Tale for a Trail

Somehow we acquired a recording of Great Expectations. Complete in 14 CDs, I imported the story into my laptop and then exported it onto my iPod. For the last couple of weeks I have listened to the whole thing, mostly while taking my morning walk on the Quinnipiac Gorge Linear Trail.

I loved the story.

This is a bit to my surprise, since I didn’t expect to like it at all.

How I wish my father were around to discuss this book with me. He was a great Dickens admirer. He loved A Christmas Carol, of course, and would describe how that tale had been retold by Choate’s headmaster – in a specially redacted version – while he was a student. We made it a Church family tradition to watch the Alistair Sim version each Christmas, once it became available in remastered video tape and then DVD. Its memorable lines – “are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?”are etched in our collective consciousness.

Dad didn’t limit his Dickens to the familiar works, though. I think he loved Chuzzlewit, Drood, Twist, and others, as well as the films based on these novels.

As a kid, I had difficulty getting into Dickens. I read Tale of Two Cities – largely because my cousin Roger Squire came home from prep school able to recite its first and last two paragraphs. This was a feat I felt challenged to duplicate, and one I can still perform, almost. While I read and enjoyed the tale, my comprehension was a bit shallow at that period of my education.

Dad read David Copperfield aloud. I loved that and loved listening to him emote. He was superlative in his furious scorn when he got to the wonderful scene when Aunt Betsy chases Mr. and Miss Murdstone off her front lawn with a broom when they come to try to retrieve David. We stopped at that point. I thought it was the end.

Several years later at prep school myself, I decided to read David Copperfield as one of my elective books for English. It required a short book report upon completion and I thought this would be an easy choice, seeing as I’d already read the book. As was my wont, I waited until the last week to reread the volume. When I came to the end and read of that tremendously satisfying scene with Aunt Betsy, I was dismayed to read, at the end of the text, “David Copperfield continues in volume two and three.”

Frantically I called home to have these hitherto unsuspected volumes parcel posted a.s.a.p. and I did manage to get through the remainder of the novel. But Dickens suffered as a result. I decided that the author really should have ended Copperfield with Aunt Betsy.

Dad had tried to read Great Expectations to me, but at an age when I could hardly appreciate Pip and the convict, much less the relationship with Miss Haviasham (what in the world was she about?) and Estella. I gave it up. The same thing happened years later when I tried again.

So it was much to my surprise that I found this reading of Great Expectations to be vastly entertaining, not to mention moving and suspenseful and half a dozen other positive adjectives. It was pretty satisfying from beginning to end, and Dickens was a master of pathos. He loved to read his works aloud to audiences. He loved to make people cry. And I did.

The only unsatisfying aspect is that, having finally read this book, Dad isn’t around to share it with. So, I guess, this is my way of saying, as perhaps Dickens repeatedly had Joe Gargery say to Pip, “Dear Boy, I finally saw the light and realized, too late, old man, what you were trying to show me.”