'All Human Qualities Are Dear'

It’s the season to read Dickens again, for the first time in years, that nameless spell between the waning of autumn and the arrival of Christmas. As a kid I had a partial set of his novels, the early ones, and read them dutifully and with pleasure. I even read A Tale of Two Cities, his second-most tedious book after Hard Times. Only later did I read his best, Little Dorritt and Our Mutual Friend. My love of Dickens waned with the years. The cartoonishness got to me, the bluster and overinflated emotions. But there’s also comedy and sumptuous language. Reading him again is an experiment. Have I reached a rapprochement?

 

“Bus riding,” Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker founder, writes in a diary entry in 1960, “always reminds me of Dickens and his stagecoach rides,” which reminds me of the coach driver Alfred Jingle in Pickwick Papers:

 

“ ‘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 coachyard. ‘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 family off – shocking, shocking.’”

 

Reading Dickens again is a curious mingling of excitement and tedium. Some pages I skim without losing the thread, picking it up again at the next set-piece. The intense focus on personality is a pleasure, even when overstated. In 1919, Rebecca West reviewed The Dickens Circle by J.W.T. Leys for The Living Age and writes:

 

“To an artist all human qualities are dear; and to him incongruities in character are a matter for happy deliberation, as the pattern on a butterfly’s wing is to an entomologist.”

 

[See the Day excerpt in The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day (Marquette University Press, 2008).]