Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1870
Acquired: November 2016
Read: December 2025

Every year over my winter break, I read a Charles Dickens novel I haven't previously read. I've been reading them in order of descending popularity on LibraryThing: this perhaps has been a mistake, since it means the last few years I have been subjected to triumphs like Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son.

I was thus a bit apprehensive about this year, where I would be reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood. What if it was as bad as the last couple books I'd read? And, famously, incomplete? ("The food here is terrible. And such small portions!")

Well, it seems to me that as he lay dying, Charles Dickens must have gotten a bit of his mojo back, because Edwin Drood was shaping up to be solid mid-tier Dickens. Not necessarily great work, but there are decent characters here and interesting dynamics and some strong descriptive passages. I doubt it would have ended spectacularly (maybe I am wrong), and certainly, books like Dombey and Son show that Dickens can start strong but ultimately fizzle out, but I was into it thus far, read it fairly quickly, and disappointed when it all came to a stop.

Just one Dickens novel to go! 

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Barnaby Rudge

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Originally published: 1848
Acquired: December 2009
Read: November 2025

As a Victorianist, I was of course made to read a lot of Brontë novels in undergrad and grad school, either in coursework or beyond: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Villette. But they were all by Emily or Charlotte... never Anne! I did once pick up a copy of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but of course it has taken me over fifteen years to get around to reading it.

I was familiar with Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës," which tells us that marrying alcoholic brooding men with no emotional intelligence was a thing that Emily and Charlotte were into, but not Anne, and indeed, that's basically the thesis of Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Our protagonist is a gentleman farmer who gets a new neighbor, a woman with a daughter; he's attracted to her but she's mysterious. Eventually she tells him the story of her first marriage, which was quite terrible. It's easy to read this as what it really might be like to be married to, say, Heathcliff. Then everything works out. It's definitely more pious than the works of Charlotte or Emily, and I don't know that it was more to my actual taste than Jane Eyre, which probably beats it for character complexity. But it, despite being a bit on the slow side, certainly wasn't as boring as The Professor or Villette.

So I am glad I finally read it, and I intend to seek out Anne's other novel now, but I doubt I will ever become a superfan of any of the Brontës, as influential as they all are. 

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction (anthology, 2010)

This is an anthology from Fall River Press (the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, I think) collecting "classic" (i.e., public domain) stories of the apocalypse, ranging from Lord Byron's poem "Darkness" (1816) to H. P. Lovecraft's short story "Nyarlathotep" (1920). I picked it up because I wanted to read the Robert Cromie novel The Crack of Doom (1895), and this was its most accessible contemporary reprinting. Several years later, I've finally gotten around to reading the rest of the book. I reread short stories I'd previously read, but not novels: this means I skipped rereading Crack of Doom as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913).

I taught a class on apocalyptic fiction many years ago; an idea that I discussed in that class in the context of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is that the concept of an apocalypse (in the nonreligious sense) is dependent on a certain understanding of time, one that didn't really emerge until the 1800s. I think in our present moment, apocalyptic narratives usually emerge from an awareness of how societies change: we know we might destroy it, be it from bombs or medicine gone wrong or environmental collapse or whatever. (Isaac Asimov discusses this in his essay "Social Science Fiction," arguing you can only get science fiction once it's clear that societies can evolve and change in fundamental ways quite quickly; he blames the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.)  

The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction
compiled by Michael Kelahan

Collection published: 2010
Contents originally published: 1816-1920
Acquired: January 2019
Read: June 2025

But before the idea that we could destroy society emerged, there was a different one that runs across the stories presented in this book: the idea of deep time, that human existence is only a very recent thing across the span of the Earth and the universe, and thus we have no reason to think it will last. We have a lot of natural disasters here: humanity undone by comets, or the sun going dark, or the sun expanding, or what have you. Once you understand how small humanity is on the scale of all time, then you also have no reason to think it will last.

Many of the stories here are good examples of what Isaac Asimov could call technology-dominant (or gadget) stories: they're not concerned with character or even society (as later apocalyptic fiction usually is), but more the mechanics of it. What would happen if the sun overheated the Earth? How could a comet wipe everything out? This means that many of the stories are technically interesting, noteworthy for what they represent in a shift in how humans understand time... but not actually all that good. This is definitely the space that George Griffith's "A Corner in Lightning" (1898) is in, for example. (Which is a little disappointing, in that while Griffith wasn't a great writer, he was usually a more interesting one than he is here.)

That said, even some of these are good to read: Robert Duncan Milne's "Into the Sun" (1882) is kind of technical, but visceral, chronicling the Earth growing so hot no one will live. His sequel story, "Plucked from the Burning" (1882), reminded me a bit of On the Beach in its tour through a destroyed familiar landscape. I don't think "The Star" (1897) is H. G. Wells's best work, but you know of course it's well thought out; similarly, Grant Allen's talent for landscape description serves him well in "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897).

Still, there are some highlights, particularly where you see the way science fiction will go coming into existence. In what's kind of a side comment in Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn discusses how initially, sf has what she calls "the incredible invention story" (Asimov's gadget story), but that it "permits only one level of emotional response, that of ritualized amazement or ritualized horror." Later, sf moves into what she calls "the completed future," where instead of showing the transition from the present moment, the reader is immersed in a world unfamiliar to them (p. xiv). The best stories here are of this type, placing the reader in the postapocalyptic future and letting them build the picture themselves. 

These ones feel particularly modern, and I suppose it's not a coincidence that they're all written by authors who have significance outside of proto-sf. For example, I really enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "For the Ahkoond" (1888, I think; Kelahan doesn't give an original publication date for it), told as a report from a forty-sixth-century archaeologist exploring a North America devastated by a New Ice Age. Along similar lines, Jack London's "The Scarlet Plague" (1912) is evocative, and inventive in how it has someone who did live through the apocalypse try to tell its story to someone born after it, who thus has no frame of reference for what the world used to be like. (It reminded me a lot of Wells's The War in the Air [1908]; surely London read it, though he was doing similar work already in The Iron Heel [1908].)

I also really like E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909). I'd read it before of course, but I'd forgotten how clever it was, Forster showing us the darkness of this future by telling the story from the perspective of someone who doesn't see how dark it all is. A lot of his contemporaries would have done a lot worse; it's probably not a coincidence that he was a king of modernism. I think a lot of ink has been spilled about the relationship between sf and realism (including by me, in my never-finished book), but I wonder if there's more to be done about modernism and sf. (It's probably been done; I should ask my colleague Cari Hovanec.)

Anyway, some duds—it would be hard to imagine a collection of pre-1900 sf that wouldn't have at least a few—but a good sampling of what was going on in the genre we know so well today before it was the genre we know so well today.

Serialization and Strategy in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son

When I read Dombey and Son (1846-48), I noted that it seemed to demonstrate a much higher level of planning than the prior Dickens novel I had read, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). The structure of Chuzzlewit very much demonstrates (to me anyway) that Dickens must have been making it up as he went along, with its diversion to America and the fact that Martin (a damp squib if there ever was one) pretty much stops being the protagonist of the novel that bears his name.

