What the Dickens?!?

I learned, googling myself this morning in search of super-dorky old photos of myself as a child, that Charles Dickens has written a story featuring me called "The Magic Fishbone."

I'm a princess. (See me in the only non-blond version of myself to the right, performing the "Dance of the Eighteen Cooks" with the other children.)

"The Magic Fishbone" is second in a four-story cycle known as "Holiday Romance" and was, according to Project Gutenberg, originally published in a children's magazine under the assumed identity (Miss Alice Rainbird) of a 7-year-old.

From what I've read, Dickens actually does a pretty good job of copying the vagaries and sudden explanations of storytellers that age: An old woman who wants to speak with the King wasn't recognized by him because "she had been invisible to him," for instance, rather than because he just hadn't looked in that direction or wanted to pay attention to an old poor woman. She turns out to be a Fairy. A particularly hilarious exchange ensues:

“You are right,” said the old lady, answering his thoughts, “I am the Good Fairy Grandmarina. Attend. When you return home to dinner, politely invite the Princess Alicia to have some of the salmon you bought just now.”

“It may disagree with her,” said the King.

The old lady became so very angry at this absurd idea, that the King was quite alarmed, and humbly begged her pardon.

“We hear a great deal too much about this thing disagreeing, and that thing disagreeing,” said the old lady, with the greatest contempt it was possible to express. “Don’t be greedy. I think you want it all yourself.”

The King hung his head under this reproof, and said he wouldn’t talk about things disagreeing, any more.

As you see, Dickens also makes a point of chastising grown-ups -- this goes on for awhile -- adding to the sense that "The Magic Fishbone" may have been written by an actual 7-year-old.

Appropriately, it features me saving the day using a magic fishbone. Just like in real life.

Even more appropriately, it appears to feature me saving the fishbone after dinner, just in case -- exactly like in real life.

After that, the coincidences pile up bizarrely, and I have to say, from my perspective, poignantly:

"[The king and queen] had nineteen children, and were always having more. Seventeen of these children took care of the baby; and Alicia, the eldest, took care of them all."

I mean, my family only has three kids, but you get the picture. The Queen faints away after dinner on the night of the story and Alicia ends up having to care for the kids more than usual:

"But that was not the worst of the good Queen’s illness. O, no! She was very ill indeed, for a long time. The Princess Alicia kept the seventeen young Princes and Princesses quiet, and dressed and undressed and danced the baby, and made the kettle boil, and heated the soup, and swept the hearth, and poured out the medicine, and nursed the Queen, and did all that ever she could, and was as busy busy busy, as busy could be."

Combined with many of the observations made in Jay Clayton's Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, an excellent reading of postmodernism into nineteenth-century literature (if you believe in that sort of thing), it makes me wonder if Dickens had access to a time machine -- and then how, bizarrely, he came upon my family's story.

It also says I'm beautiful. I'll let you be the judges of that, particularly after I find and post some super-dorky pictures of myself as a kid. I like to think I was pretty cute.

Well, I guess I have to stop hating Charles Dickens now -- too bad. That was my last pure hate left after I had to give up hating Ford Tauruses.

It's worth it, though, to be a princess.