J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)

Published: Bloomsbury, 2007

This blog entry is not so much a review as a reaction as I read the early chapters (the first ten or so) of the most eagerly anticipated novel of all time. So there are not going to be spoilers for anything later than these chapters. I may return to this post later and add a comment about the later sections of the novel.

Over eleven million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were ordered in advance of its release. The only literary events I can think of that rivalled the publication of The Deathly Hallows are the appearances of the serial parts of Dickens' novels in the nineteenth century. While there are obvious differences (Dickens released his novels in a large number of individual parts, rather than Rowling's complete novels making up a series; and Dickens' plots were a lot more predictable in broad outline, so there wasn't speculation about, for example, whether the hero might die). Does the fanaticism mean that Rowling's work last as long as Dickens'? Plenty of old bestsellers have gone completely from the public consciousness - Marie Corelli, for example, was one of the biggest sellers of the early part of the twentieth century, but it would be unusual to see her books even in second hand shops. Will Rowling turn out to be the Corelli or the Dickens of our time?.

All three have social themes in their books which make them more than just escapism, though Rowling's concerns in the Harry Potter books - racism and the rise of Neo-Nazism, and the excesses of the press and its manipulation by government - are more like the social campaigning of Dickens than Corelli's theme of the relationship between spiritualism and Christianity. The first is more explicit from the beginning of The Deathly Hallows, as Voldemort and the Death Eaters are described in ways which show them to be closer to Hitler and his followers than was seen in the earlier novels. Rowling's other major social concern is more modern and is unlikely to have occurred to Corelli at all. Dickens, on the other hand, was extremely upset by attacks on him in American newspapers after he published articles critical of some aspects of life in the United States, just as Rowling has indicated that she feels that press interest in her personal life was unwarranted. So this too is a similarity to Dickens.

Speculation has been rife about how the series will end, and an intensive security operation was (more or less) successful in keeping details from getting out before the release date. Even following this, spoilers have generally (as far as I have seen) been well signposted; it's quite remarkable on today's Internet how polite people who have posted something about the novel have been to those who are yet to read it. The main information that was widely disseminated, revealing that at least two major characters would be killed, came from Rowling herself, and this left a lot open (the ending could have the rest of the cast living happily ever after, or a bloodbath on the scale of a Jacobean revenge tragedy - or anything in between).

More important to me than the issue of what might happen in the novel is whether it would be a satisfactory ending to the series as a whole. I found Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the least involving novel in the series so far, and I was almost expecting to be disappointed by The Deathly Hallows.

And then I read the first chapter, which describes Voldemort plotting with the Death Eaters. This seemed to confirm my worst fears - dull, predictable, lacking in any kind of atmosphere. One thing it does make clear (even if Rowling's revelations about character deaths hadn't) is that The Deathly Harrows is going to continue with the darkening of the series that's been apparent since the arrival of the Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

But then, in the second chapter, Rowling seemed to return to her best form. Harry's relationship with the Dursley family is an integral part of the whole series, and has gradually been revealed as more subtle than the bullying and abuse which characterised it at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The chapter also indicates that no matter how dark things become, the humour of the series will still be part of the final volume.

Peter Ackroyd: Dickens (1990)

Edition: Minerva, 1991 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 907

As the most popular writer of his age, and as a social campaigner, Charles Dickens had an immense influence which still shapes modern literature and the culture in which we live - his stories helped shape our ideas of the "traditional" Christmas, apart from the more difficult to trace effects of his writing about social issues.

The man who had this influence was extraordinary in himself as well. As a result, he has always been a magnet for biographers, from his friend John Forster onwards. Ackroyd's acclaimed biography concentrates on what formed Dickens' character, and how his life influenced his fiction.

For someone following a sedentary profession, Dickens had an interesting life, and was certainly an unusual personality. While he could often be the life and soul of any party, his self-centredness made him a difficult person to deal with. This is brought out strongly by Ackroyd, who is also particularly good at retreading the well worn path of his relationship between his life and work (especially his childhood and the probably platonic affair with Ellen Tiernan).

