutely you know there's a story that dickens himself told that he was writing i can't remember which novel it is now but he was writing uh little dorit or whatever it was in broadstairs in kent where he used to go on summer holiday actually it wasn't little doric it was before for that because he was still with his wife at this time and he was on family holiday and he was writing this novel and he'd run out of paper and he was getting closer and closer to he started off sort of three months ahead of himself as it were but it was getting into two months and then he went just one month he went to the stationers to buy some paper and he there was a lady in front of him in the queue and she was loudly demanding from the stationer the latest installment that he was still writing yeah um let's see i got a bunch of there's so much to go over and um also everybody who's watching if you if you have questions uh please don't hesitate to put them in the comments field uh and i'll be happy to ask them and i have a feeling we're gonna run a little bit long today i hope you don't mind john no no so much too long but there's so much and i don't want to get in the way of some of the things you wanted to discuss as well um but uh yeah there was where was i going to go next yeah i wanted to we can't neglect to talk about uh the artful dodger and the importance of the artful dodger and um you know how he how much dickens admired sleight of hand yes and uh you know that whole notion of self-sufficiency that you write about uh can you talk about that a little bit yeah sure i mean because the title of my book which i have to confess uh somebody clever at the publishing company thought of it and as soon as and it's something i've never met and as soon as as it was suggested to me i just thought yes yes that that is the title i want the artful dickens because um it does echo the artful dodger and there's a there's a great episode in oliver twist which sums up the special qualities of that novel actually where oliver has been taken into a fagin's lair fagin's gang and you know and essentially what they're trying to do is corrupt him you would say teach him how to be a thief um and what happens is he watches as fagan pretends to be a gentleman in the street in london with a handkerchief in his pocket and handkerchiefs were quite valuable and easy to steal and then uh two two of um uh his kids master bates and the artful dodger practice stealing from him and they have to do it without him feeling it and you know one of them will bump into him while the other one does it and they go through a great kind of pantomime of pretending this is really happening in the street and oliver watches and at first he's sort of horrified because this is teaching you how to be a thief but it's so entertaining but eventually he just finds himself roaring with laughter and clapping you know and and um and oliver twist is a bit like that after all isn't it you know fagin who's officially the most the demonic character and in some ways a very an infamously anti-semitic representation but he's also the most entertaining character and the most amusing and the most theatrical um and dickens was was theatrical he was a performer and um i discovered i didn't know sorry you think he identified um i i think i think in a theatrical way in that i think he thought of writing parts that he would enjoy reading enjoy performing i don't think i think he identified just as much as now actors will say oh i really enjoy playing er go you know i don't know i really enjoy playing edmund and king lear you know i don't want to do edgar no no i want to be edmond um i don't you know uh and yeah so i think in that sense he he he wrote parts that he would like to inhabit and i didn't know when i was writing the book but i did you know i found out that he was not just later in his career um a noted performer of episodes from his own books which he did as a show a road show but actually he was also much earlier in his life um he was a really accomplished amateur conjurer and in the 1840s in london magic shows became quite popular um you know sort of pen and teller stuff stuff you know this is kind of it became a thing on the london stage and dickens went to these shows and [Music] he was fascinated and he learned tricks himself and there were shops you could go to in london to buy the stuff and the the historian thomas carlyle's wife jane gives a really great account of going to a an evening party and where dickens did his favorite trick which was he took a top hat and you see on the cover you kindly displayed he's got a top hat on my cover he took a top hat and into the hat he put all the ingredients for a christmas pudding and when he would shake the hat and out of it produce a steaming christmas pudding very kind of dickensian trick isn't it and that was his coup d'etat and seems to me in a way that's a kind of that epitomizes what dickens was like a sort of trickster performer and where you were you were supposed to be delighted by the flourish of ingenuity did he invent that that convention in magic with the hat or was that something no i don't think he invented it i don't think he invented it but um i think it was quite it was a trick that was already established to put stuff