Dombey and Son, on the other hand, is very obviously planned. It ran nineteen monthly installments, the last of which was double-length, making for twenty in total. At the end of every fifth installment, something of great significance happens: the death of a main character, the marriage of a main character, the flight of a main character. It's like watching the season finale of a modern serialized streaming show. I was curious about this, and reading the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition suggested that Alan Horsman's 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel would provide a detailed account of novel's composition, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

In his introduction, Horsman cites Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster, who had "stressed the contrast between Martin Chuzzlewit and subsequent books like this one which showed Dickens 'more bent upon constructive care at the outset'" (xv). Horsman argues that Forster is exaggerating a bit, as we know that Dickens had Chuzzlewit's ending in mind from the beginning. But I think (to put it awkwardly) that Horsman is exaggerating Forster's exaggeration. Sure, Dickens had his plot twist in mind the beginning... but clearly he did not have the beats and pacing in mind from the beginning in the way he did in Dombey and Son. Had he precisely planned everything in Dombey? I don't think so, based on the evidence Horsman cites, but we do often see evidence of him working ahead a bit. For example: "On 6 December [1846] he was occupied with the first chapter of Number IV. 'Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five'" (xxvi). And later: "As one would expect, the planning of Number V is very careful" (xxviii).

That said, things do get a bit looser later on. Dickens had a broad-strokes idea, but didn't have the precise planning worked out from the beginning: "The problem which the memoranda for Number VI emphasize is to continue throughout the remainder of the novel…. February letters show that he found it 'very difficult to fall into the new vein of the story'" (xxix). Perhaps this why I found my interest in the novel diminished as it went! It seems like Dickens had a lot he knew he wanted to get done by the end of no. v, but having crammed this all in, was less certain about where he was working toward for the remaining fifteen installments: "The second marriage [of Dombey] has now to sustain the greater part of the novel… he was to warn himself 'To bring on the marriage gradually'" (xxxi-xxxii). Horsman chronicles how Dickens thought of other aspects of the novel to pull into the foreground, but also how Dickens wasn't unlimited in what he could do; there were things he planned on that just didn't pan out.

Horsman doesn't mention those big turning points I identified in nos. x and xv in the same way, so it seems likely these weren't planned quite so rigorously in advance as the ending of no. v was. But it is clear that Dickens was being deliberate in his pacing in a way he had not been in Chuzzlewit, even if this ultimately undermined (I would argue) the success of the novel as a whole.

Forster said that, "for Dickens, 'the interest and passion of [the story], when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, that had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think…'" (xxxii). Again, Horsman seems a bit skeptical of Forster's claim, calling him "defensive" (xxxii), but I agree—going in publication order, for me this is Dickens's first novel to have some genuinely emotional moments, even if he would get better at this later on. And Forster also says the second half "seemed to many to have fallen short of the splendour of its opening" (xxxii)—and again, I agree. Because Dickens had to get to that twentieth installment, much like how a modern streaming show has to get its season out to ten episodes no matter what, the later parts of the novel are less dense with incident than what came before. 

It's also fascinating to learn how down-to-the-wire Dickens's composition could be; there were times Dickens had to send in each chapter of an installment as he finished it to have enough time to be typset. There were even times that a chapter had to be broken up by pages so different typesetters could do different pages simultaneously! In such a down-to-the-minute environment, I suppose the more planning you can do in advance, the better.

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XVII–XIX (Chs. 52-62)

I'm afraid my Dombey and Son project got away from me in February, both in the sense that I didn't get very much of it read, and it in the sense that I stopped writing up each installment immediately after reading it, so I can't do my usual thing of reacting to each installment on its own.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: February–March 2025

Perhaps it was my otherwise distracted state, perhaps it was the book, but I found that it more fizzled out than climaxed. The last three installments have depressingly little of Florence and her emotional states; once she (inevitably) gets engaged to Walter, she basically fades out as a focal character. There's even little of Dombey himself. He and Florence reconcile, I guess, but it felt to me like this was mostly something we heard about secondhand rather than experiences. There's some good stuff with Dombey's wife, at least, which was probably the highlight of these last three installments.

I am a woman... who from her childhood has been shamed and steeled. I have been offered and rejected, put up and appraised, until my very soul has sickened. I have not had an accomplishment or grace that might have been a resource to me, but it has been paraded and vended to enhance my value, as if the common crier had called it through the streets. My poor, proud friends, have looked on and approved; and every tie between us has been deadened in my breast. There is not one of them for whom I care, as I could care for a pet-dog. I stand alone in the world, remembering well what a hollow world it has been to me, and what a hollow part of it I have been myself. (823)

I never particularly enjoyed Mr Carker as a villain, and found the way he was eliminated kind of disappointing. Thinking about it, though, I'm not sure Dickens's villains have ever really worked for me, even the ones other people seem to be really into (e.g., Uriah Heep). 

Overall, I enjoyed the earlier installments of Dombey but it lost me the more it went on... but of course, if you've ever seen a modern streaming show, you'll know that's a thing that happens all the time in serialized fiction!

This is the final in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)
5. Nos. XIII–XIV (chs. 39-45)
6. Nos. XV–XVI (chs. 46-51)

My winter 2025/26 Dickens novel will be The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Five Very Good Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction Novels (not by H. G. Wells)

Earlier this week on Reddit, a post in r/printSF (the very best sub) asked, essentially, "Who are all the good nineteenth-century science fiction writers who aren't Jules Verne and H. G. Wells?"

Well, never was a question so well designed for me! Unfortunately, I came to it kind of late; I did write a reply but I think most people had moved on from the thread by then. But it occurred to me as given I gave five novels, the comment would also make a good installment of my sporadic "Five Very Good..." series here on my blog, where I list five things in some category.

These aren't necessarily the five best; I've skipped some heavy hitters like Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in favor of some less common and probably less good good ones because I found them particularly interesting in some way. Unfortunately, the thing you will find when you read a lot of nineteenth-century British science fiction is that the reason we only talk about Wells now is that, largely, only Wells was any good. Wells was excellent at taking the tropes of what was a pretty crappy genre in his day and doing very clever things with them, such that he redefined the tropes! Wells didn't write the first alien invasion story or the first time travel story or the first invisibility story... but he did write the first good alien invasion story, the first good time travel story, the first good invisibility story. (And what I mean by good is that his stories have both the exact right level of scientific rigor but also the ability to say something about a concept outside of science.)

But anyway, here are books I would recommend if you want to read some fun nineteenth-century sf. If I've reviewed them on this blog before, I've included a link to the post.

