Nicholas Nickleby and the Approach of Autumn

Today was Gi.'s, Ge.'s and J.'s first day of school, and Mama's first day back at work. The fact that the Canadian summer holidays are two weeks longer than the ones in Berlin doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. It does feel a little unusual for me that we haven't been frolicking around outside, swimming in Elk Lake, and spending our days in sweltering heat tempered by electric fans, but since our environment is now so different, I hadn't thought about it until now. Besides, autumn has been setting in generally; the air is cool, the fragrance of woodsmoke lay on the air and hazelnut clusters have fallen from a tree in the Kleistpark, and a golden hue is beginning to glow on the green acorns of the oaks outside the window.

Speaking of autumn, I was seized by a mournful mood and by the desire to poetize three days ago, and wrote this brief and very premature farewell to the season:

Swept are the leaves by the thinning winds of winter,
The branches stripped off, leaf by leaf, of life and all that made life fair.
Spent gold glory and crimson splendour brown and wrinkle on the ground;
The fruits of a long and bountiful summer drop and sink into the soil.
Pale purple crocuses mourn the fallen beauty on its earthen tomb
Until their time to wilt and fade comes in its fateful turn.
The billowing pomp of August clouds gives way to sullen grey;
The hopping, chirping birds take wing and leave us, flying far away.

Anyway, after school J. and I walked to the Kleistpark and became deeply absorbed as I read aloud the ninth chapter of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. It is the chapter where the unmarried and rather desperate, frivolous Miss Squeers decides to give matrimonial chase to the eponymous hero, and invites him to tea, with her friend Matilda Price and John Browdie, the Yorkshire man to whom the friend is betrothed. The chapter begins in silly flirtation and ends in a rupture between the friends and a most violent mood on the part of Mr. Browdie. J. and I both thought that Nicholas was thoughtless, rather snobby, and even rude, but his rueful reflections at the end redeemed him. And J. remarked, and I agreed, that Dickens does make his bad characters too evil and his good characters too good. Nicholas clearly has his weaknesses, but I don't think that they improve by contrast with the Squeers' depravity. Besides, I think that Dickens is too severe on harmless vulgarity; I was left with a small sympathy for the two ladies, but the portrait of John Browdie was a highly uncharitable caricature (or so I thought) of the stereotypical loutish rural working-man. As I'm reading, I also remember how Charlotte Brontë loyally depicted Yorkshire in Shirley, and I think it a pity that Dickens should portray it as an English Siberia, in every aspect from climate to culture.