into a hat and produce yeah yeah but i'm i don't know if the christmas pudding aspect of it was not i think that might have been something that he invented but it should be a christmas pudding that came out of the hat i mean what more dickensian thing could you have than a steaming christmas pudding well it's funny you mentioned dickensian because what i what would it be too easy to say that perhaps the critics kind of snubbed him or didn't really recognize how wildly invented he was because he was kind of a writer of the people he was the people's writer and uh he went he went down into the dark streets of london and wrote about very serious things that uh you know people from the lower classes were you know dealt with yeah i don't know i absolutely think that and i think that um i i don't think it was always just the subject matter although it sometimes was that um i think it was how can i put it i think it was the mixture of the serious and the absurd so it was it i think he could be forgiven by many of his more high-minded contemporaries for writing about uh crime and disease and social ills because other novelists did that that was you know that was something the novel might be expected to do um you know anthony trollope wrote a novel called the good not really good novel called the way we live now and that was one thing novels was supposed to be yeah supposed to address but what dickens did which was i think singular was so often he mingled the serious and the absurd so if if any of any of uh our listeners want a sample just just look at the first chapter of dombian son okay and it's it's about in a way it's a victorian deathbed scene mrs domby has just given birth to a baby but she's dying mr donby who's this hard-hearted business tycoon um who's unable to unbend even as his wife dies he's only even then unable to kind of express affection because actually a part of him is triumphant because he's got a son zombie and son and previously all he's had is a daughter and the daughter is in the chapter and she's absolutely distraught because her mother's dying and all he can think about is his company really and you know it's a kind of classic victorian thing you might say do you have that handy i don't have it handy i'm afraid but i it just it's only just occurred to me i'm afraid as an example because the great thing about it is the dickensian thing is in amongst all this sentiment and tragedy and the mingled kind of critique of commercial avarice um there are these doctors and nurses and the the doctors the two doctors and the nurse have been hired by mr donby and because he's really rich he's hired the most expensive doctors you know and they are used to only attending upon the aristocracy and so the doctor the harley street doctor keeps getting mrs domby's name wrong because he keeps calling out the countess of dombie and lady zombie and and and correcting himself and the nurse is so terrified by mr donby and his wealth but she can't remember anything and so even when when she's asked her name she even gives the her name as a question as if she wants to anyway these blundering idiots are kind of hilarious and it's so characteristic of dickens that and and just the kind of thing that struck many contemporaries or contemporary critics as you know now you'd say inappropriate that he often makes you laugh when you shouldn't laugh you know he often some of the funniest moments are funny because you're not supposed to laugh at that right and and the novel we've talked about most great expectations seems to me a at work absolute genius because so often it's funny as well as frightening and and or horrifying um and bleak house equally is like that so he does take you down into the dark streets and you see bad things but you can bet your bottom dollar just at the moment when you're all sort of rigid with but you're bracing yourself for some terrible bit of social realism you'll get some kind of absolutely absurd eccentric strolling in and doing a kind of comic turn it makes me think you know i wonder if monty python uh you know were influenced by dickens they do the same thing in a lot of in a lot of cases yeah yeah um well there's so much to talk about in the book um i do have a question from one of our viewers which is uh which is good uh laura says how long would a monthly cereal usually be and how long would a weekly cereal be okay gosh well that's that that's a good question so a monthly cereal um the monthly cereal is easier to answer because he had one standard way of doing it which he just discovered for himself and he only varied it once so a monthly cereal was always 20 parts but the last two parts came together because if you can imagine you know you notice this in tv serials it's quite difficult to tie everything up at the end special two-hour special two-hour conclusion yeah yes yes so um so you might say it was 19 parts with the last one being a double part so there were 18 gaps yeah and the only exception to that so that's all the great big thick dickens novels right um uh uh i like that and um so that's david copperfield bleak house martin chuzzlewit our mutual friend um i think i can't remember how many but more than half of his novels are like that and the only um exception to it is um uh