The Monthly Liaison: December 2021
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Snow blanketed the Library and Baldy beginning December 11, and it is getting deeper!
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Darkest Evening, Deepening Snow
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Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
The lines of this poem by Robert Frost drift into my mind each winter as the first deep snow falls, filling the chairs still sitting on the patio, filling the streets and the sidewalks, filling the boughs of the trees until they can hold no more and shrug, spraying a cascade of white through the air. The snow falls, and the lulling cadence of this poem fills my mind.
It is the “darkest evening of the year.” The distant village lights and nearby road have disappeared in the heavy snow. The narrator’s horse shifts nervously and “gives his harness bells a shake,” eager to continue to the barn.
What is there for the narrator to stop and watch, really? And what is there for him to hear? The woods are dark; the snow is thick; the downy flakes sweep softly. The world fills with snow and night, and all its landmarks disappear.
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” I find myself peering into the darkness with the narrator, and I am mesmerized by what I cannot see or hear or know.
The narrator’s pause is brief. His journey calls him to go on — but the snow gives him permission to stop for a moment, to turn from the road into his own mind for a spell, to be still. In four short stanzas, Frost's poem takes us to the edge of the woods, and beckons us to wonder.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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Jenny Emery Davidson, Ph.D.
Executive Director
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Charles Dickens:
Transporting Generations of Readers
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By Cathy Butterfield
Collections Development Director
I confess, my thoughts about Charles Dickens, his writings, his life, and his legacy, are deeply conflicted.
He was definitely a man of his (Victorian) times, but his writing at its best transcended its roots in the gutters of Victorian London to influence readers around the world. Charles Dickens wrote of the people and for the people he grew up with—shopkeepers and costermongers, child laborers and factory overseers, thimble-twisters and gospel-grinders.
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Regional History Librarians Olivia Terry (L) and Kelly Moulton curated the Dickens Exhibit in the Library Foyer—a special ensemble of early editions of Dickens's classic works, on loan from the collection of Helen Martin Spalding.
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“When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man,
to have so inexhaustible a subject.”
~Charles Dickens, Bleak House
While he was brought up in a household with genteel aspirations, in 1823 his father and the rest of his family were housed in the dreaded Marshalsea debtor’s prison. At the age of 12, he had to leave school to work in a rat-infested boot-blacking factory on the Hungerford Stairs, 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, before returning to his family in jail (shades of Little Dorrit). Rescued by a relative’s bequest, the family was freed after a year and young Charles was able to return to school, but the experience left indelible marks on his social views and his writing. Likewise, his plotting. Be forewarned, for his tales are prone to whipsaw reversals of fortune, miraculous inheritances, and mind-bending coincidences that do not bear up well under modern literary scrutiny. His time on the streets may have also contributed to his cavalier nonchalance toward basic grammar.
Dickens’s withering opinion of Victorian social ills was honestly, if inequably, formed from his own experiences. He was a life-long opponent of slavery, and proponent of schooling for all. He decried predatory capitalism, debtor’s laws, and wage slavery. His own biographical fictive DNA runs through many of his books featuring young heroes alone and struggling in workhouses and on the streets. Dickens excelled at transporting readers via long, lush and lurid descriptive passages, from mucky gaslit London to opulent country manors, replete with heart-rending heroines, self-made heroes, and scurrilous villains. It is worth noting that in his younger days as a journalist and writer, he was often paid by the word.
Dickens’s literary world has resonated with new generations of readers for over two centuries, but that resonance has had repercussions. Even as he declaimed in David Copperfield to “…never be mean in anything…never be false, never be cruel…” Dickens’s work also spread scarring tropes, stereotypes, and thoughtless acceptance of antisemitism, classism, and racism. While a staunch social reformer on English soil, in his overseas forays Dickens was an ironclad colonialist. His travel writings deeply disparaged the cultures and lifeways of Native peoples being displaced by imperialist expansion—he even promoted arrant falsehoods, up to and including fomenting rumors of cannibalism. Never out of print, Dickens’ worldwide popularity guaranteed the rumors would continue to harm Indigenous and race relations well into the 20th century, and his screeds still echo today.
Dickens’s nonfiction travelogues tended to lionize the reach and glory of the British Empire, while belittling other upstart nations. American government particularly attracted his ire—his spurning descriptions of Congress in Washington in American Notes would have made young Samuel Clemens blush, and very probably formed a mighty impression upon Mark Twain’s nascent satirical writings.
Still, Dickens is most remembered and revered for his fiction. A Christmas Carol and his other Christmas novels may have single-handedly launched the holiday from relatively pagan obscurity to the juggernaut solstice celebration observed in modern times. His best tales and characters, like Scrooge and Tiny Tim, have woven themselves indelibly into our literary memory.
“His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. . . I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always.”
~Bob Cratchit, A Christmas Carol
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Virtual Travel: Book Recommendations
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Whatever you do or where ever you go this season, take this with you:
The gift of story.
With your Community Library card as your passport, you can travel through time and space with the turn of a page (or the click of a button). Even when the Library is closed, you can access our digital collections 24/7. . .even when no creature is stirring, not even a mouse.
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Lord of the Rings
By J.R.R. Tolkien
Travel to Middle Earth—from The Shire, to Rivendell, through the Mines of Moria, to Mordor—in a quest to destroy "the one ring
that rules them all..."
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Roadrunner
A Film by Morgan Neville and Caitrin Rogers
Trace the extraordinary life—and tragic death—of Anthony Bourdain. Chef, writer, adventurer, and provocateur, Bourdain traveled the path from anonymous chef to world-renowned cultural icon.
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Dicken's Stories About Children Every Child Can Read
In this wonderful compilation of classic Dickens stories, the adventures surrounding children have been taken out of context and presented on their own.
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THANK YOU to Our November Donors
for Supporting the Work of the Library
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Anonymous 4
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Jane W. McCann
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Rebecca Michael and Allen Jones
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Debbie Scully and Arthur M. Scully III
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Sheena Wilson and John Ilgenfritz
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Page Turner Society
Big Wood Landscape
Kathleen Diepenbrock and Kelley Weston
Claudia and John D. Gaeddert
Kyla Merwin
Elaine H. and Michael T. Phillips
Narda Pitkethly
Gay Weake
Anita Weissberg
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Tribute Gifts
Anne Marie Emery in memory of Alfred Charles Emery
Irene and Michael Healy in honor Mary Tyson
Joy Ordal in honor Matthew and Elizabeth Ordal
Kelly and Adam Patrick in honor Heather Daves
Enid and Greg Rawlings in memory of Dorothy Perel
Trudi Schneider in memory of Lynn Bockemohle
Roberta and Howard Siegel in memory of Marjorie Traub
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