Dickens bicentennial

Estella & Pip: Great Expectations

Who else but the BBC would do a program on Charles Dickens to commemorate the bicentennial of English language’s greatest author?

(The bicentennial is on February 7. And this is the omnibus site for the celebrations: Dickens 2012).

This afternoon, the BBC World Service, had a 30-minute discussion on Dickens’ best novel – Great Expectations. (To listen to the program, click here: Dickens on BBC)

The program had a live audience and panelists from Kenya and India, besides England, of course. 

Sambudha Sen, Professor of English, University of Delhi, suggested that Dickens is today more relevant in the developing societies such as Delhi and Kolkata than to London, or any other city in the developed world. 

He argued that the societies in the developing world are going through a churn that reflects Dickensian drama in the everyday existence of its people. 

On the other hand, the societies in the developed world have homogenised almost completely and have little left of their 19th century milieu, especially after nearly a century of the welfare state.

That is true at so many different levels. For instance, the ongoing Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai – which is a celebration Mumbai’s unique cosmopolitan identity – is holding a Tributeto Dickens film festival that will show some of the classic Dickens novels turned into films by master filmmakers.

And the lineup includes Great Expectations (1946, Dir: DavidLean), Pickwick Papers (1952, Dir: Noel Langly), Nicholas Nickelby (2002, Dir:Douglas McGrath), Oliver Twist (2005, Dir: Roman Polanski). 

The festival will culminate in conversation on A Tale of Two Cities between British author Craig Taylor and Indian academic Dr. Mitra Mukherjee-Parikh.

Unfortunately, there are many events being planned to commemorate the bicentennial in Toronto, at least nothing on the net. A Charles Dickens Tribute Concert by the Counterpoint Community Orchestra is scheduled on Saturday March 3, 2012. Here is the link to the concert. Counterpoint.

Dickens is my favourite author and Great Expectation my favourite Dickens novel. I’ve written on several occasions on this blog about Dickens. (Read previous entries here: Dickens on GAB). I’ll be a good time to thank a dear friend – Pranav Joshi – for gifting me the novel at an age when I could read it as any other book, and not as a classic of English literature, which it is.  

About the image: Pip and Estella Walking in the Garden by Charles Green c. 1877 7.6 x 4.6 inches Dickens's Great Expectations, Gadshill Edition. These plates have neither captions nor pages, being inserted into the text. The Annotated Dickens provides the following caption, which is not in the original Gadshill Edition: "Estella walking in the garden at Satis House: her other hand lightly touched my shoulder as we walked" (Ch. 29). Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. 

Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/green/5.html

Charles Dickens' 198th birthday

It’s Charles Dickens’ 198th birthday today. 

Surprisingly, today’s Toronto Star’s classified section runs a small insertion paid for by the Dickens Fellowship (Toronto branch) wishing the master a Happy Birthday.

Those who know me also know my deep and abiding interest in Dickens. My first impulse when I’m reading or writing anything is to relate it to Dickens.

For instance, last week, Che needed an example of a protagonist who has lived in a particular area as a young person and then returns to the place as a grown up. Instantly, I thought of Pip and Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion – Satis House from Great Expectations.

(An aside: I won’t be surprised if Che, becomes a journalist. Proof: He was given the assignment Tuesday to be submitted Friday. He started working on it late Thursday night, sat up late night, awoke early Friday morning and roped in the entire family to get it done. I’ve know many reporters in my days with the same approach to their work. Exasperating.)

In the frenzied world of mass media, where the focus is on the here and now, history is remembered only on anniversaries.

So, Dickens will be dusted off the library shelves and his ever-lasting impact discussed in a couple years to coincide with his 200th birth anniversary. (Who knows, by then library shelves may not exist as i-Pads and Kindles replace books.)

It happened last year to Darwin and Lincoln (both born on February 12, 1809).

It would’ve been appropriate for at least one mainline newspaper in the English-speaking and reading world to write about one of English language’s biggest writers and his continuing influence on contemporary writers.

I checked Google News. The only worthwhile feature on Dickens today is by James Humes, a historian, writing in The Pueblo Chieftain (Southern Colorado).

Mass media, and especially newspapers, have conditioned media consumers to focus only on what’s new and forget the past. History is for the specialist. 

And that is so not right.

Image: http://charlesdickenspage.com/characters/ge_joe-pip-estella-havisham.gif

Great Expectations

In Toronto, spring is a pleasant combination of rain and sunshine. But it is also a state of mind.  Spring is an abrupt awakening from the winter hibernation. 

Winter lingers on till about early April and then life begins to stir as the snow melts. It brings on a sudden burst in public activities.

One of the events that I’m looking forward to is the meeting of the Dickens Fellowship, Toronto.  

I read about it late last year, but couldn’t find time to attend the monthly meeting held the 3^rd Wednesday of every month at the Northern District branch of the Toronto Public Library.

I don’t think there is a greater novelist in English than Charles Dickens. There are many who are good, and in every generation, the novel in English language gets a preeminent star. Salman Rushdie is the star for my generation – the generation that became avid followers of literature in English in the 1970s and 1980s.

Even for that generation Dickens remains unsurpassed. He lives on in the works of different novelists whose works bear a Dickensian influence.

Among the recent books that I’ve read, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance come to my mind. Dickens’ influence is palpable on Mistry’s writing, including the tendency to be God. The novelist as God is a Dickensian trait that most readers today would find unacceptable and irritating. It worked well in Dickens’ novels, and it works in Mistry’s novel, too.

Mistry subjects his characters Ishwar and Om to unrelenting cruelty. It is no doubt an accurate enumeration of the circumstances prevailing in large parts of India during the Emergency. But the reader finds no respite from the series of misfortunes that befall these two.

I was just not able to come to terms with the horrors that the uncle-nephew duo are put through by Mistry. I almost wanted to tell the novelist to stop it.

If you have read Dickens, you realize how true this would be of any of his novels. Dickens’ portrayal of the grim realities of the industrial revolution’s excesses in Britain led to far-reaching changes in the labour laws. His works acted as a catalyst for a transformation for a better and just mooring of the society.

I haven’t read everything that Dickens wrote. But from what I’ve read (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations) I’d definitely chose Great Expectations as the best.

The orphan Pip, the abandoned Miss Havisham and the beautiful Estella are characters that stay with you forever.  Dickens creates magic in the old, decaying mansion that becomes the stage for the three to meet and Havisham’s schemes to make Pip fall in love with Estella and then to ensure that it remains unrequited. Pip continues to tolerate Miss Havisham under the mistaken belief that she’s the one who is sponsoring his education and stay in London. But the benefactor turns out to be the criminal (I forget his name) whom Pip had given food just once when he (the former) was on the run from the police.

The story and the narration has all the trappings of a television soap opera. That is what Great Expectations really was – a serialised novel published every week and (needless to say) lapped up by an eager audience.

Perhaps it was because I read the book when I was in my late teens, or perhaps because I remained tongue-tied when it came to expressing my love to the girl whom I believed I loved madly and wouldn’t be able to live without, my identification with Pip  was complete. 

Pip survives those pangs of love and loneliness, so did I, and so does everyone else... they leave bitter-sweet memories to be cherished on a spring morning.