In a Wiltshire Village

Every once in a while, when my supply of current fiction is temporarily exhausted, I return to some old friends of years. Among them are the mid-nineteenth century stories of Charles Dickens. This time I picked up my old copy of Martin Chuzzlewit, in a very small print edition. I can find no date of publication on the title pages, but it is from The Oxford India Paper Dickens, Complete Edition With Illustrations by Cruikshank, ‘Phiz’ &c. In Seventeen Volumes that like came out in the early 1900s. I came by the book in the early nineties when I prowled through my father-in-law’s shelves after his death (with permission), and as it was a Dickens I had not previously read, I apprehended it as my own. I did the same with a few other well-thumbed classics in similar small sized thin paper editions but unfortunately there was no “Complete Edition” of the Dickens.

In the Martin Chuzzlewit I found the cartoons alone worth the price of admission, especially those done by Phiz, being Dickens himself. As in most Dickens novels reading the list of characters names and identities is endlessly amusing. Who can forget Pip, Abel Magwitch, and Jaggers in Great Expectations? It is strange, though, how often one hears of unusually appropriate monikers in our own social setting. You may even have run into law firms called something that might sound like Creep, Fee and Lien, and even Dickens couldn’t improve on the name of recently convicted investment thief, Bernie Madoff, and the cartoon of him downloaded from Google, which I hope to insert above to compare with the Phiz illustration of the odious Seth Pecksniff and his equally impossible daughters from Martin Chuzzlewit.

I think Dickens had fun writing the Chuzzlewit novel published in 1843. Though the book contains many of his social criticisms, commentaries and asides it seems to me it was a tongue-in-cheek exercise. Evil characters are excessively so and virtuous ones are sickeningly so. They are larger than life exaggerations but they get under your skin just as easily as do the characters in some of the good page-turning mystery yarns I am so addicted to. I got unreasonably irritated and impatient with the naïve, money hungry and lovesick hero, the young Martin Chuzzlewit. Still, I have read it through several times and always go right to the inevitable happy ending and vested inheritance.

In the first chapter Dickens goes on at length to set out the claims of the Chuzzlewit clan to higher social and financial status than was apparent in the Wiltshire countryside of the day. He takes the whole second chapter to bring about an introduction to one of the main villains of the book, the hypocritical so-called architect, Mr. Pecksniff, in a peculiar and amusing situation. The slow pace and long paragraphs of description would not likely be tolerated by any editor today. Dickens wrote for a slower time, when readers could appreciate language and its inherent power. Of course even then they may have wondered at times whether the author was paid by the word and deliberately dwelt on such scenes to pad their volume.

Still, many of them are very moving, touching or pertinent even today and as someone who recalls pre-electricity village life in my early days here in the Fraser Valley, I find his second chapter description of the end of a misty fall day in a Wiltshire village both poetic and nostalgic. Without permission I will copy a little of it here:

The wet grass sparkled in the light; the scanty patches of verdure in the hedges—where a few green twigs yet stood together bravely, resisting to the last the tyranny of nipping winds and early frosts—took heart and brightened up; the stream which had been dull and sullen all day long, broke out into a cheerful smile; the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the hopeful creatures half believed that winter had gone by, and spring had come already. The vane upon the tapering spire of the old church glistened from its lofty station in sympathy with the general gladness; and from the ivy-shaded windows such gleams of light shone back upon the glowing sky, that it seemed as if the quiet buildings were the hoarding-place of twenty summers, and all their ruddiness and warmth were stored within.

Even those tokens of the season which emphatically whispered of the coming winter, graced the landscape, and, for the moment, tinged its livelier features with no oppressive air of sadness. The fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned up the rich brown earth, and wrought a graceful pattern in the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again, still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt; about the stems of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that year; while others (hardly evergreens this class)showed somewhat stern and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs, the sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.

A moment, and its glory was no more, the sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.

An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to it moaning music. The withering leaves no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked his horses, and with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening fields.

In today’s rushing world to somewhere, we demand briefer fare from our authors. I just recently introduced myself to a series of mystery novels set on the central California coast, by Barry Siegel, whom I consider one of the better of the current crop of mystery authors. In his 2002 novel, Lines of Defense, he introduces the whole novel and its setting with the following lead paragraph:

In La Graciosa, ten miles from the sea, the most luminous summer evening can still suggest winter’s chill. The central plaza’s park benches, its bear statue, the winding creek, even the asistencia itself can abruptly vanish behind a low, thick wall of fog. Cars crawl then, blinking futile headlights. Pedestrians step with care, searching for familiar landmarks. Muffled voices blend with the smell of kelp. Invisible feet crunch on gravel.

His characters are introduced and the action begins in the very next line. That is sticking to essentials. Brief descriptions of the county settings are pursued with the action as required. Nothing like Dickens, is it? Still, the old classics are still with us, having survived for centuries, and this Dickens will yet give you days of enjoyment if you tear yourself away for a few hours at a time from the tube and cyberspace. I hope you will.

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