Dear Serial Readers,
Thanks MJ for politely indicating that I was off on the chronology of the initial part issue publication schedule. I've fixed these dates now, and I've added a well-known 1888 drawing of Dickens at his desk (presumably the one that just sold last week) with all his characters surrounding him.
Now we're up to #3, first released in Dec. 1846, and this brings me to today's topic: how can we read like those original readers? Obviously, we can't know about all the novels that follow, even though the resonances are so evident, especially around mistreated children and the woes of childhood, for poor and rich, but not quite alike. Mrs Pipchin as a "woman of system with children" makes me want to jump ahead, beyond 1846-47, to those other miserable pedagogical systems to come. But of course there's Squeers from Nickleby, and surely Dickens's original Dombey readers had in mind Squeers Academy when reading about Pipchin's "Castle."
About this "Castle" with its "Dungeon" quarters for particularly wayward children, I couldn't help but think of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, the locale of Mrs. Pipchin's establishment. This pavilion, designed by John Nash and using Asian Indian motifs galore, is a major Brighton landmark that dates back to early nineteenth century, so presumably a structure early readers would have associated with Brighton. And it does seem like it's popped out of some elaborate Eastern fairytale. I visited the Royal Pavillion in Brighton in January 2005, and am attaching a photo I took--clearly an anachronism, but also the pleasures of blending my reading of this number with experiences beyond. As Josh points out, Dickens likes to mix fairy-tale romance and realism, and this Brighton portion provides such a concoction. But so does Brighton itself, outside the pages of the novel, at least in architectural design!
I have a few other thoughts about reading "as" serial readers (as the initial consumers of the novel). By reading an installment at a time, do these chunks take on a shape, a coherence of their own, quite apart from chapter divisions? Do we get a sense of "number three"-ness here, where all roads (or many characters so far) seem to lead to Brighton? Josh mentioned that so far Dickens seems to connect his plot line dots clearly, and Julia raises the question of speculation--what can we surmise based on our knowledge of Dickens's (previous) novels and the habits of Victorian narratives? I love this kind of speculation, something that Dickens's first readers, judging from part-issue reviews, also pursued. So, on the Tox/Dombey marriage plot: I'm of two minds here. First, Dombey is such a cold character that it seems unlikely that Miss Tox would end up with him. I imagine instead that a woman more his match will come along. But then, Miss Tox could wind up a humanizing influence, an angel in the house of Dombey and Son. But what will redeem Dombey? Is this possible even? Captain Cuttle seems more suitable for Miss Tox, to me.
I wanted to mention too that initial readers always encountered the two illustrations (per part-issue number) at the front of the installment, just prior to the first chapter. In this way the illustrations act as prefaces more than simply illustrations aligned with the referenced moment in the text (as they do in the Oxford edition). So I'm trying to look long and hard at those illustrations before reading each installment. Like the variation in the tone and mood of the chapters within a number, the two illustrations usually offer a kind of contrast. Here the austerity of "Paul and Mrs Pipchin" (on p. 111 in Oxford edition) differs from the other internal scene, this one of the Instrument Maker's shop (p. 130). In the first, Paul warily studies Mrs. P who stares at the fireplace where a kettle appears to be steaming, with a black cat perched nearby. The room is sparsely furnished compared to Sol Gills's shop where there are various gadgets to manipulate, ones for measuring time and space, plus his solicitous nephew Wally with his arm around Sol, and Captain Cuttle with his arm extended toward the dejected uncle and consoling nephew. Even the moneylender/pawnbroker Brogley is interacting with these gadgets in the backroom. So the contrast I see is idle hands, lack of engagement with people and objects in the first drawing, and lots of activity, with devices for hands and minds, and human connections too, in the second one. Dickens seems to offer a warmth scale that cools down quite a bit as one moves up the social class ladder (with adults, at least).
What is this serial reading experience like for you?
Yours,
Serial Susan
5 comments:
First off, though I'm pleased it appeared as politeness, it was in fact sheer obliviousness and lack of careful reading that led me to the Oxford edition, and not the blog space itself, for info on the parts chronology. So my comment re the autumnal scene was not intended as a correction, subtle or otherwise. I just found the correspondence to be interesting--in line with the experiences of the novel's first readers, but perhaps a bit discordant and requiring more imagination for us in this very warm June.
The most significant thing in part III, to me, is the development of little Paul's character. Little Paul's seriousness and intelligence are profoundly touching. His question about money suggests he was surely born into the wrong family, and his father's substitution of "lend" for his "give" is telling. (The substitution of the child Paul for his father in the decision to help Solomon Gills also adds to the list of substitutions that Susan started in her comments on part I.) Yet little Paul also seems to effect a change in his father, making him seem much kinder than I had initially expected, although of course still with his limitations. Dombey senior also seems to be warming to Florence in a way I had not anticipated.
