On Saturday during our weekly trip to the local public library, I lamented to Rach that it’s gotten harder to find the sort of books there that I I enjoy reading. While our college library has an enjoyably diverse range of history, folklore and recent classics, the public library has a rather limited number of nonfiction titles (a dozen books on the Middle Ages, at most) and the fiction skews towards the contemporary and bestsellers. (I ended up leaving with an abridged edition of Thoreau’s journals and a feeling that I’d already read most of the good titles on offer.) And when it comes to reading fiction I’m afraid I’m hopelessly stuck in the past. A decent portion of the books on my list of Eighty-Five Favorite Books are contemporary (from the last seventy-five-or-so years), but you’ll note that even the most recent read as though they were penned in a previous era.

Having spent the past year mostly reading medieval poems and academic texts as research for various books I was writing, I’m keen to read more novels. And in asking myself, “What sort of novels would you like to read?” I realized I prefer reading books that sound as though they were written in the nineteenth century. There are, unfortunately, a finite number of books in this category—my print collection only fills about half a shelf—but they tend to be some of my most beloved books. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, for example, is often likened to the novels of Jane Austen, though the voice is more redolent of the Dickens of The Pickwick Papers (no surprise that both books are top five books for me). Sarah Perry’s widely lauded 2017 novel The Essex Serpent begins, rather enjoyably, with a lengthy description of London that seems to channel the opening of Bleak House:

One o’clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory. There was ice on the prime meridian, and ice on the rigging of the broad-beamed barges down on the busy Thames. Skippers marked the time and tide, and set their oxblood sails against the northeast wind; a freight of iron was bound for Whitechapel foundry, where bells tolled fifty against the anvil as if time were running out. Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past. Oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb.

Time was money in the Royal Exchange, where men passed the afternoon diminishing their hope of threading camels through a needle’s eye, and in the offices of Holborn Bars the long-toothed cog of a master clock caused an electric charge to set its dozen slave clocks chiming. All the clerks looked up from their ledgers, sighed, and looked down once more. On Charing Cross Road time exchanged its chariot for buses and cabs in urgent fleets, and in the wards of Barts and of the Royal Borough pain made hours of minutes. In Wesley’s chapel they sang The sands of time are sinking and wished they might sink faster, and yards away the ice was melting on the graves in Bunhill Fields.

That is, as you can imagine, one of my favorite opening pages in recent literature. I’ve also grown fond of Perry’s latest novel, Enlightenment—in fact, it might even be my favorite Perry—about the fraught friendship between a naive, idealistic young woman and a gay writer thirty years her senior, as it unfolds over several decades. Though set in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it’s written in a style that evokes the Victorian era. In interviews Perry has spoken of growing up in a home without television and how it drove her at a young age to read the King James Bible and the works of the great nineteenth-century novelists: Dickens and Doyle and Hardy and Wilkie Collins, especially. All of them are present, to varying degrees, in her writing.

I’ve recently been reading Kristin Lavransdatter and The Long Ships, Danish and Swedish books respectively, both of which leap over the nineteenth century entirely and land somewhere in the late Middle Ages, consciously evoking the directness and lack of interiority of the Icelandic Sagas. (“They rounded the Skaw with a good following wind, and there, after ancient custom, they sacrificed to Agir and all his kin, offering sheep’s flesh and pork and ale, and were followed for a long while afterwards by shrieking gulls, which they took to be a good omen,” runs a representative passage in The Long Ships.) Daniel Mason’s highly acclaimed North Woods tells the story of a single house in New England over a span of three hundred years and in a range of voices, while Lauren Groff’s short novel The Vaster Wilds follows a young servant girl as she escapes from colonial servitude in Virginia and embarks on a journey alone through the woods just as winter descends. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant similarly hearkens back to an older style in portraying an Anglo-Saxon England steeped in confusion and mystery, as an elderly man and woman set out in search of a son they may or may not have. Katie Lumsden’s The Secrets of Hartwood Hall centers on the recently widowed Margaret Lennox as she stumbles into intrigue after accepting a position as governess at the titular hall. The book reads as a love letter to the nineteenth-century Gothic novel; as with Sarah Perry, there are nods and homages throughout that will delight fans of older fiction.

There are some other books that I’m keen to read. Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx has been celebrated for its ambitions to be a Dickens novel for the late twentieth century. The New York Times wrote upon its release, “Mr. Palliser appears to have set out not merely to write a Dickens novel but to write all Dickens novels,” noting the lifting of plots and characters from Pickwick, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby and others. Susanna Clarke credits this book with teaching her that “you didn’t have to write a 21st-century novel if you didn’t want to; you could write a 19th-century one.” She’s also spoken highly of An Instance of the Fingerpost, a murder mystery set in seventeenth-century Oxford and featuring four not-always-reliable narrators. (I confess to being slightly intimidated by the bulk & heft of this book.) I recently bought a really lovely print copy of A. S. Byatt’s Possession at a library sale for a dollar, and have been informed that I would enjoy this and some of her other books. Possession involves a young academic’s growing fixation with two Victorian-era poets, while The Children’s Book explores the tumultuous life of a beloved late-Victorian children’s writer who is, apparently, based on Edith Nesbit. I’ve loved Edith Nesbit since I was very young and would be surprised if I didn’t end up loving both of these books.

So, that should give you an idea of the sorts of books I’m looking for. What other books in this category should I know about? I find myself regularly impressed by the breadth of reading on display in the comments. You folk are always introducing me to books I might otherwise have missed. What are your favorite slightly old-fashioned contemporary novels? Do let me know down below.

Dear Friends of Biblioll College,

Happy New Year, and welcome back to our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge.

If you’re reading along, what translation/edition are you using? I’ve been in a curious conundrum as to the translation—more on my final decisions below. But I received The Landmark Herodotus for Christmas, edited by Robert B. Strassler and with a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis, and I had so loved the Landmark experience with Thucydides that I had to make it a resource for this journey with Herodotus. In addition, however, I’ve also started an audiobook of the George Rawlinson translation, read by the wonderful David Timson. But then, I have heard such marvelous things about the Penguin translation by Tom Holland, a wonderful historian who is great fun to listen to, and loved his introduction speech at the Hay Festival so much that I am tempted to give that a look as well, and so I bought it for Kindle.

Which will you choose?

By the way, if you’re interested in the Tom Holland speech which is as entertaining as it is inspiring and informative, here it is:

Whatever translation you choose, I would love to hear how you get on. Let’s keep the conversation going!

“This is no conventional history as we understand the word today. It is an epic about war and empire, the frailty of the human condition, fortune’s ebb and flow, freedom versus tyranny, history with a piercing moral message. Herodotus tells us he’ll look at cities great and small because those which were once great have now declined and those which were once modest have since risen to greatness. It is about the immutability of fate, the vanity of power, religion, love, the importance of custom and the capriciousness of the gods.”
~Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus

“What are the Histories?”

Rosalind Thomas asks this question in her introduction to The Landmark Herodotus. “Far more than the history of the Persian Wars, they purport to trace the Greek-barbarian hostility back to earliest mythical times (1.1-5), and they describe the geography of most of the known world of the time” (TLH xiv).

In reading about Herodotus, watching introductory lectures, etc, what I find again and again—and the wonderful Tom Holland describes this aspect (in the above speech) as having been his twelve-year-old frustration with it, which he later came to appreciate—is how human-centered it is, calling it “a treasure-trove of wonders.”

Whereas Thucydides is focused almost solely on the military campaigns, speeches and negotiations, Herodotus is fascinated by anecdotes, stories, understanding other cultures, including those opposed to his own. The apparent digressions are there precisely because of curiosity, fascination with everything and everyone. So much so, that he is often able to look beyond prejudice and stereotypes regarding other cultures. He is constantly wondering, and filled with wonder. Christopher Pelling, in his book Herodotus and the Question Why, writes of wonder as “that distinct Herodotean word” (18).

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“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would no doubt be justified in rearing his head to the stars, remembering that Sherlock Holmes is the only really familiar figure in modern fiction. But let him droop that head again with a gentle sadness, remembering that if Sherlock Holmes is the only familiar figure in modern fiction Sherlock Holmes is also the only familiar figure in the Sherlock Holmes tales. Not many people could say offhand what was the name of the owner of Silver Blaze, or whether Mrs. Watson was dark or fair. But if Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes stories, every character in them would have been equally arresting and memorable. A Sherlock Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his cab. If Dickens brought in a man merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch or two, and made him a giant. Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of Mr. Cyrus Bantam, though he merely passes across the stage, is almost as vivid to us as Mr. Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick. The young man with the lumpy forehead, who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s foreign gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself. They appear only for a fragment of time, but they belong to eternity. We have them only for an instant, but they have us for ever.”

