The Brooknerian

…remembering that when FIELDING described Newgate, the prison immediately ceased to exist; that when SMOLLETT took Roderick Random to Bath, that city instantly sank into the earth ; that when SCOTT exercised his genius on Whitefriars, it incontinently glided into the Thames ; that an ancient place called Windsor was entirely destroyed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth by two Merry Wives of that town, acting under the direction of a person of the name of SHAKESPEARE; and that MR POPE, after having at a great expense completed his grotto at Twickenham, incautiously reduced it to ashes by writing a poem upon it… Preface (1850) to Oliver Twist My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a gl...

Followers of this blog may remember my main motivation for re-reading David Copperfield this summer. My other reason was a preference for immersing myself in long Victorian fictions during the vacation, but my chief impulse derived from an interest in reacquainting myself with Anita Brookner's A Family Romance , a novel that connects with Dickens's both directly and obliquely. Brookner, speaking through her heroine Jane, focuses on Dickens's characterisation (though she is aware that such an interest might not pass muster in the academic world). Jane loves Betsey Trotwood, but finds the Micawbers tiresome. She has an almost visceral fear of Uriah Heep. I too love Betsey Trotwood. Her gradual softening as David Copperfield proceeds, and the story of her doomed marriage, are affectingly told. The characters of Uriah and his mother ('Be umble, Ury! Make terms!') are likewise masterful. Uriah's slipperiness, his writhing and general fishiness, are triumphs ...

'Let them think of you as always singing and dancing.' Anita Brookner, A Family Romance , ch. 1 Characters in Dickens have their catchphrases, which help to establish them in the reader's mind, distinguish them from others among a cast of hundreds, and re-establish them when they return after an interval away. Catchphrases are also a staple of comedy writing, especially in TV sitcoms - something we're used to nowadays, which possibly makes us more forgiving than E. M. Forster was in Aspects of the Novel:  he castigated the practice as an indicator of 'flat' characterisation. 'I never will desert Mr Micawber,' says Mrs Micawber time and again in David Copperfield . 'Forster is generally snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller characters,' says James Wood in his entertaining How Fiction Works , an Aspects of the Novel for today. Dolly in Brookner's A Family Roma...

'They are all surprised, these inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that's the way. The old way!' 'It may be with others,' I returned, 'but I do assure you it is not with me.' David Copperfield , ch. 32 One of the fascinating things about Victorian fiction is the way some authors stray into areas that have since become hot topics. Terrorism, for example. One reads James's The Princess Casamassima or Conrad's The Secret Agent differently now, from a twenty-first century perspective. Or feminism: James's The Bostonians,  or the likes of Baroness Banmann in Trollope's Is He Popenjoy?,  take on new dimensions. Or attitudes towards Jewish people. What do we bring to a reading of  Daniel Deronda , knowing ...

In Dickens what I marvel at more than anything is his management of different plot strands. He maintains control throughout, but there is also a freedom, an unpredictability, a sense of one plot merging into another. David Copperfield hasn't the wild free-wheeling quality of, say, a Thackeray novel ( Pendennis acts as an excellent comparison), but nor has it the rigidness of structure of early- and middle-period Trollope. ( Can You Forgive Her? is an example of this sort of schema at work: three women, three love plots, a few chapters given over to each in rotation.) Anita Brookner's plots, while never predictable, tend towards the schematic, especially in those that focus on a cast of characters. Olga Kenyon asked Brookner about this in Women Writers Talk in 1989, in relation to Family and Friends : Kenyon: You've chosen a family saga, but concise, controlled, through a series of family photographs. Why did you choose that form? Brookner: Because it was easier. It ...

'It must be a mixed motive, I think,' said Mr Wickfield, shaking his head and smiling incredulously. 'A mixed fiddlestick!' returned my aunt. 'You claim to have one plain motive in all you do yourself. You don't suppose, I hope, that you are the only plain dealer in the world?' David Copperfield , ch. 15 [Brookner:] Motives are never unmixed, are they? [Haffenden:] Your own heroines are given to be unmixed. [Brookner:] Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...

What is it with  David Copperfield and Charles I? There's Mr Dick and his 'Memorial', into which the story of the doomed king keeps intruding. Then there's the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, which David sees on his visit to London towards the middle of the novel. But what of this? Adams, the head boy at Doctor Strong's school, calculates how long it will take the teacher to finish his Greek dictionary. He considered that it might be done in one thousand six hundred and forty-nine years, counting from the Doctor's last, or sixty-second, birthday. (Ch. 16) What's Dickens's game?

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner and met her. I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner, and my pen shakes in my hand. David Copperfield , ch. 26 A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the distant town, towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I fear to approach it. I cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night; of what must come again, if I go on. Ch. 32 Dickens is clear. David writes David Copperfield at some distant point in the story's future - ostensibly the contemporary reader's present. He recollects the events of his life - though not quite always in tranquillity. At times, as above, we see him at his desk, affected in the here and now by the events of long ago. Anita Brookner's handling of I-voice narration is, in places, a little less certain. Let's consider the closing pages of Look at Me, where Brookner, like Dickens, 'breaks frame': After that la...

