The Verse of Charles Dickens: with Lydia Craig & Emily Middleton

Dickens' genius as a novelist is acknowledged the world over ... but what was he like as a poet?

Joining Dominic today to find out are the inimitable Dr. Lydia Craig & Dr. Emily Middleton who have just co-authored The Verse of Charles Dickens (Edinburgh University Press)

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Hi everyone, you will have just heard me declare Dickens as one of the greatest novelists of all time. You did not, however, hear me describe him as one of the greatest poets of all time. And you're about to find out why. Returning today to talk about their new publication, The Verse of Charles Dickens, published by University Press, are the inimitable Dr. Lydia Craig and Dr. Emily Middleton. This is a hugely enjoyable read that comprehensively, for the first time ever, gathers together all the known pieces of verse, or worse, as Sam Weller would call it, from notebooks, autograph albums, sheet music, and play scripts that Dickens wrote throughout his life. The ones he was proud of, and perhaps the ones he never wanted us to see. They paint a vivid picture of a lively, often self-mocking and silly wit that likes to entertain and flirt, or pour scorn on a political party. Many of these writings are spontaneous, unrefined, while some are tortuously overworked. What they seem to highlight, perhaps, is Dickens' true genius as a prose poet, where that creative fire will flow from his subconscious, but how when he consciously tries to manipulate a metrical form, he is constrained and his powers are dampened. Above all this, though, these snatches of verse show us what he must have been like as your friend, making you collapse in hysterics as he emulated his heroes in front of you. Lydia and Emily, hello and welcome back to Charles Dickens' Brain on Fire.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Hi, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Oh yeah, there we go. Seeing it. Listeners can't see it, but there's a nice kind of sepia drawing. What is that drawing? What is that what I'm seeing?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I think it's a pencil portrait that was done of Dickens by Priscilla Horton. So she was an actress and he was writing poetry in her autograph album. And so on one of the leaves of the autograph album, she drew him in that moment as the poet. So we thought it would be a really good cover image because, you know, this is Dickens kind of hot and young and writing poetry, you know, and it's just a very romantic kind of image. The beard isn't there yet, obviously. He's really young.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

There's something of Byron about it as well, isn't there? I think that yeah, that it does have that sort of romantic, capital R romantic poet look about it.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

I think he's trying to do that as well, which is, I think, the funny part of it is, you know, when he was younger, he was very known for having this very flamboyant style. He had it throughout his life. But he was definitely doing the romantic kind of slowing hair, you know, long sleeves. You see the sort of lace at his earth when he's younger. So yeah, Dickens wanting to be romantic, I think.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Yes, he looks very rakish. And um, I suppose in that early those early years, it just occurred to me, you saying this, that I guess he's probably searching for what he's going to do still a little bit. I know it involves writing, but actually, I suppose the option for poetry is possibly a window there that he thinks he might be able to, or a door he might be able to open. Um, I do think the image does fail though if you do actually read some of the poems. Oh god. Are you okay after reading? I have to say, I am so confused. I was at first kind of shocked at how bad I thought they were, actually. But I did wonder, I mean, how important are they to Dickens? And what did he make of them himself, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Well, I think that's a really good question. I think it's really interesting that Dickens writes poetry and plays before he writes prose fiction. So this is some of the earliest stuff that we have. And I've actually been teaching students this semester, teaching David Copperfield and scenes of love and romance in that. And I had them read his romantic poetry to Mariah Biednell as part of that. And that was fascinating because they were thinking about this kind of authentic young man-in-love experience. And I think those early poems really give us that. But he writes poetry across his whole career. There's some in just about every novel. Um, it's something that he comes back to, but my my opinion has always been that he's very stuck on his romantic influences. He's very limited by rhyme schemes and he's always trying to emulate somebody.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah. Um, one of our actual um sort of unofficial methods for telling if a poem was by Dickens before doing research was whether it was good or not. And if it was good, it couldn't be by Dickens. So he's not very good at this form, but it was such a popular form in his time period. Um, and so I think when he first started writing poetry, I sort of mentioned this in the introduction a bit, but you know, he was writing poetry to impress Mariah. Her family was very literary, um, very erudite, actually. Um, and so in order to get in to her her group and to, you know, write po original poetry in her autograph album, I think he was reading poetry and studying forms. And at the time, Byron was still the great idol. So I think he sort of patterns himself on those people. But I think the fun thing about his poetry is that he's actually aware that he's not great at it. And there's that kind of sort of self-mocking quality to it that I think is essential to an understanding of Dickens because you know, he's writing poetry, especially in his later years. He knows he's not good at it, but he's still going to inflict it on his friends because he knows they love him and they'll read it, and it will be this sort of joke between them. So he uses poetry in a lot of different ways, I think. Um, but he never, I would say, would have ever thought that he was a good poet, and he knew that.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