~G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study

Today, your ‘umble correspondents have been discussing a nearly impossible subject: our favorite Dickensian characters. “Nearly impossible” only because Dickens has the most enviable ability to make even the most minor characters memorable forever. There is no rhyme or reason to the order here; more Flora Finchingesque stream of consciousness. Nor is the list comprehensive, nor is it a list of the “best”—in which we could never leave out Miss Havisham, Madame Defarge, Mr. Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Bradley Headstone, and innumerable others—but these are the favorites that we reference or quote constantly.

And so, as Mr Snevellicci might say, “The characters—I love ‘em, every one!”

Mr. Jingle (The Pickwick Papers)

Rach: One could say that Boze and I fell in love over Mr. Jingle, the utterly charming—dashing, very—con man who speaks in a staccato train of semi-connected thoughts. When Boze and I first started texting, it began with Jingle’s first line in the novel: “What’s the fun?” Jingle breezily tells one farfetched story after another—with nearly the disconnect of a kind of Flora Finching but without the honesty—all of which are stories that he apparently lived through. Don’t we love a good storyteller, even if we know in our heart of hearts that he’s a sham?

Mr Wilkins Micawber (David Copperfield)

Boze: Is there a more indelible image in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece than that of Mr Micawber—not half an hour after penning a letter in which he declares himself irretrievably ruined—sitting in a carriage, hat askew, placidly eating walnuts from a paper bag, “with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket”? Dickens drew on memories of his improvident father in depicting the travails of the Micawbers, often imprisoned for debt but always buoyed by their confidence that “something will turn up.” But in the alchemy of Dickens’s imagination, what had been dark and horrifying becomes comical and strange. As a child I was charmed by his eloquence, without quite grasping that he was a terrible father; more recently I named a beloved cat (with a habit of roaming from door to door seeking food) after him. “I will never desert him!” says Mrs Micawber, and neither will we.

Sophy & Traddles (David Copperfield)

Rach: For the best friends, the second fiddles, Tommy Traddles would be right near the top. Herbert Pocket is another delightful example of this type, but Traddles has him beat, and his delightful relationship with Sophy is a model of a happy marriage—one jovially beset by Sophy’s many siblings and relations—and there aren’t too many of those explored in Dickens.

Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers)

Rach: Sam Weller is undoubtably one of the most marvelous creations in literature, his cockney unflappability and canny charm utterly captivating with every encounter. He’s near the top of my list for the greatest male characters in all of Dickens. Utterly quotable, too; one can find a cheeky, often half-mad Wellerism for most occasions worth mentioning. Pickwick and Sam are the ideal of the now-recognizable master-servant relationship/trope in fiction, predating Frodo & Sam, Jeeves & Wooster, or Wimsey & Bunter. They are the veritable Quixote and Sancho for England, as John Forster wrote in his biography of his own best friend, Dickens.

The Boy Who Sucks on Spikes (Bleak House)

Boze: In one of the bleakest chapters in Bleak House, our heroine Esther and friends visit the Neckett siblings, three orphans, the oldest of whom, Charley, barely in her teens, is struggling to feed her two siblings (aged one and five) by working as a laundress. Before the gang descends on Bell Yard, where the children live, we’re given some illuminating exposition by a “very hideous boy” whom they find sucking on the spike of a wicket gate. Having demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of the Necketts’ situation, he returns to sucking on his spike and never appears again in the book. Somehow he is one its best characters.

Rach: This is the perfect example of the “streaky bacon” technique in Dickens—this is eccentric, funny, and terribly sad, as though he hasn’t had a good meal in a while. Brilliant.

Mr. Mantalini (Nicholas Nickleby)

Rach: He lights up a room. A bit of a Jingle in his con man capability, he is so brilliant. Boze and I quote Mr. Mantalini all the time, adopting for one another his own florid, ridiculous compliments: “My essential juice of pineapple!” “My apple streudel!” “My soul’s delight!” The ultimate Mr. Mantalini was played by John McEnery in my favorite thing ever to be put on film: the 8 ½ hour 1982 RSC stage production of Nicholas Nickleby.

James Steerforth and Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield)

Boze: The inimitable Steerforth is not only my favorite character in my favorite novel, but almost certainly my favorite character in all of Dickens. Reading the book at the age of ten, I was perplexed by David’s loyalty to Steerforth and how that loyalty went largely unrewarded—my first experience of an unreliable narrator. David clearly wants us to love Steerforth but Dickens wants us to think that there’s something shifty about him, and that tension between narrator and author is inherently fascinating. It all culminates in Chapter 55, “Tempest,” which I thought then, and think now, is the best thing anyone has written. Rosa Dartle, who seems to have been in love with Steerforth—and at whom he threw a hammer when they were both young, permanently scarring her face—is one of Dickens’s great female characters, radiating a fury and intensity that make her utterly compelling.

Rach: Still haunted by “Tempest,” some of the most glorious writing in literature, along with the second paragraph of Bleak House. And Steerforth is a fascinating cad.

Mr. F’s Aunt (Little Dorrit)

“You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn’t do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when he’s dead.”

Rach: “There’s mile-stones on the Dover road” is one of the random proclamations Mr. F’s Aunt is always making, entirely out of context, that Boze and I have adopted. Why does she have a mysterious aversion to Arthur Clennam? I love her. I need her randomness in my life.

Flora Finching (Little Dorrit)

Rach: What utterly brilliant streams of consciousness are all the words uttered by Clennam’s old flame, Flora Finching. I love her attempts to re-seduce Arthur; her living in the conceit that they are still an item after twenty years apart and a great deal of change in both—perhaps a product of reading too much Mrs. Radcliffe? She is a brilliantly loveable character. Funny, occasionally a bit heartbreaking. (Check out Miriam Margolyes playing her to perfection in the 1987 film.)

All the Ghosts (A Christmas Carol)

Boze: Half the genius of Dickens’s great festive novella is how its characters, both human and otherworldly, seem to have sprung fully formed from the collective unconscious. In reading his descriptions of the ghosts one is occasionally struck by their strangeness, how Dickens invests them with imaginative flourishes that no other writer, living or dead, could have conceived. Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner, unravels the white shroud round his head so that his jaw falls to the floor. The Ghost of Christmas Past is described as being both man and woman, both old and young, and having a disturbing number of arms and legs (which has made him / her a difficult ghost to depict onscreen). The Ghost of Christmas Present is decked out like Father Christmas in a green robe which conceals the horrible children Ignorance and Want. The story wouldn’t be half so effective at warming the heart if it weren’t also spectacularly creepy.

Miss Betsey Trotwood & Mr. Dick (David Copperfield)

Rach: One of Dickens’s greatest female characters, Miss Betsey is the prickly, curmudgeonly aunt who really comes through for you when you need her. Her decision to help David, and her verbal take-down of Mr. Murdstone, is one of the most satisfying passages in Dickens. Mr. Dick, perhaps due to an intellectual or developmental disability, was nearly institutionalized—except for the wonderful Miss Betsey. He is one of Dickens’s most genuinely loveable characters, with his obsession about Charles I, his kindness to David, and the wisdom that he expresses in his own utterly unique way. I need these two in my life always.

The Gentleman in Smallclothes (aka Mr Cucumber) (Nicholas Nickleby)

Boze: Nicholas Nickleby is quite a plot-heavy book, featuring smarmy aristocrats, hidden lineage, jovial theatrical impresarios, damsels imprisoned into bad marriages and several perfectly orchestrated comeuppances. In the midst of these machinations there’s a strange interlude involving Mrs Nickleby, a chatty widow in the mode of Flora Finching, and a gentleman next door who demonstrates his passion for her by throwing whole vegetables over a stone wall into the garden. He boasts, in a monologue that lasts nearly two pages, of having “estates, ma’am ... jewels, lighthouses, fish-ponds, a whalery of my own in the North Sea, and several oyster-beds of great profit in the Pacific Ocean.” Mr Cucumber, as we call him, is very dear to us for personal reasons: I recited his monologue to Rach when I proposed, to which she replied, “Barkis is willin’!” through tears. A friend and her kids threw cucumbers at our wedding.

Master Humphrey (Master Humphrey’s Clock/The Old Curiosity Shop)

Rach: There is something representative about this solitary old gentleman, for me, of the themes of Memory and loneliness that abound in Dickens. He and the friends he meets with periodically are worn with their years and regrets, but still possess the youthful spirit that we find in Pickwick, in Brownlow, in the Cheeryble brothers, in Mr. Lorry and Mr. Grewgious, in Newman Noggs (who should also be on this list, but we have so much Nickleby representation already!) and in all of the benevolent benefactors and self-effacing gentleman who retain compassionate and curious hearts. It was a rather quixotic venture to try and get the public interested in this solitary old bachelor—and hence Master Humphrey virtually disappeared shortly after the start of The Old Curiosity Shop, for which it was to be a kind of “frame” story—but I do love Dickens for trying.