his last novel um the mystery of edwin drude which he he's trying out something new so that was um going to be 12 parts and uh he died but he died halfway through so exactly halfway through um it ends and so it really is a mystery and um uh you know we spent a people spent a lot of time trying to fill in what was going to happen because it clearly it's about a murder or we don't even know if the guy is murdered actually um but a probable murder and it's really clear that dickens had found out exactly worked out exactly what was going to happen and that he planted the clues to the whole mystery in the bit he did finish but you know he didn't finish it he died so that was that was the a new form for the monthly one the the weekly ones they varied a bit um so the shortest is hard time and the weekly ones all appeared in a journal or magazine right uh so the where's the monthly installments are on their own in in as i described it like a little paperback book so like a digest sized yes and then at the end if you bought them in that form you could get them all bound up um if you wanted so um interestingly comic books or that is they call them graphic novels sorry to interrupt um no that's fine they follow that same convention now you know they will release the individual volumes and then if you like there is a a large trade paperback which collects okay okay so yeah so and then the weekly ones um which appeared in in what i guess we would call magazines um which they often call journals most of them were ones which dickens himself edited or as he put it conducted and those varied in length so the shortest was hard times so that's published weekly and i think how long that took about four and a half months um to to to get from beginning to end um great expectations is that seven months something like that i'm guessing i'm trying to remember so laura's caught me out slightly but i know hard times was i'm sure about was just under five months in weekly install was bleak house his longest book oh his longest well i think you see those 20 part monthly cereals were almost exactly this almost all exactly the same length wow um um i don't think bleak house is his longest actually i think that little dorit might be a bit longer than that but that's a good question i mean the difference in length amongst those monthly serials is quite small you know so they're very they're very similar lengths to each other that's funny i know uh you know writers like george simenon you know he wrote this mcgray novels yes so they were exactly this you know a particular amount no more no less he was done yeah yeah yeah well yeah that's i mean dickens had a certain space to fill um and very very occasionally it went wrong and while he was still sort of and there's a great bit um uh there's a bit in david copperfield where he hadn't he'd underwritten and the the printers went back to him and said oh no you haven't filled up the right number of pages and so you had to write some extra paragraphs and he wrote these brilliant extra paragraphs some of the best paragraphs he'd written all about little emily almost drowning and might have been better if she had drowned and what a terrible thought why am i saying this oh no i shouldn't say this now i should have said it later on in the story but let it stand [Laughter] did you did you find um in the course of you know i'm sure rereading a lot of his books um that his inventiveness over time he became more and more inventive or did it change over time um i think that yeah did he become more and more inventive i think that he could pay less attention he paid less attention to the business of pleasing people perhaps so um he became more confident that he could take his readers with him whatever he did um but no i don't think so i think that um you know bleak house which is right bleak house is right in the middle of his career and it's as formally audacious and novel as as you'll ever find i think it is the case that i think our people often think of his last novels um you know a tale of the two cities our mutual friend well it's little dorit our mutual friend the mystery of edwin jude as as darker you know and they they're often the ones that academics like writing about most of course yeah because they the academics also find it difficult the ones which are funny it's you know but the funnier it is the harder it is for us literary critics to write about so there's a certain certainly they get they get darker i would say but i i i think that no he tries different experiments he doesn't become more experimental i've had a couple of interesting questions come in here um elizabeth she writes did dickens ever make any significant amendments to the text as serialized for publication in novel form okay so no he didn't he didn't do that however he did have changes of mind in the course of publishing um and changed his mind about things that he had embarked on so um so he didn't go and rewrite the novels in order to make them into books he tended to go on to his next you know his next project although he always planned you know as soon as the cereal was near the end in its either monthly or weekly form he had the book ready to come out you know to get more sales to capitalize on that and then after that a