Armando's Tale of Charles Dickens

'This is Dickens World in Kent -

'a vast tourist attraction

'built to take visitors inside the novels of Charles Dickens.'

-Hello.

-Good afternoon. How are you?

-Good, thank you. Who are you?

-Pleased to meet you. Mr Micawber at your service, sir.

Are you Mr Micawber? Very good. And you are?

-'Ello, sir. I'm Nancy.

-Are you Nancy? Aren't you dead?

That's our famous Great Expectations boat ride.

-Great Expectations boat ride?

-Indeed.

OK. Have you got the Artful Dodgems? Have you got that?

Artful Dodgems?

May I come through?

-You may, sir.

-Fantastic, thank you very much, just get in here.

'But surely there's more to Dickens than this?

'More than just a logo attached to television costume dramas

'and West End shows about street urchins.'

It's so easy to label and package Charles Dickens,

to exhibit him as some sort of Victorian showman,

a one-off, a dazzling talent like Harry Houdini or Charlie Chaplin,

a superstar from the past.

I want to show that the work of Charles Dickens

isn't just quality entertainment for a long-dead audience.

Dickens's world of the imagination is as complex and as dark

and as sophisticated as any modern city,

and the characters he creates are as real

and as psychologically driven

as the inhabitants of any urban landscape today.

And that's why I believe that the true Dickensian world...

is our world.

'Dickens, the 19th-century novelist, speaks to us now.

'And I want to gauge his impact and relevance

'by talking not to literary critics and biographers but to his readers.'

'I'll meet those who Dickens makes laugh.'

"It was difficult to enjoy her society

"without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits."

So what he's basically saying is this woman stank of alcohol!

'The readers he stops in their tracks.'

The thing is, he has a very driving narrative.

He's got to get where he's going. But along the way something like that will just BOOM!

'And those who suggest that Dickensian characters are still living among us now.'

Some of it's timeless, yeah.

And you see it all the time. Not me, obviously...

No, me, definitely!

'Before the bestsellers of Dan Brown and JK Rowling,

'before the literary fireworks of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis,

'there was the spectacularly popular

'and critically applauded writing of Charles Dickens.

'Dickens was the complete writer.'

He wrote 15 novels, he invented 989 brand-new characters,

he edited newspapers and magazines.

He wrote speeches, plays, short stories, pamphlets, letters.

Sometimes he did all these things simultaneously.

Now, I haven't read all of these. I doubt many people have.

But I don't think we should be put off by the sheer volume of Dickens's output, or his reputation.

The great thing about him is that he had such a distinctive tone,

such a unique style that was recognisable

as he tackled the big issues -

crime, death, poverty, riches, guilt, fear.

And I think you can join him at any point.

Each novel to me feels like a continuation of all the rest.

Every character just one inhabitant in a virtual world created in his imagination.

So I think the best way to tackle Dickens is to choose your point...

and dive in!

"To resume the consideration of the curious question of refreshment..."

'Comedian Phill Jupitus didn't know any Dickens

'until he decided to perform a show at the Edinburgh Festival.

'There he would read out loud works he was seeing for the first time.'

"I turn my disconsolate eye on the refreshments that are to restore me.

"I find that I must either stuff into my delicate organisation

"a currant pin cushion which I know will swell

"into immeasurable dimensions when it's got there.

"Or I must extort from an iron-bound quarry with a fork,

"as if I were farming an inhospitable soil,

"some glutinous lumps of gristle and grease called pork pie."

I just found myself forgetting I was at a gig. And doing it live.

He'd give reign to the most inconsequential of thoughts.

He'd expand on ideas and they kind of build through the pieces.

You can almost sense his thought process as he writes.

Can I just take one which is, um... Mugby Junction.

Now not many people know Mugby Junction.

Mugby Junction's one of the latest...

It's not really a novel as such, is it?

No, it's just a story about a man who arrives at this train station, Mugby Junction,

which becomes a bit of a sort of allegory for where he's at in life.

"He spoke to himself. There was no-one else to speak to.

"Perhaps though, had there been anyone else to speak to,

"he would have preferred to speak to himself.

"Speaking to himself, he spoke to a man within five years of 50 either way,

"who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire.

"A man with many indications on him, of having been much alone."

Oooh!

And it's just...

You just stop, and it's just....

What's the fire thing, "like a decaying..."?

It was, "A man turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire."

A neglected fire!

He has a driving narrative in the pieces. Got to get where he's going.

Along the way, something like that will just...BOOM!

Stops you in your tracks. The other thing I find is

it's not flashy.

We have this image of Dickens with big, long sentences, very florid,

and it's not like that at all.

A lot of it is very simple,

and suddenly there's a phrase there that just...

