Finding “The Genius of Dickens” at the Charles Dickens House

When we visited London in 2012, I was looking forward to seeing the Charles Dickens House on Doughty Street, where the writer lived with his family for about three years in the late 1830s. This was the 200^th anniversary of his birth; Simon Callow was playing him in the one-man play “The Mystery of Charles Dickens” (written for Callow by the noted writer and Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd); and I knew a lot more about Dickens and the London of Dickens’ era than when we first visited in 1983.

The only problem was the Charles Dickens House was closed for reconstruction. On his bicentennial birth year. Go figure.

So when we went back this year, I was determined to see it. I had checked and knew it was open. Since my wife was less interested in seeing it, she chose to have a leisurely morning, and off I went, via three tube lines. Surfacing at the Russell Square station (same one you use for the British Museum),  I walked the six blocks or so to Doughty Street, found the house, paid my admission fee, and stepped back in time 170 years.

It’s a narrow structure, four floors and a basement, with narrow stairs. The self-guided tour is well done, and I could stare in wonder at the parlor when the Dickens family entertained, the study, the bedrooms, even the bathroom. The kitchen is in the basement.  The house had been furnished with period furniture, including some furniture from the final home of Dickens, at Gad’s Hill in Kent.

And the house included a small shop; the English are good at small but outstanding. I could have spent hours looking over the books, biographies, book markers, and busts of the writer. As it was, I had to watch the clock; we had plans for later in the morning.

One of books in the shop was a small volume, The Genius of Dickens by Michael Slater. Slater is a well-regarded biographer of Dickens, having not only written an official biography but also several smaller studies, including one on Dickens’ love affair with actress Ellen Ternan.

In The Genius of Dickens, Slater considers the themes that dominate the novels and other writings: fancy (something akin to what we call imagination), innocence, responsibility and earnestness, progress, home, and faith. He uses all of the novels as primary research material, but has also drawn upon articles, letters, writings of contemporaries, and news and magazine reports.

Noting the author’s continuing appeal to readers today, Slater says, however, that “we should always bear in mind that in the first place he was a man of his own age.” Dickens was a Victorian at the age’s high-water mark, sting at the “top of the literary tree in the English-speaking world” (as Slater says) for thirty-five years – no small achievement. It is almost as if Dickens were the right writer for the right time, achieving notice and then fame as literacy was surging, the middle class was growing, and the Industrial Revolution was creating great (if unevenly distributed) wealth and leisure time. In many ways in his writings, Dickens became the conscience of his era

It’s a small volume, yes, but sitting behind it is an exhaustive amount of research. Originally published in 1999 as The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens, it’s full of insight about the man and his work.

I purchased my copy, along with a small, easily packable bust, a bookmark, and a book of walking tours of Dickens’ London. Back outside, I walked in the overcast morning back to the tube station.

Illustration: Dickens Receiving His Characters by William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900), via Wikipedia.

Some Overwhelming Words About “Poetry at Work”

L.L. Barkat has posted an article about Poetry at Work, my brand-new book (so brand-new I’m rather impatiently waiting for my copies to arrive).

She calls it a “life-changing book.”

“Someone will say I am biased,” she writes. “After all, I represent the publisher. Plus, once the writer and editor did their amazing work, it was me who did the final quiet edits and changes (now you know who to blame for a handful of errors, if you were one of the two people who managed to order the book while it was secretly sitting on Amazon waiting for my final, final changes).

“But, if you know me, you know I don’t bother to say what I don’t believe is true.”

I’m sitting here at home, suffering through what may be the worst cold I’ve had in a decade, so I can blame the teary eyes on that.

All I can say is "Thank you. Thank you  for believing we could do a book like this."

You can read the whole article at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetry at Work

It started about a year ago. I was talking with (emailing, actually) L.L. Barkat, editor of Tweetspeak Poetry, about the column I write for the online publication, and she said, “I think we need a book.”

Oh, my goodness.

The contract was signed, mailed and received. Then came the work.

I know where I was when I wrote the first draft of the introduction – on a plane to San Antonio, for a kind of communications retreat at Laity Lodge. I know where I was when I wrote the rest of it – sitting right here at my computer. And I know where I was when my editor, Ann Kroeker, shouted with glee when I sent the text that I had found and verified the final footnote – I was sitting in the stacks on a footstool in the Webster Groves Public Library, about 10 minutes from my home in neighboring Kirkwood (my fourth library visit of the day trying to find the book).

So what is this book?

Poetry at Work.

What is it about?

Poetry. And work. And how I learned that poetry is inherently a part of work.

Even in PowerPoint presentations. And job interviews. And layoffs. And crises.

What I didn’t know was how people might react. Once the manuscript was edited, off it went for possible recommendations. That was a scary moment.

Poet David Malone read it and said some really cool things. David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, a friend from almost 25 years, said some unbelievable things. Scott Edward Anderson wrote an incredible foreword (Scott blogs at The Green Skeptic).

This was different from writing my two novels. The novels never actually seemed like work, although they represent years of effort.

Poetry at Work was work. Rather intense at times. Really intense.

The result – well, you’ll have to read it (I hope).

It comes together as a whole piece – a whole piece of a life.