cheap one volume book for people who couldn't afford the sort of you know the the uh the posh version um but he did do things i don't know you know he did do things like he famously changed the ending of great expectations i don't know if people know about this but from in between actually first writing it and it being published because uh one of his friends a novelist bull were lit and said he wrote he wrote a version which had an unhappy ending and it's a brilliant unhappy ending in my opinion whereas where pip meets estella years later in the street in london she's in a carriage and her her first husband the brutish bentley drummle has died he's kicked to death by a horse that he's mistreating and she's married again a shropshire doctor so she's not available and pip meets her and pip has got with him the child of joe gargery and biddy biddy whom he could have married if he hadn't been such a fool but she she married joe instead and they had a son and they named their son pip so he's with little pip in the street and he meets estella and estella says to him you know hold that child up to me and he holds the child up and estella assumes that the child is pip's child and so he she assumes that he's had a happy ending he's got a wife he's got a family and he does not correct her mistake so they set they part on a misapprehension and that was the original ending and bull were lit and said no you can't you can't do this so instead he wrote the ending which we now all read and which is still slightly ambiguous actually but where he meets stella again in the grounds of satis house and she is she's a free woman because her first husband has die has been killed and she hasn't married again and and pip says i saw no shadow of a further future parting from her so he changed his he changed it but when he changed things he changed them you know at that pre-publication stage and once it was published it was there it was gone um i'm glad i remembered this my wife asked me because my wife is a big uh devotee of edgar allan poe and um uh has some sort of distant uh relationship to that to that family i don't really gosh yeah yeah um but she was there some sort of connection between the two uh dickens was supportive of pose and that right yes and and dickens dickens did um sort of uh two american tours as it were um and and and on the earlier one he met poe who who yeah he met poe and there was they they were great admirers of each other's writing yeah and um it's likely actually that although that posed famous poem the raven has a dickens connection because i mean i don't know you do you know that poem patrick famous poem of course poe's famous playing the raven well dickens i mean it's all posed but one of the things that fascinated poe at dickens told him was um i think powered red barnaby rudge which has a talking raven in it um called grip and uh grip's quite a big character in the novel and dickens said oh yeah that's you know that that's the one knock character in in all my fiction who's not invented grip is my raven i have a raven called grip he said or rather i had a raven called grip and he died and he was my greatest friend and when he died i had him stuffed and put in a glass case above my desk so i can look at him every day and he says i've got another raven who's also called grip who's a new red but he's he's not a patch on the old grip and and apparently poe was really um taken with this story and it seems likely that it sort of generated the raven in the famous poem i'll be darn that's a wonderful story i did not know that well it seems like there is there's a little bit of a of an analog there between the two of them because if you read you know i went back and re-read some of the poe stories and a lot of that stuff is just wildly inventive and ahead of its time and um you know it's interesting to go back and read it from a modern perspective yeah yeah yeah i think there's still i mean i'm sure i'm no expert on the relationship but it seems i'm sure that there's more to it than has actually been written about because of course you know poe is incredible sort of inventor of things and he's in some ways you know the great progenitor of the detective story yeah and dickens was fascinated by detective stories and was the first in bleak house the first english novelist to have a detective um and and and as as you might know dickens actually would go out at night with the detective force in london you know not know that oh yeah yeah yeah and and he represent and wrote articles about the journalistic articles in which he represented the cleverer ones anyway as these great cerebral people who had you know a greater knowledge of human nature than anyone else in london um and then comes uh conan doyle yes yeah well conan doyle you know uh the the inspector bucket in bleak house is a sort of predecessor of sherlock holmes in that he's already developing those things that the detective has that weird weird gift of insight into human beings that makes them sort of scary slightly monstrous figures but you know they always know they always get it right right and then um i don't know if you've come across that novel by dan simmons called drewd which no i haven't what's that oh it's fantastic big thick novel um and dan