Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is one of those books that was just meant to be read aloud. Literally. Dickens considered himself the novelist of the common man and his works were originally published in the relatively inexpensive serialized form. I heard that in nineteenth century England, whole neighborhoods would go in together to purchase a copy for the local pub, and that families would crowd in expectantly in anticipation of a fabulous rendition compliments of the designated reader—that being, someone that could actually read.

Reading Dickens quietly to oneself is a fantastic journey into an exquisitely plotted world. But reading Dickens out loud is the actual living in it. Philip and I read Our Mutual Friend together last winter and it was a magical few weeks of fireside evenings and theatrical voices and frenzied breakfast table speculations. I even found myself so carried away by the quandaries in which all our new friends had found themselves that I hastily appended Philip’s suppertime grace one night with a quick appeal for their fates.

Our Mutual Friend is characteristically peopled by a cast of remarkable (and aptly-named!) characters, from the little crippled doll-maker, Jenny Wren to the wolf-like longshoreman, Rogue Riderhood. Who can forget the newly-risen society couple, the Veneerings? Or their adorable counterparts, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin? “Fascination” Fledgby or the indefatigable Podsnaps? At it’s simplest, Our Mutual Friend is the story of a young heir presumed dead and given the unique opportunity to observe the impact of such upon those affected by the redistribution of his fortune—including the lovely Bella Wilfer, whom he was literally willed to marry. But no story of Dickens is simple. He will move heaven and earth to weave together every single echelon of society, interconnected and interdependent, into an absolute miracle of coincidence and chance and glorious intention, taking his readers from the slums of London to the glittering drawing rooms of would-be MPs to the haunts of ‘waterside characters’ along the Thames.

I have always adored Dickens. I have always been mesmerized by his plots. But it wasn’t until a respected and learned friend pointed out to me that every one of his stories has a distinct and deliberate form that I really began to fully appreciate his genius: source material that was easily recognizable to his original audience, masterfully recreated into a performance all Dickens’ own. (Think Frankenstein for Great Expectations. And Jane Eyre for Bleak House.)  But when she explained what was the source material for Our Mutual Friend, I knew why this book appealed to my heart in every particular. Why of all Dickens’ books that I have read, this one stands out from the crowd as my very favorite.

For it’s none other than the Fairy Tale.

Looking back over the novel I could see it all: fairy godmothers; an ornery mother and sisters set against a princess-in-exile; wolves that can’t quite keep to their disguises. There’s even the thread running through it of my most favorite fairy tale of all, Rapunzel. (High marks to those who can identify it ) And like all true fairy tales, Our Mutual Friend confronts the problems of evil and pain. The characters suffer—both by their own hand and by the consequences of others’ actions. There’s anguish and growth and excruciating choices. But the ennobling power of love flaps over the story, like a standard straight against the wind.

And that makes all the difference.

So, she leaning on her husband’s arm, they turned homeward by a rosy path which the gracious sun struck out for them in its setting. And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O ’tis love, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round!

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

When I was seven or eight, my grandparents went to England. And among the things that they brought back to me was one of those coveted little books bound in green cloth and wrapped in a gorgeously-familiar glossy white dust jacket. Not to date myself, but it must be pointed out that this was at a time in which Beatrix Potter books were not to be had for the asking at any Borders or Barnes & Noble, not to mention the Little Professor book shop on the square in our town. (Alright—I’m not quite as old as I’m making myself sound here. Let’s just say that a lot has changed in my lifetime!)

Mrs. Tittlemouse was a most terribly tidy particular little mouse, always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors. Sometimes a beetle lost its way in the passages. "Shuh! shuh! little dirty feet!" said Mrs. Tittlemouse, clattering her dust-pan.

I had already befriended Miss Tiggy-Winkle and the illustrious Peter (how haunted I was this spring in the construction of my new cold frame with the memory of Mr. MacGregor’s cucumber apparatus!) but The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse was a treasure that immediately became a favorite. Perhaps it was the cunning little box bed that she slept in, with her slippers at one end and her dust pan and broom laid by at the other. Or the silliness of Mr. Jackson taking the thistledown that she offered him at tea and blowing it all over the room. I know that the ‘acorn-cupfuls of honeydew’ that the mice enjoyed at her party seized my little girl heart with longing, much as Edmund’s was piqued by the thought of Turkish Delights.

But it wasn’t until I was grown up and had a house of my own to keep that I realized the real, potent, deep magic of the story of Thomasina Tittlemouse. And it’s just this:

She’s me.

