The Penguin Blog

How to get children to love books...

If you’re reading the Penguin blog then it’s very likely that you’re an avid reader and know the virtues of getting kids reading from a young age. We all know that reading is fundamental for development and research has shown that having good reading skills from an early age is linked to future success in life. But what about kids that don’t enjoy reading and don’t understand the pure escapist pleasure that books can offer, how do we help them? There are many children for who, delving into a book is the last thing on their mind. Whether it’s because of the distractions of TV and video games or because it feels too much like school, some kids just don’t ‘get’ books. So as voracious readers ourselves how do we help these kids become readers and learn to love books?

 

The key is to get kids to take that first step into enjoying the reading experience, as once they start to enjoy reading they will soon flourish. One way to engage kids is through books which are not straight-forward black and white text. So books that have fun and engaging text, a humorous story or are in a comic book style are more likely to be engaging for kids as they will find reading less of a chore. This is what makes the Geronimo Stilton books so ideal for reluctant readers, not only are the books funny, (they are about a mouse reporter and his fabulous adventures, so how could they not be!) but they are also full of colourful text and pictures. Every page is interesting to look at, whether it’s the bright pink text flying across the page or the words climbing up the page, this fun text design is perfect for engagement and it’s more accessible than traditional black and white text. As one reviewer puts it: The illustrations are brilliant along with the different types of fonts and colours used as they encouraged my 5 year old to follow the words as I read them.

 

If you’re looking for further proof that books with engaging text and images are accessible for kids and great for reluctant readers, then look no further than Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series. This illustrated diary series with its comic style adventure has proved a huge hit with kids, even beating Harry Potter to be voted Blue Peter’s best book of the decade!

 

So if you know a reluctant reader why not give one of these series’ a whirl, who knows you might uncover an avid reader who was just waiting to find the perfect book for them. The key is to find the book that interests them and that they can relate to. Whether it’s a comic strip book or a book about an adventuring mouse, there will be a book out there that captures their imagination and stays with them for the rest of their lives. After all it’s book characters, more than TV, film or cartoon characters that stay with us the longest.

 

 

 

Doing Dickens – Part 9

That’s it. Dickens has broken me. Not because Dombey and Son, the ninth in our attempt to read all of his novels, was too long, or too hard, but because it is so utterly, utterly heartbreaking.

Why is this novel not more famous or popular? Why? I’m baffled. It’s GREAT. During our readathon my unscientific calculation of a book’s quality has been the number of page corners I’ve turned over (sorry, yes, I’m a folder) because I’d found something amazing. By the end of Dombey I’d not only cried twice, but the book had virtually doubled in size from my fevered page-wrecking.

There’s so much I loved in this story of a dysfunctional family, ruled by a man for whom business is everything, yet who is a sad, damaged prisoner of his own pride and conventionality. There’s little Paul (the ‘son’ of the title), a perfect study of a thoughtful, wistful child, wise beyond his years, who sees animals in the wallpaper and sits ‘as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming’. There’s Dombey himself, freezing everyone he knows with his cold arrogance, shunning his daughter Florence for his son and heir, and yet whose repressed emotions are described with astounding subtlety. And, above all, there is Edith, Dombey’s second wife and a towering rebuttal of the charge that Dickens can’t do attractive women. She is beautiful yet brave, intelligent, strong and defiant: trapped in the ideal of Victorian womanhood that she has been groomed for, consumed by self-loathing, but eventually breaking free from her cage. She is mesmerising. The novel is deep and modern in its idea of people scarred by their upbringing; the writing is wonderfully vivid and heightened. I’d urge everyone to rectify Dombey’s inexplicable poor-relative status by reading this incredible book. And so would Sam:

