When Dickens worked horrible jobs in his youth one of the few pleasures he had was taking his lunch hour in a nearby theater. The matinee price was low if you sat in the highest gallery with the errand boys and rowdies. If the gallery didn't like what was happening on stage they booed and pelted the actors with fruit from their lunches.
Some professional actors were wary of matinees so the management would allow people in the audience to buy the opportunity to play a role. The people who bought their way in were very serious about what they were doing and resented being pelted by the street kids. They always had one eye on the audience and were ready to duck fruit or fight at the drop of a hat. They often made an unscripted aside to the audience as an excuse to come to the front of the stage where they could assess the mood of the crowd.Later in life Dickens said the rough and ready matinees were the biggest influence on his work. From live theater he learned the value of frequent surprises and the importance of humor even in tragedies. He also learned that audiences craved big, over-the-top emotion. Even the rowdies would cry like babies if a villain threatened to dispossess a mother and her baby from their home. He adapted to novels the technique of talking to the audience. You see this in Fielding too, maybe for the same reason.
London must have been something to see in the 1820s when Dickens was a kid. He loved to walk the streets and explore the mysterious alleyways and stairways that disappeared into shadows. The streets were teeming with life and I can only imagine the kind of characters he must have encountered.
In the days before electronic media people cultivated their personalities. You had to carve out a unique identity for yourself and dress and move in a way that underlined that personality. We should do that today. Mild people should be very mild and louts should back slap and wear checkered suits. Stingy people should wring their hands, accountants should squint and earnest people should be well-groomed like Cary Grant. Our goal should be to remake society in such a way that street life will once again inspire cartoonists and filmmakers and writers like Charles Dickens.
What a coincidence! Just minutes ago I was thumbing through Nigel Gosling's book, Gustave Dore and thinking "Damn! Eddie should do a Dore post!" Though you don't mention him here, you do, as I am sure you know, use two pictures from GD's Dickens-influenced London: A Pilgrimage.
ReplyDeleteBTW, you do pick out what is great in Dickens. I would only add, as part of the "big emotions" idea, that he developed the villain-you-love-to-hate, one of the great guilty pleasures of reading Dickens.
Kenneth Branagh once said something similar about doing theater for kids: because they're so spontaneous in their reactions one could learn a lot from performing for them. If they were interested you could hear a pin drop. If the play wasn't working they'd just stop paying attention and start making noise.
ReplyDeleteToday you only see people on stage getting pelted by food in cartoons. Now I know where that came from. I would love to see that in real life. In fact, just last weekend I threw a tomato at a friend of mine.
ReplyDeleteSit with an audience of kids watching any Disney animated feature and notice the parts where they begin fidgeting, talking and throwing stuff. Every audience will be a bit different but each will offer a lesson in the demands of the juvenile attention span.
ReplyDeletecartoons are more real than reality today, to try to parody modern culture would be depressing which is why most of todays cartoons are bland postmodern stuff. If I draw an artist im going to draw a Don Martin stle Salvador Dali parody with the over the top moustache beret and smock not some pretensious jackass in boxframe glasses
ReplyDeleteAll proponents of postmodern culture and art should be bussed out to the bottom of the grand canyon where Tex Avery's grandson can drop an oversized anvil with the words "100 TONS" painted on the side on them
ReplyDeleteand another smaller canyon where gary larson can do the same to morons who make stupid blog entries about how he "homogonized b klibans work for the masses"
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ReplyDeleteOr should the artists, filmmakers and writers once more inspire society?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in High School I made the comment that Dickens' writing read like he was paid by the word instead of the story. Imagine my surprise when years later I read an article that stated he was paid for his stories by the WORD. Loved the post though. You write for content, not for word count.
ReplyDeleteLester: Dore was a great artist! The London book is great but it's printed in a faded grey in some recent editions.
ReplyDeleteAnon: Good advice about seeing things with kids!
Dickens is such a great writer. His best known work is so ubiquitous that we take it all for granted now, but he really was a genius. Nothing beats reading him at his best. And the least of his work has passages of brilliance.
ReplyDeleteBut much as I love your posts, Eddie, I'm always taking issue with them! I hope you don't mind-I wouldn't bother if it wasn't worthy. ; )
To wit: I don't think things have changed, or need to be changed back. The London of today has just as many colorful characters in it as in Dickens' time. All they need to be brought forth is a keen eye and the talent for creative exaggeration(and not all of them need to be exaggerated).
I am sure you yourself know lots of deathless characters-and you yourself are one of them. At least, many people have told me so.
I pine to step into the victorian past more than anyone, but I've no doubt that people have retained their oddness to the present day.
Dickens work also benefits from having been written in serial form, in digestible chunks, as designed for the attention spans for the day (or rather, the column space)
ReplyDeleteIt makes for tight characterizations and plot, without much meandering. Foreshadowing and red herrings work very well in such tight quarters.
And there is a lot of realism and truth inherent in those broad caricatures, much like cartooning.
