← Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
What Matters in Jane Austen & Charles Dickens? : with John Mullan
00:41:04
Loading summary
Transcript61 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome to Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire, a series that digs deep into the life and works of one of the greatest novelists of all time. Hi, everyone. Since 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, which was remarkably in the year of our Lord 1775, meaning there's already a connection to Austen and the historic beginnings of A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge. Anyway, today I thought it would be fun to have a conversation about the two greatest 19th century British authors, Jane Austen and, of course, Charles Dickens, to examine their combined genius and daring, and how their unique prose styles and characterisation remain an inspiration to both readers and writers today all over the world. When I think of the two of them, I find myself standing at two opposite poles because they seem so unlike each other. For instance, the way they describe their characters. While Dickens launches a joyful cannonade of adjectives that tickle and prod the reader, Austin draws her bow and releases a few choice words that hit their mark with the invisible skill of Cupid. For my part, I never forget the impression left by either author in these two approaches. Whether it's the description of Pumblechook, who has a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes and sandy hair standing upright on his head so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked and had that moment come to. Or Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich. But of course, if Jane Austen's focus is seemingly microscopic, her truths are universally acknowledged. And if Dickens uses a wider telescopic sight, he is more than capable of switching to an internal lens. At this time of the year, I think of Dr. Redlaw in his study, replying to old William in Monosyllables. In Jane Austen's case, also, it seems to me that without her very human writing, it would be much harder to perceive the daily lives of people that weren't marching across the continent in uniform or fighting great battles at sea. And if you want to see her at perhaps her most Dickensian, I can't recommend enough her random and ridiculous flights of fancy that are found in her teenage writings. Returning to the series today to shed light on the tricks, devices and styles of these two writers in is the inimitable Professor John Mullen, author of what Matters in Jane Austen, which has just been reissued in a new 250th birthday edition, and the Artful Dickens, both published by Bloomsbury Press. And in case you haven't heard our previous conversation on Great Expectations, I thoroughly recommend you scroll back to Episode Five of this series. John, hello. Welcome back to Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire. It's fantastic to have you with us again.
- [03:13]
B
Well, thanks very much. It's a delight to be with you again.
- [03:16]
A
We're here today because it's the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth and your book what Matters in Jane Austen, which I have here, is being reissued. And so I thought it was an ideal excuse to bring you back and not only talk about Jane Austen, but see if we can also talk about Dickens and your book, the artful Dickens as well, and how mind bending that experience will be.
- [03:38]
B
I don't know, how are we going to connect them? How are we going to connect the two of you?
- [03:42]
A
That's, it's interesting. First thing that springs mind, they both wrote under pseudonyms, not for the same amount of time. Neither of them went to university and I think they both have what you describe. They, they have the admiration, but they also suffer under a bit of condescension from people as well.
- [03:58]
B
Yes, well, perhaps so. I mean, I think the thing you mention about education is probably something they genuinely do have in common. I mean, it's not just that neither of them went to university. Of course, you know, until the end of the 19th century, no women in Britain went to university, but actually neither of them had anything in the way of what you or I might think of as an education at all. I mean, they had something like three and a half years schooling between them and that is likely to have been of quite a rudimentary nature. Indeed. Dickens was sort of very funny and scornful of his much awaited experience of education. You know, he was desperate to go to school and then eventually after his father got out of the debtors prison, he was allowed to go to Wellington Road Academy, where He went for two years, almost two years. And he said that Mr. Jones, the headmaster there was quite the most ignorant man it has ever been my pleasure to encounter. So he kind of felt he got much out of it. And Jane Austen, you know, went to school in reading for what, a year and a half or something and got everything that she got from books from her father's library, I think, and from the local circulating library and everything in the way of education, mostly from her father, I think, but also perhaps a bit from her brothers and perhaps she was taught a bit with them sometimes. So they were in a way liberated in similar ways to do whatever they wanted. To do whatever they wanted with the English language is what I mean. And for both of them, you can sort of see that not having been told how to write in a sense was an advantage for both of them.
