Classics Challenge Completed

I finished Romola by George Eliot this afternoon, which means I completed my Classics Challenge for 2012.

To recap, here are the books that constituted my challenge and my links to their reviews:

Silas Marner - George Eliot

This was my second time reading this book, and I loved it and appreciated it so much more the second time through.  A truly lovely tale of how love can redeem a lost soul.

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
Overall disappointing, but it was an early work of Steinbeck's and prefigured my favorite, Cannery Row, in several significant ways.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes - Robert Louis Stevenson
An interesting travel memoir, and another early work by a classic writer.  Walking memoirs evolved into one of my reading themes this year, and so this book fit into both classics and walking.

Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
I did end up liking Barchester Towers more than The Warden, the first in the series, which I didn't dislike but I found the discussion of church politics in mid-19th century England to be a bit mind-numbing.  I thought the narrative voice to be calmer and less intrusive than in The Warden also.  Also, I became acquainted with two marvelously drawn characters, Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope.

Romola - George Eliot
Wow, this book has been a roller-coaster.  I thought I would loathe it based on the first few chapters, but then it got interesting and readable.  Halfway through, I was wondering why it was titled Romola as it really seemed more about Romola's husband, Tito, but then the focus shifted and I came to understand why it was titled as it was.  Romola is definitely cut from the same cloth as Dorothea Brooke, from Eliot's Middlemarch, one of my all-time favorite heroines, but in the end I found her a bit too saintly to be a really interesting character. Tito, on the other hand, was fascinating.  I'm now listening to a Great Courses lecture series on the Italian Renaissance to help me understand what was going on in the novel!

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
After a long hiatus from Dickens, an estrangement really, I decided to make up with the great egotist and read a book whose mini-series I have long wanted to watch. I enjoyed the book and mini-series very much, and was thrilled to discover the Little Dorrit and her family visited Venice, which happened to be another of my reading threads for 2012.

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
In my opinion, one of the greatest American novels ever written.  I came to it prejudiced against it, expecting it to be cloying, pedantic, and self-righteous. It was none of those, and really helped me understand the forces that led to the American Civil War, which happens to be another reading thread for 2012.  If you haven't read this wonderful book, I urge you to do so.  Should be on every high school reading list along with To Kill a Mockingbird.

My thanks to Katherine Cox for hosting this Classics Challenge and providing such wonderful monthly prompts.  I really enjoyed reading everyone else's classics reviews, and I look forward to another year of great classics reading and rereading.  Working on my 2013 list now!

Little Dorrit: setting...Classics Challenge March

The novels of Charles Dickens are said to have created the image of Victorian London in the modern mind. Many say that Dickens' London is as much a character in his stories as any of the other fantastic, vividly portrayed characters--he wraps it in fog, he creeps along its maze of streets and alleys, he literally knows it as well as the back of his hand, from the grime under the fingernails to the rings and adornments that set it off to advantage.

While this is true in Little Dorrit as well, the setting of the story is one with the theme, prison. Every setting in the book so far, and I'm about three-quarters done now, is some type of prison, literally or figuratively. The story begins in a prison in Marseilles, moves to the Marshalsea prison in London, and depicts various forms of imprisonment that the characters somehow manage to impose upon themselves, whether that be a wheelchair, poverty, wealth, red tape, the past, idealized love, fear, or fantasy, to name but a few that Dickens explores. I'm still waiting to see if and how Dickens shows escape from imprisonment--my guess is that if he sees freedom as a real possibility for any of his characters it won't be in the form of a windfall from a dead relative.

Here's a passage from chapter VIII, Book the Second, "Mostly, Prunes and Prism," in which Dickens articulates the convergence of setting and theme, when he describes the plight of the traveller:

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture- galleries, much in the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again to-morrow or next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom. They were envied when they went away by people left behind, feigning not to want to go: and that again was the Marshalsea habit invariably. A certain set of words and phrases, as much belonging to tourists as the College and the Snuggery belonged to the jail, was always in their mouths. They had precisely the same incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have; they rather deteriorated one another, as the prisoners used to do; and they wore untidy dresses, and fell into a slouching way of life: still, always like the people in the Marshalsea.

Thematic setting aside, I was surprised to find the Dorrit family, et al, venturing out of London and England to the degree they did. In fact, part two of the book could well be called "Little Dorrit Goes on a Grand Tour." I was thrilled to find her navigating the Great St. Bernand Pass in Switzerland, and then in Venice and Rome.

For me, the image that will forever remain as my favorite from the book is Little Dorrit in Venice, chapter III of Book the Second, "On the Road"...

