Charles Dickens
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Anthony Walters as Tim Crachit
I just happened upon this picture of Anthony Walters as "Tiny Tim" Crachit from George Scott's Carol today. As the picture shows he was suitably pathetic for the role.
Kim Downer in George Scott's Carol
Here is a post I found about an actor named Kim Downer who was in George Scott's Christmas Carol, I hadn't heard of him, but it looks like he could of played Fred or even Bob Crachit. Those roles were played by Roger Rees and David Warner respectively. This guy was an extra, who fondly recalled having met George C. Scott.
Thursday, July 14, 2022
The Stephen King Connection?
Now back as a teen not long, after I read the book, I just supposed that to be rot. I mean, perhaps he met that metaphorically, or he thought it was the ending that "worked." But in fiction the author is tottally in control. he is what ultimately determines the fate the characters. SK wasn't always consistent when he said "I had to kill him off" or "I did it. I'm not totally glad I did it but..", versus "He died on his own."
The author is in control in fiction.
Or is he?
But if King didn't ultimately determine the Tadder's fate, then who or what did?
If you take it literally that it wasn't King who did, then we're talking in the realm of God or Fate. Something like that.
And God of Fate, in other words mysterious forces that control what happens, and are at least sometimes beyond human control is something I've grown to believe in. How much control do we really have? The same certainly would apply to authors, what books get written, or finished, and what fictional characters survive and which do not.
Another perhaps equally infamous child death was that of "Little Nell" Trent of Dickens' The Old Curiousity Shop. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were on the edge of the seats waiting to see if thirteen-year-old Nell would survive. Dickens disappointed the majority of them, of course. Was it for the best, artistically speaking? Dickens, had his reasons, of course just as King did. In this case, its said that he didn't want his child characters to grow up and be corrupted. But of course, many of them did survive, while others did not. He very nearly kills off Oliver's aunt seventeen-year-old Rose as well. I'm not sure what made him decide to spare her life in the end, but he seemed to be disturbed by the deaths of fragile young girls and women, yet was impelled to include it in fiction, something like his friend and contemporary, Edgar Allen Poe, influenced by the death of his young mother, and one of his girlfriends.
The fact Nell is a girl-child undoubtedly had something to do with it. Purity and innocence was and is even today, valued more highly in the "fairer sex." Then again today that might be considered a bit sexist, which wouldn't make Dickens motivations for killing her very reputable. But just how much control did Dickens(or King) have anyway, even though they personal motives?
The fact that both Little Nell and Theodore have almost the same last name is strikingly odd. King is today's nearest analogue to Dickens, in terms of popularity, output, depth of character and intricacy of plot. Dickens confined his weird elements almost entirely to his ghost tales (there's more of those than just Scrooge, in case you didn't know), and King does not, but in sheer scope, the two authors clearly rival each other. the descions such influential authors make concerning the lives and deaths of their characters is enough to influence popular culture, and culture as a whole.
The authors had their own personal demons. But why did they have those personal demons in the first place?
The deaths of Nell and Tad seem to parallel on another. Does this in fact mean they were also predetermined?
Perhaps King little less control in killing off the Tadder than he even guessed.
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Dan Simmons' Drood
I can't believe I've never made a post on Dan Simmons' Drood!
This was a novel I read some years ago. Dickens' Mystery of Edwin Drood, was of course his final (and infamously unfinished) novel. Though I do remember reading somewhere that one of Dickens notes or letters strongly suggests that Edwin Drood, who had mysteriously vanished during the Christmas season, had been murdered by John Jasper. Many have tried to wrap up the story, including Leon Garfield, I beleive, but the canonical end will foreer remain a mystery.
The "Drood" character of Simmons' novel, however, is unrelated to young Edwin Drrod, the character Dickens created, save possibily it's hinted that that's where Dickens got the name. It centers around the infamous train ride, on which Dickens was returing to London with his mistriss. After the famed accident occurs, Dickens does his best to help the injured passanngers. According to Simmons' novel, it is then that the author meets the title character, a bizarre vampire-ish fellow with white dead white skin and a gaping aperature for a nose, who introduces himself merely as Drood. This strange personage, helps Dickens help the injured, though he seems somehow to hover through the air from person to person.
