Charles Dickens was born two hundred years ago today on February 7, 1812. Few literary figures have achieved such lasting renown as Dickens, a writer at once widely respected and popular both in his own time and now. Even children of the twenty-first century who may never have read a word of Dickens are familiar with Scrooge and Tiny Tim. Most people recognize, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and “Please, sir, may I have some more?” Dickens left a mark not only on English literature but also on Western consciousness.
So, I wonder in this vaguely public forum, what sort of mark did he leave on me? As an academic who specializes in Victorian literature, I am not a typical reader of Dickens. I have read many of his novels (though fewer than I’d like to admit), taken and taught graduate seminars on his works, and published a chapter on his use of archaeological imagery in my monograph, Excavating Victorians. However, I am writing, as I try to do in “The Wardrobe Door,” as an author of children’s fiction, so I ask again, what sort of mark has my reading of Dickens left on my writing?
I think the answer has to do with people and places. I suspect Dickens’ impact on me is greater even than I might realize, but I can acknowledge with certainty an influence on the way I craft characters and their homes.
A striking physical trait can define a character quickly and effectively. This can be some aspect of the character’s appearance or a habit of movement or a speech pattern. Flora from Little Dorrit is a good example. She speaks in unending sentences that strain syntax, delightful to read aloud. She has other qualities, certainly, but this is the one that defines her. I have a character in the book I’m writing now whose speech pattern is nearly the opposite of Flora’s: he speaks in clipped phrases. When he reappears at a key moment, my characters and my readers recognize him immediately because of his distinctive way of speaking.
The spaces people inhabit tell us a tremendous amount about them and their world. So much attention is given to Dickens’ people that we often forget to attend to his places, which are just as highly wrought. Take Coketown, the fictionalized version of Manchester where Hard Times takes place. In a chapter title “The Key Note,” Dickens describes Coketown as follows:
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
Those mad, melancholy elephants amaze me every time I read this passage. What genius to offer such an unsettling, alien image of an industrial town! I don’t linger over whole towns in my writing, or I haven’t yet, but I do give careful attention to my characters’ most intimate spaces: the pile of books on Micah’s bed is probably the most striking example. In fact, because my characters have to draw places, details of space are important for them to notice and make use of. In other words, such images are not only thematic or atmospheric but essential to my plots.
Thank you, Charles Dickens, for Miss Havisham, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill, Bill Sykes’ dog, Bleak House, and those melancholy elephants. I join the many who write in your wake.