Dear Serial Readers,
I hope you received your first installment of DROOD via Mousehold Words, or, if you prefer the book format, that you've acquired a copy (I recommend the Oxford edition). I've installed a "gadget" (see right margin) of the image that appeared on every cover of the six installments of DROOD. You can see at the top center a cathedral entryway, and buried at the bottom, a dark underground, crypt-like space, complete with a key and shovel above it, the stomping ground of Durdles the grave stonemason. I wonder if the titled "mystery" will have something to do with Durdles and his tombstones (or "Tombatism," as he puts it).
Other scenes anticipated or shown early in the novel encircle the wrapper for DROOD, including a wedding couple to the front of the cathedral, upperleft, and then at the bottom right, someone smoking a pipe beneath a serious cloud of smoke. This figure seems of an Orientalized nature to me--the clothes, the shoes, even the face. The image echoes the opening disorienting passages of Jack Jasper in a (presumably London) docklands opium den, with three doped companions, a "Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman." A Lascar, according to my Oxford English Dictionary, is a sailor from India or SE Asia (with lnks to Urdu and Persian army). The contrast between the quintessential English Cathedral Town and the outreaches of Empire frames the novel's opening. I wonder where the narrative is headed, geographically speaking, with Ned Drood's plans to marry Rosebud and head "to the East" (or rather, southeastward) to Egypt as a civil engineer (the Suez canal was opened in 1869, and British interests in the area were growing).
About Ned and Rosebud--I was intrigued to see Dickens roll out the arranged marriage plot so soon again, on the heels of OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, the novel that immediately precedes this one in the Dickens canon. Unlike Bella Wilfer and John Harmon, though, Ned and Rosebud (which I prefer to "Pussy") seem to be moving along steadily, their arguments notwithstanding, toward their predestined marital future. But I suspect there's a major roadblock up ahead.
One more thing--the novel so far seems to have strains of that most popular serialized novel of the decade, sensation fiction. I couldn't help notice all the neo-Gothic elements, the Catholicism hinted at in Clositerham's ancient past, with the Nun's House, and the crypt, yet on the surface, a quaint English village with its proper Anglican hierarchy of dean, verger, clerk. Despite this atmospheric emphasis on the deep past, the narration is thoroughly in the present tense for the duration of this installment. That strikes me as unusual. Will this present tense last? Where will it shift to the past tense?
Please post a comment on anything at all about this installment of the first five chapters. You don't need to be seasoned Dickens reader, or even up on Victorian novels of the day. You can pick up on something I've mentioned, or head out in another direction entirely. The plan is to read and comment on the next installment (chapters 6-9) in about two weeks. I'll post my next comment around Nov. 3rd, but if you'd like me to post yours instead, please email me your remarks!
In the fullness of serial time,
Susan
POOR MISS FINCH by Wilkie Collins
20 October 2008
15 October 2008
Coming Attraction: The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Dear Serial Readers,
We're starting our next serial novel, Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We'll read this novel in the six installments in which it was originally written and published monthly from April to September 1870. Dickens died suddenly in June 1870, before he completed the novel. So we should have a lively discussion joining nearly a century and a half of readerly (and theatrical) speculations on this unwritten ending.
Here's how our reading schedule works. First, you can order the electronic delivery of your installments (in double-column format) from Mousehold Words (see sidebar for the link to this site). You can specify the schedule of delivery, from a limited set of choices. I suggest signing up for weekly delivery on Mondays (Saturday is the other option for weekly delivery), beginning this coming Monday October 20th. However, we'll discuss the installments on a biweekly schedule, starting next week. (Mousehold Words does not offer a biweekly delivery.) Our reading schedule means that the weeks of Oct 20, Nov 3, Nov 17, Dec 1, Dec 15, and Dec 28 either I or a guest blogger (one of you, I hope) will start off our conversation about the respective installment (#1 for Oct 20, #2 for Nov 3, etc). So be sure to check the blog and then post a comment on the installment we're discussing.