It is probably the case that to write this kind of biography you would need to be a fan, and this is certainly the case with Ackroyd, who likes certain of the novels far more than I do and hasn't really a bad word to say about any. This isn't really a failing, as there is no particular reason why people shouldn't have different opinions, but it does lead to an occasional loss of sympathy on the part of this reader.

Another minor problem with this biography, which reduces its usefulness as any kind of reference, is the lack of dated information. Not only is there no separate chronology of Dickens' life, but there are relatively few dates given in the text; to try to work out, say, the dates of the first and last appearances of Bleak House in serial form is extremely difficult.

Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 870

Two subjects have fascinated readers of Dickens' final, unfinished novel ever since the author's death. The more obvious is the question of how it should end; what we have is about half of a psychological thriller, not quite enough to make it clear exactly what the conclusion was to be. The second topic of discussion is just how much the novel is different from Dickens' other fiction.

Edwin Drood is set in the cathedral town of Cloisterham, based on Rochester, one of Dickens' homes in early life. There, Edwin Drood, a young man who lives in London, spends his holidays with his uncle Jasper. He is visiting Rosa Budd, who is just completing her schooling and who was betrothed to him long ago by the wishes of both their parents, now deceased. To the town also come the Landlesses, brother and sister, who have returned to England from the East and are lodging with a relation in the Cathedral Close. Neville Landless takes a fancy to Rosa, and is piqued by Edwin's growing feeling that Rosa and he are not particularly suited. They quarrel about his treatment of her, and though they seem to have made it up, he is an obvious suspect when Edwin goes missing after the two of them dine with Jasper.

The one thing that is clear about the solution of The Mystery of Edwin Drood is that the villain is Jasper, despite the virtuous front that fools the world. The unanswerable question, in the absence of notes about the ending, is how his guilt will become known; this is obviously connected with the appearance of a stranger in Cloisterham just before the end of the completed section. Conjectures as to who this is have included Neville's sister in disguise, trying to clear her brother's name, or even Edwin himself. To know what Dickens intended here would probably make it easy to work out the solution.

That Our Mutual Friend, Dickens' last completed novel, and Edwin Drood are rather different in some fairly fundamental way to the rest of the author's output is undeniable. The difference almost certainly stems from two causes. Towards the end of his life, spurred by feelings of financial insecurity because he was supporting two households, Dickens massively increased the reading tours that he made, which were extremely lucrative. Not only did they leave him little time to write new material - the gap between the two novels is much longer than in the earlier days, when the appearances of some in periodical form overlapped - but the physical strain they caused is likely to have hastened his death. The longer period of gestation must have made a difference to the way that he approached his novels, and the pair are much more carefully put together. Edwin Drood is much sparser than Our Mutual Friend, which has many complicated subplots and far more characters, and is perhaps a novel planned by a man conscious of his own exhaustion.

The other cause of the change is that there were new writers about who were writing different novels; Edwin Drood was at least in part inspired by a desire to complete with Wilkie Collins, a close friend. Times change and fashion moves on, and to some extent Dickens must have wanted to change in response. That he succeeded so well is a tribute to just how talented he was; Edwin Drood is recognisably by the same author as Oliver Twist, but has new concerns which are expressed differently.

The very beginning of Edwin Drood makes it obvious that it would have been a great novel, with its remarkably modern seeming description of the awakening from an opium dream. The atmosphere of Cloisterham is as well rendered as any Dickensian backgrounds, and the plot is clearly one of his best. The element which is missing, an absence hardly noticed, is the crowd of minor characters which throng most of his novels, Our Mutual Friend included. The incompleteness of Edwin Drood is one of the major tragedies of English literature.

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1863)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 839

The two quotations that everyone remembers from this novel come at the very beginning ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...") and at the very end ("It is a far far better thing..."). There are other memorable phrases ("Recalled to life", for example), and plenty of memorable scenes as Dickens depicts the arrogance of the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century and the turmoil of the revolution.

