'The Inimitable', who also liked to write under the 18th-century moniker 'Boz'

EIC Brad Fruhauff reminisces on his relationship to the great Victorian novelist.

On midnight, February 7th, 200 years ago, Charles John Huffam was born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. He would grow up to become the most famous and best-selling novelist of his day and arguably one of the finest talents for character and wordplay since Shakespeare.

I tell my students that if they don’t like Dickens there’s something wrong with their souls. I’m only half kidding. How, after all, can you not love a man who had such great love for his characters and for his native tongue? One of my favorite examples of his skill at mixing evocative description with the absurd comes from the opening paragraph of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes–gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

That Megalosaurus is simply unimaginable in a Thackeray or Trollope or even Joyce (in whom much is imaginable).

In high school, I read an abridged version of Great Expectations and hated it. I knew what a novel was like and this wasn’t it. The writing was verbose, the characters exaggerated, and the angst was completely inaccessible. Later, I discovered a small cadre of friends who similarly disliked it, and it became a point of pride among us that we had “found out” the great Dickens to be an over-rated windbag.

It took eight years for me to give Dickens another chance, and that after I had read through most of the rest of the century’s authors: Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy. I began with Hard Times, which is probably now my least favorite, but at the time it was a revelation: Dickens wasn’t trying to write a novel like any of those other folks. He was reimagining what the novel was, and what it was was a playground for his infinitely flexible imagination.

The quintessential Dickens scene is a meal

Dickens gives us a world of characters who are alive because they are larger than life, and if they are not always fully aware of themselves (few, if any, are at all), they are no less lovable for being caught up in the same egotism that affects us all. More than that, his portrayals teach us to love even the grotesque and bizarre, to appreciate the carnival of life in the midst of our strivings.

More still, and most significantly, I think, for the Christian, he insists on a world infused with moral purpose and even clarity. His villains are punished and his heroes rewarded with a self-consciously fairy-tale consistency. Social causes pervade his novels, but he never gets so bogged down in the brokenness of reality that he can’t simultaneously remind us where grace and beauty shine through.

And he does it all in an ebullient prose that reminds us why we love novels in the first place: their ability to wrap us up in words and convince us that some parts of the chaos of our lives are intelligible, if only for a little while. Dickens’s facility with the English language is a joy all its own, and it’s why I tell my students they need to enjoy the ride.

He wasn’t a perfect man, but what man is? We remember him not as a saint but as an artist who left us with a great gift.

If you haven’t read any Dickens, you might start with Great Expectations (unabridged) or David Copperfield. Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend all rank high among his “five or six masterpieces,” but may be harder to get into until you get a feel for him.

Brad Fruhauff is Editor-in-Chief of Relief. He wrote his dissertation on ethics and genre in the work of Dickens and so has a personal investment in this bicentennial year’s celebrations.

Issue 5.2

We are taking 5.2 to print, but before we do we want to offer you one last chance to get your copy at the discounted rate. As a little incentive, we’d like to throw in a free eBook copy of issue 5.1, featuring poetry by David Holper, creative nonfiction by Leslie Leyland Fields and Samuel Thomas Martin, and fiction by Margot Patterson, among others. This will give you something to read while you await poetry by Scott Cairns and Julie L. Moore, fiction by Thomas Allbaugh and Joshua Hren, and creative nonfiction by Jean Hoefling and Chely Roach.

Actually, we’re offering this bonus on both print and eBook copies of 5.2. Just click the relevant button to the right there and you’ll receive a discount code for 5.1 in your confirmation e-mail.

If you’ve been sitting on the fence on this one, now’s the time to act. We’ll end this deal on midnight New Year’s Day (figuring you’ll be busy the previous evening).

Thanks to Relief intern Lyle Enright for sharing this Christmas memory with us. N.B.: Lyle won the Trinity College Chapel “My Best Christmas Story” contest with a longer version of this.

When you’re little, life can usually be defined by whatever consistently holds your attention moment by moment. At five years old, my life revolved around trains and dinosaurs – trains because they were awesome, dinosaurs because they ate people, symbols of the total masculinity I exemplified at that age (so no, I didn’t believe in girl dinosaurs).

Mom was studying counseling psychology before she had me and decided that she wasn’t going to need any other patients. Dad was the associate pastor at our church. He’s a carpenter by trade, with thick stubble and a preaching voice that could’ve belonged to an eighties rock-star, landing him somewhere on the spectrum between Jesus and Paul McCartney.

But, as you might guess, we did not have anything close to Paul McCartney’s money. I didn’t know at the time how much work it took for Dad to keep us afloat, but our Christmastimes centered on family, the birth of Jesus, and my parents doting on me as much as practicality would allow. They were content, hopeful in the Lord, and very much in love. I was harder to please.

The fact is that little boys with burgeoning machismo enjoy having numerous miniature replicas of things that they can mangle. If you’ve ever read Calvin and Hobbes, you may be familiar with the scene where Calvin hands his mother his Christmas list:

“This says, ‘Volume One’,” she says.

“‘Atom Bomb’ through ‘Grenade Launcher’,” he explains.

My parents did try. Once when I was eyeing a particularly realistic tyrannosaurus in Toys R’ Us, my father came up and said “Son, I’ll give you a choice: I’ll either buy you that T-Rex now or, if you wait until you’re eighteen, I’ll buy you a convertible.” I knew a deal when I heard one, and I walked out with the massive lizard under my arm. I still haven’t quite forgiven him.

