Certainly my favourite Dickens, and one of my favourtie books ever. Eugene Wrayburn is brilliant, Bradley Headstone truly disturbed and disturbing. It's incredible how Dickens managed to draw the character with such small actions. All the characters are drawn perfectly and the plot is wonderfully intricate and absorbing. It is difficult to get into and you might wonder what it's all about to start with, but it's worth sticking with! ( )

I think the key to this novel lies in a scene where Mr. Twemlow has the misfortune to bump into Mr. Fledgeby in the latter's office, though the latter is pretending that it is not his office. "An unexpected sort of place this to meet in," remarks Fledgeby; "but one never knows, when one gets into the City, what people one may knock up against." And indeed, one does not-- this is a novel of chance meetings, and deliberate meetings made to look like chance. Everyone in London has their agenda; everyone is trying to move up that social ladder, or at least maintain their position, from the Golden Dustman to the Right Honorable Veneering, M.P. for Pocket-Breeches. It's got a million characters, none of them truly central, but all of them a joy to visit in their own ways, even Bradley Headstone, but especially good old Mortimer Lightwood. But the true central character of this book is London itself, London with the Thames running through it where a lone boatman floats, fishing up whatever may lurk beneath the water's depths...

The last complete novel of Dickens, and the one following Great Expectations. Another intricate plot with events in the first chapter being important to the resolution 950 pages later. How the readers of the serialised version remembered what happened 20 months earlier beats me. I have trouble seeing why Dickens has a greater reputation than Trollope and this book doesn’t give any answers. Read May 2008 ( )

This is a ridiculously long, complicated serial novel (originally published in 19 monthly installments) with some vivid scenes of London's nouveaux riches and its toujours pauvres. Characters are simplified like cartoon characters -- with the possible exceptions of three minor ones. Much of the dialogue is ridiculously long-winded, though in places very effective. Plotting takes bizarre implausible turns but does eventually tie almost all the threads. The book's greatest single merit is its descriptions of physical settings --the Thames, Venus's "articulation" shop, the Veneering table settings, the London streets, etc. Its most irksome features are Dickens' frequent interjections of preachments, and --far, far worse --his maudlin sentimentalizing of such a ninny as Bella Wilfer, who gets the full Dickens treatment of loving attention to the details of speech, dress and grimace.

The only characters with a little complexity are (1) Sophronia, the wife of Alfred Lammle and his accomplice in con games, but with qualms of conscience; (2) Mr. Venus, the "articulator" (he assembles miscellaneous bones to construct whole skeletons of men and beasts), who also finds he has scruples after having allowed himself to be dragged into a nefarious plot; and (3) Twemlow, a poor relative of an aristocrat, who never understands what is going on and is frightfully timid, but who acts on an independent code of honor in the end.

I was glad when Dickens finally got so enraged at one of his ineffectual characters, Eugene Wrayburn, that he broke him to pieces. It was distressing to learn later that Wrayburn had survived and was likely to recover. But Wrayburn was not the most annoying character. I would have preferred that Dickens commit some mayhem on obtuse, saccharine-sweet Bella Wilfer and shut her up -- but that was too much to hope. The author seems actually to have liked that character.

The key to Dickens' clumsiness is the medium he chose: Monthly installments over 19 months, the author keeping only a little ahead of his readers. Thus, by the time he had sickened of Wrayburn, a professional failure who becomes a stalker of a pure-hearted poor girl (daughter of a river scavenger), it was too late to go back and rewrite his story to make him more interesting or attractive; all of London (the novel-reading part of it, that is) had read those earlier chapters, and Dickens was stuck with him. The author's only recourses were either to let Wrayburn's ineffectualness continue to slow down the story, or to do him violence. The violence is stunning, and quite a bit more than would be necessary for the plot. The villain -- another stalker, more infuriated by Wrayburn's behavior than even I was -- doesn't merely knock him out and try to drown him; he cudgels him, breaks his arms and wrists and cracks his skull before hurling his limp, barely pulsating body into the river. Dickens was really pissed off.

But then, to please his sentimental readers (he could hardly have had any other kind), he lets Lizzie Hexam (the stalkee) rescue him and nurse him back to life. She even marries him! And all the nasty bad guys (who all dress badly) are duly punished, and the sweet-natured good gals and guys (they're the ones who have good grooming) live happily ever after. Ugh. ( )

Shadowy mystery and a tale of greed
September 2000

When I first tried to read Dickens, in the form of Great Expectations, I was disgusted by plot and character, and even skipped 100 pages somewhere in the middle, not missing one single plot twist. You see, I had been brought up on soap operas - I knew the common, unbelievable developments in such a plot.

I did not understand the point of a Dickens novel at the tender, unexperienced age of 13.

Many people nowadays may be daunted by the size of such a novel (the Dickens novels taught at schools - A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations - are of his =shortest= novels), but a reader will be well-rewarded for embarking on this one. It opens with a father and daughter in a rowboat, dragging back a body found in the river. The murdered man was heir to a fortune made through London's garbage, and Bella, a woman in town of modest means was to have been his wife by the will of the murdered man's father. Instead, the fortune of the ash heaps go to the Boffins, who had been employees of the old man. Shall they be spoiled by the instant wealth? Is there another will to be found among the ash heaps? Who is the mysterious, backgroundless man who becomes Mr. Boffin's secretary and watches over Bella? What of the daughter of the riverman, who is pursued by an idle lawyer and her brother's brooding schoolmaster?

Dickens was at the top of his craft in weaving plots and characters together in this novel. He throws some bones to readers every so often, answering some mysteries while opening some others. The recent production on Masterpiece Theater follows the story well, but, as is usual, many of the side characters have been dropped, and the development of some of the characters is rather sketchy. Don't stand for diluted Dickens! The man was master of the novel, and this should be one of the first of his to read. ( )