THUD.
That is how I came to know of Charles Dickens. I was twelve years old and I had a British English teacher named Miss Mills who had bug eyes, frizzy hair she always wore up, and a long nose that was still too small for the enormous pair of glasses she wore. She was forever pushing them up with her forefinger after she looked down at me. She was quite comical to me even then, but what I remember most about her was what I call the Day of the Thud.
For a few weeks I had been going to my lessons with Miss Mills with a red leather bound two volume edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables that I kept together with a simple but practical elastic.
The thud was Miss Mills' response to my declaration that Hugo was the world's greatest writer. To Miss Mills credit she did listen to my reasons about why I felt this way - but I was obviously wrong. The very next lesson she dropped Great Expectations on my desk.
THUD.
Even then at twelve I was meticulous about my reading. I had a very small and sad bookshelf that had been oddly fixed to the wall above my desk in my room. It was only three shelves, but I couldn't reach the top one without standing on a chair and so I naturally kept the books I'd already read on that shelf. The second shelf was for books I was going to read eventually and the bottom shelf was reserved for books I was going to read right away. Dickens' Great Expectations was placed on this bottom shelf, if only because I feared Miss Mills too much to not at least attempt it, which I did a few weeks later.
I am sure that Miss Mills didn't know that I'd read Great Expectations and form ideas about her. She wasn't the type of person who thought she revealed herself in any way, but the more I read about Pip's older sister Mrs Joe Gargery and became engrossed in Dickens' picture of Victorian England, the more I saw things that made me think of Miss Mills.
I attended class with curious eyes. I started to take a closer look at Miss Mills.
All the time I'd been taking lessons with Miss Mills she rarely sat. She always dressed in the same sort of attire - a long wool skirt (regardless of the temperature), a white blouse that buttoned to the middle of her throat, and over this blouse was always the same sort of jacket and always the same brooch on the lapel - a sort of silver pod leaf with two pearl "peas" tucked inside it.
The length of her skirt hid the fact that Miss Mills always wore high heeled shoes. She wasn't very tall but nor was she graceful. After each class she would linger behind in the classroom and change from her high heels into a pair of tennis shoes. I only discovered this because my curiosity about Miss Mills and her life outside of being my English tutor led me to find a convenient spot in the corridor to observe and follow her.
As she walked I saw the flash of white tennis shoes from underneath her skirt. She carried her shoes in a heavily wrinkled brown paper sack. She walked in timid steps and puffed up like a peacock the minute she crossed anybody in the corridor. She never said "hello" or "good-bye" to anybody. She simply said "good afternoon" in passing, as a greeting, and as a farewell.
"Good afternoon." She said to Mr. Wilkes the janitor who was sweeping up the corridor. It's then that I noticed because of the blazer she wore how her shoulders hunched up in the presence of a man for longer than it took to cross in a hallway. As if she were gathering up her shoulders like loose sheets of paper. She turned her body in the wide corridor as if it had suddenly narrowed and she couldn't pass by Mr. Wilkes without brushing against him unless she did so.
"It's almost nighttime now," Mr. Wilkes told Miss Mills. "So good evening," he said with a smile.
Now maybe it's because I adored Mr. Wilkes and wasn't fond of Miss Mills to begin with, but it upset me when she stopped, puffed up again, turned the thin metal watch on her wrist, pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, and summarily told Mr. Wilkes that it being precisely five thirty-seven meant it was not yet evening.
"So good afternoon," Miss Mills told him again.
Mr. Wilkes' smile faded and Miss Mills unaware of how she'd treated him turned to continue on her way, but not before the rubber sole of her shoe gave a little squeak that sounded like a pathetic little fart. Miss Mills paused a moment with her back to Mr. Wilkes who was kind enough to keep sweeping down the hall as if he hadn't noticed and I slinked outside to the faculty parking lot just in time to see Miss Mills get into a tiny car brown and orange with rust that made an unbelievable amount of noise when she started it. The car stalled after a few moments and finally when it had restarted she drove away in the exhaust smoke that surrounded it like a fog.