-It's very difficult to go two pages without a phrase...

-Yes.

-Just giving you a little...

-Yeah.

I mean, emotionally, I felt...

cos when I read him, it was three years ago, I was 45...

I felt like an idiot for not having picked any up before.

Dickens was born in 1812.

By the time he was 30,

he was the most famous writer in the world.

By then, he'd made his name and his fortune

with the comic tale The Pickwick Papers,

and with Oliver Twist,

the rags to riches story of the orphan who asks for more.

He wrote his novels in monthly instalments,

keeping his massive audience hungry for each arresting plot development or extraordinary new character.

He delighted them with A Christmas Carol,

and in later novels such as Hard Times,

Little Dorrit and Bleak House,

he secured his reputation as a champion of social justice,

with his vivid and angry portraits of the condition of Britain.

But there's one novel that gives us the most tantalising insight

into the life of Dickens himself...

..and that's David Copperfield,

the book he described as his favourite child.

Dickens wrote,

"Of all my books, I like this the best."

David Copperfield is the most autobiographical of his novels -

it tells the story of a young boy going through a troubled childhood,

but on to become a successful writer.

Now I think the closeness of the subject

and the intimacy of the style

together shine a special light on the rest of his work.

'In the novel, David's childhood starts as a happy one.

'Though his father is dead, he's loved by his mother

'and cosseted by their maid, Peggotty.

'But we constantly see through the child's eyes

'as soon the world turns dark around him.'

I remember when I started reading David Copperfield for the very first time.

It was one of those books that,

as it says in the blurb, you cannot put down.

I was drawn into it and the reason was,

it has the most accurately sustained piece of writing

from the perspective of a child that I've ever come across.

Here's the start of Chapter Two, I Observe.

This is the very young David Copperfield

aged about what...two, three...

looking up at what's around him, trying to describe his surroundings,

his mother, and Peggotty, the family maid.

"The first objects", he says, "that assume a distinct presence before me

"as I look far back into the blank of my infancy,

"are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape,

"and Peggotty, with no shape at all

"And eyes so dark they seemed to darken

"the whole neighbourhood in her face."

That's that thing of children,

remembering things much larger than they were in reality.

"Eyes so dark

"that they seemed to darken the whole neighbourhood in her face,

"and cheeks and arms so hard and red

"that I wondered the birds didn't peck her in preference to apples."

Again, everything is very simple at this stage.

Dickens the great wordsmith, the literary showman,

is actually putting everything back into his box of tricks,

and shutting that box tight.

So everything is in monosyllables.

"Cheeks and arms so hard and red."

And then that little image,

the bird pecking at her cheeks in preference to apples.

Of course, that's an image a child would understand. The bird pecking.

He wouldn't have anything more sophisticated

to compare Peggotty's cheeks to.

'But David's idyll shatters as his mother remarries

'to a cold and heartless man called Mr Murdstone.

'And now David can only see harshness wherever he gazes.'

"I could not look at her,

"I could not look at him. I knew quite well

"that he was looking at us both.

"And I turned to the window and looked out there at some shrubs

"that were drooping their heads in the cold."

The young Copperfield is the camera in this picture,

and everything we're perceiving,

we're reading about, is done, as it's perceived, through his eyes.

"And I turned to the window..."

and that thing of childhood where as you grow up,

if you receive bad news,

if there's been a sudden dramatic moment,

you instantly recall the first image you saw at the time,

an image that, no matter how insignificant it appears,

still burns there in your heart with significance.

This whole process in these first few chapters of David Copperfield

is not just a fascinating story from the perspective of the little boy

but actually quite a modern, experimental exercise in language.

He's not like a serious novelist,

who would very consciously set out to impress us

with the stylistic mastery he has

over a description of child psychology.

Instead he wants to write himself out of the picture.

He doesn't want us to feel written at by an author.

Instead he wants us to be pulled in to the work,

and to watch it and observe it from the perspective of the little boy,

sitting low, on the floor, at the world around him.

'Dickens's lifelong sympathy with the way children think

'actually affected everything he wrote.'

The very first time I took my son to see a film at the cinema,

afterwards I asked him what he thought.

He said it was very good, just like a DVD you could only see once.

And it's that ability as a child to describe something

no way an adult would, that Dickens always carried around with him.

'Dickens wrote children's stories for adults.

'He stressed the power of the imagination,

'the power a child has in abundance,

'as a way of describing and reacting to

'the world he saw around us.

'Even as he matured as a writer, his novels read like fairy tales,

'of heroes growing up with wicked step-parents, running away,

'gaining vast fortunes, being lost and found.'

'In 1849 Dickens published the first instalment of David Copperfield.

'Like all his novels, it was released as a serial,

'issued in 19 monthly parts.