The tale is narrated by Dickens' friendly rival Wilkie Collins, author of The MoonStone and other works of mystery and wierd fiction. It's clear from the start that Collins harbers a strong resentment of his friend for being far more famous, and partiularly hates how Dickens has become known as "the inimatable." Still, he sticks by Dickens through the final faze of his relatively short life, when his travels and readings (particularly "Sikes and Nancy"--and I still have no idea why Dickens took it on himself to act out this particularly horrid scene repeatedly on stage) were taking a toll on the author's health.
Dickens has a few more encounters with the mysterious Drood, once seeing him floating outside his window! It is never fully explained whether Drood is actually real, or a figment of the author's overwrought imagination. Who or what is he? If a hallucination (or perhaps even if not) is Drood a manifestation of
Dickens's failing health or anxiety? Or perhaps his guilt over having an affair? Has the apparition come into being as the result of the strain of writing? Simmons does not tell us, which makes it one of those stories where it's ultimately up to the reader to decide.
Drood provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an aging literary genius, but no concrete explanations for its elements of the surreal.
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
Great Expectations (1980)
Tale of Two Cities (1981)
As a young child, I really didn't know of anything by Dickens other than Scrooge. In fact, I sometimes wondered if this man had ever written anything else. My first real exposure of Dickens beyond Scrooge was A Tale of Two Cities, in the then-current issue of Scope magazine, a publication for junior high kids.
At first I didn't care for the tale, because I small peasant boy gets run over by a callous noble in a carriage. Gaspard, the poor child's grieving father, later climbs into the marquis's bedchamber and murders him (I recall this scene vividly from the movie when it aired), but is caught and executed. The fault of the Marquis de Evermonde (for that is who it is, of course,) is not so much that he hit a child (that was an accident) as his callous response to it. I hated the deaths of children even back then. What's more, I really didn't understand most of the story, or it's political and ethical significance, including Carton's noble sacrifice at the end. I was just sad he got executed. I recall there was a paperback at the time that contained stills from the movie.
Some years later, when the Clive Donner production of The Scarlet Pimpernel became my favorite of all movies, I tended to think of it as a Dickens movie, even though it was not. Pimpernel,was after all, part of my "big three" of Donner adaptations, long with Twist and Carol. All of these had scores by Nick and Tony Bicet, and some of the same actors had roles in each of them. Like Tale, Baroness Orczy's Pimpernel series relied very much on the concept of innocent people wrongly condemned merely for having been born into the former ruling class. Orczy was, admittedly, biased on the side of the aristos; she was a member of the Austrian aristocracy herself, and there was, as I recall, a rebellion when she was young, and she feared what might happen if it were taken too far. The villains in the Pimpernel novels, are not, for the most part, the starving and vengeful underclass, but the ambitious bourgeoisie, including Robespierre and Chauvelin who are primarily motivated by power, and use the rage of the disenfrancised to attain it.
Dickens, though, depicts terrible atrocities wrought by both callous and privileged aristos and fanatic revolutionaries. He crafts an accurate and disturbing portrait of human psychology, personified primarily in Madame Defarge. Through her, we are shown how and why humans are given to revenge and scapegoating. Even Dr. Manette's diary shows that even he, when imprisoned by the Evermonde's pens something in rage which he will later come to regret. Orczy never really goes that deep.
I didn't actually read Tale until college (though not for a class--they never seemed to have good classes on Dickens at Purdue), and a still remember haunting passages. One of the finest was during the real Darnay and family's flight from Paris: Look back, see if we are pursued!...the whole wild night rushes after us...but we are pursued by nothing else.
On a side note, I don't know much further about Chris Sanderson's acting career, but he did play the Frankenstein Monster on a Thanksgiving afternoon special. It was so dark and morbid I had to turn it off. Which I later learned was why it was so much truer to the original than most of the movies!