Of course, you can get a book version of the novel, and read that. I recommend the Oxford edition because it indicates on the top right of the left-hand page the installment. The first one consists of five short chapters, 36pp in the Oxford, or just over 19pp in the Mousehold Words format. I'll also include in my posts the next installment chapter spread, for those of you using editions without the serial notations.
Please circulate this website address to anyone who might possibly like to join us. If you have received this message by email, let me know if you prefer not to be notified each time I post on the website. Otherwise, I'll leave you on this list. If you haven't received an email notice of this post, but would like the reminder in the future, just email me. Anyone can join in!
Until next week,
Serial Susan
We're starting our next serial novel, Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We'll read this novel in the six installments in which it was originally written and published monthly from April to September 1870. Dickens died suddenly in June 1870, before he completed the novel. So we should have a lively discussion joining nearly a century and a half of readerly (and theatrical) speculations on this unwritten ending.
Here's how our reading schedule works. First, you can order the electronic delivery of your installments (in double-column format) from Mousehold Words (see sidebar for the link to this site). You can specify the schedule of delivery, from a limited set of choices. I suggest signing up for weekly delivery on Mondays (Saturday is the other option for weekly delivery), beginning this coming Monday October 20th. However, we'll discuss the installments on a biweekly schedule, starting next week. (Mousehold Words does not offer a biweekly delivery.) Our reading schedule means that the weeks of Oct 20, Nov 3, Nov 17, Dec 1, Dec 15, and Dec 28 either I or a guest blogger (one of you, I hope) will start off our conversation about the respective installment (#1 for Oct 20, #2 for Nov 3, etc). So be sure to check the blog and then post a comment on the installment we're discussing.
Of course, you can get a book version of the novel, and read that. I recommend the Oxford edition because it indicates on the top right of the left-hand page the installment. The first one consists of five short chapters, 36pp in the Oxford, or just over 19pp in the Mousehold Words format. I'll also include in my posts the next installment chapter spread, for those of you using editions without the serial notations.
Please circulate this website address to anyone who might possibly like to join us. If you have received this message by email, let me know if you prefer not to be notified each time I post on the website. Otherwise, I'll leave you on this list. If you haven't received an email notice of this post, but would like the reminder in the future, just email me. Anyone can join in!
Until next week,
Serial Susan
12 October 2008
Dombey #19-20 (chaps 58-62) April 1848
Dear Serial Readers,
Finis! I savored this concluding double number and will miss this wide cast of characters! The additional length of the last issue offers a textual fanfare of a finale. Apparently there were even more words in Dickens's initial ending, but he had to strike the last two paragraphs due to space restrictions. Those lines (reprinted in the Oxford edition), about the "voices in the waves," reiterate the watery, timeless or eternal present "voices" at the end of chap 16 when Paul dies. And they also echo the very opening lines of this number, a nice cyclical shape tied to the passage of "Time" within the story and even the passage of a year and more in the delivery and reading of the story.
And the novel concludes with a different repetition, the second generation of "Paul" and "Florence," with the past now improved in the present, the affective childhoods of this Paul and Florence much more promising given the rehabilitated Dombey.
The latency of the attention to the "Daughter after all" (as Miss Tox puts it in chap 16) continues in these last paragraphs about Dombey's secret "affection" for his granddaughter Florence: he "hoards her in his heart" and no one knows. While Dombey seems redeemed as a kindly grandfather at the end, Alice and Edith do not enjoy earthly redemption, although we do learn why they resemble each other. Both are evidently moribund in one way or another--the fallen women who perish for their transgressions.
I did appreciate Edith's resistant stance towards repenting--or rather her insistence on what amounts to a contingent repentance. It's in that section of chap 51 where Edith refers to Dombey's "own present" in relation to her "past." I found this notion of one's own present intriguing, a way to recognize the variety of presentnesses within and through the reading of the novel. Dickens continues to wield the present tense strategically in this final number, most notably perhaps when Florence returns to her wrecked father in the "ruin" of the house.
The "Retribution" chapter about the dismantling of the Dombey household--all in the present tense--makes evident that the "house" of Dombey has at least three different meanings: the business, the household--both staff and the material objects that are sold, and the family itself. It seems that only in the last sense does "Dombey and Son" survive and prosper, and only through the angelic and reproductive "Daughter after all."
