Question! If Charles Dickens were alive today would he be:
a) Writing The Wire?
b) Starring in The Wire?
or
c) Stumbling around, open-mouthed, vomiting with terror and astonishment at all the things he didn’t understand about modern life?
Footnote: he was born in 1812, making him over 200 years old if he were alive today. He wouldn’t be a pretty sight I suspect. His skin – what skin he had left – would drag behind him like a liver-spotted shadow. He’d also be in considerable pain. With hollow bowls of bone for eyes, he would occasionally look through the window of Curry’s or Dixons where a 13-inch plasma screen is showing old episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. He would force his 19th-century brain to try to recognize some semblance of storytelling and character as he understood it. But, as the episode goes on, it only seems to add to his genuine torment.
I think Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin were friends. Have I made that up? In the Venn diagram of their lives, the only overlap I can think of is Simon Callow who always plays them in bad TV films at Christmas.
All this new information on the man has lead me to set myself the challenge of reading the complete works of Charles Dickens.
This literary voyage shall begin with Bleak House. A cursory glance at page one, already informs me that it’s pretty bleak. Whilst I am reading Bleak House, if honest, I suspect I’ll secretly be wishing that I was doing something else like being on the internet, flaneuring, smooching or talking. However I have given myself a full year in order to complete this challenge, which does come with certain stipulations i.e. the man wrote about twenty-four novels for goodness sake…I’m not going to read them ALL. Some of them are non-fiction, one of them doesn’t even have an ending (WTF!) and some of them look boring. I’m going to read all the main ones. Oh, yeah – and I’m allowed to give up at anytime.
(Said with American accent.) “And this kinda got me to thinking…” for those of you that don’t know, that was my impression of Carrie Bradshaw, from Sex in the City. I think we are actually similar in style. By the way, if I was the Samantha Jones’ character in the show, the neo-feminist/slag, depending on your politics, then at this point I would chime in with something like: “Well, I don’t know about Dick-ens, but I do know about Dicks-out”, before raising a perfectly shaped eyebrow and downing a pink gin.
The point is, I find reading novels has become increasingly harder, as the amount of possible things I could be doing increases. It takes a certain amount of discipline to – let’s call it – ‘read consciously’.
Does more choice actually make us any happier in modern life or does it simply paralyse us? Does more choice raise our expectaions perhaps? It could be a dangerous thing? Ergo – we are no happier than our forefathers (I only have one).
In conclusion: bring on the Victorian gloom. Whoooop!