House Call
Letter from Charles Dickens to a chimney sweep, March 15, 1864:
Dear Sir,
Since you last swept my study chimney it has developed some peculiar eccentricities. Smoke has indeed proceeded from the cowl that surmounts it, but it has seemingly been undergoing internal agonies of a most distressing nature, and pours forth disastrous volumes of swarthy vapour into the apartment wherein I habitually labour. Although a comforting relief probably to the chimney, this is not altogether convenient to me. If you can send a confidential sub-sweep, with whom the chimney can engage in social intercourse, it might be induced to disclose the cause of the departure from its normal functions.
Faithfully yours,
Charles Dickens
The reply might well have read as follows:
16th March 1864
Mr C.Dickens, Esq.
Honoured Sir,
I wuz greatly distressed by your hintimation that all is not well wiv your noble chimbley after hit ad received my hattentions.
I shall immediately send Arry, my best climbin boy, oo is well acquainted with the fell ways of chimbleys.
I would respeckfully arst you ter make sartin that no lidies is presint on that occasion, as the hintercourse between climbin boys and their chimbleys can oftimes be arsh.
Your hobediant sv’t
Alf. Doolittle
Chimbley Sweep
Hey, OK !
I really liked it, especially the part about
absenting any gentlewomen.
You is a very creative mate.
Busman's holiday, I fear - C19 Social History is how I've earned my beer-moey these last 30 years.
Yep, and you've done a good job of rewriting it, too!
As I have for many years told my students, there is no such thing as 'right' or 'wrong' in history - it is all a matter of interpretation!
- -and who the winners were!
I love Mr. Dickens' wording. Was he intending to be humorous, do you reckon?
I think there is a good chance that he was, Jackie.
One of the few bits of Dickens I've ever read start to finish, and even enjoyed. When I try to read his novels I get halfway (or less) through, then hurl the damned thing across the room.
I'm sorry to hear that, Trombo! I'll agree that some of his lengthy descriptive passages are tedious - fairly obviously written to fill up the pages for his latest episode to be pubilshed in the magazine that week - but I would advise that you 'skip read' those bits (there is sometimes important information contained within the descriptions!) The stories always come to a satisfactory end - now and again a bitmawkish, but that was Dickens satisfying his Victorian public. On the whole, and despite some stylistic deficiencies (from a modernist point of view!) he is a very fine writer and many of his ideas are as current today as they were then!
I was force-fed David Copperfield, tried Great Expectations (twice) and never got past page 14. I was told repeatedly, "Oh, but you must read A Tale of Two Cities. It's different. You'll love it." Well, it wasn't, and I didn't. That's the one that flew. There were other attempts, but I've forgotten what they were. There's no doubt of his brilliance, but I just can't get past the style and, as you say, the mawkishness. My hopes are dimming for finding a Dickens I can appreciate.
that's what movies are for.
;¬ )
You took the words out of my mouth.
I have many of them on DVD.
Yeah, but that doesn't scratch the same itch.
There is nodoubt that Dickens is a writer - like Marmite - that you either love or hate! My dear wife was of the same opinion as you, Peter, deapite allmy proletysing.
I'm sure that a Freudian Analysist would make something out of it, but then - they always do, don't they?
I'm afraid I've never read Marmite (
), but perhaps here in the West we can learn to appreciate the wonders of the Yeast.