MaryLee159's Open Salon Blog

Dickens, Shakespeare, and the Theater of Fiction

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 12:03:11 -0400

So here we are on the day that is sandwiched between St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day, two feast days with their own distinct celebratory rituals, but each rich in a certain level of almost theatrical pomp.

Of course, so many aspects of reality seem to be intertwined with some form of fiction or theater. In the well-known words of William Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players…”

Like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens considered himself an actor as well as a writer, and the similarities between the two influential English writers do not end there. As men Shakespeare and Dickens both had tumultuous lives and marriages, with each man even going so far as leaving his spouse, and as writers, both scribed thoughts and words that have entered the collective consciousness, remaining within the vault of the general knowledge bank of the masses even now that the information explosion has made a collective cultural knowledge less possible to achieve. Even individuals who have never formally or informally studied the works of either writer have come into regular contact with Shakespeare and Dickens. Many of the words and phrases we utilize in daily language were initiated by one of these two writers. For example, the term, “red tape,” is accredited to Charles Dickens, who often wrote about the oddities and confinements of bureaucracy.

Shakespeare and Dickens both created extreme comedies and high dramas both to entertain others and earn personal security, and both men did not start out from early childhood with the set notion of becoming a writer. In fact, it has often been noted that if a cold had not prevented the young Dickens from pursuing a thespian audition, he might have kept his feet mounted firmly to the floorboards of the stage rather than lifting the pen with his hand. Many would argue that the theater’s loss proved to be literature’s gain, but reading even only the first few chapters of Oliver Twist exposes Charles Dickens’ flare for the theatrical.

Dickens’ second novel is written almost like a fast-developing stage play. The descriptions of the characters, their behaviors, and their appearances cause one to see the events of the story playing out as if on a stage. Upon reading the novel, it becomes easy to understand why there have been so many acted adaptations of Oliver Twist.

Countless films and miniseries have been produced as retellings of Dickens’ tale about the foundling Oliver, but perhaps, the most famous to date has remained the 1948 film version that was directed and adapted by David Lean, starring Alec Guinness, Anthony Newley, and John Howard Davies. Yet, no single cinema or television recounting of the story has seemed to enjoy more success than the novel-based musical, Oliver!.

In many ways, although fate in the form of a simple illness seemed to close the curtain on Charles Dickens’ acting ambitions, his novels were of themselves very theatrically-rooted. In his middle and later years, Dickens even toured his country and abroad performing excerpts of some of the most dramatic scenes from his novels. The current Charles Dickens exhibit at the Museum of London even displays a printed copy of an excerpt from Oliver Twist that was marked with notes by Charles Dickens to prompt the details of his reading performances.

Dickens third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, heavily features an acting troop, and references are made throughout Dickens’ novels to theatrically linked professions. Yet, during the 1800s, acting was not considered the glamorous career that it has sometimes come to be considered in modern times. Dickens makes reference to the social stigma attached to a life on the stage through the character of Fanny Dorrit in his novel, Little Dorrit. Performing to a paying audience was considered undignified and even sordid. It was thought an immoral profession, somewhat connected to prostitution. Dickens would not shy away from addressing such stereotypes and the resulting treatment of individuals in such professions. In Oliver Twist, Dickens would do something rather revolutionary by winning reader sympathy for the fallen female, Nancy…

The Births of Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 08:03:11 -0400

The births of Charles Dickens and his famous foundling child protagonist, Oliver Twist, were very different, not only due to the obvious difference of the former being an event in reality and the later having only occurred in the pages of fiction.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, the second child and first son of his parents. His father, John Dickens, would eventually financially ruin the family through economic foolishness, and he would later inspire several of the frivolous male characters in his son's novels. His mother, Elizabeth Dickens, would also prove to be an inspirational figure, but it will be more appropriate to discuss both of these individuals in connection to Dickens's most autobiographical character, David Copperfield.

While Charles Dickens was still very young, his family moved to London and eventually, Kent. The family grew to include many more siblings for Charles and his older sister, Fanny, and while a succession of family hardships may have caused Dickens to feel somewhat orphaned, neither of his parents would die until his adulthood.