- [05:57]
A
I can't imagine what they would gain from studying and if anything it might constrain them as writers.
- [06:03]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's a larger thing about the history of the novel actually, certainly in this country that there's a generalization which actually of course isn't true. It has exceptions. But you can say until the early 20th century all great poets went to Oxford and Cambridge or Cambridge. All great novelists didn't. And there are one or two exceptions, but surprisingly not very many. It is actually quite difficult to name a great male poet who did not go to Oxford of Cambridge before the 20th century. I mean, there are one or two. Keats is the obvious example, Blake another, but, but you know, very many did. And you know, all those other romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, they all went to Oxford and Cambridge. And, and similarly with novelists, it's not just Austen and Dickens, is it? You know, it's lots of other great novelists, lots of them were women, but even men, I don't know. Thomas Hardy, another great example, didn't have that privileged education which could produce poetry. And the novel's always been, I think, this capacious and permissive type of literature which allows jumped up nobodies to contribute to it.
- [07:29]
A
One idea that I had, John, was whether or not it was possible to think of Jane Austen perhaps as a mistress of understatement, as opposed to Dickens as a master of overstatement. Is there anything in that or is that too.
- [07:40]
B
Yes, I think I, I think there is something in that. I think that their, their virtues as writers are almost the opposite of, I mean, they're almost opposites. And Dickens is the novelist of excess, hyperbole, monstrosity, excess both in how he describes things and people, but also in terms of the kind of bulk and inclusiveness of the novels themselves. And Jane Austen the opposite. She's the absolute master or mistress, have it as you will, of exactitude, precision, everything honed down. Nothing is surplus to requirements. And those are very different kinds of pleasures that the two writers provide. And equally pioneering, an original, but in totally different ways. I mean, such a pity that we don't know if Dickens ever read Jane Austen and there's no particular evidence that he did. We know he owned a copy of her complete works, but I'm afraid that's because very typically when he made it with his second or third novels and he, he rented this big house In.
- [09:12]
A
In.
- [09:12]
B
In Doughty street in London, and he wanted a library. So he literally just bought up Bentley's complete English novels, which is sort of two or 300 volumes, and that would have been. That included Jane Austen. So it's a bit like a sort of golf club. You know, they buy up these books and put them on the wall of the clubhouse to make it look like a literary space. And. And that's what he did. But. But the one time that his friend John Forster said to him in a letter that Flora Finching, character in Little Dorrit, very garrulous character, might owe something to Ms. Bates in Emma. And Dickens said, absolutely not.
- [09:57]
A
Right.
- [09:57]
B
But he said it in such a way as to not indicate whether he'd even read Emma or not. So we don't know whether he was saying, no, I read Emma, but I wasn't imitating it, or, no, I can't have been imitating it because I never read it. So we just don't know.
- [10:12]
A
Sadly, that's so interesting, because Ms. Bates comes across so Dickensian, doesn't she?
- [10:17]
B
Ah, she does. She is. She is. She is wonderful. And. And, you know, it is. You can do a wonderful comparison between these two women who have other things in common. Of course, they're both, as it were. Well, one's a widow and one is a spinster, but they're both ladies who are sort of getting on a bit and who are sort of anxious to please and sort of hungry for company, but as a result make themselves, you know, almost impossible, almost unconversable with. So it would be. It would be terrific if we knew that Dickens had followed Austen's lead, but we don't. I think the difference is, though, and again, it's a very, you know, it tells, I suppose, rather in Jane Austen's favor. Whereas Flora Finching's character and her monologues are really entertaining. Ms. Bates's monologues actually contain lots of clues as to the plot of Emma, as to what's going on, but because nobody listens to her, nobody hears the clues. And that includes, I think, quite a lot of readers of the novel. So Dickens, when he introduced a character, he couldn't resist giving that character a voice, you know, giving them an extraordinary way of talking, because most of his characters exist because of their extraordinary ways of talking. Jane Austen's characters, at least by the time of her, you know, once she's writing her third and fourth novels, everything they say is also woven into the plot of the novel. There's nothing that's just there to make us laugh. Because, you know, Dickens was writing installment fiction and Jane Austen not. And writing novels in installments is a completely different skill, I think.
