This month’s prompt for the Classics Challenge is to create a visual tour using quotes from the book you are reading; a series of images that closely represents how you see the scene or description. It doesn’t have to absolutely follow the text but it must reflect the mood.
I’ve been reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and so there are many scenes I could choose from, varying from London to Paris, from calm and peaceful scenes to trial scenes and scenes of violence, revolution and death by guillotine.
But I’ve decide to concentrate on the place described by Dickens as Doctor Manette’s house in London, the house he lived in with his daughter, Lucie after he was released from the Bastille in Paris.
The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street corner not far from Soho Square.
Soho Square illustration is South-west Corner of Soho Square in 1816. From an aquatint in John B. Papworth's Select Views of London
I was intrigued by it being described as a quiet street corner – in Soho. But the Soho of 1780 was rather different from what it later became, so I had to alter my mental picture of it. This view of Soho Square is from about 50 years after the events in the book, but it shows the rural nature of London at that time.
I wondered about the location of the Manettes’ lodging house, just where was it? And then I founnd this plan (see illustration below) showing the location of Soho Square, coloured in green. Just below the Square are Greek Street and Rose Street. It has been conjectured that Dr Manette’s house was No.1 Greek Street with its courtyard in Rose Street. In 1895 Rose Street was changed to Manette Street after Dicken’s character:
Soho Square
However that may or may not been, at that time Soho was very much in the countryside:
A quainter corner than the corner where the doctor lived, was not to be found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of the doctor’s lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that has a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road, and forest trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields.
Hawthorn bushes
Somewhat different from the London scene these days!
Doctor Manette occupied two floors of the house, with a courtyard at the back:
where a plane-tree rustled its green leaves
It was where Lucie, Mr Lorry from Tellson’s Bank and Charles Darney sat under the tree talking and drinking wine and where Lucie and her father sat when she told him she was going to marry Darney:
Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise on a milder radiance over great London, than on that night when it found them still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.
It’s been a few weeks now since I finished reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, his last and unfinished book. I was surprised that it took so long before the mystery actually began to emerge and that it’s more the story of Edwin Drood’s uncle, John Jasper, than it is of Drood himself. I was also surprised that much of it is written in the present tense, a style that I’m not too keen on. I haven’t read a Dickens novel for a few years and found the difference in style between this and modern mystery novels interesting. The build up to the mystery is so much more leisurely and descriptive than in modern novels, and I had to tone down my impatience for something mysterious to happen. Once I’d passed these hurdles I enjoyed the book immensely, even though I knew that the mystery is left open.
It begins dramatically with a scene in an opium den where Jasper lies under the influence of several pipes of opium, trembling and almost incoherent from the visions that came to him. According to the introduction to the book, Dickens took great care to make the scenes in the opium den authentic and had visited one in the east end of London, under police guidance. The mystery only becomes apparent when Drood has disappeared and cannot be found.
He had been engaged to Rosa Bud from their childhood days and both had realised that they didn’t want to get married. Before that Neville Landless and Edwin had come to blows over Rosa, but made up their differences just before Edwin disappears, but Jasper spreads suspicion that Neville may have killed him.
The novel abounds with wonderful characters – Canon Crisparkle, Neville’s mentor; Durdles a stonemason and his assistant, Deputy, whose tasks include making sure the drunken Durdles gets home safely, by the unlikely means of throwing rocks at him; and my favourite character, Mr Grewgious, a lawyer and Rosa’s guardian. Over and above these characters is the setting of Cloisterham (Rochester), with its Cathedral and sinister and dark background, ideal for secrecy and crime:
… a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter.
The inhabitants of Cloisterham feel
the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it, from dust out of which the breath of life has passed. (page 105)
The mystery remains unsolved. What did happen to Edwin Drood? Was he killed and if so was it by John Jasper, his uncle, obsessed with his passion for Rosa? Who is Datchery, a stranger who arrives in Cloisterham six months after Edwin’s disappearance and what is his part in the story? And what is ‘Er Royal Highness the Princess Puffer’, the opium den woman’s connection with Jasper? I suppose it’s up to each reader to decide, although there is an account given by Forster, Dickens’s friend, in which he wrote that Dickens had intended it to be a story of the murder of a nephew by his uncle, but we’ll never know if that was so.
The Holly-Tree Inn by Charles Dickens and others is a lovely little book, both to hold and to read. It’s a Hesperus Press publication, smooth paper and a softback cover with flaps you can use as bookmarks. I received my copy via Library Thing Early Reviewers Programme. I enjoyed reading it.
This was originally published in 1855, being the Christmas number of Dickens’s periodical Household Words. It was so popular that it was then adapted for the stage. It’s a collection of short stories by Dickens, Wilkie Collins, William Howitt, Adelaide Anne Procter and Harriet Parr, around the theme of travellers and inns. I liked Collins’s and Howlitt’s stories the most.
It begins with a story by Dickens, The Guest in which a gentleman on his way to Liverpool is snowed in at the Holly-Tree Inn in Yorkshire. To keep himself entertained he reminisces about inns he has visited, giving glimpses into travel and inns in the 19th century. Having exhausted his own memories, this story ends with the idea of asking the inmates of the inn for their own stories.