While the Dickens family suffered economic embarrassment due to the financial mismanagement of John Dickens, at the time of Charles Dickens's birth the family lived relatively comfortably in a terraced house that may only seem modest by modern standards. By contrast, the fictional infant that would be named by strangers, Oliver Twist, was born into complete poverty and under the blight of illegitimacy. His father was unknown, and his disgraced mother died in childbirth. Oliver would be initially raised in the workhouse rather than by the hearth of a family home.

In the 1830s, it was arguably scandalous to write the bastard orphan of a fallen woman as an innocent main character, deserving of a happy ending, but Dickens would challenge several accepted ideas of the forming Victorian Age...

Dickens and England

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 09:03:52 -0500

Dickens is so often associated with London that England’s capital city has sometimes been described as another character in Dickens’ already character-loaded novels, and the famed metropolis certainly features in Oliver Twist.

The Museum of London, to mark the bicentennial anniversary of Dickens’ birth, has even launched a special exhibit devoted to “Dickens and London.” The exhibition explores the ways in which London is depicted within the works of Dickens and the ways in which the city inspired aspects of the works. Drafts and original papers connected to many of the novels are on display alongside information intended to allow visitors some insight into the London of the Victorians, but by far, I was most affected by seeing Dickens’ actual desk and chair, which is on loan from a private collector. The moment was (only in my opinion) somewhat spoiled by the desk being set against a multi-media wall that was repeatedly playing a jumpy cartoon of Dickensian characters, but it was nonetheless a thrilling experience to stand beside the imposing desk at which Dickens penned many of his famed later novels. Of course, non-writers may understandably not find such a proximity to the object where fictions were created so inspirational, but as a writer, I find it interesting to learn about the writing habits of other writers.

I perhaps first became aware of the potential impact of observing the writing conditions of past writers when I visited the Brontë Parsonage in Yorkshire. At the time, the parsonage was displaying a dress worn by Charlotte Brontë and in one of the rooms of the family’s former home, and somehow getting an impression of the small author’s height and frame in the vicinity that had so heavily inspired the literary sisters made something of an impact on me. I cannot pretend I have ever had much time for Emily Brontë, who has always seemed to me someone who would have greatly benefitted from psychiatric treatment, so seeing the couch on which she died did not have a similar affect, but I rather like Charlotte Brontë because of her exploration of negligent schools in Jane Eyre. Prior to the publication of Jane Eyre, the negligence of some Yorkshire schools had been exposed and explored by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby. Now, I should never liken my educational experiences to the much more basically awful experiences of those nineteenth-century students who suffered terrible deprivations at so-called schools, but through my differing form of educational deprivation, I do empathize with the fictional child characters depicted by authors as being deprived of learning. I sometimes jest that I am a child of “academic aristocracy.” For generations my family has valued education and culture, as a means of bettering one’s condition and one’s personal understanding. Between only my two parents, five postgraduate degrees have been gained (mainly through scholarships and competitive grants), and teachers seem to bud from my family tree as naturally as apples in autumn. With this academic pedigree, we can be snobbish about education. We do not go in for designer degrees or name schools. Instead, we value education for the sake of its utility. We merit learning for its own sake, and we merit knowledge as a means of becoming more useful to the philosophy and practicality of society. Thus, we are not the sort to sit silently while witnessing an educational system regularly failing its students on even basic levels. As a highly effective teacher and school administrator, my mother was among the supervisors to assist in establishing the ‘gifted program’ in New York, but sadly, by the time of my birth, she had witnessed the city’s corruption of that special education sector. Thus, I became a bundle for Britain at the age of fourteen. England became my full-time home for the next eight years, and its schools became my parents’ means of providing me with a more effective education. Is it any wonder that I identify with the storylines of Victorian fictions? Many Victorian authors seem to have led relatively peripatetic lives, especially with travel becoming more prevalent in the course of the 1800s, and Dickens was no exception. Although we associate Dickens with London, many areas of England feature in his novels and legitimately claim connection to his life. The house in Portsmouth in which he was born is open to view, and this week, a friend and I ventured to the nautical city to tour the residence. It was rather odd to see the room in which he entered the world and cross the hall to the room in which the couch, which has been moved from his former home in Kent, where he left the world is displayed, but I would recommend visiting the Dickens ‘homestead.’ Of course, Dickens, despite his sometimes difficult childhood, arrived to much better conditions than Oliver Twist…

Oliver Twist

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:02:29 -0500

The serialization of Oliver Twist began from even before the completion of the serialization of The Pickwick Papers. Charles Dickens’ ability to work on multiple projects during the same period has caused him to gain his reputation as a prolific writer, and the influential popularity of Oliver Twist sealed his position as a prominent writer of the time.