I saw through Miss Mills after that. In a way after that I saw through everyone. I paid closer attention to people and wrote down my observations in notebooks. A few months later I won an award for my writing and my father decided if my English was good enough that I could win writing awards I didn't need a tutor anymore.
I saw Miss Mills one last time before she went off to wherever she went off to after she was no longer my tutor. She'd tried to find another student and asked to stay on at the school but there was no place for her. I returned her copy of Great Expectations with a bookmark - it had a little sparrow painted on it and I'd bought it as a gift for my father, but much like me he never had much use for a bookmark. She thanked me for my present, corrected me for using I'll instead of I will, and though I had her address never bothered with her ever again.
But even now when I think of Mrs Joe Gargery, with her complaints and aspirations and nuances I always see Miss Mills. Who looked, with a slight change in attire, quite a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West.
This realisation - that everybody could be a character and was - had a brief but lasting impact on me. People extol the virtues of Dickens for chronicling Victorian England, but I refuse to limit him in this way. Every writer is a historian of their age. There are greats like Dickens, Hugo, Zola, and Steinbeck who did it better than others certainly - but what is it about Dickens that makes his legacy so profound that Prince Charles himself is involved in the festitivities to mark the author's 200th birthday? Why are there festivals in his honour? Why do people walk the streets to find what is called "Dickens' London"?
In Dickens' work, Great Expectations is one of the keys to understanding why his work is still so beloved in the characters of the convict Magwitch and especially Joe Gargery. Dickens believed that people deserved a second chance, but more importantly he believed that there were those, like Joe, who are good to begin with and will always be good.
The other key and the more significant perhaps is in Dickens' best known work A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is visited by his former partner Jacob Marley and the three ghosts, wakes up, and becomes a better man. The narrator assures us that the transformation is complete and permanent. That Scrooge has successfully "changed the shadows of what may be".
That is how I came to know of Charles Dickens. I was twelve years old and I had a British English teacher named Miss Mills who had bug eyes, frizzy hair she always wore up, and a long nose that was still too small for the enormous pair of glasses she wore. She was forever pushing them up with her forefinger after she looked down at me. She was quite comical to me even then, but what I remember most about her was what I call the Day of the Thud.
For a few weeks I had been going to my lessons with Miss Mills with a red leather bound two volume edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables that I kept together with a simple but practical elastic.
The thud was Miss Mills' response to my declaration that Hugo was the world's greatest writer. To Miss Mills credit she did listen to my reasons about why I felt this way - but I was obviously wrong. The very next lesson she dropped Great Expectations on my desk.
THUD.
Even then at twelve I was meticulous about my reading. I had a very small and sad bookshelf that had been oddly fixed to the wall above my desk in my room. It was only three shelves, but I couldn't reach the top one without standing on a chair and so I naturally kept the books I'd already read on that shelf. The second shelf was for books I was going to read eventually and the bottom shelf was reserved for books I was going to read right away. Dickens' Great Expectations was placed on this bottom shelf, if only because I feared Miss Mills too much to not at least attempt it, which I did a few weeks later.
I am sure that Miss Mills didn't know that I'd read Great Expectations and form ideas about her. She wasn't the type of person who thought she revealed herself in any way, but the more I read about Pip's older sister Mrs Joe Gargery and became engrossed in Dickens' picture of Victorian England, the more I saw things that made me think of Miss Mills.
I attended class with curious eyes. I started to take a closer look at Miss Mills.
All the time I'd been taking lessons with Miss Mills she rarely sat. She always dressed in the same sort of attire - a long wool skirt (regardless of the temperature), a white blouse that buttoned to the middle of her throat, and over this blouse was always the same sort of jacket and always the same brooch on the lapel - a sort of silver pod leaf with two pearl "peas" tucked inside it.