‘I had to ask for this latest Dickens Club to be postponed by a couple of weeks so I could finish this huge tome, but boy, was it worth it. We all seemed equally baffled that Dombey and Son is not only not hailed as a masterpiece, but is also rarely heard of at all (the usual response seems to be, "Mmmm... I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is.") So here's what it is, in a nutshell: Brilliant. It's great. It's so clearly the twin of David Copperfield, which we all loved with a passion, but in many ways Dombey slightly tips the scales for me, in part for the female characters. Many people criticise Dickens, saying he can't write women, but with Edith Granger and Florence Dombey, I think this book proves those critics wrong. Yes, they are both beautiful, and yes, Florence can seem slightly wet, but only in a passing glance. She's actually an incredibly strong, intelligent and independent (eventually) young woman, ground down daily by the dysfunctional family she's clinging to. And Edith, an early (and I think better-written) version of Great Expectation's Estella, is fierce, bold and completely broken by the society she's born into. There are so many echoes between characters, parallels and repeats, and the book is filled with imagery of the sea: tides, waves, weather, plus Dickens is the best writer I know of children and childhood. Throw in old, old-fashioned Paul and Mrs Skewton, Captain Cuttle and master villain Carker and you've got my joint favourite Dickens ever. Please read it. A hearty, merry, insistent 9.4/10.’ Sam

 

Louise Willder

Conversations with A Twist

Oliver Twist is Cityread’s Dickens novel for April. London’s libraries launch the first ever Cityread London in partnership with Penguin Classics, focusing on Oliver Twist as part of Dickens 2012. Over 300 Cityread events will take place throughout April, across all 33 London boroughs, bringing Oliver Twist to life in libraries, cinemas and museums. From afternoon tea and Dickens at Kensington Palace, to Hip Hop Dickens workshops in libraries, there’s something for readers of all ages. You can take part in Cityread London by asking at your local library or visiting the Cityread Facebook group.

Here Cityread blogger Aoife Mannix attends the launch

of the ‘Conversations with A Twist’ exhibition at the Free Word Centre.  You can find out more about the exhibition and watch the accompanying short films here.

I arrive at the Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road just as they are finishing filming Professor Robert L. Patten’s series of short films on Oliver Twist.  It’s a place I’ve come to know well over the last couple of years as I’ve run writing workshops here as well as attending poetry readings and interesting talks on various aspects of freedom of expression and the role of the writer in society.
 
In addition to being the home of organisations such as English PEN, Free Word is launching an exhibition in conjunction with the Charles Dickens Museum.  ‘Conversations With A Twist’ examines Oliver Twist from the point of view of social justice.  I stand under a huge banner bearing one of the best known quotes in English literature ‘Please, Sir, I want some more’.  The illustration is from George Cruikshank’s series for the original serialisation of the book.  It shows a fat bald man in a white apron peering down at a scrawny boy.  Professor Patten, who is visiting scholar at the Charles Dickens museum, points out that this famous drawing has often since been reinterpreted as a political cartoon.  It’s a perfect way of representing a huge gap in power relations that dates back to the French Revolution.

Oliver has had the misfortune to draw the short straw amongst the starving workhouse boys and thus he is the one who has to ask the cook if they can have more food.  Far from taking pity on him. the cook hits Oliver with his ladle and has him dragged before the board.  These good gentlemen are so shocked at the little boy’s audaciousness in complaining about slowly starving to death that they decide to imprison the nine year old in solitary confinement until they can find a trader to take him off their hands for a reward of five pounds.  They also confidently predict that rebellion at such a young age is a sure sign that Oliver is destined for the hangman.  By ending the first serialisation with this prediction, Dickens is giving us a damning indictment of Victorian society while at the same time leaving his readers anxious to find out if this will indeed be Oliver’s fate.
 
Cruikshank’s drawing shows the other workhouse boys with pale, twisted faces.  It’s a vivid, nightmarish image.  Patten argues that while the faces may look like caricatures, the boys were actually starving and shrunk from severe malnutrition. Also their heads had been shaved because of lice.  Thus the power of the image lies in its ability to capture a very real social phenomenon.

By mixing quotations from the book with illustrations, playbills and images from Dickens’s own life, ‘Conversations With A Twist’ demonstrates how this classic novel explores deep social and political themes that are still of huge relevance today.  Poverty, child labour, exploitation, abuse of power, crime, neglect of orphans, corruption and hypocrisy are all sadly still very much in existence in the world of the 21st century.  This exhibition, and the accompanying short films, encourages us to ask the same questions about the injustices of our society as Dickens did of his.

 

Aoife Mannix is the author of a novel, Heritage of Secrets, and four collections of poetry, The Trick of Foreign Words, The Elephant in the Corner, Growing Up an Alien and Turn the Clocks Upside Down. A regular on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live and on the festival scene, she was recently writer-in-residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has also toured countries as diverse as China, Nigeria and Norway on behalf of the British Council.

