Our Dickens Champions Hollingbourne Reading Group decided to get into the swing of things with a summer Garden Party to talk about Little Dorrit. Here’s what they had to say:
We’ve been reading books chosen by members alongside our Dickens’ Choices, so we decided an evening in the garden was called for.
Our discussions focused on Little Dorrit – a real rags to riches tale with over 900 pages of narrative.We first had to come to terms with The Circumlocution Office without which nothing could be achieved – sounds like government today. Then there were the people who worked there – Mr Tite Barnacle, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, Miss Tite Barnacle, William Barnacle and many more including the Stiltstalking side of the family. Where did Dickens find these names?
There’s a lot of walking
Next we were impressed with how far Dickens’ characters walked. We knew that Dickens himself liked to walk in Kent and had seen that Mr Pickwick walked from Rochester to Tonbridge – how far is that ever? Mr Clennan walked from central London to Twickenham to visit the Meagles Family. In Dickens’ biography we read that the man himself walked from his central London home to Gadd’s Hill Rochester at night – not something to attempt today.
Dickens and character descriptions
There are several teachers in our group who say that they use Dickens as an example of how to write about character descriptions. However some of these are very wordy:
“Nobody knew that Mr Merdle had ever done any good to anyone in any capacity or had ever thrown the farthest candle ray of light on any path of duty or diversion, pain or pleasure, toil or rest, fact or fancy among the multiplicity of paths trodden by the sons of Adam…….”
Pupils would not finish in the allotted time if they continued in this vein during exams today.
So many characters…
We therefore began to analyse what we really thought of the style of the book, but beforehand we had to run off a list of characters from the web. There are so many characters in this book it is easy to get confused – Meagles or Merdle, Rigaud or Blabois, Tattycoram or Beadle or Harriet. We wondered if Dickens wrote in such length as his book was published in serial form – did he earn more this way?
Does Dickens need an editor?
We agreed with The Belper Book Group that there was too much plot and too many words. This was not our favourite Dickens. One thing that we contemplated was the skill of the script writers who prepare Dickens for serialisation on television. We all remembered the recent serialisation of Little Dorrit and how well it was done. Someone had to spend a long time editing this work. Did Dickens need a skilled editor himself?
We felt quite tired after our mammoth read and certainly enjoyed a well earned glass of wine.
Get involved
Watch out for our Dickens Champions’ blog posts as they read and review their way through Dickens during 2012.
Reading Dickens in your reading group or book club? Get in touch or post a comment to let us know how you’re getting on.
