This was
the assigned reading for one of the upper-level English classes at my school.
I’ve never
actually read Oliver Twist
before. Partly because, like a lot of
people, I’ve been so influenced by the movie versions I’ve never really found a
need to read the actual novel. (The 1968 musical version Oliver! (W)
was re-run on the Disney channel a lot during the 1980s when I was a kid.)
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Charles Dickens, but at some
point I really should go and read the full version of Oliver Twist just for the sake of it. But for now the graded reader version is too
fresh in my memory, so I’ll probably wait a few years.
I was
slightly surprised to learn that the movie was somewhat different than the
original story. The original story had a
lot more plot, and a much more complex backstory for Oliver’s family tree
(including the character Monk, who wasn’t in the movie at all). All of which make me even more curious to
check out the original book someday.
Teaching Materials
[This is just a cheat sheet I made for myself for some of the comprehensions questions in the back. The students had to identify which character said which quote, and I wrote up the answers and the page number for myself on a paper I could hold up at the front of the class.]
1. Let me see the child and die
--Mother, p. 1
2. The old story
--Doctor, p. 2
3. I don’t like to
see them suffer
--Mrs. Mann, p.3
4 Please, sir, I want
some more
--Oliver Twist p.5
5. You see if I’m not right
--man on the board at the workhouse p. 6
6. Why shouldn’t I be
able to make use of them in my work?
--Mr. Sowerberry p.7
7. Everybody hates me
--Oliver Twist p. 7
8. You’ll sleep here,
among the coffins!
--Mrs. Sowerberry p.8
9. She was so bad it
was lucky she died
--Noah Claypole p. 12
10. It’s the meat
that’s caused this, you know
--Mr. Bumble, p.14
11. We’ve just taken
them all out to wash them, that’s all!
--Fagin p. 20
12. What fine men
they were! Loyal to the end!
--Fagin p. 20
13. Do you see that
old man outside the bookshop? He’s the
one.
I came across this book while browsing through the shelves of a used bookstore. My first reaction was to think:
a) Everyone loves Ghost stories
b) Everyone loves Charles Dickens
c) How could you go wrong with a book like this?
However, upon completing the book, I must confess to having a lot of mixed feelings about it. Perhaps some of these less remembered stories are less remembered for a reason.
As always it’s difficult to review - an - anthology book because the different stories collected here are of varying style, purpose and quality.
(And in fact, this much is admitted in the publisher’s introduction: “The quality of these twelve stories is inevitably uneven, for they span virtually the whole of Dickens’s creative lifetime, cover a variety of supernatural elements, and were written with varying intentions” p. viii-ix).
Some of these stories I enjoyed immensely. Others were a real struggle to get through, and required me to force myself to keep reading till the end.
The title of the anthology is perhaps a bit misleading. All of these stories involve hints of the supernatural, but not all of them are “ghost stories” in the sense of a spooky tale that gives you chills at night. Some of them are more traditional ghost stories, but many of these stories are morality tales in which somebody learns a lesson about humanity through the intervention of supernatural elements. These morality tales can get a bit repetitive when they are all collected together in one volume.
Most of these stories also lack the sort of surprise plot twist you expect from a ghost story, and have a predictable ending.
And then there’s Dickens’s famous long-winded prose. There are stories in this book where he takes forever to get to the point.
Depending on your patience as a reader, Dickens’s long descriptions, filled with various digressions and dry humor, are either the best thing about his writing, or the most frustrating. Although I count “A Tale of Two Cities” among my favorite books of all time, some stories in this book had me wondering if I really possess enough patience to read Dickens.
(This may be more reflective on my limitations as a reader than on the strength of Dickens’s writing.)
When I mentioned Dickens’s tendency to describe things to excess back in a high school report on “A Tale of Two Cities”, my English teacher wrote in the margins, “He got paid by the word.” According to this website [LINK], that’s actually not technically true (he got paid by the installment), but I can certainly see where the rumor got started. Take, for example, the opening few paragraphs from “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” and see if they don’t read like the author was getting paid for every extra word he crammed in, and every pointless extra digression he took.
Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everyone says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be infallible. Everybody may sometimes be right, ‘but that’s no rule’ as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the balled. The dread word, Ghost, recalls me. Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is that they were so far right. He did. Who could have seen his hollow cheeks; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well knit and well proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled seaweed, about his face—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity, but might have said he looked like a haunted man? Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to bygone places and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man? Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fullness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man? Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library, and part laboratory—for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart, like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour, who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too? Who might not, by a very flight of fancy, have believed that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on haunted ground? His dwelling was so solitary and vaultlike—an old, retired of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smoke-age-and weather-darkened, squeezed on every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney stacks; its old trees insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sundial a little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when in all other places it was silent and still. His dwelling, at its heart and core—within doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so crazy, yet so strong, with its wormeaten beams of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak chimneypieces; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town, yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten crypt where the Norman arches were half-buried in the earth.
Dickens actually goes on like this for another 2 pages before any action happens, but you get the point.
And this is actually very typical of a lot of the stories in this collection, many of which start out with two or three pages of long ramblings before Dickens gets to the story.
A better reader than myself might enjoy these long descriptive passages. Read the above excerpt, and see what your reaction is. If you’re able to get all the way through it without your mind wandering off somewhere else, than you will probably enjoy this book.
As for me, I discovered I have a limited attention span. I need to have lots of things happening in each paragraph in order to hold my attention. I would get a couple lines into these long descriptions, and then my mind would immediately go someplace else. And then I would get to the bottom of the page and realize I hadn’t absorbed anything, and have to go back up to the top of the page and try to read it again. And again. And again. Some of these pages took me forever to get through, and in the end much of this book ended up being a forced march rather than pleasure reading.
And then after working my way through all that description, I was frequently disappointed when the pay off wasn’t very good—when the actual story would be very mundane or predictable.
The stories collected in this volume are as follows:
1. The Queer Chair
2. A Madman’s Manuscript
3. The Goblins who Stole a Sexton
4. The Ghosts of the Mail
5. The Baron of Grogzwig
6. A Christmas Carol
7. The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
8. To be Read at Dusk
9. The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber
10. The Haunted House
11. Trial for Murder
12. The Signalman
Of these stories, I enjoyed “The Queer Chair,” “The Baron of Grogzwig”, “A Christmas Carol,” “To Be Read at Dusk,”, “The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber,” and “Trial for Murder,” and “The Signalman”. Long-winded descriptions aside, all of these were worth the trouble, although for different reasons. “The Queer Chair” is recommended for its humor, while “The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber” is more of a chilling tale.
The other stories I had more mixed feelings about, but I suppose that is to be expected in an anthology volume.
Some of these are excerpts from larger works. The first 4 stories, for example, all come from The Pickwick Papers, but you would never know that because they stand perfectly on their own as short stories. (According to the publisher’s introduction, it was apparently Dickens’ practice to insert smaller stand alone stories into some of his longer serializations.)
The only place where the short story did not excerpt itself cleanly was “The Haunted House”. This was apparently from a book that was a collaborative effort between Dickens and several other writers (W). Dickens was given the job of setting up the story, but I never got to see how it concluded.
Everything else stands on its own very nicely.
A Christmas Carol
This is the most famous story in the collection and is often published as a novella in its own right, so I’ll say a few words about it separately.
I think everyone is familiar with this story whether you’ve read the original or not. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen so many television adaptations of this story that you’ve got the entire plot memorized before you start reading it.
That being said, it’s well written and worth reading, even if you know exactly what is going to happen next. Unlike some of the other stories in this collection, the pacing is pretty good. The characters are very colorful. And the story manages to do (and do well) humor, pathos, and redemption.
As someone who dislikes - Christmas - myself, I fully expected to hate this story, which was the mother of all subsequent sappy Christmas stories—not to mention the story that made hating Christmas equivalent to misanthropy in the popular mind.
