Really long-winded Dickens thoughts

Charles Dickens, 1859

So Friday’s blog post was not a List of Giant Things entry in the sense that I’ve usually been doing them, but it was a collection of quotes on an issue that’s closely related to that list. The quotes deserve a little additional commentary, which I was going to do yesterday, but Treme interfered. For now, then, back to Charles Dickens, Father of TV.

As I indicated in a comment on that post, one of the most important things to think about that little collection is how many of those quotes misread Dickens, or use him in an extremely limited way. I have a list here that covers some of the primary contexts in which Dickens appears when related to television, but there’s a lot about his work that does not have much impact on the commentary. (For instance: his frustratingly narrow depiction of most of his female characters, his astonishing prolificacy, his presence as a public performer, his role as an editor, his impact on social reform, etc. etc.)

This ended up being sort of absurdly long, so it’s going after a break. Join me for some TV-pertinent iterations of Charles Dickens:

1)    Charles Dickens, the serializer.

This one comes up a lot from creators of television, usually while discussing the unique art of building a television show. My set of quotes included Tim Kring, David Lindelof, Carleton Cuse, and JJ Abrams all discussing Dickens as a serial author, and a few of them use him defensively. The claim is that Dickens was often accused of making things up as he went along, an accusation frequently leveled against television writers (especially anyone who has anything to do with Lost). This was true and not true, but mostly for the purposes of these television producers, not true. Certainly Dickens didn’t sit down to write Bleak House with a complete plan for exactly what would happen or when it would take place, but all indications point to his having a clear vision for the outline of his novels. He left extensive notes on his later novels, often included in appendices of current critical editions, which are fascinating to examine, and provide a surprisingly clear portrait of the working process of constructing those fictions. Dickens knew all along that David Copperfield would end up with Agnes, even if there was a brief ill-considered marriage to Dora – it was just a question of when and how they’d finally get together.

The claim that Dickens made it up as he went was contemporary as well: this caricature is called "The Committee of Concoction," illustrating Dickens and his staff working out the story for a Christmas issue

Probably more importantly, Dickens could plan the course of his novels in a way that Carleton Cuse and Damon Lindelof could not do at the beginning of Lost. Most of his novels were released in monthly or bi-monthly “numbers,” and they were as controlled a production as a season of television – twenty or twenty-two installments, with the final installment a double issue (just like a two-hour finale!). Even when Dickens published his later work in periodicals, like Great Expectations, he did so in magazines like All the Year Round, which he himself created and controlled. Because of this, he had the freedom to control his own endings, which has been sadly absent on most network television. My hope is that shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica (and possibly Mad Men) announcing a pre-determined length of their production will become a wider trend in the genre. I’m sure it will be a way to boost quality, but if nothing else, TV writers won’t have to complain that Dickens didn’t plan his novels in advance, either.

2)    Charles Dickens, the legitimizer.

Obviously, some of what’s going on underneath statements about Dickens as a serial producer is a claim for legitimacy by

Detail from an illustration of Dickens surrounded by his characters by J.R. Brown

connecting shows like Lost to a canonical, intellectual, well-respected history of fiction. “We thought a lot about Dickens when making this show” is a shortcut to “and thus, we are a little like Dickens.” I gotta say, I can’t really blame anyone for this. Yes, I think that most Dickens novels are better than a lot of television, particularly in the case of you, Tim Kring, because wow, Heroes was not as good as it should have been. But “better” is one of those wishy-washy words that doesn’t let the argument go much farther, and creators of immensely popular serial television do have a point when they reach back to someone like Dickens for comparison. By most measures, Dickens’ work was incredibly popular, vaulting him into a celebrity status that was complete with packed-house swoon-worthy public readings. Holding up his career as an icon for cultural legitimacy is a way of reacting against the gut-reaction “popular = crappy” response that still bleeds into some TV criticism.

Still, “Don’t call my show crappy! You’re just jealous because it’s popular! You know who else was popular? Dickens!” is not going to get you wider critical acceptance if your show is still bad.

3)    Charles Dickens, the urban fictionalizer.

This one is worth examining because it seems to express something about both Dickens’ work and the content of recent television shows that indicates a similar thematic focus outside the central restraints of serial production. Unlike the previous two claims, which are used in conjunction with many different television shows, this one is most frequently brought up in relation with The Wire as a way of appreciating the show’s portrait of a troubled American city.

I love that David Simon quote from the Vice interview, in which he suggests that comparisons between his show and Dickens’ novels are unfair. He points out that many other nineteenth-century writers did similar depictions of urban environments (true), but more importantly, Simon claims that Dickens ultimately reaches radically different conclusions with his fictions, and “punks out” when it comes to his endings. It’s undeniable that Dickens finds conclusions for his texts that look extremely different than season endings in The Wire. Marriage plots, acquisitions of wealth, regained families, judicial resolutions – these structures do not pull together seasons of The Wire with lovely, cheerful bows on top. But in denigrating Dickens’ endings, I think Simon undervalues the process of bringing those novels to those (admittedly unrealistic) closures. However happy Esther Summerson may be at the end of Bleak House, (spoiler alert!) Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweep still die pretty awful deaths, and I don’t think the novel’s satisfying conclusion entirely undermines the excoriation of the social institutions that bring about Jo’s painful end. Likewise, my impression of watching The Wire is that even though most characters fail to escape the oppressive bureaucracy that traps them inside miserable circumstances, their well-intentioned efforts aren’t invalidated by their failures. Simon is right – the endings are different. But I think overall, the projects may be less different than he claims.

4)    Charles Dickens, the stand in for “novelistic” (err… novelizer?)

This is perhaps the most frustrating for me, as it obscures a lot about both Dickens and the television that the use of “Dickens” attempts to describe. Saying “Dickens” as a shortcut for “like literature” is obviously related to Charles Dickens, the legitimizer, but his name in particular often indicates something to do with plot or narrative structures. In most criticism I’ve run across, “Dickens” often implies complexity in some form or another, usually referring to enormous casts of characters, multiple interrelated systems of plots, expansive tonal or thematic scope, or extended length. But there are all sorts of probably unintended connotations that could accompany the use of his name – Satire? Allegory? Christianity? Moralizing? Sentimentalism? Surely these are not what anybody means when they say that The Sopranos is like Dickens. (If it is what they meant, I have to admit that I totally missed the sentimentalism in that show.)

Two contemporary illustrations from Dickens' work: first from Oliver Twist, second from Great Expectations

I think it’s completely fascinating that Dickens has been revived in this new and unexpected context, and for a number of reasons, he’s probably the right author for the job. But it seems that he’s being remembered in a certain, specific form – a constructor of complicated, interwoven plots that take place in urban spaces and are produced over a long period of time. It would be helpful to broaden the focus a little bit, because if a more thorough understanding of his work were brought to bear, it’s likely that other aspects of his work would speak to a lot of what’s on television in interesting and unexpected ways. Do we still use allegory? Are our female characters all that different from the saccharine angels that populate most of his novels? Does television have the same burden of social reform that popular fiction did in the nineteenth-century?

Dickens, the thought-provoker.