Late expectations

There’s “late to the party” and then there’s “we contacted the missing person’s bureau ten minutes ago and sent out the dogs.” I have been on the no-show list for the Charles Dickens fangirl jam for years. But, ding-dong—I’m finally here! Why the long wait? Why am I apparently content to consume outrageous Hallmark variations of A Christmas Carol and call it a day?

First things first. Let me tell you how I met Mr. Dickens.

Like all Depression Era children, my parents determined their little ones would have life’s best. And to them, God bless them, that meant great literature, so they bought a nicely bound Classics collection, including A Christmas Carol with the original illustrations. I adored this fusty-looking edition so much, I “voluntold” my 3^rd grade teacher I’d make a Ghost of Christmas Present mural for our classroom holiday decoration. Who knows why Mrs. Chan agreed to such a grandiose project, but, next PTA night, my proud (and probably unsurprised) parents got an eyeful. There on the hallway bulletin board, as convincing as the burning ardor of a nine-year-old and her Crayolas could achieve, towered the barefoot, bare-chested jolly giant, blazing torch held high, capacious green robe wrapped around shivering Ignorance and Want. Those were the days when a child’s every scribble wasn’t documented, so, sadly (or maybe wisely) there’s no record of this triumphant installation. And if my ambitious creation didn’t exactly serve ART, it certainly reflected my reverence for this unforgettable personage.

You may justly inquire why, given such a slam-bang start, didn’t I continue with Dickens? Two words: Required Reading. I’d been force-fed disembodied snippets of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield (usually the gruesome bits featuring horrid Victorian child abuse) until I cowered like Want and Ignorance. Who wants a steady diet of that? And then there’s the acquired-taste Pickwick Papers. I only sampled those unfunny sketches because Louisa May Alcott lauded them in Little Women as 19^th-century knee-slappers. No, thanks.  

Besides, I had plenty to devour. My folks enrolled me in a strange and wonderful children’s book club with two-book volumes of paired classics (one printed upside down!). Librarians (read more about this mutual admiration society here) filled my bookbag with gothics by Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and historical epics by Elswyth Thane and Lloyd C. Douglas. In between, I snacked on Nancy Drews, Anne Emery, Rosamund du Jardin, and Betty Cavanna. During my formative English Lit degree years, my voracious literary appetite encompassed Shakespeare, Morte D’Arthur, and convoluted epics by Milton and Spencer. But not Dickens. At my university, he and his coaldust-clogged contemporaries were down the hall and there was no cross-contamination.  

So, why Dickens at this late date? As is the case with many other puzzling behaviors, New Year’s resolutions are responsible. Because our bookshelves teemed with unread impulse purchases, my bookish best friend and I vowed not to buy any more new books—we’d ONLY read what we owned. (Here’s my pal’s blog post on her home library discoveries.) Naturally, I immediately cheated when I spied a limp, heavily-stickered college text edition of Great Expectations at my library’s continual book sale. I’m still not sure why I bought it. Probably my latent Miss Haversham tendencies. At any rate, I curled up with Pip that night with no expectations, much less great ones. One chapter in and I realized only my 1990’s P.G. Wodehouse binge made me laugh this hard. I’d struck Brit Lit gold.

Forget about Dickens puffing his prose for more bucks. Forget about modern “write tight” dictums. Just wade into the heady morass of page-long Dickensian paragraphs. Don’t be afraid, the murky water’s fine. Like his countryman Shakespeare, this man invents words and scoffs at usage rules. He jabs at society and culture like Swift or Austen with dry, deadly wit. Bring a hanky for heart-deep sentiment that’ll catch you by surprise. But it’s the characters, oh, the characters that set Dickens apart. In one or two shockingly pithy lines, he can encapsulate a person, body and soul. You’ll recognize these people—heck, you can practically smell them (particularly Magwitch).

I could blather on, but I’ll spare you the further ecstasies of the newly converted and just urge you to give Dickens a second chance. As a gateway book, Great Expectations is a relatively easy way to tackle elevated Victorian prose. You’ll probably have to work your way up to A Tale of Two Cities or Bleak House (what a title!) but, as the Instagram Dickens groupies will tell you, the view is worth it.

“… of making many books there is no end…” Ecclesiastes 12:12