Jane Loudon, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
For a while I was obsessed with this book... and I still do think it's pretty great. It's a world where multiple revolutions have left England a Catholic country with a matriarchal monarchy. Education has come to all classes, leading to incredibly smart laborers-- and thus rich people act incredibly stupid so no one mistakes them for poor people. Technological inventions abound, extending to sending mail by loading letters into metal balls that are launched into a steam-powered cannon, aiming for a net at the house of the recipient. Which is awesome and hilarious all at once. There's a lot of satire going on, here: on class, on gender, on science, on progress. Some of it is funny, all of it is fascinating. Genuinely fun and readable; most early sf isn't. And I haven't even gotten to the mummy accidentally resurrected by a mad scientist who hides in the English palace and dispenses political advice. (You can get the original three-volume edition from Google Books, but I think the reprint edited by Alan Rauch is just fine for casual reading despite being abridged; he captures all the good bits.)

Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
Several generations into the future, after a mysterious disaster has ripped through the heart of Victorian Britain, the Thames is a giant lake and London a deadly swamp. With the upper and middle classes having fled the country for parts unknown, civilization and technology collapsed, leaving a new feudal order to come about, constantly under threat from invasion by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish, all out for revenge. The first third of the novel is just a description of this postapocalyptic world, telling how animals and plants have been affected (Jefferies was a nature writer), and about the political and social setup, with marauding bands of "gipsies" and the sinister Bushmen lurking between cities for hapless travelers. It's well-thought-out, detailed world-building, the best I know of in the nineteenth century, almost Tolkienesque. There are so many fruitful avenues for stories suggested in just five chapters.

George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893)
Griffith isn't a great writer, but he is a genuinely clever one, basically the first guy to unite the Verne-style "amazing technology" story with the Butler/Lytton-style "strange society" story, giving us a novel about anarchists who use airships to bomb Europe into submission... leading to a utopia! He wrote a lot of novels, and was the leading writer of "future war" fiction for a long time; Wells even makes fun of him in The War in the Air. Angel is his first and best book. Lots of fun stuff; it was reissued under the title "Tsar Wars" for a reason, though the best edition to get is the annotated one Steven McLean edited for Victorian Secrets Press.

T. Mullett Ellis, Zalma (1896)
Count Pahlen (a Russian nobleman, Tsarist counter-spy, and professor of biology) give his illegitimate daughter up to the Catholic Church, which raises her in a convent and plans to marry her to the heir to the throne of England to turn it into a Catholic country, but the plan fails, and Zalma rejoins her father, who is actually the ringleader of an anarchist conspiracy. Her father dies before he can bring his plans to fruition, and so Zalma decides to dump anthrax on all the capital cities of Europe from balloons. And that just scratches the surface of how bonkers this book is. Sometimes meandering and dull, of course, but usually fascinating. (The book has no modern reprint, but the complete text is available on the HathiTrust site.)

M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
Not quite nineteenth-century, I guess, but close enough. What would you do if you were the last person left alive? Why, you'd probably conclude that the world was made for you-- why else would only you have survived?-- and so you'd tour the cities of Europe, burning each of them down when you were done. Because once you're done with them, certainly no one else is ever going to see them. The novel is filled with brilliant bits where we get to see the narrator trying to cope with being the last man-- and seeing the world those last panicky humans left behind. There's just a lot of nice little moments peppered throughout the novel, which feels so intense and so real. Shiel's ability to depict human isolation without ever getting dull is extraordinary. (I recommend the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" edition, which uses the weirder 1929 revised text.)

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XV–XVI (Chs. 46-51)

No. XV (chs. 46-48)
She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight of him with her trembling hands; she did not weep; she did not utter one word of reproach. But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation issued from her heart. For as she looked, she saw him murdering that fond idea to which she had held in spite of him. She saw his cruelty, neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down. She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house. (721)

Not much to say about this one... except that I called it! Precisely at the three-quarters mark, Dickens gives us our next big moment in the story, the total collapse of good feeling between Dombey and his wife, which leads to Dombey striking Florence, and Florence fleeing his house into the refuge of Captain Cuttle. Cracking stuff: any Dickens novel can have its languid moments, but he knows how to twist a knife like few others.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January–February 2025

It's interesting how deliberately structured and plotted Dombey and Son is, because this was very much not the case with Dickens's previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44, which I suffered through last winter). Indeed, I don't think it's the case with any previous Dickens novel. Maybe Oliver Twist? I don't remember that one well. But it certainly wasn't true for Pickwick Papers (1836-37), or Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), or The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). The only other early Dickens novel I haven't read yet is Barnaby Rudge (1841); I guess I'll see how structured that one is... but I kind of doubt it's highly structured given what I know of it.

I wonder what happened in 1846 that turned Dickens toward plotting things out in more detail and pacing more deliberately... perhaps he suffered through Martin Chuzzlewit as much as I did and wasn't keen to repeat the experience! The introduction and notes to my Penguin Classics edition don't mention anything about this as far as I noticed, but they do recommend reading the 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel for an account of its composition. I will put in an interlibrary loan request for it.

No. XVI (chs. 49-51)
'Hope. It's that as animates you. Hope is a buoy... but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy, it only floats; it can't be steered nowhere.' (757)

Well, guess what... Walter is alive! Given this seemed quite obvious from the moment his body failed to turn up, it's a little annoying that Dickens dragged this out for five whole installments. It's like the guy hasn't been on the show a whole season!

But anyway, decent stuff as we move into the endgame, but I particularly liked the little glimpse we get of Dombey: "Mr Dombey and the world are alone together" (781).

This is the sixth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xvii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)
5. Nos. XIII–XIV (chs. 39-45)
   

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XIII–XIV (Chs. 39-45)

No. XIII (chs. 39-41)
Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance, had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself to be. He had been 'Mr Dombey' with her when she first saw him, and he was 'Mr Dombey' when she died. He had asserted his greatness during their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own—would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured himself haughtier than ever, with Edith’s haughtiness subservient to his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself against him. (608-9)

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January 2025

Not much to report about this one, which continues the depiction of the slow deterioration of the Dombey marriage—see above. Also some good but sad stuff about Florence. The new Mrs Dombey's mother dies.

No. XIV (chs. 42-45)
'Does that bold-faced slut... intend to take her warning, or does she not?' (669)

Another one that I found a bit slow and a bit plodding. More Florence, please! I mean, Dombey is thrown from his horse and injured and all, but there's a bit too much Carker. I get that he's up to no good, but I find something about Dickens's underhanded villains who spend a lot of time "on screen" a bit dull; I mean, he's not as bad as Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, but I feel like less would be more with this guy, but instead we just get more. Which is not more.

That said, at times, he's chillingly effective. When Dombey is injured, Carker brings a message from him to Edith (only I am suspicious that the message probably does not represent Dombey's actual intentions), trying to drive a wedge between Edith and Florence:

'His instructions were,' he said, in a low voice, 'that I should inform you that your demeanour towards Miss Dombey is not agreeable to him. That it suggests comparisons to him which are not favourable to himself. That he desires it may be wholly changed; and that if you are in earnest, he is confident it will be; for your continued show of affection will not benefit its object.'
     'That is a threat,' she said.
     'That is a threat,' he answered, in his voiceless manner of assent: adding aloud, 'but not directed against you.' (683)

I've been reading this book a solid month now, you know, and though my reading has slowed a little of late, I'm almost at the three-quarters mark, so I ought to finish it up in February.

