BOOK: Charles Dickens, "The Old Curiosity Shop"

Charles Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Audiobook on Youtube, read by Mil Nicholson.

I don't listen to audiobooks often, because I find it hard to focus on two things at once; so whatever else I'd be doing while listening to the audiobook would distract me too much from following the story of the book. Nevertheless, I recently listened to an audiobook of Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop while doing other comparatively mindless things on my computer, so here goes my first blog post based on an audiobook that I only listened to, as opposed to a book that I actually read.

I had never read anything by Dickens before, so I just had the general impression one gets about him from pop culture: a writer of interminable realist novels, mostly about orphans starving on the streets of London, featuring lots of characters with ridiculous names (and probably equally ridiculous facial hair), etc. etc. I never quite saw why one would want to read something like this. Now, after listening to The Old Curiosity Shop, my feeling is that it's a perfectly fine thing to listen to while doing something else, but I wouldn't particularly care to read it properly, unless I suddenly felt that I really had a massive amount of time to kill. (The audiobook version that I listened to runs to almost 24 hours, though I guess reading it silently would be a fair bit faster.)

I don't wish to sound too critical of the book. As something to listen to in the background, it was in fact quite enjoyable. It's a proper big fat realist novel, with a decently large and varied set of characters; with villains you love to hate, and heroes you love to sympathize with (though sometimes even I felt that the characters were a little too black-or-white); the story switches from place to place and from character to character regularly enough so as not to get boring. Dickens knows how to administer regular punches right into the reader's feelings, and he brought me to the verge of tears on at least two occasions. (One, unsurprisingly, was when Nell died, but the other one was much earlier, in chapter 17, in the brief passing episode of the old widow who has been coming to her husband's grave for fifty-five years: there was no need for Dickens to include that episode, and yet he did, and I found it very moving.)

But what I liked best about this novel is the style in which it is written — that good, old-fashioned storytelling style that had suited humankind well enough for thousands of years but was then discarded so mercilessly by serious literature somewhere around the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. A storyteller like Dickens acts like the reader's friend, who holds you by the hand and leads you through his imaginary world, and you can see that his interest and effort is clearly turned to making sure that the experience of listening to his story will be a pleasant one for you, the reader. Not so the modern writers, who would be more likely to simply take a big dump on the carpet right in the middle of the reader's living-room and then walk away shamelessly, letting you deal with it as you see fit. While listening to The Old Curiosity Shop, I couldn't help having that same wistful feeling that you can see in Kipling's Three-Decker, “taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest”. I guess that The Old Curiosity Shop was one of those Victorian three-deckers too; it certainly seems to fit the stereotype well enough in terms of style and content, not to mention in length.

Another thing I liked is how, in the early parts of the book, especially in the early parts of Nell's and her grandfather's journey, everything seems kind of picaresque, as if the author was just throwing one random thing after another in their way, but eventually you notice that it wasn't random at all, there is a logic and a structure to the story as a whole, which the author has artfully and cunningly constructed but which he deliberately reveals only gradually. Seemingly random encounters on the road early on, like the travelling Punch showmen or the elderly schoolmaster, later turn out to be much more important to the story than they seemed at first.

There were, of course, also some few things I disliked. At times I couldn't help feeling that it shows that the book was written by someone who was paid by the word (or by the instalment, which surely amounts to the same thing in the end), and who could never resist the opportunity to pad out the text with an aside to the audience, or to prolong a conversation by making the characters say the same thing twice in a row. Speaking of conversations, I often felt, and was annoyed by the fact, that so many characters in this book are slow — mentally slow, I mean, as if people had been somehow dumber in the 19th century. Surely that is nonsense, but why did they always have to waste such an inordinate amount of time before getting to the point? Samson Brass was perhaps the most annoying one in this regard, though in his case that might be partly a professional defect (he is a lawyer, after all) and partly deliberate dissimulation. Nell's grandfather is another case in point, but he at least has the good excuse that he is literally senile and not playing with a full stack of cards at that point.