Okay. It's important to know that, I think, isn't it? It's helpful to know I did wonder though whether Mariah broke off their romance on the basis of those poems that he gave her.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Yeah, we w we were talking about this a little bit. Um, we don't know what the circumstances were of him reciting this. Uh, people sort of think maybe it was at a dinner party. So all the people who were mentioned in the Bill of Fair could have heard what was being said, but we do know that he sent it to her ahead of time because he sent her a letter that said, you know, read this and pay attention to this section here where I declare my love, basically. So she did have advance warning.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

And Charles Dickens, who in our feast plays a part, is a young summer cabbage without any heart. Not that he's heartless, but because, as folks say, he lost his a twelve month ago from last May.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

But I I do think it's really striking that we don't have evidence of any poems he ever sent to Catherine or to Ellen. So I think there is always that self-aware humour in it, and they're basically all funny. But even if it's a little bit kind of self-deprecating, even at the beginning, he he seems to decide that it's not gonna help an actual romance and doesn't do it again. So he does it with other women and daughter, a daughter of a friend, um, who are friends of his, but not romantically after that first effort.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

That's for that um the one poetry, uh, I think it was the Ivy Green, which might have been slightly romantic, but that's it's dependent on the family um that he wrote it for. They have this legend that he proposed to the woman um whose all of he wrote it for. So, but yeah, mostly I don't think he'd he he does a romantic thing again, unless it's a joke.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings, and a staunch old heart has he. How closely he twineth, how tight he clings to his friend the huge oak tree. And slyly he traileth along the ground, and his leaves he gently waves, as he joyously hugs and crawleth round the rich mould of dead man's graves, creeping where grim death hath been. A rare old plant is the ivy green. It's so interesting because I'm so aware that from the novels he's aware of what bad poetry is. You know, you've got Sam's Valentine card in Pickwick, and you've got the ode to the expiring frog, and none of that's meant to be serious at all, is it? But at the same time, I always think as a writer he's so generous with showing his workings out. In that he doesn't tend to refine himself quite as much as so maybe that's why the poetic form kind of stifles him a bit.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah. I think we did also talk about this earlier, Emily. We were talking about how you just can't keep to the meter.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

As the great rage just now is imitation, among highborn and low throughout the whole nation. I trust will excuse the few following lines of which I'll say nothing but these poor rhymes.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Yeah, even though he writes in blank verse when he's doing prose, which people noticed in his own lifetime. I think prose let him be more expansive and lyrical if he wanted to be, but he he found a lot of trouble, I think, actually expressing himself in the confines of the verse form.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Absolutely. I I think that um he felt like good poetry should rhyme, or he felt like his poetry should rhyme, but he did, as Lydia said, um fall into blank verse when he was trying to be very sentimental. And this was pointed out to him, and he didn't like it. He didn't like someone pointing out that you could read his sentimental passages in a blank verse um meter. So I do sometimes wonder if he'd done a bit more of a sort of tenny narrative poem or something a bit more expansive, if it could have worked. But he seemed very stuck on the idea of what poetry should be, and it was almost always these rigid forms that that didn't get the best out of it.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating to me that he didn't know so much about poetry. Um, we sort of were looking at his career as an editor as well. Um, and he he often tells people what good poetry is, which usually doesn't have, you know, wild metaphors, it needs to rhyme, it needs to have to be in meter. Um, but he just himself um you know, he admired Tennyson. He loved Tennyson, actually. He would read his his works to people at home and really thought he was so um incredible as a as a poet. But just not for decades.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

But but but at that moment, you know, you're both talking about when he does drop into verse in his prose, in his, you know, the ending of David Copperfield. I mean, that's very regular, isn't it? Um Oh Agnes. Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed. That is shatteringly useful where that falls. And the end of a tale of two cities as well. It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. So there it's kind of working for him, but for some reason, as soon as he sits down to write something, it goes all humpty dumpty and sort of jarry, doesn't it? I don't know why.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