But despite myself I found myself enjoying it.
For one thing, the liberal in me enjoyed seeing Dickens’ liberal views on display.
Dickens was no revolutionary, as Orwell points out clearly in this essay here [LINK], but he was definitely on the side of the liberal reformers of his day.
As the publisher’s introduction sums up the theme of this story, “The virtues of generosity and goodwill to all mankind which are traditionally associated with Christmas are presented as an antidote to the harsh puritan attitude that prevailed in the world of Victorian trade.”
Dickens’ message of putting people before profit comes through clearly in his writing.
When confronted with the doomed ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley, who is being punished in the afterlife for his greedy business practices, Scrooge says:
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
At other points, the miserly Scrooge (pre-redemption) sounds very much like today’s Gingrich-esque conservative, complaining about the lazy poor people on welfare. When asked to give money to the poor, Scrooge has the following response:
“At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge,” said the gentleman, taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.” “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?” “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman. “I wish I could say they were not.” “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge. “Both very busy, sir.” “Oh! I was afraid from what you said at first that something had had occurred to stop them in their usual course,” said Scrooge. “I am very glad to hear it…. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas, and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”
I also found myself getting drawn into the drama of Scrooge’s life as the spirits take him back and forwards in time to show him what his life used to be like, and what his future will be. The reader feels, along with Scrooge, the intense sorrow of the relationships he’s lost in the past, and the happiness that could have been his.
[Actually some of Scrooge’s life reminded me a little bit of Citizen Kane. Scrooge starts out as a poor child with nothing, goes to be hard working young man, becomes obsessed with money and success and loses track of what is important in life, and then is seemingly fated to die alone. But unlike Citizen Kane, Scrooge is given a chance to change his fate and rejoin humanity.]
It’s true that this story uses Christmas as a setting, but actually the really appealing parts of the story have nothing to do with Christmas, and the story could easily have been re-written without Christmas altogether.
In fact, it is the Christmas sections of the story that are the weakest.
I’m not sure if Dickens amplified the importance of Christmas because he though it would make his story more popular, or if he really believed what he wrote, but the Christmas sections are pretty over the top.
Dickens seemed to believe that without Christmas, society would completely collapse. And yet plenty of societies have gotten along for centuries just fine without it.
At one point the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge around the world to show Scrooge that Christmas is even being celebrated down in the ground in the mines, and in the middle of the ocean in the ships.
What Dickens forgets to mention is that most of the world actually doesn’t celebrate Christmas. (Well, globalization is spreading some of the superficial aspects of Christmas into Asia these days, but it is still not considered a major holiday, and it certainly wasn’t celebrated in Asia in the 19th century.)
But the charms of the story were more than enough to make up for its excessive zeal about Christmas.
According to the publisher’s introduction, it became Dickens’ tradition to publish a Christmas themed story every year, and two others are included in this anthology: “The Goblins who Stole a Sexton”, and “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain.”
These stories are very similar in theme and plot to “A Christmas Carol” and when included in the same book they can quickly start to feel repetitive. By the time I got to the end of the 3rd story about ghosts showing a man the error of his ways on Christmas I had just about lost patience for the formula.
But that’s the problem of the anthology. Standing alone, these stories are perfectly fine.
I thought I’d throw the following topic out: Recently I was talking to a friend and he posed the question to me, “which books would you say have changed your life?”
Of course this is the type of question that requires a lot of thought and is impossible to answer adequately on the spot. So I thought I’d turn it into a blog entry instead. Ideally I would hope to inspire other people to think and write in with their list as well, but if I end up all alone on this one, then at the very least this will have kept me occupied for the afternoon.
Book 1: “The Trojan War” By Olivia Coolidge.
When I was in 6th grade I was at my cousins’ house, and they had several picture books on Greek Myths on loan from the library. They encouraged me to read the book on Troy, but I was more interested in Hercules. After all, how interesting could Troy be? Even at that age I was familiar enough with pop culture references to know the war ended with the Trojan Horse. What else could there be to the story?
