Too tired to move, too tired to leave

[sovay]

So first I re-read George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) and then I rewatched Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit (1987) and was reminded that I never managed to locate my own copy of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit (1857) and started re-reading A Tale of Two Cities (1859) instead; it is not that everything is very nineteenth-century right now, everything is very twenty-first-century, that's the problem, really, but nonetheless. I would like to have the time to write about anything. Or think. That would be fun, too.

[edit] Edging briefly into the twentieth century, I watched Donald Pleasance as a dark-cowled drowning spirit in Lonely Water (1973), a delightful ninety-second horror film in the guise of public information which I can only hope jumpstarted at least one career in weird fiction in among its audience's trauma. I had been hearing about it for years in a sort of legendary way. Thanks, COI.

Comments

[nineweaving]

Snap! I've just re-read David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and I'm midway through Bleak House. I keep wanting to liberate his heroines.

Nine

[cmcmck]

I really ought to re-read 'Little Dorrit'.

People seem to believe that Dickens made up so many of the names he uses but there in the Cathedral churchyard of my home town of Rochester (also Dickens' home town) are the gravestones with the name: 'Dorrit'.

[davidgillon]

Never noticed that one, despite having lived in Rochester/Chatham for 36 years.

[cmcmck]

The little churchyard to the left of the cathedral- between it and St Nicholas.

I also recall there being a firm of solicitors in the High Street with the wonderfully Dickensian name of Arnold, Tuff & Grimwade! :o)

[davidgillon]

The little churchyard to the left of the cathedral- between it and St Nicholas.

I must have been past it hundreds of times, but I don't think I've ever been inside.

[lauradi7dw]

There was a popular epistolary novel (if one includes memos and notes from the suggestion box as epistles) called "Up the Down Staircase," about teaching English in a rundown high school in NYC. Wikipedia tells me was published in 1964, and I think I read it a few years after that. We were not made to read anything by George Eliot in school, but the students in the novel were, and one of the passed notes referred to it as "Silly-ass Marner," which has stuck with me forever as its title.

I am on phase whatever of sorting through my parents' house. There is a 25-volume set of the works of Charles Dickens, printed in 1911, which I would be happy to pack up and send to you by book post. Or Jules Verne. Or Arthur Conan Doyle. Or Bret Harte, for crying out loud. Or the Harvard Classics. Shelves full of improving books that maybe were never read, as opposed to the hundreds of later books that were.

I could not watch more than the set-up of Lonely Water. Horror indeed.

[cmcmck]

Iirc there was a film made of the novel you mention.

[lauradi7dw]

Soon after the novel became a best-seller, apparently, but I haven't seen it and can't really imagine it - so much depended on the spelling mistakes and little drawings the students put on their suggestion box messages or notes passed in class, the imperious directives from the administration, a few actual letters, etc. I've seen an adaptation of Richardson's "Clarissa," so I know that letters are not actually required to tell a story, but in this case, I just don't think it would be a good thing.

[ethelmay]

Tangent: Bel Kaufman (author of Up the Down Staircase) was Sholom Aleichem's granddaughter and a good friend of C.S. Lewis's wife Joy Davidman. Connections are so weird.

[sovay]

Connections are so weird.

Bel Kaufman's grandfather who wasn't Sholem Aleichem was the older brother of my great-great-grandfather. I would need a chart to work out what kind of cousin that made us—she was a second cousin of my grandmother, so, fourth once removed?—but I agree on the weirdness. I didn't know about the connection to Davidman.

[selkie]

I always love this one when I remember it.

Also I CONSIDER IT A PERSONAL OVERSIGHT NEVER TO HAVE SHOWN YOU THE SPIRIT OF DARK AND LONELY WATER. HOLY NATIONAL PSYCHE DAMAGE.

[ethelmay]

She'd be your second cousin twice removed, then. Also, wow.

[minoanmiss]

... are you a geneologist? Or a hobbit? I am very impressed that you knew that right off.

[ethelmay]

The exact meaning of "once removed" was something my father pounded into my head more than once over the years. It finally took. It so happened that he was very good friends with one of his second cousins (basically being cousins was the reason they met, not why they were such good friends). His cousin's wife became one of my mother's best friends, and the two families lived near each other for a number of years and were in and out of each other's houses a good deal. That was before my time, but I knew them as people we saw at Thanksgiving and occasionally at other times. So I went from having to have it explained (when I was pretty young) that they were called Aunt A and Uncle B by courtesy, but they were really cousins, to having to have it explained (when I was a bit older, and several more times over the years) that Uncle B was my father's second cousin and his kids were my third cousins, but Uncle B and I were second cousins once removed. And Dad found the easiest way to explain the exact relationship between himself and Uncle B was to say "Our grandmothers were sisters." So sovay's grandmother and Bel were like Dad and Uncle B, and sovay is at the level of my kids to Uncle B. Have some pipeweed.

[minoanmiss]

Bwee. :) lights your pipe for you