I I just think he has something so basic, but I think he had too many words. Um He he he loves adding words to something and making it really descriptive and just painting the scene. And that's not something you could easily do in poetry. I think um Tennyson had a great gift for that, and Yates and people like this have a gift in one or two lines of showing you an image. I don't think Dickens could do that in line. He needed a paragraph. Um, and and this isn't perhaps fair because there are times where he'll choose the right words and it just sort of hits you immediately. But I think in general, he needed to set the scene. And so a lot of his power is in showing you the environment, and it sort of builds up over several paragraphs. I'm thinking particularly of that um, I think it's about one or two paragraphs in Our Mutual Friend, where he sets the scene of London covered in fog.

SPEAKER_02 12:19

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London with smarting eyes and irritated lungs was blinking, wheezing, and choking. Inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being holy, neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblessed air, as knowing themselves to be night creatures that had no business abroad under the sun, while the sun itself, when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day. But there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the city, which calls St. Mary acts, it was rusty black.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

And what's really interesting is you can compare that to a poem I think he wrote where he mentions London covered in fog, and it just doesn't have the same impact in one line where he's deliberately uh paraphrasing that paragraph, I think.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Dark and grey, it makes the day. O'er forest, dale, and down, prospect yellow, faces sallow in London's gloomy town.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

But you just don't really see it the way you do in his novel.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

But I feel like at this point of the podcast, everyone listening is gonna think I'm gonna be.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

They feel betrayed, they've switched off. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I'm not going to read any of Dickens' poetry. But one of the reasons that we structured the book chronologically is to show its development across his life and how he uses it in different places, and that it does show his immersion in different kinds of popular culture. That in Edwin Drude, one of the last ones he writes, it's a very silly little um childhood playground song, a little bit like What's the Time, Mr. Wolf? Um, so he's immersed in popular culture and songs and games. Lots of them are set to music, so there's a real musicality to it. It shows his relationships with women, but not just romantic ones, but flirty friendships as well. And there are some great political ones, too, where he turns that humor and satire to a bit more effect. So I think, in terms of making him immersed in a culture and a society and in relationships with people who are the the wives of his friends, or just his friends in their own right, and showing how he was connected into all these things, as well as his interest in romantic poetry and what he thought poetry was, it's got real value, even if it's not necessarily got the poetic value that we might expect.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

Yes, because Emma, you the the the fine old English gentleman, I think it's called, isn't it? I I actually liked that one, because actually that had a bit of bite. That was satirizing old Toryism.

SPEAKER_03 15:22

You know, all of that.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Um and I I thought that was great, actually. I didn't think that was bad at all. I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first rate, of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate, when they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate on every mistress, pimp, and scamp at every noble gate, in the fine old English Tory times. Soon may they come again.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

But it's based on another song, which I think is the funny thing. He's actually he's using a form from another poet. And um so he's sort of fitting his own words to it, which he does, I think, tolerably well. So I I would agree with you on that. I think it's um it's one of his best political poems, um, because he's able to sort of show the folly of people voting for Torism if they want a progressive society. And he's very, you know, furious about this. Um so yeah, I think that's one of his best poems.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, the good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed, the good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, came down direct from paradise at more than railroad speed. Oh, the fine old English Tory times. When will they come again?

SPEAKER_00 16:45

Yeah, I think because at that moment they had just elected a Tory government, right? And and there were all these anxieties that he's harking back to of the 1820s. And I think his connection to people like Lee Hunt, who was himself connected to Keats and Byron and all of that romantic circle, that Lee Hunt was one of those people kind of referred to in the poem who had been locked up for saying something about the Prince of Wales, that he's sort of connecting that romantic past and present, that Lee Hunt, as his friend, does really well, I think, connects him to that past. But whenever I talk about this, I always read that poem because its critique feels so present today, that sense of what is it that we're harking back to in those fine old English Tory times? Um, what is it that we want to preserve? And why is it that that sense of conservatism ignores the scandals of the past while still glorifying it?