Follow Aoife on Twitter: @AoifeMannix
Click here to see Aoife's Facebook page
Click here to visit Aoife's website

 

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Jennifer McVeigh talks about the research behind her novel, The Fever Tree

The Fever Tree took me down a rabbit warren of research - a world of dust, diamonds and disease. I began with an idea: what was life like for the British on the diamond fields of South Africa? Who were the men and women who went out there? What kind of lives did they lead? And what moral codes were they bound by? My journey started in the British Library, reading books on the history of South Africa in the 19th Century. These were wonderful for giving me a general overview of the period - the politics of the time, and the people who were in power - but they couldn't bring that world to life. I needed real stories about ordinary people. I wanted to know what it smelt like to live in a tent in a diamond mining town, alongside 4,000 Europeans and 10,000 Africans, without sanitation or running water. I wanted to know what it was like to be shipped out to South Africa to work, by an emigration society which specialised in re-locating women. Using the bibliographies of the history books, I tracked down the primary sources from which much of their material was taken. I was drawn into the extraordinary world of the pioneer - men who travelled thousands of miles into the interior of South Africa with little more than the shirts on their backs. There was Barney Barnato, a Jewish boxer from Whitechapel who scraped a living as a comedian, and went on to become one of the richest men on the fields. There were cockney traders, flush with success - lighting cigars with five pound notes; there were men who made little and - after a bad turn at the gambling tables - shot themselves on the veldt. These were the stories which allowed me to see just as my characters would have done over a hundred years ago. I read guide books on the Cape published in 1880 and sifted through women’s magazines from the 1870s - turning over patterns for embroidered glove boxes and lace cushion covers - just as my character Frances might have done. I delved into manuals on social etiquette, cooking, botany, and what to bring on a hunting expedition to the Transvaal. There are books in the British Library which you simply couldn’t find in a lending library. Books that might have had a tiny print run, and aren’t useful to anyone but a handful of historians, which proved priceless for my research.

One afternoon, I was reading about African labour on the diamond fields, when I came across a reference to a smallpox epidemic which had ravaged the diamond mining town of Kimberley in the 1880s. I looked at the notes at the back of the book, and they cited the diary of a doctor called Hans Sauer. I tapped it into the British Library catalogue, and sure enough, they had a copy. In just over an hour Sauer’s diary was sitting on my desk, and it told the extraordinary story of a smallpox outbreak which had been covered up by Cecil Rhodes, the great statesman. The epidemic - which could have been easily contained with vaccination - ended up killing thousands. At the time it was reported as ‘the greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine’, but it has since been forgotten. Two of the doctors who were paid off to deny the presence of smallpox - Jameson and Matthews - went on to become Prime Minister and MP. This shocking story seemed to lie at the very heart of Britain's exploitation of the resources and people of South Africa under the banner of 'civilisation'. Here was a tale of adventure, greed and exploitation, of gambling dens and brothels, of men - one minute a pauper, the next a millionaire - scratching a living on the veldt looking for diamonds. After six months of research, I knew I had 'found' my story.

 

Doing Dickens – Part 8

We made it! With Martin Chuzzlewit we have officially reached the peak of our Dickens mountain – 8 books down and 8 to go – and it’s downhill all the way from now on (in a good way, obviously).

Unfortunately, Martin Chuzzlewit had a strange effect on our little group as we found ourselves wondering if, perhaps, it was all becoming a bit too much? Were we drowning under a weight of apple-cheeked urchins? Were we (whisper it) Dickensed out?

 Luckily a crisis was averted with a week’s extension, and we concluded that we still love Dickens (phew) but Chuzzlewit is definitely not our favourite. However, even being able to say ‘it’s not my favourite Dickens’ makes me feel unbelievably smug.

 This odd morality tale sees our hero Martin transformed from a bit of a tool into a reformed character (via a slightly pointless but hilarious trip to America), but it’s hard to root for him and somehow it doesn’t quite hang together. As always, the incredible characters save the day: passive-aggressive villain Pecksniff; prematurely bald Tom Pinch (one of those people who ‘look their oldest when they are very young, and get it over at once’); permanently drunk Mrs Gamp and her magnificent verbal tics; and, best of all, the meanly-portrayed cast of pompous, gluttonous, spitting, ludicrously-titled Americans such as General Lafayette Kettle. Did the others agree?

