GEORGE SILVERMAN'S EXPLANATION 📚: with Emily Middleton

Hot on the heels of Dominic's audiobook of George Silverman's Explanation comes the discussion with Dr. Emily Middleton (formerly Bell) … who we’ve met before in the episodes on Oliver Twist and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices …

Emily is working on George Silverman, and other rarer Dickens stories for Oxford University Press, and has just published The Verse of Charles of Dickens for Edinburgh University Press which she has co-authored with Dr Lydia Craig. ( There is a joint episode on this with Emily and Lydia already waiting in the wings)

George Silverman's Explanation is an indictment against poverty, as powerful as you will find in any of Dickens’ larger works. It is also a biting satire against the 'daring ignorance' and little 'meannesses' found in many non-conformist movements. Above all it is a deeply affecting examination of how far a childhood of of both want and punishing religious control can impact a man’s self-worth and future happiness.

Original cover headshot of Dominic Gerrard © Jane Lloyd  / Original cover headshot of Emily Middleton © Dustin Smith, Skywall Photography / Original Dickens illustrations sourced from Michael John Goodman's incredible Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:23

Hi everyone. Hot on the heels of my audiobook of George Silverman comes now the discussion with Dr. Emily Middleton, formerly Belle, who we've met before in the episodes on Oliver Twist and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. Emily is currently working on George Silverman and other rarer Dickens stories for Oxford University Press and has just published the verse of Charles Dickens for Edinburgh University Press, which she has co-authored with Dr. Lydia Craig. And there is a joint episode on this with Emily and Lydia already waiting in the wings. Before we invite Emily in, I'm just going to spin the character wheel a little bit to remind us of who we meet in this story. There's George Silverman, of course, our narrator, guiding us along a psychological tightrope, both reticent and yet compelled to unburden his heart to us. Often faltering as a narrator, always fearful of being misconstrued, and yet it seems the greatest misconstruction is the one he places on himself. His voice is a solitary one, and unlike Pip or David, he doesn't know if we are really there listening to him, and if we exist, we remain until the very end unknown to him. As a young boy, George meets Sylvia, who he feels a childish love for, but who he shuns for fear of infecting her with a fever. Brother Hawkyard, the crazed preacher of a strange religious sect, who takes the young George under his wing, and at the same time, lurking in the shadows, there's the deeply malevolent crab-faced Brother Gimlet. Lady Fairway, the tall, imposing, managing woman with a hard stare, who offers George a living in the church and role as tutor to her daughter, the wonderful Adelina. Emily, hello, welcome back to Charles Dickens' Brain on Fire.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Hello, it's a pleasure to be back.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Well, you're back because you dropped something into our conversation about Oliver Twist last time, where you mentioned George Silverman's explanation, and I realized that I hadn't read it at all. And that it's a fairly rare story, isn't it? Especially outside the Dickens circles. So yeah, what where do we start with this? I mean, I was really struck by it. But where did your interests start with this one?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. It's hardly ever read, and to be honest, it's hardly ever read even in Dickens circles. I often go to conferences and say to people, this really resonates with this story. So I'm always waving the flag for George Silverman's explanation. So the way I came to it was a master's course, I think, at the University of York on Dickens and Wilkie Collins that essentially took some of the weirder stories by the two of them. And the only edition we had was one of those terrible print-on-demand ones with, you know, horrible kind of orange plastic cover. Uh, because they're just there isn't really a good edition of the story, even to work with, because it's not really been reprinted, it's not, it's not very popular outside of Dickens circles. But I think it's so interesting as one of the last things that Dickens wrote before he died, coming as it does in 1868 and being so overlooked, but containing so much that resonates with so many of his other novels. And there's a wonderful quote from a critic called Rosemary Bodenheimer, who wrote a wonderful book called Knowing Dickens, but what she says about George Silverman's explanation probably wouldn't make anybody want to read it. She says it is stripped of every charm, humorous fancy, satirical exaggeration, or syntactical energy that made his work Dekensian. And I just can't agree with that. I think the satire, the exaggeration of like non-conformist congregations, um, and that exploration of psychological character is is fascinating and it's not completely un-Dekensian. So I'd love to know what you think as someone who came to it not knowing very much about it.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Well, first of all, I really, really loved it. I think my one gripe with it is that I wish it was actually a full-length novel. I felt like actually the story of this guy could have expounded much further. But um, but there are some fantastic moments in there. Like you said, the characters like Brother Hawkyard that we'll come to and Brother Gimlet. They're definitely Dickensian characters. And there's one little line where he describes himself, the young orphan George, describes himself as lying down by the narrow moonlight like a little vampire or something.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

