This year, I decided that I wanted to read the four remaining novels of Charles Dickens, which I had previously never read.  A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers.  A quick status report, four months of the year in: three down; and one in progress.  Not bad going, IMHO.

Now, I haven’t read my four Dickens sequentially, immediately one after the other.  Oh, no.  I have alternated them with reading other books, sometimes several other books inserted in between each Dickensian excursion.  Most typically, I have returned to a Golden Age crime novel, or perhaps a more contemporary novel of detection, before plunging back into the Dickensian world.

And often it does feel like a plunge.  Sometimes into an ice bath of freezing water.  Something where you simply have to gird your loins, take a deep breath, and hope that you emerge unscathed the other side of your immersion.

Because after a natural surfeit of contemporary language, there is a certain linguistic transformation required to tackle a fat Dickens blockbuster.  There are the long paragraphs, at odds with modern text-speech; the arcane phrases, rather than a string of abbreviations; the gradual development of plot and character, as opposed to quick-fix first-page gratification; no emojis.

Normally, it would always take me a good couple of chapters before I fully acclimatised myself to a new Dickens; those first few chapters acting like a literary decompression chamber in order to inhabit his world in comfort.  Often, I would emerge from the last page of one of his books and be grateful to be able to take a deep breath of modern jargon again. 

But, recently, a funny thing has happened.

Finishing Barnaby Rudge, I picked up a 1970s thriller by Elizabeth Ferrars.  And, rather than experience a sense of relief, instead, it took me quite a while to get used to the more contemporary style of writing.  Part of me was still fixed in a Dickensian time zone; finding it hard to shed his preoccupations and his language.  Moreover, preferring his preoccupations and language.

Once I have finished reading The Pickwick Papers, I will have read all fifteen of Dickens’ major novels.  I only hope my transition back into the modern word will not prove too traumatic because, if I find myself looking to Dickens for sanctuary, I have nowhere else to go.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow is left flummoxed.