Damon Runyon

"One evening along about seven o'clock I am sitting in Mindy's restaurant putting on the gefiltte, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John."

So begins one of Damon Runyon's most anthologized stories, "Butch Minds the Baby," instantly recognizable for its voice, humour, characters, and use of the present tense.

Runyon's fiction came out of a life that spanned the lawlessness of two eras - the Old West and Prohibition on the East Coast.

As a newspaperman he covered wars and sporting events. He loved to gamble and hang out in nightclubs with gangsters, sometimes even accompanying them on the way to a job.

According to Breslin, Runyon preferred the company of gangsters because they were much more colourful than politicians and bigshot businessmen, who were equally corrupt:

It was unfortunate that Charles Barney was not smart enough to stop stealing even when he had to take his clothes out of the closet to make room for his money, and he continued into some impossibly corrupt real estate businesses. One day he woke up and found the only way he could see his way out was to blow his brains out, which he did. This did not stop his heirs, who founded Smith Barny stockbrokers and used as their motto, "We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it." They should have said, "We steal it," but that's all right. This is America.

Patrice

The book opens and closes with Patrice, Runyon's second wife. He met her in Juarez when he was covering Pancho Villa. She was a barefoot girl just past 12 who wanted to be a dancer. He promised to find her a job in New York if she learned to read and write, and paid for her education. Years later he made good on his promise when she showed up unexpectedly in the Big Apple. She became his mistress and later his wife. He was 51 and she 26 when they married. The bridesmaid was his own daughter. His first wife had just died.

Together they fabricated a tale that made her a Spanish countess who possessed one of the 10 largest diamonds in the world. The fabrication was similar to one of Runyon's short stories, and so complete that they came to believe it themselves.

Patrice however chafed at the difference in their ages, and soon began fooling around with the boxer, Primo Carnera. Runyon arranged for Carnera to fight Joe Louis, whose body "looked like the electric chair." He delivered a beating to Carnera.

When Runyon was dying of throat cancer, his doctor asked Patrice to write a supportive letter to Runyon. Instead she wrote that she was now in love with a younger man.

Breslin

There are no footnotes or bibliography. Breslin relies instead on newspaper files and his own memory of stories he's heard over the years. At times he slips into the present tense, and tells it like a Runyon short story. It's incredible stuff -- Al Capone conducting an orchestra, Bugsy Siegel doing a screen test, Jack Dempsey slipping lead pipes into his gloves, Bat Masterson and Benito Mussolini writing for NYC papers.

At one point Runyon was the highest paid newspaper writer in the county. Several of his stories were made into movies. His most famous title is Guys and Dolls. He shares with several other literary greats the distinction of having contributed an adjective to the English language: Orwellian, Dickensian, Runyonesque. He had a liver "weak as a glass chin."

There are no pictures in the book. Here's one I found on the Web:

Insect Dreams

The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

It turns out the protagonist of Kafka's Metamorphosis didn't die after all. He joined a freak show in Vienna where, as "the human roach," he reads from Rilke and holds seminars on Spengler. Such is his notoriety that Wittgenstein and novelist Robert Musil pay him a visit, and in America he inspires a dance craze.

In New York he meets composer Charles Ives, and provides the inspiration for the "Insect Sonata," which is performed on the piano with the use of a brick and a couple of two-by-fours. Gregor goes to work at Ives's insurance firm, where he specializes in risk management and develops a formula to gauge the probability of a person being kidnapped. The formula incorporates an Index of Suffering -- "an original contribution of Gregor's, now in standard use among economists."

                    (unemployment rate in percent)(inflation in percent)
        S =  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
                 1 - (probabability of situation continuing another month)

He moves to Washington DC and takes up residence in a White House broom closet, working for the Dept. of Agriculture as an expert on entomological matters. The US is mired in the Great Depression, and Gregor, while studying grasshopper behaviour, discovers "smelltrons" and invents the Elektroantennograph and the Heuschreckekitzelapparat.

When war breaks out he meets Einstein and delivers his famous letter to FDR, then is reassigned to Los Alamos as a risk management consultant. He pals around with Feynman and Oppenheimer, and suggests the principle for the device used to trigger the atomic bomb.

By then Gregor's despair has deepened to an intolerable level; there's the wound in his back, FDR's dithering over the war, and the decision to continue the Manhattan Project even after Germany had abandoned its own efforts at an atomic bomb.

