The Hermit Philosopher: Happy Birthday, Charles John Huffam Dickens!

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Those words may cause a frisson of dread, painful memories of being forced to read the 135,000 words of A Tale of Two Cities. Similar recollections might accompany “I called myself Pip” from Great Expectations (185,000 words), or “London, Michaelmas term lately over” from Bleak House (213,000).

When given by my high school English teachers (Sidney Silverman and Waldola Wasson—yes, those are real names), assignments to read these great works caused groans throughout the classroom. But I am glad now to have made Mr. Dickens’ acquaintance and to remember him today, February 7, the 201st anniversary of his birth.

Dickens’ serialized novels—their appearance in installments and the fact that he was paid by the word help explain their great length—are some of the gems of the English language and home to some of the world’s most memorable characters. Consider, for example, the following (from my favorite, Bleak House)—

A band of music comes and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog—a drover’s dog, waiting for his master outside a butcher’s shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has had upon his mind for some hours and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting three or four, can’t remember where he left them, looks up and down the street as half expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his hears and remembers all about it. A thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public houses; a terrific dog to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs and tear out mouthfuls of their wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog who has been taught his duties and knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par.

Do you not feel you know that dog? You can see him, right? And Jo: you know something more about him too, just from having him compared to that “vagabond dog, accustomed to low company.” What masterful, evocative prose this is!

Consider too this description, beginning on page one, that presages the author’s withering criticism of the arcane, slow, murky 18th Century English legal system—

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

… And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincolns Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.