I do find anachronistic resonances of Mr. Gradgrind in the "Charitable Grinders" and Mrs. Pipchin's system, as well as hints of misogyny such as we see toward Mrs. Jellyby and other later ridiculed female characters in the treatment of Mrs. P. I also sense the "partness" of each part, as I assume early readers did, too. This one seemed a bit slow and uneventful--until I began to think some more about little Paul. I'll look forward to reading the comments of others.
Something that I thought about while reading this section was the repetition and the extent to which it establishes a temporality within the parts but also a temporal structure that works between the parts. The most obvious repetition is of course "Dombey and Son" which little Paul repeats in front of Walter, but also the ballad that they sing at Sol Gills shop as they dream about Walter and Florence. Both of these repetitions are forward looking, projecting the characters' hopes for the future, yet they also establish continuity over time and, when the repetition leads to substitution, it reveals change throughout time (for instance, substituting Florence's name, or at lest, Fle-e-g for Peg in the ballad, and Paul declaring "Dombey and Son" instead of Mr. Dombey).
I also really liked when the narrator describes Walter, saying, "Such was his condition at the Pipchin period, when he looked a little older than of yore, but not much" (120) because the whole idea of a "Pipchin period" seemed to ironically play into Mr. Dombey's sense of his own historical importance at the same time that it established a shared sense of time between the different plots.
I'd have to agree that this installment seemed slow to me, but that did give me a chance to think about some of the issues everyone's been posting about: time, speculation, and part-ness.
On Time: The first sentence of this installment reminds us of the passage of time, as Paul has moved from baby to child "beneath the watching and attentive eyes of Time." There has been a gap of time in the narrative, just as the serial reader has experienced a gap of time between installments. I wonder if this is a technique to solidify a bond between readers and characters by making the narrative seem more true to life. Time passes "there" just as it does for the reader's "here" (although it does seem to be on fast forward within the novel!)
On speculation: I love the vignette in which Mrs. Wickam shares the story of Betsey Jane with Miss Berry. Mrs. Wickam clearly misleads her listener in this mini-narrative, and does so with "an air of triumph" (p. 91). Is this subtle warning to serial readers who might be anticipating certain plot developments? Or a suggestion to be open to the possibility that even the most ordinary story might become extraordinary at any moment? The fairy-tale references shore up the idea that the mundane can be fantastic.
On part-ness: I found it fascinating that we had a "sequel" within this short installment. Using this terminology with respect to Solomon Gills' financial misfortune gave this portion of the installment the sense of an interpolated episode rather than an equally powerful plotline. This was reinforced for me by the way it had a clearly delineated crisis and resolution (not unlike Florence’s kidnapping in the earlier installment). I’m wondering if each installment will continue to have one of these mini-stories along with the more sustained (and perhaps slower) narrative development.
As a final thought about the multiplot structure, I'm finding myself preferring the plotline that follows the Dombey household and Florence in particular. I’m wondering whether this will change, and how this preference will shape my reception of future installments.
On the very interesting topic of how we can read like Dickens' original readers: one thought that occurs to me is that Victorian readers would have been flooded with Dickens' prose. If we take a look at the Dickens project chronology (at http://dickens.ucsc.edu/chronology/chronology.html), we see that there are fewer periods of time leading up to Dombey and Son where Dickens wasn't publishing something than times when he was. And that's an idea that runs against what we think of as normal patterns of publishing, where an author's new book is treated like something of an event. It would have been a pretty normal occurrence from, say, late 1836 onward, to simply assume that there was a new Dickens installment (or, at the very least, that another would be on its way quickly). I'm trying to think of contemporary analogies where the norm is that there'd be something new to experience ... maybe TV shows like The Simpsons or Law and Order that have been on for years. And even then, there are more breaks than Dickens had -- about 22 new episodes every calendar year. We might be even further removed from this type of reading than we think, in other words -- we don't read serially now, and we don't simply assume that a favorite author will have something new for us more often than not.
To get to the actual content of the novel, I was quite amused by Mrs. Pipchin and her taste for didactic storytelling (and Paul's understandable resistance -- why, after all, would a bull care if you asked questions?). But it's interesting to see this satire against didactic fiction set alongside a novel that's not all that far removed at points from didacticism. Florence and Walter have more than a few fairy-tale resemblances, after all, and we can all spot the "moral" of Dombey's obsession with "Dombey and Son" coming. How can we differentiate what this novel is doing from the didacticism lampooned in the text itself? Can we?
I can't think of anything more compelling and heart rendering than an earnest child. Paul is always earnest, intelligent, not self-conscious, easy to love, like a candle from whom Mrs. Wickam, like her name, draws out the strength. I like to think of these installments being read aloud in front of fireplaces in thousands of homes, which might result in a more careful reading, more careful understanding, and what would have been for me a wonderful anticipation of the the next segment. The wonderful clock in Chapter 11 begins to loom large.
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