 ‘Nearing the half way point in the marathon that is the complete works, I hit a Dickens wall with Martin Chuzzlewit (a Dickens wall is made out of cobblestones and sentimentality) and didn't want to read another of his novels as long as I lived. But after a few chapters, I found myself giggling aloud on public transport at the dysfunctional Chuzzlewit family, and revelling in the abject evil of Jonas, and loving the awful Mrs Gamp and her cucumber obsession. So, perhaps not Dickens's best book, but a very funny one, and I like the way the story hops back and forth across the Atlantic, and is so very rude about poor old America.’ Becky

‘I didn't get as far with this as I'd hoped before our deadline discussion day, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed what I did read, considering I'd had this pitched  to me as a weaker one. This comes up again and again in our Dickens talks, but I'm struck repeatedly that even a weak Dickens book is so brilliant, and his wit and humour makes even the most turgid/confusing/bizarre story easy to read. And as ever, his villains are so well imagined and written, and his ironic asides (and King of Irony himself, Mark Tapley) make Martin Chuzzlewit laugh-out-loud. Some points deducted from the final score as I didn't finish it (yet) and can't deduct points from myself, so I give this a solid 6.4/10. ******UPDATE****** I did finish this, and completely loved it. Although flawed, I think Jonas is a marvellous villain, and Pecksniff too, in his own way. Plus, I continued to laugh out loud on the tube, reading it. I'm upping this score to 7.2/10.’ Sam

 Next time, hankies ready for Dombey & Son, which is apparently a bit of a tear-jerker …

 Louise Willder, Copywriter

Say hello to our little friend...

 

Hearing about an exciting new novel is up there with hearing that your favourite band have got a new tour coming up, or that Mad Men have finally got a new series planned.

You want to pass judgement on the cover, to find out what the critics say, to see how it stacks up against the writer’s previous book. You want to find out more about the writer, you want to discuss the plot with your friends and see which characters you love and hate. Hell, you want to see if you can get your hands on an early copy and read it before anyone else.

Enter onthestrand.tumblr.com, the new blog from Penguin General that’s going to bring you all the news on all of our new fiction titles. Fig Tree have a debut author who we can’t stop raving about? They’re on there. Viking have just acquired a new US sleeper hit that’s going to be massive in the UK next year? The author interview and early proofs are up for grabs on the blog. Hamish Hamilton have the new cover for Zadie Smith’s first novel in 7 years?  No, seriously, IT IS UP THERE.


Onthestrand.tumblr.com
Premiering the cover for NW, out September 2012.

 

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Doing Dickens - Part 7

We’re nearly halfway through our Dickens readathon with Barnaby Rudge, a story of family secrets set amid the riots that nearly destroyed 18^th-century London.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s January, or because Claire Tomalin’s biography says it is ‘the least popular of his books at the time, and has remained so’, or just because of its drudgy name, but I have to confess I was slightly dreading Barnaby Rudge. In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised. (I think).

The plus points are easy. The most thrilling, bloodthirsty descriptions of mob violence I’ve ever read, as mad raging crowds in the Gordon riots set fire to churches, storm Newgate prison and lie in depraved heaps drinking flaming liquor. The plausibility of weak men with grudges forming themselves into groups called things like ‘United Bulldogs’ and acting all macho as they smash things up. The baddies, of course: smooth-talking Sir John Chester, and animalistic Hugh, who is transformed by alcohol from a rugged beefcake (at which point Becky pointed out it was slightly wrong of me to be attracted to a 19^th-century illustration) into a devilish beast. The last few chapters are a thrillride of shocking revelations, burnings, kidnappings, heaving bosoms, sizzling gypsies and sword fights.

