What’cha Reading?

[Danik 2016]

@bounty- Agnes is seen by some people as the model of Victorian female perfection as Sancho observes in opposition to the child wife Dora, who is full of faults but therefore more human.

@Sancho-I particularly like the portrait of Betsy Trotwood by Eytinge. And I agree with you about Emily.

I suppose you guys know already the ilustration by Phiz or even have books with them as this is the illustrate most often associated with Dickens. His take is very different from Reynolds or Eytinge, I like his collective scenes. Not sure that you will like his Agnes, bounty, as she appears just as a substitute of Dora. It interesting, how each of the ilustrators "tells" a different story by highlighting different episodes or characters.

Anyway here is Phiz: https://victorianweb.org/art/illustr.../dc/index.html

I miss St Luke´s posts too. He visited Litnet I think it was last year, but probably found us too few.

[bounty]

one of the reasons why I like watching movies and then reading the book, is that the movies help me visualize the characters much better. we watched david Copperfield in high school, but I don't remember it. as a result, my actual image of agnes has remained somewhat nebulous. with a lot of the other illustrations its pretty easy to say "yep, that captures so and so really well" but I don't think any of them have done justice to what I hoped agnes would look like. maybe i'll have to watch all the movies and read the book again!

that said, I like this agnes:

(spoiler alert Sancho!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qu67tzc2K8

found this little blurb:

Agnes' character was based on Dickens' sisters-in-law Mary and Georgina Hogarth, both of whom were very close to Dickens. Mary died in 1837 at the age of 17, and Georgina, from 1842, lived with the Dickens family. Dickens referred to her affectionately as his "little housekeeper". After Dickens' separation from his wife Catherine, Georgina stayed with him for the rest of his life and took complete responsibility for managing his household.

Lettice Cooper has suggested that Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts may also have influenced Dickens in the creation of Agnes.

a small piece of trivia. ive been aware of the old English rock band called Uriah heep long before I knew of the character in a dickens' book. I did a little wiki reading---the band renamed itself in 1969 because it was the 100th anniversary of dickens' death and "the name was everywhere." the band still exists today.

[spikepipsqueak]

Great thread Idea, Sancho. Thank you.

I now have a few more books in my "To read" file.

Something you said about Dickens. I've read Great Expectations many times mandated by various schools, and have never liked it. Read Tale of Two Cities and other Dickens of my own free will and love them.

The downside of using force in literature.

[Danik 2016]

I fully agree with you.

[spikepipsqueak]

Oops. What I'm reading is The Joy of High Places, Patti Miller, Nothing if Not Critical, Robert Hughes (at the rate of about one critique a week).


I am going to make a horrible admission in this den of book lovers.

I have just been travelling and I took A Suitable Boy with me. No car, and it wasn't long before my heavy case and my day pack started to give me joint and muscle pain. (I want to report that in France fit young men will help you get your case up the stairs in the Metro without being asked. It was a pleasant confirmation that people are basically kind.)

The book weighs about a kilo and I tore off the first 400 pages, once they were read, and gave them to a woman I'd been speaking to on the train. I discarded swatches every 50 pages or so, grateful that my day pack was getting lighter and lighter. And experiencing less and less guilt with every rip.



But please don't tell anyone.

[Danik 2016]

Hm. You should try E-Books!

[bounty]

Something you said about Dickens. I've read Great Expectations many times mandated by various schools, and have never liked it. Read Tale of Two Cities and other Dickens of my own free will and love them.

The downside of using force in literature.

ah yes, easy enough to say, but then one is "forced" answer the question of how do you otherwise propose to tackle literature with students? particularly high school kids?

that said, I think I might have posted this before, some years ago I was talking with someone I knew from high school days, I asked how his kids were doing in school. he told me his son was hating English because he was being made to read jane austen. how many 15yr old boys can read jane austen??