“We are men of secluded habits, with something of a cloud upon our early fortunes, whose enthusiasm, nevertheless, has not cooled with age, whose spirit of romance is not yet quenched, who are content to ramble through the world in a pleasant dream, rather than ever waken again to its harsh realities. We are alchemists who would extract the essence of perpetual youth from dust and ashes, tempt coy Truth in many light and airy forms from the bottom of her well, and discover one crumb of comfort or one grain of good in the commonest and least-regarded matter that passes through our crucible…”

The “Goroo!” Man (David Copperfield)

Boze: On his eighty-mile trek to Dover in pursuit of his formidable aunt, young David is swindled, robbed and beaten by nearly everyone he meets. The most terrifying such encounter involves a dodgy shopkeeper, “a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum,” who seizes David by the hair and cries, “Oh, my eyes and limbs! Oh, my lungs and liver! Oh, goroo, goroo!” The manner in which he says this—screwing it out of himself like a corkscrew, his eyes at each utterance threatening to burst from his head—is vivid and unsettling. “Mr Goroo,” as he’s known in our house, was a pop culture sensation well into the Edwardian era—one is constantly stumbling on allusions to the curious gentleman in books from that era.

Amy Dorrit & Mr. Clennam (Little Dorrit)

Rach: Clennam remains my favorite male romantic lead, and a kind of beau ideal: a self-effacing, gentle, genuinely kind man who tries to help a poor, obscure young woman who has lived all her life in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison due to her father’s financial misfortunes. Clennam, fortyish and having just returned from twenty years abroad attending to a family business that he hated, feels as though he has somehow missed his path in life. Still, in spite of a melancholia that makes him very relatable, he is dogged in his pursuit of the secret that his parents were keeping from him, though he fears it might indicate some terrible injustice done by his family, particularly to the Dorrits.

This leads naturally to my favorite female romantic lead: the quiet and sensitive Amy Dorrit, “child of the Marshalsea,” who manages to think and act and work for her entire, impoverished family, while dealing with the mental vulnerability and decline of her father, a “gentleman” who has been so long in the Marshalsea prison that he loses touch with reality, himself, and his own daughter in his efforts to maintain a veneer of gentility. One can never mistake her quietness for weakness; she’s imaginative, brave, self-effacing, determined.

Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Boze: A somewhat controversial choice, as Nell has become synonymous with the free-flowing sentimentality of Dickens’s early period, but I’ll defend her. Certainly there are Dickens heroines who suffer from a lack of personality—one thinks of the dull Madeline Bray in Nicholas Nickleby and Dora Spenlow. But Nell demonstrates agency and courage in battling the demonic Quilp and her grandfather’s gambling habits (an inventive and nightmarish conflict that sees him behaving like a proto-Gollum). As the sane central figure in a carnivalesque world of rogues, dogsbodies, puppeteers and waxwork owners, Nell is necessarily more ordinary by contrast, but no more so than David Copperfield in the book of that name. Taking into account the full arc of Dickens’s career, she reads at times like an early version of the great Amy Dorrit.

The Marchioness and Dick Swiveller (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Rach: Among the great unlikely friendships/relationships, we must put that of Dick & the Marchioness near the top. How can one not completely fall for the unexpected connection between the dissolute, careless clerk (perhaps an early, comical prototype of the Sydney Carton character, along with Lord Verisopht in Nicholas Nickleby) and the orphaned drudge—really, a prisoner—of the Brass siblings? Between them, they could start their own private detective agency, and we’d gladly follow them through all of their adventures.

Miss Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend)

Rach: Our Mutual Friend, for me, has not one but three of Dickens’s greatest female heroines. But I highlight the quirky dolls’ dressmaker, Miss Jenny Wren. Jenny has managed, since she was little more than a child and in spite of her physical disability, to make a living for herself and her alcoholic father. She’s utterly quirky, funny, unique, spirited, intelligent and canny…and even, a mystic. Her relationship with Mr. Riah, Lizzie, and even Eugene is utterly marvelous. She’s my favorite female Dickens character, and one of my personal heroines.

The Goblin of Avignon (Pictures from Italy)

Boze: We might well have included the Goblins from “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” on this list, but the most memorable “goblin” in the Dickens canon is an elderly woman whom Dickens meets in his travels through France, as narrated in Pictures from Italy. Residing in the Palace of the Popes, where she claims to have been born, she gives tours of the subterranean torture dungeons with a relish which seems both to alarm and impress Dickens. “With her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber, describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows. Thus it ran round! cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs.” Less attention is paid to Dickens’s sketches, travelogues and letters (totaling twelve volumes in the Pilgrim edition) than to his novels, but even if he had never written a word of fiction he would have numbered among the great Victorian writers.

Mr. Bucket (Bleak House)

Rach: In Mr. Bucket, we have one of the first detectives in fiction, and one of the greatest. Using for inspiration a certain Inspector Field with whom Dickens tagged along as an observer (see “On Duty with Inspector Field” in Reprinted Pieces), Mr. Bucket, while being utterly quirky and unpredictable—occasionally, cruel, though with the intent of doing some good, although sometimes his motives are quite obscure—he has an almost godlike influence over a number of characters, with an unflappability that makes him comfortable in any society, from that of Sir Leicester Dedlock, to the destitute of Tom-All-Alone’s. You feel as though he’d be a great bloke to have a pint with, as long as you’re not a suspect in a murder case.

Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots (Dombey & Son)

Rach: “Stand by!” “When found, make a note of.” One of the things I love most about Dickens are some of the unlikely friendships formed between very different characters in different life situations. I love that Floy Dombey, in her distress, finds refuge and protection with the avuncular sea dog who has stayed true to his old friend, Sol Gills, and has been looking after his nautical shop—The Wooden Midshipman—during his disappearance. There is a “found family” in the Midshipman, with Cuttle, Walter, Sol Gills, Floy, and Mr. Toots—the latter being one of those delightfully besotted and utterly goodhearted fellows who are doomed not to get the girl—at least, not the one he’d had his heart set on for so long.

The Fat Boy (Pickwick Papers)

Boze: “Damn that boy! He’s gone to asleep again!” Let me preface by saying: you could not get away with writing a book today in which a prominent minor character is dubbed “The Fat Boy” and the joke is that he has narcolepsy. Maybe that’s for the best. But the Fat Boy, whose name is Joe, who eats great quantities of pies, whose snores are prodigious and who sleeps “as soundly as if the roaring of cannon were his ordinary lullaby,” who astonishes Sam Weller and is threatened with horse-whipping by the roguish Jingle, who shows his gratitude towards the deaf old lady by saying, “I wants to make your flesh creep!”—this young man, I say, embodies something of the eternal spring in which Pickwick takes place. The book is, somehow, all the more comforting for his presence in it. There’s even a medical condition named after him, which further demonstrates the cultural ubiquity of Dickens (and the greatness of the Fat Boy).

John Jasper (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Rach: One of Dickens’s best, most disturbing, most fascinating creations, John Jasper, for me, came to surpass even the great Bradley Headstone as my favorite Dickensian villain. I love him. And he is utterly terrifying. Here in Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, we have one who would probably have been a very Gollum-like character: Jasper is, during the “day,” a respectable choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral; he seems not to entirely know, remember, or accept what he becomes under the influence of opium. Or is he more aware of his violent intentions than he seems to be? Did he kill Edwin Drood and frame Neville Landless, or did Edwin merely…disappear? Was Jasper, if guilty, fully aware of what he’d done? His is one of the great psychological portraits of envy, dissatisfaction, and obsession.

Dick Datchery/Bazzard (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Rach: One of the great Droodish mysteries, aside from whether or not Edwin Drood was murdered, is: Who is Dick Datchery? Datchery is the enigmatic detective who enters the scene after the disappearance of Edwin Drood, clearly with suspicions of his own. Is he an entirely new character, or one of the characters we’ve already met, in disguise? Bazzard? Helena Landless? Even, Edwin Drood himself? Personally—and I’ve thought about this far too much—I am strongly with the Bazzardian camp. As a rather failed actor and playwright, Bazzard, theatrically-hearted clerk to the wonderful Mr. Grewgious, suddenly disappears in the novel, right about the time when Datchery comes to Cloisterham to investigate. I say he was instructed by Grewgious to find evidence of the crime.

Magwitch (Great Expectations)

Boze: “A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered and glared and growled.” From this unpromising beginning—Magwitch even threatens to have the young Pip’s “heart and liver out,” like a near relation of Mr Goroo—Dickens builds one of fiction’s most lovable and sympathetic baddies, employing a device which I will not spoil here. Only Dickens could make you so thoroughly invested in the fate of a man who forces Pip to steal pork pies and says aloud, to no one in particular, “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!” So do I, Abel. So do I.

Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities)

Rach: A dissolute, near-twin to Charles Darnay whose life has utterly gone in the wrong direction, consumed in work and wine, Sydney Carton is a broken barrister with a hopeless love for Lucie Manette—and an utter disdain for himself. So much so, that he loves her too much to want her to return his love. Always in the shadows, always underrecognized and underappreciated, always doing a good turn even when he’d rather not, Sydney is always the smartest—and most sarcastic—guy in the room. He continually broods, walks, works, thinks and overthinks; he has the heart of a Romantic but his true feelings he shows to few. His mysterious dissatisfaction with himself, beginning around the time of his father’s death which is only briefly alluded to in the text, is brought to an amazing, though quiet, circularity and fulfillment in his relationship with Mr. Lorry—one of the best relationships in Dickens. Sydney is the reason I became obsessed not only with this novel, but with the history of the French Revolution. It is a joke in my house that “everything relates to Sydney Carton,” and even after more than twenty years he remains my favorite character in literature.

Dear Friends of Biblioll College,

First off, welcome back after a longer delay than usual to our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge. I’m still catching up with several of you who finished Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War back in October! Due to the nature of my work this past year—which is changing significantly for 2026—I had to focus a good deal on sewing large batches of products to meet holiday deadlines for clients throughout October and November and wasn’t finished until December was well underway! So, although I have still been reading our Great Books, I haven’t been able to make regular, in-depth posts.

This post will be, instead, a simple sharing of some closing thoughts on Thucydides and Euripides, thereby wrapping up my Great Books Challenge reads for 2025, after which I’ll spend the rest of December with other reading, including holiday-themed reading. (Boze and I will update on our “Book Flood” experience on Christmas Eve!) Think of this post as just a few informal thoughts on our last two authors. If you have a chance to comment and share on your own experience, that would be so enriching for all of us.

Please join me in January 2026 as I continue the Challenge with the next author on our list: Herodotus! If you’re reading along, I’d love to hear which edition/translation you’ll be using. I’ll be using The Landmark Herodotus, which a little bird tells me will be among my Christmas gifts.

A little housekeeping. You’ll find, below—right above the “Works Cited,” a new addition to these posts, which will be continued: a growing list of links to all the posts in our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge series! I hope this helps to keep everything in some sort of order, and to help you reference earlier posts more easily. Besides, it is delightful to see in a glance just how far we’ve come in our journey through the Great Books!

Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War

Due to the nature of Thucydides’s challenging Book One, combined with a flood of work in October/November, I spent far longer with the War than anticipated. I did find that, once I reached the second book, where the action really takes off, it becomes more compelling.

It is not difficult to see that, however strong her naval power and political dominance, Athens became more and more beset by revolts all around; she was stretched thin, her resources dwindling with the progression of the lengthy, bloody war. There is so much drama, that, from this distance of time, it was hard to keep up with the many places and peoples involved, and who is taking which side. (The maps in The Landmark Thucydides were, for me, of indispensable help!)

Revolts in Corcyra and Messana; multiple Attican invasions; changing alliances (Alcibiades!); an oligarchic takeover after Athens is stripped of her democracy; hidden intrigues between Chia and Sparta; oligarchic plots; the construction of walls and counter-walls; the nearly insuperable Syracusans; naval victories; raids; pillaging; night attacks and routs; an alliance between the Persians and Peloponnesians; Athenian defeat, humiliation, demoralization; executions (Nicias, Demosthenes); enslavement; uprisings; revolution.

Thucydides on Revolution

Without question, the section that struck me most profoundly—perhaps because I’ve long had an obsession with the French Revolution, and specifically the Reign of Terror of 1793-94—was in Book Three, 3.82-84, when Thucydides describes the nature of revolution and its consequences.

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“We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us…”

~Pericles to his fellow Athenians (2.41), at the funeral oration for the fallen early heroes of the war (1^st year, winter)

Friends, welcome back to our St. John’s College Great Books Challenge—and Thucydides! My apologies for the delay in this second post on The Peloponnesian War. Some personal changes (which we knew were coming) have arrived: namely, my taking on more work to replace the work for the school district—due to budget cuts, I was going to be transferred to a new location, which I didn’t feel comfortable with nor drawn to—and it has been a wonderfully busy few weeks. (More on this, perhaps, in a separate post. But in short, it is just the kind of handsewing work that I love, along with an apprenticeship with a master hatmaker who has been helping to preserve a dying art—the kind of work that I like to imagine William Morris looking down on with a nod of approval.)

Through everything, I made my slow way through Book Two and am beginning Book Three. (A post on that one will have a quicker turnaround!)

With Book Two, we are well and truly into the war, and I have found it far easier to follow than the difficult (if not downright messy) organization of Book One, fascinating as the first book was. If you’re reading along, I would love to hear your thoughts…where you’re at and how you’re enjoying it.

With that, let’s get started.

The War Begins: Thebes and Plataea

The war, as Thucydides writes at the opening of the second book, “now really begins” (2.1).

Fourteen years of the Thirty Years’ Peace had indeed been relatively peaceful, but in the fifteenth year, trouble was brewing…

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“I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time” (1.22).

Friends, and any of you who might be reading along with me in the St. John’s College Great Books Challenge, I must confess that I had hoped by now to have a full reflection completed on both Books One and Two. However, I found myself a bit mired in confusion in Book One, and hadn’t sufficiently prepared myself for how to read and understand it, by those who have studied it voraciously.

(If you’ve been reading along, I’d love to hear your initial thoughts, reactions, and what has helped you through it!)

In short, I took a little detour about halfway through Book One in order to read articles, watch videos, and begin delving into side works about Thucydides, particularly in beginning with this first, complex book.

I hope you’ll enjoy this introduction to some of the resources that have been helpful for me in grappling with it—resources which I wish I’d encountered before beginning.

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Friends, it has been a delightfully busy summer. And I also had recently lost my Kindle (which was just replaced yesterday). Perhaps these are not the best excuses, but both have played into why I’ve not spent as much time as I would like to have done on Sophocles. There’s another reason, though: I’m particularly excited about the next stage of the Great Books Challenge: Thucydides’s famous history, The Peloponnesian War.

I finished my Sophoclean journey (for now) with two plays that represented different stages of his playwriting career: Ajax and Philoctetes. Though I didn’t have sufficient inspiration to write a whole essay on either—I’m a rereader, after all, and might have to return to them with fresh insights after some time has passed—I thought I would just share a few thoughts before moving to starting Thucydides’s history. Since the Thucydidean history is much longer than the plays we’ve been journeying with, I personally will likely take a longer time with it, and write several posts throughout rather than one reflection at the end. This current post will serve as something of an introduction to the journey.

And friends, if any of you are reading along with me, I’d love to hear which translation of Sophocles you’ve been reading, and which copy of The Peloponnesian War you end up choosing!

But first, a note on finishing this first encounter with Sophocles…

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As I said in Sunday’s post on how to rekindle your love of reading, many of us hesitate to make reading a daily habit because we assume only long books count as real books. (Case in point: when I shared the above post on twitter, within the first minute a woman replied to inform me that I couldn’t have read 186 books in six months because books are 400 pages—apparently under the assumption that all books are precisely this length.)

I enjoy reading three and four hundred-page books—in college I read a great many for pleasure—but as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to see the value in the single-sitting book, the book that can be begun and ended in the same evening. This week, for example, in the midst of reading tomes on Marco Polo and the prehistoric world, I’m also reading Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch (147 pages), the third book in the Dark Is Rising sequence. It’s the shortest book in the series and a modern classic. You’d be shocked at the number of classics you can read in three hours or less (assuming a normal reading pace and a room free of distractions). Today I bring you a list.

The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. Presented as a series of letters from a functionary demon to his apprentice nephew, this isn’t really a book about religion but about the many ways in which people lie to themselves. Often imitated, it has never been equalled.

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James Cain. When the no-good Frank Chambers meets Cora at a diner, the attraction is instantaneous. They dream up a foolproof means of murdering Cora’s husband, but “these violent delights have violent ends.”

War in Heaven, by Charles Williams. “The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no one in the room but the corpse.” A murder inside a publishing office leads to the discovery of the Holy Grail in a village church, in this darkly comic thriller.

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann. Unfolding with the air of a fever dream, Mann’s oddest book follows a writer as he wanders through a Venice of street singers, dodgy gondoliers and achingly beautiful youths, while a cholera pandemic ravages the city.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. A series of lyrical vignettes centering on Esperanza, a young woman coming of age in a Latina neighborhood, and her colorful neighbors, from Elenita the witch-lady to Cathy, who has “cats and cats and cats.”

