The Monster (Charles Dickens)

On a dreary afternoon, Harriet Carker pauses from her needlework to gaze at the scene outside her window.

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction—always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death—they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

Dombey and Son

Calais

Charles Dickens:

The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais was, with the tide ebbing out towards low water-mark. There had been no more water on the bar than had sufficed to float the packet in; and now the bar itself, with a shallow break of sea over it, looked like a lazy marine monster just risen to the surface, whose form was indistinctly shown as it lay asleep. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dropped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. The long rows of gaunt black piles, slimy and wet and weather-worn, with funeral garlands of seaweed twisted about them by the late tide, might have represented an unsightly marine cemetery. Every wave-dashed, storm-beaten object, was so low and so little, under the broad grey sky, in the noise of the wind and sea, and before the curling lines of surf, making at it ferociously, that the wonder was there was any Calais left, and that its low gates and low wall and low roofs and low ditches and low sand-hills and low ramparts and flat streets, had not yielded long ago to the undermining and besieging sea, like the fortifications children make on the sea-shore.

Little Dorrit

Notes for a Commonplace Book (28)

Charles Dickens:

I had no thought that night — none, I am quite sure — of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.

Bleak House

Notes for a Commonplace Book (27): Lost Powers

Charles Dickens:

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

A Christmas Carol

Ruins

"One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin. Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble; mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes, loose walls, built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones, obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves, rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us, stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen, clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished; where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust! Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from the distance, on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost feel (as I had felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world."

Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy

Image above: Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries

The Land of the Free

Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.

When Charles Dickens made his first visit to the United States in 1842, he found much to admire as well as much to deplore. Foremost among the latter (in addition to the widespread practice of tobacco chewing and spitting, which disgusted him) was the institution of slavery, which he condemned vehemently and categorically, devoting an entire chapter of American Notes for General Circulation to the topic. Much of that chapter consists of a list of runaway slave advertisements like the one quoted above, notices that were made all the more harrowing by the fact that the ardent defenders of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness who placed them made careful note of the brandings, ear-clippings, and other mutilations that could serve to identify their escaped "property." Dickens invented nothing here; the advertisements were copied, almost verbatim (and without attribution), from a volume entitled American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, compiled by Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké, which scrupulously recorded the sources of the advertisements. Thanks to Weld and the Grimkés, and to The North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements project, we know that the epitome of Southern chivalry responsible for this particular notice was one Micajah Ricks of Nash County, North Carolina, and that the advertisement appeared in the North Carolina Standard on July 18, 1838.

In recent weeks the legislatures of at least two states (Oklahoma and Georgia) have passed measures opposing the curriculum of the Advanced Placement course in U. S. History, on the grounds that it offers, in the words of one critic of the course, "a consistently negative view of American history that highlights oppressors and exploiters." Perhaps those lawmakers need to dust off their Dickens?

The Language of Dreams

"It is very remarkable, that as we dream in words, and carry on imaginary conversations, in which we speak both for ourselves and for the shadows who appear to us in those visions of the night, so she, having no words, uses her finger alphabet in her sleep. And it has been ascertained that when her slumber is broken, and is much disturbed by dreams, she expresses her thoughts in an irregular and confused manner on her fingers: just as we should murmur and matter them indistinctly, in the like circumstances."

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, writing of Laura Bridgman. Bridgman, left blind, deaf, and unable to speak after an early illness, learned to communicate by means of a manual alphabet while in residence at the Perkins Institution near Boston, Massachusetts.

The mind habituates itself to whatever tools it has at hand. If I converse in Spanish for a while and then return to English, it sometimes takes me a moment to realize that I no longer need to mentally translate before speaking. After reading Dickens's lengthy description of Bridgman, (much of which reproduces the written account of her teacher Samuel Gridley Howe), I found myself only slowly returning to a world in which the senses of sight and hearing could be taken for granted.

Laura Bridgman eventually learned to write with ink and paper. Among her writings are descriptions of her dreams.