Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "charles-dickens"

Thursday 3rd October is National Poetry Day, the theme this year is water.
The books I have been reading and reviewing made me think how many of us write about the River Thames or use it as our setting. Starting as a spring in a field, 215 miles later it has become a wide estuary at the mercy of North Sea storms and tidal surges.
Charles Dickens' characters picnic by it, live by it, work on it and sometimes drown in it.
On a jollier note Jerome K Jerome wrote 'Three Men In A Boat' in 1889, unaware he was capturing for ever the innocence of a world before The Great War. His story of a trip for pleasure is still very amusing to modern readers. A few years later H.G. Wells' time traveller found the Thames still in existence 800,000 years later, though it's course had altered!
Our greatest living London writer, Peter Ackroyd, has written a book in tribute - 'Thames Sacred River'.
People are drawn to the Thames. They drive, walk, cycle and travel in underground trains through its many tunnels, but love to walk across, boat along, hover above it in the Millenium Wheel and now also cross by ski lift to the Greenwich Peninsular.
But The Thames has its own dramas, the land is sinking, the sea rising. In January 1953 300 people drowned in the estuary area during North Sea storms and tidal surges. Whatever happens in the future there will always be stories to write about The Thames.

As we strolled along the Thames one day I wondered where musicians, writers, filmmakers and artists would be without rivers and bridges. We walked from Waterloo Station along the South Bank to Tate Modern, stopping to enjoy the views from Waterloo Bridge. Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, Waterloo Bridge, a 1930 play that became films in 1931 and 1940 about a couple who meet on the bridge.
‘Our Mutual Friend’ by Charles Dickens is set on The Thames, a lot has changed since then, but at low tide you can walk on the mud, perhaps pick up a fragment of clay pipe and get a feel for Dickensian riverside.
The Millennium Footbridge by Tate Modern has appeared in numerous television thrillers and films during its short life. The bridge is always thronged with people, walking to and from Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the City of London.
Busy places are a gift to authors, our characters can make secret assignations or escape from dangerous individuals into the crowds. Anybody from anywhere could be in these well known places, so the plot is believable. Waterloo Station, the busiest station in England by passenger numbers, features in all my novels. In the Brief Encounters Trilogy the slow train to Salisbury takes characters to an anonymous little station in an unnamed village in Wiltshire. With the vast departures board flickering constantly, what reader can challenge the destinations and train times for a fictional person?
A short walk from Waterloo brings you to the South Bank, all life is here. You can ride on the London Eye giant wheel and gaze down at Westminster, go to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, walk along the river or walk across the Jubilee Bridges, alongside rattling trains on their way to Charing Cross Station. Plenty of scope for writers and this part of London features in the trilogy and some of my short stories.
Next time you are out and about, strolling across a bridge or rushing to catch your train, remember, the people you brush shoulders with may be fictional.

Just as divisive as the Presidential Campaign or the referendum on the European Union is a BBC television series that has just finished, ‘Dickensian’, a delightful confection of twenty soap style half hour episodes that started at Christmas. This drama entwined many Dickens characters together in the same pocket of London Streets, filling in back stories. It started with the murder of Jacob Marley, we followed the domestic life of the Cratchet family and events in the life of young Miss Haversham leading to her tragic jilting; equally tragic, her friend who will become the widow Lady Dedlock with a secret. In the last episode The Artful Dodger takes Oliver to meet Fagin.
In the unlikely event you have never heard of any Dickens characters you would have enjoyed a rattling good tale. Keen readers and watchers of BBC dramatisations could enjoy picking out the characters and novels. Opinions were divided, some thought Dickens should not be tampered with, or didn’t like the attempts to give his simpering female characters some zest. I don’t usually like the idea of prequels and sequels written on behalf of dead authors, when they have no say in the matter, but this series was fun and delightfully dark for pre watershed viewing.
Dickens wrote short stories, plays and of course his novels, which started as weekly installments and ended as public readings on both sides of the Atlantic in the last years of his life. He was a great publicist, so no doubt he would have been delighted to see so many film and television portrayals of his tales. As for ‘Dickensian’; famously he changed the ending of Great Expectations, would he mind others constructing the beginnings of his stories?
Whether you like it or not Dickens is surely part of many people’s lives. One of my earliest memories is having nightmares after watching black and white Miss Haversham on television. The first Dickens books I actually read were my mother’s library books ‘One Pair of Hands’ by his great granddaughter Monica; disillusioned with her upper class origins she went ‘into service’ and then into nursing –‘One Pair of Feet’. I recall them being hilarious, I don’t know if they have stood the test of time like her ancestor. In high school in Australia we had to ‘do’ Great Expectations. Picture a gnarled old bloke with nicotine stained hands and a hacking cough. This was our literature teacher. ‘Personally I can’t stand Dickens’ were his first words to us. Most lessons we were left to do ‘free reading’. I was determined on principal to read and enjoy the work of a fellow Englishman.
Since then I have read some, but not all of his novels, usually prompted by enjoying a BBC television series. We have a house full of Dickens paperbacks as a teenage member of the family discovered one could buy paperback classics for a pound and hit upon these as cheap birthday presents. The novels of Charles Dickens are bound to feel heavy and the print small in paperbacks, not to be read on the bus or tube, but savoured at a leisurely pace. Every sentence is packed full of description of people and places, but if you lose your way and don’t finish you can always catch up on DVD.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vbmfq

Sandscript Serialised

Famously Charles Dickens’ novels started life as serials, in weekly and monthly magazines, but mostly in twenty stand-alone monthly parts costing only a shilling, the final double part being two shillings. We imagine cosy Victorian families gathered around the hearth, eager for Father to read the latest chapter. But I am sure there would also be homes where the family would get behind with the issues; Father late home from work or laid low with a bad throat. The magazines would start to pile up and when the next door neighbour said
‘Have you read yesterday’s chapter? I couldn’t believe it when…’
They would be met with urgent pleas to stay silent.
‘Don’t tell me what happens to Little Nell’ or
‘I don’t want to know who killed Edwin Drood!’
Serialised television dramas have always been popular and until the advent of video recorders Monday morning would see adults around the country discussing last night’s episode of the Forsyte Saga or children at school recounting Saturday night’s episode of Doctor Who.
Press the button videos have been replaced by a variety of complicated technologies; whole series scheduled to record while you are on holiday, televisions recording several programmes simultaneously while you watch another channel.
But there are no more hours in the day and you realise you have six more episodes of Indian Summers to watch and the series has finished in real time. You daren’t read any TV reviews in case the ending is given away.
Sometimes you wish you had not bothered with the stress of trying to catch up when a final episode peters out in confusion. This happened to us recently with BBC’s ‘Undercover’, we were only a few days behind so turned to the modern equivalent of chatting with the neighbours and went on line to see what other viewers thought. We were relieved to know we had not suffered some form of brain malfunction; other viewers were left confused and angry that they had wasted time with a story line that was not very credible at the start and became totally incredible. Oh well, only another three drama series we haven’t even started yet.
But what of Little Nell? When a British ship bearing the latest installment of the story arrived in New York in 1841, Dickens fans stormed the city's piers, shouting to the sailors: "Is Little Nell alive?" alas she was not.
…and who did kill Edwin Drood? Dickens died of a stroke before the final episodes were written so we will never know; it has been a subject for speculation ever since.
For the modern writer there are internet sites where you can post chapters of your novel as you go along and get reader feedback... just make sure you don't let your on line followers down by dying before you finish the book.

Many stories start with strangers, characters who are new in town or perhaps locals who start acting strangely. Even if we enjoy a gentle story where nothing much happens there is bound to be a stranger lurking somewhere for locals to gossip about.
Mr. Bingley arrives in Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' and there would be no story without him for he also brings his friend Mr. Darcy, another stranger.
In Charles' Dickens 'Great Expectations' young Pip meets a stranger far more fearsome, Magwitch lurking in the dark among the gravestones, an escaped convict.

