During Dickens’ reign – from the publication of Pickwick Papers in 1836 when he was 24 to his death in 1870 from what feels like spontaneous combustion – reading his latest was no boast. You had to. Everybody did – from Queen to schoolboy; not to have would have marked you as eccentric. In the English-speaking world, no entertainer has so dominated popular attention for so long. Shakespeare when he died was remembered as one helluva playwright, but few people read then (less than a third of adults) or saw plays.
Today, reading one of Dickens’ blockbusters – on the page or through earphones – is a solitary exercise, unless you’re doing it for school or a book group. It takes about thirty hours to read one Dickens novel and Dickens wrote fifteen. My Dickens’ retrospective will have occupied five hundred hours and two years – in Rome, Poughquag, hiking, driving – just us two, alone together. Tally the friends you’ve spent that kind of time with. Unless you’re a scholar (which I’m not), only love can explain such an exorbitant investment of my precious (and fast-dwindling) trove.
Yes, love. That’s why I read – either to locate a new heartthrob or deepen an intimacy. I long to know my writers – and for them to know me – to laugh, kid, sob, rage, sigh together. I scan plenty of words for “input,” that ugly term, but I read to hug, sweat, exult. I write for the same reason.
I love Dickens. Why, I wonder. Yes, he’s funny, dramatic, a language inebriate, audacious in his inventions. He makes me laugh and weep. Even when he exhausts, he never bores. But I glimpse a deeper affinity, which he shares with the charmed circle of makers I cannot live without: he offers me his all, entrusts me with his entirety, holds back only as much as he must not to scare me off. The deeper the love, the less cautious. Because love needs to be held, squeezed, protected, as a mother holds her newborn.
The greatest makers, while they entertain, are less entertainers than intertwiners. Dickens dares to entrust me with his ache, fury, fear, fulminous wrath. His satire is bitter in its hilarity. How he longs to avenge himself on tormenters of children and the defenseless good. How he hates wafflers and those who look away. He loathes the rich, while admiring himself for having become one. His depictions of injured innocence inflame. He does not exonerate himself or rate himself superior. His heroes – self-portraits – generally repel.
What courage to confess so much! Thoreau, writing at the same time, did much the same differently. Both offered their surprising all. So Montaigne, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Bach, Handel, Michelangelo, Caravaggio… and others, but not many… you can feel their trust; their discreditable truth pulses through their elegance. They are great because they are not great, just human, their mereness their majesty.
The other day I finished Little Dorrit – now, sadly, only Our Mutual Friend and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood await. I doubt I’ll be back – not many five-hundred-hour intervals remain. I wept – not for the art – artistically, Little Dorrit’s conclusion is a clumsy mess – but for the heart. Evil was whacked. Goodness prevailed. The light of heaven shone even into the terrible debtors’ prison. No, I did not rate such a happy ending probable; this was a fairy tale, where princess and prince marry under a final rainbow, not a likelihood. Dickens is no realist. He's a dreamer – that we humans can be better than we are, that we can redeem this cruel world with our decency.
It is good to dream.