The book's humour, erudition, historical characters, and WW2 setting reminded me very much of Cryptonomicon and Gravity's Rainbow, but at 464 pages it is much shorter and not as convoluted. Interestingly, all three novels end explosively.

Viva la cucaracha!

The Lost City of Z

A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Percy Fawcett was an English explorer who became obsessed with finding El Dorado in the Amazon forest. He led several expeditions in search of it, each time emerging virtually unscathed while those around him sickened and died, their minds deranged, their bodies oozing pus and maggots. Piranhas, vampire bats, malaria, xenophobic tribes armed with 6-foot poisonous arrows -- these were just a few of the dangers involved.

Thanks to an iron constitution, ruthless determination, and suicidal bravery, Fawcett became one of the most famous explorers of the early 20th century. He seemed absolutely invincible -- until 1925 when he shocked the world by vanishing without a trace. Party after party set out in search of him, but many of them also disappeared, which only deepened the mystery. As time wore on, cults sprang up worshipping Fawcett.

More recently New Yorker author David Grann joined the ranks of the obsessed and set off to solve the mystery. The result is this compulsively readable book, which cleverly (and somewhat disingenuously) dovetails Grann's own journey with the final Fawcett expedition.

At the end he delivers a surprising conclusion. Fawcett wasn't so crazy after all. Recent findings by anthropologists such as Anna Roosevelt and Michael Hecklenberger seem to indicate that advanced civilizations did exist in the Amazon. One site has been dubbed the "Stonehenge of the Amazon."

Literary Echoes

The Lost World - Conan Doyle knew Fawcett and is believed to have used him as a model for one of the characters.

Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils - Who better to find Fawcett than Indy?

A Handful of Dust - Fawcett's fate likely inspired the ending of this Evelyn Waugh novel.

Gringos - An end-of-the-world cult called the Magical Nucleus reminded me of a similar cult in this Charles Portis novel set in the Yucatan.

The Lost City of Zzz...

Brad Pitt is not starring in the upcoming movie.

What sounds better? The lost city of Zee (Grann), or the lost city of Zed (Fawcett)?

There are interesting similarities between the lost expeditions of Fawcett and Franklin.

David Grann's website
Simon & Schuster book trailer

Salvage King, Ya!

A Herky-Jerky Picaresque

The opening quote from "Heart of Darkness" tells you this is not going to be your ordinary hockey story.

The book's protagonist "desired to have Kings meet him...on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things."

Here the "ghastly Nowhere" is the horrific world of pro hockey, and the word "Kings" refers to both the LA Kings and the name of the salvage yard operated by our hero. To cement the connection with "Heart of Darkness," his fiancée is known only as "the Intended."

The second quote, from Eliot's "The Dry Salvages," announces a water motif, which is reinforced by the hockey player's ironic name, Drinkwater. He prefers booze. Water is something people drown in, like his grandfather, and a dead California surfer, and the ships and planes that sink beneath the waves before his very eyes.

Blindness is another motif. Drinkwater has a bad eye. His uncle wears an eyepatch. A player loses an eye to one of Drinkwater's shots on goal. A dead horse flies past in a tornado, eyes open. A shark is shot in the eye. "Out vile jelly," thinks Drinkwater. He sees but cannot resist the violence, hypocrisy, and decadence of pro hockey. He's unruly on and off the ice. He snorts cocaine, takes Antabuse to control his drinking, shuttles back and forth between the three women in his life, his Intended, his ex-wife, and a waitress known only as X.

The GM has a huge face, part meat, part vegetable. Count your fingers after shaking hands with him. This man wouldn't give you the parsley off his plate, he wouldn't give a worm to a blind robin, he'd sell a blind man a rat's asshole for a wedding ring.

But it's not just pro hockey. The game's ills are society's ills, and violence is everywhere. An ETA bomb blows up Drinkwater's packsack. His dentist commits murder. A bullet hole in his car signals the death of a young boy in a Disneyland parking lot. A Coast Guard ship capsizes, planes keep crashing around him -- a jetliner at LAX, a floatplane cartwheeling across a California inlet, another slamming into the lake in front of his house. He grabs a body but loses his grip. He swims down among the dead.