Before too long Dad, in an effort to save their bank account, presented me with several hand-made wooden houses. When I asked him what they were for, he explained that they were scenery for me to build my train tracks around.

“Cool,” I said. “And what else?” With a twinkle in his eye, Dad took one of my toys and demonstrated that a velociraptor could easily demolish it in a pinch.

Right then, I knew what I wanted for that Christmas. I’d found out that hand-made things could be pretty fantastic. I also discovered that they saved money. That was my way in.

“Dawdy,” I said in my best I’m-your-only-son voice. “Dawdy for Christmas I want you to build Jurassic Park in the backyard.”

“Lyle, you’ve never even seen that movie,” Mom said, dumbfounded. Well . . . I’d known the film had to be amazing because it was about dinosaurs and yet my parents wouldn’t let me see it, so on the night they rented it I cracked the door to my room open, squatted in the shadows and marveled at the carnage on-screen from off in the corner.

“I think I saw more than you did, Mom,” I said. “You had a blanket over your head the whole time.” But what had really baffled me was that they thought such violence would scare me. Those sorts of things, and worse, happened on a daily basis during playtime, I explained – and was promptly grounded.

It took Mom to explain that Jurassic Park in the backyard would be way more expensive than I thought, even with Dad making everything by hand. I was disappointed but I understood – I understood everything except for how much time Dad began spending in the garage after that, only getting to say goodnight to him as he would come back inside late at night, exhausted.

There was a part of me that worried I’d hurt his feelings, that he thought I didn’t believe in him anymore, didn’t see him as Invincible Dad. I mean I didn’t, quite, but it wasn’t his fault. Maybe it was a little his fault, but I didn’t want him to feel bad about it.

I didn’t see him at all on Christmas Eve. I thought it was about time he got over himself. I missed him, but Mom told me I couldn’t bug him. Now I was the one thinking it was unfair, and all the marshmallows in my cocoa couldn’t quite make it all better.

That morning I got Mom and Dad up around seven, herding them out of bed like a good only-child. Dad got a hold of me.

“Hey boss-man,” he said. “Mom and I still have to get ready. Why don’t you run downstairs and take a look under the tree?”

I did as I was told, but within moments I’d shot back up the stairs and latched myself around Dad’s neck. I didn’t thank him because I didn’t know how.

Under the tree, the lights flashing across it, was a two-hundred-piece, hand-carved wooden train track with each of my little engines ready to pull coal and passengers for as long as my imagination would allow.

Dad put something of himself into that gift more than fifteen years ago, through all the cuts and splinters. He did it with no other thought in his mind than seeing my joy.

God did that. He knit himself a body in a girl’s womb – His Son, fearfully and wonderfully hand-made, laid on a bed of hay in a cave for us to find.

Clearly, God likes surprises too because it took us more than thirty years to figure out what he’d given us. But we didn’t share it, didn’t use it or give it away . . . we tortured it and hung it up to die. It goes to show God’s genius though, something incomprehensible about his heart, to know that that’s exactly how we were supposed to use his gift after all.

One of these days, I want to finally be speechless about that.

Lyle Enright is a senior English major at Trinity International University and an intern for Relief.

Scrooge meets Ignorance & Want

What does Relief want for Christmas?

The same thing we want every year: money.

Not for ourselves, of course – we’re still an all-volunteer staff – but to keep us solvent and able to offer high-quality print books in our lo-tech virtual world. We’re also a 501(c)3 non-profit, so when we ask for money the government is looking over our shoulders to make sure it goes back into the business – no stockholders or CEOs to pay off, here, which is why you’re not likely to see an Occupy Relief anytime soon.

But the fact of the matter is that we’re still a very small company and we’re made of creatives rather than accountants and marketers, so we’re still learning how to keep up a steady stream of income in between print runs.

That makes us both Ignorance and Want in the current economy. We have 5.2 all ready to go, and I’m personally very excited about it, but we’re a bit shy of where we’d like to be to print and ship it.

So, what we’re asking is that you consider giving Relief for Christmas Twelfth Night (Jan.6, Epiphany, the namesake of the Twelve Days of Christmas). We’ll keep the print version available at the pre-sale price of $11.47 a little longer, and we also have the eBooks for only $4.99 (those you can get for Dec. 25th; see right —>). Either one would make a great gift and set you right with the cosmos¹ to begin the new year.

If you’ve already bought a book, consider buying one for a friend. If you’ve bought an eBook, consider the same. We know there are workarounds for digital files, but this is about supporting something valuable.

Alternatively, if you have a heart like a converted Scrooge, bursting with Christmas spirit and looking for an outlet, or if you know someone who fits this description, we also welcome last-minute, tax-write-off donations.

Some relevant Christmas-y links:

• Advent Conspiracy
• Is Christmas Christian?
• Nonprofits Improve Communities

¹ Editor’s Note: Relief does not endorse a kharmic view of the universe.

John Donne

This pleasant little fourteener is actually number 3 of 7 from “Holy Sonnets,” a short cycle that links each poem by repeating the last line of the previous poem as the first of the next.

Nativitie

Immensity cloistered in thy dear wombe
Now leaves his welbelov’d imprisonment,
There he hath made himselfe to his intent
Weake enough, now into our world to come;
But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome?
Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Starres, and wisemen will travell to prevent
Th’effect of Herods jealous generall doome.
Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he
Which fils all place, yet none holds him, doth lye?
Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pittied by thee?
Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,
With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe.