That"s all for today! This is Kathryn here again signing off. I"m sorry if I didn"t get to your question. I was typing as fast as I could. I"ve had a lovely time and I hope you have too. Kathryn Thank you to Kathryn for giving us so much of her time, and to everyone who has posted a question. Our reading group theme for July will be put to a vote tomorrow - check in then! Which contemporary authors are most directly influenced by Dickens? John Lanchester most obviously (and brilliantly) I think Sarah Waters too although obviously she veers a bit more to the gothic - Willkie Collins and Miss Braddon. The 10-year-old me played the Artful Dodger in a reprise of Oliver! in a school musical in the late 1970s: Lionel Bart got a bit grumpy about this and we had to ditch the songs (so The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ replaced ‘Where is Love?’ etc.) Which of Dickens’ other works do you think merit a musical makeover? I"m not very good on music but I"m breathless with admiration that you played the Artful Dodger. The 1970s me was in love with Jack Wilde who of course played the Dodger in Bart"s film and then went on to play Charley Hexam in the 1976 Peter Hammond BBC versions. RIP. I’ve seen it claimed recently that Fagin was a paedophile. What’s your take on that? Yes I"ve seen that too and it was shocking to have it set out quite so starkly. I"ll have to read it again and think about it some more. How are we to reconcile the empathy that Dickens amply demonstrates for the desperate and the downtrodden in Victorian England with his own behaviour? His treatment of his wife, once his head was turned by the teenage Nelly Ternan - in itself, very dubious - was utterly merciless, separating the children from her and at one point pondering whether to commit her to an asylum. Was he simply a sociopath, for whom others were merely fodder for his pen? Was he ironically more like Skimpole than he would have liked to admit? Is it possible, in 2020, to read his novels without a huge sense of disquiet, a feeling that he cheated us all along? Nom_DePlume adds: This is such a good question. I’ve also read that he helped impoverished women get out of a life of prostitution while simultaneously believing it was acceptable to take advantage of their services (whether he did himself or not). Just a quick response here about CD and prostitution. Yes, he helped Baroness Burdett-Coutts run a home/hostel for girls who had "fallen" into sex work but who were deemed to be capable of returning to "good" society. At the same time he was relaxed about the fact that his sons might have visited prostitutes. Quite hard, I"d have thought, to square that away, but it points to his extraordinary sense of being able to occupy multiple points of view. What’s your favorite film/series adaptation of a Dickens novel?...mine, Little Dorrit with Claire Foy, and an all around terrific cast... Yes I loved that one. I also liked the 2005 Bleak House. To underscore the idea that Dickens was really a modern kind of writer who would have been happy writing for EastEnders, Andrew Davies wrote the series as 15 half hour episodes. It sounds gimmicky but actually it worked very well. The best OMF adaptation I think is not the one with Stephen Mackintosh and Keeley Hawes but the 1976 one with Leo McKern as Boffin, Alfie Bass as Wegg and Polly James as Jenny Wren. A bit stagey and creaky now but the talent involved was just extraordinary... Is there a connection between Dickens’ metaphor of capitalism as “dustheap” and Dostoyevsky’s use of “antheap” as an analogy for society? Yes, except I can"t help thinking that "antheap" is more productive-sounding than "dustheap". The dustheaps are refuse, the leavings of a society that has become fixated on making things - all those shiny objects that are found in the Veneering"s home. They represent a sort of environmental wound. They"re also, I think, related to the idea of "everything returning to dust" - that sense that all Empires will crumble. Finally, "dust" was often used as a euphemism for human excrement, so I think there"s a sense that all those poor dust workers who sift the dust looking for things that they might be able to sell for a few pennies are actually sifting through human waste. Dickens gets Wegg to read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Did Dickens foresee this happening to the British Empire or is it purely an internal device to foreshadow the fate of the Boffins? I"m sure it"s intentional. Right at the beginning of the novel Boffin thinks the book is actually "The Decline of the Russian Empire" before being corrected by Wegg. The point is I think that it doesn"t matter which Empire we"re talking about - Russian, Roman or British - they will all decline and collapse. And what Dickens shows us is London, the centre of the British Empire, already fraying around the edges. The dust mounds are a symbol of the waste and desolation that comes from all that energetic money making which, in turn, is predicated on the River Thames which connects Britain to the rest of the world. A world that it must dominate and despoil. Which character in the novel is the Mutual Friend of the title? The book seems to be, in part, about loyalty, but did Dickens consider alternate titles, and what is the significance of his final choice? Very interest thread here. I agree that I think Harmon/Rokesmith/Hanford is probably the most obvious "Mutual Friend". But the brilliant thing about the title, as someone said earlier, is that it could apply to multiple characters, all of whom pop up in different social localities, linking people and places that would otherwise lie far apart. Take "Twemlow" who is a brilliant major minor character, if you see what I mean. No-one really knows who he is (apart from being second cousin to a peer of the realm) but somehow everyone claims him as a friend. He seems like a cypher until, at the end of the book, he finally reveals himself to be a man of some character. I don"t know of any alternative titles. I think the use of "mutual" was probably very much intended by CD. It was a word that was often part of the title of early savings banks/working men"s insurance clubs etc. It implies that finance can be something