Technically, if it's "One Year" with Dickens, I don't have to finish in December. I have until next June. Dickens 2012 be damned! Anyway, I got through The Mudfog Papers and, well, it was not one of my favourite. Let me put it that way. I read it because it had been mentioned by the Dickens lady who came here for The Uncommercial Traveller do, and with a name like Mudfog, well, how couldn't it be interesting?
How wrong I was.
The characters are all highly stylised. He takes his characteristic humour and carries it too far. While in books like Pickwick, it skirts on the verge of cruelty but never quite gets there (being too full of the milk of human kindness), here it is out and out cruel.
When I read about a pug dog being killed and dissected, I had to stop and put it away for a while. And I would have stopped reading the stupid Mudfog papers then and there except that I had promised myself to read ALL OF DICKENS and like it or not, Mudfog is part of the cannon, though not that popular a part. (In fact, many literate and literary people haven't heard of it).
He mocks everyone and everything, including at one point (at least I think, because the character being made fun of was a literary lion), himself.
And he ends it on this discordant note about giving up his two and a half year old, which seems a little cruel (and in keeping with the rest of the book) until you realise that he's talking about the manuscript itself.
He shouldn't have given it up. He should have kept it, perhaps for reference, to be used and worked into something else. Or else burnt it.
I'm moving on to a real book next but have just not decided which real book. I have Dombey & Son, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Great Expectations and The Uncommercial Traveller downloaded on my iPad.
Wish I was not so scatty and could pick one and stick with it. Some of these books are weighty indeed (but anything would be preferable to Mudfog).
No picture because I'm too disgusted.
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