Sometimes even authors are surprised by strangers walking into their novels. When I was writing ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ a nameless policeman featured briefly in one scene, then he appeared again, in a following scene I gave him a name. After some chapters he had become an important part of the plot. By the end of the novel he was demanding to tell his own story.

A man wakes up on a London park bench wearing another man's clothes and another man's watch. As he finds his bearings he realises the impossible has happened.
This is the preparallequel to 'Brief Encounters of the Third Kind' and second of the trilogy.
In the early years of the Twenty First Century a stranger arrives in Ashley. Only he knows the truth about what will happen to beautiful musician Emma Dexter in seven months time, but will he be able to save her and the others caught up in events that defy explanation?
Julie Welsh is a busy mother with plenty of problems and her life is about to get far more complicated when she stops to help a stranger.

‘Three Ages of Man’ can also be read as a stand alone novel and is now available as a paperback.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Ages-Bri...

If you want to start reading the trilogy ‘Brief Encounters of the Third Kind’ can be downloaded for just $1.33.
https://www.amazon.com/Brief-Encounte...

Charles Dickens and I have one thing in common, not literary success, but we have both been to Broadstairs, Kent, on holiday. He enjoyed summer holidays in a house now called Bleak House, where you can still stay. My earliest holiday memory is of Broadstairs, two summers blended into one set of memories. There was only me at the time and Mum and Dad did not attempt to stay in a hotel again.
On one occasion I opened the wrong door, to be confronted with a lady wearing black underwear, I had never seen such an outfit. With brilliant insight she said ‘Are you looking for your Mummy and Daddy?’
The hotel boasted child minding, so one evening Mum and Dad left me; probably only for a little cliff top stroll, I’m sure they did not spend all night in the pub, but whatever the supervisory arrangements were, I had enough time to take our clothes out of the suitcase and wash them in the large washbasin in our room – this was in the days before everyone expected en suite facilities.
Apparently I never wanted to leave the beach, drawn to the sea already, and had to be dragged off screaming or bribed with a ride on the ‘Peter Pan Railway’.
Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Margate are all part of The Isle of Thanet, the easternmost part of Kent; an island formed about five thousand years ago and always a busy place, Stone Age, Bronze Age communities and then The Romans. The last ship sailed through the Wantsum Channel in 1672 and over the decades it narrowed, it is many years since Thanet was an island.
The next time I visited the Isle of Thanet was when we took our toddler, in the days when we wondered how anyone coped with more than one child on outings, on a British Rail Awayaday to Margate. It was a sunny day, but fog descended halfway down the line and never lifted. We sat on the beach, but never actually saw Margate.
When a branch of the family moved to Margate in 2015 we returned in sunshine; a great chance to explore more of the British coast. We were soon sitting in the cafe of Turner Contemporary Gallery, which had opened only four years previously, looking out over the sunny harbour. Margate claims the painter JMW Turner as one of her own, he loved the famous Margate sunsets.
May Bank Holiday Monday brought hot weather and hordes of visitors streaming out of the railway station. The Turner Gallery was gleaming white in the sun and as part of the Margate Bookie there was a book launch. Once again Dickens and I have something in common, we both have short stories in a new anthology. Shoal is a venture by Thanet Writers.
Writing is a solitary occupation; most of us are energised by meeting up with other writers in local groups or on line. To speak in public and read out your work is another skill very different from writing. Gathering people together, setting up a website, publishing and creating a book requires plenty of enthusiasm and yet another set of skills.
The launch of the anthology was very well attended and presented and the book is a delight. A varied selection, from the brief and poignant ‘The Pigeons’ to ‘Life and Times of a Zombie.’ There are flamingos in Pegwell Bay, an unhappy wife a hundred years ago and a fairy tale so much darker than Disney.
See more pictures of Margate at my website.
https://www.ccsidewriter.co.uk/chapte...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shoal-Anthol...