[spikepipsqueak]

Yeah. Good Point. A good teacher will discuss relevance and context early on, so that the kid can read alertly, knowing what to look for.

The year I first did Great Expectations I had an amazing teacher. She set me up to appreciate Dickens in general but couldn't leaven the lump of GE.

We had Catcher in the Rye one year for that reason. And Only One Earth. And Authority and the Individual.

I think they try to do a little Something for Everyone.

[Sancho]

Welcome to the the thread, Spikepipsqueak. We be readin’. I’m a firm believer in - read what grabs ya, be it highfalutin or pulp, it’s all good for the soul. I used to leave books in airports — read ‘em and set ‘em free. I like to think whoever picks it up will read it and pass it along. But I finally broke down and bought a Kindle. So far, so good. I keep it in my knapsack. The downside is I can’t use it as fire starter if I find myself in a tough spot.

Haha, no worries about the spoiler, bounty. I’m reading David Copperfield after reading Demon Copperhead so I pretty much already know the curve of the story.

Thanks for the link, Danik. I’ve always enjoyed illustrated books, particularly from that era. I have a superb edition of Moby Dick (sorry bounty) with colorized plates. I liked the artist’s idea of Queequeg better than my own.

Concerning illustrated books, I think Lewis Carroll’s Alice said it best:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”

[bounty]

noooooooo moby dick sucks!

although i bet illustrations make it suck less.

spike, I used to "teach" (whatever that means) at the college level. outside of some text book stuff, and some other universally required stuff, I would give the students choices of what to read and we'd do lots of work in small groups.

its possible a great teacher could make jane austen palatable to a 15yr old boy, but if I were a high school English and I wanted to expose kids to the classics, id offer up 4-5 choices and have the kids alternate back and forth between homogenous and heterogenous groups. there is nothing so magical about pride and prejudice that i think some similar meaningful experience couldn't also be gotten from say Frankenstein, Dracula, huckleberry finn, or 20,000 leagues under the sea.

related to Sancho's airport book leavings, have you all ever heard of a thing called "book crossing?"

[tailor STATELY]

My brief interpretation of Moby Dick... "" Call me Ishmael"... call me anything but late for dinner." finis.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[bounty]

some of you might remember john the motormouth moschitta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKhUoFCBhNE

[tailor STATELY]

Lol... perfect !

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

[Sancho]

Hahahah!

THAR SHE BLOWS… and everyone dies, except the fish and Ish’

School assigned reading really does set the tone, eh? Sometimes for life. One of my early assignments was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. And at that point in my school career (7th grade I think) it was pretty much indecipherable to me. It put me off reading for a while. I wish they’d ease us into that sort of book . You know, they could start us with something fun, something more contemporary, like a Stephen King book.

What got me back on track (by and large) was my next English teacher. She was a woman who got us reading in spite of the school board’s reading list. I remember an incident with her like it was yesterday. It was a watershed moment in my reading career. I had a copy of Mad Magazine with me in class and I had it under a pile of textbooks, you know hiding it from her. She walked by my desk and said something along the lines of — “What’cha hiding there, Lil’ Sancho?” I sort of sheepishly handed it over to her. She got a big smile on her face and handed it back. She said something like, “What’cha hiding that for? There’s a lot of good stuff in Mad Magazine. Keep on reading.”

What — Me worry?

[spikepipsqueak]

What got me back on track (by and large) was my next English teacher. She was a woman who got us reading in spite of the school board’s reading list. I remember an incident with her like it was yesterday. It was a watershed moment in my reading career. I had a copy of Mad Magazine with me in class and I had it under a pile of textbooks, you know hiding it from her. She walked by my desk and said something along the lines of — “What’cha hiding there, Lil’ Sancho?” I sort of sheepishly handed it over to her. She got a big smile on her face and handed it back. She said something like, “What’cha hiding that for? There’s a lot of good stuff in Mad Magazine. Keep on reading.”

I think I love this teacher.