I completely sympathize with Thomasina’s obsession with a clean house. From one perfectionist to another, I hail her with a kindred salute. I keep her on top of my bread box in the kitchen with a small stack of other resoundingly house-wifely titles (like a facsimile edition of an old Williamsburg cookbook and a domestic science textbook from the twenties) and the other night I leaned against the counter and chuckled over her skirmishes with muddy footprints and uninvited guests of an insect variety.

But beneath my smiles I was aching for her a bit. It’s difficult to keep house. It’s a battle to combat the daily evidences we homemakers encounter of demise and decay and the constant reality of entropy. No matter how much we might love it as an overarching vision and ennoble it as a vocation in the truest sense of the word, down in the flatlands of the everyday it can be rather trying to complete one task and move on to another, only to turn around and find that the first one needs doing again. Or to be too exhausted at a given moment to rationally prioritize the onslaught of chores that all seem to be clamoring for our attention at once. Both of which, incidentally, our diminutive heroine contended with in thirty tiny pages of text, with additional botherations thrown in besides.

Mrs. Tittlemouse followed him with a dish-cloth, to wipe his large wet footmarks off the parlour floor.

“All noble things are difficult,” said Oswald Chambers, and homemaking is nothing if not noble. But it can be almost as difficult to keep a governor on noble desires in overdrive. To prevent order and beauty from slipping over into perfectionism. It’s a field that I have to take every single day, or suffer the consequences. And I’m not nearly so cocky as I once was in thinking that I could take it alone. I need the help of the God of creation to run my house in a way that honors Him. And I need the camaraderie of other souls.

“If you expect perfection or nothing,” I pontificated to a friend the other day, quoting Brenda quoting Edith Schaeffer, “you will always end up with nothing.”

And it wasn’t two hours later that I was on the phone with the very same friend being gently admonished for the very same thing, only in different words.

I had the most striking insight a while back that puts a much graver face on the quest for control that lurks behind the innocent smile of perfectionism. It was from the 127th psalm: one of the songs of ascents that were used by Jewish pilgrims as they traveled, singing, to their true home.

She fetched soft soap, and flannel, and a new scrubbing brush from the storeroom. But she was too tired to do any more. First she fell asleep in her chair, and then she went to bed. "Will it ever be tidy again?" said poor Mrs. Tittlemouse.

Unless the LORD builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the LORD watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Being the lover or words that I am, the great big bulking Strong’s Concordance is one of my best friends. And every once in a while a word will leap up from its context in Scripture and beg to be explored to the enlightenment of the whole passage. Such was the case with the word ‘vain’ in the verses above. I looked it up , keeping in mind the setting, the futile efforts for control, the promise of rest. And when I found it in the original Hebrew I gasped. And then I felt a little ill. For it’s a word not used often in the Bible–one of the only other references was from the account of Moses handing down the Commandments in Exodus 20: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.”

To call upon God for help in the issues of life–great and small–and then to neglect (another word for refuse) to avail myself of it on His terms (another definition of surrender) is not only futile. It’s blasphemous. It’s taking God’s name in vain. Here all these years I’ve been preening over the fact that I don’t use God’s name as a swear word so commandment number three is a shoe-in. And yet, I’m doing essentially the same thing when I pay Him lip service in my prayers and then go scrambling around trying to perfectly control my environment from the effects of the Fall.

When it was all beautifully neat and clean, she gave a party to five other little mice...

“I eat the bread of anxious toil,” another friend told me candidly. “I knead it and I bake it. I chew on it–often far into the night. I digest it where I should be digesting God’s words.”

But the majestic tenderness of God gleams like a precious gem in the culmination of this section of the psalm: for He gives to His beloved sleep.

“You’re not in control,” He essentially says, “but that’s alright because I AM. I am building your house and I am watching your city. It’s too much for you and you’re tired from all the work that is your own to do. Rest now–go to sleep. You can, you know, in perfect peace, because I love you.”

Good literature begs good questions. I’m not going to pretend that The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse delves the great difficulties of the universe. But neither will I conceal my respect for Beatrix Potter as one of the significant writers of the 20th century, particularly in the spirit of Walter de la Mare’s “only the best for the children”. If one can write timelessly for the children–timelessly to the tune of being the best-selling childrens’ author of all time–then I would venture to say she was on to something. That she knew a little that was worth knowing about the intangibles and the unutterables. That her books, simple as they are, live because they are true.

“Will it ever be tidy again?” worries Mrs. Tittlemouse.

Yes. And no. And it’s alright. We care for the smeary prints of honey all over the cupboards and the muddy footprints and the loving of the souls in our charge. And He cares for us.