'Dickens was writing only weeks before his audience was reading him.'

'The original manuscript is housed

'in the National Art Library at London's Victoria and Albert Museum,

'and I looked to see if it betrayed any signs of the relentless pressure

'Dickens must have been under.'

Am I allowed to touch them?

Yes, please. Please do. Open it.

It starts off with part number three,

the first volume had the first two parts.

"Personal history and experience of David Copperfield.

"Chapter seven."

I'm seeing if I can read it.

"School began in earnest that day."

It is quite... This would go off to the printers?

-This would go to the printers.

-They could decipher this?

-Yes!

But look at this, this is a mess, isn't it?

This is in fact, extremely,

really neat...

-Really?

-..And clear.

You can tell that because the compositors,

when they set from these manuscripts were extremely accurate.

So he's writing these novels almost live, in a way.

People are watching him write, in that he doesn't quite know...

He has a rough idea where he wants to go,

but doesn't quite know how it's going to end.

He seems to have been fairly disciplined.

He had a copy date of the 20th of each month.

And he was normally two, three weeks in advance.

-Really?

-So he was relatively good at keeping up with...

The idea of being two weeks in advance of any writing deadline,

to me is completely alien, I have to say!

I don't want to read too much analysis into the handwriting

but I get the sense of a very, very restless, unsettled personality.

You know, having been a lifelong Dickens fan, to have this...

I am like a kid in a sweetie shop at the moment.

But a sweetie shop run by a guy who makes bloody good sweets.

'Dickens started his writing career first as a court reporter

'and then as a parliamentary sketch writer.

'He was trained to be fast, vivid and entertaining.

'So it's no surprise when he had his first piece of fiction published in 1833, when he was just 21,

'that it was in the form of a comic short story.

'And more, much more comedy, was to follow.'

As a kid I was two things - I was very bookish, you know,

I loved reading, and I was also into comedy, but I always regarded those two worlds as being quite separate.

Literature was serious, and for the funny stuff,

I spent all my money on comics and listening to great radio shows

like Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy.

And then I remember when I got hooked on Dickens, I picked up The Old Curiosity Shop, as you do,

and very early on, I came across this episode

where there's a great guy called Dick Swiveller

who has no money. And he's in a pub, and he's bought a meal.

And he says to the innkeeper he'll come round later that night

and pay for it, and writes something down in a book.

And his friend says to him,

"Are you just writing down a reminder to come back this evening?"

and Dick says, "Not exactly, Fred.

"I enter into this little book the names of the streets that I can't go down while the shops are open.

"This dinner today closes Long Acre.

"I bought a pair of boots in Great Queen Street last week

"and made that no thoroughfare too.

"There's only one avenue to the Strand left open now,

"and I shall have to stop up that tonight with a pair of gloves."

So what Dick Swiveller's doing is he's got a mental map of London

and he's just crossing out the streets he can't move down,

because he owes people money there.

And I was thinking, that's funny, but it reminds me of something,

it reminds me of a stand-up comedy routine or a sketch,

or that Charlie Chaplin scene where he's quite happily eating his own shoes

because he has no food left and no money to buy some.

And that for me was a great eye-opener about Dickens.

I think we're put off by this notion we have of Charles Dickens

as this great Victorian novelist, because it implies he's serious,

whereas in fact I think he's the finest comedian we've ever produced.

'By that I mean, much comedy today is still conditioned

'by the way Dickens wrote it in the 19th century,

'and comedy writers and performers today owe a huge debt to him.

'Other people who work in comedy think so too.'

There's this thing about Mrs Gamp.

Oh, Mrs Gamp who's the nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit.

This sentence where he goes,

"It was difficult to enjoy her society

"without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits."

So what he's basically saying is "This woman stank of alcohol".

The way he puts it, "It was difficult to enjoy her company!"

But Mrs Gamp, again, is kind of like a character from Psychoville,

she's this small, squat woman.

What you can do is, you can put a bottle of spirits on the side.

She says, "I may take a drink. Or I may not.

"It just depends on how I'll be disposed."

She'll drink the whole lot is what will happen.

I'm devoted to Pickwick Papers. And Mr Jingle.

He's a complete conman. A real con.

And he speaks very fast so nobody else can get a word in.

Bang-bang-bang, like a machine gun. He's a very funny character.

It's desperately dark, as well. Like...

It's a man talking about how a woman's head was knocked off

by the top of an arch, in front of her children and then he's going,

"She couldn't even eat a sandwich. She didn't have a head any more."

" 'Heads, heads, take care of your heads', cried a loquacious stranger

"as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach yard.

