Last week singing songs from Oliver! This week we’re moving on to the Demon Barber of Fleet Street….
Summary
Dodger and Solomon have an evening walk, which leads to Dodger learning that there are other planets and that the Earth goes around the sun. The next morning he wakes and Solomon makes him shine his shoes and go get a haircut. This leads Dodger to Sweeney Todd in Fleet Street, who no sooner has Dodger in his chair than he begins to have a PTSD flashback to his time in a war. Dodger speaks gently to him and disarms him, not realizing that he’s being observed by peelers, and is suddenly lauded as a hero who stopped a terrible murderer; the man’s basement contains six dead men. Charlie arrives and tells everyone that Dodger recently saved the Chronicle staff in a similar fashion; when Dodger protests back at his offices, Charlie promises to put his account of Todd into the paper when he writes up the article. Dodger goes to the Mayhews to take Simplicity for her walk with Mrs. Sharples the housekeeper as their chaperone. He realizes they’re being followed and corners the spy, who turns out to be Dirty Benjamin. Dodger finds out that other folks are looking for him and Simplicity. He threatens Ben into staying silent, then tells the Mayhews that they need to move Simplicity for her safety and takes her to the Chronicle to get Charlie’s help.
It turns out Charlie isn’t there, and they’re directed to the Houses of Parliament where he’s reporting for the day. Dodger is given some trouble when trying to get in, but Benjamin Disraeli shows up and insists on letting them inside. Charlie arrives and they talk with him and Disraeli about Simplicity’s predicament: She married a young prince of one of the German countries, not knowing that doing so would prevent him from making a political marriage. As a result she has angered the man’s father, who wants the marriage erased; so far everyone who was witness to it has met an untimely death. Dodger insists that the government cannot hand her over despite their desire to do so, and Charlie suggests that she stay with their friend Angela Burdett-Coutts for the time being. They bring her to the woman’s house, and Dodger almost catches the squeaking coach on the way home but loses it, getting his suit soiled in the process. Charlie finds him close to home and gives him the money raised by London for his “heroics.” Dodger brings it back to Solomon, who tells him that he must put it into a bank, and worries that he only has one day to teach Dodger enough manners for their dinner at Angela’s tomorrow. When Dodger walks Onan that night, someone puts a knife to his throat on behalf of Sharp Bob.
The knifeman turns out to be one of the men who beat Simplicity (the other is dead), and knowing that enrages Dodger enough to easily get the drop on him and turn the tables. He lets the street know everything’s okay, drags the man off his patch, and gives his money to a nearby poor woman. The next day, he and Solomon go to the bank owned by Angela’s family and get a bank account with a very good interest rate, then Dodger goes to be drawn by the artist at Punch magazine. Next they head to a Turkish bath and get massages while Solomon tells Dodger how things are changing for him, and what he might have to do and become. They get into a cab, and Dodger hears that squeaky-wheeled cart again, but they lose it. Solomon and Dodger head to Savile Row to see Izzy, who knows Solomon and will give them a deal on a much better suit for Dodger. Then they head to St. James to get Dodger a better hat, and then to a barber for a haircut and shave. (Dodger gets cut by the barber when Solomon mentions the Todd business to the poor man.) They go home and change, with Solomon in finery Dodger has never seen, plus a Freemasons medallion. They head to Angela’s party.
Once they’ve arrived, Disraeli makes a little jibe at Dodger for moving back and forth between gentleman and tosher, causing Dodger to issue a little challenge that Charlie picks up, suggesting Benjamin follow him into the sewers a couple days from now and learn about them. Everyone is at the party, including Sir Robert Peel, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and more. Angela engineers it so that Dodger is looking after her “cousin,” Simplicity, and Dodger finds a moment to tell her that he thinks he has a plan to keep her safe permanently. He makes good small talk during the meal, and gets cornered by Peel who guides him to the toilets halfway through dinner. It turns out Sharp Bob is dead and two men claim Dodger did it. Peel knows this isn’t the case because his men know the two men in question to be liars, but he sees how complex this business is getting. He believes Dodger can be the one to fix it, and warns him not to break the law, but that the law can sometimes be flexible. Angela later tells Dodger that he must learn to read; to help motivate him, she wants him to attend the theatre with herself and Simplicity that following night. Joseph Bazalgette asks if he can join in the sewer expedition with Disraeli, which Dodger agrees to. Before the night is out, Angela gives Dodger an address where he might “teach someone a lesson.”
Commentary
Uh…
I was unprepared for a segment where Solomon talked about his arguments with God over the doctrine stating that other living beings don’t have souls because his dog saved him from an anti-Semitic attack when he was a puppy and it left the dog disabled? Not to be overfamiliar, but, Terry. Terry, please, I miss my dog so much, he’s only been gone five months, I can’t handle this right now.
