A session of pure literary fun opened Monday at Writers’ Week, despite Charles Dickens expert John Mullan initially missing from a UK video link, leaving novelist Linda Jaivin flying solo on the main stage at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden.
Jaivin, a China expert who is also a Dickens fan, held the floor before Mullan appeared, converting her research into an impromptu chat about Dickens and Mullan’s book, The Artful Dickens, whose chapters include one on the use of smell as a plot device and another on characters who drowned.
“Dickens is hilarious, Dickens is such high comedy, even when he’s writing tragedy, and he pulls it off,” Jaivin said.
An apologetic Mullan, once present, said Dickens was condescended to in his lifetime by critics. They would acknowledge that yes, of course he was very funny, or agree that he was popular and sold a lot of books, but his cleverness was missed then – and also sometimes now. Barely anyone noticed that Bleak House seamlessly interleaved chapters that switched between the past and the present tense, and between first and third person, while building a vast story.
“Nobody had ever done anything like this in novels before; it’s the kind of thing you might do nowadays if you wanted to get onto the Booker Prize longlist, to show how ingenious you are,” Mullan said. “It’s almost as if some of his experiments were so unusual, they were invisible.”
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