"Terrible place - dangerous work - other day - five children - mother - tall lady -

"eating sandwiches - forgot the arch - crash - knock - children looked round -

"mother's head off - sandwich in her hand -

"no mouth to put it in - head of a family off -

"shocking - shocking. Didn't keep a sharp look out enough, eh? Eh, sir? Eh?"

THEY LAUGH

That's Peston on about 17 espressos.

THEY LAUGH

Yes! That's spot on.

It's that sense of the rhythms of colloquialisms and the way people speak.

Because in reality, we don't finish our sentences and we all interrupt each other.

That's the performer in him.

There's a bit from Bleak House here with a little child roadsweeper.

"She says to me, she says, 'Are you the boy at the inquich?'

"I says 'Yes', she says to me, she says, 'You could show me all them places'. I says, 'Yes, I can',

"she says to me, 'Do it' and I done it, and she give me a sovereign and I hooked it.

"I hadn't much of the sovereign neither. I had to pay five bob down in old Tom Alone's

" 'fore they'd square it to give me change and then a young man thieved another fiver while I was asleep.

"Another boy thieved ninepence."

I'm half expecting you now to go "Am I bovvered?"

Exactly, yeah.

'Dickens's comedy still seems fresh,

'but it's the dark and serious nature of his themes

'that make his novels seem surprisingly modern.

'And there's no more dominant theme in those novels...than money.'

'In Dickens's world, heroes and villains are obsessed with money -

'how to get it, what to do with it,

'and above all, the terror of losing it.

'A huge fear of debt and poverty

'can be traced back to Dickens's own childhood.

'His father, John Dickens, was forever in debt,

'and at one point endured the public shame

'of being sent to debtors' prison.'

'Charles was taken out of school, and aged 12, was sent to work

'in a shoe polish warehouse to feed his family.

'The experience haunted him for the rest of his life.'

'When he came to write David Copperfield,

'Dickens poured many of these feelings

'into the serial debtor Mr Micawber.'

Now, Mr Micawber is such a brilliant character.

I think we have this image of him from TV adaptations

of being just a sort of gregarious, fat, rather optimistic chap who,

even though he has no money, is always talking about his expectation

that something is just around the corner,

something is going to turn up.

It's so different when you read the book.

There, it's a much more sophisticated, painful read,

because Micawber can start off by being very affectionate

and outgoing and full of high spirits,

and there's a genuine affection between him and Copperfield.

But within seconds, as soon as the realisation comes upon him

of the debt that he carries,

Micawber is reduced to being an almost childlike, self-pitying

little creature, railing about how he's doomed for the debtors' prison.

He starts making knife-cutting gestures across his throat

and talks about what a tragic figure he is.

And then he can pull himself together

and start singing songs and dancing the hornpipe.

It's a very realistic and affectionate,

and yet frustrated look at the twisted poison

that can be injected into someone's personality

by this awareness of debt.

It's so hard to read,

you almost have to put your fingers across your eyes as you read it.

This looks like Julius Caesar.

-That is Julius Caesar. That was the Leeds Playhouse.

-Right.

'For 63-year-old actor Ian Hurley,

'Dickens's portrait of Micawber has a special significance.

'When work dried up, Ian found himself in debt,

'owing the bank £40,000.'

Mr Micawber, you can see that when he has these highs and lows

and when someone has a debt problem, it really doesn't go...

It, it... You see how he's trying to escape from it.

Well, here's the passage which describes that sense of being up and down

that goes through Mr Micawber.

"It was nothing at all unusual for Mr Micawber to sob violently

"at the beginning of one of these Saturday night conversations

"and sing about Jack's delight being his lovely Nan towards the end of it.

"I've known him come home to supper with a flood of tears

"and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail

"and go to bed making a calculation of the expense

"of putting bow windows on the house in case anything turned up, which was his favourite expression."

It will give you a high and a low and can make you cry.

You can even be driving along in your car and you think about this and you cry. But to....

Why the high? Where does the high come from?

Well, the high is the telling yourself that it's OK.

Because of the presence of the worry of debt you will take highs from it

to remove the... Let's say to remove the depression of it.

And I think this is where the highs come and the crying and the emotion.

And he does great flourishes.

He suddenly... When he's trying to enjoy himself

he enjoys himself very, very noisily and energetically,

as if to show there's nothing wrong.

And that's very interesting.

To show there's nothing wrong, to show that it's OK.

"It's OK, yeah, fine, come and have another drink! It's fine."

And someone says to you, "You look a bit sad, you look a bit tense."

You say, "No, no, no, I'm fine, it's OK!"

And the other thing he does is sometimes pretend that he's paying stuff back,

but he'll know he's running up a debt

and with a great flourish he'll write an I-O-U.

I think that's wonderful. I think it's a wonderful idea.

