Just finished Dickens' Dombey and Son, his longest novel. It is not great. It starts really well, with excellent writing, characters and descriptions. But about halfway through, it plateaus, and then coasts for a long time -- hundreds of pages -- and then ends. Oh, there is a little excitement with Edith and Mr. Carker toward the end, but this is too little, too late.

I think Dickens blew a chance to have a really exciting story by paying some attention to Walter after he sails. Walter could have had all sorts of interesting adventures, involving wild characters, as he sailed and then was shipwrecked, and rescued, etc. Similarly with Uncle Sol in his travels.

But, no. Dickens just has them go away, disappear, be taken for lost, and then has them simply show up near the end of the book, safe and sound, and they don't even tell us their stories. Quite disappointing.

Still, this, the best paragraph in the novel, is superb:

Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze smooths or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!

I will continue to read all of the novels of Dickens. So far, I've read the grey ones:

• Dombey and Son (1.95)
• David Copperfield (1.91)
• Bleak House (1.91)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1.86)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1.85)
• Little Dorrit (1.85)
• Our Mutual Friend (1.83)
• Pickwick Papers (1.72)
• Barnaby Rudge (1.41)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1.19)
• Great Expectations (1.01)
• Oliver Twist (0.91)
• A Tale of Two Cities (0.78)
• Hard Times (0.58)

The numbers are proportional to the length of the book (they should be
approximately the number of characters in the novel, in millions).

Only four left.

I just finished reading Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens. I liked it pretty well, and read it faster than I usually read his works. Jenny Wren is certainly the most interesting character, but the plot is really the interesting element in this one, with more twists and dark passages than some of his novels.

My favorite sentence from the book: "Mr Wegg pursued the biography of that eminent man through its various phases of avarice and dirt, through Miss Dancer's death on a sick regimen of cold dumpling, and through Mr Dancer's keeping his rags together with a hayband, and warming his dinner by sitting upon it, down to the consolatory incident of his dying naked in a sack. "

Thus, I am one novel closer to reading all of Dickens' novels.

So far, I've read the grey ones:

• Dombey and Son (1.95)
• David Copperfield (1.91)
• Bleak House (1.91)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1.86)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1.85)
• Little Dorrit (1.85)
• Our Mutual Friend (1.83)
• Pickwick Papers (1.72)
• Barnaby Rudge (1.41)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1.19)
• Great Expectations (1.01)
• Oliver Twist (0.91)
• A Tale of Two Cities (0.78)
• Hard Times (0.58)

The numbers are proportional to the length of the book (they should be
approximately the number of characters in the novel, in millions).

I probably won't read another until next summer; there are other things I'd like to read now.

I've been wanting to try some multidimensional scaling since 1998, and now I've tried it.

Multidimensional scaling is this fantastic concept whereby "objects" which you can place in a (possibly) highly dimensional space (i.e., to each object you can associate a (perhaps large) finite set of values) can be approximately placed into a lower-dimensional space for better visualization and perhaps to get a better understanding of the really important features that distinguish the objects. The crux is to generate a set of distances between your objects. From this set of distances, after a dimension is chosen (say, 2), the objects are placed into a two-dimensional space as best as possible, in the sense that the distance information is as accurately represented by the two-dimensional coordinates as possible.

I first encountered this idea in Larry Polansky's seminar on timbre at Dartmouth, in 1997 or 1998, while I was wallowing in unemployment before getting my first post-PhD job. The example I most remember is a study done in which people were played pairs of sounds and asked to rate how "similar" the sounds were (i.e., to specify a distance between pairs of sounds). Run through the MDS process, a two-dimensional model was found to be reasonably accurate. The fun part is to then figure out what, if anything, those two dimensions represent. In the case of the sounds, one of the dimensions seemed to be attack time, and I forget what the other was (I'll have to fill this in later).

Since then, I've been meaning to try MDS out. I recently found out that the horribly named statistics software R does MDS, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. But what to try it on? I decided I would measure the letter frequencies in a bunch of Dickens novels. I then defined the distance between Dickens novels to be the euclidean distance based on these frequencies (i.e. the square root of the sum of the squares of the differences in frequency for each letter). Here is the result!