But – the bad news it takes about 400 pages to get here. Not that much seems to happen before that. It’s a novel without a hero, not necessarily a problem, but I found the holy fool Barnaby Rudge too much of a cutout. And, we all agreed the depiction of young women was decidedly icky. Now on to my fellow Dickens fans’ views:

‘I don't understand why Barnaby Rudge is so unpopular; it's great! It starts slowly, I'll admit, but I really enjoyed Dickens's London of the 1780s, which is all lawlessness, muddy streets, villains crouching on corners and wigs being blown off. I think the best, most interesting character in this novel is THE MOB itself, with its complex motivations, and its unstoppable, destructive will. I love the build up of tension as the London riots gather momentum, and the climax is compelling. One thing really bugs me, though: even allowing for the fact he's a Victorian, the author's attitude towards young women is sometimes deeply unnerving. There is one uncomfortable chapter, in which our heroines are at the mercy of some potential rapists, where Dickens seems to be enjoying himself -ahem- a bit too much. It says a lot for the brilliance, humour and insightfulness of the rest of his story telling that I still love the book.’  Becky Stocks

‘Although this didn't have the immediate pace of the other Dickenses I've read, Barnaby Rudge is still full of such amazing characters. The consensus seemed to be in our group that even a weaker Dickens knocks the spots off particularly modern fiction, and with figures like wicked-but-possibly-handsome Hugh (have you ever seen someone swoon over a nineteenth-century line-drawing? I have, now), lovely Gabriel Varden (apparently the original main character in Dickens's early thoughts), dreadful small-man Simon Tappertit and the best villain I think I've ever read, Mr Chester. Father of Edward, our male love-interest, Mr Chester is utterly evil in the most friendly, smiling manner: a perfect sociopath, delighted to be fooling people with his welcoming face. His dialogue throughout is some of the best, most modern I've read in any fiction, and I urge you to read this book to acquaint yourself with him alone, even if it didn't (four hundred pages in) also contain wild rioting, burning lakes of alcohol and terrible bloodshed. Overall score: a surprising 6.2.’  Sam Binnie

Next time – Martin Chuzzlewit, where we look forward to discovering the drunkard Mrs Gamp.

Doing Dickens, Part 6 – Christmas Special

 ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’

Ah, Dickens and Christmas, two things that go together just like chestnuts roasting and open fires, or... I don’t know... raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens (I may be mixing up my seasonal references). The above remark from a little London barrow-girl, apparently overheard in 1870, pretty much sums up how inseparable Dickens and Christmas are in most people’s minds. And as the festive season gets into full swing, the Dickens reading group have worked ourselves into a fever pitch of yuletide excitement, with a whole host of Dickens-related events to fuel our obsession.

The first of these: a special Christmas Carol book club, which met in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street (a pub Dickens used to frequent), to drink wine, eat mince pies and talk about the book. Nearly half of our group of 12 or so were reduced to tears by it, with some of us sobbing pretty much throughout, even at Tiny Tim. One reader described it as “worse than the John Lewis adverts”. We all remarked on how strange it was to actually read something we already knew so well from film and TV adaptations, and loved that so much of the dialogue was the same – proof, if any more were needed, of how minty fresh and perfect Dickens’s writing is. We were still moved by the book’s humanist message of opening up your heart at Christmas (a time “to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures”), and its anger at complacency and ignorance (“are there no workhouses?”). We also loved how Scrooge suddenly becomes so silly and hysterical after his transformation, and how the book has such an exuberant, comic, holiday feel. But mainly, we were just so impressed that Dickens managed to conjure up this timeless fairy tale out of nowhere one night (apparently he composed it in his head while walking the streets of London, laughing and crying as he did so). I would also like to thank Dickens for A Christmas Carol because without it, It’s a Wonderful Life would surely never have existed.    

Next in our festive Dickensathon was an evening discussion of A Christmas Carol with the Guardian and the wonderful Claire Tomalin, author of Dickens: A Life. Tomalin pinpointed the moment of Scrooge’s transformation as right at the start of the hauntings, where he looks back at his lonely childhood and says “poor boy” – by pitying himself as a child, he is able to acknowledge what’s wrong with him as an adult. Discussions also ranged over the persona of the Narrator, the child-wraith figures of Ignorance and Want, Dickens’s hatred of workhouses (including the fact that all domestic servants were sent to them once they were too old to work. Did you know that? Neither did I. Bloody Victorians), and the slightly unsavoury descriptions of some of the book’s women: see page 87 and you’ll know what I mean.