So I never did read the book on Troy, but it began to bug me afterwards. Why did my cousins’ like that story so much? What did I miss?
My school library had a copy of “The Trojan War” by Olivia Coolidge, and when I stumbled upon it I was impressed by how thick it was. My cousins only had a small picture book about Troy. Could there be enough story to fill up a thick book like this? Now I was really curious. I checked the book out and started reading it.
Of course I soon discovered that there was much more to the story of “The Trojan War” than just the Trojan Horse. I was fascinated with all the stories of heroes and gods fighting side by side on the battlefield.
I thought that because Olivia Coolidge’s book was so thick, it would teach me everything about the Trojan War. But I soon discovered that Coolidge’s book was only a summary, and that there were volumes upon volumes written about the Trojan War by Greek, Roman and Medieval authors. I tried to read everything I could about the Trojan War. As a 7th grade boy, I was at the perfect age to enjoy all the gory battle stories in “The Iliad.” Other books like “The Aeneid” and “The Odyssey” were somewhat slower going, but I struggled through them.
Eventually my interests spread from The Trojan War to Greek and Roman Mythology in general, and then to Greek and Roman History. For many years I was convinced I wanted to become a classical scholar. This interested faded out halfway into my second year of Calvin, when I decided my interests had moved on to more contemporary history. But even though I ultimately gave up on the classics, the interest still had the following effects on my life:
1. For a good six year period almost all of my leisure reading was in someway connected to classical history or classical mythology.
2. My decision to take Latin in High School and College instead of something more useful like Spanish or Japanese. Actually since the idea of going to Japan didn’t occur to me until my last year at Calvin, I probably still wouldn’t have studied Japanese. I would probably have taken Spanish. And every now and again, even in Japan, I do sometimes realize that I am at a disadvantage for not knowing Spanish. Like, in a previous blog post, when Tom was able to cut me out of the conversation by switching into Spanish. At that moment I realized that my current linguistic disadvantage was a direct result of my having studied Latin over Spanish.
3. My decision to attend Calvin College was partly based on the strength of their Classics program. Of course being from Grand Rapids Christian, I may well have ended up at Calvin eventually anyway. But then again, you never know, I may not have. And then who knows how different my life would have ended up?
4. Staying the extra year at Calvin was partly because of switching majors halfway through. Again, maybe this is stretching things a little because everyone switches majors, and if I hadn’t switched from Classics to History, I would probably have switched from something to something else. Or than again I might not have. And then that 5th year at Calvin, and everything that happened in it, is again a result of this book.
5. Strange as it may sound a lot of my politics were formed by reading about classical history. This was especially true around 11th and 12th grade when I was reading a lot about the last 100 years of the Roman Republic, and the rise of Julius Caesar.
Of course the obvious lesson from this period is that republics have a way of turning into empires very easily. All governments are human institutions and are not eternal. The Roman republic lasted for 500 years before becoming an empire. We sometimes think that because our republic has lasted for 200 years, we have created the best system of government ever invented and nothing could ever destroy it.
It is always the natural ambition of those in power to seek more power. It was true in the roman republic and it is true today, and we need to be very careful about our elected officials.
But aside from the whole “collapse of the republic” theme, I found the intense class warfare of the late republic almost more interesting. For example, the attempted reforms of the Gracchi brothers and the intense opposition of the patrician class to these reforms.
This made me realize that all governments always exists for the benefit of those in power, and that the poor are always being screwed over by the rich. It’s a theme that was true in the Roman days and has been consistent all throughout history.
I started to think about how American history will look to historians from 2000 years in the future. I decided I wanted to be on the “right side” of history, and be on the side of the poor and the oppressed.
Book 2: “A Tale of Two Cities” Charles Dickens
I guess when I talk about the changes in my life resulting from previous book, “The Trojan War”, I’m referring not so much to the one book itself as to all the books I read during this period, and just identifying “The Trojan War” as the one that sparked it all.
In the same way, “A Tale of Two Cities” didn’t really change my life by itself so much as it just opened the way for a new interest.
I’ve re-read the book several times, but when I was in 12th grade I was doing it for a book report. The depiction of the French Revolution fascinated me, and I thought for the first time that perhaps I might be more interested in recent history than I was in the classics. It was a couple years later before I finally decided to switch over, and it certainly was not the result of this book alone, but it was one of the first sparks. Otherwise who knows? Maybe I’d still be studying the classics right now, in graduate school or something.
Book 3: “The Manufacture of Consent” Noam Chomsky
Unlike the previous books, it is hard with this book to point to so many concrete examples of my physical life being changed. But as far as my mental thought processes or the way I look at the world, I can’t think of any book that affected me as much as this one.
I was in my fourth year of Calvin and doing a research paper on Nicaragua during the 1980s. As part of the research I was interviewing a Calvin professor who had spent time in Nicaragua during the period and written articles on the subject for “Christianity Today”. Near the end of our talk, he said something to me like, “Have you read any Noam Chomsky?”
Given my politics, I should probably have come across this name earlier than I did, but even at age 21 I still had no clue who Chomsky was. The professor told me that Chomsky had written a lot of interesting things about Nicaragua, and that I would definitely want to check his writings out.
I went to the library and checked out what I could find. It absolutely blew my mind. Although “Manufacture of Consent” is the book that sticks out in my mind the most, any book by Chomsky is quite shocking to someone who is not familiar with his work.
As a result of reading Chomksy, I’ve certainly become a lot more critical of the information I find in the mainstream news. Also my decision to get involved with independent media groups, like “Media Mouse” was largely motivated by Chomsky.
Books 4: “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells.
I was already leaning towards science fiction before I discovered H.G. Wells, but after reading his books I started calling myself a science fiction fan without any embarrassment. The end result was hours and hours of wasted time watching science fiction movies on TV, and reading pulp science fiction paperbacks. Also for a long time I incorporated science fiction themes into everything I wrote, (such as the “Fabulae” story I wrote in 9th grade.)
Also H.G. Wells was my first exposure to socialist ideology. In particular his (somewhat heavy handed) socialist novel/manifesto “In the Days of the Comet”, which I read in 8th grade. At the time I had no idea what socialism was, and the story largely confused me. Yet it stuck out in my mind and for a long time afterwards I remembered his depiction of a socialist utopia.
Well, that’s my list. At least that’s my list as it appears to me at the moment. I’m sure I’ll think of another book as soon as I post this, but these are all the “life-changing” books I can think of at the moment. If anyone cares to take me up on this challenge, I’d be curious to see your list.
Here’s another observation: I just finished re-reading “A Tale of Two Cities”, and it strikes me that this should be made into a movie. I know it’s already been made into a movie, but it should be made into a movie again. So much of the book reads just like a movie anyway, it would be perfect for the big screen.
I’ve often wondered if books are different now than they were before the advent of movies. Most people watch more movies than they read books, so perhaps today’s authors find themselves heavily influenced by the big screen, and write books that start to resemble screen plays. I’ve not done any research into this question, or attempted to compare literature or anything like that. It’s just a thought that wanders into my brains sometimes. Perhaps some of you who are more knowledgeable than I about literature could shed some light on this question.
But the interesting thing about Dickens is his book, well before the invention of movies, already was resembling a screenplay. Not all of it. There are a lot of long and windy parts (I’m told Dickens got paid by the word), and there would be a lot of parts that would have to be chopped out to make the transition to the screen.
But the parts that would be left would very easily transfer to the screen. I’m thinking specifically of some of the court scenes, or the scenes that take place in Paris. The say the characters seem to talk to each other in memorable one-liners, the way the drama is built up in the conversation leading towards some sort of revelation, the way most of the story is revealed in the character’s dialogue rather than by the author. It all seems perfect for the screen.
