Another door into a place where there ordinarily isn't a door! Yesterday there was an old woman who lived under a hill. Today, because I found myself paging through My Book House books, which hold a treasure-trove of memories for me, I came upon this illustration of a houseboat.
I was quite taken by surprise to find this houseboat is in a whole chapter from David Copperfield! Is this where my love of Dickens first began? David has gone to Yarmouth to spend a fortnight in a house by the sea. But he cannot see any house, only an old boat "high and dry on the ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and smoking very cosily."
Then he learns that this old boat is the house. Later, inside the houseboat and after tea, David (or Dickens) says:
To hear the wind getting up out at sea, to know the fog was creeping over the desolate flat outside, and to look at the fire, and think that there was no house near but this one, and this one a boat, was like enchantment.
Of course, David falls in love with Little Em'ly, they put some stranded starfish back into the water, but in the end he must leave her, promising he will write to her: "I kept that promise afterwards in letters larger than those in which apartments are usually announced as being to let." Oh, I can just see those letters, enormous on the page in his child-size rendition of the alphabet.
I found myself taken aback at how innocent Dickens is in his writing.
This little chapter is slightly abridged, but every word is so sweet, so simple, so very childlike. And yet Dickens was not writing for children; he was writing for adults. And I cannot help but wonder if it is an improvement in literature when writers write stories for adults that are horrendously inappropriate for children to read.
I mean, is it really good for adults to read the things we read? I'm not for censorship, but I'm just wondering . . .
Anyway, it seems to me that both children and grown-ups, equally, want to open this little door into this little boat and wander around its interior:
There was a table, and a Dutch clock, and a chest of drawers, and on the chest of drawers there was a tea-tray with a painting on it of a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child who was trundling a hoop. The tray was kept from falling down, by a Bible, and the tray, if it had tumbled down, would have smashed a quantity of cups and saucers and a teapot.
If you love Dickens as much as I do, I have added below how in such a tiny handful of words, he invokes the whole character of Mrs. Gummidge:
It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind.
Mrs. Gummidge's peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the easiest, but it didn't suit her that day. She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning what she called "the creeps in her back." At last, she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was "a lone lorn creetur' and every think went contrairy with her."
"It is certainly very cold," said Peggotty. "Everybody must feel it."
"I feel it more than other people," said Mrs. Gummidge.
Ahhhhh, yes, I have known a Mrs. Gummidge or two, and honestly, there are days when I myself feel that I feel it more than other people, too, and every "think" seems to be going very contrary with me, although I don't want anyone to know. But isn't it wonderful to have a Mrs. Gummidge in our repertoire of characters of the world, to put a name and a face to these sad forlorn feelings?
And isn't it particularly wonderful to find that doorway in that boat and walk around inside, if only for a little while?
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