- [12:19]
A
Yes, you will know this, of course, but I've definitely found, obviously, Dickens pays from rereading him. But I've had so much pleasure in rereading Emma because the neatness of her writing and the little simple phrase where Mr. Elton, I think, is mentioned for the first time, and she says, Mr. Elson, a young man living alone without liking it when you know. When you know everything that's coming. I found that so, so funny. But at the same time, it would be tantalizing to see how Dickens would write Elton as a kind of dick swiveller.
- [12:50]
B
Yes. Living alone without liking it. And of course, there's, as with every Jane Austen sentence, is sort of loaded with stuff, isn't it? And. And the fact that they're simply worded doesn't mean they're any less loaded. And I mean, it's funny when you know what's coming, of course. But also, think of the most famous Jane Austen sentence, probably. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And in want there, you know, means, I think, what that sentence about Mr. Elton also means, that in the world of Jane Austen, if a man, you know, wants to have a sex life, he's got to get married, you know, living alone without liking it also delicately means that too, I think, that he wants female company sensually as well as socially.
- [13:58]
A
Yes, yes, absolutely. It's so interesting what you were saying a moment ago about Ms. Bates and about how people don't listen to her, but buried within it are such key points of plot, because I hadn't realized until reading your book what matters in Jane Austen. That detail of Ms. Bates mentioning how her and Jane talk about Frank Churchill.
- [14:17]
B
Yes, well, you know, you were talking about rereading Jane Austen and rereading Jane Austen and rereading Dickens are always, you know, like any great literature, great literature is what you reread rather than what you read, I think. But there's a special thing with Emma, I think, which is that reading it first time, when you read it for the first time, if you don't already know from a film, say, what's happening, what's going to happen, you are tricked because the novel is narrated almost entirely from the point of view of Emma, although in the third person, of course. And Emma is almost entirely wrong about almost everything, and you inhabit her wrongness as it were. You know, it's not like a George Eliot novel where there's a wise narrator there to reflect upon how the characters are behaving and where they're getting things wrong. And there's even a double bluff because of course the first volume of Emma depends upon. It's about Emma thinking that her numbskull protege Harriet Smith will be a suitable wife for Mr. Elton and that Mr. Elton will think so too. And the reader thinks he or she is really, really clever. Because we know almost from the off, I think, that Mr. Elter's not interested in Harriet, he's interested in Emma. While we're busy congratulating ourself on our discernment, Jane Austen smuggles in this other subplot, which is Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, which no first time reader I think can possibly get, even though the clues are there, you know, rather like a really good whodunit. When you find out at the end what's happened and you go back, Jane Austen's played completely fair and all the clues are there, including especially in the monologue soliloquies almost of Miss. Of Ms. Bates. So I mean, when she wrote Emma, I think she was sort of, dare I say it, the first novelist, I think in English anyway, deliberately to write a novel that had to be read twice, that you couldn't get it first time. And actually of course you have to read it many more times after that. But, but, but I think you make blunders, to use a word which is frequent in Emma. You make blunders inescapably on a first time reading, which you then need a second reading to kind of correct.
- [17:11]
A
Yes. Hidden in plain sight, I feel also which I picked up from reading your book is the weather in Jane Austen. Now we're so ready for the weather in Dickens. We've got the fog that basically creates chancery in Bleak House, don't we? You know, and we have the snow settling and everything hushing down when little Nell's passing away. But there is, you say pathetic fallacy in Jane Austen as well.
