I wrote a post a couple of 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 last year at this time, I told you about all my favorite Dickensian things.
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This year I present a Dickens quiz. Can you match the quotation to the novel?
1. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
2. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
3. “I would rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a life as this!”
4. “It’s over and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man’s head off.”
5. “If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass–a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience–by experience.”
6. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
7. “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.”
Those are from the seven Dickens novels I’ve read. Perhaps you’ve read them. too?
(Doesn’t Shakespeare somewhere call the law “an ass”?)
I know #2 and 6. I think I read a Shakespearean character call the law an ass, but I don’t remember. I can’t find it searching through Bartleby.com’s Oxford Shakespeare.
These ones, I’m sure of:
2. Tale of Two Cities
5. Oliver Twist
6. A Christmas Carol
Number 1 seems terribly familiar, but I can’t place it. Clearly, when I’m done working my way through the novels, I shall have to reread them.