Not too bad! A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers are definitely the outliers. I don't exactly know why, but here is a table with some data:

I created this table to show the maximum and minimum frequency of occurrence of each letter in Dickens novels.

You can see that A Christmas Carol has a number of extreme letter frequencies. This could just be due to its shortness: I imagine longer works might tend to smooth out their frequencies. Pickwick Papers also has a number of extremes; this is Dickens first novel, so perhaps he was using odd choices of letters. Or maybe it just that the work "Pickwick" appears alot, and this might explain the high occurrence of the letters c, k, and p, though why Great Expectations is more dense in 'w', I have no idea.

I finished reading Bleak House the other day. I only liked it so-so, which isn't good for a 900 page novel. The characters were a little too smooth, and not quirky enough for me. Plus the story arc really didn't finish in a very interesting way.

Still, I continue with my project to read all of Dickens' novels.

So far, I've read the grey ones:

• Dombey and Son (1.95)
• David Copperfield (1.91)
• Bleak House (1.91)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1.86)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1.85)
• Little Dorrit (1.85)
• Our Mutual Friends (1.83)
• Pickwick Papers (1.72)
• Barnaby Rudge (1.41)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1.19)
• Great Expectations (1.01)
• Oliver Twist (0.91)
• A Tale of Two Cities (0.78)
• Hard Times (0.58)

The numbers are proportional to the length of the book (they should be
approximately the number of characters in the novel, in millions).

What to read next? I'm thinking perhaps Nicholas Nickleby, since a lot of people like it a lot. I'm saving A Tale of Two Cities for last since it's the shortest. I know I have a copy of Our Mutual Friend, so that might be a good one. In any case, I'm not going to start until I've read a few other things on my "to read" list.

Dickens paragraph of the day:

Much mighty speech-making there has been, both in and out of Parliament, concerning Tom, and much wrathful disputation how Tom shall be got right. Whether he shall be put into the main road by constables, or by beadles, or by bell-ringing, or by force of figures, or by correct principles of taste, or by high church, or by low church, or by no church; whether he shall be set to splitting trusses of polemical straws with the crooked knife of his mind or whether he shall be put to stone-breaking instead. In the midst of which dust and noise there is but one thing perfectly clear, to wit, that Tom only may and can, or shall and will, be reclaimed according to somebody's theory but nobody's practice. And in the hopeful meantime, Tom goes to perdition head foremost in his old determined spirit.

From Bleak House.

I'm reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens, part of my ongoing project to read all of his novels. I just read this awesome list:

The old man, looking up at the cages [of birds] after another look at us, went through the list.
"Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. That's the whole collection," said the old man, "all cooped up together, by my noble and learned brother."

I finished reading The Pickwick Papers last night. I have to say, it was one of my least favorite Dickens novels so far. I really don't think Dickens did a good job of delineating the characters (e.g., I couldn't tell you the difference between Mr. Winkle, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Tupman). Sam Weller is, of course, an excellent character, and the best feature of the book.

It took me outrageously long to read this, since I didn't like it very much, so I wasn't drawn to it, and I restarted at least once. As I continue with my Dickens project, I really hope I have better luck with his other novels.

So far, I've read the grey ones:

• Dombey and Son (1.95)
• David Copperfield (1.91)
• Bleak House (1.91)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1.86)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1.85)
• Little Dorrit (1.85)
• Our Mutual Friends (1.83)
• Pickwick Papers (1.72)
• Barnaby Rudge (1.41)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1.19)
• Great Expectations (1.01)
• Oliver Twist (0.91)
• A Tale of Two Cities (0.78)
• Hard Times (0.58)

The numbers are proportional to the length of the book (they should be
approximately the number of characters in the novel, in millions).

What should I read next? I think Bleak House, since I've been wanting to read that for some time, but I'm going to take a break, and maybe start it in the fall. I've got a stack of other things to read, and I do seem to be able to get some reading done in the summer while I'm not working.