I'm worried about that three-quarters mark, though; so far, Dickens has made the worst things happen at the ends of installment nos. v and x. What will no. xv bring?

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xv and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)
   

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XI–XII (Chs. 32-38)

No. XI (chs. 32-34)
It’s entered on the ship’s log, and that’s the truest book as a man can write. (505)

As I had kind of predicted, after a heavy emphasis on Florence and Dombey in the previous installment, we totally stay away from the two of them here. The first chapter is about Captain Cuttle finding out that Walter's ship was destroyed at sea with no survivors. (My prediction, though: in the absence of a body, assume he will turn up alive in a later installment nonetheless.) Dickens does a great job with Cuttle's grief:

Because it ain’t one loss, but a round dozen. Where’s that there young schoolboy with the rosy face and curly hair, that used to be as merry in this here parlour, come round every week, as a piece of music? Gone down with Wal’r. Where’s that there fresh lad, that nothing couldn’t tire nor put out, and that sparkled up and blushed so, when we joked him about Heart’s Delight, that he was beautiful to look at? Gone down with Wal’r. Where’s that there man’s spirit, all afire, that wouldn’t see the old man hove down for a minute, and cared nothing for itself? Gone down with Wal’r. It ain’t one Wal’r. There was a dozen Wal’rs that I know’d and loved, all holding round his neck when he went down, and they’re a-holding round mine now! (505)

People claim that we didn't get the idea of a multiplicity of selves until modernism, but Charles Dickens has got it here!

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January 2025

This chapter, and the other two, continue the growing recognition of the villainy of Mr Carker. Mr Carker reacts coldly to Captain Cuttle's announcement of Walter's death, throwing him out of the firm. The next couple are honestly a bit confusing at first, because over halfway through this book, Dickens is apparrently still introducing new key characters! I thought at first they were from earlier chapters and I'd forgot them, but no. I guess if you think of each quarter of the novel as a "season" of a television show (which seems a pretty good analogy, pacing-wise), it makes sense to introduce some new regular cast members at the beginning of season three. 

Anyway, the new character here is Harriet, the sister of the two Carker brothers; in this chapter, she has a conversation with a mysterious man about John, the disgraced one; there are also hints that Mr Carker is up to something as regards Edith, Dombey's new wife. Harriet then dispenses some assistance to a homeless woman.

Then, in the next chapter, we learn more about the homeless woman, another new character, named Alice—but like Harriet, related to a preexisting character, Good Mrs Brown, the street woman who way back in installment no. iii took advantage of Florence. Alice is Mrs Brown's daughter, recently returned from transportation to Australia. Here, we learn that 1) Good Mrs Brown has been keeping tabs on the Dombeys ever since then, and 2) they both have some reason to hate Mr Carker. Upon Alice realizing it was Carker who helped her, she and her mother actually go back to Harriet's house and return the assistance she got. Wow! How all this is going to weave together, but provided I can keep track of it all, I am interested to find out.

No. XII (chs. 35-38)
'Polly, my gal,' said Mr Toodle, with a young Toodle on each knee, and two more making tea for him, and plenty more scattered about – Mr Toodle was never out of children, but always kept a good supply on hand. (580)

Unlike most installments of Dombey and Son, this one has four chapters instead of three—I assume of somewhat shorter length, since I think all the installments are equally long. The first one here is the real standout, chronicling the return of Dombey and the new Mrs Dombey, Edith, from their honeymoon:

'And how my dearest Dombey did you find that delightfullest of cities, Paris?' she [Mrs Skewton, his mother-in-law] asked, subduing her emotion.
     'It was cold,' returned Mr Dombey.
     'Gay as ever,' said Mrs Skewton, 'of course.'
     'Not particularly. I thought it dull.' (543)

There's a really beautiful, but sad, and powerfully written, scene as Dombey almost finds himself showing affection toward Florence. But then he realizes that the only time that Edith demonstrates any affection toward anyone is when she sees Florence; indeed, Edith is a totally different person in the presence of Florence. What exactly Edith is up to, we don't know, but it's clear the one person she has genuine affection toward is not even her own mother, but Florence. Dombey is still, so still that Florence and Edith take him to be asleep in his chair, and so he observes them in secret, discovering a different side to the two of them that he never gets to see under normal circumstances.

The motto of the book, its indictment of Dombey, might be best expressed through this exchange in chapter 35:

[Dombey:] 'I directed that no expense should be spared; and all that money could do, has been done, I believe.'
     'And what can it not do, dear Dombey?' observed Cleopatra.
     'It is powerful, Madam.' (544)

Obviously the trajectory of this novel is going to be Dombey learning that there are things more powerful than money... but at what cost is this knowledge going to come? For me, the most heartrending passage in this chapter was this exchange between a couple of Dombey's servants: "Cook leads a sigh then, and a murmur of 'Ah, it’s a strange world, – it is indeed!' and when it has gone round the table, adds persuasively, 'but Miss Florence can’t well be the worse for any change, Tom.' Mr Towlinson’s rejoinder, pregnant with frightful meaning, is 'Oh, can’t she though!'" (542). It does seem quite probable to me that things are going to get worse for Florence before they get better; you can feel the tension rising through this chapter most excruciatingly. Poor Florence.

The other chapters here are less captivating but still important, showing the continuing deterioration (is that the right word? you can't deteriorate a thing that was never constructed to begin with) the Dombeys' new marriage, and the continuing negative influence of Carker.

Back in the opening quarter of the book, with Paul's schooling, there was a lot of Dickens's usual invective against bad systems of education; with Paul dead, we can't really get that, but there's still a little of it here, through the character of Rob, who is sent to a badly run charity school for the lower classes:

they never taught honour at the Grinders’ School, where the system that prevailed was particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy. Insomuch, that many of the friends and masters of past Grinders said, if this were what came of education for the common people, let us have none. Some more rational said, let us have a better one. But the governing powers of the Grinders’ Company were always ready for them, by picking out a few boys who had turned out well in spite of the system, and roundly asserting that they could have only turned out well because of it. Which settled the business of those objectors out of hand, and established the glory of the Grinders’ Institution. (588-89)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xiii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
   

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. VIII–X (Chs. 23-31)

No. VIII (Chs. 23-25)
Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery. (375)

I feel like Dombey and Son is drifting a bit in this installment, languishing. It's not bad... but I'm also still not quite clear where the novel is going following from the death of Paul Dombey. In these chapters, we follow Florence mostly, with a bit also about Uncle Sol and Captain Cuttle. Probably this is all going somewhere... but where?