But A Tale of Two Cities is not just about memorable phrases and scenes. It is the Dickens novel which is most clearly plotted as a whole, where events flow from one to another and melodramatic coincidences are at a minimum. (The obvious example of the resemblance between Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton is long established by the time it is needed.) The novel is one of Dickens' shortest, and that may be a reason why it is better plotted, but it also lacks the wonderful casts of minor characters which fill most of his writing.

Having said that, the most memorable characters are the Defarges, particularly Madame, who has a disturbing malevolence. They are not as central to the plot as they are to the atmosphere in the Paris set sections of the novel, as it moves from sullen resentment of the aristocracy to the tyranny of the Terror. Dickens' handling of the history is closely based on Carlyle's account, and is even-handedly against injustice, portraying a terrible picture of the actions of both sides. We shouldn't forget, of course, that when Dickens was writing this novel, the French Revolution was comparatively recent history, as much as the Second World War is today, and well within living memory.

The story is one of personal heroism in a world gone mad, and Dickens' novel is a plea for humanity. It remains immensely powerful, perhaps more so than some of his works which campaign with a specific target, now long attained.

Charles Dickens: Sketches by Boz (1836)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 823

The young Charles Dickens became a published author (anonymously) when the first of the Sketches was printed; he went on to write two volumes of them, some of which overlapped with the early parts of The Pickwick Papers. The pieces all attempt to give a picture of life in London, which remained probably the most important theme in almost all of Dickens' writing. The central theme is elaborated in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, considering the inexperience of the writer, from humorous descriptions to short stories to a vivid recreation of the lives of the former owners of the clothes in a second hand shop.

In general, the sketches combine humour and social comment; some are more amusing, some more serious (notably the ones about Newgate Prison). At their best, they foreshadow the most famous virtues of Dickens' writing; they are, however, variable in quality and some of them have dated atrociously. Sketches by Boz is the work of an extraordinarily gifted writer at the very beginning of his career, still feeling his way and not yet sure of himself.

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (1836)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 797

The immense success if the story that launched Dickens' career is shown by the fact that the 400 copies of the first issue of the serial had become 40000 by the fifteenth. It has remained something of a favourite with readers ever since.

Unfortunately, I am not one of those people. I find the character of Mr Pickwick annoying, particularly at the start of the novel - at least until the introduction of Sam Weller; for someone who has lived to middle age he is unbelievably naive. The interpolated stories are dull and for the most part deserve to be skipped; one (Gabriel Grub) is interesting as a precursor to The Christmas Carol.

It is only really following the election at Eatonswill and Mrs Bardwell's breach of promise suit against Mr Pickwick that things pick up. Sam Weller and his father are good characters, even if the rendition of their accents now seems tediously affected rather than comic.

I like the later writings of Dickens better, when he had more discipline. The Pickwick Papers developed as its serial numbers were written, and it shows. (In fact, it was originally meant to be a set of pieces to accompany the illustrations, rather than the other way around, and the virtually unknown Dickens was not the first choice to write them.) There are elements which prefigure Dickens' strengths as a writer, but they are more enjoyable when more fully developed (in David Copperfield,say).

Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend (1865)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 777

Dickens' late novel is one of my favourites. It is a satire on hypocrisy and the British class system. John Harmon has made a fortune from the rubbish of others, collecting great mounds of dust which tower over London. On his death, his wealth is to pass to his son, also named John, who is murdered on his return to England. The money then passes to Harmon's foreman, Mr Boffin, who begins to take a new place in society and becomes known as "The Golden Dustman".

The melodramatic plot is more unified than most of Dickens', though it does have some holes. Coincidence plays a large part, with characters from unrelated strands meeting by accident. Occasionally, motivation is not quite clear, particularly for John Harmon's pretense that he has been murdered, and indeed for his changing clothes with the victim in the first place. (The motive might seem to be to test his bride to be, but he as yet knows very little about her.)

There is quite a wide variety of characters, both male and female, which are perhaps created less for grotesque effect than is usual in Dickens. Moreover, all the main characters present a different viewpoint on the subject of class, whether they are in their "rightful place" (as, say, the Podsnaps and Rogue Riderhood are) or out of it (like Headstone, educated out of his background or Lizzie Hexam whose birth is far inferior to her nobility of character). The novel does not posess the same immediate charm of some of Dickens' earlier writing, which may explain why many readers feel that it is well done without loving it, but to me it is right at the peak of his work.

Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1837)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 734

The story of Oliver Twist is extremely well known, mainly because of children's versions of the novel and the film and musical versions. It is a melodrama, about the orphan who grows up in the workhouse, is apprenticed and escapes to London. There, he falls in with a group of young thieves led by the Jew Fagin, but also meets kindly, well off people who help him to the point where his history is discovered and he is restored to his estates.

Oliver Twist was Dicken's first real novel (The Pickwick Papers being a series of episodes), and in fact shows more signs of careful planning and structural thought than some of his more mature works. Like them, Oliver Twist was published in serial form, but reading it in a single volume reveals few signs that this was the case. It is also one of Dickens' shorter novels, which may have also helped its structural unity.

It is of course inspired by the way in which the English Poor Law operated, where the poor were treated more like criminals than anything else, where the system allowed corrupt bullies like Mr Bumble the beadle a free hand, where children were effectively sold as apprentices to tradesmen looking for the cheapest of cheap labour. The social campaigning side of the novel is not handled as well in Oliver Twist as it is in many of Dickens' later books; it frequently threatens to overwhelm the story, which then descends into sentimentality. This is partly because Oliver, like a several other children in Dickens (Little Nell and Paul Dombey are other examples) is very colourless and bland. He is both too naive and powerless to provide much of a commentary on what happens to him.

The most interesting characters in the novel, in fact, turn out to be Fagin and his gang of thieves. He is a bit of a stock character, and has led to accusations of anti-Semitism against the novel. (The character of Riah in Our Mutual Friend is to some extent intended as an apology for Fagin.) These are to a certain extent justifiable (he is consistently described in such terms as "villainous Jew", for example), but Dickens is quite mild by comparison with some of his contemporaries, and he is, of course, a man of his period. There is no particular reason why Fagin should be Jewish, except that Jews have always been accused by their enemies of making up a kind of underground community, closer to their co-religionists than to Gentile neighbours. This is used to give him links to accomplices in other parts of the country.

Nancy is the most three dimensional of all the characters, torn between her pity for Oliver and her desire to do something right on the one side and her love for the unpleasant Bill Sikes and her fear of Fagin on the other. She refuses an offer to help her escape her life, but is then killed because of Fagin's suspicions that she might betray him. Her tragic situation raised Dickens to write better once it had been established, and makes the last hundred or so pages of Oliver Twist come alive much more than the duller earlier sections.

Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 708

Like Dickens' other earlier novels, The Old Curiosity Shop was a huge success at the time, even eclipsing The Pickwick Papers. Today it is much less well liked, for a variety of reasons. When I first read it, I thought it his poorest work, tough now I would not quite say that of it.

The plot is simple. The villainous dwarf Mr Quilp is determined to destroy the virtuous, to bring down whoever he can get into his power. This includes the owner of the shop of the title, a real place which is still a minor tourist attraction. (I work close to it, and there are usually two or three people taking photos outside it.) His innocent, virtuous teenage granddaughter Nell is destined by Quilp to be his second wife (once he has succeeded in hounding the first to her grave). Just as Quilp is about to demonstrate his power over the pair, they flee from London.

The descriptions of the journey of Nell and her grandfather are the best pieces of writing in the novel. They encounter picturesque travellers long since driven out of business by cinema and TV - a punch and judy troupe, stilt-walkers, a travelling waxworks - and these are vividly brought to life, so that they are fascinating even to those of us who are not social historians. (Dickens does the same with Astley's circus in London, visited by another character.)

The outcome is also interesting, for virtue triumphs more because Quilp overreaches himself than through positive heroic action. This is unusual, though Dickens in general pays fairly perfunctory attention to plotting. The discovery of the villain's plots is quickly followed by his destruction in an accidental fire - dramatic, if far fetched. The virtuous characters, which can, I think, include the good at heart but weak Dick Swiveller, are very passive; this is again unusual but has several parallels throughout Dickens' writing.