Drug use is epidemic. Everyone is using or selling. Farmboys, jocks at the local gymn. Coke snorted out of the Stanley Cup, off a model's belly. One of Drinkwater's friends wants him to smuggle in a small boatload. Bodies of addicts turn up in the lake in front of his house. Alberta is a giant quivering nostril. The whole planet is freebasing.

A Hockey Everyman

Drinkwater's played for the Pats, Broncos, Mudcats, Screaming Eagles, and LA Kings. He's played for Billings, Billington, and the Birmingham Bulls, for Kansas City and Salt Lake City, for Adirondack in the AHL, Peoria and Flint in the IHL. He's played the hookworm league, and semi-pro in Seattle, and for $100 a game in Saskatchewan. He's won the K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha.

His face has been carved up by Bobby Clarke and Billy Smith. He's driven around with Gretzky in a gold Italian sport car. He's played poker with Harold Snepsts, lent smokes to Eddie Mio, sat drinking in the same bar as Chelios and Ludwig, Chris Nilan and John Kordic. He's been coached by Bep Guidolin, defended by Don Cherry.

He wears a knee brace and is "held together with velcro and tape." He keeps breaking his fingers and nose. He's punched a fan and a ref. He's been concussed, knifed in the thigh, defrauded by his agent. He's played the game since before helmets were mandatory.

The forward with Phoenix, an Oiler draft pick, comes at me, using me for a screen, and powers a slapshot right past my midsection. His shot breaks our goalie's stick. I ice the puck up high, ring the glass to get a whistle, to let Dobozy the redhead goalie pick out a new stick. "He broke my stick," Dobozy complains, sounding offended, "my good stick." "There, there, don't cry." I'm just glad the Phoenix guy didn't maim me with his slapshot, a howitzer, a cannon blasting by my gonads. He rang one off our goalie's mask; out cold. 120 MPH. Now: imagine that it's another game in Podunk that means nothing and it's YOUR head, your face on the line. The pruneface scouts at the end of the arena jot down the following brainstorm: "LACKS DESIRE." Fuck them. As if they have the market on desire.

Structure

Jarman is primarily a short story writer, and this, his only novel, is packaged in non-linear chunks. There's no complete game, season or conventional plot. It's all in pieces, like Drinkwater himself. Everything is flattened out, past and present and future rolled into one.

Because of the structure, most readers would not notice if a few of the 58 chapters were sent to the penalty box. They have titles like Kingdom Fucking Come, Sexual Nebraska, Hoarse Latitudes, The Land of No Odometers. Excerpts have appeared in 28 journals and one anthology.

Jarman's latest collection, My White Planet, contains an account of playing hockey in New Brunswick. It's called "A Nation Plays Chopsticks." Any hockey anthology without it is incomplete.

Defining the World

The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary

The making of a dictionary hardly seems a fascinating topic, yet reading this book made me wonder if it's possible to write a dull volume about Samuel Johnson.

Defining the World by Henry Hitchings describes the herculean feat of creating the first comprehensive English dictionary, a task which Johnson completed almost single-handedly in nine years. (Its French counterpart occupied 40 scholars for 40 years.) One of the reasons for the dictionary's success was its inclusion of quotations to illustrate usage.

Defining the World is organized chronologically, while chapter titles are presented in alphabetical order using words from the dictionary, beginning with "Adventurous" and ending with "Zootomy." Johnson's methodology and the dictionary's subsequent influence are given, along with details on Johnson's life in 18th century England.

While a monumental achievement, the dictionary wasn't perfect, and Hitchings doesn't shy away from its mistakes and shortcomings. He notes absent words, as well as words whose meanings have altered over the years, or which have become quaint or are no longer in use, like pissburnt, jolthead, smellfeast, bedswerver, and looby. Some definitions (like the oft-quoted one for oats) have a delightful quirkiness that reveal as much about Johnson as the word itself.

But as Hitchings notes, "Johnson's finest definitions remind us that he was a poet." The dictionary is a work of art, one that can be browsed through for pleasure, not only for the enjoyment of Johnson's prose but also for its snapshot of 18th-century life. As Hitchings says, "it abounds with stories, arcane information, home truths, snippets of trivia, and lost myths. It is, in short, a treasure house."