It is one of Dickens’ comparatively shorter works, although similarly to the novella-length A Christmas Carol, the story of Oliver Twist is one of the most familiar and widely-known of all Dickens’ works, and it is certainly especially familiar to me, although I have not previously formerly read the actual novel.

During my childhood, I regularly watched film adaptations of the works of Dickens, as I have already mentioned, but I do not think I become familiar with Oliver Twist via any of the many adaptations of it. Instead, I knew it because my mother, an English-teacher by profession, annually read the novel with her students. Maybe due to my dyslexia (but more likely due to the increasing fashion for school boards to wrongly think exorbitant amounts of homework a method of learning rather than a method of reinforcing what has been taught in class), I had no substantial time to read a book ‘for fun,’ so any attempts to do so, eventually failed more miserably than the 1930s policy of appeasing Hitler. Thus, during my childhood, my only hope of reading a Dickens novel (I might add that I may not have then fully understood their average length) was if one was selected as assigned reading by one of my own teachers, but alas, such a selection did not occur until I was about fifteen years old. During my years of waiting, I was assigned to read some novels that I still recall fondly, including Emma (1815) by Jane Austen, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) both by Mark Twain, Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis (a fellow-Oxonian), and to date, my favorite novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee. Yet, my only knowledge of Dickens’ stories continued to be gained from television and my mother.

My mother did not need a dress rehearsal audience for her Oliver Twist lesson plans, but she knew that I enjoyed learning about authors and their works, so it was logical to talk to me about such things. Dickens was of particular fascination to me due to his mass and varied appeal, and whatever it takes to spin a story that enthrals a wide-ranging readership, Dickens certainly spun it in Oliver Twist. Dickens’ second novel emerged as a smash hit during its original publication from February 1837 to April 1839, a “social novel” that both entertained and influentially examined prevalent issues from poverty to prostitution. The story remained popular throughout the decades, and due to the consistently enthusiastic reaction of my mother’s eleven year old students (an annual cross-section of varied ethnicity, socio-economic backgrounds, intelligence levels, and academic-interest levels) I can state with reasonable certainty that it is an actual crowd pleaser to this day.

Unfortunately, Oliver Twist was not the Dickens novel finally assigned to me at school. Instead, perhaps ironically, about the same time I was first assigned a novel by Dickens, Great Expectations, I was cast in my school’s stage production of the musical, Oliver! My character began the show as the Widow Corney, who assists the comically villainous and infamous Mr. Bumble in torturing small orphaned children, and my character concluded the show as Mrs. Bumble, who seemed to simply torment her new husband. The main musical offering of Mr. Bumble and his future wife is an amusing duet entitled, “I Shall Scream,” and so as I was screaming through Great Expectations’ Estella’s cruel treatment of Pip, I was singing about screaming in a Dickens musical that was dear to my mother’s heart.

My mother, unlike me, had been an avid reader as a child, and she counted Oliver Twist as possibly her favorite novel. As a child reading it, she was fascinated that the novel depicted the torment of children, so when the musical adaptation of the novel came to Broadway, she begged her own mother to take her to see the show, and upon the opening number, as the deprived orphan characters marched onto the workhouse set, my impish mother thought, “This is just like my school...” During my childhood, this anecdote became a source of special amusement to my mother and me because an addendum was added to it about my first school, which only remained my supposed educational institution (‘institution’ being the operative word) until I was six years of age. The addendum being that the appearance of my first school (which oddly enough was situated down the street from a house that I still call “Boo Radley’s House” – It’s a regular literary amusement park in that area of my neighborhood) still consistently reminds me of a Dickensian factory whenever I walk past it.

