![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Flirting with Dickens
Feb. 7th, 2012 09:11 pmIt being the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, I thought I might try again to read something of his other than "A Christmas Carol."
I've never been terribly successful -- I've picked up and put down David Copperfield more times than I care to count. I've tried A Tale of Two Cities a couple of times. The guy's descriptions get on my nerves.
But I thought I'd try again. I downloaded Bleak House to my cellphone Kindle app, suffered through several screens of fog, and then realized this is the one about the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit in Chancery. Never mind.
Next I thought I might try Pickwick Papers, since that's supposed to be more cheerful. Somewhere along the second chapter a ne'er do well character was describing a possibly apocryphal tragedy in Spain, wherein a man's body was found in a fountain, with his head in a drainpipe and a full confession in his right boot. Wait a minute, says I, that sounds suspiciously like Kipling. I found the reference I was fairly sure I remembered, in Stalky & Co., in which one of our young hellions, ooops, heroes misquotes it totally out of context, putting the confession in the left boot not the right. As it was a splendid springlike afternoon, I settled down happily to renew my acquaintance, intimate and unholy, with those tales instead. Kipling keeps his narratives mercifully on point. None of this three pages of fog.
While I'm on the subject, here's a nice bit of Dickens trivia. Philadelphia is home to the only American publisher that honored Dickens' copyrights when he was a young man. Everybody else ripped him off. The ethical publisher was named Carey, Lea & Blanchard. Isn't that cool?
I've never been terribly successful -- I've picked up and put down David Copperfield more times than I care to count. I've tried A Tale of Two Cities a couple of times. The guy's descriptions get on my nerves.
But I thought I'd try again. I downloaded Bleak House to my cellphone Kindle app, suffered through several screens of fog, and then realized this is the one about the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit in Chancery. Never mind.
Next I thought I might try Pickwick Papers, since that's supposed to be more cheerful. Somewhere along the second chapter a ne'er do well character was describing a possibly apocryphal tragedy in Spain, wherein a man's body was found in a fountain, with his head in a drainpipe and a full confession in his right boot. Wait a minute, says I, that sounds suspiciously like Kipling. I found the reference I was fairly sure I remembered, in Stalky & Co., in which one of our young hellions, ooops, heroes misquotes it totally out of context, putting the confession in the left boot not the right. As it was a splendid springlike afternoon, I settled down happily to renew my acquaintance, intimate and unholy, with those tales instead. Kipling keeps his narratives mercifully on point. None of this three pages of fog.
While I'm on the subject, here's a nice bit of Dickens trivia. Philadelphia is home to the only American publisher that honored Dickens' copyrights when he was a young man. Everybody else ripped him off. The ethical publisher was named Carey, Lea & Blanchard. Isn't that cool?