Billy Budd, by Herman Melville. Melville’s last novella, discovered in a biscuit tin after his death, concerns an accidental murder at sea and contains some of his best, weirdest prose. Rach and I have a special holiday dedicated to celebrating this book, and its author.

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Fans of The Twilight Zone will enjoy these tales of the first earth expeditions to Mars, all of which are doomed in interesting ways. “There Will Come Soft Rains” remains one of the most disturbing stories ever written.

The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. “Very early in my life it was too late … I grew old at eighteen.” This partially autobiographical novel tells—in mesmeric prose that recalls a French New Wave film—of a young woman’s coming of age and her first, illicit affair.

Our Town, by Thornton Wilder. “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it… every, every minute?” “No. Saints and poets maybe… they do, some.” Wilder’s most famous play, in which he ponders the secret glory at the back of things, remains a classroom staple.

The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon. In the summer of 1944, Sherlock Holmes thinks his sleuthing days are behind him. But then he meets a mute Jewish boy whose only companion is a parrot who spits out a string of mysterious numbers in German.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. The rare book where not a word is misplaced, Spark’s most beloved novel tells of a formidable young boarding school teacher, her affairs, her fascist sympathies, and her ultimate betrayal by a favorite student.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterston. Furiously funny and strange, this is the story of a bookish girl adopted into a strict Pentecostal family, who plans on going into missions—until one day she meets a beautiful girl at the fish market.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Orwell became disillusioned with Stalinist communism, and in this jovial but macabre allegory he examines the fallout when a group of barnyard critters revolt against their humans and attempt to create a society of equals.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Dreamy and eccentric Merricat shares an immense house with her agoraphobic sister Constance and their uncle Julian, until the arrival of a guest threatens to expose the truth about the death of her parents six years before.

Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin. Colm Tóibín said of this book, “Baldwin … could work wonders with the light and shade of intimacy, could move easily and effortlessly into a whispered prose and then, with equal facility, evoke the excitement of a crowded bar.”

On the Shortness of Life. “Learning how to live takes a whole life,” writes Seneca the Younger, “and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.” An essential work for gaining perspective on what’s important.

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue. Hearkening back to a time when poets were also warriors, this beloved Icelandic saga tells of a romantic rivalry between bards Gunnlaug & Raven who, endearingly, recite verses to one another before inflicting baneful bloodshed.

I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land, by Connie Willis. A man who thinks books are deservedly obsolete encounters an underground warehouse containing the last surviving copy of every destroyed or forgotten book. A novella to reaffirm your love of reading.

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams, by Lady Sarashina. David Bentley Hart calls this book “one of the most delicate specimens of Heian Japanese literature … It tells of temple pilgrimages and shimmering landscapes and private melancholy and mystical dreams.”

The Saga of Grettir the Strong. My favorite of the dozen-or-so Icelandic Sagas I’ve read, featuring a man cursed to be unlucky and one of the most haunting battles in literature, between Grettir and the corpse of a shepherd possessed by a wight.

Essays in Idleness, by Yoshida Kenko. A brisk, rambling collection of stray thoughts written by a Japanese monk in seclusion between 1330 and 1332, in which nuggets of wisdom jostle with gossipy anecdotes and random asides (“it is hard to feel sentimental about plants”).

The Epic of Gilgamesh (N. K. Sandars translation). Published in 1960 for Penguin Classics. I prefer this one over the recent Mitchell translation for the beauty of its poetry, which has something of the clarity and majesty of the King James Bible.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Dr. Frankl was deported to Auschwitz for the crime of being Jewish, where he lost his pregnant wife. Here he describes life in a concentration camp and ponders how to find meaning in our most terrible afflictions.

A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr. A veteran of the Great War is assigned the task of restoring a medieval mural in a rural English church. During the ensuing month he makes friends, falls aimlessly in love and puzzles over mysteries of time and eternity.

A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” When his beloved wife Joy died of cancer at the age of 45, after three years of marriage, Lewis penned four deeply personal journals recording his crisis of faith. This is his Book of Job.

O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker. Imagine writing only one novel—but that novel is perfect. This tale of a sixteen-year-old girl who prefers reading Gothic fiction and traipsing about the Highlands with her pet raven to attending boarding school is one of my favorite books ever.

Heart of Darkness. What struck me on my latest reading is Conrad’s eagerness to puncture the pretensions of the superpower of his era. The Roman colonization of Britain is a specter haunting the book. “This too has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff. Based on a decades-long correspondence between the author and the proprietor of a bookshop in London whom she never met. Anyone who rejoices in reading will enjoy their chats about Pepys, Donne, the difficulty of finding a decent Chaucer.

Fantastic Mr Fox. I’ve been on a Dahl kick lately and this one is easily my favorite. The cunning and resourceful Mr Fox delights in geese, good cider & his wife’s lovingly made dinners. Readers will delight in his schemes to foil three horrible farmers.

Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman. As a young Einstein formulates his theory of relativity, he dreams of worlds in which time follows different rules. In one world, we repeat the same life an infinite number of times. In another, no one ever dies.

“This day will show your birth and will destroy you.”

~Oedipus the King, 438

Oedipus the King

The Oedipus story is a tough one to stomach, but it almost seemed fated—probably the wrong word—that I should read it now when not only was it the next on the St. John’s College Curriculum reading list, but I found a copy of the whole trilogy, translated by David Grene, sitting in our Little Free Library at just the moment I needed it, probably left by an obliging neighbor.

For all of the difficulty of the story, I enjoyed—if that is the word—this first encounter with Sophocles and Oedipus’s fateful and tragic story. In case you are not familiar with it, the gist is (SPOILERS): Oedipus, King of Thebes, is doomed by fate to inadvertently marry his mother and kill his own father. His father, Laius, having consulted an oracle and realizing that the child is doomed to eventually kill him, he tries to get his wife Jocasta to kill the child. She gives the child to a servant. Rather than expose him to the elements on a mountaintop, the servant gives the child to a shepherd to care for. Much later, the child becomes the unlikely King of Thebes, marrying the former queen, Jocasta (his mother).

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“The prominent feature of [Percy Bysshe] Shelley’s theory of the destiny of the human species was, that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled….Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none….That man could be so perfectionized as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation, was the cardinal point of his system.”

~ Mary Shelley

“The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring or is about to be restored.”

~Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound

“If there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.”

~John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chapter Five

1816: The Year Without a Summer; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Percy Bysshe Shelley was still in Italy at the end of 1816, bringing the fire of his poetry to the world along with his ideas on the perfectability of man and his ability to will evil away, while the corpse of his pregnant, abandoned wife—with whom he had eloped when she was sixteen, and had two children—was found by a pensioner from Chelsea Hospital one December morning, floating in the Serpentine in London's Hyde Park. The inquest following at the Fox and Bull Inn at Knightsbridge ruled that Harriet Shelley was “found dead” by suicide. Harriet had disappeared from her family for some weeks, two years after her husband had abandoned her and their children to run away with Mary Godwin, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Shelley’s political idol who advocated for free love against the constraints of marriage. Mary’s elopement mirrored Harriet’s own with Shelley at the same age, five years before.

The two children Harriet had had with Percy were left to the care of a sister and the family.

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You could make a case—you would be wrong, because Shakespeare exists, but you could make a case—that Dickens is the greatest writer the English language has produced. As it stands, he’s comfortably lodged in second place and it’s unlikely that he’ll ever yield the position to another. Book editor Cheryl Klein once wrote that writing talent is a combination of five traits—imagination, insight, observation, writing craft and dramatic skill—and that she had never known an author who excelled in all five. But Dickens possessed them all. He seems to have been almost genetically predisposed to write perfect books, the way Michael Phelps was built to swim or Secretariat to win races. No other novelist evinces the same combination of effortless characterization, vibrant description and perfect plotting, that mysterious ability to arrange the events of a story in such brilliant sequence that your hairs stand on end.

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For some time before the Dickens Chronological Reading Club ended, we (Rach and I) had been contemplating doing a ranking of every Dickens novel. This was a project close to our hearts: for three years we ran the reading club together, and shortly before it ended, we married. During those three years we read the books aloud, listened to them on audio, unearthed obscure short stories and essays from the dusty corners of the Dickens canon and recited our favorite passages so often we nearly committed them to memory. We discussed how it might feel to live in a Victorian rookery with birds circling the windows, or sit in the Greenwich Naval Hospital on a dark, dismal day in November and observe “the eyes and throats of ancient … pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards.” We have been quite mad for all things Dickens.

