Back to the Best Books: Dickens
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

Editors’ Note: Come and join Meridian’s best books club. Marilyn Green Faulkner will be suggesting a book each month for us to read, sharing insights, and providing an opportunity for you to write about your response.

A Difficult Pleasure: Back to the Best Books
“Have you read anything good lately?” This familiar question usually leads to a discussion of the latest volume on the bestseller list. Let’s talk about this for a minute. What have you read lately? Sure, you read some great books in college or high school and have picked up a “classic” now and then since that time. But perhaps you are feeling that reading has become less satisfying than you would like. It’s hard to focus your reading during the middle period of life, when family and work take so much energy that there is little left at the end of the day. So, when you go on vacation you take along the latest Grisham or Turow, or perhaps even stay up late enthralled with Stephen King. It’s fun stuff, but after awhile the plots all seem to run together, and you must admit that most bestsellers today don’t come within shouting distance of the thirteenth Article of Faith. These books can be more like watching television or a movie than actually reading. Why? The reason is that serious reading is more like a good hike or a stimulating run than a passive activity. It is what Harold Bloom calls a “difficult pleasure.” You have to invest a lot of effort in a good book. The vocabulary may be unfamiliar, the imagery confusing, and the length of the book may call for a larger commitment of your time than a weekend or so. A good book asks something of you, but offers in return the same thrill you feel when you reach the top of the mountain or finish that 5K run. If you have felt that feeling before and would like to feel it again it’s time to get back to the best books that have ever been written.

Every great book changes your life in some way. When I was a little girl my mother was the Cultural Refinement teacher for the Relief Society. She taught a course titled “Out of the Best Books,” using an anthology prepared by some BYU professors. I loved to sit in her room and look through the books, and those readings led us both to the complete volumes from which they were taken. My mother never went to college or had a career, but she educated herself through reading the best books, and her eight children reaped the rewards of her efforts. Each of us is the sum of what we have put in to our minds through the years. Great books teach us about the shared experience of living, the complexities of the human psyche and the simplicity of the human heart. It is difficult to read great literature and be narrow and prejudiced, and it is easier to understand our own experiences when they can be examined and illuminated through fictional lives. Great books, says David Denby in his book by the same name, “speak most powerfully of what a human being can be.”

A Flabby Brain is Not a Pretty Thing
We know that television and movies ask very little of our brains, and thus offer us little in the way of enrichment. A great book engages both sides of your brain, which is always a good thing, since you are dealing with ideas as well as events. Thinking about moral issues in a fictional setting helps us develop a “moral imagination” that enables us to creatively solve the knotty problems that face us in real life. That is why it is important that literature paint an accurate, rather than an idealized representation of the human heart. The best books show us ourselves with all our imperfections, but inspire us to rise above those weaknesses to something finer. That means going a step deeper than the sentimental, feel-good story, but it also means avoiding the bleak, hopeless fare that passes for literature in today’s world.

Perhaps you have felt a desire to get back to the best books, but wished there was a systematic way of doing so. Well, now there is! Welcome to the first meeting of the Best Books Club. Now that we have called the meeting to order I’d like to invite you to join me in reading a great book every month for the next year. We’ll alternate between old books and newer ones, and they will all be taken from the best books out there. We’ll talk about the author and some of the historical background of the book, and even get into some criticism from different theoretical perspectives, if it doesn’t get too dry. What you need to do is get a few friends to read along with you so that you can talk about the book together, and then get on line and offer your input via email as we go.

Sound like fun? If so, let’s get started.

