I wrote a post three years ago (my, have I really been doing this blogging thing for that long?) about all the illustrious people born on February 7th: Sir Thomas More, b. 1478, Charles Dickens, b. 1812, Laura Ingalls Wilder, b. 1867, Sinclair Lewis, b. 1885, Henry Clifford Darby, b. 1909.
And a couple of years ago at this time, I told you about all my favorite Dickensian things.
Last year I did a Dickens quiz, and only one person attempted to answer it. You’re welcome to visit last year’s quiz and see how well you do at matching the Dickens quotation to the novel it came from.
This year I have a few quotations about Mr. Dickens, links and thoughts that I’ve picked up over the course of the year. Enjoy.
“They may admire Shakespeare more but it’s Dickens they love. Maybe the average Englishman, being neither king nor peasant, identified less with the kings and peasants of Shakespeare than with the lower and middle-class upward-mobility types in Dickens.” The Duchess of Bloomsbury by Helen Hanff. (Borrowed/stolen from MFS at Mental Multi-vitamin)
“Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o’er my lifeless body,
I heartily invite such birds
To come outside and say those words.” —“Charles Dickens” by Dorothy Parker
G.K. Chesterton Discusses Dickens’ Christmas Books
. . . one of the things that makes Dickens run is language. Think of the names in his fiction: Scrooge and Jarndyce and Betsy Trotwood and Oliver Twist. And think of his propensity for describing inanimate objects with the adjectives of life. In the Cratchits’ kitchen, the “potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled.†Scrooge has “a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.”
—Joseph Bottum at First Things in an article entitled “A Christmas Carol Revisited.”
“As chance and cultural confessions would have it I sat down on Sunday afternoon in very determined fashion and surrounded by a stack of Dickens.The plan was to read a first chapter or two of each until one suddenly jumped out, grabbed me by the throat and pulled me in kicking and screaming to read it in the run up to Christmas. —Dove Grey Reader, December, 2006.
What a fun way to come at Dickens! I want to try it, too. I wonder which book would capture me. Have Dickens’ novels ever captured you?
It has been my habit for some years now to read one new novel by Dickens each year. Last year I read A Tale of Two Cities, and I may be the only person on earth who doesn’t think it is Dickens’ best. I’ve got Bleak House planned for this year, and quite without realizing today was CD’s birthday, yesterday I bought Little Dorrit, which will probably be for 2008.
Now I’m off to take last year’s quiz, which I missed.
Oops. Not Bleak House. This year I’m planning to read Pickwick Papers.
Yes, since I was 13 or 14 I’ve been besotted with Dickens! I’d read Oliver Twist when I was 10, but it wasn’t until 8th grade and Great Expectations that I was hooked. Then I read a steady diet of Dickens, enjoying the knowledge that although dead, he had been a prolific writer.
A few years ago I realized that there were only 4 of Dickens’s novels I had not yet read, and I began to mete them out to myself sparingly, as though they were one of those tiny 4-pc. boxes of Whitman chocolates.
Imagine my horror when, a few weeks ago while reading over the lists of books I’ve read since 1991, I saw that I had read one of the Dickens novels I had been “saving!” And I was already over 1/2-way through with Martin Chuzzlewit, so I couldn’t put it down. Unhappily, I acknowledged that I now have only 2 books by Dickens to look forward to reading “for the first time.”