The novel has two closely related structural defects. It was not, apparently, conceived as a novel from the very start, and this makes its beginning very slow. It was originally meant to be the first of a series of impressions rather like Sketches by Boz. This is where the first chapter is coming from, in which a narrator absent form the rest of the novel visits the shop; he is Master Humphrey, and the name of the journal in which the serial appeared was Master Humphrey's Clock. Even when the novel itself begins, it is a long time before the plot starts to move.

The novel has its most famous scenes near the end - the death of Quilp and the death of Nell. The latter, which was for a long time the best known piece of nineteenth century fiction, doesn't take place until the seventieth chapter. It is obvious what is going to happen almost from the beginning of the novel; Nell seems to have been conceived as an illustration of the phrase "too good for this world". The death itself is very sentimental, which is both why it was popular at the time and why it has become less appreciated. It is an admirable piece of writing, all the more so for not appearing to be calculating in its effects. However, by the point where Nell's death occurs, the main interest of the novel is already over; Quilp is the driving force behind it, and what forward momentum it has dissipates with his death.

Charles Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby (1838)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 666

One of the most successful of all Dickens' early novels, Nicholas Nickleby will always be remembered for its portrayal of the wonderfully named brutal school, Dotheboys Hall. The plot of the novel is a variation of the young man coming to terms with the world theme. After his father's death, Nicholas Nickleby and his sister Kate need to earn their livings for the first time. They turn to their rich uncle Ralph for help, not realising that he is an evil man - avaricious miser and unscrupulous moneylender driven by hatred of their father. He arranges work for Nicholas as a teacher at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire and for Kate as a dressmaker. Naturally, these jobs do not turn out to be the wonderful opportunities expected by the two of them.

The main problems the novel has are certain of the characters. Ralph Nickleby is the most serious flaw; he is a melodramatic villain and no more, bu plays a big enough part in the plot that he should be made more realistic. The Cheerybyle brothers are blandly generous, and again, insufficiently individualised. A few of the minor characters are irritating, particularly the vain and stupid Mrs Nickleby, mother of Nicholas and Kate. There are excellent and interesting people in the novel, including Mr Squeers the vicious headmaster of Dotheboys Hall. In Dickens' introduction, written later, he explicitly denies that Squeers is based on any real person, to counter various schoolteachers being almost proud to point to themselves as the original; he is so unpleasant that it is bizarre that anyone would wish to do so.

The real strength of the novel is journalistic, the way in which various different worlds are sketched in - the London moneylender, the Yorkshire school (boarding schools in that county were notoriously bad), and the touring stage company which Nicholas joins after fleeing the school with the unfortunate Smike. This last is perhaps a little overly theatrical, but is interesting because of Dickens' own keen interest in the stage.

Nicholas Nickleby, like all of Dickens' novels, has obvious flaws, but it clearly deserves its place among the favourite classics in the English language.

Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 602

There can be few fans who would consider Martin Chuzzlewit to be one of the best of Dickens' novels. It created a considerable drop in the sales of the periodical in which it originally appeared, despite getting good reviews, and shows evidence of some desperation to reverse this trend. (The hastily thrown in and later regretted American episodes which are among the novel's best known parts form an example of this.)

That is not to say that there is not some excellent writing in Martin Chuzzlewit. There is a remarkable section about two thirds of the way through, starting with the journey made by Jonas Chuzzlewit and Tigg Montague to Salisbury, which is extremely vivid. It has one or two characters up to the usual standard, of whom the most famous is Mrs Gamp. In the main, though, it remains a dull, straightforward and regrettably sentimental story of the downfall of hypocrisy (personified by Mr Pecksniff) and the triumph of virtue (personified by Martin Chuzzlewit).

Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit (1855)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 577

As in The Mill on the Floss, many of the characters in Little Dorrit are studies in different kinds of selfishness. There's the self-contained happiness of the Meagles, who don't realise the effect of the way they spoil their daughter on the foundling brought up to be her maid; there's the obsessive gentility pf William Dorrit and his eldest daughter; there's the thoughtless carelessness of Ned Dorrit. There is also a selfless heroine in Amy Dorrit, like Eliot's Maggie Tulliver.