- [17:35]
B
Yeah. I mean, the weather in Dickens is, is like as we were talking about earlier, it's extreme, isn't it? Often. And, and you mentioned Bleak House, which opens with a description of a November day, but it's hardly day at all in London. Implacable November weather. That's a sentence in Dickens. That's a sentence. No main verb, you know, no main verb for three paragraphs at the beginning of Bleak House. And I see if I can do this from memory as Much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. And it would not be wonderful to see a megalosaurus 40ft long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Hoven Hill. Bravo. Poetry, really, isn't it?
- [18:32]
A
Yeah, it's wonderful.
- [18:33]
B
And. But so extreme, you know, it's so muddy and wet and horrible in London that you would think that you're back in primeval. The primeval world of dinosaurs.
- [18:49]
A
Yes.
- [18:51]
B
It would not be wonderful. Extreme, you know. You know, as he says later on in the same description, as if the sun itself had given out. Yes, Those as ifs of Dickens are extraordinary. Now, you know, Jane Austen, the weather is as it really is, you might say, but it's no less important. And the plots of Jane Austen novels often turn on the weather and things that the weather does. And I think as a. As a woman, as a, you know, woman in the early 19th century, Jane Austen would have necessarily been particularly weather sensitive. And her letters are full of, you know, we've been inside for five days now because of the rain, because if you couldn't afford a covered carriage, which Jane Austen's. When she. When she was living in Chawton and writing her novels, she didn't have a carriage then. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't go out. So, you know, it's. And that's very important to some of the female characters in. In Austen. But even she eventually gets to, yes, what you've called a pathetic fallacy where the weather seems to reflect human actions, feelings, emotions. And it's the bit in Emma where Emma has just found out, to her horror, that Harriet Smith, her creation, really her frankentine monster she's become, Fancies Mr. Knightley and has reason to think that Mr. Knightley returns her affection. And Emma thinks, praise the Lord, it turns out to be, wrongly, that Harriet's going to get Mr. Knightley and then she's, you know, she's going to be deprived of him as a. As a companion, friend, jousting partner, and just be with her sort of dad playing backgammon forever. And it's July and it's raining and it says the weather added what it could of gloom. And that is the. That's the nearest Jane Austen ever gets to sort of a version of the weather, which, you know, you'll get in the work of her romantic poet contemporaries, where the weather is a sort of often turbulent projection of the human psyche. But that's the one time, and it feels like a really extreme Thing to say in the context of a Jane Austen novel, the weather added what it could have. Gloom is really arresting.
- [21:43]
A
Yeah.
- [21:43]
B
In the context of the kind of prose that she writes.
- [21:46]
A
Yes. Context must be everything for these sorts of things. And something. You mentioning the mud in Bleak House a moment ago, and there's a. There's a sort of a spasm of repetition from Dickens about the mud was at its muddiest at the mud. You know, I remember thinking, reading that, thinking, if I wrote that in an essay at school.
- [22:00]
B
Yes.
- [22:01]
A
My English teacher would have thrown it out the window. That use of repetition in Dickens is quite crazy as well, I think.
- [22:07]
B
Yes. I mean, that is. That is, again, a difference between them, that although Jane Austen's language, her syntax, some of her punctuation, and quite a bit of her vocabulary does belong to another age, you know, it is 200 years ago at the same time, a lot of. Most of the time, she writes what I think we would recognize as really elegant, correct prose. And Dickens, not so much. Dickens disobeys every rule, you know, and. And he doesn't. He doesn't do it by mistake. He does it with delight and gusto and all those rules like, don't use the word very any more than you absolutely have to. Don't use the word and more than twice in a sentence, you know, don't repeat yourself. Don't use cliches. You know, I mean, Dickens loves cliches, and he recognizes that cliches are in some ways the. The frozen poetry of the English language. And I think many of your listeners will. Will probably know how A Christmas Carol, perhaps his most widely read work, certainly his most frequently adapted work, begins. It's got my favorite colon in English literature. Yeah, Marley was dead colon to begin with. And he's going to come back to life, of course. And then he says in the third sentence, dead as a doornail. And then he starts saying, although why are doornails should be thought to be particularly. And then here's a whole paragraph about ruminating upon this odd figure of speech. Dead as a doornail. Wouldn't it be better to say dead as a coffin nail? And as if the richness of the idiom has diverted the narrator for quite a while from the business of telling his story. And when you read that, and then it gets to the end of the paragraph and he says something like. So I say it again emphatically, Marley was dead as a doornail.