The length of her skirt hid the fact that Miss Mills always wore high heeled shoes. She wasn't very tall but nor was she graceful. After each class she would linger behind in the classroom and change from her high heels into a pair of tennis shoes. I only discovered this because my curiosity about Miss Mills and her life outside of being my English tutor led me to find a convenient spot in the corridor to observe and follow her.
As she walked I saw the flash of white tennis shoes from underneath her skirt. She carried her shoes in a heavily wrinkled brown paper sack. She walked in timid steps and puffed up like a peacock the minute she crossed anybody in the corridor. She never said "hello" or "good-bye" to anybody. She simply said "good afternoon" in passing, as a greeting, and as a farewell.
"Good afternoon." She said to Mr. Wilkes the janitor who was sweeping up the corridor. It's then that I noticed because of the blazer she wore how her shoulders hunched up in the presence of a man for longer than it took to cross in a hallway. As if she were gathering up her shoulders like loose sheets of paper. She turned her body in the wide corridor as if it had suddenly narrowed and she couldn't pass by Mr. Wilkes without brushing against him unless she did so.
"It's almost nighttime now," Mr. Wilkes told Miss Mills. "So good evening," he said with a smile.
Now maybe it's because I adored Mr. Wilkes and wasn't fond of Miss Mills to begin with, but it upset me when she stopped, puffed up again, turned the thin metal watch on her wrist, pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, and summarily told Mr. Wilkes that it being precisely five thirty-seven meant it was not yet evening.
"So good afternoon," Miss Mills told him again.
Mr. Wilkes' smile faded and Miss Mills unaware of how she'd treated him turned to continue on her way, but not before the rubber sole of her shoe gave a little squeak that sounded like a pathetic little fart. Miss Mills paused a moment with her back to Mr. Wilkes who was kind enough to keep sweeping down the hall as if he hadn't noticed and I slinked outside to the faculty parking lot just in time to see Miss Mills get into a tiny car brown and orange with rust that made an unbelievable amount of noise when she started it. The car stalled after a few moments and finally when it had restarted she drove away in the exhaust smoke that surrounded it like a fog.
I saw through Miss Mills after that. In a way after that I saw through everyone. I paid closer attention to people and wrote down my observations in notebooks. A few months later I won an award for my writing and my father decided if my English was good enough that I could win writing awards I didn't need a tutor anymore.
I saw Miss Mills one last time before she went off to wherever she went off to after she was no longer my tutor. She'd tried to find another student and asked to stay on at the school but there was no place for her. I returned her copy of Great Expectations with a bookmark - it had a little sparrow painted on it and I'd bought it as a gift for my father, but much like me he never had much use for a bookmark. She thanked me for my present, corrected me for using I'll instead of I will, and though I had her address never bothered with her ever again.
But even now when I think of Mrs Joe Gargery, with her complaints and aspirations and nuances I always see Miss Mills. Who looked, with a slight change in attire, quite a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West.
This realisation - that everybody could be a character and was - had a brief but lasting impact on me. People extol the virtues of Dickens for chronicling Victorian England, but I refuse to limit him in this way. Every writer is a historian of their age. There are greats like Dickens, Hugo, Zola, and Steinbeck who did it better than others certainly - but what is it about Dickens that makes his legacy so profound that Prince Charles himself is involved in the festitivities to mark the author's 200th birthday? Why are there festivals in his honour? Why do people walk the streets to find what is called "Dickens' London"?
In Dickens' work, Great Expectations is one of the keys to understanding why his work is still so beloved in the characters of the convict Magwitch and especially Joe Gargery. Dickens believed that people deserved a second chance, but more importantly he believed that there were those, like Joe, who are good to begin with and will always be good.
The other key and the more significant perhaps is in Dickens' best known work A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is visited by his former partner Jacob Marley and the three ghosts, wakes up, and becomes a better man. The narrator assures us that the transformation is complete and permanent. That Scrooge has successfully "changed the shadows of what may be".
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