Gotta drag myself out of an emotional pit before I can address anything else, hang on.
The inclusion of Sweeney Todd here is another attempt at reconsidering the plights of characters who are framed largely as monsters. Though I will always be preferential toward the musical at every available turn, the thought to give Todd reasons for committing murder that fall well beyond his penny dreadful beginnings plays into one of the main themes the book builds up: Dodger is capable of helping out in these dangerous situations because he knows that all of the world’s poor and destitute are people. He can talk down the guy holding up the paper because he knows who the man is and that he’s worse for drink; he saves Simplicity because two men are beating on a helpless young woman in his territory; he helps the flower girls because he knows they’re being taken advantage of by wealthier men; he is capable of stopping Todd because he understands the PSTD flashback for what it is and empathizes with the barber in that moment.
The peelers see a helpless young man standing up to a cold-blooded murderer. In reality, a young man who has seen enough of life’s difficulties connects with another man who has been failed by his society. This book is all about that interplay between these layers of class, and everyone has their own ideas about how that interplay should go, but Dodger’s perspective is, by necessity, the most guileless.
It is interesting watching Dodger receive benefactors from all corners and what motivates the involvement of each. From Dodger’s perspective, most of them do it because it makes them feel better for having more while others don’t, and he’s largely right about that. In the case of Henry and Charlie, there’s an element of activism in that, as we know historically that Dickens used his writing to draw attention to numerous horrors in his country. But the questions of what divides those who have a great deal from those who do not is ever-present. Solomon tries to make sense of it when he tells Dodger:
“Money makes people rich; it is a fallacy to think that it makes them better, or even that it makes them worse. People are what they do, and what they leave behind.”
It is a sure thing that Solomon believes this, and probably most people do. The latter half of the statement are certainly words to live by. However, it is also true that there have been numerous studies on the way that wealth affects the human brain, and that the findings are startling and frankly depressing: Not only is there evidence that people who have more generally give a smaller percentage of what they have away to charitable causes, but it’s also been found that those with considerable wealth tend to believe that they gained it entirely through their own hard work, while privilege—of birth country, of class, of family wealth—never enters their mind. And this is just scraping the surface of what the research indicates about those with wealth.
All of which is to say, it’s probably good for Solomon to believe that money doesn’t change a person. In some cases, perhaps it doesn’t, but that’s not, by and large, what seems to be true.
Another major theme of the book is obviously thinking on what makes up identities. While it’s easy to get caught up in Dodger’s transformation physically, with the clothes, the haircut, and so on, Dodger himself is thinking of this more deeply:
But it was all a show, a game… and when he was not Dodger, he sometimes wondered who he really was. Dodger, he thought, was a lot stronger than he was.
The persona he’s made for himself is already its own construction, and it’s changing as he makes these friends and works out this mystery. He rightfully wonders where his true identity lies and whether or not it serves him. Which seems like a very healthy psychological barrier to erect when you’ve spent a decent portion of your life in poverty or only just above water.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Charlie says of Simplicity’s plight, “Perhaps we could smuggle her onto a boat to the Americas or possibly Australia, although this is me now thinking as a novelist.” And I grumbled to myself because that’s exactly what I had been thinking of as a solution. Shut up, Charlie.
- I had never once in my life encountered the word firkytoodle, so I had to go looking that one up. You can find it listed in an 1873 slang dictionary, and apparently it means “to cuddle or fondle amorously.” So, you know, time to bring that one back.
- After a good haggle between them over the hat, Solomon asks Dodger if he’s sure he wasn’t born Jewish, to which Dodger responds “No. I’ve looked.” I snorted. Genuinely, that’s a good one.
Pratchettisms
All was calm and placid—but you knew that this was merely the shift change, because the night people followed the day people as, well, night follows day, although day, generally speaking, doesn’t pick night’s pockets.
It seemed to Dodger that everything he was told by Solomon stuck him like a silver pin, which didn’t hurt but filled him up with a sort of fuzz.
The little room was silent and dark, apart from the slight snoring of Solomon, the grey light that managed to filter through the dirty window, and the smell of Onan, which in some peculiar way could almost be heard.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Mr. Todd hadn’t tried to ignore it by pretending to be cheerful; it was like putting rouge on a skull.
One day the old lady, who had a face that was a playground for wrinkles, told him where she got them from, and after that he had never thought about the cemeteries in the same way.
After a few seconds, the goddesses of reality and self-preservation ganged up on him, and a man holding a fortune raced through Seven Dials and hammered on Solomon’s door.
The rain was falling faster now, rain that was undeniably London rain, already grubby before it hit the ground, putting back on the streets what had been taken away by the chimneys. It tasted like licking a dirty penny.
Next week we finish the book!
