Category: Culture

The Heart of Mid-Lothian ★★★★


“The Porteous Mob,” James Drummond, 1855. The painting is on display in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article in The Herald of Scotland in which a scholar of literature urged filmmakers to make “blockbuster” movies from Walter Scott novels. The article is “Call for Walter Scott’s novels to be given film treatment,” Aug. 10.

I found the article charming, but I also was skeptical. At that point, I had read only one Walter Scott novel, The Antiquary, 1816, the third of Scott’s Waverley novels. That novel was a good enough read, but it’s not blockbuster material. Had I continued to judge Scott’s novels based only on the The Antiquary, I would not have rated him all that high, and I would have continued to wonder whether the high esteem in which the Scottish hold Scott has more to do with nationalism than with literature.

But any scholar, in this age, who makes a specialty of 19th Century literature automatically has my respect. So, I thought it likely than Alison Lumsden, who is quoted in the article, must know things that I don’t know. I ordered a used copy of The Heart of Mid-Lothian from Amazon. It’s a 1947 edition, poorly printed and with small type, but I didn’t want to read this book on a Kindle. Almost always, when old books are made into Kindle editions, they are full of typos because the text was scanned and was poorly edited, or not edited at all, for scanner errors.

The novel was first published in 1818. That makes it more than 200 years old. I had just finished reading Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1842) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). To read these novels back to back seemed like a good idea, not least because my neural circuits for parsing long 19th Century sentences were fully warmed up, and also because I was curious how the Dickens would compare with the Scott.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian is a seriously good novel, and I now agree with Alison Lumsden: It deserves to be made into a blockbuster.

One of the reasons Lumsden gives for bringing Scott to the screen is “because I think that’s a really good way of getting people to engage with writers again — they see the film and then they read the book.”

No doubt Professor Lumsden has students who would be able to read The Heart of Mid-Lothian. But my guess is that this novel would be insurmountable by most young readers today. The novel is long. The sentences are very long. For the first 120 pages, hardly anything happens. Most daunting, though, is that the dialogue (of which there is a great deal) is in dialect, written phonetically. (Some people would see this speech not as a dialect of English, but as a separate Scots language.) Thus there is a great deal of reader friction. Other readers may have other methods, but my method is to sound the dialogue in my mind. Usually it can be understood from the sound of it. If a character uses the word “waur” in a sentence, it’s not too difficult to recognize that “waur” means “worse.” The word “maun,” meaning “must,” will already be understood by readers of English literature. But some words simply have to be looked up, such as “gleg,” meaning sharp or wary. I learned the meaning of “Gardyloo!” from a walking tour in Edinburgh, in which I also learned about the Grassmarket and Half-Hanged Maggie, and where the gallows used to be. (If you love Edinburgh or are planning a trip there, that alone is a reason to read this novel.)

Even the people of Edinburgh speak in dialect. But characters from the Highlands are more challenging:

Hout, tout, ne’er fash your thumb, Mrs. Putler. The law is put twa-three years auld yet, and is ower young to hae come our length ; and pesides, how is the lads to climb the praes wi’ thae tamn’d breekens on them? It makes me sick to see them. Put ony how, I thought I kend Donacha’s haunts gey and weel, and I was at the place where he had rested yestreen ; for I saw the laves the limmers had lain on, and the ashes of them ; by the same token there was a pit greeshoch purning yet. I am thinking they got some word out o’ the island what was intended — I sought every glen and cleuch, as if I had been deer-stalking, but teil and wauff of his coat-tail could I see — Cot tam!

Note the beautiful rhythm of this little speech. Rhythm has a great deal to do with why we find Scottish accents so charming.