- [24:29]
A
Yes.
- [24:31]
B
And it's marvellous, isn't it? And it makes you realize as often bits of Dickens, which employ which riff, I suppose we would say now on cliches, but make you realize that we love cliches. We love them if we can bring them back to life. And you know, Mr. Pecksniff, who looks as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and you think, yes, butter. Butter melted. Somebody must have coined that once. And isn't it a brilliant confection?
- [25:06]
A
Yeah, absolutely. The talk of weather a moment ago leads us possibly onto what you identify as the danger or the excitement or the thrill of the sea, certainly in Jane Austen. And I have to say, from my own experience going to Lyme, when I saw the cob. The cob is potentially lethal. Until I'd seen it in a storm, I hadn't really understood that moment with Louisa Musgrove injuring herself, that it's not something a bit silly.
- [25:34]
B
Yes, yes. Well, the sea, of course. As a matter of fact, I think, you know, a matter of social history, probably when you went to the seaside in Jane Austen's day, rather I think, as I think this is true now, and it certainly was true in my childhood in Britain, the rules were loosened. The rules about how you have to behave, what you have to wear, you know, how proper you have to be. And I think most people still understand how going to the seaside might involve a sort of loosening of restraints. And the point of social history is not the important one. The point is that in Jane Austen novels, things happen by when people go to the seaside. That couldn't happen otherwise. So, of course, Lydia in Pride and Prejudice elopes with Wickham when she goes to Brighton, and Brighton, terribly sinful place, always. And of course, she's not supervised by her parents. Her family aren't there. She's got a chaperone who's her friend, Mrs. Forster, who's described as a very young wife. So she's probably only 18 herself. And Lydia's often away, and that's what Brighton's like. And when Wickham wants to seduce Georgiana Darcy, Mr. Darcy's sister, he gets her ex governess, Mrs. Young, to take her to Ramsgate. Because if she's in Ramsgate by the sea, she's sort of available.
- [27:15]
A
Yes.
- [27:15]
B
And people go on the honeymoon. You know, it's a. It's. There's an association between the sea and sex. You know, people go on their honeymoon. Yeah, to the seaside. In Sense and Sensibility, Lucy Steele, when she marries Robert Ferrars, they go off to Dawlish. And in Mansfield park, when Maria Bertram marries the sort of utterly wooden Mr. Rushworth. They go to Brighton for their honeymoon and she takes her sister with her, her sister Julia, because the thought of being on her own with Mr. Rushworth is too grim for words. And. Yes. Then on the other hand, in Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion, the sea and being by the sea is what revivifies Anne Elliot and, you know, her first burst of sea air. She's walking back with Captain Wentworth and the rest of the party to the hotel, the inn where they're staying, and they pass this unidentified man who turns out to be Mr. Elliot, and he looks at Anne with evident admiration because she's all sort of juiced up by the sea air and she's become. She's regained her. Her bloom. And Captain Wentworth notices this and it's a. It's one of the sort of steps in his reborn interest in her and indeed his jealousy of. Of Mr. Elliot. So, yeah, the sea. Sea air does incredible things, it seems, to characters in Jane Austen's novels. In Dickens, of course, the sea is much more like the place where you risk drowning. That's another story. I mean, Dickens obsessed with drowning, I think.
- [29:01]
A
Yeah. And Steerforth at the end of David Copperfield. Yeah, yeah. And you mentioning Wickham a moment ago, I wondered, John, whether Wickham is really the only name that Jane Austen has given a character that in a Dickensian way, might tell us something about the villainousness of a character, for example, or. Because it does seem. He does seem to stand out, because I don't. You don't read anything from Mr. Collins, do you, until you know him?