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January 2025

If the novel has a main point, though, it's clearly Florence's emotional deprivation. In this installment, Florence overhears the aunt of an orphan talking to her charge about Florence: "your misfortune is a lighter one than Florence’s; for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love" (381). There are a lot of emotionally deprived orphans (or seeming orphans, e.g., Great Expectations) in Dickens, but (perhaps I'm forgetting something) I can't think of any nonorphans so deprived as Florence. How bad is it to have a parent who doesn't love you, doesn't even hate you, just doesn't think of you at all? All the stuff about Florence is sort of quietly devastating, and for me anyway, she's emerging as one of Dickens's best female characters. 

I'm not really sure where this is all going to go, but I continue to mostly enjoy the journey.

No. IX (chs. 26-28)
Am I hitting some kind of mid-book slump? Again, an installment I was mostly pretty "meh" on—except for the stuff about Florence, of course, who I continue to have great empathy for. I think the problem is when there's too much stuff about Dombey himself (and his social circle). But all that does lead somewhere in this one, which is... Dombey is getting remarried! What implications will this have for Florence, who doesn't even get to meet her new mother prior to the engagement? I would say it can't make her life worse, but there's over half the novel to go, so it probably will.

What is up with Mr Carker? I don't trust that guy. You might object to a key character only emerging halfway through a novel, but I guess that's serialization for you. Indeed, I like the way he's slowly emerging as a figure of significance. (Douglas Adams does something similar with a minor character in the Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet.) ((I am willing to bet no one has ever compared these two texts before.))

No. X (chs. 29-31)
Say what you will about our man Charles Dickens, but he knows how to pace a serial. Dombey and Son consists of nineteen parts, but the last is double-length (a two-part finale), so the end of installment no. x is the exact midpoint of the novel. At the end of the first quarter, Paul Dombey died; at the end of the second quarter, Mr Dombey gets remarried.

But poor Florence! What is going to happen to her? Dombey's new in-laws are clearly up to something (I am a bit worried I should know what this is but that I glazed over it when I was bored in a previous installment, but I'm sure I'll figure it out), and Dombey's new wife clearly has regrets about it... but is willing to go forward with the plan anyway.

This installment basically totally revolves around the lead-up to the wedding. It has been a while, actually, since we have checked in on some of the side characters. Soon, I am guessing? But in the meantime, I continue to be very into the trajectory of Florence, surely one of Dickens's most put-upon female characters!

This is the third in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xi and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
   

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, No. V–VII (Chs. 14-22)

No. V (Chs. 14-16)
This deviates from the structure of the last couple installments. Instead of going Paul→Paul→someone else (probably Walter), here we get Paul→someone else (indeed, Walter)→Paul. In the first chapter, Paul and Florence attend an end-of-term party for the students at Paul's school, but Paul suffers an attack of illness. The whole chapter has a kind of dreamlike quality, and though the installment came out in February, and the party actually precedes summer break, it actually felt very appropriate to read it in December; tonally, it felt very appropriate for Christmas, with its nostalgic, wistful tone.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024–January 2025

There's also some good jokes about an eternal Dickens bugaboo, the oversystematization of that which should not be systematized. In this case, there's a funny bit about how the teachers at Paul's school rate him at 6¾ on a scale of one to eight for "natural capacity" and "general disposition to study"... though only at a four for "gentlemanly demeanour" (208). Paul, however, is "undecided whether six three-fourths, meant six pounds fifteen, or sixpence three farthings, or six foot three, or three quarters past six, or six somethings that he hadn’t learnt yet, with three unknown something elses over"!

Incidentally, when sick, Paul perceives things around them changing size and position; it seemed to me that this could be (based on my limited understanding) an example of a malady named after a different Victorian novel, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but in some quick Googling, anyway, I didn't find anyone else making that connection to Dombey and Son. Maybe I don't understand AIWS, or maybe I misread the novel? For example, it's noted that "Mr Toots’s head had the appearance of being at once bigger and farther off than was quite natural" (213). It's very vivid, though, making me wonder if Dickens himself suffered from it at some point.

The Walter bit goes on a bit too long, like all the other ones, but we do see that Walter is beginning to invest himself emotionally in Florence. Florence, incidentally, is probably the Dickens girlest Dickens girl who ever Dickens girled, being a beautiful naïve slip of a girl who the men adore. The statement that she was "something precious, unattainable, unchangeable, and indefinite – indefinite in all but its power of giving him pleasure, and restraining him like an angel’s hand from anything unworthy" (243) could sum up so many of Dickens's female characters.

The big spoiler for this section—which I did not know going in, so avert your eyes if you want that to be true of you as well—is that the "Son" of Dombey and Son is no more following this section. That's right, Paul dies one-quarter of the way into the novel of which he is one-half of the title!

I did not see this turn of events, partially for that reason, and partially because it seemed like we were in for a very typical Dickens formula: the bildungsroman about a boy with an emotionally deprived childhood, e.g., Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Great Expectations (1860-61). I would say it's clever of Dickens to subvert your expectations that way... except that two of those examples postdate this novel, so it wasn't a formula yet! But anyway, it's a very effective piece of writing either way, Dickens at his sentimental best. He would bring himself to tears reading the chapter aloud at public performances, apparently; I would have loved to see and hear such a thing.

No. VI (Chs. 17-19)
'Wal'r,' said the Captain, handing it [the watch] over, and shaking him heartily by the hand, 'a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the afternoon, and it’s a watch that’ll do you credit.' (300)

The first and third chapters here are about Captain Cuttle and Walter respectively, and they're fine for what they are. (Is Captain Cuttle the character my friend said I'd like?) But the clear standout here is the middle chapter, "Father and Daughter," about how Florence is mourning the death of her brother Paul and how her father just doesn't care for her or her feelings in any way, shape, or form.

I occasionally have remarked that I want to have more access to Florence's interiority, but I think I'm just projecting my twenty-first-century expectations onto this novel. Dickens wasn't a realist, like those Victorian writers that came after him, such as George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, his project wasn't to reveal character by taking you into someone's head. Dickens reveals character through dialogue and action. In the realist novel, you have this artifice, that the narrator somehow knows what Hetty Sorell or Molly Gibson were thinking. Dickens projects no such artifice—well, he projects a different one. His narrators never claim to know what someone is thinking, only what someone is saying and doing. Imagine someone else telling you the story of Florence Dombey because it was real; they wouldn't give you her thoughts via free indirect discourse or something because they don't know them. But what they could tell was what she did, how she looked out at the happy family across the street every day, and that would be enough to let you know how she felt, because that's how humans always figure out how each other feel. You need to imagine a Dickens novel is being related to you by a friend who knows the story in detail.

So of course we don't have access to Florence's interiority, and you should stop hoping for it! Dickens does a great job of communicating what's going on inside her regardless, particularly in that devastating scene where Florence goes to see her father.

I don't think this is an absolute; clearly we do get a bit of Paul's interiority in his last couple chapters, as he's dying. But it's not a move Dickens makes a lot, and he only deploys it to make a particularly strong point. His next novel after Dombey and Son would be David Copperfield, which is (I believe) his first told in the first person, so we finally do get that dose of interiority... but the old-fashioned way. He would use it in just two other novels, both ones I rank among his best, Great Expectations and Bleak House (1852-53).