There is another factor that Chuzzlewit, Rudge, and Mid-Lothian have in common that may be offputting to contemporary readers. That is that the dramatic trajectories are very different. Contemporary readers will expect a story to begin with some dramatic action. Then the author will be forgiven for a bit of exposition. Then the action will resume and build step by step until the climax. The climax will be followed by a very short denouement. Readers of 200 years ago, no doubt, would have been entirely content with a different sort of trajectory. For many pages — maybe even 20 percent of the novel’s length — nothing much will happen. Some scenes will be set and characters will be introduced. But nothing happens, and how the characters and settings are related is not disclosed. There will be clues and a bit of foreshadowing, but there is hardly any dramatic tension. Finally the threads of the plot (and the subplots) will start to emerge. By the halfway point, the reader will finally see where the story is going. The climax will occur very early, around the three-quarters mark, followed by a very long denouement. Readers who anticipate this might be more motivated to stick with an antique novel if they have low expections that anything important will happen until well after 100 pages.

For that reason, books such as The Heart of Mid-Lothian would present some big problems for filmmakers. A filmmaker might, for example, have to start the movie with a high-drama event that doesn’t occur until much later in the story, and then depend on a flashback to introduce the characters and settings and to do the necessary exposition. Or screenwriters might cut the first quarter of the novel completely, and dribble in the background some other way. Exposition is another challenge. Contemporary writers avoid relying on exposition, in which the author explains what is happening. Instead, the action is expected to tell the story. In Mid-Lothian, the readers will encounter many pages of exposition, and only the key dramatic parts will be handled with scenes and dialogue. The art of storytelling and the expectations of readers have changed. But old stories are good stories all the same.

As the drama in Mid-Lothian picked up and peaked, I found myself staying up late to read. Was it a good read, worth the effort? Yes!

There are other rewards, though, for reading a novel like this. I understand much better now why the Scottish hold Scott in such high esteem. I have a much better feel for some Scottish history — particularly the events that followed “the Glorious revolution,” though that history is complicated and remains vague to me. Scott was a lawyer. He works in some very interesting facts about Scottish law, for which he clearly had great respect. And though I don’t think that Scott was particularly religious, a major theme in Mid-Lothian is the religious conflict in Scotland that was closely connected with conflict around the union of Scotland and England. One of the characters in Mid-Lothian, David Deans, goes into long and rather tedious disquisitions on doctrine. Scott refers to Deans as a “proser,” and it’s fairly clear that Scott was making fun of doctrinal hair-splitting, as well as of old men who talk too much.

As for the Porteous riots, the riots are not central to the plot of Mid-Lothian, but the riots have a great deal to do with the characters. The Porteous riots — of which Scott’s account is surely historically accurate — also ruffled feathers in London, and those ruffled feathers in London also connect with the plot.

Jeanie Deans, Mid-Lothian‘s heroine, will seem like a prude, I think, to young people today. But Jeanie’s sister, Effie, is very different. The difference between these two sisters will give modern young readers plenty to think about. And for students looking for a topic for a paper, I suggest this: Compare the hangman characters in Barnaby Rudge and The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Was Scott as much a social reformer as Dickens? How did the Scottish of the time justify capital punishment? Was the public attitude toward capital punishment starting to change? Why or why not? How does a duke’s attitude compare with that of a peasant, or with that of a religious character such as David Deans?

I should say a few words about the moral tone of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. It is an extended meditation on suffering and justice. Here is a quotation from Jeanie Deans:

O madam, if ever ye kend what it was to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffering creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she can be neither ca’d fit to live or die, have some compassion on our misery! — Save an honest house from dishonour, and an unhappy girl, not eighteen years of age, from an early and dreadful death! Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that we think on other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our ain wrangs and fighting our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body — and seldom may it visit your Leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours! — Oh, my Leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.

In short, though I read this novel in two weeks, I feel as though I just finished an entire semester in a tough course on Scottish literature and history that I found very rewarding. Thank you, Professor Alison Lumsden of the University of Aberdeen.


The Scott Monument in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens. The monument stands on prime real estate just west of Waverley Station, below, and northeast of, the castle. I’ve never been inside this tower and have only admired it from the park, from which I took this photo, but I’ll climb the steps on my next trip. The tower is over 200 feet high.