The dictionary is available as a pair of downloads (Volume 1 and Volume 2), but if you're not interested in perusing an electronic edition, Hitchings's book is the next best thing.

Boswell's Life of Johnson

The World Without Us

The most obvious aspect of this book, and one that has delighted sci-fi writers for years, is what would happen to our cities should the human race be decimated.

Generally, the structures which would last the longest are either underground or made of stone. Khufu after all has diminished only 30 feet in 4500 years, and the astonishing subterranean cities in the Cappadocia region of Turkey have been around since the dawn of history.

The Chunnel and the Moscow subway system would have a a good chance of lengthy survival, though they will eventually be flooded. In the case of the NYC subway system, that will only take a matter of days.

Monuments such as Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and Hagia Sofia will survive, as well as ceramic objects and pennies that contain substantial amounts of copper (unlike the current ones). Even paper will last a relatively long time if not exposed to air and water.

Poisonous Legacy

Of course, less palatable monuments will also survive. Take nuclear waste. Now there's something that's going to be around for a long long time. How can we warn future generations about the locations where we've stored it? What kind of sign would last for 10,000 years, and would people understand it? In 10,000 years languages will morph into unrecognizable forms.

Then there's plastic. Approximately one billion tons have been produced and all of it is still around. It doesn't biodegrade. It weathers to bits but that only means an increase in the number of creatures that can swallow it, often to their detriment. The oceans are filling up with it. The North Pacific Gyre is an expanse almost the size of Africa, covered with floating garbage, most of which is plastic.

Then there's genetically modified food, POPs and PCBs, and other unsavoury items. Humanity, we are told, has become a force of nature.

What About the Animals?

The author covers the origins of humans, and who might replace us if we disappeared. (The primate with the second largest brain, he suggests -- baboons.)

He visits the theory that megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons were extirpated by prehistoric hunters, and mentions a plan to return elephants to North America. He provides details on more recent extinctions (the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon), and discusses the vast numbers of birds killed each year by flying into glass windows or frying themselves on power lines.  One authority says one billion necks are broken annually in the US alone.  Birds will definitely do better without us.

As for our pets, cats will survive but dogs won't. Neither will cockroaches in unheated apartments, nor all those creatures that live in or on us, such as lice and numerous kinds of bacteria.

The End

The author concludes the book by mentioning the Voluntary Human Extinction Project, and the Transhumanist movement, which involves uploading our minds into machines.

Then he heads off into space, tracking the interstellar vehicles we have sent aloft -- the Pioneers and Voyagers -- which will exit the solar system and likely keep on travelling long after we are gone. So too will electromagnetic signals from Earth, including TV shows. I Love Lucy will play to the rest of the galaxy until the signal is lost in the background noise of the universe.

Physically, this well-written and wide-ranging book ends with a 30-page bibliography and a 16-page index. But it is the 14 pages of acknowledgements that gives a better idea of its scope. The author visited Chernobyl, the Korean DMZ, East Africa, a primeval Polish forest, an isolated coral reef in the Pacific, the abandoned resort of Varosha on Cyprus, the petrochemical complex stretching from Houston to Galveston, the Ekati diamond mine in the Canadian Arctic, and other places.

Your Inner Fish

A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Paleontologist Neil Shubin begins with a brief account of his role in discovering an ancient creature intermediate between a fish and a land animal. Its fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic in 2004, and the creature was given the Inuit name Tiktaalik.

Later, Shubin pays another visit to Canada, this time the fossil beds near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy. There they found rare fossils of the tritheledont, a reptile whose teeth showed mammalian characteristics.

Shubin uses these events to anchor a description of how our anatomy contains links to more primitive creatures. For example: "Tiktaalik has a shoulder, elbow, and wrist composed of the same bones as an upper arm, forearm, and wrist in a human."

Following are a number of observations that I found interesting.  

Human Embryos

1. They have four gill arches, which ultimately develop into jaws, ears, larynx and throat.

2. They have a notochord, which breaks up and forms the disks that cushion our vertebrae.

3. At an early stage in their development, their elbows and knees face the same direction, as do fish and amphibians.

4. Gonads are initially located high up in the body, as in fish.

Evolution

1. Two factors may have been involved in the evolution of bodies: predation, and the rise in atmospheric oxygen.

2. "The origin of mammals involved not only new patterns of chewing...but new ways of hearing... Bones originally used by reptiles to chew evolved in mammals to assist in hearing."