simmons by the way is is a really really terrific uh writer um but druid is is obviously about dickens's death and uh and the process of writing the mystery of edwin drude but it's told from the perspective of wilkie collins collins i guess it's funny uh just what we're talking about um with commercial fiction versus you know quote literary fiction and collins in this book considers himself salieri to uh dickens's mozart you know almost yes uh and it's just a wonderful wonderful book you know and of course it speculates that dickens is murdered and right what kind yeah it's a lot of fun yes well i think that dick i think i think i have to say i think collins i think salieri mozart i think collins collins knew dickens was a sort of greater writer but at the same time i mean dickens learned a lot from collins and it was a it wasn't it wasn't one way that relationship yeah perhaps i have it reversed maybe maybe dickens was sally oh right i can't recall okay i guess it would work either way wouldn't it um let's see linda has a question uh is there any truth to the myth that dickens was paid by the word um no he wasn't paid by the word um but he did a he did he did as it were a new deal every time you know and um sorry he had a good agent he was his own agent i mean his friend foster sometimes helped him negotiate but no dickens was his own agent and um uh yeah i mean he did a new deal every time and the deals got better and better generally speaking through his career and um you know the deal there's a wonderful book called dickens and his publishers by a guy called robert patton p a double t e n which goes into my newton fascinating detail and and you know like a good agent would do on the writer's behalf now but dickens did it for himself his deals would specify not just how much he was going to get for say writing um a 20 part serial novel but also how much he was going to get for the three volume book version how much he was going to get for the one volume cheat reprint how much he was going to get for any versions made to be sold at railway stations how much you know um complicated deals so not exactly you know not by the word but um uh he definitely you know he wrote for money he absolutely wrote for money but there are not many novelists who don't care about money at all he's just right more efficient than most in you know monetizing the very different ways in which his novels you know could appear and and you should also realize you know uh two things which is first of all that he came from a background where the fear of penury was very real and therefore his ability to make a lot of money a lot quite a lot of which he then had to hand back to his feckless father and his hopeless brothers and then in time his feckless children um the ability to make money was bread the desire to make money was bred into him by the the circumstances in which he grew up but also i think um the amount of money he made was a sort of measure of his of his appeal to his readers throughout the world so it wasn't just he wasn't i mean you know he liked to earn money he liked to spend money but i think also it was another measure of his vibrancy in the uh as he thought it in the in in the lives of his readers who were prepared actually to pay to read him you know i mean shakespeare was a hugely commercial successful commercial writer and all the evidences but he went to considerable lengths to maximize his earning potential and you know it's it's it's it's uh it's absolutely reconcilable with the highest creative abilities that i was going to ask you there's a great great quote somewhere in the book where you say uh popularity and literary ambition were twinned in dickens yeah i think that's what you've been talking about i think that's right you know that that um you know just in some of the little samples the little passages that we looked at earlier um you know he's in some ways he's using aspects of the english language for instance which are alive still in the ways we talk to each other but perhaps also sometimes alive in dickens's day on the popular stage or in the popular press but which were not alive in good literature and he tapped into those you know repetitions cliches extraordinary flights of fancies ghosts you know all the kind of things which um you might say don't don't normally belong in high literary works he brought in um so popularity you know was really essential to the way he wrote well i want to just i know we're we're kind of going all over the place but i'm having such a wonderful time talking with you and i hope the readers are having fun too they seem to be uh let's see just to give people a taste of what you can expect in this book maybe we can just go briefly through you just mentioned a couple of the chapters but um here they are uh some of the things that he wrote about fantasizing smelling uh changing tenses which we've talked about a little a little bit but i wanted to ask did he ever employ the second person which is very rare no no he didn't no i mean that is very rare yeah those things what is it um jay mcinerney bright light big city i think that's all in the second person that's uh like all of them yeah they're rather one or two others but you know yeah that would be hard to sustain i would think