On a lighter note: It’s entirely possible that the difficulty of understanding the many Scottish accents has been a running joke among speakers of English for centuries. I’d have to say that, as a native speaker of Southern Appalachian English, I am pretty good at parsing Scottish. I easily understand all of the video below. Twice in my life I have encountered English accents that I have not been able to understand, and it’s possible that one of them was speaking Gaelic rather than English. One was a Cockney taxi driver in London. I knew he was speaking Cockney only because of “My Fair Lady” (though I also read “Pygmalion” in high school and thought that it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read). The other was an old man, a beggar, I think, who approached me on the street in Edinburgh. Sometimes locals will take the time to school you, as with a clerk in the ferry office in the east of England who wouldn’t give me my ticket to the Hook of Holland until I correctly pronounced “Harwich” (which sounds like “Harridge” to me). There are very funny videos about this on YouTube with James McAvoy.

Watchmen

I’m two years behind on this. It took a while for Watchmen (2019) to show up on my radar screen. I’ve watched only the first episode so far, but rarely have I seen a first episode as original, as surprising, and as good as this.

A friend recommended Watchmen (in a texting conversation) while we were talking about Trumpists and Trumpist militias. Watchmen is based on a comic book series from the 1980s. HBO, I understand, made significant changes in updating the storylines. Comics purists, I understand, were enraged at the changes. But Watchmen — or at least the first episode — speaks directly, and maybe even presciently, to what we’re living through. It was extremely satisfying to see rightwing defectives who would take the law into their own hands taken down and taken out in the picturesque ways that Hollywood can deal with villains.

But it also worried me. I texted my friend: “Has there been any concern that it might encourage the militia crazies?” He replied, “No, those folks didn’t have it on their radar.” Whew.

As we wait for justice to catch up with the tyrants, traitors, racists, insurrectionists and criminals who are trying to destroy American democracy and install their little Hitler, Watchmen is good therapy. There are nine episodes, and they can be streamed from HBO.

Church culture


A tent revival

I drove out during the cool of the evening yesterday to pick up the mail and look for more canning jars. At Sandy Ridge up near the Virginia line, people were gathering under a big tent for a tent revival. I stopped to take pictures, but I kept well back from the tent, assuming that I would quickly be identified as an outsider up to no good. I watched for a few minutes, though, and it was easy to see that this was a social occasion. Most of the people clearly knew each other. To them, I think, it was an occasion for dressing up just a little and spending a pleasant summer evening fanning themselves and exchanging gossip.

I envy them for the social part. Country churches, had they not aligned themselves with such an ugly politics, could serve as social glue in places where social glue is badly needed. Nor am I just guessing at the politics being offered at this particular tent revival. The preacher behind this tent revival ran for county commissioner a few years ago but lost in the Republican primary. After losing, he set up a little church in a vacant building across the road from this tent. I think the vacant building formerly was a garage. When he was running for commissioner, he ran his campaign from Facebook, where his theology and his politics were on full display. If you’ve read about some of the preachers who recently tried to take over the Southern Baptist church, then you know the type.

If there is an opposite of church culture, I think it would be pub culture. I would argue that one of the reasons rural American culture is falling apart is that church culture has become such a poison. Church culture is highly antagonistic to pub culture. Churches have done everything possible to prevent and kill pub culture. The real reason, I would argue, is competition. Even now, in the state of North Carolina, alcohol cannot be sold on Sunday mornings. Given a choice between a healthy pub culture and church culture, most people would choose pub culture, as they still do all over the British Isles and Ireland.