shared, something communal. Whereas the evidence of the novel is that finance, money, capitalism keeps people as atomised individuals, all competing with one another. deadgod has a question unrelated to Dickens: You teach “biographical studies”. What’s your favorite, your desert-island one-and-one-only-survived-the-shipwreck, biography? (My favorite is Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo. I guess it’s a promotion-of-one-of-my-favorite-books pseudo-question, ha ha ha.) My favourite classic biography is James Boswell"s Life of Samuel Johnson. Brilliant evocation of the 18th Century. My favourite contemporary biography is Hermione Lee on Virginia Woolf - a brilliant example of matching the biographical form to a subject who was herself a constant experimenter with form. I think Peter Brown"s Augustine is excellent and still stands up very well indeed. Rembetis has a three questions: I find the character Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend fascinating. Dickens often based his characters on people he knew. Was Jenny Wren based on a real person? Some of the passages in ‘Our Mutual Friend’ between Bella Wilfer and her father are absolutely cringe inducing to modern eyes. Would they have been viewed so when the book was first released? Biographers tend to the view that Dickens died at the age of 58 because he was burned out from his constant frenetic energy, not least during his frequent Reading Tours and his frenzied performance of ‘Sykes and Nancy’. However, he had been hypocritically leading a double life in his last 12 years with his mistress Nelly Ternan. Wouldn’t the real fear of being publicly discovered and exposed, the duplicity of maintaining a double life for so long with ‘fake identities’, and the constant stress of keeping those lives entirely separate, have had a devastating effect on his physical and mental health? Great questions. 1. I have never found any evidence that Jenny Wren - a brilliant character - was based on a real person. People have come up with a real-life model for Mr Venus the taxidermist and there"s long been a suggestion that Gaffer Hexam and Betty - don"t put me in the Workhouse - Higden are based on "characters" that Henry Mayhew interviews in the 1840s for his London Labour and the London Poor. What"s so fascinating about Jenny is that she"s a caricature but she"s also real. She"s clearly an abused child who, as a result of inadequate parenting, can"t order the world in a way that we recognise. She thinks dolls are people and people are dolls. And her relationship with her alcoholic father is heart-breaking. If you compare her with Tiny Tim,whom CD wrote much earlier in his career - another disabled child with preternatural insight - she seems so rich and real. 2. I agree it"s hard to get through the baby talk that Bella and her dad go in for without gagging. It"s not just "sentimental" but borders to a modern reading on the incestuous. Actually a lot of literary critics by this stage in CD"s career were causing him of being "gushing and maudlin", so I think it would be a mistake to assume that contemporaries didn"t feel a bit queasy. One way of dealing with our own discomfort is perhaps to place the icky qualities of Bella and her father alongside those of Jenny and Mr Dolls. These are actually parallel examples of teenage girls who"ve been badly let down by their fathers and are trying to find a way through. 3. Yes, CD was burned out by this point. While writing OMF he was involved in the Staplehurst train accident and not only almost lost his novel but was unmasked as an adulterer. He was travelling with Nelly on the train, which crashed killing many passengers. He left some chapters of OMF on the train and had to climb back into the mangled carriage to retrieve them. He was terrified than an eagle-eyed journalist would spot that he was travelling with a lady who wasn"t his wife. Apparently his physical and mental health was never the same after that. "I"m not sure we can ever fully reconcile Dickens" empathy for the downtrodden in Victorian England with his cruel treatment of his wife" klikkonthis says: Ever since I’ve learned more about Dickens’ divorce of his wife, and his attempts to have her committed, and to keep her children away from her, I’ve found I enjoy his books far less. How do you reconcile the talented author, and social commentator/campaigner with this darker side? Tbh I"m not sure we can ever fully reconcile CD"s empathy for the desperate and the downtrodden in Victorian England with his cruel treatment of his wife. The fact that he was able not just to separate from Catherine Dickens but to place notices in leading British and American newspapers alluding to his wife"s "peculiarity of character" is the worse kind of patriarchal power in action. And the fact that he bullies all but one of his children into take his "side" is even worse somehow - clearly he was quite comfortable making use of his cultural and financial capital to make them think that it would be very bad for them if they dared defend their mother. So...but...so...but I"m also very concerned about the idea of not reading author just because his/her personal life seems cruel, unusual or messed up. In this regard I really admire the literary critics of the mid 20th Century who insisted on looking at "the text" on its own terms and refused to allow any biographical biases. The uncomfortable truth is that rotten people make great art and it"s out of the turmoil of Dickens" psyche, the evasions and suppressions, that these great novels arise. Just thank your lucky stars he"s not your husband or your dad. Do you think that Dickens relied on coincidence to tie up his huge plots, or that this was part of his sense of the world? Yes he did! But name me a Victorian novelist who didn"t. Just think of Jane Eyre, who goes wandering on the moors and "just happens" to stumble across the cottage of some cousins she didn"t know she had. Or try Middlemarch where everyone turns out to be the cousin of someone else"s second wife. My point is that I think it"s a function of the difficulty of writing a "realist" novel - there"s just no way of "showing" rather than "telling" that everyone is connected. drragon asks: How do you