Where in the Dickens shall we begin?
Everyone thinks of Dickens at the holidays, with all those cute little villages in the Hallmark stores and “The Christmas Carol” being performed everywhere. Dickens is an ideal place to begin reading the best books, because he is arguably the greatest writer of prose in the English language. Having said that, I’ll warn you that to open a novel of Dickens is to wade into a sea of words. We’re not used to so many words in our 30-second sound bite age. Dickens lived and wrote during the Victorian era (His life, from 1812 to 1870, was contemporary with Joseph Smith’s life and the pioneer era.) and most of his novels were published in serial form, in weekly or monthly installments. Rather than trying to tell the story in the shortest, most direct manner, he was using his prose to entertain as he went. We have lost some of the feel for the enjoyment of our language that Dickens shared with his audience, but it is easy to recapture it. Imagine yourself in the London of the late 1850’s. You have no television, no movies, no Internet, no radio, CD player or car. You do, however, have a subscription to All the Year Round, the new periodical published by Charles Dickens, the most popular writer in England, and the first installment of his newest novel is in this edition. When it arrives you eagerly take it home and gather the family in the living room after dinner. When everyone is settled you open the paper and read these words:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Thus begins A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s take on the French revolution. It is more than that, of course, as the title hints. It is a story of how political movements affect nations, cities, and above all, families. As the introduction states, “History leaks into everyday life, almost invisibly; domestic tragedy has public reverberations.” Beginning with an old man, making shoes in a dark corner of a prison, Dickens weaves a tale of a family torn between the two sides in a national conflict over the course of about twenty years. The two cities are, of course, London and Paris. The French revolution had repercussions throughout Europe, and Dickens, skeptical of any political system, explores the evils of both the monarchy and the new republic, portraying both worlds with dramatic flair. The novel’s opening paragraph is so famous because it seems to describe every period of history, and certainly seems applicable today. Reading about another time of turmoil in history gives us a better perspective on our own troubled times. (Perhaps our two cities today would be Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, Florida!)

I am a devoted fan of books on tape, and recommend listening to Dickens if you feel a little overwhelmed by reading him. His prose is so poetic that it begs to be read aloud. Choose a taped version that is not abridged. Two companies that sell unabridged versions of classic literature are Recorded Books on Tape and Blackstone Audio Books. The books are inexpensive to rent, about 50 cents a day, and easy to return after a month. You might consider giving up talk radio for a month or so and letting Dickens entertain you on your commute to work, or as you do your housework. I listen to tapes as I walk, and I’ll never forget the day that I listened to the final scenes of this book, as the tumbrels roll over the cobblestones toward the guillotine, with the crowd jeering and the terrified victims looking out on their last moments of life. Sydney Carton speaks his great lines, “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to, than I have ever known.” Suddenly I realized that I had stopped walking some time before. I was standing in the middle of the street, and my dogs were sitting quietly on either side of me, looking up, wondering what was wrong. Those are the moments for which we read a great book. Easy, escapist fare will never offer a thrilling, mountaintop moment like that.

If you’d like to read A Tale of Two Cities with us, I recommend the Penguin Classic edition. It is inexpensive and has a good introduction and a timeline of the events of the revolution, which is helpful. It also has the marvelous painting by Charles-Louis Muller, titled, “The Roll Call of the Last Victims of the Reign of Terror” on its cover, which gives a visual image of the scenes Dickens depicts. If we are going to get some cranial synapses firing we might notice a little imagery in the novel, and talk about Dickens’s craft for a moment. Shoes and footsteps figure largely in the imagery, along with knitting and other homely crafts that are juxtaposed with terrifying events, symbolizing the way that history leaks into the daily events of life. Take a look at the titles of his chapters, they often point to an image you might otherwise miss. Remember that Dickens had to start over, in a sense, with every installment, so characters are “marked” by certain mannerisms, modes of dress or patterns of speech, in order to make them easily identifiable. See if you notice what these are for each major character. Dickens is criticized for being too sentimental and melodramatic, and he does go rather over the top at times. But I have noticed that life is often sentimental and melodramatic, and Dickens is not afraid to tug our heartstrings, knowing that oftentimes our better natures are awakened by our emotions. The plot for this novel is taken from French melodrama, and is quite simple, but Dickens overlays it with his usual cast of colorful characters. The psychological portrait of Dr. Manette is a work of subtle genius, and I defy Stephen King to come up with anything scarier than Madame DeFarge and her knitting. We’ll have to talk about whether the melodrama gets in the way of the real emotional impact of the tale, and I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Lucy Manette.

It was difficult to choose among Dickens’s novels, there are so many that would be fun to read together. I chose this one because it is shorter, almost by half, than most of the novels, and because it contains a wonderful message of self-sacrifice that is universally inspiring. I’ll share some of your comments on the book in my next column. Enjoy!

Final note: In case you’re feeling like a little Dickens rather than a lot, a perfect gift for everyone on your Christmas list would be Charles Dickens’s story of the life of Jesus titled, The Life of our Lord. This was written for his children and was not published until just a few years ago. I first heard it quoted in a talk by President Hinckley, and later found it at Deseret Book. It is a simple, beautiful retelling of the events of the gospels that reveals Dickens’s faith in the Savior, and his great regard for children. I bought several copies for friends and enjoyed reading from it aloud at Christmas time to our children. It’s a nice introduction to Dickens and a lovely way to bring the true spirit of Christmas into your home.