Imaginary friends on absurd adventures

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A small group of gentlemen with the leisure and resources to do whatever they choose, and without having anything particular to do, accompany Mr. Samuel Pickwick on his adventures to explore the more curious portions of the world — as long as they are not more than a two-day stagecoach drive from London, and there is assurance of a comfortable inn at their destination. There follow 57 chapters of silliness, in which Dickens alternately lampoons and lovingly illustrates personalities and customs — some truly absurd — of laborers, lawyers, medical students, journalists, coachmen, servants, businessmen and the idle and pretentious sub-aristocracy of the 1820s (supposed period of the Pickwick Club) or '30s (the novel began to appear in 1836).

Young Dickens (then 25) was invited to write text to accompany comic sketches of sportsmen by illustrator Robert Seymour, and at first he seems to have had no clear idea of how to develop it nor anything about the characters beyond the funny names he assigned them and the physical appearance that Seymour had given them. After the first installments, Seymour (who had a history of mental problems) committed suicide, but by that time Dickens' narrative inventions had already taken priority, so that instead of the text following the sketches, the sketches had to illustrate the new text, as other artists (R. W. Buss, briefly, and then Hablot Knight Browne, "Phiz") succeeded Seymour. Among the more memorable episodes is Pickwick's unequal litigation with the shyster lawyers Dodson and Fogg and Pickwick's subsequent sojourn in debtors' prison because he refuses to pay the obviously unjust sentence of costs and compensation for a breach of promise he never made (brought by a hysterical widow who mistook the overly-polite Pickwick's inquiries about lodgings as a proposal to marry). The story eventually becomes clear and the characters more clearly defined, especially Pickwick's cockney manservant Sam Weller, the quick-witted scoundrel Jingle, and Sam Weller's marvelously drawn coachman father, full of false wisdom mispronounced, generous and well-disposed to all but ready to fight for honor and justice when he thinks these have been offended.

Especially delightful to any of us in the trade are Dickens' wry comments on the craft of writing. There are many, including the nearly-illiterate Sam Weller's efforts to compose a love letter. But I'll quote only one, near the end (Ch. LVII) of this long serial, which is an observation on the work itself: "It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides." In this, his first long work of fiction, Dickens has succeeded to the delight of many thousands of his contemporaries and to generations ever since.

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Zipping into the dismal future

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In his London bachelor quarters, a well-to-do amateur inventor and mechanics enthusiast astounds his friends with a tiny working model of what he describes as a time machine, which when a little lever is adjusted slightly, vanishes — into the future, according to the host. A week later, some of these same friends and others return for a second dinner, but when the host returns late, he looks haggard and his clothes are torn. He has, he tells them, journeyed on his machine (the full-sized model, like a stationary bicycle with special levers) far into the future — to 802,701 AD — when London no longer exists but in its place are strange ruins inhabited by a gentle, listless, indolent race of little people called the Eloi, who do no work and seem to make no special effort at all but are well-clothed and fed. He eventually discovers that underground lives another race of much more enterprising and savage little people, the Morlocks, who presumably manufacture the clothing and other necessities of the Eloi and ghost-like emerge at night to snatch some of them to carry back underground and cook and eat them. Such is the distant future of the division of London's social classes, the ever more indolent and incapable aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, and the ever more savage laboring poor on whom they come to depend. This is not the first time-travel fantasy (see Wikipedia Time Travel in Fiction) nor even the first to claim a mechanical conveyance, but is the one that has inspired more imitators. The characters are exceedingly simple, the dialogue is completely monotone and the physical descriptions are also very simple, but the one thing this little book has going for it is its stimulating concept, time travel.



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Ex-Gurkha Soldiers Denied British Residency - NYTimes.com

Still going on! It was just this kind of betrayal that sparked the rebellion in Kiran Desai's Booker Prize novel. See my more extended commentary on The Inheritance of Loss.

And here's the recent news story: Ex-Gurkha Soldiers Denied British Residency - NYTimes.com

Cantankerous crusader

An English friend here in Carboneras lent me this book about a crusading, cantankerous and extremely energetic journalist who had a lot to do with establishing the ground rules for pamphleteers, journalists and today's bloggers -- nearly two centuries ago.


Ingrams, Richard. The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett. London: HarperCollins, 2005.

This is a very detailed bio, focused almost entirely on Cobbett himself (1763-1835), his movements and his voluminous writings, to the point that it is easy to lose sight of the wider context and why any of it mattered. It did matter, however, tremendously. Cobbett's vigorous journalism taking on powerful figures got him into many troubles, including a 2-year jail term, but ended up helping establish truth as a defense in libel actions and thus widen freedom of press in England. His campaign for parliamentary reform was a major contributor to its triumph in 1832 (elimination of rotten boroughs and much else), and his reports on country life in his late collection of articles, Rural Rides, includes vivid portraits of rural life in England, Scotland and Ireland on the brink of the industrial-urban revolution.

It would probably be best to read this after something like E. P. Thompson, so as to get the context and analysis before diving into so much detail of one man's life and career.

Above: Caricature of Cobbett (standing on cart and waving copies of his newspaper to beat his drum) and fellow reformer Francis Burdett (sitting on cart and waving his hat) at the 1806 Middlesex election. Click on image to enlarge.