In Celebration of the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens

Ready Availability

The Bachelor the Bachelor the Barnacles the Bachelor the Badger
Dedlock (Dartle)(Drummle)(Duff) Cripples (Crimple)(Crupp)
Cupcake (Caught)Creakle (Gradgrind)(Grimwig) (Gulpage)(Great)
Rokesmith (Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Real)(Rug)
Sloppy (Slowboy)(Slightboy)(Slammer) Situation (Speculative)(Slight)
the Warden the Warden (Wardle)(Wardle)(Waterbrook)
Wopsle (clerk)(friend)(actor) (thesb.)(fame) (luck)
Plornish (plasterer)(lime) (aggregate)(hair))(lath fix)(shrinkage)(scuttlebuck)
Petowker Price Prigg Pross (pretty) (fix)(sort)(guess)
Podsnap Pogram (shuffle)(shard) Potterson (experience)(list)
start somewhere (Adams) rattle hiss wish concentrate realign
rhestr reallocate random rip retaliate render rich realise reach
Fanny Cleaver aka Jenny Wren cripple doll driven dressmaker
Dilber distrust Dodson and Fogg duplicity dealers (foxed)(slight
Scuffing)( rusted staples)(binding loose)(rip)
(uncut)(pages mssng) (water damage) (author sig)
(brittle)(buggered)(book club ed)(dedication “my Johnny lad you are
a wonderful boy, love Uncle Ron”)(shelf cocked)(tanning visible)
(torn)(rip) (crease)(cracked)(defaced) (mild mould) (binding undone)
bought Grewgious guardian (Rosa Bud) man of many angles
no conversation (Fips) (Fish)(Finching) found (fell) (filched) (fractured)(fresh)(filled)(fixed)(frozen)(finished)
Pickwick eminence (see 7 above) mender of roads
filibuster final finisher surface like a calm pond (shouting)
storm at sea episodic (multiple) cliffhang forthright
(available)read (read to) don’t stop.

Peter Finch

taken from A Mutual Friend - Poems for Charles Dickens.
Edited by Peter Robinson.
Two Rivers Press with the English Association. £10.00

Porn is Rampant and Nobody Reads Anymore

According to writer Gary Shteyngart the future of America is one where nobody reads and porn is rampant. Jobs in retail trump everything and the National Guard patrol Manhattan. How soon? Ten years. What happens in the US first happens to us next. On my recent visit to the American south I expected to see flags, southern Baptists and even more never-leave-your-car shopping experiences than I had last time. And, given the progressive nature of the land of the free, everyone would be using iPads and Kindles. Books, in paper form at least, would no longer be.

What I actually witnessed was rather different. To start with there seemed to be fewer drive-ins although given the increasing number at home maybe I’d simply got used to the phenomenon. The 9/11 marking at a festival I attended went by in perfunctory fashion with little of the national heart wrenching I’d seen on previous visits. Then there was the lack of iPads. Well, i anything actually.

Looking around the 2000-strong audience I spotted only one man holding an object that could be said to resemble a portable device. When I got closer this turned out to be a games machine. So much for progress. Nevertheless , a large proportion of these North Carolina festival goers were reading. Novels, collections of short fiction, paperbacked poetry. Out here the book certainly wasn’t in retreat. You wouldn’t experience this amount of mass open air reading anywhere in Wales, even at the Hay Literature Festival. Death of the paper book? Not yet.

Back home I found my Kindle waiting. Slim, elegant, very light weight and resolutely black and white. Would I get on with this? Could I use it in bed? As digital machines go it turned out to be pretty flawless. Operation was instinctive, the displayed text easy on the eye and pages changed at the flick of a fingertip.

Online at the Kindle Store masses of free content awaited. Dictionaries, science fiction compendia, the complete works of Dickens, classic poetry by the lorry load. There was also any amount of free blog-books by self-published literary wannabes content to forego professional profit just to be read.

In the commercial section titles turned out not to cost quite as much as I’d expected. Delivery was instant. Press the buy button and text would arrive by 3G in seconds - the cost recouped from my card virtually without me noticing. The future, certainly, but would it catch on? I got off the train at Cardiff Bay amid a rush of Sudoku players and window gazers. Ahead of me was a woman reading as she walked. That’s something you don’t see much these days. And what was she using? A kindle.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in The Western Mail. #171

Hard Times Again?

The arts flourish in hard times. Dickens didn’t quite say this in his novel of the same name. He was more concerned to reveal the conditions under which working people laboured and to expose the misconception that prosperity makes us moral. You reap what you sow. Mr Gradgrind discovers the use of creativity but ultimately fails as a MP. Josiah Bounderby is revealed as a hypocrite and a bully. Louisa grows old and childless. Only the circus performer, Sissy Jupe, really finds happiness. In Hard Times’s take on deprivation culture helps but cannot on its own save the world.

Yet Dickens himself certainly knew how to capitalise on times of industrial darkness. Hard Times was written in parts and sold as a serial. Like a Victorian version of Eastenders. The process allowed the author to hone delivery of cliff-hanger suspense which kept his huge audience completely enthralled. The he backed the book with a seemingly never-ending reading tour. Charles Dickens, a bit like the Rolling Stones, was forever on the road.

It was he, more than anyone else, who popularised the idea of live dramatic readings from works of fiction as a form of public entertainment. Pay your money. Come in and hear the writer speak. During the 1860s Dickens gave hundreds of performances from his work – first in America and then later up and down the UK. The shows were full of gesture, dramatic declamation, changes of pitch and of voice. Dickens worked propless. He was a great success.

Wales enters its own version of hard times with its literary readings machine operating at full stretch. At no time that I can recall have there been so many well-attended and well-organised public performances of poetry and prose put on at venues across the country. In the south-east it’s even possible to attend something of a literary nature every night of the week.

Owen Sheers, Nigel Jenkins, Mab Jones, Gemma June Howells, John Williams, Dave Oprava, Nick Fisk, Ifor Thomas, Mike Jenkins, Paul Henry, Liam Johnson, Menna Elfyn, and Catrin Dafydd work well and often. The National Poet, Gillian Clarke, engages in gruelling tour schedules of Dickensian proportions. The pay is little more than adequate. But audiences can be spectacularly good.

Hard times threaten all this.

Literature has seen more than a decade now of Welsh development. Such determined foundation building is now providing results. It’s cheap, too. Hour for hour poets tend to cost less than plumbers. Take the money away and, far from being more creative, a lot of them will have to turn back to teaching and other staples to keep the world from the door.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #166