A Charles Dickens' Anniversary Tribute (Courtesy of Marty Feldman and John Cleese)

 (Right ) The famous sketch of Dickens, entitled "Mr. Dickens contemplates throwing Mr. E. Wells off a large tower."  

On this 200th Anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, the staff at "doug's Site" has chosen not to embellish on Charles Dickens literary reputation but to observe this occasion by presenting a past tribute to Dickens and his arch-nemesis, Edmund Wells.    

This classic two-handed "bookshop sketch" was originally done with Marty Feldman and John Cleese in the late 1960's for Feldman's "At Last the 1948 Show" and was revived over and over with various other comedians (Graham Chapman, Ronnie Corbett, Connie Booth, Terry Jones, et al) usually with Feldman or Cleese in the sketch with them. This as far as I can tell is the original. 

Not only is the sketch a sort of left-handed tribute to Charles Dickens, but also to Dickens great literary rival, the great Victorian plagiarist Edmund Wells (b. 1824?--d. 1875?/1878? or perhaps even $18.99?) 

As Dickens himself once said of Edmund Wells while at a Cardiff hotel in 1864 where he was about to give one of his famous public readings at a local theater: 

"Wells!  Wells!  A plague on that carbuncle! That bastard has nicked my book...again!" 

 Mr. Dickens followed this remark by flying into one of his rare but famous homicidal rages. He bodily threw a local reporter, two bell-boys, a spaniel named "Alf"  and several manuscript pages of his latest novel through the open window of his second-floor suite.  All the human victims survived thanks to landing on a large canopy over the hotel entrance and were promptly given free tickets to that evening's performance by the contrite author. 

 Great fun was had by all.  

 

Charles Dickens, Superstar: "American Notes" and his Farewell Tour

"Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. I have many friends in America, I feel a grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing: which is always a very easy one."--Charles Dickens, from his original preface to "American Notes". 

Charles Dickens was a month shy of his 30th birthday when he landed for the first time in the United States. He returned to America twenty-five years later in 1867 and 1868 to give a series of popular readings which were a great success. Between those two trips both  commentators in the United States and Charles Dickens had a falling out of sorts. His books, however, remained popular with the reading public and it was Dickens the popular and tireless artist and speaker who triumphed over his critics.   

Although hailed as the most popular novelist of the time while in America, Charles Dickens first trip to the United States (from January to June, 1842) was marred by controversy.  Reading his travel and journalism book, "American Notes (for General Circulation)" today one finds it hard to find anything controversial or deliberately vindictive about it.

 

Dickens toured factories, prisons and asylums; took stagecoaches on rough terrain; travelled with his wife in canal and river boats and, at least on the eastern seaboard, experienced the rigors of early American railroads. Much of the humor and drama of his extensive journey comes out in the details he brings to these trips.  Dickens preferred  to ride on the tops of stage coaches, for instance, and frequently suffered all types of inclement weather and bad roads and the fear that his coachman was going to land him and his party in a ditch or the midst of a river ford. All of this was of course comparable but more primitive than he and his wife Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens were used to.           

The things that got under Mr. Dickens' skin while visiting the young republic were things that have long since lost any motive for taking a  contrary position upon. His first "mistake" was to call for Americans to recognize authors' copyrights, not exactly a radical idea today. He also had nothing good to say about the "peculiar instituton" of chattle slavery.  What would one expect from a man who loathed cruelty and came from a nation where slavery had for decades been unsupported by law?  

He shocked audiences of VIPs and the press in New York and Boston when he called for Congress to pass an International Copyright Law to protect both American and British authors from having their work pirated.  He cited the poverty of fellow author Walter Scott as a good reason to  support a common sense law.  But the idea of "intellectual property"--which would have protected the works of popular American writers as well--was met with harsh attacks by the American newspapers.  He tried to get other American authors like his friends Washington Irving and Henry Longfellow, to support him, but to no avail. 

 

The strongest supporter for International  Copyright was Senator and ofttimes presidential candidate Henry Clay of Kentucky, the man known as the "Great Compromiser" for his efforts to forestall a civil war in America.  Clay tried hard, but failed in his own and Dickens' time. The international copyright law was not passed by Congress until 1891.  

 

(Charles Dickens at about the time of his first and second trips to America,respectively.)

His third dislike  was to find the habits of spitting tobacco to be disgusting.  He took notice of this for a bit of humor when he visited Washington City to meet President John Tyler and attend sessions of Congress. 

 

"Both Houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account."