The Prerogative Court, Doctors' Commons Illustrated London News  1 June 1850 The languid stillness of the place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey. David Copperfield , ch. 23 David begins work, apprenticed to Doctors' Commons, a legal backwater that seems very agreeable: he commends the 'dreamy nature of this retreat'. Such undemanding havens have attractions for Brookner's characters too, not least Jane Manning in A Family Romance , who goes to work at a press cuttings agency (somewhat unimaginatively called ABC Enterprises), where she is immediately looked after by 'the dearest women', Margaret and Wendy (ch. 5). But this is Brookner, not Barbara Pym, or for that matter Dickens. Nothing can be allowed to remain too cosy for long. Class...

I was reading David Copperfield at the time and was aware that my mother, like Barkis, was going out with the tide. A Family Romance , ch. 5 Not only was it of prime importance to a woman like Dolly to have a man of her own, but that same man, if he were willing (Barkis again), would, in marrying her, confer on her a status which she had not enjoyed for many years. Ibid ., ch. 6 Barkis is a relatively minor character in David Copperfield . He marries Peggotty (David acts as a go-between, delivering the 'if willing' message), is mean with his money, and fades away - going out like the tide . That wonderful phrase is probably what got Brookner's attention: it's more than a little Brooknerian. The second Barkis reference, in chapter 6 of A Family Romance , is more demanding. I wonder: if I hadn't read David Copperfield , or I wasn't reading it alongside A Family Romance , would I have the faintest idea what Brookner was going on about? Phiz, I ...

I've explored the topic of servants before , and they're very evident in A Family Romance too. There's the Mannings' Miss Lawlor (an ideal servant: she barely speaks), and Dolly's Annie Verkade, who, like 'a butler in a grander establishment', takes a pride in 'expressionless efficiency' (ch. 4). Brookner admits it's unusual for someone to have a live-in maid in the period, which we have to be reminded is actually the 1980s. And indeed it would have been most surprising. But this is the Brookner world, cushioned from at least some of the harsher realities of life. In David Copperfield Peggotty, like Miss Lawlor, is inherited, and ideal in her way. In Henry James's story 'Brooksmith' the eponymous butler is so perfect he's an 'artist'. The tale is, however, powered by an unspoken queer dynamic; it doesn't end well for Brooksmith. But none of these writers, not even Dickens - the least conservative of the three, an...

...and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. David Copperfield , ch. 4 Whatever I had within me that was romantic and dreamy, was encouraged by so much story-telling in the dark... Ch. 7 [The old books] were my only comfort; and I was as true to them as they were to me, and read them over and over I don't know how many times more. Ch. 10 And so I lost her.* David Copperfield's words not mine, but never bettered. During the days which followed I read the book urgently, obsessively, in order to reassure myself of David's eventual victory over circumstance. A Family Romance , ch. 6 Strange how one book leads to another. David Copperfield's treasured books comprise the classics of the eighteenth century. Smollett's Peregrine Pickle is a favourite. One wonders: was David's an expurgated edition? For my part I've never read it, though I want to and indeed I've tried to. (I once downloaded an edition on to my e-reader, but it wa...

I grew impatient with those who wasted [David Copperfield's] time: I saw nothing amusing in Mr Micawber ... I realised why I was so impatient with Mr Micawber. And Dolly was not only Mr Micawber, she was Mrs Micawber as well, hinting that she had come down in the world... A Family Romance , ch. 6 Nothing amusing in Mr Micawber?! When a stranger came on the scene in chapter 11 of David Copperfield , with a 'certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel', I found myself newly fascinated. I had forgotten how Micawber was introduced, and how early, but I welcomed him as an old friend, and looked forward to his every return. I don't often disagree with Brookner, but on the subject of Mr Micawber I must make an exception.

1. I rarely read new things now – rarely visit new places either. But now I was in Zurich, previously only travelled through. I arrived early, and nothing was ready, and it was a Sunday and raining and the streets were empty. Thoughts of panic and flight beset me. But by noon I’d planned the coming days and booked my train ticket to Vevey and my room was cleaned. I was glad of the ideal company of Brookner ( A Family Romance ) and Dickens ( David Copperfield ), mightn’t have got through otherwise: I chose my summer reading well this year. ‘I led the same secretly unhappy life; but I led it in the same, lonely, self-reliant manner.’ 2. Still half-lost in the unfamiliar streets I at last found my way to the edge of the Zürichsee and a two-hour cruise: it seemed the Brookner thing to do, and indeed the weather was as it was for Mr Neville and Edith in fiction and on another lake: grey-blue distances, indistinct horizons. I lunched at Rapperswil and returned by train....