We do have places here that serve alcohol. But a healthy pub culture does not exist. On the way to Walnut Cove there is a motorcycle bar. I believe it is loosely aligned with one or more militias. On the other side of Danbury, in a nice spot overlooking the Dan River, there is a place that might have succeeded if people in these parts understood pub culture. I am among those who will never go back again, though, because the atmosphere is so ugly and the music is so loud. Those who won’t go back tell similar versions of the same story: friends of the musicians tell people to shut up so they can hear the music, and people who want to talk ask the musicians to keep it down. The owner of the place is so undiplomatic that he makes things worse. And so the vibe is terrible. A pub can’t be a concert hall and a place for friends to drink at the same time. Certainly, in Ireland, the music and noise in a popular pub might go on until late at night. But the locals also know when they can go for a quiet drink and when the place will be a party.

Mental health people tell us that drinking is healthiest when it’s social. In places like this, social drinking is pretty much totally unsupported. Instead, people stop at Dollar Generals and gas stations for beer. Recently, on my way to buy groceries, I passed the ABC store in Walnut Cove a few minutes before opening time. There were a dozen people lined up to buy liquor at 9:30 a.m. Alcoholism is a major rural problem, but social drinking in a form that could serve as healthy social glue is unsupported and almost unknown.

There is little charm anymore in rural American culture, as far as I can tell. Most rural people these days crave a suburban lifestyle, not a rural lifestyle — that is, a lifestyle that revolves around cars, without the slightest effort toward self-sufficiency or any kind of interaction with the outdoors. Even deer hunters rarely stalk deer on foot in the woods anymore. Instead, they set up deer feeders (containing corn) and then put up blinds or stands that they can drive to and in which they can sit and shoot deer. (Walmart sells blinds and deer stands.) I have met one local “coon hunter” whom a neighbor invites to hunt in our woods. I’m not sure that I’m on board with killing raccoons for sport (in spite of the damage that one has done to my tomatoes), but at least the coon hunter does it in the traditional way — on foot, in the woods, at night. I liked this coon hunter, actually. He said he didn’t know why, but that there was something spooky and exciting about being in the woods at night. “It’s primal,” I offered. “That’s it,” he said, “primal.” So he is one unsuburbanized person, at least, who is still in touch with traditional rural culture. He’d probably go to pubs, if there were any. The woods are his church, my guess would be.

I would argue that, decades ago, we passed the point at which rural white churches served any healthy purpose. Instead, the purpose they chiefly serve is to reinforce the grievances and identity that the Republican Party requires to retain its hold on rural America. Churches now operate as social wedges, not social glue. If we liberals were half as anti-freedom as authoritarians think we are, we’d close the churches and open some pubs to save some rural souls.

By the way, not one single mask was in sight at that tent revival.

On sliding from note to note

Listen link #1. Please read the first two paragraphs before you listen.

Want to start a barroom brawl in a place where the musical cognoscenti hang out to drink? Easy. Just say the explosive Italian word portamento and run for your life.

The Italian word is about carrying something. But portamento singing, in English, better translates to sliding, or gliding, from one note to the next note. Gliding from note to note is one of the markers of country music singing — so much so that there is even a country music instrument designed to slide from note to note, the steel guitar. Patsy Cline’s wonderful version of “The Wayward Wind” sounds almost as though she is imitating the steel guitar, sliding both up and down to reach her notes. Go ahead and listen to Listen link #1 now.

Patsy Cline was a fantastic singer, from the days when country music singers actually could sing. But, as far as I know, she never had formal musical training. Her portamento sliding from note to note works (for most ears, anyway), because she does eventually end up on pitch, and the timing of her sliding serves her musical and emotional intent. One of the reasons I grit my teeth at, and run screaming from, most country music is that the sliding from note to note is done with little musical skill and in poor taste. As for skill, the singer seems to lack the ability to land on pitch and must hunt for the note (often without ever finding it). As for taste, the singer is attempting to convey emotion but doesn’t have the skill or taste to do it.

It would be easy to write off all portamento singing as provincial. But the Italians, after all, do have a word for it. And then there is Maria Callas (and many other opera singers). Go ahead and listen to Listen link #2 now and take note of her portamento. You may need to listen carefully, because Callas’ portamento is more discreet than Patsy Cline’s.