Related:

The Poetry at Work page at Tweetspeak Poetry

How I Learned to Love Handicapped Parking Spaces

I wouldn’t say much, if anything. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of handicapped parking spaces. And while I would do an internal grimace whenever I was looking for a parking space and find the only empty spaces to be those marked handicapped, I knew that if they weren’t marked, they would have been long filled.

Intellectually, I understood it. I’d even bite my tongue when I’d see people with a handicapped parking sticker or tag on their cars rather cheerfully exit their automobiles and almost skip to wherever it was they were going. Handicapped, right.

Then came the ruptured disk in my back.

After working at home for three weeks (the most comfortable position was flat on my back on the floor), I finally had enough pain medication to consider returning to work.

What I forgot was that the building with my office was a good long block from the employee parking lot. And it was uphill, requiring maneuvering through several sets of stairs. With my cane and my computer bag. And having to use an umbrella when it’s raining.

This lasted all of about three days.

I talked to the doctor and got the form for a handicapped parking space. I went to a state revenue office and paid the small fee. It was good for 90 days. I would later renew it once, for an additional 90 days.

Instead of walking a long block uphill, I was able to park right outside my office building. Flat terrain. No stairs. It was still a hassle when it rained (and later snowed), having two hands when I needed three for the cane, computer bag and umbrella, but it was a much shorter hassle.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge says that one of the first things that happened after he experienced a physical affliction was “new-found compassion for the handicapped and the infirm. My pain sensitized me to the pain of the world.”

I can’t say my pain, and the affliction of a ruptured disk, sensitized me to the pain of the world, but it did make me extraordinarily thankful for handicapped parking spaces. It helped me understand why there were needed in the first place. It stopped my internal complaining. And it made me more conscious of people with physical handicaps who have to struggle to do the things we take for granted.

Like walking to your office from the parking lot.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Comfort for the Afflicted,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Tonny Watanebe via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Ted Hughes’ “Crow”

My introduction to Ted Hughes was, for better or worse, a rather bad one.

When I was in college, the poems of Sylvia Plath were all the rage. She was known as the poet who had killed herself (1962) by sticking her head in a gas oven, and it was that ghastly tragedy that seemed to provide the initial attraction. These years were also the first full rush of the feminist movement, and Plath became a symbol – the poet who had killed herself because her husband had left her for another woman.

The husband was the poet Ted Hughes, who had had an almost meteoric rise in the 1950s. He had left his marriage with Plath for another woman, the poet Assia Butmann Wevill. Four years later, in 1966, Wevill killed herself (and their daughter) in the same manner as Plath had died.

I’m not sure if this is the stuff of poetry or soap opera, but for years Hughes was called “murderer” at public readings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Navigating the Gray

One of the movie critics in our local newspaper always provides guidance for us in how we approach movies.

If he likes a movie, we know the film will be generally edgy, with some violence and an “anti” kind of message, as in “anti-establishment” or what the critic (and the movie) had determined to be “anti-establishment.” Like Pulp Fiction.

If the movie is about values (family and otherwise) or is life-affirming, we know the critic will usually pan it. Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

In other words, his movie reviews often if not always reveal more about the critic than the movie, and that may be true of most criticism in the arts. It’s not that our local critic is always wrong, but I’ve read enough of his reviews to understand his worldview, and I know how and when it differs from my own.

What’s clear is that, in his writing his reviews and my reading them, we are both engaging in the business of culture.

In my own writing, and people’s reading and responding to it, we are all about the business of culture – making it, consuming it, understanding it, becoming part of it. We Christians, says Brett McCracken in Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, tend to have one of two responses to culture. We see it as godless, heretical, blasphemous, and abominable. Or we saturate ourselves in it to get as far away from our Christian upbringing as possible.

Few of us, McCracken says, attempt to understand it. Discern what if anything is worthy, and celebrate the beauty of what is good in culture. Man is created in God’s image, and he made us to be creators, and that original impulse can be found across humanity.

What we have largely done is to wall ourselves off from popular culture, even as we embrace (and often unwittingly embrace) many of the forms that popular culture takes – art, rock music, radio, television, movies magazines, novels, self-help books. We have Christian versions of virtually every form of popular culture available.

What we have not done is to ask whether these forms of culture change what we try to say and communicate. The reality is that they do change the message, and often in profound ways; some messages are better suited to certain forms rather than others. And they change what we say in exactly the same way they changed what is said and communicated in the popular culture.

For the next four Mondays in December, TheHigh Calling will be discussing Gray Matters. McCracken examines four manifestations of how popular culture manifests itself – food, music, film, and drinking, and he considers each from the perspective of both creation and consumption. Each Monday the discussion will focus on a different manifestation. Check out The High Calling to see where the discussion is going. It promises to be lively.

Related:

Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service interviewed Brett McCracken earlier this year.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Advent: Listening to the wind

Look at what I did,

not at why I did it.

I may not know why,

and the reason why

is unimportant, a single note

(a G? a C? I can’t hear it)

in a wind storm. No one

bothers to ask why, didn’t

you know?

Now I can’t recall

what I did. It seemed

to matter at the time

but no longer. All

that’s left is to climb

the trail to the top,

and consider the vista

set before me, purposely

set before me, to provide

the silence so I can hear

the symphony in the wind.

Photograph by Consuelo Suarez via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.