The deaths of Ham and Steerforth together, one enemy trying to save the life of the other, in the "Tempest" chapter of David Copperfield, is the story-telling flaw one gets in Romances; yet that structural defect common to the genre does not, in any way, lessen the brilliance of Charles Dickens' descriptive writing of the hurricane. It is unsurpassed in the English tongue.
The sky:
It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was overcast, and it blew hard.
The wind:
But, as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel...
When day broke, it blew harder and harder...We came to Ipswich [Aston Villa will be coming to Ipswich next season.]...and found a cluster of people in the marketplace, [Villains, when you come to the Etihad next, you are DEAD (Sorry)] who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high church-tower, and flung into a bye street...Others had to tell of country people, coming in from neighboring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about the roads and fields. Still, there was no abatement in the storm, but it blew harder.
And, the sea, the best:
Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
...
I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam...
...
The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me...the watery walls came rolling in...the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar...Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound...the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds flew thick and fast...
And finally, the effect of all this on the mind:
My long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that I has lost the clear arrangement of time and distance...So to speak, there was a curious inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too...
Oh my. Wonderful stuff, there, wonderful.
...
I went to bed, exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all such sensations vanished, as if by magic, and I was broad awake, with every sense refined.
Such is its convincing realism that scholars have tried to tie that account to a particular storm that Dickens could have experienced. There is not a clear "one," and this non-scholar does not believe there was a real one. What Dickens has described is a hurricane; Dickens would not have experienced a hurricane in the British Isles; "Tempest" was not based in reality; it was a creation of Dickens' imagination, an imagination so keen that it could produce eye-witness like fiction. I was surprised to read in Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on Dickens, that the nobility scenes in Bleak House were not based on Dickens' experience or observation, he had never been in such as Chesny Wold, had never associated with such as the Dedlocks, yet Nabokov could say, "The first description of Chesney Wold and of its mistress, Lady Dedlock, is a passage of sheer genius." Ernest Hemingway had to experience it--a hurricane, fishing, war, the bull ring--in order to write it. It is Charles Dickens'
genius that it was all in his mind.
The sky:
It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was overcast, and it blew hard.
The wind:
But, as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times, in the dark part of the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short), the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel...
When day broke, it blew harder and harder...We came to Ipswich [Aston Villa will be coming to Ipswich next season.]...and found a cluster of people in the marketplace, [Villains, when you come to the Etihad next, you are DEAD (Sorry)] who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high church-tower, and flung into a bye street...Others had to tell of country people, coming in from neighboring villages, who had seen great trees lying torn out of the earth, and whole ricks scattered about the roads and fields. Still, there was no abatement in the storm, but it blew harder.
And, the sea, the best:
Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
...
I put up at the old inn, and went down to look at the sea; staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea-foam...
...
The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me...the watery walls came rolling in...the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar...Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound...the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds flew thick and fast...
And finally, the effect of all this on the mind:
My long exposure to the fierce wind had confused me. There was that jumble in my thoughts and recollections, that I has lost the clear arrangement of time and distance...So to speak, there was a curious inattention in my mind. Yet it was busy, too...
Oh my. Wonderful stuff, there, wonderful.
...
I went to bed, exceedingly weary and heavy; but, on my lying down, all such sensations vanished, as if by magic, and I was broad awake, with every sense refined.
Such is its convincing realism that scholars have tried to tie that account to a particular storm that Dickens could have experienced. There is not a clear "one," and this non-scholar does not believe there was a real one. What Dickens has described is a hurricane; Dickens would not have experienced a hurricane in the British Isles; "Tempest" was not based in reality; it was a creation of Dickens' imagination, an imagination so keen that it could produce eye-witness like fiction. I was surprised to read in Vladimir Nabokov's lectures on Dickens, that the nobility scenes in Bleak House were not based on Dickens' experience or observation, he had never been in such as Chesny Wold, had never associated with such as the Dedlocks, yet Nabokov could say, "The first description of Chesney Wold and of its mistress, Lady Dedlock, is a passage of sheer genius." Ernest Hemingway had to experience it--a hurricane, fishing, war, the bull ring--in order to write it. It is Charles Dickens'
genius that it was all in his mind.
