The Haunting of Charles Dickens
The Haunting of Charles Dickens
Lewis Buzbee
Illustr. Greg Ruth
Ages 10+
Hardcover, 368 pages, illustrated
Feiwel & Friends
ISBN 978-0312382568
Pre-order the book (Available October 2010)
When we meet Meg Pickel, her brother Orion has been missing for six months. It is this harrowing fact that sends a sleepless Meg out into the night in a kind of aimless reverie. When she encounters a family friend, the great author Charles Dickens, also wandering the rooftops, both insomniacs find themselves spying on a seance taking place inside Satis House, which yields an unexpected clue as to her brother’s disappearance.
Lovers of Dickens will recognize Buzbee’s Satis House as the fictional offspring of Miss Havisham’s dilapidated mansion in Dickens’ novel, Great Expectations. This recognition is the beginning of many to come in The Haunting, which launches readers on a tour of Dickens’ London that not only teaches a great deal about letterpress printing and the construction of the Underground Railway (now known as The Tube) but also about the class system, and the ill treatment of child workers in that day.
Thought-provoking on many subjects, the book doesn’t shy away from the dark side of Old London. Like a Dickens tale, Buzbee’s Haunting lends the reader the author’s insatiable appetite for the details of the city — by turns noisy, mystical, intriguing, dangerous and even cruel. Children toiling in underground workhouses, thieves skulking in dark bars, kidnappers and con artists — all delivered from the point of view of Meg Pickel, a courageous, warm-hearted and serious investigative journalist-in-the-making.
There’s a lighter side to this novel as well. Suffice it to say that Beatles fans should take note when Meg Pickel makes her way down Penny Lane. Masterful illustrations by über-cool comic (and music video) artist Greg Ruth bring a modern edge to Buzbee’s Old London, both the dark and the light.
The novel is set in 1862, the Silver Jubilee year of the reign of Queen Victoria and boasts a wealth of 19th-century details in both settings and language. Protagonist Meg Pickel prefers her tea Tiff (tea first), not Miff (milk first), and characters make their way through the dark with match-lit “rush-lights.” Chapter titles honor the writing style of Charles Dickens, as do words hyphenated as Dickens would have done: “sleep-walker,” “work-house.” But the homage doesn’t stop there — witness this passage, roiling with industry:
“. . . the two-wheeled Hansom cabs stopped and started, weaved and darted, delivering their fares only to pick up others and fly away again. On the sidewalks, the wheeled carts of vendors — flat-fish, breakfast rolls, coffee, baked potatoes — strolled up and down, and between the carts and the storefronts, hurried and harried Londoners weaved in and around one another.”
It’s a tricky thing to bestow the power of a protagonist on a young girl of the 19th century, but Buzbee deftly accomplishes it, despite having to concede that “It is generally accepted of reality that there are fields of endeavor suited to the male sex and fields of endeavor suited to the female sex.” To strike a tone of gender equality true to the time period, the narrator muses,
“Perhaps there will come a time — can we strain our minds to imagine a future one hundred, even two hundred years hence? — in which women and men will compete for the same positions of skill and adventure. But that time is not now.”
Nevertheless, it is Meg Pickel’s curiosity, wit, and compassion that drive this story forward. In writing The Haunting, the author sets out to bring a bit of gender balance to Dickens’ young all-male heroes, as though certain that Dickens himself would have more prominently featured young girls in his novels, had he been given a hundred more years to get used to the idea.
Whether in children’s literature or books for adults, a protagonist must possess extraordinary qualities, and true to form, Meg Pickel is no average girl. Only a genuine mystery sleuth would venture out for a walk on the rooftops at night! And on more than one occasion Meg questions the efficacy of dresses and petticoats. Although Meg knows well enough how to play the part of a proper young girl of the 19th century, she does so only if and when it serves her primary purpose: to find her missing brother.
Along the way our heroine discovers, and vows to end, the tragic abuse of press-ganged child workers in the dark and hidden parts of London. When it becomes clear to both Meg and Mr. Dickens that it is futile to attack the problem head-on, they rely on the power of the written word to weave worlds and expose wrongs, as well as (for good or ill) to say one thing while seeming to say another:
“Yes, Meg. You’ve nailed it down. Words, as you well know, may expose the world as it truly is. Or they may be used to paint a world that never was nor will be. Words reveal and conceal, and sometimes both.”
Lewis Buzbee is also the author of the extremely well-made YA mystery Steinbeck’s Ghost (reviewed here earlier) and The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, the award-winning memoir of a confirmed bibliophile.
Teachers, take note: Like Steinbeck’s Ghost, The Haunting of Charles Dickens will compel young readers to seek out works by the writer honored in its title. To thoroughly appreciate the delightful collection of literary allusions in the novel, I’d suggest looking into Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities, at the very least. I can easily imagine a classroom contest made out of locating these allusions, with a smartly bound copy of one of these classics awarded as a prize.
Here’s a trailer of the 1946 version of the film “Great Expectations” which suitably evokes the settings revisited in Buzbee’s rich homage, The Haunting of Charles Dickens:
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Ceci Miller is co-publisher of BooktiMookti Press, home of the Runt Farm chapter book series. She is also a children’s author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. Ceci Miller’s recent book projects