SPEAKER_01 17:36

He's publishing this in The Examiner too, and he's trying to influence voters with this. And I think that is fascinating because he's doing poetry for a political purpose. So he's not doing the autograph albums anymore. He's it's not just you know sending letters to people with a poem inside it. It's not private, it's extremely public. And the examiner was not then under Lee Hunt's editorship, but it still had that connection. And so he even mentions, I think, Lee Hunt in his poem, This One. He says those were the days for taxes and for war's infernal din, for scarcity of bread, that final dowagers might win, for shutting men of letters up through iron bars to grin, because they didn't think the prince was altogether thin, which was actually what Lee Hunt was put in prison for saying. So he's sort of, you know, winking to the people reading this paper because they know about this history of Lee Hunt. So he's very aware of his audience in this poem.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

Does it kind of bring Dickens a little bit closer as a person? Some of these poems. Do you see his failures really? See what he can't do. Is there value in that?

SPEAKER_00 18:45

I think there is. I think the difficulty comes with the fact that if he just wrote this poetry, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. That there were plenty of people. We have letters where he rejects poems that people have submitted to his journals. So we don't discuss the poetry of many amateurs, but we do discuss Dickens's poetry. So I do think there's a there's a value in, and you can see him attempting the construction. You can, it feels like he's trying, where with his prose, it sometimes feels so effortless and it and it feels like it works, even though we know that Dickens was very hardworking. I feel like the mechanics are much more on display here, but we're we're primarily interested because it's Dickens, aren't we?

SPEAKER_01 19:22

We wouldn't have made this if it wasn't Dickens, which I think is a really important thing to say. I actually sort of mentioned this in the introduction where I'm saying, you know, he would not be in Westminster Abbey if this just depended on his poetry. He would be where he wanted to be buried in the first place in Rochester. So yeah, it this is bad poetry. I I just kind of want to read one of them for you.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

Go for it.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

This is one of the worst ones. Um and actually the funny thing about this is he sent this to John Hulla when he was doing the village coquettes in 1836. And he basically said, Oh, I thought about this, you know, basically thoughts in the bathtub. And here's this poem, and you can work it into it. And we don't know what Hulla said, but I'm pretty sure it was just like, no, this would be morally wrong to put music to this. So this is in the Lord Chamberlain's copy, but it was never actually used. Okay, so this was a song that was supposed to be in act two, scene three, and it was supposed to be sung by the two women in the piece. He despises, he shuns me, the thunderbolt falls on the rock-seated castle and crumbles its walls, the whirlwind destroys with its furious breath, the lightning is charged with its mission of death, but the tempest that scatters my hopes in the air, more terrible far, bids me live in despair. He despises, he shuns me, there's guilt on my name, it drives me to madness, it brands me with shame.

unknown 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

That's it. I mean, imagine what it would have been like. Because nothing else in the play sounds like this. You know, I don't know if it was supposed to be comic. Uh we don't know, but it's just horrible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

I mean, is it does it is it more plausible with music, some of this verse? Does it work better as song lyrics ever?

SPEAKER_00 21:09

I definitely think that is true. And many of them were written to be set to music. Pretty much all the ones in the plays are. Um, but other ones, like the final English gentleman, is meant to have a sort of tune attached to it, and sometimes they did. And you've got to bear in mind that Victorians did like sentimentality, that people like Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been written off at some points in history for being too sentimental, and people have written defenses of sentimentality as a kind of affective strategy. Um, that you that people like things that are sentimental. That is really bad, obviously. But but some of the things really well read. I was I was taken by it though, Lydia. But but even the ones that do make it in and the ones that do work, I don't think anyone would have been leaving the theatre thinking, oh, that was excellent. But I also don't necessarily think they would have been leaving the theatre thinking that this was absolutely in the pit strikingly bad. I think it's just a kind of run of the mill.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Well, some of them are actually quite famous and popular. Um so some of them I think were hit or miss, but the others didn't make it, especially because they were made into sheet music. And so People could play them at home, they would be parts of collections. Um, we also have George Augustus Sala's testimony about going to see the village coquettes. And he wrote about this in his memoir later, and he basically said that he can still remember the words to the tunes. Um, and we do have the tunes in many cases. We obviously couldn't replicate that in a printed book, but um, you can look it up for yourself if you're a musical and I played one of them, um, the Autumn Leaves one, which I think is just really kind of funny until you put it with the music and then it sounds really beautiful. People are finding these catchy, not only because of his lyrics, but also Hella's music. So I think it did fairly well in its time.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

I understand that you both have been at separate locations examining manuscripts here. And I think, Emily, you you discovered Cheer for the Year and Lydia, you did my Uncle Toby swore an oath in London and and and New York. What what can you tell us about those particular ones? And and holding the manuscripts, was there anything kind of revealing? Were there lots of crossings out where he's like, I can't get this to work? Or was he really fluent and sort of happy with what he was setting down?