yes yes there was a book a really slim it's funny you mentioned muriel spark earlier who i really love and who is finally starting to get a little resurgence of interest but there's this real bizarre scottish writer named ron butland who wrote a book called the sound of my voice and i believe the entire thing is in second person right okay one of the most devastating books about alcoholism i've ever read anyway okay i digress um changing tenses haunting laughing um naming which will go back let's bookmark that i want to ask you about that of course um using coincidences exposing or excuse me enjoying cliches speaking foreseeing drowning knowing about sex um then finally just breaking the rules yeah but naming is so important with dickens um we we would be remiss if we didn't talk about that for a few minutes okay fine yeah names yeah names are really really important to him and i mentioned earlier these notes these mems he left of his plans for his novels and quite often when he's beginning thinking about a novel what you find him doing is beginning thinking about the names of the main characters and maybe even just the name of the main character as if once he's got the name he's in and i just i've actually got it from my i'm afraid i haven't got it as a slide but i've got it in my book i'll just read you it's not very short what you get on the um first notes for david copperfield right and he writes out the first thing he does he writes out some columns of names and the first columns goes like this trotfield tropbury spankle welbury copperboy flowerbury top flower magbre copperstone copperfield copper field and the copper bill's the only one he writes twice and once he's got it he writes it twice and he's got it and and you can see what he's thinking about because actually in those names he tries out that he doesn't use tropery trotbri flowerberry top flower there's this thing i don't know if if you if you remember it but there's this thing in uh david copperfield that um uh steerforth a sort of diabolical friend who actually brings tragedy and destruction in his wake but who david thinks is wonderful calls david daisy because he's so innocent and in a way and it it's half affectionate but half nasty because he's so innocent that he can't see what's happening which is that steerforth is seducing emily oh and he's he's going to get her to elope with him and it's happening in front of david he can't see it because he's too much of a of a daisy you know and and you can hear that dickens is thinking about that isn't he top flower flowerberry copper boy um and in fact he thinks about it a lot because and trotfield and chopri and and um uh david's uh uh aunt betsy trotwood um uh wanted wanted him to be a girl didn't she and so and and so she refuses to call him david she calls him trot and actually all through the novel everybody calls david something apart from david everybody calls him something else and he's a bit of a play thing for people's projections you might say and um i remember there's that wonderful bit early on where mr murderstone who david doesn't quite realize he's courting david's mother he's going to marry her she's a beautiful young widow and she is he's a predator really and he go takes david out for a day by the sea with these loose friends of his who lie around smoking all the time and they say things to him like how's the young widow and murderstone talks to them in front of the boy in such a way that the boy won't realize what's going on and he calls he says be careful of brooks of sheffield he's sharp and brooks of sheffield is david but david doesn't realize and they're talking and they they get david drunk he's only a little boy and they're all toasting brooks of sheffield which is and again it's it's actually a mocking name and you realize that all this stuff about names it runs really deep into the novel so that when dickens was thinking about the names he was thinking hard about every aspect of his protagonist actually it seems like dickens would have would have loved uh cockney rhyming slang well dickens loved old slang yeah yeah and and he loved i mean he loved the way it's great isn't it the way his names don't they don't sort of directly tell you what somebody is like right but they are a kind of poetry aren't they i mean murder stone we've mentioned is quite close to telling you murder stone um what he's like and um actually betsy trotwood later says in the novel that awful man whose name is like murder and he is a murderer yeah she kills in a sense she kills david with cruelty how is merged spelled is it m-e-m-u-r-d s-t-o-n-e murder stone um uh but they're great aren't they i mean you know the famous ones it's difficult it's difficult now to believe that dickens invented the name scrooge i mean you know it's not a word he invented it right and it became a word yes um i mean scrooge is brilliant because it's as soon as you hear it it's an incarnation of what that character is and you can try and unpack it and say oh it's screw and gouge and is it i mean i don't know maybe it is all those things um but he had a special it conjures up yeah conjures up a feeling of you know being kind of i don't know you know what i mean yeah it's as i said it was an early sentence about him it