I just wish I could write a few I-O-Us to the bank and say,

"Well, that's you paid!"

'Micawber is a brilliant creation on his own.

'But what Dickens also does is show how debt spreads like an infection,

'so that it extends its hold beyond Micawber

'on to anybody who he befriends.'

Like David Copperfield's friend Tommy Traddles

who sells a number of objects to the pawn shop to raise some money for Micawber.

And then one day Traddles decides there's one thing he really wants back from that pawn shop,

a little decorative pot given to him by his girlfriend.

'As the pawnbroker will only sell it back to Traddles

'at an inflated price, he begs Peggotty to buy it back for him.

'Leaving Traddles himself waiting anxiously around the corner.'

'At first Peggotty leaves empty-handed,

'but then the broker calls her back.'

'And finally she returns, triumphant.'

It's like a scene from a film, it's like a farce,

where money is reduced to something very small, very specific

and yet very, very meaningful.

'When Dickens wrote David Copperfield

'his public image was of a restless but nonetheless contented family man.'

'He'd been married to Catherine Dickens for 13 years

'and with their brood of eight children it seemed like they had a happy home.'

'Privately, though, Dickens developed misgivings about Catherine's suitability as a wife

'and there were quiet strains within the marriage.'

'In David Copperfield we can sense Dickens's own ambivalence towards his marriage

'in his portrayal of David's relationship with his wife, Dora.'

'Impulsive and immature, David is at first blind to the fact

'that Dora is wrong for him.'

'But wiser friends and family can see trouble coming from the start.'

Here's a scene with David and his aunt Betsey Trotwood,

and the loudest sound in this whole passage is of Betsy Trotwood biting her lip.

"So you fancy yourself in love, do you?"

"Fancy, Aunt?" I exclaimed as red as I could be.

"I adore her with my whole soul."

"Dora indeed!" returned my Aunt.

"And you mean to say the little thing is very fascinating, I suppose?"

"My dear Aunt, no-one could form the least idea what she is."

"Ah! And not silly?" said my aunt.

"Silly, Aunt?"

"Not light-headed?" "Light-headed, Aunt?"

I could only repeat this daring speculation.

"Well, well, I only ask. I don't depreciate her.

"Poor little couple. And so you think you were formed for one another

"and are to go through a party-supper-table kind of life,

"like two pretty pieces of confectionary?

"Do you, Trot?"

It's a difficult, uncomfortable read

as you go through this plotline in the book.

It's a daring, sophisticated, brutal analysis

of two young people committing nuptial suicide.

'It's almost as if Dickens was toying with the boundaries

'that separated his private life from public gaze.

'In 1859, he and Catherine had another child, a girl,

'and they called her...Dora.'

Meanwhile the fictional Dora was proving far, far too much

for the novel to bear.

The love story was staining the rest of the novel

with a mood of bitterness and guilt.

The marriage between Dora and David had to come to an end.

But in Victorian times it would have been improper for it to end

with divorce or even separation.

So Dickens has Dora fall ill

and quite suddenly and quite conveniently die.

Now, his daughter was born a week before Dora is killed in the novel

and at the time Dickens writes to his wife Catherine,

"I'm uncertain of my movements, for after another splitting day

"I still have Dora to kill.

"I mean the Copperfield Dora!"

SEAGULLS CAW

'This is Broadstairs on the Kent coast.'

'Dickens often brought his family here in the summer

'to escape from the crowds and heat of London.'

'The year he was finishing David Copperfield

'they stayed at Fort House, since renamed Bleak House.'

'It's occasionally open to the public

'but it's also home to Richard and Jackie Hilton.

'And they have a sometimes unorthodox take

'on the life of Charles Dickens.'

We're just going into the Charles Dickens dining room...

-Right.

-..which is where he used to, um...from all reports,

have a seven or eight-course breakfast.

That would finish me off, that would.

-I'd be in bed for an hour after.

-Yeah, me too.

And no doubt people come and ask you all sorts of questions.

Well, they do, yeah, but I don't know that much.

Only that he was married with seven children.

-Nine.

-Sorry, nine children.

THEY LAUGH

-But he had quite a few women on the side.

-Oh, did he now?

Well, I know about one. You reckon there were all sorts going on?

Yeah, for sure.

-So this would have been living quarters as well.

-Yeah.

-I mean, did you know much about Dickens before the house?

-Nothing at all.

And how do you feel now, six years on?

Do you feel there's this other presence around? This life that you've....

Well, you can hear soldiers sometimes.

-Hear soldiers?

-You can hear soldiers, Cos this was called Fort House

and we did contact Most Haunted

cos I thought it would be good for people to know.

-A Christmas Special!

-Yeah!

-And this is at night?

-At night. But the voices are in the daytime.