Stay tuned for our next serial show, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD!
Serially signing off from Dombey and Son,
Susan
Finis! I savored this concluding double number and will miss this wide cast of characters! The additional length of the last issue offers a textual fanfare of a finale. Apparently there were even more words in Dickens's initial ending, but he had to strike the last two paragraphs due to space restrictions. Those lines (reprinted in the Oxford edition), about the "voices in the waves," reiterate the watery, timeless or eternal present "voices" at the end of chap 16 when Paul dies. And they also echo the very opening lines of this number, a nice cyclical shape tied to the passage of "Time" within the story and even the passage of a year and more in the delivery and reading of the story.
And the novel concludes with a different repetition, the second generation of "Paul" and "Florence," with the past now improved in the present, the affective childhoods of this Paul and Florence much more promising given the rehabilitated Dombey.
The latency of the attention to the "Daughter after all" (as Miss Tox puts it in chap 16) continues in these last paragraphs about Dombey's secret "affection" for his granddaughter Florence: he "hoards her in his heart" and no one knows. While Dombey seems redeemed as a kindly grandfather at the end, Alice and Edith do not enjoy earthly redemption, although we do learn why they resemble each other. Both are evidently moribund in one way or another--the fallen women who perish for their transgressions.
I did appreciate Edith's resistant stance towards repenting--or rather her insistence on what amounts to a contingent repentance. It's in that section of chap 51 where Edith refers to Dombey's "own present" in relation to her "past." I found this notion of one's own present intriguing, a way to recognize the variety of presentnesses within and through the reading of the novel. Dickens continues to wield the present tense strategically in this final number, most notably perhaps when Florence returns to her wrecked father in the "ruin" of the house.
The "Retribution" chapter about the dismantling of the Dombey household--all in the present tense--makes evident that the "house" of Dombey has at least three different meanings: the business, the household--both staff and the material objects that are sold, and the family itself. It seems that only in the last sense does "Dombey and Son" survive and prosper, and only through the angelic and reproductive "Daughter after all."
Stay tuned for our next serial show, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD!
Serially signing off from Dombey and Son,
Susan
29 September 2008
Dombey #18 (chaps 55-57) March 1848
Dear Serial Readers,
There's a powerful tempo to these last numbers that I'm finding really compelling at a time with plenty of serious reading competition going on in my daily life! The three chapters of #18 provide that delicious tonal range, from the melodramatic and monomaniacal to the soothingly sentimental.
I've often commented on Dickens's verb-tense switching in DOMBEY. What I found especially astounding in chap 55 on Carker's mad flight from France back to England was the suspension of verb tenses altogether. I marveled here at Dickens's verbal (without verbs no less) brilliance, how his style beautifully captures the frenetic fugitive. Especially effective was the long section (pp 817-19, Oxford UP) of prepositional phrases starting with "of"--the possessive and compulsive syntax that conveys Carker's mental condition. Sections like these surely seem like a postmodern Dickens to me--a different strain of psychological realism than we get in Eliot's novels. While I wouldn't say that this chapter renders Carker a sympathetic character, still I'm fascinated by Dickens's adroit handling of Carker's frenzy, something that reveals the flipside of his otherwise iron-clad controlling nature that now drives himself rather than manipulates others.
This chapter anticipates a later Dickens monomaniac and his demise, namely Bradley Headstone. I'm sure other readers can think of more parallels, more doubles. And speaking of doubles, I thought the railway "monsters" provided a phantasmagoric touch, a frightening modern machine that Dickens seems to link with Carker and with Dombey at the end of the chapter. Here I thought of Frankenstein and his creature and their mutual pursuit and flight.
The other two chapters offer comic relief and softer tones, with the obvious contrast of Florence's wedding from not only the one briefly mentioned at the start of chap 57, but more pointedly from the earlier marriage between Dombey and Edith.
