Reviews for Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times

The average rating for Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-26 00:00:00 Kathryn Bryant Spiritual sleuth-work from an Irish scholar Author Ciaran Murray grew up in the town of Carlow, Ireland, a small county seat about 80 kilometers southwest of Dublin. One would find it an odd place to begin a narrative about eighteenth century garden design except that William Temple, diplomat, philosopher, and garden theorist, began his illustrious career there. After representing Carlow in the Irish parliament, Temple served as ambassador to the Netherlands. It was in Holland that he learned of the concept of sharawadgi. Attributed to China at the time, sharawadgi was most probably a phonetic misreading of the Japanese sorowaji meaning "not being regular." Though the term was not widely known at the time, Temple was familiar with it because "he was accredited to the one country in Europe to which Japan was still open by trade; that trade was conducted through Djarkarta by the Dutch East India Company; and it was with this company that, in his trade negotiations in Holland, he had to deal." From this beginning, Murray proceeds to ferret out every reference to sharawadgi either explicit or implicit throughout the eighteenth century. But because these references are often obscure and usually embedded in the political discourse of the day, Murray expands his thesis to include both aesthetics and political philosophy. Addison is the key figure here: "He [Addison] had assimilated the idea of the Japanese garden to the ideology of the English revolution; and, by mediating this through his own inmost needs, initiated the romantic return to nature." The book covers the period from the Glorious Revolution in 1688 to the French Revolution (1789) a little more than a hundred years later. We meet Addison and Steele, Horace Walpole, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. Each man's character is carefully delineated and their principal works considered in light of the thesis that "'liberty in politics and liberty in landscape'" are reflections of one another. "Liberty in landscape" means letting nature have its way. Not in the sense of being untouched by man, but in the ordered chaos of the Japanese garden where space is created for nature to do what it does outside the linear, authoritarian prescriptions of boxwood hedges and lines of trees. The genius of Murray's book is that he takes the concept of sharawadgi beyond garden aesthetics to suggest that "not being regular" implied "liberty in politics". The change in English garden design in the eighteenth century from the rectilinear to the natural and the picturesque was emblematic of a corresponding change between the government and its subjects. Nowhere is this any clearer than in the relationship between the "sweeping, ruthless, mathematical approach to nature of Versailles" and the Court of Louis XIV. In the opening chapter to the third and final section of Sharawadgi, Murray goes on to state that the gothic is sharawadgi "transposed from the garden to the building [architecture], now applied to imagination in general; and to the imagining of nature in its most apocalyptic forms." He cites Walpole's The Castle of Otranto as an example of the garden invading the house. This is followed by meditations on the life and writings of William Pitt, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Paine in the run up to the American and French Revolutions. Once again, there are the astute characterizations and brilliant analyses of subject and theme that marked the earlier discussions of Temple, Addison, Steele, Pope, and Swift. Murray adds a further layer to an already nuanced history by using Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to add the Roman viewpoint to the mix. (Earlier, in his consideration of Temple's aesthetics, he had invoked Epicurus.) Murray closes Sharawadgi with the French Revolution because its excesses clearly showed the limits of "liberty in politics". The French had gone too far. According to Burke, the execution of Louis XVI "had merely cast absolutism into a new form: as Napoleon was to crown the Champs-Elysees with the arch commemorating his triumphal armies." When all is said and done, the word "sharawadgi" might as well be shazam for all of the power that Murray has invested it with. Sharawadgi came to England via Holland by word of mouth. And even though none of the principals ever actually saw a Japanese garden, what it represented was enough for them to chart a new course for themselves and their countrymen. With over fifty pages of notes, thick blue boards and white paper, Sharawadgi has the look and feel of a dissertation - which it is - but what sets this scholarly book apart from the other books on the shelf is its companionability and charm. Reading it, you feel that Murray is just one editor away from the history bestseller lists.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-07 00:00:00 Wayne Downey The Dragon Has Two Tongues was of minimal use for my essay, but fascinating in its own way. Glyn Jones' essays are as much reminiscence about himself, the world that made him, and the people he knew and the worlds that formed them. He has a lot of warm, humanising memories of Caradoc Evans, an inside view on Dylan Thomas, a deep admiration for all the men about whom he writes. He is writing about a genre or movement in literature that at the time was relatively looked down upon, it seems: Anglo-Welsh literature. He has to define this, which I think he does very well, and what makes one an Anglo-Welsh writer when one is writing in English. He puts the views of both sides here, the Welsh-language writers with their questioning of what audience the Anglo-Welsh writers had, and the view of the Anglo-Welsh authors making their own way. I think what he says, that, 'To me, anyone can be a Welshman who chooses to be so and is prepared to take the consequences,' is a very sound idea -- given that were I a writer I'd be aligned with the Anglo-Welsh, since I speak no Welsh and grew up in England, but from the very beginning asserted my identity as a Welsh person. The shortcomings of the volume are the hyper-masculinity of it, of course. He mentions Margiad Evans and Menna Gallie, for example, without ever making them come alive in the way he does the male authors of the tradition. Margiad Evans and Menna Gallie surely deserve as prominent a place in the tradition as the men. It's, as a whole, very easy to read, rarely bogged down in technical detail. Even where you haven't read the work he's writing about, it remains clear and interesting, which I can't say for many essay writers.