What voices? Where do these voices come from?

You hear a woman's voice, and she'll say, "Not again!" in a very posh voice.

Let's get out. Let's... This is extraordinary! I didn't know any of this.

-Where are we going? In here?

-This is Charles Dickens's bedroom.

-Uh-huh?

Um...

And I gather there's a cellar, someone was saying?

-Yes, that's right.

-And what did Dickens use the cellar for, then?

I think mainly probably some of his staff slept in it.

But I think he also used it for contraband.

-Contraband?

-Contraband, yeah.

When he died,

there were two 50-gallon drums - barrels, rather - of tobacco

and 2,000 bottles of brandy found in the cellar.

Oh, that's completely coloured my view of him

as being a respectable member of society!

Now, look at this.

This is where Dickens wrote.

This is where he finished David Copperfield.

His little airy nest, as he called it.

And it's about the size of a nest, it is quite small.

I'm surprised how small it is.

It's almost like he forced himself to sit down and write.

It's the Victorian equivalent of a writer

switching off his mobile phone and disconnecting the internet

to avoid all distractions here.

But here is where this whole room

forces you to look out towards the sea.

In David Copperfield, he describes towards the end of the novel,

a gargantuan storm scene that kills several major characters in the novel.

I won't reveal the names, that would spoil things.

And Dickens himself found these quite traumatic scenes,

not just in the storm, but as the novel reached its conclusion,

quite difficult to finish.

He says he was nearly "clean knocked over" by the writing of it.

At one point he says, "It defeated me."

In actual fact, those scenes were some of the most powerful scenes that Dickens had written to date.

And he did it here, at this desk.

Let's see if I can get some inspiration.

Maybe for my next link.

As I look out towards the sea, just drink it all in.

'Dickens's popularity rested not just on his characters and stories,

'but also on his satire.'

'His early works savage the Victorian governing classes'

'appalling treatment of its dispossessed.'

'And as he wrote more and more,

'he poured derision on ever vaster sections of society.'

'As Dickens grew more successful, he was welcomed into the British establishment,

'and the closer he looked at that establishment,'

the surer he was that it was rotten to the core.

And that's why, in the later novels,

it's this world that he wants to show us up close.

Welcome to Dickensopolis.

'Today, Dickens's satire still stings.

'In the novel Little Dorrit, he caricatures

'the way the country is run by "the Circumlocution Office." '

"The Circumlocution Office was the most important department under government.

"Its finger was in the largest public pie

"and in the smallest public tart.

"If another gunpowder plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match,

"nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament

"until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes,

"several sacks of official memoranda and a family vault full of

"ungrammatical correspondence on the part of the Circumlocution Office."

Dickens's description of bureaucracy run riot

really set the template

for any satirical take on government written ever since.

In this, we have the beginnings of Big Brother

in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four,

Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister

and even the obstructiveness and obtuseness

that Harry Potter meets from the Ministry of Magic.

'One of Dickens's favourite targets was the law.'

'The novel Bleak House is set against the background

'of a disputed inheritance and the infamous, long-running

'Chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.'

The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce

is based on a long-running Chancery dispute

that I'm sure Tony Arlidge has at his fingertips and can tell us all about.

I was in it. I appeared in it!

But that was an actual case which I think lasted 20-odd years.

'I met Judge John Lafferty,

'the first visually impaired judge on the bench,

'senior barrister Antony Arlidge QC

'and Ellis Sareen, also a barrister, to see

'how well they thought Dickens made his case,

'and whether there's still a case to answer.'

We also need to remember in all of this

-that he has got this fantastic vividness of phrase.

-He has.

When the Lord Chancellor comes in,

all the barristers in their white wigs and black gowns get up and bow

like "so many pianoforte keys".

Even now, there are days in the Courts of Chancery where there are

quite a large number of barristers present at one time.

And in just one little phrase, he absolutely encapsulates that.

Do you feel that Dickens presents

a fair portrait of how the law operated at the time that he was writing?

He's out to pillory the way in which institutions can evolve

so that they're there to serve as much

the interests of their practitioners,

to the detriment of the vulnerable, the poor and the needy,

as they are to right the wrongs in society.

Central to it, actually, is something that remains a problem -

that very often, particularly with small civil claims,

the cost of the legal proceedings is bound to exceed

the damages that are obtained.

Yes. In the time of Bleak House,

there were lawyers who prolonged litigation for their own advantage.

There have been ever since, and there always will be.

That's always going to be a problem.

One thing I do want to ask is,

when you read these accounts of the law,

do you feel implicated or part of that?

There's always a tendency... for example, politicians looking at The Thick Of It would tell me

"Oh, I know someone just like that." It's never themselves,

but it's always someone that they know.