Which brings us to the last, and best, plum in our December Dickens pudding: a field trip to the almost indescribable wonder that is Dickens World in Kent (who had, very kindly, given us some tickets), about which we had worked ourselves up into such a state of excitement that by the time we arrived we were like toddlers after ten slices of birthday cake.
Marooned in the middle of nowhere, Dickens World is part kitsch theme-park wonderland, part a recreation of the best Dickens film set you have ever seen, with a haunted house, 4D – yes, 4D – cinema, pub, shops and, to top it all, a Great Expectations boat ride (I don’t remember this in the novel but then it’s a long time since I read it at school), and is so unreal that part of me wonders if I dreamt the whole thing. In Sam’s words:

“From an unprepossessing retail park by the dockyards, we entered Dickens World like Tiny Tim Cratchit on Boxing Day, eyes all aglow with the giant turkey (theme park) before him (us). It was utterly magical, from the roofs of Dickens's London to the costumed staff pointing you to all the delights on offer. I particularly liked screaming so loudly on the water ride that I almost blacked out. A hearty 9/10.”

I leave the last word with Becky, however: “Looking back, in the cold light of day, I am not convinced that the Great Expectations log flume was that good. However at the time, the fit of hysteria that Sam and Louise were having in the back of our log, combined with the novelty and charm of the all consuming Victorian world we had entered, made travelling at 0.5 miles an hour past an unconvincing model of Miss Havisham seem like possibly the most exhilarating thing I'd ever done. Henceforth, if I am invited to another Dickens attraction - the acclaimed Dickens Birthplace museum of Portsmouth perhaps, or the Dickens House Museum of Broadstairs, or the great Dickens Museum of London town - I will ask: 'Does it have a flume, sir?' And if the answer is 'No, sir', then I will not go, sir!”

And on that bombshell I’ll just say, in the time-honoured tradition, “God bless us, every one”, and wish you the merriest of Christmasses in the good old world!


Louise Willder, Copywriter

Previous Dickens posts:

Part 5: Nicholas Nickleby
Part 4: The Old Curiosity Shop
Part 3: David Copperfield
Part 2: Oliver Twist
Part 1: The Pickwick Papers

 

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Blog a Penguin Short 1: A Guest at the Feast

There is something very satisfying about reading an entire book in one sitting. Part of the pleasure of Julian Barnes’ Booker Prizing winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, is that you can spend a deeply pleasurable and indulgent afternoon devouring the book whole. You don’t have to worry about forgetting who said what when, of losing track of the plot as you nibble your way through the pages, piecemeal, when you get a moment here or there. The book is completely with you and the reading experience all the richer for it.

Last week we launched a new series of eBooks written with this experience in mind. The Penguin Shorts can be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, these brief books provide a short escape into a fictional world or act as a primer in a particular field or provide a new angle on an old subject.

To introduce you to the series, we are going to blog our way through all nine of the launch books, as we read through the series on our way in and out of work. To kick off, I’m starting with Colm Tóibín’s A Guest at the Feast. Celebrated as one of the finest novelists and short story writers of his generation Colm Tóibín, in his Penguin Short, turns his hand to his first piece of memoir, moving from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family.

To Work: 388 from Victoria Park Road to Embankment (50 minutes)


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It was bitterly cold yesterday morning. It proved difficult to keep my reader still as I tried to steal away the first few pages while keeping my morning vigil for the 388 to take me into work. It’s a good journey, I always get a seat and it allows for just shy of an hour of solid reading time. A Guest at the Feast opens with Tóibín's childhood in Enniscorthy, the story of how parents got together, his schooling (good at maths, giving ‘smart answers’ and being ‘no good’), childhood trips to the Wexford Town, and by the time I reach work, he is on his way to Dublin and University.


Back Home: 26 from Aldwych to Cassland Crescent (50 minutes)

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In Dublin, Tóibín’s love of the arts develops. There is a wonderful scene in which he meets Frederick May, a forgotten Irish composer, responsible for ‘one of the greatest contributions to Irish beauty which was ever made’. He continues, reflecting on his mother, an avid reader that adored ‘smart’ books and stayed clear of those she found ‘slow-moving’. And finally, to the importance of place and the influence it has had on him and his work. And that’s it, a perfect gem of a book and an insight into one of our most profound writers, completely enjoyed and digested on a single day on my way in and out of work.