Listen link #2

Though the musical cognoscenti and Callas fans (of which there are millions) may argue about her portamento, there is no disagreement on her technique. She knew what the destination pitch was and was perfectly capable of landing on that pitch.

If you’re not quite clear what it means to slide from note to note, consider the piano, where no sliding is possible. Strike a key and you’re on pitch. But consider the violin, which has no frets. Violinists can slide from note to note by sliding a finger, but they don’t (except occasionally and intentionally for musical effect).

For an extreme example of a portamento instrument, consider the theramin. The musician has pretty much no choice but to slide from note to note, and the quality of the musician’s ear will determine the accuracy of the destination pitch and the musical quality of the sliding. And a skillful player such as Clara Rockmore can make surprisingly quick transitions from note to note:

Listen link #3.

 

Extra credit: In the Maria Callas video above, note the difference between portamento and the glissando. At 6:09, Callas sings a descending glissando. Note that she doesn’t slide from note to note in the glissando. She hits each individual note, stunningly and on pitch, on the way down.

In the theramin video, note the wavering of the musician’s left hand, which produces vibrato, a kind of trembling of the pitch.

Joan Baez was known for her rapid vibrato. Clearly it wasn’t easy, because as she aged (she is now 80) she lost this vibrato and wisely sings many of her old songs differently.

Bottom line: singers and musicians play with pitch. But it helps if they know what they’re doing.

What ended the Mediterranean civilizations?


The Mediterranean today. Google Earth. Click here for high-resolution version.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Eric H. Cline. Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pages.

Reading about ancient history before the time of the classical Greeks is a challenge. We want a reasonably clear narrative and a good story. But the problem is that we don’t know enough about what happened 3,000 years ago for a clear narrative. All we get is a big mosaic of random pieces, with most of the pieces missing. No clear narrative emerges. But we continue to learn about ancient history, and so quickly, that this book, originally published in 2014, was revised in 2021.

Books from Oxford University Press (and certainly from Princeton as well) can be very dry reading. But the Oxford press in particular has a knack for finding academics who can write for non-academic (though motivated) readers. Eric Cline is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. His device for making this book more readable is to treat it as a mystery. That’s fair, because the history of high civilization in the Mediterranean and how it ended is a mystery. The year 1177 B.C. is arbitrary, of course. Cline chose that year because that is the year that Egypt, under the pharaoh Ramses III, was invaded by the “Sea Peoples,” and the long era of Egyptian power came to an end.

The kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were rich and powerful — Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Cypriots. Each kingdom fell, quickly, like dominoes. There followed a dark age, out of which new civilizations arose — Israelites, Aramaeans, Phonenicians, Athenians, Spartans.

Because Cline wrote this book as a mystery, I think I will not get into what he has to say about what caused the collapse, insofar as we even understand what caused the collapse. The pleasure of this book is in becoming interested in the mystery. For a long time, what we knew about this period was learned only through archeology and from the thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that have been found all over the eastern Mediterranean. I had no idea, actually, that so many tablets survived. Many are mundane — inventories, or ships’ manifests. But the rulers of those kingdoms wrote each other lots of letters (on clay tablets), and many of them survive. At least one language has not been deciphered. Other tablets are still being translated and published. In addition to the new material from newly discovered and newly translated clay tablets and the ongoing work in archeology, new types of data are becoming available — DNA studies (from DNA recovered from bones), climate studies, and data on ancient disease pathogens. The history of the ancient Mediterranean is still very much being written.

Clearly some historians including Cline would like for us to know more about ancient history because there are parallels with today’s world that might serve as warnings. That’s fine. But historians are as unlikely to agree on the lessons to be learned as they are to agree on why a civilization fell. Cline makes reference to one historian whose view is that maybe it was a good thing that palace power in the Mediterranean collapsed, leaving room for experiments with different sorts of cultures and governments and a wider (if only slightly) distribution of wealth and power.