think Edwin Drood should end? (If you don’t understand this question, Edwin Drood was Dickens’ final novel, which was left unfinished when he died in 1870. A few writers have attempted to finish it.) McScootikins says: Oliver Twist struck me as antisemitic in a number of its more descriptive passages, however my university lecturer assured me Dickens wasn’t an antisemite, just a reflection of his era. He’s a fascinating writer, but do you see Dickens’ creations such as Fagin as problematic in this era of “cancel culture”? And pbendall replies: I think the “reflection of his era” point is completely bogus. What about all the people of his time who were opposed to antisemitism? Aren’t they equally a reflection of their era? This is a really interest conversation. I completely agree with the idea that Dickens responded to the earlier criticisms of Fagin. He was stung by Mrs Davis" comments (in part this was doubtless because he was a people pleaser and found it hard to be challenged) and he did try to do better with Riah. I think he makes it completely clear that the dastardly Fledgeby mobilises anti-semitic stereotypes in order to have everyone think that Riah is a "grasping Jew" when, in fact, it is Fledgeby (a gentile) who is the greedy one. And I also note that Dickens makes Rev Milvey, the obvious representative of the Christian faith, into a rapacious man who is doing a brisk warehouse business in orphans - it"s one of the funniest sections in the book I think. "It can be tricky to understand what"s going on when you"re reading Dickens" later books for the first time" Sidslac says: A very new and novice Dickens reader here, only read A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. Sometimes I don’t understand entire paragraphs in his books, I can often get the gist of it and I have enjoyed the stories so far but, I have had to use reading guides to help me. Is it because the writing style was different back in his day or am I just not really that educated on my own language? I think you"re in very good company in finding the longer books difficult. There"s a reason why children get given (often abbreviated) versions of Christmas Carol and perhaps David Copperfield to read. By the time you get to the later books - which are long and dense, it can be tricky to understand what"s going on when you"re reading for the first time. But in the case of OMF I do think Dickens is giving us tortuous language for a reason - he"s letting us feel what it"s like to live in a world where meaning is hidden. No-one can talk straightforwardly in the book, everyone has got an "angle". Wegg, Fledgeby even Wrayburn at the beginning, constantly say the opposite of what they mean. Everyone is fighting to get hold of the narrative. And all those endless repetitions too aren"t just "Dickensian" - they"re a sign of how stuck the characters are. It"s a bit like being trapped with some nasty pub bores. "If Dickens was writing today he"d make bankers into his baddies" onlyonpaper says: If Wells’ time machine could be borrowed to bring Dickens to the present day, do you think he’d notice much difference in human relations? What do you think he’d make of the Internet and social media? If he were to write a book about the early 21st century, what, in your opinion, would the main theme or themes be and who do you think he’d base his heroes/ heroines and villains on? The thing I"ve been most struck by re-reading OMF during Lockdown is just how incredibly "timely" it feels. Which is another way of saying "no I don"t think CD would notice much difference in human relations". OMF is all about the exhaustion of mature capitalism and the way in which it turns personal relations, even family relations, into economic transactions. That"s obvious in the case of the "bad" characters like Riderhood and Hexam fishing corpses out of the river to ransack their pockets and the Lamles, trying to sell Georgiana Podsnap to Fledgeby. But it"s true even of the good people too - the Boffins and John Harmon are examples where money has warped all kinds of natural, familial affections. I think if CD was writing today he"d make bankers, or at least the financial sector, into his baddy and, although it sounds a bit pat to say so, I do think he"d find plenty of examples of NHS workers and delivery people to play his heroes and heroines. Caretakers and emissaries always fare well in his books and I can"t see why he"d find it any different now. Kathryn Hughes is with us now Thank you for joining us! NellyLawless kicks things off: What’s your favorite biography of Dickens? Tomalin? Ackroyd? It"s Ackroyd for me. He has London seeped into the marrow of his bones, just like CD. When the book came out in the early 1990s it had slightly tricksy sections where Ackroyd imagined himself having conversations with CD. At one point they even met on a bridge over the Thames. But those bits seem to be absent from the newer editions and what you"re left with is a marvellous love song to the author and his city. Post your questions now! Kathryn Hughes will join us for a webchat about Charles Dickens, the subject of this month’s reading group, on 29 June at 12pm BST. Kathryn Hughes is the professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia, a fine literary critic and the author of several acclaimed books about eminent Victorians and Victorian life. George Eliot, The Last Victorian won her the James Tait Black Memorial prize for biography in 1999, and The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in 2005. Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, an account of what it was like to live in the body of a Victorian, was described as a “dazzling experiment in life writing”. You can get an idea of how well she writes about Dickens himself by reading this piece on Bleak House, written for the Guardian in 2011, and this longer article on A Christmas Carol, marital strife and Dickens’ relationship with his traumatic past. We will benefit greatly from Kathryn’s expertise on Dickens and Victorians, and she’s been rereading Our Mutual Friend in order to answer specific questions about that extraordinary book. She will be answering questions from 12pm on Monday 29 June, but please post your questions early.