WHO NOW READS DICKENS? Harvard's literature professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been much celebrated in recent weeks for his discovery, purchase, and plans to publish a 300-page handwritten manuscript called "The Bondswoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, recently Escaped from North Carolina," a novel--apparently written between 1853 and 1860--about a runaway slave who eventually becomes a teacher in New Jersey. In "The Fugitive," his February New Yorker article describing the manuscript, Gates suggests that "there are a few points at which Hannah's story appears to coincide with historical fact." He mentions in particular a passage describing "winter in Washington with the vividness of someone who may have seen it for herself": "Gloom everywhere. Gloom up the Potomac; where it rolls among meadows no longer green, and by splendid country seats. Gloom down the Potomac where it washes the sides of huge war-ships. Gloom on the marshes, the fields, and heights. Gloom settling steadily down over the sumptuous habitations of the rich, and creeping through the cellars of the poor. Gloom arresting the steps of chance office-seekers, and bewildering the heads of grave and reverend Senators; for with fog, and drizzle, and a sleety driving mist the night has come at least two hours before its time." [Punctuation added] Oops. All it actually shows is the author of "The Bondswoman's Narrative" had read Dickens. The once-famous second paragraph of "Bleak House"--which was serialized in America in 1852 and pirated as a book in 1853--runs: "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds." In a recent online interview, Gates mentions that, after his article's publication, "an alert graduate student" informed him the novel contains "some striking similarities to passages in 'Bleak House.'" But the curious question is why he needed a graduate student to point it out to him. When did literature professors stop knowing Dickens? WHEN DID everyone stop knowing Dickens, for that matter? Several newspapers reported this fall on the appearance in the Archives of Disease in Childhood of an article by a pediatrician named Patricia Brennan which announced--with all the breathlessness of a shocking new discovery--that Dickens's work contains many "classic categories" of parental abuse of children. "In terms of standards in Britain in the year 2001," Dr. Brennan informed her readers, "many of the childcare practices described in "Oliver Twist" constitute child abuse." In any other context, Oxford University Press's publication this month of "The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1868-1870," edited by Graham Storey and Margaret Brown, would be recognized as a major literary event. This is the twelfth and final volume in the "Pilgrim Edition" of the correspondence, completing at last the project begun with the publication of the first volume in 1965. Dickens is our first fully documented writer, the author of 14,252 known letters, and the portrait that emerges from these last letters is of a man filled with comic power and tragic feeling. A man as well known in his lifetime as any author has ever been but driven to the end to find even greater love from his audience. A man so popular he could do almost nothing to harm his popularity--and yet unable to stop himself from giving the public readings that were killing him. He was, in fact, a man much like the Dickens we all knew, back in the days when we remembered what "Bleak House" and "Oliver Twist" were about. --J. Bottum
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