Yes, under the mullioned window like a young vampire.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

And though that isn't Dickens, nothing is. I mean, yeah. What I found very interesting is that Dickens in this one seems to say, with far fewer words, something so powerful and profound about poverty and psychological damage from childhood. Things that he's covered in in so many of his novels. You know, I think of Oliver Twist way back when we talked about that. But this one, it's even more powerful in places, I think.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah, absolutely. And bookending his career, as those stories do, of Oliver Twist and someone kind of overcoming their childhood, really, to the very end of Dickens' life, two years before he died. It's published in the first months of 1868, coming back to this question of childhood influence in a much bleaker way that you sort of never do get away from it, you never do lose that kind of stain of the seller, and it it has that psychological impact on you right the way through your life.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Um, so I can see why Bodenheimer says it's not got that kind of humour and charm to it, but it does have those Dickensian characters, and it certainly has those themes of damaged and abandoned children, um, and the impact that that would have on your life.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

But something else, I think, which I can kind of understand what the critic is getting at a little bit, is that in this story it occurred to me that Dickens doesn't really break character. He's definitely writing as George Silverman, and he never becomes the author addressing us to ask us questions or consider this, or and I wonder whether that's coming at the end of his theatrical reading career, that he's becoming more and more of an actor almost in his writing, and then it's shorter. Is he abandoning long form as well? Because obviously, I've got an episode on the mystery of Edmund Drud. You know, even though he didn't finish it, he was writing a much shorter novel anyway.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

Yeah, yeah, planning to do it in 12 rather than the kind of longer versions. But I think that narrative style really aligns it with David Copperfield and Great Expectations. It's got this first-person narrator, and I love the fact that we go from Copperfield to Silverman. So we have that that kind of invoking of that, but also Silverman as he's not gold, he he's always second place and he's always putting himself in this lower position, but also coins and worldliness and money and the invoking of that. But yeah, Copperfield to Silverman, and that sense of telling the story of a life through the voice of that character. And George Silverman as a narrator is is such a a weird narrator, and the opening of this short story is kind of proto-modernist of we keep starting and stopping. It happened in this wise.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

First chapter. It happened in this wise. But sitting with my pen in my hand, looking at those words again, without describing any hint in them of the words that should follow, it comes into my mind that they have an abrupt appearance. They may serve, however, if I let them remain, to suggest how very difficult I find it to begin my explanation.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Oh no, we've got to start the chapter again. Chapter two, it happened in this wise.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Second chapter. It happened in this wise. But looking at those words and comparing them with my former opening, I find they are the selfsame words repeated.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

And I think opening it and looking at that, it feels quite unvictorian. It feels it feels very different from anything else that Dickens has done, of s of showing the difficulties of explaining yourself and the difficulties of a voice that isn't his. And you know, Dickens is very comfortable with writing and speaking, but this is somebody that can't work out how to convey themselves.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Yeah, I was very struck by that beginning. That must be the shortest first chapter he's ever written of anything. Sure. First two chapters, yeah, where he's got those full starts happening. I must assume that a lot of people listening to this haven't read George Silverman. So perhaps avoiding the very final spoiler at the end. I don't know if we can get away with that or not, but how would you summarise the story or the character?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

So George Silverman opens with this child in a Preston cellar, and we've been in Preston in hard times, so it's an interesting, it's taking us out of London. A small child that is essentially starving with his parents in a cellar in Preston. And his mother is clearly part of some non-conformist congregation. She accuses him of being a worldly little devil because he's always hungry and he's only ever thinking about how to get food, how to get warmth.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