I should explain that my mother and I did not hate the idea of school, but rather we hated the practice of it during each of our early years. We had been odd children, who, in our ignorance and zeal to learn, looked forward to going to school prior to our passage over the academic threshold, but we, by different means, found ourselves as shockingly awakened by our schools as Jane Eyre by her initial experience of Lowood. I still contend, partly due to later positive experience, that also like Lowood, schools have the potential to be sources of learning rather than institutions of busy work, but any school does run the risk of failing to strike that all important balance. It is after all an institution, like any other, so unless its authorities are careful and wise, it is possible that a school may teach its young charges no other lesson than what it might be like to be a poorly made product cranked out by a disreputable factory.

For my mother and me, it was our early school experiences that caused the stories of Dickens to penetrate pieces of our personal thoughts, and it was through personal associations that Oliver Twist became especially endeared to us. Thus, I face a challenge within this challenge: My long anticipated reading of Oliver Twist may prove either satisfying or disappointing, and I think it depends on my ability to put aside all past impressions and expectations about the novel and come to it as if it is a stranger. I may be assisted in forgetting my personal past projections because as I begin to read the novel, I will be busy going to several of the bicentennial exhibitions about Charles Dickens that are throughout England, the country where I spent eight of my formative years...

Oliver Twist

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:02:33 -0500

During my childhood, I regularly watched film adaptations of the works of Dickens, as I have already mentioned, but I do not think I become familiar with Oliver Twist via any of the many adaptations of it. Instead, I knew it because my mother, an English-teacher by profession, annually read the novel with her students. Maybe due to my dyslexia (but more likely due to the increasing fashion for school boards to wrongly think that exorbitant amounts of homework is a method of learning rather than reinforcement of what has been taught in class), I had no substantial time to read a book ‘for fun,’ so any attempts to do so, eventually failed more miserably than the 1930s policy of appeasing Hitler. Thus, during my childhood, my only hope of reading a Dickens novel (I might add that I may not have then fully understood their average length) was if one was selected as assigned reading by one of my own teachers, but alas, such a selection did not occur until I was about fifteen years old. During my years of waiting, I was assigned to read some novels that I still recall fondly, including Emma (1815) by Jane Austen, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) both by Mark Twain, Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis (a fellow-Oxonian), and to date, my favorite novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee. Yet, my only knowledge of Dickens’ stories continued to be gained from television and my mother.

My mother did not need a dress rehearsal audience for her Oliver Twist lesson plans, but she knew that I enjoyed learning about authors and their works, so it was logical to talk to me about such things. Dickens was of particular fascination to me due to his mass and varied appeal, and whatever it takes to spin a story that enthrals a wide-ranging readership, Dickens certainly spun it in Oliver Twist. Dickens' second novel emerged as a smash hit during its original publication from February 1837 to April 1839, a “social novel” that both entertained and influentially examined prevalent issues from poverty to prostitution. The story remained popular throughout the decades, and due to the consistently enthusiastic reaction of my mother’s eleven year old students (an annual cross-section of varied ethnicity, socio-economic backgrounds, intelligence levels, and academic-interest levels) I can state with reasonable certainty that it is an actual crowd pleaser to this day.

My mother, unlike me, had been an avid reader as a child, and she counted Oliver Twist as possibly her favorite novel because as a child reading it, she was fascinated that the novel depicted the torment of children, so when the musical adaptation of the novel came to Broadway, she begged her own mother to take her to see the show, and upon the opening number, as the deprived orphan characters marched onto the workhouse set, my impish mother thought, “This is just like my school...” During my childhood, this anecdote became a source of special amusement to my mother and me because an addendum was added to it about my first school, which only remained my supposed educational institution (‘institution’ being the operative word) until I was six years of age. The appearance of this school (which oddly enough was situated down the street from a house that I still call “Boo Radley’s House” – It’s a regular literary amusement park in that area of my neighborhood) still consistently reminds me of a Dickensian factory whenever I walk past it.

For my mother and me, it was our early school experiences that caused the stories of Dickens to penetrate pieces of our personal thoughts, and it was through personal associations that Oliver Twist became especially endeared to us. Thus, I face a challenge within this challenge: My long anticipated reading of Oliver Twist may prove either satisfying or disappointing, and I think it depends on my ability to put aside all past impressions and expectations about the novel and come to it as if it is a stranger. I may be assisted in forgetting my personal past projections because as I begin to read the novel, I will be busy going to several of the bicentennial exhibitions about Charles Dickens that have opened throughout England, the country where I spent eight of my formative years...