No. VII (Chs. 20-22)
'You are too great a man, Dombey, to be thoughtful. In your position, Sir, you’re far above that kind of thing.' (314)

This is probably the first installment of Dombey and Son that I found ho-hum. It had its moments, but none of the three chapters was a great one. In the first, Dombey hangs out with a new character, Major Joe Bagstock—he's who I've quoted above, and he is in general quite funny. In the second, Dombey and Bagstock go on a trip and bump into Mrs Richards, who reveals her eldest son (whose education Dombey sponsored) has gone bad. In the third, said son shows up at Dombey and Son looking for a job so he can straighten himself out, and doesn't get one directly, but Dombey's clerk gets him a placement with Walter's uncle, the instument-maker. (Walter himself is missing, his ship unheard of since its departure.)

It's all fine, and definitely there are some great bits, but it felt to me like things were being moved into position for the next phase of the story—whatever that may be.

This is the second in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. viii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
   

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. I–IV (Chs. 1-13)

Every winter break, I read the most popular Charles Dickens novel that I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to Dombey and Son, originally serialized in nineteen monthly parts from October 1846 to April 1848 under the title of Dealings with with the Firm Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. Last year, I experimented with reading Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) serially. Not across nineteen months(!), but rather alternating installments of the novel with parts of other books (or, in some cases, whole other books), and then writing up those installments as I went. I would say it was a successful experiment, in that instead of being forced to endure nothing but Martin Chuzzlewit for weeks, I got to alternate it with book that were actually good, so I decided to go for it again this year.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024

I should say, that going in, I literally knew nothing at all about this book, beyond what I gleaned from the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition. I feel like I've never heard anyone ever mention it, even in passing. A totally forgotten (or forgettable) Dickens novel? It doesn't bode well, to be honest, beginning a book that's nine hundred pages long and not even worth complaining about, but I tried to be open-minded.

No. I (Chs. 1-4)
Some Dickens novels begin ominously, a mode that Dickens excels in. Think of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Great Expectations (1860-61). But it seems to me that earlier in his career, perhaps because his big success was still the hijinks of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens was much more likely to begin comically, even when his topic was tragic. He takes a similar mode here to that of David Copperfield (1849-50), beginning with the birth of a child, largely under sad circumstances, but mostly focusing on making jokes about it all. The first line is so funny I stopped immediately to read it aloud to my wife: "Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new" (11). And then the second line is also a joke: "Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet" (11).

What this all belies is that the opening of the book is quite sad! Dombey is the owner of the titular firm; he use to be the "Son" and now he is the "Dombey," but though he has been married ten years, he has only just got a "Son." He does have a daughter, aged six... who he doesn't care about at all, because a girl "was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more" (13). Dombey's lack of affection extends to his wife, who dies after giving birth to Son, and Dombey is more concerned about the logistical difficulties this will lead to in raising his Son. And though this bit is of course sad, Dickens also has a lot of jokes here, mostly from the dead Mrs. Dombey's sister-in-law, who keeps insisting she just needs to make an effort and she'll be fine: "It’s necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps a very great and painful effort which you are not disposed to make; but this is a world of effort you know, Fanny, and we must never yield, when so much depends upon us. Come! Try! I must really scold you if you don’t!" (20-1)

I feel like Dickens pulls you in with the jokes in order to subsequently get you with the tragedy, but also the tragedy is perhaps a bit too muted, more abstractly understood than felt, but like I said, maybe the Dickens audience of 1846 didn't want tragedy, only comedy, so he had to understate it a bit. (This is after The Old Curiosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, though, so maybe I am overstating this point.)

After this, there's some comic hijinks as Dombey must engage a wet-nurse, excellent stuff, I really enjoyed it. So many great lines about the wet-nurse and her apple-faced family. But then Dickens is always very good at this sort of thing, and from here we move away from comedy a bit, as the wet-nurse (real name: Mrs Toodle, but called Mrs Richards when at work because it's more "ordinary" and "convenient") meets the daughter of Dombey for the first time, and realizes how isolated and alone and sad the poor girl is. After all this, I was fairly into the book; a much better opening installment than Martin Chuzzlewit, to be sure.

The fourth chapter is some blather about a shopkeeper and his nephew Walter, though, so you can't win them all, though again it had a couple good jokes. But then I got to take a break and go read something else. One installment down... eighteen to go!

No. II (Chs. 5-7)
It's interesting that two of the three chapter titles here center Dombey's son Paul—"Paul's Progress and Christening" and "Paul's Second Deprivation"—because it seems to me that the clear emotional focus of the chapters is Dombey's neglected daughter, Florence. Yes, Paul's christening is the event on which these three chapters hinge, in that it's there that the characters make some key decisions that end up having major repercussions. (Mrs Richards decides to go visit her son at his new school, which results in her and a couple others losing their jobs working for the Dombeys.) But the person who goes through trauma here is Florence; on her way back from the visit, she gets separated from her caretakers, and she is taken advantage of by "Good Mrs Brown," who steals her clothes and cuts her hair off and claims she will murder Florence if Florence rats her out! Poor Florence goes through some awful stuff here.

Still, we feel a bit distanced from it all. The things we're told about are quite awful to read, but I don't feel like we're totally in Florence's interiority the way Dickens sometimes brings us, like he did a few years after this with Little Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1855-57).

I didn't expect the whole thing with Mrs Richards and the Dombeys to fall apart like that so quickly, though, so I am curious to see where this all goes in the next installment.

No. III (Chs. 8-10)
'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son.' (153)

Here we get one chapter about Paul and two about a character I haven't discussed much so far, Walter. Back in no. II, Walter helped rescue Florence after her ordeal at the hands of Good Mrs Brown; here, he comes calling to Mr Dombey to seek help paying off the debts of his uncle, a ship's instrument-maker who has no customers.

I am a bit worried that Walter may be the character about which my friend Christiana said, "I can think of one character who I expect you to like," because I find that so far his sections substantially slow the narrative down with a lot of unnecessary detail. I'm loathe to say Dickens could have done something in fewer words... but I really think "nobody is buying anything at my shop" doesn't need as many words as he gives it.

On the other hand, I found chapter 8 very interesting; we've jumped ahead a bit here, and now Paul Dombey is almost five, and we actually get some insight into his psychology. Poor kid! But I like best of all the simultaneously sympathetic and scathing way that Dickens describes Mr Dombey himself: "But he loved his son with all the love he had. If there were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if its very hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the image of that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a boy, but as a grown man – the 'Son' of the Firm. Therefore he was impatient to advance into the future, and to hurry over the intervening passages of his history" (109).

No. IV (Chs. 11-13)
She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone dead – and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoule. (163) 

We're settling into a pattern here, I think: two chapters about Paul Dombey, and then one going elsewhere. The Paul ones are about how at first he and Florence go to the seaside and spend time with a terrible governess (she's not called a governess, I don't think, but she's essentially so), and then Dombey decides Son needs an education, so he gets packed off to a nearby terrible school. What Victorian does horrible systems better than Dickens? Great stuff about the terrible, terrible education Paul is beginning to get; lots of good jokes on this and other topics. I am not loving this book yet (still a bit long-winded, we're still a bit distant from Paul and Florence, I think) but certainly I am enjoying it more than Martin Chuzzlewit or The Old Curiosity Shop; I don't know this one isn't better know. I guess Dickens has got 750 pages in which he can screw it up.

The other chapter is about the doings at the firm Dombey and Son, a place we previously haven't gone despite it being the title of the novel! Most of the characters here are thus new, but there's a bit more about Walter, who is being sent to the West Indies. I remain open-minded, I suppose, but I am not sure where this strand of the novel is going. The best part, though, is this zinger between two new characters who are estranged brothers:

'Haven’t you injured me enough already?'
     'I have never injured you, James, wilfully.'
     'You are my brother... That’s injury enough.' (200)

Dickens has a good line in insult comedy. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. v and beyond.

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Finally... the end!

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: March 2024

No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)
I wish I could say this whole novel was worth it for the scene where the elder Martin Chuzzlewit whacks Pecksniff with a walking stick, knocking him to the floor. It did make me laugh and want to cheer. Unfortunately, getting to see an annoying character whacked with a stick doesn't quite make up for having to read over seven hundred pages about that character... but at least Dickens himself knew the guy was annoying.

I also think Dickens himself clearly recognized that Martin Chuzzlewit was a failure of a protagonist; the last few chapters are far more interested in Tom Pinch and how he ends up than Martin Chuzzlewit and how he ended up. He's the one who gets what is clearly the protagonist's wrap-up, not Martin, with a whole chapter spent on his future happiness. The up- and downside of the serial novel, one supposes. If your protagonist doesn't work out, you can get a new one (shades of a tv show shifting who its lead is), but... but if your protagonist doesn't work out, you can't go back and make someone more interesting the protagonist from the beginning, all you can do is pack them off to America!

So, overall, did this work as a way to read Dickens? Well, I did not (as you can tell) like Martin Chuzzlewit much... but I think I would have liked it even less had I attempted to read it straight through! Hopefully next year's Dickens is better (but I doubt it).

This is the last in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
7. Nos. XIII–XVIII (chs. 33-50)
   

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. XIII–XVIII (Chs. 33-50)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

I was sick last week, so I was able to get through a lot of Martin Chuzzlewit. (If you think that sounds like I punished myself for being sick, you're right.)

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installments read: February–March 2024

No. XIII (Chs. 33-35)
I seriously do not understand people who think the American segments drag this book down. The middle chapter here is about Americans being ridiculous and stupid (some Americans try to talk to Mark on a steamboat). The jokes are not top-tier Dickens, but at least they are jokes. I would much rather read them than whatever else is going on in this book.

No. XIV (Chs. 36-38)
This installment actually has some inklings of interest. Tom Pinch (who I am sure might have been in this book all along, but whom I last remember doing something interesting back in ch. 12) strikes out on his own, hanging out some with his sister, a much put-upon governess. Like the America stuff, it feels like a soft reset. Okay, Dickens thinks to himself, even after being packed off to America, Martin is still boring, so let's focus on this other guy, he seemed nice. I very much enjoyed all the stuff with him tramping about London:

Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about them, where the graves are green, and daisies sleep—for it is evening—on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock-fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!

(Was this chapter an inspiration for Little Blue Truck's Springtime? "Yoo-hoo duck!")

Anyway, will the second relaunch work? Well, who knows because then we get two chapters of tedium. The only thing more boring than Pecksniff is the two Miss Pecksniffs.

No. XV (Chs. 39-41)
With Victorian novels, I often play a game: how would you see it if it had a different title? For example, Adam Bede could be the exact same text and justifiably titled Dinah Morris or even Hetty Sorrel. But if it was, it would be much sadder. Or, how would we see Bleak House if it was called Esther Summerson?

Anyway, it seems to me Martin Chuzzlewit would much more justifiably be called Pecksniff, but then I would also hate it all the more. But on the basis of this installment, perhaps it ought to have been called Tom Pinch, and probably I might have liked it a bit more. There's no Martin, sure, but I'd much rather read about Tom Pinch doing stuff. This is a bit of a classic Dickens set-up: the down-on-the-luck fellow who gets a mysterious benefactor. But it's classic because it works. Chuck all the Martin and Pecksniff chapters and retitle this book, please.

No. XVI (Chs. 42-44)
Who is even less interesting than Pecksniff? Signs point to Jonah. Tom Pinch continues to seem like a nice book, though.

No. XVII (Chs. 45-47)
Okay, so I just said I found Jonah boring... but ch. 47 here, where Jonah does a murder, is one of the best in the book. Classic Dickens, totally captivating suspense.

No. XVIII (Chs. 48-50)
Okay, lots of boring stuff... FUCK ME, THE ELDER MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT HAS BEEN FAKING IT THIS ENTIRE TIME!? AND HE'S THE SECRET BENEFACTOR OF TOM PINCH??!? You do occasionally know how to hit a home run, Charles.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. xix. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
   

qtd. in

I subscribe to a number of different academic subrebbits, and this semester, I feel like I've seen a lot of questions on a number of the "Ask" ones (e.g., "AskAcademia," "AskLiteraryStudies," "AskProfessors") about whether it's okay for an academic writer to cite someone's citation of someone else, rather than dig back into that original source themself.

There are two ways to think about this question. The first is that can you do this? And the answer to this is pretty simple: yes. I don't know how it goes for other citation formats, but in MLA you do this by putting "qtd. in" in your parenthetical citation and then indicating where you found your quotation; the best practice is that the signal phrase should indicate who actually said it. Here's an example from own eternally in progress book:

In an 1872 letter to an unknown correspondent, Charles Kinglsey vented his frustration at the way many men of science excluded men of religion: “There are many men – I among them – who love physical science as dearly as Spencer and Tyndall can; who are ready to follow Darwin… without the least fear. But when it is said to us. No. You shall not be a scientific man and a Xtian… then, I think, an honest man has a right to lose his temper deliberately, and use a few hard words” (qtd. in Conlin 123).

The signal phrase makes it clear that Kingsley is who said this, but the parenthetical makes it clear that to find this quotation, you will need to go to Conlin. Then, if you go to the Works Cited (which I've included at the bottom of this post), you can see where I actually got the quotation from.

So this achieves the two goals of every citation: giving credit, and providing documentation.

But as a wise man once said, "Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing" (Meyer and Martin qtd. in 137th Gebirg). There a couple problems that "qtd. in" is prone to, and a couple circumstances in which it is definitely warranted.

First, you are trusting that the source you read gets it right.

