Dickens and Poe

The 1976 BBC Masterpiece Theatre production Dickens of London, was on while I was still a small child, and I was unaware of it until as a young adult, I came across overage of it in a book chronicling the Masterpiece Theatre productions. It wasn't until the early 2000s that I actually got a copy, after it had been re-released in the US on DVD.

 
 
      As I anticipated, it is an excellent production, with separate actors protraying the author as a boy, a young man, and (both) a middle-aged man, and an old man. The film faithfully follows the life of Dickens from his boyhood to his deathbed. There was another biographical portrait of Dickens broadcast sometime this new century on PBS, which I taped. There were actors portraying Dickens parents and contemporaries in that as well (including Timothy West as Dickens father), but that was not a straightforward dramatazation of the author's life. This version is. The life of Dickens dramatized, making the film seem like the life of one of Dickens characters, and could stand alongside the adventures of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist or Phillip Pirrip. Only this boy really lived and some of what he endured was the equal of the hadships his fictional characters went through. There seem to be less evil adults here than in his novels (though I suspect that there were in young Charles' life), but young bullies are well represented. The actor who protrays the elder Dickens makes him a jovial, flamboyant merry-maker, and relentless optimist. That's probaly fairly close to reality, as Dickens claims to have based David Coppperfield's Mr. Mcawber on his father. The incidents of Charles' family ending up in depter's prison, and the Blacking Factory are well-presented. There's plenty of darkness in this, including a harrowing scene in which two accost young Charles in Warren's Blacking Factory and pour boiling shoe polish on him. The later incidents of Charles' affair with a young actress, and the accident on the train are not included here, BTW.

The episodes flash back and forward from the author's boyhood and youth to his elder years. There are some disconcerting incodents, including one with a man who is made up to resemble Mr. Pickwick, barges in to Dickens' sickbed to have word with the auhtor, and the doctor throughs him out. The elderly author reflects, "Am I dreaming of him, or is he dreaming of me?"

    This scene and others beg the question as to how much of all this is faithful to the author's life and how much is fictionalized. And this brings me to the point of this essay, which happens to be Dickens and Poe, what I set to write out in the first place. Later in the serial, there is an episode titled "Nightmare," which is clearly based on the real-life incident in which Dickens met with Edgar Allen Poe in America.
    
 

    This occurred during Dickens first tour of the continental US, which would shrotly inspire him to write Martin Cuzzlewit(not his most popular work, particularly not with Americans). Both authors knew and  admired one another's work by this time. Poe reportedly urged Dickens to find a Birtish publisher for his Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque. Dickens promised he would, but was apparently unable to do so. Did Dickens fudge on his promise? Probably he did his best to find a publisher, but one wonders if the outcome of his meeting with Poe could have been influenced by the bizarre incident in "Nightmare"--if it occurred at all, that is.

   In the film, Poe lets Dickens in on a secret of his: he had discovered a way to find out what lies beyond the grave. Poe tells Dickens that he has been experimenting with hynosis, and has managed to drug a man into a hypnotic state at the moment of his death, so that his consciousness (spirit), is in a suspended state, caught between the world of the living and the dead. Naturally, Dickens is intrigued by this (remember, Dickens was an amateur magician himself, and also experimented with hypnosis--not to mention he was reputed to have been a member of London's "Ghost Club"), and he accompanies Poe to the house where the man in question is sprawled out on a bed in a darkned room. Poe demands that the man tell them what lies beyond this world, whereupon he pulls back the linen covers. The body, which has been in suspended "life for 7 months, collapses into a dired skeleton. Horrified, Dickens flees, with Poe's vampirish laughter ringing in his ears.

     Any truth to this? And if so, is it a trick devised by Poe or a real-life paranormal incident?

Nicholas Nickleby (1980)

  I recieved the entire set of Nicholas Nickleby the Christmas before last. It was on old VHS tapes, not DVDS. It's been ages since I've actually read the novel. It has been even longer than that since I've seen some of this adaptation, possibly the most celebrated one ever of Dickens' third novel. It was put on by the Royal Shakespeare company back in the eighties.

    I remember when this was telvised in 1982, on ABC, I think. I was in ninth grade at the time. My English teacher had us read Great Expections that year, the first time I'd had to read a lengthy Dickens novel. I remember her assigning extra credit to anyone who would watch the Nicholas Nickleby serial and do a special report on it. I saw just a bit of it, and it seemed very dark, but that's the way Dickens' adaptations often are. What I most remember though, is my mom absolutely hating it, due mostly to the darkness, and some of the violence going on. However, we didn't really see enough to make any judgement of the series as whole, especially considering it's length.


     Now that I've finally watched it from beginning to end (and knowing the story), I can safely say that it lives up to all the hype it recieved back then. While some Dickens adaptations of the time cut corners and leave out imprtant characters and events, that is certainly not the case. It's all here--Nicholas's confronation with the sadistic Wackford Squeers, the Cheeryble Brothers, the Vile Mulberry Hawk, Smike's tragic death, the horrible realization that prompts Ralph Nickleby's suicide, everything. The scene in which Nicholas thrashes Squeers is memorable, and appears especially orchastrated here to have the audience cheering.
 

    The approach this adaptation employs here is a bit unorthodox, or at least it seems so for as a film adaptation. Before each subsequent act, the performers give monologues to the audience in regard to the events. Thus, we get the sensation of the people on stage transforming from actor to character, and back again. As a film, this can be a bit disconcerting, but the adaptation does manage to work both as a film and a play. This is literally a film of the play (caught live on camera it spooled out on the London stage).  And though the sets change throughout the performance, they are convincing enough to work on film, as though shot in the gloom-shrouded steeets of Victorian London--well, nearly. The atmosphere in this production is indeed quite dark, as it should be, and we don't see too much that would reveal itself as stagey during the actual scenes.

