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07 Mar 12 - 04:06 AM (#3318534) Subject: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Will Fly I've just finished Claire Tomalin's excellent biography of Charles Dickens and, once again, the thought has struck me how little probability there is in his novels of change. In spite of the range of his characters and the invention in the novels, everything is condemned to be as it will be from the very beginning. This is typified by the names he chose for his characters and, once named, that's them set up for the duration of the plot. Imagine you've just been born into a Dickens novel. There's the Great Author, bending over your bassinet. Here's the subsequent dialogue: You: "Hey, Charlie, what's my name?" Dickens: "Wackford Squeers'" You: "Oh great! Wackford Squeers - thank you very much! Haven't you anything a bit better." Dickens: "Oh, very well. How about Gradgrind?" You: "Oh, for fuck's sake!" Of course there's some character development in Dickens but the Good are condemned generally to be Good and the Bad are generally condemned to be Bad. It's striking that Dickens showed great compassion for the poor and thought that the better-off in society should do more for them - but he never, as far as I'm aware, agitated or campaigned for the law to be changed to make conditions better. He accepted society and its hierarchies and divisions for what it was, and hoped that more compassionate attitudes to the poor, rather than legislation, would make things better for them. For the Law and Parliament, he had nothing but contempt. Will (Uriah Heep) Fly |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:18 AM (#3318535) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Dave Hanson Is it me, I find Dickens' stories really very very dreary and I've generally had enough after 5 minutes. Dave H |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:24 AM (#3318537) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Richard Bridge Although I was inoculated against Dickens at school, and have never been tempted to pick up a Dicken since, I think it is customary to assert that he was paid by the word for regular instalments, which is why his style is so turgid and prolix with one interesting or intendedly exciting bit every so often, just as the end of an instalment arrives, so that readers would return the following week/month/whatever. I cannot understand why anyone reads his stuff. |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:45 AM (#3318542) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,CS I enjoy Dickens on a drear day - comforting, solid and predictable, like a slab of Dundee cake. He writes fairy stories for grown-ups and while I enjoy that, his prose isn't by any stretch of the imagination "great" literature (as I've heard asserted). |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:47 AM (#3318544) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Will Fly Dickens wrote a fair amount of what we would consider tosh today, but I remember reading "David Copperfield" and "Great Expectations" as a young lad and devouring them. I still think "Great Expectations" is a superb book - and it does have some real character development in it. |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:49 AM (#3318546) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,CS Oh and barring the psychologically more complex Estella, his feeble little heroines are vomit worthy! Very much a whore/madonna complex going on there, as we may gather from his rather creepy infatuations with a series of 'pure' young muses. |
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07 Mar 12 - 04:52 AM (#3318547) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,CS Great Expectations is an excellent story. And I like the ambiguous ending, unusually for Dickens it's not tidily wrapped up as a "happy ever after" or "unhappily ever after" - but otherwise Will I think your observations are well made. |
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07 Mar 12 - 05:12 AM (#3318554) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Nigel Parsons Of course there's some character development in Dickens but the Good are condemned generally to be Good and the Bad are generally condemned to be Bad. A concise observation, and most suitable to the 'BS' section of the forum. To totally rebut it I need only say "Ebenezer Scrooge" |
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07 Mar 12 - 05:44 AM (#3318570) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Will Fly Nigel - I nearly mentioned Scrooge as the Great Exception! But I think he's probably the only exception in Dickens. Not quite a total rebuttal, perhaps. |
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07 Mar 12 - 06:16 AM (#3318579) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,Eliza I think you have to judge any author in the context of the age and background in which he/she lived. Victorian England had a very different ethos to that of today. Also, you have to consider what Dickens' motives and goals were when he wrote. Obviously he wanted to make money. (After his experiences in the blacking factory and seeing his father in prison for debt, he had a lifelong horror of insolvency) He wanted to 'move' people in various ways emotionally. I believe he also genuinely wanted to bring about social reform, but chose to do it through literature rather than by campaigning. I studied his books at Uni, but I'd always loved them and had already read the lot before my A levels. Tha strange names of his characters was a relic from earlier literature ( eg Doll Tearsheet) and I found it helps me to remember who is who! Great Expectations is my all-time favourite. Spontaneous combustion! Inspector Bucket! What a super name! And "The waters were out in Lincolnshire..." very evocative. |