 

 The fourth "bad move" was to notice and report that  many Americans lacked reserve  when meeting people of re-known. (He and his wife were mobbed by well-wishers, local big wigs and plain old "stalkers" at all the hotels in any city they stayed at.)  His young American secretary, George Putnam, was hard-pressed to give him some private space and to keep up on the local invitations and the spontaneous "meet-and-greets" of mobs of well-wishes and badgering press hawks Dickens generally endured for hours on end in hotel lobbies, streets. He was even mobbed by ladies, Paul McCartney style, when just trying  to get a haircut in Baltimore.  Some females reportedly requested pieces of his hair on that occasion, hopefully after it was already cut!    

Here I think we see the beginnings of the modern "cult of celebrity" in America.  One might express surprise that  Dickens didn't see the adulation coming, given reports of the popularity of "Boz" (his nickname)  with, among other works,   "The Pickwick Papers", "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickelby".  

 

  Perhaps he didn't read accounts of the old hero of the American Revolution General Lafayette's tour of America in the 1820s, which was quite a circus of adulation  in its day.  

 Still, Dickens kept a great deal of this 19th Century American Beatlemania  out of his "American Notes", preferring instead to confine his consternation to private letters to friends--like his close friend John Forster--back home.    He also made no mention of the copyright controversy in the book.  Much of it is focused instead on his day-to-day travels which stretched all the way from Washington and then down the Ohio River valley by steamboat to St. Louis and then further westward for a day's trip to see the vast prairies that led to the frontier lands. 

 

Here is a part of his view of Cincinnati, Ohio: "Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and footways bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance. The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their elegance and neatness."

 

This is a usual passage in the book; many positive reflections like this abound, along with some measured negatives about being in contact with grumpy people or that strange  American propensity for settling domestic maters with firearms.  Again, its hard to see what his contemporary American critics could be so upset  about. This is far from a perfect view of America, nothing scholarly here except perhaps the final chapter which takes slavery to task through newspaper clippings and books Dickens used to prove his point that it was a cruel and wanton waste of humanity.  But it is a travel book, not an encyclopedia!     

 

Modern critic and historian Christopher Hitchens called "American Notes" 'Dickens worst book.' Better I think to recall an earlier intellectual critic, the American Edmund Wilson, who said  "Dickens' picture of the United States in 1842, at a period of brave boastings and often squalid or meager realities, has a unique and permanent value"

 

 To me, Hitchens is most unfair.  Charles Dickens was trained first as a journalist and reading his book it is clear that he leaves the editorializing to a minimum.  He was not one of those English travellers of a Tory persuasion who were in habit of coming to America to put down the republic mainly to, as John Whitley and Arnold Goldman in the Penguin Classics Introduction suggest, mainly to discourage the hundreds of thousands of skilled workers who are already leaving Britain every decade for America between 1815 and 1859. At the same time he is not given to overpraise American institutions  as some radical writers had done as a way to bring reform to U.K.  Parliamentary election scandals, poor workers' conditions, broader voting rights for male citizens,  and other progressive struggles of the time. 

 

When he meets Americans he likes, he is unstinting in praise.   When some person or institution fails to meet his liberal-minded expectations, he is direct and sharp but not bigoted.

In 1867, against the advice of friends and his doctor due to ill-health, "The Inimitable" returned to the United States. The idealistic young man was now a seasoned and weathered man of 55, and not a young 55 even for those times.  Hard work at his writing and public appearances at home had made any long travel difficult.  He was also  without the company of the young actress Ellen Tiernan, who had replaced Catherine in his affections.  (The couple had divorced in 1859 after she had borne him ten children.)  

 

The 1867-68 tour was a huge success. Dickens, according to a biographer Peter Ackroyd, received about $200,000 for his well-honed recitations of his written works.  And, whatever the professional critics had to say about "American Notes" back in the 1840's, it had little if any effect on the public in post-Civil War  America. Thousands came to see him during his more modest, travel-wise, tour of the East  Coast.  Many camped out in front of theaters for tickets to see the rock star of their time.

 

His success was complete by the time the tour closed in New York City; thousands of his regular  readers saw him off on the ship back to England in the harbor. He waved his hat from the ship back to the harbor throng, getting the same hearty cheers he had received at the end of his performances in theaters and lecture halls.

Dickens left behind an edition to his "American Notes" after this second tour. It was a postscript to that book and his "Martin Chuzzlewit" novel (partly set in America) that records a deeper understanding of the United States and of himself, taken from a dinner in his honor in New York on the eve of his return to his homeland:  

"`So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might have been contented with troubling you no further from my present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side, - changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first."       

