A Dickens of a fiction fan
QUESTION Do we know what Charles Dickens liked to read? CHARLES DICKENS was a voracious reader. In his novels you can find references to his favourite authors. He was also a champion of new writers, many of whom he serialised in his magazine, All The Year Round.
Born in Portsmouth on February 7, 1812, to John and Elizabeth Dickens, he was the second of eight children. His nursemaid, Mary Weller, helped inspire his passion for fiction.
Her bedtime stories featured characters such as Captain Murderer, who made pies out of his wives. She also introduced him to fairy tales. These were the original dark tales of the Brothers Grimm, not the sanitised versions re-written by the moralising Victorians.
As a young man, Dickens’ favourite works were Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and Arabian Nights — all picaresque novels composed of a series of loosely linked adventures, a format evident in his early works.
Dickens was a lifelong devotee of William Shakespeare and in 1838 made a pilgrimage with friends to the Bard’s birthplace in Stratfordupon-Avon, near Birmingham.
In his letters, he writes of how the group ‘sat down in the room where Shakespeare was born, and left our autographs and read those of other people and so forth’.
The visitors’ book with Dickens’s signature is on display in Stratford.
In Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), Dickens showed his strength of feeling about this visit in his character Mrs Wititterly: ‘I don’t know how it is, but after you’ve seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one.’
Dickens admired the social realism of Elizabeth Gaskell (18101865) and called her his ‘dear Scheherazade’ — the legendary Persian queen and storyteller of One Thousand And One Nights. He serialised her novels Cranford and North And South in All The Year Round.
He had a close bond with Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), whose most successful novels, The Woman In White and The Moonstone, were serialised in the magazine. They were companions on travels abroad and collaborated on plays such as The Frozen Deep. Dickens also admired the works of William Makepeace Thackeray (18111863), the celebrated author of Vanity Fair. They became friends, but after a quarrel they didn’t speak for years..
Dickens praised the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (18031873), a prolific author and playwright, and Sir Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the essayist and social political commentator.
He was on good terms with George Henry Lewes, the partner of Marian Evans, aka George Eliot. He greatly admired Eliot’s Adam Bede, published in 1859, and offered to serialise her next book, The Mill On The Floss, but she turned him down. Davin Finch, Matlock, Derbys. QUESTION Was Star Wars the first film to use an opening scroll to set the scene? WHILE Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope in 1977 was the first feature film to use what is called an opening crawl sequence — which begins ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .’ — the director George Lucas was inspired by the popular motion picture serials of the Thirties, such as Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939), both starring Buster Crabbe. These forerunners of today’s serialised TV dramas had been around since the early days of cinema.
Cliffhangers were used to ensure the audience came back for the next instalment to find out the latest plot twists and how the hero or heroine had escaped from the previous week’s peril.
An opening crawl was used to set the scene and remind cinemagoers what had happened the week before.
Ian F. Gower, Malvern, Worcs. QUESTION My grandfather was a Garda superintendent in the 1950s in Connemara, and in around 1953, he was visited by the head of Scotland Yard. Was it a common occurrence at the time for the head of Scotland Yard to visit Ireland?
IT was highly unusual then for the head of Scotland Yard, or New Scotland Yard, to give the force its correct title, to visit anyone at senior level in the gardaí, even in a private capacity, and that’s still the case today.
New Scotland Yard is London’s metropolitan police force, covering the greater London area, but not the city of London, which has its own force. The Yard was formed in 1829 and ever since, it had always had a special place in popular culture. To this day, whenever people think of a police force in Britain, it’s usually New Scotland Yard that comes to mind.
But in the 1950s, co-operation between the gardaí and crosschannel police forces was so limited as to have been virtually nonexistent. So there must have been a strong personal bond between the correspondent’s grandfather, then a Garda superintendent, and the head of New Scotland Yard.
It’s also highly unlikely that such a meeting would have been arranged officially, so in all proba- bility, the head of New Scotland Yard might have come to the West of Ireland in a personal capacity only, say on a fishing holiday, and while in Connemara met up on an informal basis with the local Garda superintendent.
Although the correspondent doesn’t give an exact date for the meeting, it’s very likely that the Commissioner concerned was John Nott-Bower. He held the position between 1953 and 1958, the first career police officer to head New Scotland Yard. The current commissioner, Cressida Dick, was appointed in April, 2017, the first woman to hold the most senior police job in Britain.
Not only was liaison between the gardaí and cross-channel police forces virtually non-existent for many decades, but contacts between the gardaí and the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland were rare. The RUC was disbanded in 2001 and replaced with the cross-community Police Service of Northern Ireland.
After the PSNI was set up, cooperation with the gardaí started to improve. In 2010, when the new cross-border policing strategy was introduced, it was said the depth and strength of co-operation between the two police forces on this island was unprecedented.