And “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”.

Also, there was Mrs. Tittlemouse's bedroom, where she slept in a little box bed!

all images and captions, Beatrix Potter, and compliments of The Project Gutenberg

"The Dean's Watch" by Elizabeth Goudge

… is the only word to describe the void that is following The Dean’s Watch,” quoth my friend Laura in an email over the weekend.

Our book club just finished reading this 1960 Elizabeth Goudge jewel and I know exactly how she feels. We’re all kind of wandering, I’m afraid, unwilling to exchange that post-Goudge dreamy sort of happy-sadness for the cares of a new cast of characters with which Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is doubtless only too eager to supply us.

Personally, I’ve been saving The Dean’s Watch, only slipping it onto our ballot after some half-dozen of her other books had in their turn been unanimously voted onto our reading list. My mother—who introduced me to Elizabeth in the first place—has long named it her favorite, and so it was with as much reverence as expectation that I anticipated the pleasure of its acquaintance.

At the meeting, everyone wanted to know if it was my favorite, as well. I hemmed and hawed and contradicted myself in the way that I generally do when confronted with a question that I haven’t fully settled in my own mind. I thought about Henrietta slipping like a sprite through the cobbled streets of A City of Bells. I swung round towards the beckoning flare that Pilgrim’s Inn will always be to me. I set down the delicate crystal goblet with which our hostess had supplied me upon arrival and sighed.

“It will be someday,” I said.

Someday when its hard-earned lessons of love are less experimental on my part and hopefully more experiential. When I am old enough to look back on the vision it has cast and God-willing able to say that the light it first shed is more dazzling upon approach than I could have dared to dream. The Dean’s Watch is a book of great maturity, disarmingly simple at face value. But Elizabeth Goudge will not let you take anything at face value. She, like all truly great novelists, probes the hearts and motives of her characters with an oftentimes brutal honesty. She examines what a life of love really looks like—and what it really costs.

Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, England, reputed to be the setting of 'The Dean's Watch'

Through descriptions that glint and gleam and live, like the glimpses of heaven that they are, Goudge takes us into the heart of an English cathedral city at the turn of the nineteenth century. She gives us the fens of Cambridgeshire in all their stark beauty, and the personalities of those that inhabit them—oftentimes more stark and startlingly more beautiful. But the light with which this book is filled and borne along is set against a dark foil of evil and suffering. Goudge will not let us content ourselves with the charm of the narrow cobbled streets, with the warmth of Miss Montague’s drawing room fire and the music of the birds in the trees of the Cathedral Close. With a persistence that seems almost dogged she draws us into the slums of the city, into the repulsiveness of child labor and into the festering alleyways of hatred. And she bears the light with her, inexorably lavishing it upon all who come within its circle of brightness–deserving and undeserving alike.

The great Cathedral that towers over the city and all who dwell in it is itself a figure of love. An image of grace that overwhelms both reader and character alike with what Charles Williams would call a “terrible goodness”. And at the helm of the Cathedral, we find the Dean, like a captain at the wheel of a mighty ship. A man whose whose simple godliness–straightforward but never facile–has the power to affect an entire city. But it’s one man, the atheistic little clockmaker Isaac Peabody, that seems to have the whole burden of his soul…

I love and esteem the way that Goudge writes of sacred things with an absolutely spiritual touch and never resorts to triteness in the way that many Christian authors inadvertently do. She doesn’t tell us that God is good, that Love is real and that Light will always triumph over darkness. She shows us.  She blinds us with beauties and breaks our hearts with joy.

She enfleshes the Body of Christ–the Church–with characters that are humanly flawed and yet beatifically drawn into the heaven they’ve been made for.

The Heaven we’ve all been made for. God bless you, Elizabeth. You’ve done it again.

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"

Quaint child, old-fashioned Alice, lend your dream:
I would be done with modern story-spinners,
Follow with you the laughter and the gleam:
Weary am I, this night, with saints and sinners.
We have been friends since Lewis and old Tenniel
Housed you immortally in red and gold.
Come! Your naïveté is a spring perennial:
Let me be young again before I am old.