The story which these characters act out, along with the hero, Arthur Clennam, is one of the most formless in Dickens, even the point at the end when everything is meant to be explained being curiously incoherent. Essentially, when Arthur's father dies, he returns from abroad to the mother whose hardness had driven them away. He is strangely struck by the young girl employed by her as a seamstress, in an uncharacteristic act of charity. The girl is secretive about her origins, but he discovers that she is the daughter of one of the inmates of the London debtors' prison, the Marshalsea. Clennam decides that her family must be the victims of some sort of injustice perpetrated by his father's firm, so he sets out to help them as much as he can.

The lack of definition to the plot is part of the general air of melancholy listlessness in the novel, established in the very first paragraph after the story moves to London - "gloomy, close and stale...melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, seeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency". This is of course appropriate in a novel whose central image is that of a prison; the dreariness and hopelessness of the Marshalsea infects almost the whole novel. The early chapters set in the south of France are the only ones to escape this; even the other scenes set in Switzerland and Italy later have something of the prison about them.

The Marshalsea is the main centre of the novel, with prisons being used as metaphors throughout. People in debt were put into a debtors' prison until they were able to repay what they owed until about the middle of the nineteenth century. The regime was more liberal than that for a criminal incarceration, but the prisons were generally hopeless places; many prisoners had no way to pay off their debts. The mood is far more sobre than in Great Expectations, the other Dickens novel in which imprisonment has a major part to play.

The other important institution in Little Dorrit is the Circumlocution Office, a government body devoted to "how not to do it". It is the embodiment of the inflexibility of a bureaucratic government, the inertia of a Civil Service opposed to anything new. It is full of men who has positions in the Office because of family and society connections rather than through merit and ability of their own. It is an easy target for satire, and Dickens clearly loses interest in it after a while.

Though there are passages to treasure, and Dickens' genius for portraying small characters is fully present, Little Dorrit is one of his more unsatisfying novels. The spirit of the prison is so strong that its grim drabness is the major impression produced by the novel, and not even Dickens can overcome what he has so powerfully created.

Charles Dickens: Hard Times (1854)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 542

Generally considered Dickens' weakest novel, and certainly consistently his least known, Hard Times is a campaigning work about the conditions experienced by workers in northern English industrial towns. The reason that it is unsatisfactory is not, in fact, hard to see: Dickens did not become involved in his subject in the way that he did in his other novels attacking abuses (such as David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby and Little Dorrit). The remedy for the abuses of the rich mill owners was not obvious, and Dickens viewed one potential remedy (organisation of the workers) with deep distrust. So Dickens' campaign here had no definite aim, and so the best that he could suggest was an appeal to the individual philanthropy of the mill owners.

The distance of author from subject has its most obvious repercussions in the characters in the novel, normally one of Dickens' strong points. His plots are usually melodramatic, and characters tend not to develop, but even the small parts are vividly drawn. The most interesting person in the book is Mr Gradgrind, but he is the personification of a secondary target of the novel, the idea that education should just be about "hard facts", the bloodless classification of objects into categories which are meaningless and useless to the average child ("Horse. Graminivorous quadruped..."). Everyone else, particularly the working class, is colourless.

The best pasts of Hard Times are the descriptions of the fictional Coketown in which it is set. These remind the reader that Dickens started out as a journalist. In the end, though, I was quite grateful that Hard Times is one of Dickens' shortest completed novels.

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 508

Great Expectations is one of Dickens' shortest and best known novels, nine-tenths of it is also one of his best. The elements that made Dickens famous are all here with the exception (to a great extent) of social commentary. A young boy grows up in an atmospheric environment (the bleaker parts of the Kent countryside); he becomes involved with strange grotesque characters. It is perhaps rather more aimless than most of Dickens' novels; rather than achieving happiness through his own exertions, Pip has little to do except to be idle and expensive once adopted by an unknown benefactor.

The important character in the book is not its nominal hero, but one of the grotesques, who are not usually allowed more than a cameo role by Dickens. Miss Havisham dominates most of the book, by her patronage of Pip (real and imagined) and Pip's love for her protegé Estella. It is from the point of her death that Dickens seems to lose interest in the novel, wrapping the whole thing up in a few unsatisfying chapters. She is such a wonderful character that Dickens' fascination with her is easy to understand. Twisted by having been left at the altar, she has kept her house exactly as it was on the day of the wedding, with years of decay turning Satis House into a Gothic mausoleum, even the wedding breakfast being allowed to rot where it sits. She has brought up Estella to be the means of her revenge on the male sex - fascinating but heartless.

Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son (1848)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 477

Of Dickens' early novels, Dombey and Son is perhaps most clearly shaped by the serial form in which it originally appeared, as well as the commercial pressures which made the serial a high selling format.

The story begins with the birth to Paul Dombey and his wife of a son, destined to inherit the great City firm of Dombey and Son. The whole of the novel is shaped by Paul Dombey's monomaniacal desire to bring about this inheritance. Thus the son, also named Paul, is subjected to a regime designed to bring the days of his childhood to an end as quickly as possible so that he can begin to take up his inheritance. His elder sister, Florence, is almost totally ignored by her father; she is of interest to him only as she affects Paul (who is devoted to her). Then the young Paul, never very strong, dies, and the Dombey household begins to feel the results of the machinations of John Carker, general manager of Dombey and Son, and an unscrupulous character with great ambitions.

To unpick the novel a bit, it is clear that in the young Paul, Dickens was attempting to repeat his great early success, for many years the most popular scene in any of his novels, the death of Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. The death scene here is in fact superb, avoiding much of the sentimentality which so mars the earlier version to a modern reader. It occurs just a bit before the halfway point, and very clearly splits the novel in two. Having built up to this point, the reader senses that Dickens is a little unsure what to do next. The end point to which he aims is clear enough, but it takes some time to get started again, and John Carker, introduced at about this point to motivate the second half, is never entirely convincing.

Because of the importance of Paul and of his memory, there is not really space in the novel for a conventional hero - Florence takes on part of this role - and I suspect that this was something else which gave Dickens problems.

In the end, Dombey and Son is one of the more obviously flawed of Dickens' novels, but it still contains much that is worthwhile with occasional flashes of brilliance.

Charles Dickens: David Copperfield (1850)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 446

David Copperfield is a novel which is often declared to be autobiographical, and almost as often declared to be nothing of the sort. It is easy to see why it seems to be about Dickens' own early life. Several scenes echo actual events, such as the way that David is sent to work as a child, though in each of the obvious instances there are differences (in the case mentioned, it is a different kind of work and for motives other than the poverty of Dickens' own childhood). Copperfield's career path as an adult (law, journalism, novel writing) is a particularly strong similarity. But these parallels are not the real reason why the assumption is made. David Copperfield is written as though it is an autobiography, a successful author telling the story of his early life. The persistence of the theory is a tribute to how convincing the first person narrator is made. The intimacy of the first person is another reason in itself, and is possibly also one reason why this was Dickens' own favourite amongst his novels.

Occasionally a little sentimental for my tastes (particularly in the sections dealing with Copperfield's childhood), David Copperfield also displays some infelicities in plotting. Several unmotivated coincidences occur, particularly in relationship to the Steerforth subplot. The most annoying character is Copperfield's "childwife" Dora, but she is at least intended to be annoying. (She is also part of the social commentary side of the novel. She is brought up spoilt and silly, and has a childish air which Copperfield finds charming in a lover. But the personality captivating in a fiancée is frustrating in a wife - she has neither the skills nor the aptitude to act as a housekeeper, the principal role of the mid-Victorian middle class wife without children. She has been brought up to be a toy, but expected to be able to instantly take on another role following her wedding day, and to point this out is a way that Dickens criticises the then contemporary attitude to women's education.) Re-reading this novel, a few years later, I wish to modify what I say here a little. Although Dora's faults are obvious, both to the reader and to Copperfield himself, his tenderness and genuine love for her come through strongly. Not only that, but others around her respond to her warmly. There is more to her than a pretty girl in a sickly-sweet Victorian painting, and the other characters' regard for her is tenderly depicted by Dickens in a way which tends to ameliorate the irritation that a reader would otherwise feel with someone so childish. The main reason for being irritated is more because of David Copperfield's action in falling for her - he is so clearly better suited for Agnes Wickfield, who adores him.