 

 

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Charles Dickens

A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book that reminds me how powerful a story can affect a reader, especially a younger one for the rest of his life. It was a favorite book of my father as he was growing up. I first read it at fifteen, and at my most recent return to it I was impressed by how quickly I was absorbed into a book I was already familiar with from earlier times.


For a Dickens novel , this story is not all that complex. An old doctor named Manette is freed from the Bastille after seventeen years; his daughter Lucie, brought up in England, goes to fetch him with the help of Mr. Lorry, a banker at Tellson's who has looked out for her since she her father was thrust unjustly into the Bastille and forgotten.

A man whom they meet on the return voyage across the Channel (Charles Darnay) is a French aristocrat who has turned his back on the cruelty and feudal barbarism of his family to make a life in a foreign land.

Later, the man Darnay finds himself on trail for his life, mistakenly thought to be a spy for the French in 1780's London, when both nations were at war with each other over the issue of the American Revolution. An identical-looking man in the courtroom that day, the lawyer Sidney Carton happens to be there helping his associate. The fact that Darnay and Carton both look alike convinces the jury that one witness must be lying. Darnay is spared from a gruesome death.

Dickens will come again to that plot device in good time. But the scene will not be in England but in the chaos of Paris in the time of The Terror, where the unforgettable figures of Madame Defarge and her husband lead a pack of blood-thirsty revolutionaries to a measure of vengence beyond anything close to justice.

Darnay is descended from an aristocratic French family whose hobbies include running-down a small child with an over-sized coach, then tossing the poor father a gold coin for the inconvenience. He is not like his uncle, the Monseigneur, although he will have to likely have to pay for the crimes of his elders.


Darnay is a enlightened man, a good egg and Dr. Manette welcomes him as the groom for his beloved daughter Lucie. Carton is a heavy drinker and a reprobate--he is in love with Lucie, too, but he knows he's no good for her. All this plays into Dickens theme of redemption and sacrifice. Darnay goes to France in a suicidal mission to get an old servant out of prison and away from the harsh justice of the Jacobins. This inspires Carton, who rises above his past to use blackmail and his considerable personal resources to redeem himself beyond all measure, all in the hope of a better world in the future.

That the individual human heart can bring a person to change his course and that a better world can be made from this, writ large, is a great theme of Dickens. Look at "A Christmas Carol" where Ebenezer Scrooge gets a makeover of his conscience in one horrific night, and turns into a decent and generous man. .

Paris and London are the settings for the book . Both cities have their share of injustices. But Paris is depicted as having a more hungry and brutalized populace. In London much of the lower classes are in dire straits but are not planning more than the breaking the laws (such as Jerry Cruncher, the Tellson Bank odd job man and part-time grave robber) or robbing a stagecoach or two. In the end its the servant -class people of people, including Miss Pross, Lucie's lifelong maid, who are as much appalled by the violence they see while in Paris during the September Massacres of September 1792 and on through the Great Terror as any of the middle-class folk they serve.


Critics have chided Dickens for some points in this book, for not balancing the violence of the old regime with that of the Great Terror for instance. But the Terror is the stuff of great drama and to expect a great novelist to also be a great historian is really asking too much.


In George Orwell's 1941 Essay on Dickens, he comments on this book with a particular emphasis. Here is one part:

"The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine--
tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the
basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these
scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible
intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he
says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will
follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being
reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside,
somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn
into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The
inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon... in the
clearest terms..."

But Orwell also analyzed (keenly I think) that Dickens was not really a political writer, as some would have him be, but rather one whose attitudes were to show his countrymen and women how bad things could get if reform wasn't followed through upon. Then the politicians themselves (well ,some of them, like John Russell, the Parliamentary reformer that Dickens dedicated the book to in 1859) would see the way to head off the tide of red blood running through the streets of some future London.


Whatever can be said for Charles Dickens, he knew how to make you want to read more. His whole style was perfect for the way novels were introduced to the public in those days, with passages in serial form in magazines. Each couple of weeks there was a new couple of chapters in his magazine
"All the Way Around".

In "The Inimitable" Dickens' case, thousands of eager people shelled out hard coin to read about the latest triumphs, setbacks, wicked deeds and tragic ends of his characters. He was as popular in North America as his own nation.


Reading the book again, it was clear to me why my father--not a keen novel reader later in life, but a man who preferred non-fiction books--had always remembered this work with such fondness. It's a novel of great suspense and memorable characters first and foremost and, secondly, one that shows the power of an individual or a small group of people to rise above personal concerns for those they love.