Vincent Starrett, from Brillig

I’ve known Alice all my life. Before I was old enough to read for myself, I remember having bits of Through the Looking Glass read aloud to me, and John Tenniel’s illustrations are a part of my childhood. I’ve had ‘twas-brillig-and-the-slithy-toves-did-gyre-and-gimble-in-the-wabe stuck in my head times out of mind. I’ve even acted in a play version of the story, in an illustrious theatre in a friend’s backyard, constructed entirely of donated wood and directed by a twelve year-old ‘little brother’. (I was 23 at the time, and acted the part of the Tiger Lily, should anyone care to know. )

I love Alice like I would a childhood friend and I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve revisited Wonderland as an adult. With her pluck and propriety and her disarming questions she set the world of childrens’ literature on it’s ear, and it has never been the same since. “Who am I?” she dares to ask more than once. And in the same breath, it seems, she turns those thoughtful eyes of hers, still glinting with the wonders they have beheld, upon the young readers and the adults that are paying attention, with logical uncertainty: Very well, then, who are you?

'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

Is it a dream, or it is real? And what’s more actual—the real or the dream?

Far from being merely a covert foray into psychoanalysis, as many modern critics would have us believe, or, even worse, a string of sheer nonsense, Alice in Wonderland is a brilliant and thoroughly entertaining gambol in the world of the imagination. Every stroke of Carroll’s pen hits it mark with mathematical precision—from life-sized chess matches to grinning cats uttering profundities to absurd games of croquet employing flamingoes as mallets and hedgehogs as balls—and he manages thereby to make a case for the latent streak of moonstruck madness present in us all.

Just what would happen if Alice took that madness back to the real world with her? we can’t help but ask. Just how Alice would she be then?

That’s one of the questions that the new Alice in Wonderland (2010) film poses. We saw it this weekend in the theatre and I really had no idea what to expect. Apart from an engaging review on The Rabbit Room, and the glowing praise of a very dear friend, I pretty much went in cold.

‘It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

But I came out glowing. I thought it was a wonderful movie, most especially because it made no pretense of sticking to the book. It was more of a ‘what if’ or ‘what’s next’ than a faithful adaptation of Alice, which always seems to turn out rather ludicrous. (Or more ludicrous ) But the film kept to the essence of the book while engaging me with a plot (which the book manages to do quite delightfully without). It’s a return to Wonderland—or, Underland, suggestively called, a once-beautiful dream-world that has been ravaged and impoverished by the Red Queen’s reign of terror. Alice is almost grown now, “almost Alice”, as it’s poignantly pointed out, and the situations that she faces both above ground and below it force her to choose between comfortable, conventional adulthood and the real maturity that is always childlike.

“I always believe six impossible things before breakfast,” Alice’s father states early in the film.

I couldn’t help but think of the One Impossible Thing that I believe and which makes every other thing in the world plausible.

'Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: 'it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'

Alice in Wonderland is a dark film, there’s no denying it. It’s quirky and crazy and oftentimes baffling. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is over the top—I was completely mesmerized. And Helena Bonham Carter is brilliant as the insecure Red Queen, really more pitiable than terrifying. The Jabberwocky, now—John Tenniel’s illustration leapt to horrible life before my eyes. I was literally a bit dizzy over that sequence. But to make up for it there’s a glimpse of the original Mad Hatter’s tea party that was nothing short of beautiful.

Another thing going for this film is that Alice’s madness has a foil in the form of aunt that is really, truly mad, and I think that was a good stroke. It’s delicate, but all the more effective. We’re not talking about howling at the moon around here. Just being mad enough to be…yourself.

I came home from the movie and pulled out my beloved Annotated Alice, reading over Jabberwocky again and delighting in the many allusions to the original that the movie had been carefully laced with. It really was a fun romp, and good to see Wonderland again, even in its war-torn condition.

But it was even better to see Alice. And to know that she hadn’t forgotten how to dream. Or just how real dreams might be.

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo

(By the way, if you and Alice have never been properly introduced, allow me to suggest Martin Gardner’s definitive tome, The Annotated Alice. It’s a scholarly but wholly approachable explanation of the staggering symbolism, the embedded jokes and the scads of contemporary allusions that Victorian audiences would have easily recognized. I enjoyed reading the original text side by side with Gardner’s fascinating footnotes. Case in point: did you know that Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a close friend with the great George MacDonald and his family? Or that we have MacDonald’s young son, Greville, to thank in part for Alice’s eventual publication? Apparently Carroll sent his manuscript to Mrs. MacDonald, asking her to try it out on her children. The six year-old Greville was said to declare that “there ought to be sixty-thousand copies of it”. )

So, have any of you seen the movie? Love it? Hate it? Adore the book?

Or perhaps a better question might be Carroll’s own:

Was it a dream? What do you think?

all captions from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

illustrations by John Tenniel

Here’s another great Rabbit Room link to an article by Travis Prinzi: Alice and the Imagination