What the Dickens! Compacted Classics

Rebecca Starford
Deputy Editor of ABR

Back in May, I was first alerted to the UK publisher Orion’s plans to release abridged versions of classics such as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. Shocked as I was by panellist Peter Goldsworthy’s claim that ‘none of these texts [Eliot, Gaskell, Thackeray] are sacred …
[y]ou can take great slabs our of Tolstoy without damaging it overall’, I did take a guilty glance at my bookshelf – where the token War and Peace, The Illiad and Chaucer sit, spine uncracked – and wondered if I would ever find the time to read them.

Who hasn’t been through the ‘Wordsworth Classics’ phase: those familiar $4.95 editions of canonical volumes found conveniently outside inner-city bookshops. I’d always thought that there was something terribly romantic about bedrooms overcrowded with books: spilling from shelves, cluttered upon the desk, stacked on a window sill. (This illusion quickly dissolved: my bedroom soon had a greater resemblance to the decrepit residences regularly featured on Today Tonight specials, ‘Neighbours from Hell’.)

The literary classics are, as Jane Sullivan wrote in the Age earlier in the year, ‘the brussels sprouts of the book world. Worthy tomes that feed the intellect and nourish the soul.’ I like this analogy; an absence of such tomes from the literary diet can make the best of us a little scurvied. But the digestion of these novels is not always easy. As Zadie Smith notes, ‘reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing’. Yes indeed, though as she continues with claims like ‘reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and no shame in cultivating them’, and ‘to become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more’, such intestinal fortitude begins to sound dangerously like a chore. We don’t read for duty, do we, but for pleasure?

Here I must confess that I feel a strange kind of obligation to read the ‘classic’ works. Not in the same league as the ‘1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die’, these texts do, nonetheless, feature on my burgeoning list of ‘must reads’ – the list we all have, clandestine or otherwise. Which brings me back to the abridged classics which this week made their way to ABR. Well marketed from Orion, they are attractive, dare I say sexy publications, with lustrous covers depicting appealing young men and women. They remain weighty books, none less than 300 pages. The blurbs, however, take a different tone. The final paragraph on the back cover of The Mill on the Floss, for example, reads:

The great classics contain passionate romance, thrilling adventure, arresting characters and unforgettable scenes and situations. But finding the time to read them can be a problem. So, we’ve condensed some of the finest books in the world to a manageable length to enable you to enjoy them.

Hear the classicists screech! ‘Finding time to read’ will certainly be a problem: reading takes time. A fast-food approach to reading is bound to leave you intellectually bloated and unsatisfied. And what about the question of editing – or rather deletion – of particular sections of the novel? Who decides what should remain and what is worthy of omission? The Orion press release assures us that

the editing has been done with sensitivity in order to retain the author’s voice. [Tell that to Tolstoy!] In addition, each book includes a timeline to give the new reader a sense of its historical context.

It is ungracious, but such editorial smacks of ‘Eliot for dummies’. Which is not fair, as the appeal of the shortened versions of these books is clear. The complete and unabridged volume of Anna Karenina weighs in at a whopping 806 pages; it requires patience and stamina. And reading literary fiction is not the same as reading popular literature, poetry or short stories. In a sense, a reader must train themselves for the reading of classics, which proves difficult for increasing numbers of people. There has been much discussion about the reduction of canonical texts in English courses at school; English Literature is a VCE subject of choice, rather than a requisite. I was not introduced to Shakespeare’s sonnets, in a formal sense, for instance, until university; in high school, there was not a single work of Dickens, Austen, Eliot or the Brontës on my English syllabus; Medea was the sole Greek appetiser; David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, though brilliant, seemed a strange sort of Roman understudy.

Perhaps we take for granted an ability, acquired through training, education and privilege, to ‘read’ these awe-inspiring works. ‘The Compact Editions are aimed at encouraging more mainstream readers to become better acquainted with our literary heritage,’ wrote The Bookseller (UK), ‘which, personally, I salute.’

For those who approach the classics for the first time, these abridged versions may act as gentle introductions. Clever marketing may also play a part in this – time will tell. And while the Compact Edition of David Copperfield is not the version I will choose when I walk into the bookshop (particularly when those wonderful Wordsworth Classics are handy), I appreciate their place in the broader literary landscape.