Before we embark, some rules. (“Business first, pleasure arterwards, as King Richard the Third said when he stabbed the t’other king in the Tower, afore he smothered the babbies.”) We’re only ranking the fourteen canonical novels and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so you won’t see A Christmas Carol (one of the most perfect things ever written, but at only 30,000 words it hardly qualifies as a novel). Nor will you see any of the other Christmas books on this list. Likewise for American Notes, Pictures from Italy, Sketches by Boz, The Uncommercial Traveller, &c., though we’ve read and recommend them. Indeed, some of our favorite pieces by Dickens—“Mr. Tulrumble,” “The Magic Fishbone,” “The Signal-Man,” “The Gin Palace,” that passage in his letters where he (playfully, we assume) debates throwing himself in the Thames because the young Queen Victoria doesn’t fancy him—didn’t make it onto the list. When you start really digging into Dickens, you find that his novels are a small portion of his published work. But it’s largely on this portion that his fame (deservedly) rests.

All that said… “lead on, spirit—the night is waning fast!”

14. Hard Times (1854)

I hope some of our beloved Dickensian friends will not take offense at this placement of Hard Times—for really, the “least” of Dickens’s books is, for us, better than nearly anything else. And some of our most brilliant friends love Dickens’s hammer-blow at utilitarianism, logic-over-fancy, and the divorce laws. While we love much of what Dickens is attempting to do here, we just didn’t love (as much) the way he did it. It had far more of the overtly allegorical/representative about it than is typical for the ridiculously generous and distinct Dickensian characterization. (Though Gradgrind is a brilliant figure and Gradgrindian is up there with Pecksniffery for glorious character adjectivery.) Though Sissy Jupe is lovely, I found Louisa and Gradgrind both less successful, as characters, than some earlier parallels—e.g. Floy, Edith, and Mr. Dombey. Too, we found the sentiment surrounding Stephen Blackpool’s long monologues and tragic story less effective. Still, it is our glorious Dickens. –Rach

13. Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

Martin Chuzzlewit surely has one of the most atmospheric openings of any novel, and some really knock-out characters. Revolving around the inheritance—and disinheritance—to be left by the jaded Martin Chuzzlewit (the elder) and on his relationship with his family and ward, Dickens tackles the subjects of selfishness and greed with his usual flair. The second half, though a fantastic spoof of America—and it is fun to read this in conjunction with Dickens’s bitingly humorous and insightful American Notes—I found the English parts far more interesting. Especially in the character of Tom Pinch, who is one of Dickens’s greats. –Rach

12. Barnaby Rudge (1841)

During our Dickens Chronological Reading Club, this one became a surprise hit, and it was hard to find a place to put it here on our list, as I would tend to rank it higher. Barnaby Rudge was quite a long-term labor for Dickens, and his only historical novel besides A Tale of Two Cities. Like A Tale, Barnaby evinces Dickens’s concern for the social issues of his day and the potential for mob violence by taking his readers along on a journey with a young man with an intellectual or developmental disability (and his amazing pet raven) as he gets caught up in the Gordon Riots of the 1780s. The tale is full of Gothic atmosphere and begins on a note of murder and ghostly visitations. I hope you give it a go—I’m looking forward to doing another reread myself very soon. –Rach

11. Oliver Twist (1838)

After the comic rambles of Pickwick, his first novel, Dickens was keen to prove his skills as a serious dramatic writer. He made a hard swerve into drama (and melodrama) with his second book, the story of an orphaned boy who falls in with a gang of thieves led by the irascible Fagin. The cleverness of Dickens’s plotting in this novel isn’t fully appreciated; it’s the Victorian equivalent of something like Breaking Bad, building to a climax that is no less thrilling and emotionally gutting. What’s remarkable (and infuriating) is that he largely improvised the plot as he wrote—and that he was only twenty-six. —Boze

10. The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

This early picaresque novel about a young woman and her grandfather wandering across a surreal English landscape of rogues, freaks and ne’er-do-wells, pursued by the malevolent dwarf Quilp, has the dreamlike quality of Pilgrim’s Progress or a romance of the Middle Ages. Thoroughly rooted in the sentimental tradition, and featuring a heroine, Little Nell, who embodies some of young Dickens’s more annoying tendencies with respect to female characters (Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that you would need a heart of stone to read about her death without laughing), it nonetheless holds together because of its strangeness, a strangeness that occasionally assumes the quality of a nightmare. —Boze

09. Nicholas Nickleby (1839)

In some ways, I would put this higher—although I have no idea what it would replace—simply because it is one of the funniest and most moving stories in existence. As Boze has written during our Dickens Club period, Nickleby is, somehow, a combination of the best of sunny and picaresque Pickwick with the most sentimental and tragic of Oliver Twist, the two works that preceded it. It is as though Dickens was finding his way; it is the consummate sort of “streaky bacon” tale—a term which Dickens used to indicate the layers of humor mixed with pathos that make for effective storytelling. Nickleby also has some of Dickens’s most genius comic creations, from Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Mantalini, to the mad gentleman in small-clothes who throws cucumbers as an eccentric wooing technique. (Boze memorized his entire, mad speech to Mrs. Nickleby as his marriage proposal to me…what could I say except, “Barkis is willin’!”?) An early gift from Boze was the Nonesuch edition of this novel, and I am forever enamored of the 1982 recorded stage production of the 8 ½ hour stage miracle with Roger Rees and Edward Petherbridge. If you love humor, theater, villains getting the most poetical justice…this is for you. –Rach

08. Dombey and Son (1848)

Dickens’s mid-career masterpiece centers on the relationship between Paul Dombey, a shipping magnate, and his daughter Florence, and has much to say about family, money, marriage, and the kind of pride that isolates and destroys. In the figure of Edith Dombey, Paul’s second wife, Dickens invents one of his best female characters, and the dissolution of the Dombey’s marriage mirrors and anticipates Dickens’s own. Unjustly neglected because of the books that immediately followed it, Dombey and Son represents Dickens’s most successful fusion to this point of realism and fairy-tale. —Boze

07. Our Mutual Friend (1865)

“The river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.”

Though this is a quote from Dickens’s essay, “Night Walks,” it might as well sum up the atmosphere of this consummately London-centered novel, with its majestic and secretive River who gives life and death equally. It’s hard to rank this any lower than the top five, as it is not only great social satire and a marvelous story, but has some of Dickens’s best characters in any novel—in other words, some of the greatest characters of all time. The book has, arguably, two of his three strongest female leads in Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam, and my very favorite Dickensian character—along with Sam Weller and Sydney Carton—in Miss Jenny Wren, the quirky dolls’ dressmaker. It also has one of his greatest villains in the haunted, insecure Bradley Headstone. This really is little short of perfection, and I hope you’ll love it too. –Rach

06. Great Expectations (1861)

An early scene in which the orphaned Pip, contemplating his parents’ gravestone, is violently accosted by an escaped convict named Magwitch, sets the tone for the rest of the book, which has some claim to being the eeriest novel Dickens ever wrote. Magwitch and Miss Havisham seem to have wandered in out of some demented tale by the Grimm Brothers, and Dickens powerfully subverts the Cinderella story arcs of his previous novels to devastating effect. By the end, Pip’s “great expectations” have been utterly crushed, but it’s these youthful humiliations and the loss of his idealism that make this one of the great coming-of-age novels. —Boze

05. Little Dorrit (1857)

For me, Little Dorrit remains in my top three Dickens works—which means it is certainly in my top five books of all time—with all of its glorious strangeness. Set a couple of decades before Dickens wrote it, the story revolves around a young woman, Amy Dorrit—called “Little Dorrit”—who has the distinction of being born in the Marshalsea prison for debtors. Her father, William Dorrit, one of the great tragic characters, had been imprisoned for mysterious reasons, and has been there so long that he has come to be known as “the Father of the Marshalsea.” The Dorrits are aided by a kind stranger, Arthur Clennam. Now entering midlife after a dismal twenty years abroad working at his family merchant business, Arthur realizes that he has let much of his life slip by him and wants to make reparation for some wrong that was done by his parents years before—a wrong which haunted Arthur’s father before his death. Arthur fears it might have something to do with the misfortunes of the Dorrit family, and he is determined to find out the truth. Though the resolution is somewhat convoluted and it has a particularly moustache-twirling villain, Little Dorrit has my favorite settings and atmosphere of any Dickens, and my favorite leading romantic pair. –Rach

04. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Had Dickens lived long enough to finish the final half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, we might now be talking about it as one of the most perfect books ever written. Here, Dickens not only out-Wilkies Wilkie Collins but does so in a delightfully Gothic and humorous fashion. He also returns to his childhood setting, Rochester, under the fictional name of Cloisterham. The story revolves around a troubled choirmaster, John Jasper—one of Dickens’s great characters, and the fulfilment of the terrifying Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend—who is living a double-life in a grimy London opium den, where his strangest and most violent fantasies come to life. Typically, the violent fantasies revolve around his beloved—or is he?—nephew, Edwin Drood, the golden boy who seems to live an undeservedly blessed existence, including in the long-arranged betrothal with the young woman that John Jasper himself wants to make his own. On one stormy Christmas Eve night, Edwin Drood goes mysteriously missing, his last contact having, insofar as we know, been the hot-tempered Neville Landless, on whom Jasper is determined to throw suspicion and have revenge. Is Edwin Drood actually dead, or has he been in hiding or spirited away? If dead, who killed him? It is one of the great literary mysteries, and half the fun of this deranged and delightful half-novel is trying to figure it out. Much ink has been spilled on the subject, and even G.B. Shaw and G.K. Chesterton participated in a mock trial to try and determine Jasper’s guilt. I cannot recommend this book enough—even more so because it grows on you. (Boze thinks it is secretly my favorite Dickens.) Once you start Drooding, there’s no turning back. –Rach

03. Bleak House (1853)

“Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London,” writes Peter Ackroyd, “… a serious London, full of mysteries of the past and mysteries of origin. In all respects it conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard, and full of ghosts and unseen presences.” The fog that oozes in from the Essex marshes and lodges in the stems of pipes in the opening paragraphs seems to suffuse the whole book. Here, more than anywhere else, Dickens cements his reputation as a master of atmosphere and description. There’s an energy to the whole affair that, rather like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, suggests a creative genius writing at the height of his powers. —Boze

02. [tied for second] David Copperfield (1850)

There are those—Freud and Tolstoy among them—who think David Copperfield the greatest book ever written. Certainly it brings to a shining perfection the “Dickens plot,” variations of which he had been writing since Oliver Twist. The version presented in this book—the orphaned boy, cruelly beaten by an implacable stepfather and forced to work in a blacking factory before absconding to London in search of a new life—has proven the most influential of all Dickens’s plots, animating the novels of Stephen King, J. K. Rowling and Barbara Kingsolver, among others. And this most autobiographical of all Dickens’s novels also features his best cast of characters. Mr. Micawber, Steerforth, Tommy Traddles, Agnes, Uriah Heep, Aunt Betsey, Rosa Dartle, the man who yells “goroo!”—every character who speaks, even once, is made instantly memorable. There’s a scene towards the end that might be the most emotionally devastating in the Dickens canon. It is my favorite book. — Boze

02. [tied for second] A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

The first time I encountered this classic tale of revolution and unrequited love inspired by Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, it was with Frank Muller’s atmospheric voice on audiobook, and my life has never been the same since. (I blame everything on Sydney Carton.) It is often argued that the usual Dickens humor is less effective here (looking at you, Jerry Cruncher) and it has one of his less successful leading females. But the perfection of its story and fulfillment cannot be overstated, and Sydney Carton is possibly the greatest fictional character ever, side-by-side with Jean Valjean. Dickens pays off every possible line and motif that he sets up. Madame Defarge is one of the most iconic villains in any novel, and the almost-father-figure of Mr. Lorry remains one of my favorites. A Tale of Two Cities has a melancholy grandeur and timelessness; it feels more like a fairy story, or a parable, that just happens to be set during a very distinctly violent period under the shadow of the guillotine. Like A Christmas Carol, one cannot imagine an alternate timeline in which A Tale of Two Cities hadn’t been written. It is “a far, far better thing.” –Rach

01. The Pickwick Papers (1837)

“Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick are the Sancho and the Quixote of Londoners, and as little likely to pass away as the old city itself.”

~John Forster

We debated the ranking of the second and third books (before settling on a tie), but there was never any question which would be our joint favorite. Chesterton thought Pickwick, Dickens’ debut novel, the best he ever wrote, “the splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars were ultimately made.” It is certainly the one Dickens book that can be said to have invented a whole world. The landscape of coaching inns, taverns, village squares and bright May meadows through which Pickwick and friends ramble seemingly without end belongs to an England that may never quite have existed, an England of the mind. In this the book anticipates the great fantasy novels of the twentieth century, many of which use a similar imagined England as their basis (the fingerprints of Pickwick can be seen in Fellowship of the Ring). The Christmas sequence at Dingley Dell may be the most purely pleasurable sequence Dickens ever wrote. Dickens never took as much joy in writing as he did in this novel; indeed, if any book can be joy in book form, it’s this. —Boze

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.”

~ The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 57

Friends, today I'm pleased to share this podcast I recorded with Faith Moore, a very dear twitter friend, at the beginning of May. We talked about myths and tales of enchantment, why they matter, and some of our favorite fairy-tale anthologies. She said I've read more stories of this sort than anyone she's ever met, which was nice. And she was kind enough to edit out all my flustered hemming & hawing. Do have a listen:

As I sit with my library-loaned Great Books volume open to The Eumenides, I can’t help but recall the playbill—I wish I still had it—from a marvelous ‘90s-era Hamlet up in Portland, Oregon, whose cover text read something like:

Murder. Madness. Incest. A ghost (hero’s father) claiming to be murdered by his brother. Hero’s mother marries the murderer, the hero’s uncle. Hero stabs girlfriend’s father, thinking it’s his uncle. Girlfriend dies by suicide. Brother comes for revenge. Brother dies. Mother/aunt drinks poison. Hero kills uncle/father, then dies.

Suddenly your family seems normal.

First encountering Aeschylus, the “father of tragedy,” I realized that I was definitely not in Kansas anymore, even if allusions to these figures—e.g. the Furies—and others in the classical world are rife in my favorite Shakespeare and Dickens works. It helps to have just reread Homer, though. We are to some degree in familiar territory here, in the timeframe between The Iliad and The Odyssey, albeit with one of our least-sympathetic characters, Agamemnon.

However strange and elusive, this “father of tragedy,” Aeschylus, resonates today. Announcing the terrible news of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968 and relating it to the loss of his own brother, Robert F. Kennedy said to the crowd at his campaign rally:

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

Aeschylus challenges us; and, it seems, he meant to.

In a delightful and informative YouTube conversation between Professor Joshua Billings of Princeton University and Professor Joseph Howley of Columbia University, the former argues that Aeschylus’s is the “most challenging” language of classical literature, even in translation. He advises that we shouldn’t “panic” if things don’t fall into place straightaway, and any translation that is too simple and accessible is probably not a particularly good one.

This has been my first real encounter with Aeschylus, and so I am writing this more as a “first impressions” piece, which hopefully will be followed up by another after I have more time and experience in this strange world. In the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to share here some of what I have learned as a beginner with Greek tragedy.

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In late December, it was announced that Christopher Nolan’s next movie will be an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Naturally, folks were excited: Nolan is one of the most esteemed filmmakers working today (his talky three-hour film about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer made close to a billion dollars and won seven Oscars), and the Odyssey… well, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of it. It’s the single most famous story in the canon of Western literature after the Bible. (Globally, it’s rivaled only by Journey to the West.) And most of us remember it fondly as being one of the few truly enjoyable books we were made to read in school, an irresistible confection of sirens, sea witches, cave giants, post-traumatic stress and domestic slaughter. The classics: they’re fun!

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And memory is one of the great themes of Homer’s Odyssey.

A year earlier, when I first read The Iliad and The Odyssey, I preferred The Iliad. Now, on this reread for our Great Books Challenge, I am surprised by this. The Odyssey is such a winning myth, a fairy-tale full of seafaring adventure; it is also a more personal and accessible tale, filled with the nostalgia of home. It glories in life and survival, as The Iliad glories in, and mourns for, the dead.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are each, in their own way, perfect, and the parallels between these two great literary compilations of years of oral tradition are fascinating: each is divided into twenty-four Books; each begins near the end of an adventure of approximately ten years in total. And it is particularly interesting, as Pietro Pucci writes in “The Song of the Sirens,” that it is the Siren passage in The Odyssey that is particularly “Iliadic” in tone/grammar, and even in the repetitions of certain phrases such as “over all the generous earth”: “The Sirens’ conspicuous use of Iliadic traditional phrases can hardly be an accident; on the contrary it forces the listener to the realization that they mean to define Odysseus as the Odysseus of the Iliad” (Pucci 194). If the sailors listen to their song, they’ll be lured away from their true adventure, whose active recall keeps the past ever present and forward-moving. In this way, the Siren song has the same effect as that of the lotos: oblivion to the task at hand, which is connected to active memory. Still, it is fascinating that Odysseus has the chance to hear it—this is part of his lust for knowledge and adventure—but he must have his muffle-eared crew literally tie him to the mast to prevent him physically retreating in the direction of the deadly song. To adventure, and yet not to yield to the temptations, is key.