 

    On a final note, actor Roger Rees, who has the title role, also played Scrooge's nephew Fred 1984's A Christmas Carol. He's who I always pictured as Nicholas, thanks to this performance--in spite of the fact that I'd not the seen but very little of the performance before now.

Hard Times (1977)

I just recently got to purchase and view the 1977 adaptation of Hard Times. I remember reading the original novel back in college. It was for a course in Victorian literature. As a rule, most college courses tended to avoid the longer works by authors, given the time allowed in a semester, and that rules out virtually all of Dickens. Hard Times, however is a realtively slim novel. It is basically a scalding comentary on the rise of industrialization at the time, in particular the small, industrial towns that were popping up in the north of England over the past few decades. The novel is to be beleived, these industrialized "progressive" villages were dominated by crushing uniformy, terrible working conditions, and mass exploitation of impoverished laborers. The story takes place in fictional Coketown, and centers around the ruthlessly materialistic schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, who discourages all flights of "fancy" in his pupils, and his friend, the blustering, "self-made man" Josiah Bounderby, who is later revealed to be a fraud. It is a satire on extreme ultalitarinism, which Gradgrind pounds into his students, and imposes upon his own children. Part of the tragedy of the tale is that Gradgrind, at least, seems to be well-meaning in this, and seems to realize his error after the damage has taken effect.

     Back when I first read this, I pictured Bounderby as looking like Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist--in fact, like Timothy West's portrayl of the character in 1982.  So it seems pretty appropriate here that he is actually played by Timothy West,  And so he is. It's almost as though he's playing the same character. He's so gross and hypocritical, its quite a relief when he finally gets what's coming to him.

     Also in this version, the city of Coketown is itself very well portrayed. With smoke stacks belching forth vile chemicals, it very much resmebles the city in the book. We didn't really see any of the city itself in the more recent adaptation by the BBC, as I recall, although I would recomend the DVD of that as well, in part becuase that version also includes a short film of Dickens' often anthologized ghost story "The Signal Man" as an added bonus. Bitzer, Gradgrind star pupil, is protrayed as a very pale albino boy in the 1977 version, unlike in the BBC version, but the same as in the novel. This is important, as Bitzer's paleness was a metaphor for the bland "colorless" school of thought Gradgrind imposed on his students.

Where is "The Haunted Man"?

Charles Dickens' novella, The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain presents an enigma in that it has not been adapted so much as once as a screen or even a known stage production since the nineteenth century. That's right---Dickens' ghostly tale of a gloomy chemistry teacher named Redlaw, haunted by wrongs done to him in the past, who encounters his ghostly double on Christmas eve has yet even to be filmed. Contrast that with the story of Scrooge, with more adaptations on screen and stage (not to mention parodies, animated, and sticom version, etc) than any other Dickens work bar none. Mention the name "Scrooge", and anyone will know the character. It would be very difficult ot find someone familiar with Redlaw's tale.

     The species of phantom Redlaw encounters, a duplicate of himself, is known to folklore as a "fetch". The phantom doppleganger is staple in paranormal literature. One also features in Edgar Allen Poe's short story "William Wilson."

    Dickens' Haunted Man was the last of his Christmas stories, which he began publishing annually following A Christmas Carol's roaring success, the previous ones being The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, adn the Battle For Life. Of these, only The Chimes was another ghost story, about phantoms that haunt the bell tower, though it took place on New Year's Eve rather than Christmas. The protagonist of The Haunted Man, which, like Carol, occurs on Christmas proper, is so morbid about past wrongs (I think there's many who can relate to him), that he accepts the phantom's offer to obliberate all his unpleasant memories. The phantom's "gift," has unforseen consequences, as Redlaw becomes unable to express a loving nature--be becomes merely bitter and quarrelsome. Worse, his affliction spreads to others around him. The loving Swidger family and Tetterby family become...not so nice. It is only an innocent child character, Milly Swidger, who, because she remains uneffected by the affliction, is able to save Redlaw. the chemist recounts his bargain with the ghost, and all is restored to right and good by the end. The message hear, delivered in the final line by Milly Swidger, is that even painful memories of our past must be preserved in order for love and joy to exist in the present. That message, and the story itself, did not manage to resonate nearly as deeply with the collective human psyche as A Christmas Carol did. Still, the story seems to have been fairly popular on the stage following its publication. The story also includes a heavy dose of social criticsim of the times, just as in Carol and Chimes: at one point Redlaw encounters a half-wild "beast child," a sort of equivelent of Carol's Ignorance and Want.
 
     The reasons for its utter disapearance following the Victorian era remain unclear. Fred Guida, in his book A Christmas Carol and its Adaptations, relates that records show that one of the early stage adaptations featured a "flying ghost" onstage, and a later one was the first presentation of the "Pepper's Ghost" effect, very innovative for the time, in which the ghostly image of a human actor was projected onto the stage via a light projector, and through a pane of glass situated between the stage and audience. The effect was pioneered by polytechnic Henry Dirks, and presented on the stage by another polytechnic, John Henry Pepper, hence the name.

 


Whatever the reason, dispite its early popularity, it's obvious by now that the story of Scrooge managed to totally eclipse that of Redlaw. I think it's time The Haunted Man was given its due on screen. Come to think of it George C. Scott might well have made a formidable Redlaw just as he did Scrooge. Scott was very good at depicting complex, conflicted characters in his movies. It's a pity he's no loger with us.

Here is an illustration of the fetch from the story:







 And some interesting illustrations for The Chimes: