Across the literary pages

David Blackburn

Monday, 6th February 2012

Tomorrow is the bi-centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, and Fleet Street’s literary editors devoted much of their weekend pages to man who called himself ‘the Inimitable’.

Penguin has run a poll on the nation’s favourite Dickens character; the Guardian reports that the winner is Ebenezer Scrooge, who saw off the likes of Pip, Fagin, Sydney Carton and Miss Havisham. Scrooge’s story is one of redemption. I can’t improve on the Spectator’s original review of A Christmas Carol, which said:

‘In short, the grasping, grudging money-muck, is transformed into a merry-faced, open-handed, warm-hearted old fellow.’

You might have expected one of Dickens’s arch-villains to top a public poll — Fagin or Sikes, Steerforth or Uriah Heep, Tulkinghorn, even Gradgrind. So Scrooge’s victory is rather heartening. God bless us, every one — as Tiny Tim would have said.

Meanwhile, Claire Tomalin (Dickens’s biographer) has fired a salvo at 'dreadful television'. She said:

'Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity.'

Tomalin is right, in a broad sense; but the implication that TV is a purely negative distraction is unfair. She has overlooked the impact that episodic TV adaptations have on sales of Dickens’ episodic novels. The recent series of Great Expectations and the Mystery of Edwin Drood were of varying quality, but audiences were fairly strong: Great Expectations won 6.6 million viewers, while the comparatively obscure Drood was watched by 3 million. Sales of all of Dickens’ books have spiked in consequence, according to publishers. 

The most amusing Dickens-related story of the moment was published in the Times on Friday (£). A ‘happy hooker’ wrote an article in the Times in 1858 complaining about a campaign to save ‘fallen women’, run by Dickens and his philanthropist friend, the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts. The woman wrote,

'What if I am a prostitute? What business has society to abuse me? . . . If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcase?' 

She went on to describe how British prostitutes were being replaced by immigrants, largely from France. Prostitution, she concluded, would not be eradicated by do-gooding alone. Plus ça change…

Public and private sex in Victorian England is a topic of The Origins of Sex by Oxford don Faramerz Dabhoiwala, which argues that there was a sexual liberation during the Enlightenment. The book has divided opinion. Germaine Greer was absolutely scathing in the Guardian, while the historian Ian Kelly praised (£) Dabhoiwala’s ‘masterful debut’. If those two reviews have left you none the wiser, then you can call back here later in the week, when Dabhoiwala will be writing about the political implications of the ‘first sexual revolution’, and the historian Daisy Dunn will be reviewing the book.

Finally, the protests against library closures continue. Julian Barnes has added an extra scene to his 1998 satire England, England in which he imagines an England without libraries. In fact, it’s an England without much of anything in particular. If you were expecting Orwellian drama or Burgess’s dystopia from Barnes, then think again. His vision of the future sounds like a grey afternoon spent watching telly in Surbiton. I hope I never live to see it. You can read it here.

Blog Tags: Across the literary pages , Charles Dickens , Fiction , Libraries , Sexuality , Television