In general, though, the minor characters are among the best in all of Dickens' novels. Mr Micawber is the most famous, of course, but Uriah Heep, David's aunt, the Peggotty family, and Tommy Traddles among many others are amusing and vivid in the same manner without threatening to overpower the rest of the narrative.

Charles Dickens: Bleak House (1853)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 414

This famous attack on the excesses of the Court of Chancery is one of my favourite Dickens novels. By the nineteenth century, Chancery was a medieval anachronism which still made decisions on property disputes arising out of wills. Based on obscure law and strange principles of equity, its judgements were expensive and time consuming, incomprehensible even to most lawyers. Cases dragged on for many years - generations, even - frequently incurring costs beyond the sums disputed, occasionally eating up the entire estate in question in costs before a decision was reached.

Such a case forms the background to Bleak House. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has gone on for years, casting uncertainty over the lives of those embroiled in it, including the young orphans Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, who are wards of the court because of their inherited interests in the case. They are adopted by their genial and charitable cousin John Jarndyce, who takes them to live in his home, Bleak House, in attempted reparation for the shadow of the suit. As in Much Ado About Nothing, the conventional main plot of Bleak House (the romance between Richard and Ada) takes second place to events involving more interesting characters. Their cousin brings them together with the focus of another of his charitable projects, the gentle Esther Summerson. Much of the novel is told from her point of view - it is written in an unusual combination of first and third person narrative, depending on whether Esther witnesses events or not. Other than an over sentimental side, she is quite charming and easily becomes the most important personality in the book. The mystery of her parentage is one of the important strands of the plot.

But it is the minor characters who are the main treasures of Bleak House, both likeable and unlikeable. In the latter category there are several characters satirising the Victorian obsession with charity. Mrs Jellyby is the most prominent of these, obsessed with projects for the natives of Borriboola-Gha to the exclusion of bringing up - or even noticing - her large family. On the likeable side, there are several who are connected in some way with the Chancery, and these include one of my favourite of all Dickensian characters, Miss Flite, at one time a party to a Chancery suit driven mad by the proceedings of the court.

Bleak House is a remarkably genial novel for a satire with the intention to provoke reform. This is partly due to the nature of the target (best exemplified through the metaphorical fog which appears throughout the novel), but it also produces a sense of helplessness in the face of legal obfuscation which in the end makes its point even more strongly.

Charles Dickens: Barnaby Rudge (1841)

Edition: Heron
Review number: 387

Barnaby Rudge was originally planned as Dickens' first novel. The success of The Pickwick Papers and his development of the serial publication of novels in his magazines - as opposed to the two or three volumes of contemporary practice - meant that writing a novel about the Gordon riots was delayed for some years. And yet Barnaby Rudge still reads like a very early work.

The influence of Scott - novels like The Heart of Midlothian - is fairly obvious, and this is one thing which marks out the novel as the work of a young writer. Later Dickens reads like no one but himself.

The character of Barnaby is a nice idea, imperfectly realised. A simpleton possessed of a benevolent, trusting attitude to the world around him, he is an easy prey for those who want to involve him in the riots as a sort of figurehead to hide the extent of their own involvement. The parallels with Lord George Gordon, whose naive extreme anti-Catholicism sparked off the riots, is a nice touch: the Gordon family at this time were famous for having less than common sense, even for madness. But Barnaby is not convincing; he is rather sentimentalised (to a modern reader, Dickens' greatest fault), and attempts to create humour through his character do not really come off.

Barnaby Rudge is interesting because we can see in it where Dickens started from, and because the riots themselves are a dramatic subject.