I’ve gone for a still shorter book today – 47 pages – and it’s in the series of Dolphin Books that I’ve written about before. This set of slim hardbacks from the 1930s are very varied – poetry, essays, plays, all sorts – and I love them. I love how they look; I love that such an eccentric imprint existed at all. Though it didn’t last very long, so I guess it wasn’t successful – but it’s fun to see what they chose.
Osbert Sitwell was, of course, one of the famous Sitwell family – and in this volume he takes it upon himself to defend Dickens. I don’t know quite what status Dickens had in the 1930s, but apparently some sort of defence was needed. This is essentially a 47-page essay on why Dickens is great, with illustrative examples. It’s also often quite funny:
It was said he was unable to portray ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ has to be content – for such a deliberate choice was unthinkable – to concern himself with low life, the unpleasant low life of the industrial cities, and never, it was evident, could have dealt, on the one hand, in the subtle psychological reactions of baronets, after the manner of George Meredith, then in his heyday, nor, on the other, have portrayed, with the pen of a Thomas Hardy, the ever-recurring woes of simple-minded by suicidal peasants.
Sitwell manages to keep it quite broad (a lot of it does feel like YAY DICKENS) while dipping into specific examples. So we see how he beautifully he describes a scene, how he shows us a character’s essential traits in a few lines of dialogue, how he presents literary morality. We get an overall sense that he’s a very English, very era-defining writer. And Sitwell is obviously influenced by the long, winding sentences of Dickens.
It’s slightly dizzying to read such a short book with such a vast thesis, and there are plenty of novels that aren’t mentioned at all – but it was fun and intriguing, and certainly left me wanting to read more Dickens soon.