What do you make of Florence and Walter sailing away from England? What's the significance of this exodus, that their cross-class match can't be sustained in a traditional, class-bound, materialistic society? Since others here have mentioned Gwendolen and DANIEL DERONDA, I also thought of the ending of Eliot's later novel--only Daniel and his new bride don't set sail in the narrative, while this chapter ends with the newlyweds at sea, in the present tense of those whispering waves "not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time."
Only one more number to go! In my ongoing commitment to "part-numberness," I won't divide my posts on this last double part-issue (#19-20, chaps 58-62). But I will likely take two weeks--and aim for Oct. 13th.
Remember that DROOD starts on a biweekly schedule on Monday Oct. 20th. The parts are shorter in length, and we'll take two weeks per number, and there are only six. Sign up via Mousehold Words (see link on sidebar of blog) and spread the word!
Serially yours,
Susan
There's a powerful tempo to these last numbers that I'm finding really compelling at a time with plenty of serious reading competition going on in my daily life! The three chapters of #18 provide that delicious tonal range, from the melodramatic and monomaniacal to the soothingly sentimental.
I've often commented on Dickens's verb-tense switching in DOMBEY. What I found especially astounding in chap 55 on Carker's mad flight from France back to England was the suspension of verb tenses altogether. I marveled here at Dickens's verbal (without verbs no less) brilliance, how his style beautifully captures the frenetic fugitive. Especially effective was the long section (pp 817-19, Oxford UP) of prepositional phrases starting with "of"--the possessive and compulsive syntax that conveys Carker's mental condition. Sections like these surely seem like a postmodern Dickens to me--a different strain of psychological realism than we get in Eliot's novels. While I wouldn't say that this chapter renders Carker a sympathetic character, still I'm fascinated by Dickens's adroit handling of Carker's frenzy, something that reveals the flipside of his otherwise iron-clad controlling nature that now drives himself rather than manipulates others.
This chapter anticipates a later Dickens monomaniac and his demise, namely Bradley Headstone. I'm sure other readers can think of more parallels, more doubles. And speaking of doubles, I thought the railway "monsters" provided a phantasmagoric touch, a frightening modern machine that Dickens seems to link with Carker and with Dombey at the end of the chapter. Here I thought of Frankenstein and his creature and their mutual pursuit and flight.
The other two chapters offer comic relief and softer tones, with the obvious contrast of Florence's wedding from not only the one briefly mentioned at the start of chap 57, but more pointedly from the earlier marriage between Dombey and Edith.
What do you make of Florence and Walter sailing away from England? What's the significance of this exodus, that their cross-class match can't be sustained in a traditional, class-bound, materialistic society? Since others here have mentioned Gwendolen and DANIEL DERONDA, I also thought of the ending of Eliot's later novel--only Daniel and his new bride don't set sail in the narrative, while this chapter ends with the newlyweds at sea, in the present tense of those whispering waves "not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time."
Only one more number to go! In my ongoing commitment to "part-numberness," I won't divide my posts on this last double part-issue (#19-20, chaps 58-62). But I will likely take two weeks--and aim for Oct. 13th.
Remember that DROOD starts on a biweekly schedule on Monday Oct. 20th. The parts are shorter in length, and we'll take two weeks per number, and there are only six. Sign up via Mousehold Words (see link on sidebar of blog) and spread the word!
Serially yours,
Susan
21 September 2008
Dombey #17 (chaps 52-54) February 1848
Dear Serial Reader(s),
We've been dwindling in commenting numbers these weeks. I wonder if you noticed that I didn't deliver a post last week? I'd like to claim that the boat carrying the part-issue numbers just didn't arrive, although I waited eagerly (wanting to know about the elopement of Edith and Carker) for hours and days. Yes, there was a delivery problem last week--between the pages and my eyes. But we're also nearing the end of this novel, and approaching a new serial reading adventure next month where I'm hoping that the shorter length of Drood (along with the delivery system of Mousehold Words--see sidebar) will increase our community of serial readers. Please do spread the word about the coming attraction.
So a few thoughts on this installment: a cleverly structured number with various groups trying to gather information about the shocking elopement of Edith and Carker in the first two chapters as a fine accretion of suspense leading to the last chapter where we finally see Edith and Carker in DIJON. I love the self-conscious construction and delivery of this "intelligence" of the elopement via Carker's variously abused associates throughout the number.
I'm also continually taken with the emphasis on maligned, abused, and furious women. Alice tells Harriet the story of Carker seducing and discarding her, a companion narrative to Edith's marriage market and elopement plot accounts. Alice's story reminded me of Esther Barton in Gaskell's novel of the same year this episode appeared. Then in the last chapter here, Edith delivers a powerful "I am a woman" speech to Carker in their Dijon quarters in which she echoes some of Alice's murderous sentiments, and we have the illustration to emphasize her imperial stature in contrast to his slimy and now cowering posture. Does this section redeem Edith from the sexual taint of the elopement? But this long delivery has another purpose, to fill in the narrative gap of the elopement plot from a few numbers ago.
More than earlier installments, these last few seem especially designed to get readers to read on, to discover what happens. Will Dombey murder Carker in this revenge plot where he's been set up as the proxy for at least two or even three wronged and furious women? Will Edith persist in turning her passionate anger toward herself? I suspect there are more deaths in store, of a very different tonality than Paul's sentimental death, or Mrs. Skewton's (aka Cleopatra) sardonic death, or even Walter's falsely reported death.
I'd wager that we don't get Dombey and Carker and Edith next time, since the pattern is usually a detour installment to build more craving for resolution. What's up with Florence, Walter, Cuttle, and will Old Sol return?
Next time: #18, chapters 55-57.
In serial time,
Susan
We've been dwindling in commenting numbers these weeks. I wonder if you noticed that I didn't deliver a post last week? I'd like to claim that the boat carrying the part-issue numbers just didn't arrive, although I waited eagerly (wanting to know about the elopement of Edith and Carker) for hours and days. Yes, there was a delivery problem last week--between the pages and my eyes. But we're also nearing the end of this novel, and approaching a new serial reading adventure next month where I'm hoping that the shorter length of Drood (along with the delivery system of Mousehold Words--see sidebar) will increase our community of serial readers. Please do spread the word about the coming attraction.
So a few thoughts on this installment: a cleverly structured number with various groups trying to gather information about the shocking elopement of Edith and Carker in the first two chapters as a fine accretion of suspense leading to the last chapter where we finally see Edith and Carker in DIJON. I love the self-conscious construction and delivery of this "intelligence" of the elopement via Carker's variously abused associates throughout the number.
I'm also continually taken with the emphasis on maligned, abused, and furious women. Alice tells Harriet the story of Carker seducing and discarding her, a companion narrative to Edith's marriage market and elopement plot accounts. Alice's story reminded me of Esther Barton in Gaskell's novel of the same year this episode appeared. Then in the last chapter here, Edith delivers a powerful "I am a woman" speech to Carker in their Dijon quarters in which she echoes some of Alice's murderous sentiments, and we have the illustration to emphasize her imperial stature in contrast to his slimy and now cowering posture. Does this section redeem Edith from the sexual taint of the elopement? But this long delivery has another purpose, to fill in the narrative gap of the elopement plot from a few numbers ago.
More than earlier installments, these last few seem especially designed to get readers to read on, to discover what happens. Will Dombey murder Carker in this revenge plot where he's been set up as the proxy for at least two or even three wronged and furious women? Will Edith persist in turning her passionate anger toward herself? I suspect there are more deaths in store, of a very different tonality than Paul's sentimental death, or Mrs. Skewton's (aka Cleopatra) sardonic death, or even Walter's falsely reported death.
I'd wager that we don't get Dombey and Carker and Edith next time, since the pattern is usually a detour installment to build more craving for resolution. What's up with Florence, Walter, Cuttle, and will Old Sol return?
Next time: #18, chapters 55-57.
In serial time,
Susan
08 September 2008
Dombey #16 (chaps 49-51) January 1848
Dear Serial Readers,
Happy New Year! I mean, of course, January 1848, when the sixteenth installment first appeared, but for many of us serial readers, it is also the start of a new academic year. Like others, my comments will be brief here. Still, I'd like to continue on track, since we're so close to the end of the novel. I don't think I can manage reading the double-number (19-20) of the last installment in one week though, so I propose we take a week for each one. This means: #17 for Sept 15, #18 for Sept 22, #19 for Sept 29, and #20 for Oct 6. I also propose that we next turn to The Mystery of Edwin Drood for two reasons: only six parts and available for delivery via Mousehold Words. You can subscribe through Mousehold Words and have each part number delivered to you electronically on whatever schedule you request. Even if you prefer to read the novel in book form, these deliveries will serve as reminders, and simulate (virtually, of course) the part-issue publications for Dickens's original readers. I recommend a biweekly plan for Drood, beginning on Monday Oct. 20. We would then finish just around a different new year.
After the calamities of the last number, #16 delivers a generous heaping of Dickensian sentiment. Florence has lost her home and father (although I found some relief that she finally fled a "corner" house in which any semblance of family and home had withered and died), and now she finds a home of genuine solicitude and warmth. Where Dickens introduced a working-class angel into the middle-class Dombey household in number #1 through Richards, here he relocates his middle-class angel into a modest, East London, sea captain's home and shop. On Walter's somewhat anticipated return from the deep: I was interested that we don't actually get details on how Walter survived a shipwreck, and what we do get is conveyed in Cuttle's bare-bones story which serves to clue-in Florence to Walter's appearance, first through the illustrated shadow on the wall. I'm interested also in another reversal: Florence's proposal to Walter. Presumably her superior class station trumps gender here.
The final chapter, back at the Dombey domicile, marks this scene and tone shift with the use of the present tense, and with wry narratorial addresses, something we've seen often in the novel. The concluding line, "Mr Dombey and the world are alone together," accentuates the ironic treatment of solitude and isolation we've commented on.
Next week: #17, chaps. 52-54.
Please spread the word about Drood and "Mousehold Words"--every other week starting mid October!
Yours in seriality,
Susan
Happy New Year! I mean, of course, January 1848, when the sixteenth installment first appeared, but for many of us serial readers, it is also the start of a new academic year. Like others, my comments will be brief here. Still, I'd like to continue on track, since we're so close to the end of the novel. I don't think I can manage reading the double-number (19-20) of the last installment in one week though, so I propose we take a week for each one. This means: #17 for Sept 15, #18 for Sept 22, #19 for Sept 29, and #20 for Oct 6. I also propose that we next turn to The Mystery of Edwin Drood for two reasons: only six parts and available for delivery via Mousehold Words. You can subscribe through Mousehold Words and have each part number delivered to you electronically on whatever schedule you request. Even if you prefer to read the novel in book form, these deliveries will serve as reminders, and simulate (virtually, of course) the part-issue publications for Dickens's original readers. I recommend a biweekly plan for Drood, beginning on Monday Oct. 20. We would then finish just around a different new year.
After the calamities of the last number, #16 delivers a generous heaping of Dickensian sentiment. Florence has lost her home and father (although I found some relief that she finally fled a "corner" house in which any semblance of family and home had withered and died), and now she finds a home of genuine solicitude and warmth. Where Dickens introduced a working-class angel into the middle-class Dombey household in number #1 through Richards, here he relocates his middle-class angel into a modest, East London, sea captain's home and shop. On Walter's somewhat anticipated return from the deep: I was interested that we don't actually get details on how Walter survived a shipwreck, and what we do get is conveyed in Cuttle's bare-bones story which serves to clue-in Florence to Walter's appearance, first through the illustrated shadow on the wall. I'm interested also in another reversal: Florence's proposal to Walter. Presumably her superior class station trumps gender here.
The final chapter, back at the Dombey domicile, marks this scene and tone shift with the use of the present tense, and with wry narratorial addresses, something we've seen often in the novel. The concluding line, "Mr Dombey and the world are alone together," accentuates the ironic treatment of solitude and isolation we've commented on.
Next week: #17, chaps. 52-54.
Please spread the word about Drood and "Mousehold Words"--every other week starting mid October!