A worldly little devil was mother's usual name for me. Whether I cried for that I was in the dark, or for that it was cold, or for that I was hungry, or whether I squeezed myself into a warm corner when there was a fire, or ate voraciously when there was food, she would still say, Oh, you worldly little devil! And the sting of it was that I quite well knew myself to be a worldly little devil. Worldly as wanting to be housed and warmed. Worldly as wanting to be fed.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Both of his parents succumb to fever and die, and he's brought out of the cellar and ends up being looked after by another non-conformist who'd known his his grandfather and taken down to West Bromwich, we have to assume. But before he does that, everyone is so concerned about infection that he's taken to this weirdly gothic evocative location of a farmhouse near Houghton Tower, which is an actual place, a kind of falling apart mansion, not very far from Preston. So he lives at this farm and starts to have a moral compass. It starts instead of just being defined by hunger and cold and want to really take on this idea of not being worldly and and start to try and be self-denying. He doesn't want to make a little girl ill so he stays away from her, but he's always misinterpreted.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

One night, when I lifted the kitchen latch at my usual time, Sylvia, that was her pretty name, had but just gone out of the room. Seeing her ascending the opposite stairs, I stood still at the door. She had heard the clink of the latch and looked round. George, she called to me in a pleased voice, tomorrow is my birthday, and we're to have a fiddler, and there's a party of boys and girls coming in a cart, and we shall dance. I invite you. Be sociable for once, George. I I'm very sorry, Miss, I answered. But uh but no, I can't come. You are a disagreeable, ill humoured lad, she returned disdainfully, and I ought not to have asked you. I shall never speak to you again.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

And he is taken under the wing of Brother Hawkyard, this wonderfully Dickensian character who speaks in parenthesis in this very evangelical way, um and essentially has his money and his inheritance stolen from him, and he works this out, but he doesn't want to be worldly, so he lets it happen. And then he goes to university and he lets other students that he tutors kind of take advantage of him because he doesn't want to be worldly. He gets a position as a tutor to a lovely young lady, Adelina, but she falls in love with him, he falls in love with her, but without spoiling the ending, what could he possibly do when he's wanting to be so self-denying and he doesn't want to be worldly? So he has this real problem of dealing with this younger woman, and again, interesting for Dickens later in his life, who has left his wife and has Ellen Ternan as his mistress, a younger woman. A man in this story sees this younger woman who loves him, he loves her, and he thinks, I can't do this, I've got to encourage her to love somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

She may have enhanced my knowledge and loved me for that. She may have overvalued my discharge of duty to her and loved me for that. She may have refined upon a playful compassion which she would sometimes show for what she called my want of wisdom, according to the light of the world's dark lanterns, and loved me for that. She may, she must, have confused the borrowed light of what I had only learnt with its brightness and its pure original rays. But she loved me at that time. And she made me know it.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

And that's my not very short summary of the short story.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

It's very it's very good, and of course, even in the summary, the word worldly recurs and recurs, even trying to explain what's going on. And that's the big thing, isn't it? The word the insult of being worldly. It damages him so profoundly, doesn't it, in a psychological way that it's with him right to the very, very end. It becomes the defining insult at the end. And and he's never he's never worldly at, I don't think, at any point in the story, is he? And the Christian idea of turning the other cheek, it's taken to an extreme in his life, isn't it? Where he will not ever, ever fight his own corner. He won't ever look out for his own interests first.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Yeah, absolutely. And Dickens is really showing the hypocrisy then of accusing the poorest people, people are really suffering in poverty and starving of being worldly for wanting their basic needs to be met. And then by showing somebody who who moves from this position of poverty to being a clergyman's having a having a living, somebody that works their way up as Dickens himself did, that those accusations and that sense that somebody who is so in need is somehow immoral for wanting to have their needs met.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

It's so interesting that Dickens takes that on, particularly in light of his own life.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yeah. What I find interesting also is his um his takedown of obscure religious denominations. And so much of the dialogue of Brother Hawkyard and Brother Gimlet, it actually reminds me of the evangelical movement, actually. Specifically in in America as well. I think that that self obsession and that that use of religion for manipulation and um the squashing down of God for your own ends, your own selfish ends. Brother Hawkyard, as he insisted on my calling him, put me to school and told me to work my way. You are all right, George, he said. I have been the best servant the Lord has had in his service for this five and thirty years. Oh I have. And he knows the value of such a servant as I've been to him. Oh yes, he does. And he'll prosper your schooling as a part of my reward. That's what he'll do, George. He'll do it for me.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

