A Little Dickens

Without comment, my 19-year-old son, a sophomore at a college in Manhattan, today sent me this excerpt from Great Expectations, a novel he is reading for the first time:

"Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I wasn't allowed to speak (I didn't want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, hadhad the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn't leave me alone."

I’m guessing that Joshua has fallen under the spell of the Dickens sentence, that great, unfurling contrivance that huffs and puffs and threatens to explode into gibberish but manages to carry the baffled reader like a steam engine into the train station of good sense and comedy. I know the feeling. Here’s an exchange between Alfred Jingle and Mr. Pickwick, from the second chapter of Pickwick Papers, that always makes me laugh:

“Heads, heads--take care of your heads!” cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. “Terrible place-- dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?--fine place--little window--somebody else's head off there, eh, sir?--he didn't keep a sharp look-out enough either--eh, Sir, eh?”

“I am ruminating,” said Mr. Pickwick, “on the strange mutability of human affairs.”

“Ah! I see--in at the palace door one day, out at the window the next. Philosopher, Sir?”

“An observer of human nature, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“Ah, so am I. Most people are when they've little to do and less to get. Poet, Sir?”

“My friend Mr. Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn,” said Mr. Pickwick.

“So have I,” said the stranger. “Epic poem--ten thousand lines --revolution of July--composed it on the spot--Mars by day, Apollo by night--bang the field-piece, twang the lyre.”