I just wonder how you feel?

It's a fair cop, guv. You've got me bang to rights.

Some of it's timeless. Yeah... and you see it all the time.

Not me, obviously.

The great thing about it is that it is hugely entertaining.

That's right, the great thing about Dickens is his theatricality.

It's a series of vivid scenes.

And how about today? If Dickens were writing today, then,

what in the way the system works now, is there anything you think

he would immediately seize on?

Oh, I don't think he'd be short of material.

'It's not just in our institutions that we can sometimes spot

'the timelessness of Dickens's attacks.'

'The characters who dominate his institutions can seem familiar too.

'Today, we may have the likes of Mr Murdoch, but in Little Dorrit,

'Dickens gives us a Mr Merdle.'

"Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise;

"a Midas who turned all he touched to gold.

"He was in everything good, from banking to building.

"He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City necessarily.

"The weightiest of men had said to projectors

"What name have you got? Have you got Merdle?" And the reply being in the negative

had said "Then I won't look at you."

The whole novel is a depiction partly of this figure.

One figure, Merdle, moving through society,

and first the politicians and then the media

and then the law all come to pay homage to him.

But he himself is a strange shadowy figure whose bank collapses,

whose money fritters away and who ends up killing himself in a bath.

It's a frightening and sadly familiar depiction

of the whole of British society

converging around one man who tries to control it,

and in the end...imploding.

Now, surely something as horrific as that,

150 years ago, couldn't happen today.

I mean, we know so much more now, don't we?

'It wasn't just as a novelist

'that Dickens expressed his views on society.

'As a journalist, and then as a magazine editor,

'he had the chance to publish his observations on everything.

'And he fed his enormous appetite for the detail of life

'by taking long walks almost every day,

'regularly clocking up to 20 miles.'

'As he walked, he observed every little oddity -

'a weird play of light,

'or the strange bend of a nose on a passer-by.'

'And he was most inspired by the walks he took at night.'

There's a fantastic essay that he wrote called "Night Walks"

in which he describes wandering over to an insane asylum,

Bethlehem Hospital, a house full of lunatics.

And he goes there because he has a particular fancy in his head.

"Are not the sane and the insane

"equal at night as the sane lie adreaming?"

"Are not all of us outside this hospital who dream more or less

"in the condition of those inside it every night of our lives?"

Basically, we're as mad as the people inside at night,

by what goes on inside our head in our dreams.

"Said an afflicted man to me

"when I was last in a hospital like this,

" 'Sir, I can frequently fly!'

"I was half-ashamed to reflect that so could I, by night.

"Said a woman to me on the same occasion,

" 'Queen Victoria comes to dine with me,

" 'and Her Majesty and I dine off peaches and macaroni in our nightgowns.'

"Could I refrain from reddening with consciousness when I remembered

"the amazing royal parties I myself had given at night?"

That's what I love about Dickens, his ability to come up

with a conclusion or make an observation

you'd think would be bizarre,

but actually, when you hear it, seems perfectly natural.

That's why I think the night plays such a prominent role

in his writing, because it gives him this ability

to take those two worlds, the everyday and the familiar

and the unfamiliar, the dark and the mysterious,

and superimpose them on each other simultaneously,

so that throughout his writing,

those two worlds are weaving in and out of each other,

so at no one point do you know exactly where you stand.

'All sorts of human pathologies intrigued Dickens,

'and David Copperfield includes an extraordinary character

'who suffers from delusions.'

'But instead of being shut up in an asylum,

'he's been taken in by David's Aunt Betsey.

'He's the rather marvellous Mr Dick.'

'Mr Dick is one of the strangest, most peculiar characters

'I've ever encountered,

'not just in a Dickens novel, but in any novel.

'For most of his life, he's been writing a project'

which he calls The Memorial.

We never quite get to the bottom of what The Memorial is.

It's this very nebulous historical document that he's trying to write,

but his work on a daily basis is interrupted by thoughts

in his head about the execution of King Charles I.

These thoughts torture and torment him,

and the only thing he can do to get this these thoughts of the execution of Charles I out of his head

is to write them down on big pieces of paper,

to gather those bits of paper up and to fashion a paper kite out of them

and to go outside and fly the kite in the air.

Now, when I describe it like that,

you might think that sounds so deranged and bizarre

that it's unbelievable, and yet when you read David's account

of his relationship with Mr Dick,

it suddenly seems believable.

"I used to fancy as I sat by him of an evening on a green slope

"and saw him watch the kite high in the quiet air

"that it lifted his mind out of its confusion

"and bore it into the skies.

"As he wound the string in and it came lower and lower down

"out of the beautiful light till it fluttered to the ground

"and lay there like a dead thing,

"he seemed to wake gradually out a dream,

"and I remembered to have seen him take it up

"and look about him in a lost way,

"as if they had both come down together,

"so that I pitied him with all my heart."