And it's worth noting that this story was first published in America.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Was it?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Yeah. So there's a couple of stories of Dickens's that are first published in America. One of them is Hunted Down, and partly he does this because he gets a fabulous amount of money for it. Um he gets paid a thousand pounds just for this story, and it's published in the Atlantic Monthly, um, and then it's around the same time as published in his journal. So it is speaking as well to an American audience that has those kinds of churches growing up, as well as what Dickens himself had seen in places like Preston, where these non-denominational groups speak like this and evangelize like this. And he was very critical of the fact that they didn't really speak to the poor. They were evangelizing, but they were very much doing it in a kind of self-interested way, in the way that Dickens saw it, and not speaking again to the kind of George Silvermans, the people that were really in need, but very much about their own class and their own interests.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

What's your feeling towards this story then?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

You know, knowing all of Dickens, it does feel like a potted Dickens novel. It's got that first-person perspective, a really distinctive voice, a critique of religion, a psychological element, psychological damage to a child, and again that connection to Dickens himself as a child working in the Blacking factory and feeling that that experience never quite left him. And he he said to John Forster in in the fragment, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even though I am a man and wander desolately back to that time of my life. It stays with him, just as he describes the vapours of the cellar staying with George Silverman, and just as that worldliness stays with George.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Yes, I think it's it's interesting you mentioned that because I feel like perhaps Dickens' own potential sense of unworthiness because of his background mirrors George is where he talks about Adelina, but mentions the Preston Seller to himself as why he is not worthy of her because of his background. So I wonder whether Dickens at some point felt on a level he could always be caught out and be shown to be not quite what he wanted to project himself as.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Yeah, I very much do think that he felt that, and that one of the reasons that he did reading tours and and was it appealed to him that he could get quite a lot of money for this, was that, you know, at Dickens' death, the money he left in his will was not a fabulous amount of money to support his large family after his death. He had an enormous family, and and with his father's experience of never quite having enough money, I think Dickens was always really worried about the kind of financial side of things, and that you could very easily lose that position. You could still see yourself as a gentleman, but you could actually end up in the poorhouse, you could actually end up in the debtor's prison, and that things were a lot more fragile than than they might seem. And even the way that he dressed as a kind of regency dandy in his velvet trousers and his geranium and his buttonhole, it was the bling of the of the time, it wasn't quite the right class. You weren't quite putting out the right signals in terms of your class status. So I really do think that that he felt like everything was a lot more fragile. And the way that he writes about his experience as a child, the being penetrated with grief and humiliation that never left him, was that you never could quite get rid of the vapours of that experience and it would kind of linger around you for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Yes, and and I suppose decay your confidence, that kind of thing, corode your confidence. If you were pressed too hard, if people probed too deeply, the whole edifice would collapse.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

It reminded me of a of a quote from Great Expectations, George's experience, where Pip talks about meeting Estella, and he says that you'll know this one, but he says uh her contempt for me was so strong that it became infectious and I caught it. And so the insults thrown at George as a little boy for being worldly because he's half-starved and he's asking for food that carry right the way through into adulthood. It's so potent, isn't it? And I just wondered, as you read it, where do you think George Silverman himself is at the point when he's writing down the story? Because he says that he's over 60, but he's describing events that happened when by the time he was 30. So where is he at? I'm trying to work out whether he's whether he feels a bit more detached or whether he's humorous about it, or or I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

It's a really good question because we have to think about why he's writing this at all. So it's George Silverman's explanation. Who's he explaining himself to, and what is he trying to explain? So he ends it with this idea that he's looking out in the churchyard, he's got a living from the college, and he's looking out at the churchyard, which is this equal resting place for everybody. So he's quite secluded, and that's the theme of his life, is being secluded. But why to feel the need to write this down in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

