WTD?

I just don't know what I think of Charles Dickens.  I want to like him. I really do, because the man can turn a phrase and his description is some of the best out there.  But seriously, I am 500 pages into Bleak House and the plot is still maddeningly obscure.  It is like he got so wound up in laughing at the creation of the ridiculous Messrs. Boodle, Coodle, Doodle, Foodle…all the way down to Zoodle that he forgot he was writing a story about Esther Summerson and her mysterious parentage.  (At least, I think that is what the story is about--but I could be completely mistaken because chapters on end will pass without the slightest mention of her.)  Mr. Guppy, Mr. Snagsby, the Turveydrops and goodness-knows-who else are all so elaborately painted that I have forgotten their relation to Miss Summerson completely by the time their introduction has run its course.  Or, perhaps I never knew their importance.  Perhaps it was never revealed--and that I erroneously assumed I had missed the major connection that would bring all of these detailed descriptions into focus.  I simply don't know.  There has been an cavalcade of characters (each painstakingly characterized) with little to no context of why I should care about them.  They appear, almost as though the plot of Bleak House might be about them entirely; rattle on for tens of pages, then recede back into the mists having yet to make a secondary appearance.  Bleak House is one of those books that make me feel like a careless and inattentive reader.  As though I couldn't be bothered to remember from one chapter to the next who everybody is and why they matter--putting pay to the phrase "What the dickens?"

But Dickens still has about 500 pages left to wrap it neatly up together and so I will withhold my yay or nay opinion until the last page.  However, my previous criticism of the classics needing more editing still stands.  A new writer would never get away with that sort of thing today.  The feedback is always to tighten the plot, the dialogue, the pacing--so that everything included serves to advance your story.  This doesn't seem to have been as important back in Victoria's day; which brings me to another book I read, Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters, by N. John Hall.  Correspondence is an epistolatory novel which means it is written in the form of letters.  It is the story of a man who inherits a collection of letters written by several famous Victorian authors and through reading them, becomes enamoured with the writers and their works.  Correspondence, therefore, is a love letter to the Victorian writers.  Unfortunately, having recently slogged my way through George Eliot's Middlemarch and Charlotte Bronte's Villette and finding them much encumbered with tangential and incidental information that did little to serve or advance their respective plots--I couldn't share Hall's enthusiasm for the Victorians.  But I recently read in an article in Maclean's magazine which stated that our collective I.Q's have gone down fourteen points since Victorian times. So, perhaps Dickens et al. just make me feel like an inattentive and stupid reader because I am one.