The Pickwick Papers contains what seems to me Dickens' closest approach to an erotic passage that I've come across, at the end of chapter 25:

'Get your hat, Sam,' said Mr. Pickwick.

'It's below stairs, Sir,' said Sam, and he ran down after it.

Now, there was nobody in the kitchen, but the pretty housemaid; and as
Sam's hat was mislaid, he had to look for it, and the pretty housemaid
lighted him. They had to look all over the place for the hat. The pretty
housemaid, in her anxiety to find it, went down on her knees, and turned
over all the things that were heaped together in a little corner by the
door. It was an awkward corner. You couldn't get at it without shutting
the door first.

'Here it is,' said the pretty housemaid. 'This is it, ain't it?'

'Let me look,' said Sam.

The pretty housemaid had stood the candle on the floor; and, as it gave
a very dim light, Sam was obliged to go down on HIS knees before he
could see whether it really was his own hat or not. It was a remarkably
small corner, and so--it was nobody's fault but the man's who built
the house--Sam and the pretty housemaid were necessarily very close
together.

'Yes, this is it,' said Sam. 'Good-bye!'

'Good-bye!' said the pretty housemaid.

'Good-bye!' said Sam; and as he said it, he dropped the hat that had
cost so much trouble in looking for.

'How awkward you are,' said the pretty housemaid. 'You'll lose it again,
if you don't take care.'

So just to prevent his losing it again, she put it on for him.

Whether it was that the pretty housemaid's face looked prettier still,
when it was raised towards Sam's, or whether it was the accidental
consequence of their being so near to each other, is matter of
uncertainty to this day; but Sam kissed her.

'You don't mean to say you did that on purpose,' said the pretty
housemaid, blushing.

'No, I didn't then,' said Sam; 'but I will now.'

So he kissed her again. 'Sam!' said Mr. Pickwick, calling over the
banisters.

'Coming, Sir,' replied Sam, running upstairs.

'How long you have been!' said Mr. Pickwick.

'There was something behind the door, Sir, which perwented our getting
it open, for ever so long, Sir,' replied Sam.

And this was the first passage of Mr. Weller's first love.

As Dickens is a very colorful author, and often writes about the simple joys and pleasures of life, I'm sure he had such thoughts on his mind often, but, writing for a very wide and general audience, he had to restrain himself. This is as far in a certain direction as I've ever seen him go.

Today I finished reading Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. I have a project going in which I am attempting to read every novel by Dickens. I expect to read about one novel per year, as they are quite time consuming. His novels, by length, are

• Dombey and Son (1.95)
• David Copperfield (1.91)
• Bleak House (1.91)
• Nicholas Nickleby (1.86)
• Martin Chuzzlewit (1.85)
• Little Dorrit (1.85)
• Our Mutual Friends (1.83)
• Pickwick Papers (1.72)
• Barnaby Rudge (1.41)
• The Old Curiosity Shop (1.19)
• Great Expectations (1.01)
• Oliver Twist (0.91)
• A Tale of Two Cities (0.78)
• Hard Times (0.58)

I've read the grey titles. The numbers are proportional to the length of the book (they should be
approximately the number of characters in the novel, in millions).

I liked Little Dorrit quite a bit. I especially liked the ending, the last 50 pages or so. As always in Dickens, there are some unexplainable coincidences and happenings. But I've come to expect that, so it doesn't bother me. I always love the tone, the spirit of his writing, and his words are often beautiful.

On a silly note, here is the shortest pangrammatic window in Little Dorrit:

'Why, mother, no,' returned Mr Meagles, 'not exactly there. I
can't quite leave it there; I must say just half-a-dozen words
more. Mrs Gowan, I hope I am not over-sensitive. I believe I
don't look it.'

What to read next? I think Our Mutual Friend or Pickwick Papers, since I picked up copies of those two at the last Friends of the Seattle Library sale. I have A Tale of Two Cities, but it's so short, I think I should save that for much later.