I was led to this book by David Frum’s substantial YouTube channel. He sometimes reviews old books. He also sometimes brings up contemporary releases….which I no longer find engaging. I’m tempted to say that I no longer find the times we live in interesting, although I am impressed by its nonsense. The past seems more alive to me, and smarter…or perhaps offers more opportunities to stimulate the intelligence.
The immediate pitfall of reading The Old Curiosity Shop, is to be blindsided by the concept of “bathos”, or the alleged extravagant sentimentality of the text. Frum alludes to this issue in his introduction to his reading experience. But like all stereotypes, or outright canards, the attitude of patronizing “bathos” obscures far more than it reveals. It’s like: “You hypocritical reader, forced to knowledge the literary merit of an old book, seemingly against your will and better judgement, you have to patronize it before you will admit it to the canon. Or cannon as I like to say.”
What impressed me more about the novel was the savagery with which Dickens attacked the injustices of his age. And the eloquence with which he underscored loneliness, abandonment, social isolation and despair; poverty and the blighting of the earth and its inhabitants by the industrial revolution. His defense of an embattled humanism is the fulcrum upon which his bathos turns. So talk of angels, and heaven and the sweetness of innocent Victorian children, and having villains meticulously punished and decent folk generously rewarded in a comprehensive epilogue that outlines the fate of every character that has appeared in this mid-nineteenth century tapestry, balance each other out.
The past as a ruin. With death as inevitable. The utter bleakness of lost hopes. Of people who don’t make it through. A sinking into addiction. Flip a coin to see if children live or die. One hundred and eighty years on, and it’s still a very good book. A little bathos included? So what.
*****