I think what I find interesting is that, you know, if you read Pitt or David, when they talk about their past reflections, they've re-evaluated what's happened and they've reached an understanding of either themselves being awful and needing to change or awful things being done to them. But with George Silverman, it's almost as if as he goes through it, I could quite believe that he does still believe that he was being worldly sometimes, or that um some of those awful acts of self-denial that he inflicts on himself, he still believes possibly were right. I don't know. I don't know. I don't get such a clear-cut sense that he has decided for himself now, well, yes, that was wrong, and I was essentially abused as a child.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yeah, and critics have fallen down on both sides of this. Of some people see him as kind of overly tortured and overly pressing the point to make it clear that yes, he didn't actually do anything wrong, and this all comes from his trauma. But to me, because it it is a bit of a stilted style to begin with, with those false stops and starts and the explaining of your explanation, it doesn't feel to me that kind of self-aware, you know, pity me vibe. It feels to me like somebody who is who is working through it. And something that I've I've always found interesting. So when he talks about Adelina and he introduces her, he says, you know, when when did I learn that I loved her? How can I tell? And how can I separate any part of my life from before I met her from afterwards? Which would suggest that that's what we're building. Building up to everything that's come before that is building up to that, and that actually the way that he's telling the story that comes before is shaped by his love of Adelina, and that he's telling the story of the worldliness that maybe only meant what it meant to him when it came to that moment, the climax that we build up to when it's thrown back in his face for the last time, that Adelina is the defining part of the story.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

This is unlike David Copperfield and Great Expectations to me, in the sense that George Silverman, when he's looking back, he's trying to keep at bay his impressions from hindsight. So when he says, What do I know now of Horton Towers? Very little. For I have been gratefully unwilling to disturb my first impressions. So he doesn't want to let what comes ahead disturb what he tries to understand back then. But then at the same time, he's in that tangle because Adelina is everywhere in his heart and mind, and so he can't imagine anything before her at the same time. But I think that's an interesting moment because Pip, for example, always resurfaces old memories and changes them and reevaluates them and says, you know, I know what this means now, but I didn't then, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting biographically because Houghton Tower had been destroyed during the Civil War and kind of left to moulder, but it was being restored from the 1860s. So Dickens had seen it before then and doesn't disturb his own impression of it. The Houghton Tower that he's describing, which is singular rather than the plural that he gives it in the short story, it's Houghton Tower rather than Houghton Towers. Um his own impression of it, he doesn't want to disturb. And I've got a wonderful quotation from a letter because Houghton Tower was the inspiration for this story. There's all this stuff that's going on biographically, there's him being in the area for readings and things like that. But in a letter, he attributes Houghton Tower with originating the story in his mind. So in a letter to uh his sub-editor, W. H. Wills, he writes about the story upon myself, it has made the strangest impression of reality and originality. And I feel as if I had read something by somebody else which I should never get out of my mind. The main idea of the narrator's position towards the other people was the idea I had for my next novel in All the Year Round. But it's very curious that I did not in the least see how to begin his state of mind until I walked into Houghton Towers one bright April day with Dolby, and that's George Dolby, his reading tour manager. So it was the seeds for a novel that doesn't materialise, and it comes specifically from Houghton Tower, but also this weird claim with lots of exclamation marks, I should say, in these first two sentences, the strangest impression it makes on him of reality and originality, as if written by somebody else that kind of takes over Dickens' mind. So it has a fascinating impact on him.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

That's so interesting. And that thing I was feeling very strongly that he's in character. He's really immersed himself as an actor in the character of George Silverman. Those false starts, then, those chapters, that's not kind of a literary affectation. It feels more genuine, those first two chapters, knowing that he's really, really truly is struggling to work out how to speak as George Silverman.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

Like he's rehearsing the part, trying to get into character.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Absolutely. And I've done quite a lot of work with the manuscript, which is in Harvard, which makes it quite difficult.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

I was going to ask this, Emily. Yeah, tell us about the manuscript at Harvard.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

