No Thoroughfare

First off, the complete works of an author as prolific as Dickens, all compiled into a single file, can be enough to crash a Kindle or Kindle app! But how else am I going to read Dickens’s plays? I actually do have a hard copy, but they’re in a little edition from the nineteenth century; the red leather is so brittle and flaky, patches of rust-colored dust cover clothes, furniture, and floor after even a short glance inside. So finicky Kindle version it is.

Secondly (second off?), these complete works collections available for $0.99 are fairly unreliable. Dickens wrote a play called No Thoroughfare in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and then teamed with his friend again to write a prose version of the story, but my “complete” works file contains only the prose version and yet groups it with the plays. (Who knows? Maybe the dramatic version is in there somewhere under the wrong title and grouped with speeches or poetry.)

Thirdly, I thought I had read the prose No Thoroughfare previously, but, as I went through it in recent days, I didn’t remember any of the story and was quite surprised to find that the “story” is actually longer than any of Dickens’s Christmas books. Maybe I just forgot it all, but maybe I hadn’t really read it before. In any case, I thought I was going to enjoy another one-sitting play but ended up reading a novella that took about three days.

I don’t know if I would recommend No Thoroughfare to anyone other than someone like me who just enjoys reading everything Dickens wrote. Its story of an adopted orphan trying to find his birth mother may resonate with readers today. But the book also contains a character who implicitly trusts the owner of a business because, well, you know, because entrepreneurs are naturally honest and hard-working. I believe Dickens when he says that people like this or the Cheerybles from Nicholas Nickleby truly existed and were known by him personally, but I understand that this kind of character doesn’t sit well with a culture that has lived through Bernie Madoff. It also involves a melodramatic fight scene on an Alpine cliff above a melting ice promontory and not just one or two but three wild Dickensian coincidences that are all essential to the workings of the plot. (One character continues to say, “The world is small,” as if the author knew he had to sell even nineteenth-century readers on the possibility of these freakish conjunctions.) Altogether, it’s just not what most people want to read now.

But I liked it.