The Inimitable

[poliphilo]

I read Pickwick Papers as a child and wanted to be Sam Weller.  Afraid that nothing would ever live up to the splendiferousness of Pickwick, I left Dickens alone through early adolescence- and then- at seventeen- fell deeply in love with Little Dorrit. I've read all the major novels except Barnaby Rudge (most of them at least twice).  My politics- an apple-cheeked Christian socialism fuelled by rage at the Merdles and Tite-Barnacles (who still run the world)- are essentially Dickens's politics. I love many other novelists, but Dickens is in a class apart- and there have been times in my life when (like Charlie Chaplin) I couldn't be bothered with reading anyone else. No-one- before or since (and that even includes Shakespeare)- has ever been so lively. 

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to warm to Dickens. I keep trying -- I pick up novel after novel --but there's something about his authorial interjections that sends me away again. I am thinking at the moment about my last attempt to read the Tale of Two Cities. I thought to myself (after he described a nobleman and a cleric), okay, you've made your point that you consider these folk despicable. Now could we please get along with the plot? He didn't, and I moved along to something else.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He's a strong flavour. I can understand people not liking him.
I love him for his discursiveness, his humour- and almost everything except his plots. The only one of his books that is conventionally well plotted is Great Expectations.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I'll try one on Kindle on my cell phone. I can take all kinds of tediousness there, for some reason, including the lesser Anne Bronte novel _Agnes Grey_.