So, the next stories are from:
The Ostler by Wilkie Collins. In this the landlord tell’s the ostler’s tale of his dread of his wife after dreaming that she is about to murder him, a tale of impending doom:
His eyes opened owards the left hand side of the bed, and there stood – The woman of the dream again? – No! His wife; the living reality, with the dream spectre’s face – in the dream-spectre’s attitude; the fair arm up – the knife clasped in the delicate, white hand. (page 53)
The Boots by Charles Dickens – according to Melisa Klimaszewski’s Introduction this tale was such a favourite that Dickens included it in his later public readings. It’s not quite to my taste, a sentimental tale about two young children determined to elope, staying at the Holly- Tree inn:
Boots could assure me that it was better than a picter (sic) and equal to a play, to see them babies with their long bright curling hair, their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a rambling in the garden, deep in love.
The Landlord by William Howitt. An entertaining tale of the landlord’s brother who emigrated to Australia in order to better himself. But when they get there they wished they’d stayed in England. It seems they arrived just at the wrong time. Howitt, himself had travelled to Australia in search of gold and his experience is reflected in his tale.
The Barmaid by Adelaide Anne Procter – a sad story told in verse by the landlord’s niece of Maurice and his love for ‘the loveliest little damsel his eyes had ever seen.’ Not the most challenging of tales.
The Poor Pensioner by Harriet Parr. Hester lives at the inn on ‘broken victuals’, now a poor demented creature refusing to believe that her son was guilty of murder. She waits in vain for his sentence to be reversed. This tale reveals how her wild and wilful ways as a young woman led her to seek for change and excitement with disastrous results.
The Bill by Charles Dickens. This story completes the cycle. A week has gone by, the Guest’s route is now clear of snow and he can leave.He then discovers that his enforced stay at the inn has changed his life!
Reading this book has made a welcome break in reading modern fiction and has made me keen to read more of Dickens’s and Collins’s books. I knew nothing about the other authors but fortunately there is a short section at the end with biographical notes about the contributors.
Drood was the first book I finished reading this year and I do hope I’m going to read better books than this, this year. My complaints about it are:
It’s too long
It’s too wordy
It’s too full of facts described in great length
It’s too full of Wilkie Collins
It’s too full of hallucinatory nightmares, involving in particular a black beetle scarab.
I began to dislike all the characters, in particular Wilkie Collins, but then I realised this is fiction, not biography and I disliked it even more for initially lulling me into thinking this is what Collins and Dickens were like. But perhaps that’s a good point – I began to believe what I was reading. I began to believe Dickens and Collins were involved in trying to find Drood, that Drood really existed, that he wasn’t just a figment of Dickens’s imagination, or Collins’s opium induced nightmares and that Collins actually planned to kill Dickens.
Wilkie comes over as a bombastic hypocrite full of his own self-importance and with a chip on his shoulder as far as Dickens is concerned. He’s not a well man, riddled with rheumatic gout, living with a woman he refuses to marry and with a mistress who has three children by him. He sees a green- skinned woman with teeth like long, yellow curved tusks who wants to fling him down the stairs and he is haunted by the ‘Other Wilkie’. He takes laudanum by the jugful, but insists the Other Wilkie has been with him all his life and is not a laudanum-induced dream. The Other Wilkie sits and watches him, lunging for the pen as Wilkie writes and eventually writing his novels for him.
Drood as portrayed in this book is horrific, a half-Egyptian fiend, who, according to Inspector Field is a serial killer. I suspect that this bears little relationship to Dickens’s Drood. I haven’t read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but having read Drood, I feel I really should.
The plus points for Drood are that it does contain some vivid descriptions bringing the period to life for me – the slums of London, the train accident at Staplehurst and the fantastical “Undertown” with its miles of tunnels, catacombs, caverns and sewers are good examples. It has also made me keen to read more books by Dickens and Collins and biographies of them. There is a list of biographical and other sources in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, so I’m adding some to my wishlist such as Dickens by Peter Ackroyd.
Christmas has been and gone whilst I’ve been away from the blogworld. For days I didn’t even switch on the computer, what with getting ready for Christmas, which this year included moving loads of boxes we haven’t unpacked so that our son and his family had room to sleep at the weekend, and I had a cold, which didn’t help at all. Anyway we had a good time.
I had some books (my favourite presents) for Christmas, all of which I now can’t wait to read. No doubt I’ll be writing about them later – they include Agatha Christie’s autobiography, and her Secret Notebooks and a book on the Eleven Missing Days, all of which I’ve dipped into.
Meanwhile I’m still ploughing through Drood. I have very mixed feelings about this. Ann wrote the other day on her blog Table Talk that she has a problem with books centred on people who really existed and I think that is part of my problem with Drood.
Drood himself, of course, is a fictional character, but most of the book is about Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, both of whom don’t come across as people I would want to meet. But I want to know more about them, if only to find out what they were really like, and to read more of their books. I’m glad I’ve already read Collins’s The Moonstone, because the plot of this is detailed in Drood.
The other stumbling block I have with Drood is that there is far too much detail and emphasis for my liking on horrific opium induced nightmares. On the other hand I want to know how it ends, so it is keeping me turning the pages, although I am tempted just to skip to the last few pages.
The snow is still here, thawing just a little bit today, but we ventured out yesterday to the next town, over the border in Scotland and joined the library. I restricted myself to borrowing just three books – two on the history of the Borders and The Music Room by William Fiennes. I have The Snow Geese by him, which I’d really like to read soon – but it’s still in a box somewhere.
The Holly-Tree Inn
BooksPlease 