Influences: Dickens

It’s largely because of Charles Dickens that I dropped out of my Ph.D. program, twenty years ago. Bleak House, specifically. No, I know what you’re thinking. Generations of grad school students in British literature approached Bleak House with a similar enthusiasm they might muster to an appointment for a root canal.

I wasn’t one of those students. I’d read Great Expectations in high school, and had been assigned Hard Times for a history class. I was of course familiar with A Christmas Carol, or at least the multiple adaptations of it for film and television. But Bleak House was revelatory. The moment I picked it up, I was gripped by the story with all its twists and turns, and was overwhelmed—in a good way—by the overabundance of characters and dialogue. I felt as if I’d been sat at a giant buffet table covered with all manner of exotic foods, all of them fragrant in their own special ways, and informed that I had all the leisure in the world to enjoy it.

Well, I was a doctoral student on a fellowship. I did have all the leisure in the world to enjoy it, and for long days and nights I plopped myself down on the sofa with my stereo on and a bowl of snacks at my side, while I raced through the pages. There were times I knew I should take a break at the end of a chapter, but I kept turning the pages, because I had to know what happened next. It was really just that good.

In class, the first night we discussed the novel, I listened attentively to the professor’s lecture about the British legal system, and took notes when he discussed the book’s unreliable narrator. I didn’t at all disagree with any of the cool, analytical comments that the other students made about the book’s twin narrative structures, or flinch much when the students who wanted to show off their familiarity with Derrida and Foucault invoked the names of their dark masters.

Something was missing from the conversation, though. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. Not until we’d had an hour and a half of dispassionate conversation about the book’s structure and technique, of tossing back and forth the names of famous theoreticians, and of discourse that was interesting yet dry as dust, did I ask a question at the end of class. “Didn’t anyone else think the book was exciting?” I asked around the table. “I mean, didn’t anyone else enjoy it?” I mean, come one! Bleak House has character die from spontaneous combustion, for crying out loud!

The rest of the students and the faculty member looked at me as if I were a lunatic. It was at that moment I realized that at a certain level, including graduate school, one isn’t supposed to admit to sensations such as enjoyment. To admit to being excited by a book’s plot is, well, juvenile. There’s an implication that if one’s relishing a story, it’s impossible to have one’s critical sensors engaged. Having fun is for kids. Serious professionals don’t enjoy what they do. It was then that I had the first inkling that perhaps I really didn’t belong in the academic world. Many more were to come.

Dickens has been one of my very favorite authors ever since. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I riffed on bits Great Expectations in my first novel for adults, Calendar Girl. My upcoming The Buccaneer’s Apprentice is an unabashed homage to what I consider one of my favorite parts of Nicholas Nickleby, namely the too-brief section in which Nicholas and Smike travel the countryside with the Crummles’ theatrical troupe. It might strike some people as odd, though, that I haven’t read all of Dickens’ works. I pick one up every three or four years and dive in, making it last for a month or more, relishing every well-turned minor role and sentimental scene and scowling at every villain. Dickens’ heroes and heroines are inevitably always a little bit of wet dishrags to me, but they’re surrounded by such a vivid swirl of action and colorful characters that it’s hard to dislike them.

I haven’t read them all because I’ve enjoyed knowing, for a couple of decades now, that I have a few more to go. I like knowing that sometime in the future, I’ll succumb and enjoy the familiar thrill of immersing myself into one of Dickens’ worlds and swimming in it for weeks. Right now, I’m fascinated with Little Dorrit, the riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of intertwined families and a French murderer. It’s kept me awake late at nights. I’ve had to restrain myself from watching any further in the 2008 BBC television adaptation than I’ve reached in the book. It’s difficult, because the cast (which seems to have been assembled from the casts of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Clatterford) is terrific, and because my actor boyfriend Russell Tovey breaks my heart in every scene in which he appears.

When I’m reading Charles Dickens, it is the best of times. It is the worst of times. It is . . . no, wait. I haven’t read that one yet.