THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

I've started reading the early Charles Dickens novel THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP.  It's Dickens at his most shamelessly melodramatic.  It's rather hit & miss:  the first few chapters have a narrator character, but then he gets replaced with conventional third-person narration.  Mr. Quilp is an obvious but gleefully written dwarf villain. (Visually grotesque bad guys are a long cultural tradition, from Shakespeare to Dick Tracy.)

There's a funny chapter when Little Nell's whelpish brother has proposed to his friend Dick Sniveller that he'll pressure her into eventually marrying Dick, and the only problem is that Dick already has a girlfriend called Sophie Wackles.  So he goes to a social event at a girl's school run by Sophie and her mother and sisters, planning to act jealous and dump her.  And there's also a market gardener there who Sophie's older sister and mother want her to marry instead... It's like something from a different book, and a better one.

I wish I could tell Mother about this book:  that's the sort of thing she liked hearing about.  I wonder if my writing on this subject seems emotionally distant, like Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING which I happened to read recently. (I want to read the sequel, about her daughter's death.)

I had an unusual dream last night.  It took place at Broadmoor, the British institution for the criminally insane whose inmates have included psychopaths like one of the Kray brothers and one of the Moors Murderers. (Their partners were judged sane and ended up in conventional prison.) My parents were there to babysit some children, but I remembered that Mother was dead, and she suddenly disappeared from the scene.

Maybe Broadmoor in this dream was the world of the living, full of crazy people and dangerous people.  And maybe babysitting those kids meant raising me and my siblings.  And of course Mother's sudden disappearance was her death.