 

Matt Clacher
Penguin General Marketing

 

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Doing Dickens – Part 5

We were giddy with excitement this month talking about Nicholas Nickleby in our Dickens readathon gang – in fact if I were a Victorian heroine I might have had to lie down with some smelling salts. The reason: we have two new recruits! Our slightly augmented group was unanimous in agreeing that, contrary to our slightly low expectations, and perhaps compared to last month, this is an action-packed romp of a read. Nicholas is a slightly two-dimensional but incredibly dashing and spirited hero; his mother is hilariously annoying, taking rambling to a sort of stream-of-consciousness art form; and the book brims over with a host of deliciously theatrical extras, hideous grotesques and dastardly villains. The whole thing felt to me like a very jolly outing to a pantomime, hissing at the baddies and cheering on the goodies – apart from the desperately sad descriptions of the dreadful school Dotheboys Hall (I was glad to discover that, partly because of this novel, many horrific Victorian institutions such as this were closed down. Good old Dickens).

Without further ado, here are the thoughts of our readers:

‘This was my first foray into the Dickens read-a-thon and I quickly discovered that there’s an INTENSE amount of love for Dickens amongst the diehard core of book clubbers. And with good reason: Nicholas Nickleby is an absolute hoot, the sort of book the word ‘rollicking’ was coined to describe. Nicholas himself is a bit, well, beige – but it’s a minor quibble when the supporting cast is this brilliant. Personal favourites: the Crummles family’s theatre troop; the hideously lecherous usurer Arthur Gride; and the profligate Mr Mantalini, who repeatedly wins back his long-suffering wife through his seductive power of his moustache. Best of all is Mrs Nickleby –the most amusingly irritating mother since Mrs Bennet wittered her way through Pride and Prejudice.’  Jess Harrison, Classics

‘For me there is not a dud character in Dicken's Nicholas Nickleby, and a wealth of heroes and villains to choose from, all aptly named. For example, the tight fisted, Wackford Squeers, head of Dotheboys Hall, a school for boys, which bears more resemblance to a POW camp than an educational establishment, whose finest moment, I feel, was when, while watching his son eat, he ' hugged himself to think that his son and heir
should be fattening at the enemy's expense'. Or equally, the detestable Sir Mulberry Hawk, who like a bird of prey encircles and finally launches himself upon innocent Kate (Nicholas's
sister). There was just the right amount of humour (mostly provided by Nicholas's babbling mother, going off on another irrelevant tangent) to keep me from despairing at the overwhelming villainy and greed of the various monstrous characters. Even in a world seemingly teeming with evil, this book still creates a strong urge to be transported back to a Dickensian London street scene and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it...Bring on 'A Christmas Carol'!’  Rowan Powell, Art

‘I'm constantly delighted by how easy Dickens is to read and how bloody enjoyable it is. The names (Vincent Crummles, the Cheeryble twins, Peg Sliderskew - Wackford Squeers, for goodness' sake), characters (Kate and Nicholas Nickleby's spirit, Mrs Nickleby's inane ramblings that are all too recognisable for anyone with a mother over fifty, the utter villainy of Uncle Ralph and Sir Mulberry Hawk, and the wonderful kindness of Tim Linkinwater and the whole Cheeryble family) and plot (Lord Verisopht's duel! John Browdie's appearances! BROOKER!) made this a joy to read. Although it's a lot more shallow than my much-loved David Copperfield and a bit of a Victorian fairy story, it still tweaks the nose of just about every other book I've read this year, so I award it a solid 8.1. ‘  Sam Binnie

‘Nicholas Nickleby is an action hero who saves babies from conflagrations, turns the whip on violent headmasters, and spoils for fights with anyone who threatens the honour of a lady. He's so winningly flirtatious and handsome that I felt sorry for his enemy: evil Uncle Ralph, the usurer, who is essentially Ebenezer Scrooge but nastier and without the ghosts. A hugely enjoyable read with endless brilliant characters, it left me feeling claustrophobic on behalf of Nicholas's sister. Her own good looks and honour bring her not adventure but peril. She can only wait around dutifully for most of the book, hoping that the benign gentlemen will rescue her from the preying lechers. I can't decide if this storyline is social comment or if Dickens quite liked things this way.’  Becky Stocks

Next time – a quick read of A Christmas Carol, before we head into the new year, and Barnaby Rudge...