狄更斯拥有恶魔能量作家.docVIP

狄更斯拥有恶魔能量作家 　　“热切地追逐每一个攫住自己全部身心的想法，正是让我与众不同的特质之一。这些想法有时是好的，但有时，我敢说，又是邪恶的。” 　　——查尔斯·狄更斯 　　I didn’t read Claire Tomalin2)’s Charles Dickens: A Life because I’m a Dickens guy. I’m not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians3), so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was. That’s the only reason I’ve read as much Dickens as I have, to wit4): Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, a significant percentage of Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 　　So I didn’t read Tomalin’s biography because I’m a Dickens guy, although I like his novels well enough. I read it because Dickens was an alien, or at least an extreme human outlier5), and thus inherently interesting. His brain just didn’t work like other people’s. It’s ironic, or at least strange, that his work has come to stand as a kind of baseline, middle-C6) of mainstream Victorian melodrama7), because he himself was not a mainstream individual. Not at all. 　　The fuel that fed the furnace of Dickens’ mind was his memories of his crap8) childhood. His father, John Dickens, worked in the Navy Pay Office9) and earned a decent salary, but he was pathologically10) irresponsible with money, and the family was constantly in debt. When Dickens was 12, his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and Charles spent a year working in a blacking11) factory covering and labeling the jars of blacking. Dickens—a show pony12) even at that tender age—was put in the window so people could watch how insanely fast he covered and labeled. When the family’s finances recovered, his childhood picked up where it left off13), but he seems never to have felt quite safe again. 　　Dickens grew up to be a man of demonic energy: it’s like he was bitten by a radioactive scrivener that gave him superpowers. As a working writer who, like Dickens, writes novels and journalism, I can only read about his output with awe. He wrote his books as serials, published in mo