says um where the narrator says oh but he was a tight hand at the grindstone old scrooge and again you know um it's a cliche isn't it put to new use the grindstone but yeah the names um and he kept a book of names and um uh and collected them and tried them out and they're amongst his most sort of wonderful invention really um so i believe i'm right in saying there are more eponyms that means words derived from names invented by dickens in the oxford english dictionary than invented by any other writer um so um you know uh within within a few months of pickwick papers coming out the word pick wikian existed um uh as soon as our mutual friend started appearing people started talking about pod snappery um [Music] so he was brilliant wasn't he at inventing a character who seemed to embody certain recognizable human characteristics and give them a name and the name became the qualities well he also had certain alter egos throughout the books too did he not i mean uh copperfield would have been an alter ego of a sort wouldn't he yes i think so i mean david copperfield is the story of somebody who becomes a novelist who who makes his way in life by and before that he's a novelist he he's a parliamentary reporter as dickens himself was um and he also encounters in the novel his sort of what would be guardian in a way mr micawber um now there's another great name um who is modeled quite closely on dickens's father um endlessly feckless but endlessly verbose and yet somehow buoyant completely unput down a ball um if i may express myself shakespeareanly he says using a word that's never been used in english before and that is dickens's dad who was able to cover up for his hopeless fecklessness with at least being able to produce florid quotations from macbeth whenever he felt like it well this has been a really wonderful conversation um mr mullen or dr mullen professor mullen john you can call me john you've earned the right um i've really enjoyed speaking with you and uh um your next pro do you have a next project in mind are you going to write about that's a good question edgar allan poe oh that would be good that would be good i'm resting on my laurels i think a bit at the moment yeah not resting on my laurels i'm waving my laurels to rand um no i'm i i don't know quite what my next project is um at the moment i'm i'm i've got some ideas but uh they're they're i'm not gonna bring them out into the light yet but are you still are you still teaching or oh yes and and actually this has been a blissful diversion for me today because i spent the whole of the rest of the day actually not teaching but marking exams grading exams so what classes are you teaching right now well the actual teaching has stopped because the students have been doing the exams but um so i've been teaching i've been teaching victorian literature actually even a little bit of dickens and some wilkie collins and george eliot and stuff like that have you come across george is it george gissing or just i have i have come across kissing indeed yeah i haven't i've only read two or three of his novels they're quite um i mean new grub street i've read several times which is wonderful i mean i would you know the thing about kissing is i think you need to space them out because they are very depressing yeah yeah i've only read new grub street but oh it's yeah i thought it was kind of neglected you know i think uh well of course it was neglected in his own day because um he he was boycotted by moody's circulating library who were the most important purveyors of fiction in britain because moody uh the man who ran it said geesing was immoral and so that really really affected his sales badly but i think new grub street is quite still is now quite well quite you know my students read it yeah right well anyway um here is the book the artful dickens everybody should go read it it would be you know it's funny the audience for this book is so wide when i was reading i was thinking writers would do well to read this there's a lot about the technical aspects of writing just book lovers would enjoy reading this um so everybody buy two copies one of your friends you're very kind patrick the best thing about is it's got lots of dickens in it and it's a beautifully beautifully produced book it's nice isn't it yeah and so hopefully it was the intern at the publishers who suggested the title uh i don't think it was an intern i'm afraid it was somebody who's quite sort of um been at the company quite a long time but it was somebody who's on the commercial rather than the editing bit you know and hasn't had himself a dickensian nose for what would sell books well it's probably getting to be your bedtime so yeah yeah i'm gonna have gonna have to go and have my supper actually patrick oh sorry to keep you so long no no it's great it's great you've been done yeah been the truth for me thank you have a wonderful night and uh thanks everybody for watching on facebook and we will see you soon great thanks patrick i hope we meet one day that would be one cheers

Channel: The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

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Id: TH04E3ER0no

Length: 87min 28sec (5248 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021