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07 Mar 12 - 06:35 AM (#3318591) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,Eliza As well as Doll Tearsheet (Shakespeare, Henry IV) there is a wonderful Sir Epicure Mammon, a character from Ben Jonson. These gave one a thumbnail sketch of the personality of each character. |
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07 Mar 12 - 07:09 AM (#3318603) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: theleveller I'm amazed that anyone can find Dickens dreary. Along with Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys, he's one of the most evocative writers in the English language - just read the opening page of Great Expectations (Ours was the marsh country down by the river). I think that anyone who has any aspirations to be a good writer should study Dickens' use of grammar, construction, characterisation (some of the most memorable in literature) and, most of all, his wonderful sense of humour. |
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07 Mar 12 - 08:17 AM (#3318619) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,Patsy Dave H at last someone who thinks the way I do about Dickens. Every Christmas TV goes on a quest to make us feel thoroughly miserable unless it is in musical form like Oliver. His writing brought peoples attention to good, bad and suffering at the time but it doesn't have any relevance today and I am tired of finding different versions of Scrooge on every other channel all through Christmas. |
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07 Mar 12 - 08:37 AM (#3318624) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Will Fly I think there's as much relevance in Dickens today as you want there to be, frankly. The scene in which the Ghost of Christmas Present unfurls his cloak to reveal two, animal-like children whose names are "Ignorance" and "Want" is still telling today. As is his famous phrase, "Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons", etc. Times may change but attitudes can slip down generations. The point I was making in my original post is that Dickens, although he wrote about the inequalities in society, never campaigned for a change to the structure of society itself. He accepted the status quo - just hoped that people would be personally nicer! Hence the hidden (or even overt) agenda in the naming of characters. If you were christened Abel Magwitch, or Uriah Heep or Wackford Squeers or Arthur Gride, that was it! Your character - your place in society - was delineated from the start. |
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07 Mar 12 - 07:55 PM (#3318935) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Songwronger I recall the barrister in A Tale of Two Cities...was his name Carton?...going from being a wastrel to doing a far, far better thing. I liked the hell out of that book. Carton's a fateful name--would seem to indicate he's all boxed up in a certain mindset. But then he breaks out. Thinks outside the box. A naming misdirection by Dickens? |
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08 Mar 12 - 11:39 AM (#3319833) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: GUEST,Eliza I don't believe in forcing ones own enthusiasms on others, so anyone who doesn't much like Dickens has my sympathy. I have tried and tried, but I just can't find anything in Tolkien which interests me! My erudite sister is thoroughly disgusted that I still read Enid Blyton, big baby that I am. I find Blyton's children's books relaxing and calming. My sister however gobbles up modern fiction, particularly those which win prizes ( eg Booker, etc I suppose) YAWN! |
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08 Mar 12 - 11:28 PM (#3320278) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Gurney As a pre-teenager, I read some Dickens, but nowadays I don't think that I could. That Victorian language! Even books that I enjoyed once that were written at that time are too heavy going. Age, and getting used to the simplification of the language, I assume. I've found florid English harder to stomach as I've aged. Just call me bullet-point Chris. |
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09 Mar 12 - 09:15 AM (#3320419) Subject: RE: BS: What's in a (Dickens) name? Everything! From: Uncle_DaveO A Christmas Carol is the one and only Dickens story which I intensely dislike. Full of mawkish sentimentality about poor little Tiny Tim and oppressed Bob Cratchit. The change in Scrooge's personality is almost a true deus ex machina, a magical change from the gods, as it were, not a humanly explicable character change. I guess that's a clue to the above-referred-to changelessness of character of almost every Dickens character: It seems that it would take an act of God to make a Dickens character develop. And the compulsively multiple reprintings and repetitive TV, theatrical, radio productions make the story so predictable that it's truly emetic! I have to back off a little on my first paragraph above. I found Pickwick Papers dull and slow. Dave Oesterreich |