Victorians have been making lots of headlines recently. Last week, the NYT reported on the application of search software to Victorian titles as an aid to scholarship, even as Oprah announced that her next book club picks will be two works by Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Members of the audience appear to be filled with nearly childlike delight at the announcement.
Of course, when Oprah preceded her announcement with the hint that she was going with a selection that was "old, OLD school, people!", I immediately began chanting to myself, "Please let it be Pliny, please let it be Pliny." But, in a stunning confirmation of the fact that different people perceive time differently, Oprah unveiled a new Oprah edition of the two classics, nicely packaged together by Penguin for just this purpose.
As Omnivoracious at Amazon points out, the rationale behind the duplex edition might have something to do with the difficulty of capitalizing on an Oprah selection that is entirely in the public domain. Jimmy Fallon put it a little bit more ironically the other night when he noted, with a tinge of jealousy, that Dickens is "gonna get rich."
It's not clear why Oprah picked these two works, but she did admit that she'd never read Dickens, and breathlessly panted to Jonathan Franzen: "Is A Tale of Two Cities what everyone says it is?" (After claiming to have read all of Dickens, Franzen acknowledged that it's "a real page-turner.") As for my guess about why she picked the novels she picked, two words: high. school. I read AToTC in high school, but other sections of our ninth-grade English class read Great Expectations, which seems to be the most widely read Dickens in the U.S., so far as I can tell. (It inspired Pip on South Park, didn't it?)
I kind of wish she'd done something more adventurous, picking a longer work that doesn't get assigned to 7/10 high schoolers in America, but oh well. One upside of this, hopefully, will be renewed interest in Great Expectations in time for the Dickens Universe conference at Santa Cruz next summer, which is spotlighting GE as it kicks off an early celebration of the Dickens bicentennial.
It made me think about Oprah a lot, though, and what she could do with her publishing power--not so much in terms of championing new authors, but in actually shifting conceptions of the canon, or affecting what titles are kept in print. (Of course, if you look at the back pages of a Penguin edition of a book from the 1980s, you realize just how arbitrary the choices of what's in print at any given time seem to be.) Could Oprah return to George Meredith the stature he had at the end of the nineteenth century? Could she bring Marius the Epicurean back into print for the next 25 years?
But perhaps it's better not to ask such questions. It leaves one desperately craving her power...