- [29:26]
B
No.
- [29:26]
A
There's nothing in there to tell you what he is like or what you.
- [29:29]
B
Would expect to be like. Yes. Oh, it's so interesting to compare the names of characters in Dickens to the names of characters in Austin, because I would say that for both novelists, the names are very important, very carefully chosen, and do often tell you something, but not in the same way, you know. So in Dickens, it's no accident that there are more eponyms, as they're called. That's words derived from names from Dickens novels than from the works of any other writer. So the most famous example, I suppose, is Scrooge, and it's difficult to believe he ever. He did actually invent that, you know, but that hasn't always been a word lying around. But it hasn't that he did invent Scrooge Fagin, The Artful Dodger, McCorber, all these fantastic names which sometimes I think, you know, are so directly Indicative of the character that they become absurd. You know, there's a character in hard times called mcchokum Child, but more often they have a kind of poetry to them, you know, Scrooge. What's that? Screw, Gouge.
- [30:53]
A
Scourge.
- [30:54]
B
Yes, Scourge. It's somehow, you know, but. Or Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. It's on the edge of literalism, but only on the edge. There's murder there, there's stoniness there. And Dickens, if you look at his notes which survived to his novels, he played around, experimented a great deal with names. Jane Austen, her names are not so directly indicative. She would never have a Murdstone. Of course not. But still, they're important. You know, when you find out that the shark, like Mrs. Clay in Persuasion is called Penelope, you know, or that Mrs. Elton is called Augusta, I mean, those. It's harder to put your finger on it. But you know that the pretentiousness of both those names is telling you something about the vulgarity and perhaps untrustworthiness of the character.
- [32:04]
A
There's something else that you point out that I've not detected before is just not only the names of the characters in Austen, but also the way characters address each other and how important that is and how telling that is.
- [32:17]
B
Yes.
- [32:18]
A
Especially with Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot, for example.
- [32:21]
B
Yes. I mean, in Austin, even if people have what we might think of as ordinary or even colorless names, the power of the name comes from who often who's allowed and who's not allowed to use it. So, you know, we've been talking about. We mentioned Mrs. Elton's name, Augusta Harriet Smith, who of course, thought that she was gonna marry Mr. Elton because she stupidly believed that Emma. Believed Emma. When she told her this is made to report about Mr. Elton, he calls her Augusta. How charming. Because even a man calling his wife by her first name is unusual actually in that world. Or it's unusual in company. You know, think of Mr. And Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, that they. We never find out what their first names are because they call each other Mr. And Mrs. Bennet. And as you, as you might have found out from my book, there's only one married woman in all of Jane Austen who calls her husband by his first name. Quiz question for your listeners. Well, who that is?
- [33:41]
A
Married. Married. That throws it off. Because I was gonna say about Captain Wentworth's journey that you pointed out from madam, when he first sees her after the absence, to being overheard referring to.
- [33:50]
B
Her as a man. Well, he's He's. It's not that. It's. It's the same novel. Mary Musgrove calls her husband Charles and Charles, and he calls her Mary. And I think it's. It's offered us as a rather modern thing to do. You know, it's the equivalent of children in their. In the 1960s starting to call their parents by their first names. And. But of course, the irony is that when he calls her Mary, it's always to contradict her, and when she calls him Charles, it's always to tell him he's wrong about something. So there they are, perfect modern couple. But yes, in. In the same novel, there's an extraordinary moment after Louisa's fall from the cob when Anne hears Captain Wentworth use her first name. And of course, he must have used that name during the brief, very happy engagement they had. He must have used it all the time. But suddenly, in the sort of confusion and the. And the horror of this event, because he sort of thinks that she might be dead, he'll say, he says, anne. No one so proper as an. To deal with this. Yeah, and that's a kind of. She can't help but notice, because the power of your first. You know, incredible power in Sense of sensibility. Margaret Eleanor, Marianne's sister, reports the fact that Willoughby calls Marianne by her first name, and that is taken as evidence that they're engaged, you know, because you wouldn't, you know, Mr. Darcy does not call Elizabeth by her first name until she's finally accepted his proposal. Only then does he say, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth, and it would be impertinent to use her first name until that kind of intimacy is established. So, you know, there's the power attaching to names and how you name people. And Mrs. Elton calls Mr. Knightley Knightley, and that's regarded as absolutely unacceptable by Emma because it betokens a kind of intimacy that she hasn't earned. And the naming conventions are very powerful in Jane Austen's novels, or used very powerfully.
