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This Year’s Books Hard Times and The Mystery of Edwin Drood are our Books for the 2007 - 2008 Season |
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Hard Times (Readings and discussions from September, 2007 to January, 2008)
Hard Times for These Times originally appeared in weekly installments in Dickens's publication Hosehold Words, from April through August, 1854. It was published as a single volume that same year. G. K. Chesterton said of this book: ". . . you never know when you will not come upon one of the convictions of Dickens; and when you do come upon it you do know it. It is as hard and as high as any precipice or peak of the mountains. The highest and hardest of these peaks is Hard Times. . . . This tale . . . is the expression of a righteuos indignation which cannot condesecend to humor and which cannot even condescend to pathos. Twenty times we have taken Dickens's hand and it has been sometimes hot with revelry and sometimes weak with weariness, but this time we start a little, for it is inhumanly cold, and then we realise that we have touched his gauntelet of steel."
Mrs. Sparsit's nerves being slow to recover their tone, the worthy woman made a stay of some weeks in duration at the Bounderby retreat, where, notwithstanding her anchorite turn of mind based upon her becoming conscious of her altered station, she resigned herself with noble fortitude to lodging, as one may say, in clover, and feeding on the fat of the land. . . . Mr. Bounderby, having got it into his explosive composition that Mrs. Sparsit was a highly superior woman to perceive that he had that general cross upon him in his deserts (for he had not yet settled what it was), and further that Louisa would have objected to her as a frequent visitor if it had comported with his greatness that she should object to anything he chose to do, resolved not to lose sight of Mrs. Sparsit easily. So when her nerves were strung up to the pitch of again consuming sweetbreads in solitude, he said to her at the dinner table, on the day before her departure, 'I tell you what, ma'am; you shall come down here of a Saturday, while the fine weather lasts, and stay till Monday.' To which Mrs. Sparsit returned, in effect, though not of the Mahomedan persuasion: 'To hear is to obey.'
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Readings and Discussions from March, 2008 - June, 2008) Drood is Dickens's unfinished novel. Edgar Johnson, one of the world's preeminent Dickens scholars, said that The Mystery of Edwin Drood, has the atmosphere of death at its very heart and core. Set in the gloomy and sepulchral cathedral city of Cloisterham, the story, as far as it goes, concerns the disappearance and possible murder of its protagonist, Edwin Drood, a young man of wealth and promise. But Dickens does not give us a body to prove that any murder has occured. The main suspects, if suspects there be are John Jasper, the opium using choirmaster and organist of the Cloisterham cathedral and Drood's guardian and Neville Landless, a young man from the orient who clashes violently with Drood.
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