Dickens in my Ears and Eyes

I am almost at the end of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens–again. The first time, I bought the hardback and read it with my eyes. What stuck in memory was the great British author’s complaint of being chained to his desk or table in order to complete a novel. Any writer can relate, even we the unknown. Another sticky detail, like a shred of carrot or pumpkin seed in my teeth, was the worshipful obsession from the American public. Individuals would snip of bits of his fur trim. I refuse to look back at the book itself to see if I am right or wrong about this remembrance because this is an experiment. Same book, same reader, different experiences.

Bringing you to my ears. You would not want them as I have tinnitus, but if I focus on something (or someone) else–like Dickens–I forget all about the ringing. Listening to the same book on my phone has made ridiculous driving excursions, like to the grocery store, bearable.

The narrator’s voice has made a mark, no doubt. I love his accent (which stirs up the significant question of whose voice I can bear listening to, and I am as picky about this as any diner perusing a menu, so you know exactly what I mean). I love this narrator’s accent in general although I am perplexed by his intonation of all speech coming from an American character. Oh please, Mr. Jennings, these were Americans of the 19th century. They could not possibly have been all so nauseatingly nasal. Many parents of these Americans were immigrants from your home county. I can only conjecture you want a role as an uncultivated American hick. If Kevin Costner has not called you yet, perhaps you will, next time, not make every single American character sound like he has a deviated septum.

But still, the book is grand. My ears have retained completely different memories than my eyes. Partly due to Mr. Jennings, Dickens’ loss of honor in the way he verbally abused his long suffering wife, Catherine, when he finally got tired of her and began his pursuit of young Ellen Ternan, looms large. Tomalin’s astute observation of the shift in Dickens’ personal value system and how it impacted the way villains are described from that point onward in his novels also sticks, floating around with the tinnitus. The pitch of my ear-reading experience may be higher than the tonality of the eye-reading memories, but that they were different makes the experiment of reading a book more than one way quite satisfying. #Charles Dickens A Life # Claire Tomalin