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water, and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, sat down to muse...

Sometimes she would step into one of the gondolas that were always kept in waiting, moored to painted posts at the door—when she could escape from the attendance of that oppressive maid, who was her mistress, and a very hard one—and would be taken all over the strange city. Social people in other gondolas began to ask each other who the little solitary girl was whom they passed, sitting in her boat with folded hands, looking so pensively and wonderingly about her. Never thinking that it would be worth anybody's while to notice her or her doings, Little Dorrit, in her quiet, scared, lost manner, went about the city none the less.

I'm eagerly looking forward to the mini-series of Little Dorrit, and I hope, hope, hope that this scene is included.

This post is part of The Classics Challenge, hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn. Stop by her blog to find out what other Challenge participants thought about the settings they read about in March.

Classics Challenge: Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I'm only on page 82 (just finished chapter 6) of Little Dorrit, and I've only just met the title character of the book, and so I cannot go with the obvious selection for character analysis in this month's Classics Challenge prompt. Katherine of November's Autumn, host of the Classics Challenge, challenged participants in February to write a blog post about a character we find interesting.

At this stage in the novel, having but 8% of the novel read (by my Goodreads calculator), I'm going to have to go with Affery Flintwinch. She is introduced first in chapter 3 as a "cracked voice" coming "out of the dimness" to greet Arthur Clennam when he has returned home and is meeting with his mother for the first time in years. Affery is an old woman and an old servant of the family--she is described as a "tall hard-favored sinewy old woman, who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but who retreats in fear from her husband, a "little keen-eyed crab-like old man."

She tells Arthur that her husband and Mrs. Clennam decided she should marry him because it wouldn't be appropriate for the two to remain as the only servants to a bedridden woman if they weren't married. So she did--no courting, not much of a wedding, and a marriage of convenience to a man she fears. Poor Affery.

The next chapter recounts a scene in which she is sleeping, hears a noise and gets up to investigate, and sees her husband talking with someone in a stealthy way. When Mr. Flintwinch sees that his wife has seen him, he goes after her, choking her and telling her that what she saw was a dream. She is so afraid of him that she doesn't question his assessment of the situation.

I chose Affery because I anticipate her being a literary Fool--that is, a character who speaks the truth and provides a moral compass for the reader and other characters if they are wise enough to see and hear the wisdom in her ramblings. Miss Bates in Austen's Emma is such a Fool, and I'm wondering if Affery is another such character. Dickens used her to show the reader that Mr. Flintwinch is involved in some shady dealings and he will willingly resort to violence to quiet anyone whom he sees as a threat--but he does this in an oblique way. The narrator doesn't spell this out, but describes Affery's experience as a "dream."

According to my Penguin Classics Notes, Affery is an "old Puritan name, common in Kent. Variants include Aphra, Aphora, Afra, and Afferie. Dickens may have been alerted to the name by a tombstone in a churchyard at Folkestone, where he wrote the main part of Little Dorrit: 'To the Memory of Affery Jeffrey (a female)'."

Here's a photo of Affery from the BBC adaptation that I am very eager to see, as soon as I finish the book. I'm not sure that this woman could have "enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but she seems frightened enough, which is her main character trait at this point in the story.

Why BBC costume drama needs to go beyond bodices

Here's a great article from which I shamelessly stole today's post title.

I can't watch Little Dorrit because I haven't read the book yet, and I have to read Hard Times before I read any other Dickens, but maybe by the time the new series makes it to DVD I will have earned the ability to watch it...by my rules.

I loved the way the article opened with an invocation of Bleak House and all that fog.

I enjoyed the description of Andrew Davies as "...that tireless workhorse of classic adaptation," and for sheer fun I give 10 stars to the description of the new Little Dorrit: "This heritage drama plumbs unprecedented depths. One thick slice of histrionic ham drops on another, wedged between turgid doorstops of unfathomable plot. Costumed camp addles the senses of its twee antiquarian followers. This reactionary rabble would nominate the cast and crew of Emmerdale for Baftas if only they snuck in some crinolines, bustles and the odd steam-engine.

I must confess, though, I was perplexed by this bit in which the author suggests that there are other authors who could provide plots for the BBC:
"From romantic Scott and satirical Peacock to grimy Gissing and sensual George Moore, many other likely fictions from the 19th century alone lie waiting for Auntie's kiss."

Who are Peacock, Gissing, and George Moore? I thought I knew Victorian authors to some degree. Must Google later.

At any rate, enjoy this fun article.