“I am a part of all that I have met”: Place, Memory, & Psychogeography

Many—even Victorian-era Prime Minister William Gladstone—have tried to map the actual adventures of Odysseus, as though these fairy-tale landscapes filled with giants, one-eyed beings, and Sirens could be connected to a concrete geographical location.

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A very blessed Easter to those who celebrate. It has been, perhaps, very fitting that our posts this week should grapple with the personal reality of death and mourning. Boze wrote a stunning essay on this subject, relating it to the first book of the “Shadow Canon,” The Epic of Gilgamesh, last Friday. I hope you have the chance to read it!

And here we are with the Akhaians, mourning for Patróklos, and with the Trojans, mourning Hektor, as we come to the final pages of The Iliad. It is here that we have a final moment of reflection and rest coming from a long-delayed act of mercy. Could such moments be the antidote to the force of war? In these moments, the most fury-bent among us might—just might—find peace in a common humanity, even with the enemy.

Ever yours, in books,

Rach

P.S. If you have time, please see our “Look-Ahead” section below for a few updates as to our methodology for this library-educated book series as we move forward. It is all a work-in-progress, and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

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We are back aboard the ships beyond the breached wall, after a thoughtful 2-week pause, hosted by Dana, in her first and second parts of a reflection on The Iliad with the War Poets and Simone Weil.

This week, we find our missing-in-action hero, Akhilleus (Achilles), finally ready to rejoin the war after the death of his beloved Patróklos at the hands of Hektor, who has taken Akhilleus’ armor. Yet both Hektor and Akhilleus go on in spite of a sense of their own destruction; Akhilleus foresees no return to his own country.

We are left at the end of Book 18 wondering how it all will end...

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We crave war because we crave the mythic dimension, and war and religion are the collective forces that propel us there. But the reality of war is horrible and deadly. When we try to turn the myth of war into reality to satisfy our craving for meaning and passion, we risk our own destruction as well as that of each other and even meaning and reality themselves. PTSD is the soul illness suffered by individuals and cultures as a result.”

—Dr. Edward Tick, War and the Soul, p. 2791

(read Part 1: Harold Bloom, An Iliad (the play), and the War Poets)

The question I raised in part one was how does a reader like me—a Midwestern-raised American woman who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century—make sense of an ancient Greek war epic composed by men living twenty-seven centuries ago?

My answer was that I approach challenging books by “reading around” them, always operating on the a priori assumption (which, were it not true, would render all literature written by temporally or spatially distant authors virtually incomprehensible), that the fundamentals of human nature do not change; that they have not changed in any substantial way since our species made the mysterious turn from whatever state of being came before into “homo sapiens”; that however much circumstances change (religion, tech, social structure, norms), people respond to their circumstances in fundamentally familiar patterns that keep re-appearing in history, in daily life, and in stories told all over the world. Over and over and over again.

Case in point: here are some astonishingly similar “beats”, as Hollywood writers like to put it, in the war experiences of Siegfried Sassoon, WWI poet, and Achilles, son of Peleus, mythical demi-god.

1. The hero goes to war with idealism, patriotism, a belief in the justice of the cause, and a desire to earn glory through deeds of bravery.

Sassoon: Aged 27, Sassoon enlists as soon as WWI breaks out in August, 1914. Like most men of the middle and upper classes, he is convinced of the war’s justice and eager for the glory to be gained in dying for one’s country. A deeply committed soldier, he is quickly given an officer’s commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (Ffiwsilwyr Brenhinol Cymreig). In training in 1915, he can still write, in a poem called “Absolution”,

War is our scourge; yet war has
made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom,
we are free. 2

Achilles: As The Iliad begins, the great hero of the Achaean army has been with Agamemnon at the siege of Troy for nine long years, but remains determined as ever to do his duty and gain glory by defeating the Trojans and recapturing the dishonored queen of Menelaus, Helen. Achilles is especially noted by Homer as one of the few soldiers who never dishonors dead enemies by stripping or abusing their corpses, and who will allow prisoners to be ransomed rather than killed out of a desire for revenge.

2. The hero becomes convinced that he is going to die in the war but hopes that it will at least happen while performing worthy deeds of battle.

Sassoon: after losing his brother Hamo at Gallipoli, Sassoon is finally sent to France where he is quickly persuaded, on seeing the universal slaughter, that he will never make it home alive. His only hope is to die in some real battle with notable gains, rather than being picked off in a trench by a sniper.

Achilles: the demi-god is told by his mother, the goddess Thetis, that he is doomed to die soon, especially if he remains at Troy.

3. The hero experiences some great injustice or betrayal on the part of higher-ups that, whether overnight or over time, upends the soldier’s belief in the justice of the cause and the value of his, and his comrades’, sacrifices.

Sassoon: In France, he begins to experience, first-hand, the dehumanizing brutality of the trenches. After surviving military blunders ordered by superiors that cost the lives of many comrades, Sassoon begins to note that the staggering losses sustained by the British Army have gained but few meters of territory. The suspicion begins to grow in his mind that the common soldier is being sacrificed en masse by incompetent leaders issuing insane orders from a safe distance, while veiling all the butchery in patriotic cant to appease the ignorant populace back home.

The change begins to show up in Sassoon’s poetry, as evidenced by his “In the Pink” from February 1916:

Everything but wretchedness is forgotten:
To-night he’s in the pink, but soon he’ll die.
And still the war goes on – he don’t know why. 3

Achilles: After convincing Agamemnon that the only way to turn aside the plague sent by Apollo is to return his “war prize” (the daughter of a priest of Apollo), King Agamemnon, the military leader of the Greeks, breaks every rule of honor in war by taking away Achilles’ own prize, Briseus, thus humiliating him before the whole army.

Achilles, who loved Briseus, rages at Agamemnon in Book I:

No, no, we joined for you, you insolent boor,
to please you, fighting for your brother’s sake
and yours, to get revenge upon the Trojans.
You overlook this, dogface, or don’t care,
and now in the end you threaten to take my girl,
a prize I sweated for, and soldiers gave me!

Never have I had plunder like your own
from any Trojan stronghold battered down
by the Akhaians. I have seen more action
hand to hand in those assaults than you have,
but when the time for sharing comes, the greater
share is always yours. Worn out with battle
I carry off some trifle to my ships.
Well, this time I make sail for home. 4

The upshot: Achilles refuses to fight any longer for Agamemnon and the Greeks, even if it means the destruction of the entire army. He takes his own soldiers, the Myrmidons, and retires to a camp on the beach near his ships.

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It can be a challenge for a modern reader, especially one who has not personally experienced war, let alone combat, to find a way into a book like The Iliad. To begin with, there’s that seemingly unbridgeable distance of space and time between Homer’s world and ours.

My Freshman year of college I began a year-long “survey” of Ancient History. The Fall Semester focused on Ancient Greece and the Spring on Ancient Rome. We were assigned the usual introductory textbooks, loaded with pictures and broad concepts spanning centuries, and our professor, who lectured twice a week, was both uninspiring and, to my youthful taste, which hovered between Idealism and Romanticism, annoyingly cynical. (This was the ‘70s and I suspect that the ‘New Historicism’ had already begun to cut a path through the History faculty.)

Worse, given that my education heretofore, classically speaking, had not been that of an old Etonian or Harrovian, or even up to the mark of that glover’s kid, Shakespeare, with his “small Latin and less Greek”, my hazy acquaintance with ancient Greek civilization and its subsequent impact on the Western world as a whole, such as it was, had been shaped by a handful of Hollywood movies, a few weeks’ worth of study in a high school World History class, some dabblings in Plato and Aristotle from the Philosophy shelves of the public library, and Edith Hamilton’s dreary little book on mythology.

Like every reader, every student, I needed some point of reference, some sense of connection between the material under study and my own experience; but the world of the ancient Greeks seemed so remote, that I, who usually relished the foreign and far-away, couldn’t find my way in.

The upshot: I was at sea over there in the Aegean, splashing about for bits of intellectual or emotional driftwood that might carry me toward some more familiar part of the intellectual map.

Or, as Hamlet so eloquently put it, just what, after all, was Hecuba to me, or me to Hecuba, that I should weep for her?

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Greetings from the sick room! I have spent a good deal of time with our warring friends & foes these past days, as I had to take a bit of time off work due to illness. I found myself drawn into Caroline Alexander’s book, The War that Killed Achilles, borrowed from our local library, which helped to explicate some of the characters and events that we’ve encountered with The Iliad over the past two weeks. For example, Achilles’ (Akhilleus’) centrality to the story in spite of his relative inactivity in the first 2/3 of the book; the reason why Paris is so cordially—or uncordially—hated by Trojan and Achaian alike; the touching humanity of Hektor; even, whether or not Homer glorifies war and violence.

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