Charles Kingsley and his wife

This isn't always the case! Even among academics, sources can be misquoted, or even if quoted correctly, they can get the context wrong. For example, in his The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887), Francis Darwin (Charles's son) quotes a letter from Charles Kingsley to Charles Darwin saying, "I have to thank you for the unexpected honour of your book [the Origin]. That the Naturalist whom, of all naturalists living, I most wish to know and to learn from, should have sent a scientist like me his book, encourages me at least to observe more carefully, and perhaps more slowly" (81). This is quoted all over the place. When I read this, I was surprised—would Kingsley really call himself a scientist, especially back in 1859 before the word really took off?

So I tracked down the letter in the Darwin Correspondence Project, where we find that Kinglsey actually says, "a sciolist like me" (emphasis mine). A sciolist is, as the OED tells us, a "person whose knowledge is only superficial, esp. one who makes much of it; a pretender to learning"; this is a far more likely thing for Kingsley to be calling himself. But searching "'charles kingsley' 'a scientist like me'" gets 1,490 hits on Google, whereas "'charles kingsley' 'a sciolist like me'" gets seven! That 1887 Francis Darwin misquotation has been endlessly reproduced and requoted by people who have not checked the original. (Both formulations get exactly three hits in Google Scholar, however, so professional academic have been more careful.)

Second, you may not be giving adequate intellectual credit (or not making an original contribution).

The most obvious form of plagiarism is, as everyone knows, taking someone else's language without credit. But it's also plagiarism (as, in my experience, many students do not know) to take someone else's ideas without proper credit. This actually recently happened to me; I was asked to peer review an article about a novel (let's call it "novel A") that I had published about myself. The paper I reviewed took another text (let's call it "essay B") and applied it to novel A—the exact same second text that I had been the first to apply to novel A. It cited me, but only in the sense that the citations didn't actually quote essay B themselves, they quoted my quotations (e.g., qtd. in Mollmann).

Now is this plagiarism in the sense of borrowing language without attribution? No. But I do think it was pretty fishy. One, it was my idea to bring these two texts together, and nothing in the article I peer reviewed made that clear, I was just cited as the source of quotations for essay B. There was a failure to adequately give credit for a comparison that only I had thought of, even if none of my language had been stolen. Furthermore, I did the work of picking out the relevant passages from both novel A and essay B, but received no credit for it. (The writer clearly had not read essay B themselves, because they quoted nothing from it that I hadn't.)

Second, even if adequate credit had been given... what's the point? If they don't go back to that original source themselves, they are entirely dependent on my interpretation, and thus cannot be making much of an original intellectual contribution—which is the whole point of academic writing. Even if I was credited, someone else had already had the idea of pairing novel A with essay B. Why do I want to read someone else making the exact same combination of texts, using the exact same selection of passages?

For me, this is the real issue with not going back to the original source. If one writer pulls a line that's important to them out of a source, I don't need a second writer to re-pull that same line. I want to know what the second writer thinks is important to their point.

So when is it a good idea to use "qtd. in"?

I searched my book manuscript for uses of "qtd. in" in order to write this post, and discovered that I use it thirteen times in 424 pages. My uses fall into two main categories:

First, when the original source isn't readily available. This is, I believe, the case with the Kingsley letter I quoted via Conlin above. (It has been a long time, so I'm not 100% sure, but I do feel sure I would have quoted the original if I could have.) Some sources just can't be easily accessed: they are letters that have never been reprinted or periodicals that have never been digitized and are only available in some archive in another country. This makes you entirely dependent on someone else... but what else can you do? In a quick skim of my "qtd. in"s, I would guess this accounts for more than half of them.

Second, when you are working with a secondary source, but you also want to provide some detail by quoting its quotation of a primary source. There must be a more elegant way of putting that, but let me provide some examples. For one, here's a passage where I'm discussing the work of my academic grandfather, George Levine:

Levine examines how self-abnegation figures into epistemology beginning in the 1830s, both within literature and within the work of actual scientists, drawing on the writing of scientists such as Tyndall who claimed “a self-renunciation that has something lofty in it… is often enacted in the private experience of the true votary of science” (qtd. in Levine 4). Levine does not examine any specific discipline, but examines both scientists and scientist-like figures during the Victorian period to see how self-abnegation functions as a narrative: how does science create a narrative of self-abnegation, and how do literary narratives incorporate self-abnegation?

Social Darwinism: "There's always a bigger fish" (Lucas qtd. in benjay2345).

Yes, I'm quoting Tyndall, but here I'm quoting Tyndall in order to elucidate something about the Levine passage where he quotes Tyndall. Thus, I think I'm doing a better job of giving Levine credit if I make it clear that this is his quotation of Tyndall that supports his point. Similarly, when discussing social Darwinism in the novel Zalma (1895), I draw on the ideas of Mike Hawkins:

But this is not purposeless violence; an important keystone of Darwinism was “that social conflict (at least in certain guises) could be presented… as the motor of progress” (Hawkins 146). Applying this kind of evolutionary vision to humankind leads Pahlen to anticipate some of the Darwinist writers who would come after Zalma. The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi would write in 1912, “Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision” (qtd. in Hawkins 209), and the socialist writer La Monte argued in 1917, “Let us… assert the necessity and efficacy of cataclysmic revolution!” (113)

In this case, I think it's important to show that Bernhardi is Hawkins's own example of the idea he's discussing, though I also supplement them with my own example pulled from La Monte.

On the other hand, if you read a source that points you to another source, and you end up taking stuff from the second source that the first source did not, and don't use any of the ideas of the first source, I don't think there's any obligation to cite the first source. Yes, it was nice of that first source to lead you somewhere useful, but I would argue that it didn't make an intellectual contribution to your piece.

So... can you just depend on someone else's citation, and cite them? Well, sure, you can. But is it always the best choice? I don't think so. Like many aspects of writing, it's about context.

Works Cited

benjay2345. “Qui-Gon's quote 'There's always a bigger fish' in the first film of the Saga foreshadows the final film of the saga.” Reddit, 22 June 2020, www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/hdzke3/quigons_quote_theres_always_a_bigger_fish_in_the.

Conlin, Jonathan. Evolution and the Victorians: Science, Culture and Politics in Darwin’s Britain. Bloomsbury, 2014. 

Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter. 1887. Vol. 2, D. Appleton, 1888.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kingsley, Charles. Letter to Charles Darwin. 18 Nov. 1859. Darwin Correspondence Project, U of Cambridge, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2534.xml.

La Monte, Robert Rives. “Science and Revolution.” The Social-Democrat, vol. 13, no. 3, 15 Mar. 1909, pp. 105-13. HathiTrust, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101067578953&view=1up&seq=115.

Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. U of Chicago P, 2002.

137th Gebirg. “The President's Address at Khitomer - Star Trek VI: TUC.” The TrekBBS, 8 June 2007, www.trekbbs.com/threads/the-presidents-address-at-khitomer-star-trek-vi-tuc.33640.

“sciolist.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, doi: 10.1093/OED/3809113041.