Brits are hilarious! I bet you fifty bucks if you call one in the middle of the night and wake em up they'd talk-normal. None of this "Good heavens! I say! Hear hear!" Its like they ask for it. Who in their right mind chooses tea over coffee? That’s insane because coffee is refreshing and delicious while earl grey is just some random plants and hot water. And who steals calculus from Leibniz??? And when the Queen gets mad, how can you tell? She ~doesn't say anything~ just stares off making poopyface hahaha. Oh and here’s one, Cholera is caused by stinky clouds of miasma? So lets send all of our excrement into the Thames? Rid London of infectious disease right? WRONG! A-and that time the Germans bombarded the city with supersonic robot bombs from occupied France! Wait that wasn’t funny it was horrifying… Anyway. Chuck D is okay in my book (Pickwick Papers is totally lol), same goes for G.K. Chesterton, John Lennon, the Residents and what was that one dude with the funny hair...Oh yeah Shakespeare! But the point, Eddie et al, is don't be so down on modern times or you'll end up like some bipolar German.. I don't know, Oswald Spengler or, right? Or worse!
ReplyDeleteI think theater was like that in Shakespeare's time too. When you think about it, that type of relationship between the audience and the actors still exists today in the form of Pro Wrestling. So really, the WWF is closer to Shakespeare than all the other more serious theatrical works around today. Which is kind of kind of hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThe London of today has just as many colorful characters in it as in Dickens' time. All they need to be brought forth is a keen eye and the talent for creative exaggeration(and not all of them need to be exaggerated).
ReplyDelete-But the backdrop has changed.
Now I could be wrong but I believe that social upheaval is a neccessary component. Dickens had the industrial revolution and the injustice provided a color that doesn't exist within a healthy middle-class. The most colorful characters in American cinema were during the depression era. Society needs to be a little rough to encourage these kinds of things. You can't stage a fistfight in a Starbuck's.
Chnky: Spengler? You should get together with the other Theory Corner Spengler man, Kent Butterworth. Lester too!
ReplyDeleteI spot read Spengler's Decline of the West but was put off by his unnecessarily detailed histories. I got the idea he was padding the argument with detail to ram through an idea he wasn't sure of.
I also got the idea that his best arguments were in other books and articles and not in the book he was famous for.
Jenny: I'm not put off by disagreement at all! Theory sites love argument!
I disagree with what you wrote but it was still interesting. You're like a literary character yourself! For people who don't know Jenny she's a lot like Anne of Green Gables all grown up (that's a compliment!)!
The thing that stood out for me after reading A Tale of Two Cities was how the girl was so prissy and lily-livered.
ReplyDeleteDickens is dead, and so is the culture that spawned him. All we should do is nurture the talent that will become the next Dickens. So everybody just start acting over-dramatic about everything. Hmm i think i just re-asserted Eddie's point. I suck at this rebuttal stuff.
ReplyDeleteNo wait my point was this: There will never be another Dickens nor a culture as the one he experienced. The next great writer analogous to Dickens will have to extract from our present cultures to make his/her great work. Unfortunately nobody reads like they did in the 1820s, so the medium will have o be Youtube videos. No one cares about twins or revolutions anymore, so the subject will have to be backyard wrestling. Yes! The Back Yard Wrestling Federation is the Tale of Two Cities of our generation and MachoFan69 is our DIckens!
looney moon: I think theaters banned outside food for that reason. But they also formed alliances with restaurants to make sure the patrons wouldn't be restless and starving when they arrive.
ReplyDeletei think some teenagers(younger generation) are so super repressed on teh inside that the subconcioiusly counterbalance it with outrageous clothing attitudes and sillyness, which is kind of fun to draw. i think the internet has indeed put a damper on people's social skills and social indetities, as well as the flood of postmodernists lifestyles where information particulary the superficial aspects is so accessible and easily attainable that people no longer develop interesting character through life struggle but rather look like a collage of referential bullshit.
ReplyDeletekind of sad.
but the fact remainds, that everyone is a cartoon you just have dig deep and find it. stereotypes are important to cartoons to some degree, but also innovation and original characters are fun to cartoon caricature and use in animation as well.
David: Interesting analysis of teen attitudes! I'm always trying to figure teenagers out and this helps!
ReplyDeleteEddie, this is unrelated to your topic BUT realted to the comments:
ReplyDeleteHave you ever heard of the "Dangerous Book For Boys?" It's a book that encourages boys ages eight to eighty to play dangerously! I`m gonna get a copy ASAP!
One reviewer said: "It's amazing that The Dangerous Book For Boys ever got published, really, given the deeply unfashionable connotations surrounding two out of the five words in the title (the ones that aren't "The", "Book" and "For")."
Hmmm, I would say that the word Book is pretty unfashionable today as well.
Jorge: The Dangerous Book for Boys!?? Sounds great! Lots of fun kid things invove a risk. I almost got seriously hurt lots of times when I was a kid and so probably did every body else.
ReplyDeleteJorge and Eddie
ReplyDeleteHave you ever read "The Boy Mechanic".
It's a book that Popular Mechanics used to put out. I had a copy of a '50s edition of it when I was a kid and was always amazed by the kids projects in there. Many of the projects are like this and the rest use asbestos to keep stuff from catching on fire. It has sections on chemistry, toy trains, bikes and making your own bows, arrows and boomerangs. It even has a sections on mounting birds and fish.
The guy who owned the book before me read it and mounted a duck.
Rogellio: Wow! The Boy Mechanic looks great!
ReplyDeleteAero driven ice boat! Oh boy! Kids seemed to be alot smarter back then!
ReplyDelete