It's in the Horton Library in Harvard, conveniently. And Dickens' handwriting gets harder to read as he gets older, and he always seems to write on this quite small paper, it's kind of letter paper size. But those first pages have got so many cancellations, so many things that he's crossed out, and it's really quite difficult to read. So it looks like it was just as difficult for Dickens to start as it was for George Silverman. Those first lines are a mess of crossings out. I mean, a whole manuscript is, and in fact, one of one of my pet projects is I really want somebody who can do x-rays of manuscripts because there's a tantalizing page where he's pasted over a little bit of paper over the manuscript to add a new passage, and we don't know what it says underneath. And you can sort of just see a few words if you lift up the page a little bit, but then you don't want to damage it, obviously. But it it's a it's a quite a messy manuscript, and there's quite a lot of changes to it that have been made, and a lot of things that have been crossed out that are basically illegible. So I was sitting there with a magnifying glass trying to uh to read the things that Dickens had crossed out.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

And did you extract anything from the crossings out? Were there any extra thoughts or phrases or ideas that you could that were legible to you as you examined it?

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Well, okay, so in the very last sentence, uh Dickens has deleted instead of I pen it for the relief of my own mind, not for seeing whether or no it will ever have a reader. It had said I pen my explanation for the relief of my own mind, not for seeing whether or no it will ever have a reader. I think that is a really interesting change because it's suggesting he's explaining it to himself, this kind of process of working it out, as he says, for the relief of my own mind, and reiterating that idea of the explanation, which is a strange choice that has been discussed by critics of why is it not a confession or a story or the adventures of, or you know, some of these formulations that Dickens has used, but an explanation and why do we have that?

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Yeah, because of the character of old George seems so shy and solitary. I can imagine that he wouldn't write it for anyone else to see necessarily, you know, forcefully. You were saying at the start about how modern it feels in places. He's essentially journaling, isn't he? What we would call journaling today, just writing it down as a means of therapy or something.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

Yeah. I've got no sense of what George Silverman is like as a, you know, as a preacher, uh as a sermonizer. I I can't imagine that that they're the most thrilling sermons, but this happening to him, this experience, does make him a human being.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Yes. Yes, absolutely. On that thing about the idea of his type of religion and the way he would practice it and the way he would express it. If someone listening to this episode that would declare themselves Christian and part of an evangelical or non-denominational church in America or Australia or the UK, do you think this is a story for them? I mean, I I feel like it is. It may feel like they're being roundly mocked, in fact they are, but I still think there's value actually in reading it and understanding the perception and people's different approaches to religion. There's noisier and there's quieter, more contemplative forms, aren't there? There's this um moment where George Silverman is describing, I say George Silverman, not Dickens, I say George Silverman, describing uh the type of prayer that Hawkyard has. And he says uh at the end of it, he says the prayer said infinitely more in words, but nothing more to any intelligible effect. And they describe his prayer as as unmusical as well. I just think that's very interesting. And you've got Brother Gimlet roaring the word peace, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, Dickens clearly doesn't like this noisy kind of preaching. And the fact that George Silverman, we end with him kind of quietly, contemplatively looking out over a graveyard and thinking about peace and death. It's the complete opposite of that, right? And it's the complete opposite of that really noisy religion. And Dickens and religion is so interesting because he clearly was religious. You know, he writes for his children, The Life of Our Lord. One of the last letters he writes in his life is a defense of Edwin Drood not uh being kind of anti-religious, not using a phrase in a way that that is kind of against God. And he writes in that letter, you know, that he has always held his faith. But his sister, who who died in the 1840s, was non-conformist, and he sort of had to contend with that. He had a pew at a Unitarian church for a while, but we we don't know exactly where he falls, that his his faith really, like a Christmas carol, is you know, it's Christmas, but there's very little about it that is Christian specifically, other than a message of morality and and forgiveness and redemption, but it doesn't invoke specifically Christian elements. And Dickens's faith is clearly quite a private thing, clearly something that he holds and something that he thinks should be conveyed, but not necessarily in any particular denominational form. Um that doesn't stop him from being quite critical of specific forms, and as you say, falling more onto the quiet contemplation side rather than the loud evangelical side.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Yes. With Edwin Drew, a character like Chris Sparkle, he's like a super vicar, isn't he? A super reverend. So, you know, there's nothing but goodness from him, really, from the Anglican perspective. He's he's a good one. What I can't get over is how contemporary it feels, that examination of religion, even the detail of members of the congregation rolling on the floor at one point.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

Also, just the call and response element of it, right? If you tell these stories of should we take the good path or the bad path?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