In fact, when it comes to Nell's grandfather there's one thing I'm not sure about. Ultimately, the cause of nearly the whole story in this book is his insane plan to get richer by gambling. Without that, none of this book would have happened; he and Nell would not have been ruined by Quilp, they would not have wandered around England, Kit would still be working for them and not for the Garlands, etc. etc. etc. And to be sure, the grandfather seems to have started with the best of intentions; he just wanted to be able to leave a decent fortune to Nell. And yet the whole idea of gambling one's way to wealth is so absurd that it genuinely made it hard for me to sympathize with his plight at first. Should we consider him as having been senile even before his gambling problems started, to make him more sympathetic? In any case, whatever his initial motivation may have been, and despite his constant protestations that he doesn't enjoy gambling, he acts like a full-blown addict whenever he has the slightest opportunity. When he takes up gambling again, in ch. 29, and practically robs Nell to get more money (which he promptly gambles away again), I felt an enormous urge to punch him in the face and yell at him for being a retarded old idiot. Nell is nothing short of a saint for putting up with him, though I suppose she was too young to really be able to do anything about it.

Dickens is good at making you really hate his villains, especially by making them always practice their villainy in a cowardly way by selecting weaker targets. Daniel Quilp, one of the most hateful characters I've encountered in a book in a long time — and I say that, having read a biography of Hitler last year :P — easily lords it over his timid wife or his little servant Tom (who, incidentally, seems to have developed a full-blown case of Stockholm syndrome, and ends up being the only one who is sad about Quilp's death; ch. 73), often by dint of actual physical violence; but he changes his tune very quickly when encountering a stronger adversary such as Richard Swiveller (ch. 13). Speaking of Quilp, I thought he got off too easily; drowning while trying to escape arrest was too good for him after all his evil schemes and doings. And speaking of Swiveller, I really liked this character as being one of the few that aren't quite unambiguously good or bad. At first I thought him bad, as we see him all too easily persuaded to play a part in the schemes of the villains, first that of his ne'er-do-well friend Fred, Nell's brother, who wants Richard to try marrying Nell for her supposed money; and later by Quilp himself, who installs Richard as Brass's clerk partly to keep an eye on the Brasses and partly in the context of a fiendish plan to ruin Kit by framing him for theft. But Richard isn't really bad at any point, merely an easy-going fellow looking for a reasonably easy way through life, which I definitely don't blame him for, and he improves greatly in the later parts of the book, especially after he befriends the poor little servant of the Brasses, the Marchioness as he jokingly calls her, and is unambiguously one of the good characters by the end of the book.

Another thing that annoyed me in the story is the incompetent defense of Kit when he was framed for theft. It's nice of the Garlands to hire a lawyer to defend him, but why on earth didn't they tell that lawyer to meet with Kit a few times and plan a decent defense? The inept fool stood there practically speechless and easily allowed the Brasses' false testimonies to go unchallenged; he never even tried to put forth the true explanation, i.e. that Kit had been framed. I was far from having the impression that Kit's guilt had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and yet he was declared guilty anyway. Perhaps this worked differently in 19th-century England? Or perhaps it still works differently now, for all I know. My familiarity with proofs is mostly from mathematics, where these things work very differently than in law. In particular, I suspect that lawyers have very intricate and peculiar ideas as to what exactly constitutes ‘reasonable doubt’...

I would also like to praise Mil Nicholson, the voice actor who recorded this particular audiobook version of The Old Curiosity Shop. He does a great job at assuming different voices for different characters, and switches between them with impressive dexterity when reading a dialogue. He was particularly good at doing a whiny, high-pitched old man's voice, which suited the character of Nell's grandfather so well (though it also made it harder for me to sympathize with him). And at the point where Nell and her grandfather, during their wanderings, get sufficiently far west of London, the characters in this audiobook even begin to speak with an accent, which I guess corresponds to how they speak in the west of England. He also has a couple of interesting quirks in his pronunciation, e.g. the way he makes an unusually long pause before certain consonant clusters such as /ks/ and then pronounces the cluster itself very quickly.

Incidentally, I found there's another advantage to listening to an audiobook as opposed to reading it on paper. As is nearly inevitable when learning a foreign language, you learn more new words by reading than by listening, and in the case of a language like English you can never be quite sure how a word is pronounced if you've only seen it on paper as opposed to heard it spoken. Well, now when I listened to this audiobook and heard where the actor's pronunciation differs from mine, I could look that word up in the dictionary to see which pronunciation is right. In this way, I managed to discover a few errors in my pronunciation, though by now I've forgotten which words they were (and probably also what the correct pronunciation was). I wonder how many other words I'm mispronouncing in my mind without even being aware of it.

All in all, this was a fine book to listen to, and I wouldn't mind listening to some more audiobooks of Dickens's works if or when an opportunity presents itself.