Week 1 Day 2
London, Charles Dickens, "Great Prospects"
Charles Dickens
Virginia Woolf also wrote an essay, "David Copperfield," the year she published Mrs. Dalloway, in an attempt to straighten out her lifelong obsession with Dickens's work. Other great writers have shown us the subtleties of human emotions, but Woolf argues that from Dickens's novels we remember:
It is the passionate, the excited, the humorous, the distorted characters; the stench, the smell, and the soot of London; the incredible coincidence that binds together the most distant of lives; the city, the court, the nose of this man, the limbs of that man; the scenery under the arches or on the main road; and above all this, a tall, magnificent figure, so full of life that he cannot exist as an individual, but needs a group of others to fulfill himself.
She thinks, "It's likely that no one will remember the first time they read David Copperfield." Dickens, she said, is no longer an author, but rather "an institution, a monument, a thoroughfare that has been crossed by millions of people" — paved with a large number of his characters and his thousands of enthusiastic readers.
For me, it was certain that many years before I personally went to London, Dickens had already deeply shaped my impression of London. Dickens's London is known to me, perhaps from the experience I have forgotten and first read David Copperfield, or earlier in the morning when I saw the television broadcast of "Carols to Christmas" and the 1935 version of the film David Copperfield, with W.C. Fields playing Mr. McCoble.
In the 1935 film David Copperfield, W.C Fields played Mr. McCorber
For a boy who grew up in the 1950s, David Lane's films Orphans of the Mist (1948) and Lone Star Blood Tears (1946) will leave a particularly vivid impression – Lone Star Blood Tears was named by the British Film Institute in 1999 as one of the five greatest British films in the history of cinema.
Few writers and their cities have such a close connection as Dickens and London. To this day, there are a whole bunch of travel books and websites that invite you on a walking tour of Dickens's London. Along the way, you can see a lot of "landscapes" from Dickens's novels, including the "Old Antique Shop" - which is the main scene in Dickens's novel of the same name, "The Old Antique Shop" - and now the sign of "Old Antique Shop" is still proudly hanging, and it is Dickens who makes it immortal.
Old antique shop
The London I imagined in my early years was largely the creation of Dickens. This is precisely the literary reflection of Oscar Wilde's view that he believed that the Impressionist painter invented the London fog. In his remarkable essay, The Decay of Lies, he asked: "If it were not for the Impressionists, where would we have gotten the wonderful brownish-yellow fog, creeping forward in our markets, obscuring the gas lamps and turning the houses into monster-like shadows." He acknowledged that "London has been foggy for centuries." I dare say there is. But no one has ever seen them... They didn't exist until art invented them. But Wilde would not go on a Dickens tour because he could not stand Dickens's sentimentality. He once famously described his thoughts on the tragic heroine of "The Old Antique Shop", "A person needs a heart made of stone to not laugh when he reads about the death of little Nair."
Virginia Woolf wasn't content to live in Dickens's London either, and she and her friends deliberately invented another London, as well as another way of writing, both of which they liked. In the david copperfield article, she said harshly: "His sympathy is indeed limited, and roughly speaking, as long as a man or a woman earns more than two thousand pounds a year, or has gone to university, or can count three generations of ancestors, he has no sympathy for them." She prefers the emotional complexity highlighted in the works of George Eliot and Henry James. At the same time, she also sees the seeds of active intervention by readers already planted in Dickens's work, which she expects to create in her own way. Dickens, she says, "writes that the world is rich and lacks reflection, but it has a wonderful effect." They make us creators, not just readers and bystanders. ...... The delicacy and complexity are there, as long as we know where to look for them, as long as we don't get caught off guard – because for those of us who have another set of rules – they appear in the wrong place."
In fact, Dickens's later works are more psychologically complex and artistically constructed than his earlier works, such as Nicholas Nicholby and David Copperfield. Woolf's discussion of early Dickens rather than his more mature masterpieces, such as Bleak House and Great Prospects, is an interesting choice, and these later works may be too close to her own writing, so close that she is uncomfortable. It was these late novels that I found worth re-reading, and what I gained from them was far from comparable to his earlier works.
Over the past few years, I have received no less than five editions of Great Prospects, each of which embodies a different way of reading, which undoubtedly reflects the publisher's own expectations of reaching readers and increasing sales. An earlier edition was one of the multi-volume Volumes of Dickens's Collected Works. The correct way to read this book is to read it as part of the author's complete works. Victorian people were keen to buy such anthology, and in the era when there were no HBO or Netflix episodes, they could read several books in one go on a long winter night. Dickens personally oversaw the compilation of his first anthologies in 1867, but the first thing his readers read was his novels published in serial form. He published Great Prospects in his magazine, All the Year Round, a weekly nine-month series from 1860 to 1861, and he wrote diligently each week following a schedule, just as Philia Fokker followed a schedule to travel the world ten years later.
In the decades after Dickens' death, his novels were seen as popular entertainment, especially for young readers. One of my editions of Great Prospects, which was printed in New York in the early twentieth century (no specific date is given in the book), belongs to the Boys' Library series. On the back cover of the book, the publisher lists more than twenty other books in the series, with seductive titles such as "Shoe Shine Boy Tom," "Newsboy Danny," and "Spider Island." I grew up in Maine, and I guess I'd love to read Hunchback Jack, a book that "tells the story of a hunchback boy who lives on the shores of Maine, cape Elizabeth, and whose ordeal and success are incredibly interesting."
Dickens regained popularity in the mid-twentieth century, when an entire generation of new critics began to explore his art of fiction more deeply. The next edition I have, published in 1963, belongs to the "Stamp Classics" series, and the cover is a ghostly picture of Dickens's protagonist Pip encountering Magwich, a fugitive from the cemetery, at the beginning of the novel. This edition contains a postscript by the British novelist Angus Wilson, and a sentence printed on the back cover emphasizes that "Great Expectations is both a mysterious and well-structured novel and a profound examination of moral values."
Different publishers have contributed to the world over the years, and different "Great Prospects" have been different. Even the same publisher will issue different editions over time. Here are two of my Penguin editions, the first one I read when I was a freshman in college in 1971, and the second one I used when I was teaching in the late nineties.
Two Penguin Editions of GreatEr Horizons
Both editions are geared towards both the academic market and appeal to the general reader. The book contains detailed notes and prefaces by eminent scholars, as well as a bibliography of further reading. Despite these similarities, the cover of the book is very different. That early version used a detail in Turner's 1860 work, The Country Blacksmith Scrambles over the Price of The Horseshoe, And the Butcher Pays for His Little Horseshoe. The image is reminiscent of the blacksmith shop of Pip's good friend and guardian Joey Gergie, apparently placing the novel in the Realistic Tradition of "One Page of Life" in the Victorian period of England. In contrast, the updated cover presents a ghostly landscape taken from the German Romantic painter Casp David Friedrich's The Entrance to the Cemetery (1825). Friedrich's foggy "spectacle of death" (as one art historian puts it) is far removed from Dickens's novels in time and space, reminiscent of Miss Hao Weixiang's ghostly Shatis Manor, rather than the simple church cemetery in which young Pip speculates on the character of his parents by studying the tombstones. ("The shape of the letters on my father's tombstone gave me the odd idea that he should be a broad-shouldered, firm, dark-skinned man with jet-black curly hair.") ”）