The good or my friends and fellow sinners, now I told you when I began that I didn't know a word of what I was going to say to you. No I did not, but that it was all one to me, because I knew the Lord would put into my mouth the words I wanted. That's it from Brother Gimlet. And he did put into my mouth the words I wanted. So he did from Brother Gimlet. And why? Ah Let's have that from Brother Gimlet.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

It makes me think of I don't know if you've ever seen or read Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons novel. It was a great film with Ian McKellen, and it's got a parody of this kind of thing, and they're called The Shivering Brethren. Um and they all just quiver all the way through the service, and that's what they do. Um, and it it's it's just really making fun of that, right? That the kind of engagement seems in some ways anti-hierarchical and in some ways gets away from some of the problems of the church. That I think Dickens felt people felt quite removed from religion. This is almost too involved. This does suggest that that not everybody should be standing up and delivering sermons and preaching in this way.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

What I'm trying to understand, and I think you may have hinted at this a little bit, is where did Dickens see this religious kind of practice? Because he says, um, as George Silverman he says, let whosoever may peruse these lines kindly take the pains here to read twice my solemn pledge that what I write of the language and customs of the congregation in question, I write scrupulously, literally, exactly, from the life and the truth. Would Dickens be at these services then to witness them, to experience it?

SPEAKER_00 33:40

It's quite common for people to publish books of sermons and things like that. And the kind of idea of speaking in tongues, this comes out in the 19th century, and these congregations that have those kinds of things going on, it gets reported and transcriptions get published in newspapers. And as I said, his his sister was a non-conformist as well. I don't know that he attends anything in particular. I love the idea of Dickens sitting in one of these services in Preston, because I'm not sure he would have been able to hide his feelings and he would have been such a visible figure by the 1850s that I'm I'm not sure he could have got away with going without somebody noticing him. But he was definitely aware of how people spoke, and there was so much reporting of these different kinds of kind of evangelical, non-conformist, non-denominational practices in the period.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

Yeah, I'm just interested because it does dominate quite a chunk of the story, doesn't it? It certainly casts a shadow over all of George's life. There's something interesting also I found about him that he has the capacity to look on and see others having fulfilling lives and enjoying themselves quite happily, but always deny himself. It's an interesting thing. There's a moment where he because he gets to Cambridge. I mean, he's a clever guy, isn't he? He makes it to Cambridge, and that's passed off in one sentence, the fact that he achieves that. But he talks about whilst at Cambridge walking by the river and seeing people out on the boats enjoying themselves in the sun while he'll be observing from the shadows.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that comes from Dickens' life as well, in that John Forster, his first biographer, describes him as quite a sickly child that had to sit out the games. Um, and would you know, he he read a lot, and he read kind of in the the attic of one of his first houses, but specifically he couldn't play games with other children. He did kind of have to sit them out and observe and have that kind of distance. And also to pick up on your point about Cambridge, going back to Dickens' autobiographical fragment, he says of his mother that she was so proud, she was as proud of him working at the factory as if he went to Cambridge. And then his own son, Henry Dickens, goes to Cambridge. So this has got a meaning for Dickens, I think. It's kind of aspirational to end up at that particular university. So it's not Oxford, it's specifically Cambridge.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

Alongside George, we have a host of other very, very interesting characters, and particularly the women. Um, what strikes you about the female characters in this one?

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Yeah, so I think in terms of Adelina, for example, it's difficult not to see that comparison that we've talked about with Ellen Ternan, with the kind of younger woman of do you deny yourself this or let yourself have it? But Lady Fairway, I also find a fascinating figure who is introduced to us by her son as a managing woman. And in the manuscript it was deleted. It was an excellent woman first. My mother is an excellent woman. But Dickens really loves this this phrase a managing woman.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

Are you a good hand at business? I think not, said I. Said Mr Fairway then. My mother is truly, said I. Yes, my mother is what is usually called a managing woman. Doesn't make a bad thing, for instance, even out of the spendthrift habits of my elder brother abroad. In short, a managing woman.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

So he's he's really into this idea that she's such a strong and overbearing character, and she is possibly the worst person that poor George Silverman could ever come across in terms of walking over his insecurities, hitting exactly on the thing that's going to most damage him.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

I saw in My Lady Fairway a handsome, well-preserved lady of somewhat large stature, with a steady glare in her great round, dark eyes that embarrassed me.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

She's a really interesting character for Dickens to be writing at this time of this quite strong woman who knows what she wants and who manipulates George into this kind of position that kind of ultimately backfires on her.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Yeah, she is formidable, isn't she? And she completely manipulates him. She gets him to do all these uh administrative tasks for her, for nothing, doesn't she?