Yours in seriality,
Susan
01 September 2008
Dombey #15 (chaps 46-48) December 1847
Dear Serial Readers,
Julia's comments about Carker's "lynx-eyed vigilance" remind me of the opening of this number (where that phrase appears). The first chapter--later titled "recognizant and reflective"--also underscores that Carker's sharp vision has its blind spots: deep in his own reflections riding about the city, he fails to take note of "the observation of two pairs of women's eyes." While we readers see the immediate effects of Carker's seduction of Edith (rendered via Florence's vantage point), we also see that there may be a revenge plot afoot by Alice Markwood, who has been established as a kind of mirror image of Edith. That Carker's power over others, especially women, may have its come-uppance, this along compels me to read on!
I found the middle chapter where Edith descends (and falls as a fallen woman) on the Dombey staircase a variation on melodrama, or even a precursor to sensation fiction, with lots of high drama and suspense as Florence senses something very very amiss. Yes, Dickens seems fond of the staircase trope, as we readers find in his later novel HARD TIMES.
But what was most intriguing to me in this installment is the lengthy narrative intrusion near the start of chapter 47, where Dickens dismantles any sturdy distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" in the context of the disintegrating Dombey marriage, and at the brink of Edith's elopement. Dickens's treatment here of sinfulness, corruption, and human nature seemed to me a strong echo of SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE, so much so that I almost expected some mention of Blake. But did Victorians read Blake? Take these lines, for instance: "Then should we stand appalled to know, that where we generate disease to strike our children down...infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural humanity!" Like the use of present-tense passages and chapters, this intervention seems another strategy to connect with readers in a tale about isolation that we read in solitude, although collectively (as Julia has pointed out).
'Tis the season (not December, when this number first appeared, but September, when the semester calendar resumes), so my posts will be shorter. But I'd like to continue with this serial readers blogging, even so! Should we read DORRIT or DROOD next? Let me know if you have a preference for shorter or long. But in any case, let's switch to a biweekly schedule.
Does anyone know if DOMBEY was ever adopted for stage or screen?
Until next week's #16 (chaps 49-51)--
Serially yours in September,
Susan
Julia's comments about Carker's "lynx-eyed vigilance" remind me of the opening of this number (where that phrase appears). The first chapter--later titled "recognizant and reflective"--also underscores that Carker's sharp vision has its blind spots: deep in his own reflections riding about the city, he fails to take note of "the observation of two pairs of women's eyes." While we readers see the immediate effects of Carker's seduction of Edith (rendered via Florence's vantage point), we also see that there may be a revenge plot afoot by Alice Markwood, who has been established as a kind of mirror image of Edith. That Carker's power over others, especially women, may have its come-uppance, this along compels me to read on!
I found the middle chapter where Edith descends (and falls as a fallen woman) on the Dombey staircase a variation on melodrama, or even a precursor to sensation fiction, with lots of high drama and suspense as Florence senses something very very amiss. Yes, Dickens seems fond of the staircase trope, as we readers find in his later novel HARD TIMES.
But what was most intriguing to me in this installment is the lengthy narrative intrusion near the start of chapter 47, where Dickens dismantles any sturdy distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" in the context of the disintegrating Dombey marriage, and at the brink of Edith's elopement. Dickens's treatment here of sinfulness, corruption, and human nature seemed to me a strong echo of SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE, so much so that I almost expected some mention of Blake. But did Victorians read Blake? Take these lines, for instance: "Then should we stand appalled to know, that where we generate disease to strike our children down...infancy that knows no innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in nothing but in suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on the form we bear. Unnatural humanity!" Like the use of present-tense passages and chapters, this intervention seems another strategy to connect with readers in a tale about isolation that we read in solitude, although collectively (as Julia has pointed out).
'Tis the season (not December, when this number first appeared, but September, when the semester calendar resumes), so my posts will be shorter. But I'd like to continue with this serial readers blogging, even so! Should we read DORRIT or DROOD next? Let me know if you have a preference for shorter or long. But in any case, let's switch to a biweekly schedule.
Does anyone know if DOMBEY was ever adopted for stage or screen?
Until next week's #16 (chaps 49-51)--
Serially yours in September,
Susan
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