Dear Serial Readers,
I'm picking up the pace although I'm not sure I have co-readers with this serial. Any suggestions for rescheduling the pace are welcome.
With the June 20, 1840 issue of MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK, Dickens devoted the entire weekly to this novel, with two chapters per installment. These segments are much shorter in length than the monthly part issue numbers, and perhaps that makes for a tighter unit rather than the variety of scenes and plot lines in the monthly serials.
In the June 20, 1840 installment (chaps 9-10), Nell's susceptibility to her grandfather's plight and to Quilp's evil machinations around money gets lots of attention. The child/adult inversion, especially with girls, is evident too as Nell seems more the parent, more the one with good intuitive sense, than her grandfather. She tells her grandfather that homelessness and begging would be better than imprisonment in the house/shop which Quilp repossesses once he exploits the grandfather's nightly secret of gambling. In contrast to Nell's perverse home which the "crafty dwarf" invades is Kit Nubbles's jumbly family home. So does Kit's benevolent gazing contrast with Quilp's malevolent leering at Nell. Dickens seems to be dishing out lots of opposites here with these characters who surround Nell, although the grandfather's gambling vice is ameliorated by his desire to save Nell from a life of penury.
Chapters 11/12 (June 27, 1840) show Quilp in possession of Nell's home now with his legal advisor Mr. Brass in tow. Again I see the coding of Jewishness here with Brass from Bevis Marks, the City of London neighborhood where the first post-resettlement Jewish synagogue stood (and stands). I think that association would have been legible to Dickens's earliest readers. What's creepiest of course is Quilp's lecherous desire to take possession of Nell as the most valuable object in the household. Kit's banishment by the grandfather (due to Quilp claiming that Kit divulged the grandfather's gambling secret) makes Quilp's intrusion even more horrific. Yet the grandfather takes up Nell's suggestion that they choose homelessness over this unhomey home, and the episode closes with their fleeing the house as "two poor adventurers, wandering they knew not whither." In this sense of wandering, they are symbolically associated with diasporic Jews without a home.
Next time, two installments again, which translates into four chapters: 13/14 and 15/16.
Serially yours,
Susan
1 comment:
I enjoyed reading Susan's analysis of pairings. I also noted the other flaneurs in these chapters up through the end of twelve, with its ending representing a different sort of walking, that of beggars leaving the city.
I stopped reading because I was busy and because when I had free time, I wanted to read something with more interesting characters. I found Quilp and Swiveller and Fred so revolting that I couldn't even bear to read about them. And I cared that Nell wasn't abused by them, but it was hard to have any strong feelings about Nell. Kip's family introduced some fun and interest, so it seems the novel may be about to get going with kip's family providing useful counterpoint to Nell's, and at last grandpa and Nell out of the stifling house. None of this is really a critique of the novel, but I do feel that so far it has been at the low end of Dickens nuance scale. Quilp and his wife I find a much more tedious version of Flintwinch and wife Affery, yet, as Susan says, played more on the edge of farce.
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