As for the warnings, did the ancients have any?:

“Many questions still remain unanswered, however. We do not know whether the various entities (Hittites, Mycenaeans, Egyptians, etc.) knew they were in the midst of a collapse of their society. We do not know whether there were organized efforts to evaluate and remedy the overall evolving situation and look to the future. We do not yet have any indications in the archaeological remains or textual records that anyone at the time was aware of the larger picture.

“And, even if they did know, could the leaders of the individual societies have done anything to slow the spread of decay or to prevent the ultimate collapse? There were certainly individual efforts to counter the effects of famine and drought (e.g., grain ships sent by the Egyptians; possible breeding of drought-resistant cattle and crops in the Levant), but apparently they were for naught. It has been pointed out elsewhere, though, that in virtually all such previous collapses, ‘there were sages or scholars who had a reasonably good understanding of what was happening and how it might be avoided.’ However, ‘If they were listened to at all … their advice was typically followed too little and too late.'” (The quotation inside this quotation is attributed, in the notes, to Thomas D. Hall.)

You will need some good maps while reading this book, and by the time you’ve finished it your Mediterranean geography will be quite good. There are two maps in the book, but they’re not great.


The Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Testament of Youth

While scouring HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, etc., for those rare items that are both intelligent and not set in the here and now, I came across “Testament of Youth.” It is a beautiful but disturbing period piece about World War I, based on the memoir by Vera Brittain, which was published in 1940.

Brittain’s dream was to go to Oxford. That dream came true, but the war fell hard — very hard — on her generation. After the war she became a pacifist activist.

As much as I wanted to read Testament of Youth, after looking at samples on Amazon I decided not to. Unfortunately she was not an appealing writer.

But, regardless of her style of writing, Brittain’s is a story that deserves to be told and to be remembered. The film, with a fine cast, does a very good job of that. Anglophiles will find much in the film to interest them.

“Testament of Youth” can be streamed from Amazon Prime Video.

Martin Chuzzlewit


Pinch starts homeward with the new pupil. Hablot Knight Brown (also known as Phiz). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In our era, Charles Dickens is neglected and undervalued. Martin Chuzzlewit surely is one of Dickens’ most neglected and undervalued novels. For reasons that I was completely unprepared for, now would be a good time for a Dickens revival, not to mention a Martin Chuzzlewit revival.

The last villain I would have expected to mention in a review of a Charles Dickens novel is Donald John Trump (whose name happens to have a Dickensian ring to it). But it’s not Trump himself who appears in the novel. It’s the red-cap wearing, snuff-dribbling, dumb-as-rocks and in-your-face Trumpists who appear in the novel, fine Americans all.

Wikipedia writes, citing Hesketh Pearson (1949), “Dickens’s scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a ‘frenzy of wrath.’ As a consequence Dickens received abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the United States.”

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in serial form between 1842 and 1844. Dickens had visited America in 1842. Clearly he had some things he wanted to say about Americans, so, in Chuzzlewit, Dickens has two characters visit America. This visit to America is peripheral to the plots, so clearly it was a device for conveying Dickens’ disgust with the hypocrisy of Americans — or, at least, with the hypocrisy of certain Americans. Americans in Chuzzlewit are always going on about liberty, their own liberty, liberty that they deny to others, up to and including slavery. Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Dickens returned to America and backpedaled on his criticism, calling it satire (which of course it was).

Maybe Dickens believed in 1867 that Americans, having gone to war because of it, had confonted and corrected themselves on matters of liberty. If that’s what he thought, he would have been wrong. In How the South Won the Civil War, the historian Heather Cox Richardson describes how Southern values — “a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color” — not only lived on but also migrated west, encoded as the myth of the ruggedly independent cowboy. Today’s Trumpists, Richardson shows, are the very same people.

That they are the very same people also is what Dickens shows in Martin Chuzzlewit. It is to be regretted that Dickens ever backpedaled on those insights. There have been times in American history when it might have been possible to imagine that America had changed and turned over a new leaf — for example, July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act; or November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Now we know that we might as well say that we are still fighting the battles of the Civil War and that we just came through one of the most dangerous battles since Appomattox.

