The Best of Toms

We’re kicking off Dickens week with a fun excursion into the heart of Victorian London.  Be sure and enter our Dickens trivia contest for a chance to win your own copy!

The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale, by Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright, drawings by Barry Moser.  Peachtree: 2011, 228 pages.  Age/interest level: 9-12.

Skilly the blue tom is homeless on the streets of London until a careless tip from his nemesis, Pinch, directs him to a popular tavern on the Fleet.  A most bold and clever cat, Skilly marches up to Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese: “Not to the back door, mind you, where smelly fish bones and gelatinous puddings were hurled daily into the gutter–” but right in front, where he soon ingratiates his way into the post of chief mouse-catcher.  It’s the ideal situation: he gags on mice but loves cheese, and Cheshire Cheese is the best in town, if not the whole realm.

Soon enough Skilly makes a deal with Pip, an erudite mouse of noticeable overbite.  The mice will supply Skilly’s cheese habit in exchange for him leaving them in peace.  Although, to keep up appearances, Skilly will make a show of dispatching cooperative mice.

Among other talents, Pip can read and write, and not coincidentally the tavern is frequented by writers: William Makepeace Thackery, Edwin Bulver-Lytton (he of “It was a dark and stormy night”) and Charles Dickens, who is having a dickens of a time coming up with a title and opening line for his next novel.

It’s a fine life for an alley cat, until Pinch lands in the middle of it.  Adele the barmaid suspects that Skilly has been laying down on the job and Pinch, who has no scruples about mice, seems the answer to her prayers.  Not only are the little rodents in big trouble, but also their lodger, Maldwyn the raven, who has strayed from his home at the Tower and must get back for the sake of the realm.  Everybody knows that ravens have protected the tower from the time of Charles II, but Maldwyn  has shirked his responsibility and must make amends.  Skilly has his own memories and regrets: “Dark things that rattle door handles, whisper your name through the keyholes, and tear at the wood with their fingernails.  They want to be released to do their terrible work; the work of making you remember things best left forgotten.”

Mice, memories, cats, and raven come together in a heart-stopping conclusion that involves narrow escapes, perilous rescues, and a certain royal personage.  But it also involves syntax, vocabulary, and a number of literary in-jokes, such as the first sentence of this book: “He was the best of toms, he was the worst of toms.”  Can one anticipate a Eureka! moment for Mr. Dickens?  Other fun flourishes are concrete word pictures in the shape of stair risers, passageways, and a cat’s tail.

A glossary at the end includes many of the unfamiliar words a reader is likely to encounter, but not all of them—the middle-grader might need a little help with words like stygian and abattoir, but what jolly words to meet, all jaunty and undefined!   This being the 1850s, Queen Victoria shouldn’t be pictured as an old lady, but that’s the default image of her.  Otherwise the language creates a sense of the 19th century without overwhelming a 21^st-century sixth-grader, and a good time can be had by all.

COMMENTS