The truth is, we're not really looking at some grotesque eccentric,

exaggerated for our amusement.

With Mr Dick, we're watching a quite accurate

and heartrendingly real portrayal of someone with a mental illness.

In fact, some have commented with the benefit of hindsight

that Dickens's own manic behaviour may have indicated

signs of an element of bipolarity in his personality.

Now, whatever the truth of that is, you can't help but feel

that Dickens himself saw the world in this unique way.

He even described, in a letter, his own imagination as an infirmity,

a tendency to fancy or perceive relations between things

that are not apparent generally.

Which is what Mr Dick does.

I really do think it's no exaggeration to say

that Mr Dick is a heightened version of Mr Dickens.

'In 1850, as he finished David Copperfield,

'Dickens was still in control

'not only of his fanciful, but also his darker thoughts.

'But this didn't last.

'Seven years later,

'what he had subconsciously expressed in the novel

'seeped into reality, and he left his wife.

'He then pursued a relationship

'he'd begun with a 19-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan.'

'Yet the pressure of keeping the liaison secret,

'together with growing panic that his talent would desert him,

'began to make him ill.'

'But Dickens refused to slow down.

'In 1867, he embarked on a series of public reading tours,

'determined to power on.'

This is Dickens's own annotated reading copy of the scene

in which Sykes kills Nancy in Oliver Twist.

And this was the highlight of Dickens's public readings.

It had people fainting in the aisles and running out.

And you can see it's got his underlinings

and emphasis where he is signalling to himself

that he's going to pause and add dramatic action.

We've got here little marks in the side margin. "Beckon down",

"You won't be too violent", underlining, "murder coming".

That's a little note to himself now to shift up another gear.

We're in the home stretch of this bludgeoning.

And once we get up to the moment of the murder itself,

this is turning into quite a passionate, violent,

very physical performance here.

The annotations are now scarring the whole of the text here.

"Action!" "Mystery!" "Terror to the end." "Dashed out his brains!!"

Double exclamation mark at the end.

Dickens's public readings were quite sensational.

They were the hottest ticket in town. They were wildly popular.

People would queue up overnight. The place would be mobbed.

It was like Lady Gaga coming to town.

His tour of America was quite strenuous and energetic,

and really fatigued him. He was quite ill.

But Dickens couldn't help but throw himself into it,

physically and mentally.

Many say that in particular,

it was his performance of the reading of the Sykes and Nancy scene

that in the end killed him.

'In June 1870, Dickens suffered a stroke, and died at home.

'He was 58, and he was halfway through writing a new novel.

'It was a small, unremarkable ending

'for a writer that had lived such a large, remarkable life.

'But then Dickens never was very comfortable with endings.'

'David Copperfield finishes with a whole host of characters, including Mr Micawber,

'sailing off to Australia to start a new life.'

'And they succeed. Micawber grows prosperous,

'while at home, David marries again and lives happily ever after.'

'But this ending doesn't feel so happy when we shut the book.'

For me, Dickens's endings are disappointing.

I know I'm going to be hauled over the coals

by militant Dickensian Taliban for saying that,

but I feel that Dickens hated finishing his novels

and his heart wasn't in it.

It's when his characters are restless and struggling

and energetic that they're at their most animated,

and it's when they become static that something goes out of them.

For Dickens, I think a happy ending is dull.

It's how people struggle to try and attain a happy ending

that's much, much more interesting.

'It's over 170 years since Dickens published his first novel,

'and readers still find his work surprisingly fresh.'

The thing about Dickens is, it stands up so well.

A lot of the humour is entirely modern.

It is gripping.

He has great plots. He has the most incredible characterisation,

but always with a sort of psychological basis.

Whoever he writes about, even if it's a sort of loathsome character

they're human beings. He takes them warts and all.

It's like that moment in a song when you go "Oh, yeah."

You hear a song and go, "Oh, that's how I feel."

I said at the start of this programme

that I thought each Dickens novel

feels like a continuation of the rest.

Each novel gives you a unique vision of the world

that's curiously like your own,

and yet strangely magnified and distorted, and as a result,

Dickens makes you read the characters around you completely afresh.

He forces you to gaze much more intently

at your physical surroundings and inside,

looking at the state of your own mental and emotional condition.

That's why Dickens's work is, for me,

still the greatest example in the English language

of a mind trying to engage comically and yet honestly

with what it means to be human.

And that's why, also,

I think the best reaction to reading a Dickens for the very first time

is to do what quite a lot of people do

when they read a Dickens for the very first time,

which is to pick up a new one and start reading that straight away.

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