But enough about Trump and Trumpists, who seem to intrude into everything these days, for the purpose of exercising their liberty to drag everyone down with them (public health and the climate of the planet, for example, not to mention, as always, the tyranny of the rich). One of the reasons I read novels is to escape from all that.

Back in England, if I had to choose one word for what drives Dickens’ novels and motivated Dickens to write them, that word would be character. By that I mean character not in the sense of “Tom Pinch is a character in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Rather, I mean the character of the characters, as in the Oxford definition, “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” Charles Dickens, I must imagine, quietly studied the character of the people around him, no less than did Sigmund Freud. Dickens obviously did not like much (maybe most) of what he saw. He chose satire as his vehicle. As for Dickens’ lovable characters (Tom Pinch, for example), they are not perfect. During the course of the story they will learn, and by the end of the story they will be changed.

I can think of a dozen reasons for reading Dickens today beyond what I would call Dickens’ “re-relevance,” that is, the fact that, 180 years ago, he came to America and saw straight through us. (Unfortunately, as the arc of justice has moved on, some people never changed.) As I wrote here recently about Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’ style is worth studying for its cinematic qualities. His ability to evoke atmosphere is enormous. The setting, the dialogue, and even the weather will work together to create a powerful scene — for example, the opening scene of Barnaby Rudge inside an English tavern on a dark and stormy night.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens spends several pages to take the reader on an absolutely thrilling stage coach ride (on top of the coach) from Salisbury to London. If I were a scholar and had the time, the first paper I’d want to write about Dickens would be a survey of his complete works for what people are eating — scrumptious or revolting as the scene requires, and always beautifully described. Dickens gives as much attention to costumes as to food. There also can be no doubt that, just as Dickens looked around him and was horrified at the ill treatment of human beings, he also was well aware of the suffering of animals, such as the birds in the bird shop in Chuzzlewit and the horses who draw the coaches on those thrilling, and rather dangerous, stage coach rides.

Yes, reading Dickens takes time. His style is not suited to reading fast, and his novels are long. Chuzzlewit is about 770 pages. I realized, while reading Chuzzlewit, that I identify with Dickens. I too look around me and am horrified at how bad and how deluded people can be. It’s easy to be angry. But Dickens never, ever sounds angry. Rather, he makes fun of crummy people. He lets their own words expose them for what they are. And his stories always deliver in the end exactly what his characters deserve. Here we are, 180 years later, still trapped in Dickens’ world with our work cut out for us, a world in which hardly anybody — whether good or bad — gets what they deserve.

Hinge and Bracket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7KbhGQTak8

George Logan (Dr. Evadne Hinge) is now 77 years old and lives in France. Patrick Fyffe (Dame Hilda Bracket) died in 2002 at age 60. In the 1970s, their musical comedy was extremely popular on British television and stage. They first worked together in 1972 and became famous after they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974.

What was remarkable about their act was their superb musicality combined with their comic genius. Fyffe’s singing also recalls the extraordinary sound of the castrati singers of centuries past. We will never hear that sound again, but male voices singing falsetto surely come remarkably close. The best such singers (and Fyffe was one of them) can blend their “head voice” (higher notes) and “chest voice” (lower notes) in such a way that the sound is almost like a male voice and female voice singing together.

The Tomorrow War

I admit it. I’m a sucker for movies like this — pure, fast-moving, undemanding, popcorn-friendly entertainment. With that kind of movie, pacing is critical. There have to be times when the characters (and the audience) can stop and catch their breath. “The Tomorrow War” nicely balances the action against a family story, in much the same way as “Greenland.” Both the family drama and the action drama make good use of the time-travel angle.

Paramount Pictures intended this movie for release in theaters, but because of Covid-19, it was released instead on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t score very high on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’d give it at least a 90.