SPEAKER_00 37:58

Yeah, absolutely. And this is a story that's all about women, it's all about the relationship between George and women, because the person who's instilled this in him is his mother, who kicks the stool out from under his father to make him go search for work. His mother, who is the one to die first, and has this really horrible description of her voice being like someone is compressing a bag.

SPEAKER_02 38:21

It's like a bag pipe or something.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

Yeah. And he tries to speculate how she will treat him as she comes down the stairs by what her knees look like.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

I recollect that when mother came down the cellar steps, I used tremblingly to speculate on her feet, having a good or an ill-tempered look on her knees, on her waist, until finally her face came into view and settled the question.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

She's clearly quite a terrifying figure for him. And then we have Sylvia, this not quite romance, but this denial of connection. We have Adelina that shapes his life, and then we have Lady Fairway throwing it back in his face at the end. So the women in this really shape the story, even if there some of them are not in it for very much time, even for a short story. Um, and yeah, his his mother and the descriptions in the cellar are really quite kind of horrific of her dying, laughing before she dies, which clearly in his relationship with his mother is not is not something he's used to. It's kind of laughing and smiling, so it's very sinister.

SPEAKER_01 39:29

No, it isn't. He doesn't really understand what's happening, and he doesn't really feel anything at first because his condition, his living condition is so terrible and he's starving and he's cold, that he can't grieve for his parents. It's later on, isn't it, that after meeting Sylvia and his heart softening and he feels a love for her, doesn't he? Some kind of described as a childish love for her. That that he then yeah. So the women also humanize him, the the female characters. But it's so interesting that um it doesn't seem to occur to him that Adelina falls in love with him and he's very much in love with her. And to make her in his attempt to make her fall out of love with him, he starts to change his own appearance and he affects to be older than he is to open up an age gap that isn't there, and he dresses shabbily, slovenly, as a way of putting her off him. But if he remained just being himself Oh, the other thing he does is as a teacher as well, doesn't he? He won't accept that he can be uh inspirational as a teacher, that it's all the subject matter itself that is the inspiration.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Yeah, he talks about the borrowed lights of the things that he's teaching as if he's tricking her into thinking he's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

And of course he isn't. No, no, he isn't at all. But it doesn't occur to him that he's actually initially being his true self, but he's moving away from his true self to hold her at arm's length.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Yeah, absolutely, and manipulates the kind of other love interest then in order to remove himself. But yeah, I think you're absolutely right. That that sense that he's trying to make himself less physically appealing is a really interesting detail that he is making himself slovenly, he's trying to make himself boring, and as you say, make himself look older. And I think again for Dickens, this must be a real concern because his friends did say from the 1850s that he looked a lot older than he was, and Ellen Ternan was a lot younger than he was. So I think that sense of age and how you can kind of manipulate your body, again, thinking about Dickens as an actor, getting on stage and acting out these various different characters, different genders, different ages, that Dickens must have been very aware of how your body could convey or hide your age or convey other ages, other genders, other perspectives. But yeah, he he really does just seem to reject any idea that he could be appealing, George Silverman in the story, and push it all onto the borrowed lights of the things that he's read, that there's nothing in him that could be appealing.

unknown 42:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

Poor George Silverman, but it's such a great book. I really recommend people read it.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

It's so evocative and it does, as Dickens said, leave an impression on your mind that that is really quite unique, I think.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

Yeah, absolutely. I'm grateful to you for having put it out there as one to to look at. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Well, thank you so much for having me back. It's a pleasure to do that.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Not at all, not at all. It's been great to have you back.

SPEAKER_00 42:24

Excellent. All right. Well, speak speak very soon then. Speak soon.

SPEAKER_01 42:27

Enjoy, enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

You too. Bye.