- [36:29]
A
Yes. Well, John, I want to thank you so much again for coming back. As it's approaching Christmas, I just had a quick question because I understand from our previous interview that part of your Christmas ritual is often to read aloud Pip's Christmas Dinner, that episode from Great Expectations. And I have to say, for me, my favourite bit of Dickens, the bit makes me laugh out loud more than any, is the whooping cough dance. I saw the miserable creature finger his glass, playfully take it up, smile, throw his head back and drink the brandy off instantly afterwards. The company was seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping cough dance, and rushing out at the door. He then became visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces and apparently out of his mind.
- [37:25]
B
Well, the description of the. Of the Christmas dinner early in Great Expectations, which, of course, Pip's looking back and he's describing himself in a state of terror because he's taken the food and the drink from the larder to give to Magwitch, the criminal, the convict, and he's in terror of it being his theft being discovered. And yet it's absolutely hilarious, these appalling. Guess that Mrs. Jo has invited Pumblechook and Wapsel. And. And that's. In sum, that's what Dickens does so brilliantly, I think, so uniquely terror and hilarity together, not alternating, but actually almost in the same sentence. And nobody, I think, has ever managed to do fear and comedy combined so brilliantly.
- [38:21]
A
Yes. Because I mentioned, you know, reading the artful Dickens, you talk quite a bit of detail about Jaggers boots and how they creak as if.
- [38:30]
B
As if they're laughing. Yeah.
- [38:31]
A
And that does nothing to undermine his threat or seriousness or. You know, it reminds me, the only other time I can think of seeing it later on is in Life Of PI, where you've got this tiger in the boat with this poor figure, and there are a couple of moments where the tiger is described as looking a bit ridiculous, the way it's lounging on the boat. Yeah, well, but it doesn't take away the threat. But I don't. You don't see it very often, though, do you, as a thing?
- [38:54]
B
Yeah, no, it's a special thing. And, of course, A Christmas Carol is a very good example. Is it one of the great ghost stories? But it's also very funny. But it is frightening, and Mr. Jaggers is very frightening. Mr. Jaggers never laughed, but he wore great, bright, creaking boots. And in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes calls the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. And it's great, isn't it? He sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if he's doing it deliberately, as if it's a trick of his. But actually, it's all, of course, in the head of Pip, who always thinks he's being got at and laughed at, and made mock of. He's quite a paranoid narrator, actually, and.
- [39:57]
A
So.
- [39:59]
B
It is, literally speaking, his imagination. But Mr. Jaggers is so scary and so clever, but it seems entirely plausible to think for a moment, at least, that he knows exactly what effect these boots are making.
- [40:17]
A
Yes, well, John, thank you so much. And I've posted links in the description for listeners that want to buy the latest edition of what Matters in Jane Austen, and of course, the artful Dickens, because they both will fill up Christmas stockings most pleasingly. And all I can say, John, is well, thank you ever so much again. It's been a pleasure, as always.
- [40:36]
B
Pleasure.
- [40:37]
A
Bye for now. Thank you for listening to Charles Dickens, A Brain on Fire. If you're enjoying these episodes and would like to make a small donation towards the costs of producing them, please follow the link at the bottom of the description and you can make a donation there. Every coffee you buy makes a huge difference. Thank you ever so much and see you next time.