SPEAKER_01 23:27

So my uncle Toby swore an oath is actually one of his best manuscripts in terms of just the quality of his handwriting and the fact that there are no mistakes in it, and that's because he wrote it for an autograph album. I actually found this going through the um New York Public Library's website because they had digitized it, and I couldn't believe I'd missed this. Um, so this was called My Uncle Toby swore an oath. It has his signature, it has a date. Um, we know he wrote this when he was finishing the end of Little Dorrit, so in 1857. We know he was in Kent. We know he was at Waits Hotel on this day. We don't know who he wrote it for because someone took it out of their autograph album, and we just have the leaf. So there's still a mystery about who he wrote this for, but he seems very grumpy. And this is what he says. Um, he wrote this on the 14th of April, 1857, and you have to read this thinking about his earlier autograph album, poetry. He's been kind of a victim to his fame for years writing in people's autograph albums, and someone cajoled him into doing this. And so he writes this and he says, My uncle Toby swore an oath, and when the busy angel with the book and pen made haste to enter it, his heavenly grief blotted the word from the virgin leaf. I swore an oath that I would never rhyme in any album to the end of time. I wish the angel of this book would blot my oath's infraction from the present spot.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

Yeah, so he's not up for you two publishing this book, is he? No, he would hate that. On the strength of that.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

So I think the thing is that we were doing a lot of this work during COVID or during at the very least, still ongoing travel restrictions. So there was a lot less actually being in the archives than we would like, and a lot more going through every library we could think of to see if they had something that said like an autograph album with a contribution from Dickens. And in at least one case, I contacted, I think it was Yale, they had one, brilliant, they sent me a copy of it, and it was just Autumn Leaves again. We thought we'd found something no one else had ever found, and it was just Autumn Leaves again. He clearly liked that one. So Cheer for the Year was a new one that was at the Free Library of Philadelphia. And it's a really interesting one because, as I said before, we get with Dickens's poetry this sense of his friendships and flirty friendships, and particularly friendships with women. And this poem was written together with Mary Boyle, who was a friend of his, but also someone he acted in amateur dramatics with. So this poem was written, we we kind of assume drunkenly on New Year's Eve, 31st of December 1850, at Rockingham Castle, where the Watsons lived, where Dickens had been putting on Animal Magnetism, a play by Elizabeth Inchbold. And it's essentially what you might imagine some drunk friends writing to thank their hosts and celebrate the end of one year and the new year coming in, but it's collaboratively written.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Cheer for the year that's opening around us. Light, may its shadows touch us as they fall. Peace and affection lovingly surround us. Cheer for our host and his old ancestral hall. Hope for the youthful comfort for the aged. Heaven's gracious bounties plentifully pour, head, heart, and hand in godly works engaged. Green rest the present deck in memory's storeroom.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

It really shows that kind of sociability and poetry as as a kind of fun thing that you do with friends. And I once had somebody at a talk about Dickens say, is his poetry just doggeral? Basically. It's just and it's it's kind of hard to hard to say no, but on the other hand, he was very good at adapting it to particular people, to particular occasions, and making it feel personal and intimate and funny.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

So in terms of coming together the two of you to to produce this, what were the steps that led you both to do this, to to want to do this, and and and how long has it all taken?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

This actually was not a plan at first. We've been working on a database called Dickens Search. And so we were putting this all together, and then we we just kept finding new poetry that people hadn't seen before. And one thing we also discovered was there's so much confusion about what Dickens wrote and what Dickens didn't. You know, some people have set verse to music thinking that it's by Dickens and it's just something that someone else wrote at the same time period. One of the worst ones that people usually do is by Charles Dickinson, who is an American poet and was very upset over the fact that everyone was always attributing this really fine poem to Dickens rather than himself. He even got a note from Dickens' son, Charles Dickens Jr., saying, My dad didn't write this.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

And I I went to a Zoom performance of a poem that Dickens didn't write and had to tell the person who had set it in a lovely setting to use it.