Genetics

Shubin also describes some of the Dr. Moreau-like tinkering that scientists have done in order to understand how genes work. Some of the genes he mentions are Noggin, Pax 6, and Sonic hedgehog.

1. Genes from the embryo of one animal (e.g. a mouse), when grafted to the embryo of another (e.g. a shark), can perform the same function.  This leads to a conclusion such as: "all appendages, whether they are fins or limbs, are built by similar kinds of genes."

2. "Inject extra amounts of frog Noggin into a frog egg, and the frog will grow extra back structures, sometimes even a second head."

3. Turning on an "eyeless" gene can result in creatures growing eyes virtually anywhere on the body. For example, "they could use the mouse gene to trigger the formation of an extra fly eye anywhere: on the back, on a wing, near the mouth."

Trivia

1. Fish have no necks.

2. Tooth replacement in reptiles continues throughout their entire lives.

3. Some creatures, like single-celled microbes, have no body at all.

4. Some creatures have no anus, they expel waste through their mouth e.g. jellyfish and corals.

Memory Babe

My friend Sam and I take the frontside bus over North Bridge
The semi-conductor is handing out complimentary metal oxide
The driver is honking out beep codes: OS, OS, SOS
That fellow is starting to irk me, I say
Mind your IRQs, I tell him

But Sam, he don't care
He's high on memory
Can't tell if he's extended or expanded
He carries his cache on a stick
He issues non-maskable interrupts to complete strangers

At a COM port we go for a DRAM
And Sam yells, Hey SYS, get your HIMEM over here
Lets plug and play, baby
But just then in walks his wife Pam wheeling a PRAM
Damn that DRAM, she hollers at him, you double data-rate RAM

Marsport

And warlike!  He had not realized how bellicose they were.

Now, whenever he saw a column trudging along, he imagined them as tiny Greek soldiers, marching off to overthrow a neighbouring city-state.

Their exoskeletons provided ready-made helmets and cuirasses. Their swords were mandibles and stings, their spears sprays of formic acid.

They were brave, merciless, without fear.  Every battle was a Thermopylae. Their legions were everywhere. Perhaps even in space, and not as a science experiment aboard the Space Shuttle, but as stowaways on Mir.

He imagined ant scientists launching their own rockets and sending ant astronauts into space.  They'd be wearing white spacesuits with transparent bubbles around their heads. They wouldn't have to worry about cosmic rays.

When humans finally reached Mars, they'd find anthills there.

Little Dorrit

Duke Classics ebook

Though one of his later and darker novels, there is also much humour and exuberance here, and the storyline is easier to follow than that of the last two by Dickens I read, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

In Book I (“Poverty”), Mr. Dorrit is confined to Marshalsea, the same debtor's prison that Dickens' father had been incarcerated in.  He and his daughter, Little Dorrit (born in prison), are visited by Arthur Clennam, whose generosity includes discreet financial assistance.

In Book II (“Wealth”) Mr. Dorrit enjoys unexpected riches, while other people are suddenly ruined, including Clennam, who ends up in Mr. Dorrit's former room in Marshalsea.  Now it is Little Dorrit who comes visiting.

Theme

Little Dorrit is about imprisonment. The book opens in Marseilles -- first in a jail, then behind walls where some travellers have been quarantined. The story moves on to London – first to a decrepit house where Arthur's mother has been confined to a wheelchair for years, then to the Marshalsea prison.

These visible forms of imprisonment are matched by self-imposed barriers. When Mr. Dorrit is set free, he remains trapped by his own pride and vanity. Arthur Clennam has been a prisoner in the family business for 20 years.  Miss Wade is a “self-tormentor,” caged by her own bitterness and resentment. The Circumlocution Office is a bureaucratic fortress with the power to enslave the unwary in its labyrinthine coils.

Marriage can be a prison too. Mrs. Clennam's sterile morality divides her from her husband and sends him into exile, while the Merdles and the Sparklers are bound together in arid unions based entirely on money and appearances. Mrs. Flintwinch is so bullied by her husband that her life becomes a nightmare. All are marriages of convenience.

