The Best of Times : Great Expectations Are Fulfilled When the Local Fellowship Meets in La Habra to Celebrate and Discuss the Life and Twists of Charles Dickens

Sidney Sheldon, Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel may dominate the bestseller lists, but the two dozen book lovers gathered in a La Habra living room on a drizzly Sunday afternoon had come to celebrate an author whose popularity was at its peak more than 120 years ago.

“What can we say about a man who has given so much joy in our lives?” said USC professor Jack Kerr, leading a toast to “one of our great men” of the 19th Century: “I give you Charles Dickens, the unforgettable.”

Fellow members of the Greater Los Angeles Dickens Fellowship raised their wine glasses and coffee cups in honor of the celebrated author of “David Copperfield,” “Oliver Twist” and more than a dozen other enduring classics.

Toasting Dickens is not a regular part of Dickens Fellowship meetings, which begin with potluck socials and end with discussions of one of the authors’ novels. But the gathering last Sunday coincided with the 181st anniversary of Dickens’ birth. And, said group leader Aileen Krechtler, members share the same “conviviality” as the flamboyant author who immodestly referred to himself as “the Inimitable.”

“Dickens was a wonderfully convivial person--very dynamic and full of energy--and so the meeting is a time of good fellowship, plus a time devoted to the study of Dickens’ works,” Krechtler said.

An international organization founded in England in 1902, the Dickens Fellowship is considered the oldest literary society in the world.

The Greater Los Angeles group, one of 59 fellowships worldwide and the only one in Southern California, was formed in 1984 by Krechtler, a retired elementary schoolteacher whose home was the setting for the recent meeting.

As did many members, she developed her Dickens fascination late in life, having previously read only “A Christmas Carol.”

That changed in 1981 when she attended the Dickens Universe, an annual conference at UC Santa Cruz, in which an entire week is devoted to scholarly discussions of a single Dickens novel, along with dramatic readings, evening sherry hours, screenings of movies based on Dickens novels and other events.

“It actually opened a new world of interest to me,” said Krechtler, who has since read all but one of Dickens’ 15 novels (“Barnaby Rudge”), in addition to many of his short stories and numerous critical works and biographies of the author.

The first Greater Los Angeles Dickens Fellowship meeting was held in Krechtler’s living room with three other Dickensians, as the author’s fans are called. Although little publicized, membership now numbers 50, with meetings (along with the group’s bronzed Dickens bust) rotating among members’ homes.

Krechtler, who as fellowship leader bears the title Honorable Secretary, thought the group would be larger by now, but she’s happy it isn’t: “If we show too much growth, we won’t be able to fit into each other’s homes.”

The fellowship meets only five times a year but, as Krechtler said, “we usually have a couple of extras.” The “extras” include attending plays and readings of Dickens’ work and, coming up in May, a Victorian tea in the City of Industry featuring a slide lecture on Dickens by Ann Murray, a well-known guide to literary England.

Members, who receive the group’s newsletter, include lawyers, accountants, secretaries, homemakers, teachers and an English actress: Miriam Margolyes, who played the satirically comic character of Flora Finching in the movie version of Dickens’ “Little Dorrit.”

One member, German-born Gerda Friend of Woodland Hills, learned English by reading “David Copperfield,” which was given to her as a gift before leaving Germany for the United States as a teen-ager in the 1940s.

“I knew ‘open the door’ and ‘shut the door’ and had learned some grammar but didn’t know how to speak (English),” Friend recalled. “I took a dictionary and read (‘David Copperfield’). When I got to difficult places my father, who knew some English, helped me out.”

It was, she recalled, “slow progress.”

Indeed. Reading Dickens’ lush Victorian prose is slow-going for even the best readers.

Krechtler acknowledges that in an era of minimalist writing in which you can “race through” many contemporary novels in a day and “with television and the demands on one’s time, a lot of people aren’t going to sit down and read these long, long paragraphs”

With a chuckle, she added that “I counted sentences that had 350 words, and those weren’t his longest sentences. You have to give your time to it.”

For Dickensians, who relish the author’s vivid characterizations and Victorian settings, it’s time well spent.

“His picture of the Victorian period has always fascinated me,” said Kerr, a professor of public administration at USC. “It’s not only great literature but great adventure and great social significance.”

The societal problems Dickens addressed in his novels, Kerr said, “seem to be ever with us--the problems of poverty, homelessness, injustices of various kinds. We see him take a stand against all kinds of injustices. I think he’s done a great deal for society by writing about problems a great many people didn’t care to look at.”

Kerr’s wife, Anna, an English teacher, concurs. “The reason he seems eternally contemporary,” she said, “is because he read human nature so well, and of course that’s still with us.”

Observed Jean Eggen of Westchester, who led the group’s discussion of “the Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the unfinished novel Dickens was writing when he died in 1870 at 58: “He wrote for the masses; he didn’t really write for the elite as many people think, and people loved him. He became a very popular author in his own time.”

Although it’s widely regarded that Shakespeare is England’s greatest poet while Charles Dickens is England’s greatest author, Krechtler said that “when I was growing up Dickens was in disrepute. In the ‘30s and early ‘40s, he was regarded as overly sentimental and was just overlooked. But now he’s very highly regarded, and there is a tremendous amount of work written on him--biographies and critical works--and of course movies and stage productions” adapted from his novels.

Peggy Tigerman, a retired English professor from Rancho Palos Verdes, said she began using Dickens in her college composition classes in the late ‘80s. Although some students were initially “very unhappy” at the prospect of having to read Dickens, she found they particularly enjoyed the first-person narrative in “David Copperfield.”

In fact, she said, reading Dickens encouraged many students to do their own autobiographical writing: “The more enthusiastic they became about Dickens, the better writers they became.”

Indeed, for those of any age who haven’t discovered the pleasure of reading Dickens, most Dickens Fellowship members would agree with Gerda Friend:

“It’s a pity.”

For more information about the Greater Los Angeles Dickens Fellowship, call (310) 697-8736.