SPEAKER_02 28:13

Academics, academics, come on.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

It's always ruining everything. I feel like we need a t-shirt that says actually.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

I think you're fine.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

I think you're fine.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

But the poetry, as much as again, we've been kind of hammering home how bad it is, the fact that it has never been collected together properly is kind of astounding.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

It's wild too, because a lot of these, um, especially the we have appendices, one of them has things that are reputed to be by Dickens. And a lot of that comes from people's reminiscences of Dickens. And they mention, oh, he wrote me this poem, or, you know, I heard this in a play that he did, and they repeat it from memory. And at least in one case, I have the actual poem to compare it to. And it's very close, but there's some mistakes. So we know that they're not recalling it perfectly because that's not something that humans always do very well. Um, but they're remembering something. And so a lot of this is sort of it's so scattered. A lot of the actual manuscripts are in the US, they're in Texas or New York or Boston or Philadelphia. And obviously in the UK as well, but they're everywhere. I'm sure there's more out there though.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Yes. And if anyone finds any, let us know.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Let us know. I feel like this is encouraging forgerers.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

So there's also But the there's one poem I think that captures what you were saying really well about poems that are really ephemeral and uh we only have somebody's account of the poem. So did you maybe want to talk about because I it's one of my favorites, I think, for this sense that Dickens is never beyond his influences, but also was funny and was able to do it all very quickly, which is the lines to EP after Byron written on a window shutter.

SPEAKER_02 29:50

Sorry, sorry, what on a window shutter?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Yes. This was written by Eleanor Emma Picken, and she actually has two versions because she shared her reminiscences of Dickens twice um in two different articles. We went with the first one.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

So you have kind of essentially good folios and bad quartos of people.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

But yeah, the first one was usually what we went with, which is kind of obviously an editorial choice. But um this was written for Eleanor Emma Picken. Dickens definitely had a crush on her. That's the woman that he held in the water as she Oh yeah, ruined her dress.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Yeah. And then she got married and he was apparently grumpy about that, which is so strange. But um, anyway, this is what happened. So she said one morning at his own house, Dickens was talking on art to a gentleman present, and they discussed the statue of Venus, which Byron raves about in his pilgrimage. Dickens objected to the expression used by Byron, quote, dazed and drunk with beauty, quote, the heart reels with its fullness, end quote, as being an unpoetical metaphor, and said it must have been written tipsily under the influence of that beverage, gin and water, which sometimes inspired this great poet. I defended the verse, and Dickens rose up and pushed his hands through his flowing locks so as to give them their most weird look, turned down his shirt collars, slapped his brow, and exclaimed in the Bombastis Furioso style, Stand back! I am suddenly seized with a divine aphlatus. Don't disturb me till I have given birth to my grand conceptions. He took out his pencil and finding there was no paper in the room, he stalked with grotesquely melodramatic air to the window and wrote on the white shutter. Afterwards, Fred Dickens, who is Dickens' brother, copied these lines and gave them to me the same day as Dickens had tried to rub them out. So Fred Dickens comes to the rescue, writes this on a piece of paper. And so this these are the lines. Oh maiden of the amber dropping hair, may I, Byronically, thy praises utter? Drunk with thy beauty, tell me, may I dare to sing thy payons born upon a shutter? So he's making fun of carrying bodies on a shutter, which people would sometimes do, but he's also written it on the shutter. So it's bearing his verse.

SPEAKER_02 32:04

No, I like it. I like it actually. That's good. Once I have that context, I've got more time for it.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

That's I really like it because I think it shows how quick he was because he was looking for paper. He didn't know he was going to write it on a shutter. So he came up with that. Like it's again, it's not brilliant poetry, but it does show that he's quick-witted, that he's funny. And I think also the whole setting up of the story about what is and what isn't a poetical metaphor is showing what Dickens thinks poetry is and what it should be. Um, and that in itself is really interesting to me. Yes, he knows what it should be.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

He can't always do that, but he knows what it shouldn't be as well, which I think is also part of the joke. And he tried to get rid of it. He didn't leave it to posterity. It's just the fact, again, that he's so famous. His brother is going behind him, you know, taking these drops of wit and giving them to people because he knows they want this memory of Dickens. He wrote them a poem. This woman obviously has a crush on Dickens and would like to have this memorabilia. It's funny though, because sometimes we can actually see Dickens trying to keep us from seeing this. And I feel like the Daily Mail, but um but yes, it it's so funny to think that we're actually doing something that he would hate. And I have some mixed ethical feelings about that.

SPEAKER_02 33:16

But well, that is interesting, isn't it? I mean, it's a bit like if you could uncover a trove of lessons that to Ellen Turlin that you thought would gone forever, buried it somewhere. I mean, how would you feel? What do you do about that, really? I mean, what can you do?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Yeah, it's tricky. I think this is a humanities question because I know Emily and I have dealt with this sometimes in our career in different ways, is kind of, you know, the we're scavengers. We're going through people's mail. I'm working on another project right now where we're about to find out something about Dickens. And, you know, he would not have wanted us to know this. And, you know, it it's in the interests of truth in some ways to put it out there so people can see. One thing I've kind of dealt with in some of my own research is the fact that Dickens might not want us to know about something. But because his his reputation is so powerful in how we interpret the 19th century, sometimes showing the good, the bad, and the ugly, I think is really important in a historical sense. Um, I would be very sad if people went through my things the way that I'm going through Dickens's. So again, there is that ethical question. I try to be as fair as possible in my research and look at other sides and that kind of thing. And I'm sure Emily is has similar thoughts about this.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Yeah, well, there's a great story that Dickens met a woman who had a manuscript of one of his plays and he traded it away. So he gave her a better manuscript of one of his novels because he didn't want it, he didn't want that to be in circulation, basically. My PhD back in the day was about biographies of Dickens and Dickens's legacy. And I think what Lydia says about that sense of reputation and hagiography, basically, that some people put Dickens on such a pedestal that it's helpful to show that this is a three-dimensional person, that he he did not treat his wife well, but at one point he was a romantic young man writing bad poetry. He does have friendships with women, which are quite interesting social things. And if we just ignore the bad about Dickens or don't bring these things to light, then we're at risk of making him into some kind of two-dimensional hero. And lots of his family and people that knew him tried to make that happen. That was an active project to bury the bad. So I think the passage of time makes these things feel better. He did die quite a long time ago now. So I don't really believe in that present damage. But as Lydia says, it's not something we necessarily want for ourselves, is it? For somebody to go through all of our correspondence um and draw conclusions about what kind of people we are from them.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

So definitely not. And I think that's the thing. Dickens was a human being with maybe more than usual pressures on him because of all the scrutiny and all the stuff. So it's not that I make excuses for him, but I also sort of see the wisdom of learning the truth sometimes about a public figure. Um, just not in a in a cruel way, but just to know this is a human.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Yeah. But it but also just to bring it back to his writing, I mean, I feel like you know, reading your book it just really understanding his power as a prose poet. Rather than in all sincerity. Because I think, you know, when when he subliminally goes there and it starts to get a bit metrical and burst-like, and then it fades away again, it comes in so powerfully. But of course, when he constrains himself and he's too self-conscious about it, yeah, he loses his kind of powers, which I find really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

One of the better ones is Song of the Month that he writes after Mary Hogarth dies. I think that one actually the way it uses me to it's still sentimental, but that one w that one for me works. So that's definitely one to read.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

I stood by a young girl's grave last night. Beautiful, innocent, pure and bright, who in the bloom of her summer's pride and all its loveliness drooped and died.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

But he is the great dabbler, isn't he? Like I whenever I teach something like Oliver Twist, like call it a glorious mess because it starts as this high satirical style, and then it goes into something else, and it's Newgate novel and it's melodrama. And in prose, you can move between those different things in a paragraph. But in the poems he dabbles, but it I don't think he ever spends enough time on it to get particularly good at it. But with the prose, you can see him working through that process, and there's glimmer, glimmers of brilliance even when it doesn't fully come together in places. But he makes it his own, he gets beyond those influences, he doesn't get stuck on what it should be. And it is the great form of the 19th century, like serialization and the increased um availability of cheap print like that. The fact that he published poetry in newspapers and made the most of cheap available print to get people to read these things. He never published the fancy poetry book um that was associated with people like Tennyson and um Barrett Browning and things like that. Um yeah, he was very much kind of of the people in this, I think. And it was more about its resonance with his friends and the person it was addressed to than um some some great poetic project, right?

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Oh gosh, well I I've enjoyed this so much. Thank you so much for talking to me about the verse of Charles Dickens. A link to purchase is in the description, people listening. So I hope you really enjoyed it. So fascinating to to read.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Thanks for having us on. Thank you.