Memorable Characters

Mostly they are villains. Chief among them is an arrogrant cartoon Frenchman named Blandois, who overflows with extravagant speech and gestures. He snaps his fingers at everyone and cries out “Holy blue!” at the drop of a hat. Somehow Dickens manages to make him sinister and comic at the same time.

Flintwinch is Mrs. Clennam's servant turned business partner.  He has a wry neck and twisted body, and moves like a “screw-machine that fell short of its grip.” His poor wife Affery is so bullied by him that she's forever throwing her apron over her head in fright.

Gowan is a careless fellow who excels at nothing except his own self-interest. His nonchalant and patronizing comments are superb, especially when he cloaks his disparaging remarks in words of praise.

Mrs. General is the companion that Mr. Dorrit hires for his two daughters while they are touring Europe. Her idea of genteel breeding is never to show an interest in anything unpleasant.  To be genteel is to have an impervious, highly polished surface, and Dickens has great fun when he refers to her efforts at “varnishing” the two young ladies.

My favourite character is the collection agent Mr. Pancks, who is compared to a steam-tug, constantly puffing and snorting and towing away other people:

Mr. Pancks, who was always in a hurry, and who referred to a little dirty notebook which he kept beside him (perhaps containing the names of the defaulters he meant to look up by way of dessert), took in his victuals as if he were coaling; with a good deal of noise, and a good deal of dropping about, and a puff and a snort occasionally, as if he were nearly ready to steam away.

Gripes

Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam are the least interesting characters in the book. Little Dorrit is selfless to the point of sainthood (which suggests a title change, Little Doormat), while the bland Clennam is more of a plot device than a character, linking up the Clennams, the Dorrits, the Meagles, and others. Though he spent 20 years in China, he shows no evidence of it, returning without souvenirs, anecdotes, or mannerisms.

Another problem is the age difference between hero and heroine. Little Dorrit is 22, yet petite enough to be mistaken for a child. Clennam, who is 40, frets about his age and often addresses her as "My dear child." Their first embrace is described as that of a father embracing a daughter. Since this is a prelude to a sexual relationship, the whole thing strikes me as rather creepy.

(There is an interesting sidelight to this in Dickens's own life. He met Ellen Ternan in 1857, the year he completed Little Dorrit. He was 45, she 18. Soon afterward, he left his wife and conducted a lengthy affair with Ternan. While he didn't meet her early enough for their relationship to influence the book, it's an odd coincidence, almost as though he were imagining, and perhaps justifying, a future involvement with a woman young enough to be his daughter.)

Then there are the usual things that modern readers tend to roll their eyes at -- an unexpected legacy, an overwrought death scene, a secret twin, and an improbably melodramatic event. The latter, which is intended to mirror the financial collapse brought about by Merdle's swindles, is the sudden disintegration of Mrs. Clennam's house. Dickens sets it up beforehand in various ways, but it's no more convincing than the spontaneous combustion of Krook in Bleak House.

And wait a minute, how does the paralyzed Mrs. Clennam survive the collapse of her house? Well, just before the house falls apart she miraculously regains the use of her limbs, leaping to her feet and rushing out to Marshalsea prison. But seriously, having been wheelchair-bound for years, it's unlikely she would have made it to the door, let alone down the stairs.

Finally, I mentioned earlier that the narrative is easy to follow. That's true, except for the denouement, when Dickens launches into a lengthy explanation of the book's backstory. It's so convoluted that the Penguin edition I read includes a precis of it in the appendix.

Canadian Connection

For several years Dickens managed a house for "fallen" women called Urania Cottage.  One of the young women was Rhena Pollard, a headstrong girl with dark hair and dark eyes. She seems to have been the model for Tattycoram (an orphan taken on as a maid by the Meagleses). Pollard eventually came to Canada, where she married and settled down to a respectable life in Ontario.

Tattycoram is also the subject of a novel of the same name by Canadian author Audrey Thomas. Thomas has been nominated twice for the GG.

Mrs. Merdle's son, Edmund Sparkler, was born in "St. John's, New Brunswick."

Links

After reading the book I watched the recent and most excellent BBC production of Little Dorrit. It was interesting to see how the book was shaped for the screen I urge you to see it. You can find out more at the following sites:

BBC
Jane Austen's World

Here's a review of Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women. The book discusses the role of Dickens in running Urania Cottage.

I also discovered that there is a Dickens World in England. Wouldn't that be fun to visit!