I’m hoping to get to A Tale of Two Cities next year, when I’ll be visiting both Paris and London, and looking for some Two Cities reads. It and Bleak House are great places to start with continuing your Dickens’ reading!Believe it or not (probably at this stage, you are not shocked) but I have not read anything Dickens.
Start your Independent Premium subscription today.After boarding school and an unhappy stint in London, David is befriended in Dover by his monomaniacal aunt Betsy Trotwood before encountering the tippling lawyer Mr Wickfield and his “dreadful ‘umble” assistant Uriah Heep, the latter slyly seeking to usurp the former.Betrayed by his schoolmate Steerforth, David rises to prominence as a novelist, has his heart broken by tragedy and ultimately finds lasting happiness.Victorian novelist offers wealth of unforgettable characters and some of the most pointed satire on British society and manners ever committed to paperHis fall at the hands of Newman Noggs, a man he has effectively enslaved by obligation, can only be read with a rousing cheer in a book that contains nothing close to a dull moment.The seemingly never-ending case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce at its centre rumbles on indefinitely, gradually chewing up the disputed inheritance in question until no one can remember its origins and there are no spoils left for the victor in any event: “Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.”The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. Normally BarnabyI would like to give Bleak House a try, in part because I know that I did like Great Expectations; I just need to get over my disappointment with A Tale of Two Cities first. After reading this post I am thinking I need to read Bleak House. Technically this isn’t a ‘novel’ but a novella, but it’s one of Dickens’s finest …
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but pickwick stands out in this regard, and for me, is a must read.And yet, this is not Detective Bucket’s story. Known as “the Father of the Marshalsea”, Dorrit is respected by his fellow inmates and too vain to acknowledge his daughter’s efforts on behalf of the family.Sharing the full story, not just the headlinesDickens used his own unhappy adolescence in the workhouse to sketch in Oliver’s childhood under Mr Bumble and his experience as a journalist to report the plight of street children, forced into pickpocketing and worse by desperate necessity.The author had known poverty himself as a child after his father John was incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark for debt, forcing the young Charles into hard labour at a boot-blacking workhouse.Pickwick’s arrest and imprisonment in the Fleet for “breach of promise” after a misunderstanding with his landlady is hilarious, as is the clipped bluster of Alfred Jingle, the snoring of Joe and the wit and wisdom of Sam Weller, one of the great English everymen.Haversham, sat alone in her mansion wearing white, a three-tiered cake mouldering at her side, utterly consumed by hatred, would be worth the price of admission alone.Only Sydney Carton, an alcoholic English lawyer also in love with Lucie, can help Darnay, a man he closely resembles.Incredibly, he manages to surpass it at the close, with Carton’s desperately moving words as he awaits the guillotine: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.”This masterly bildungsroman charts the life and adventures of the eponymous hero, dispatched to live in an upturned boat on Yarmouth beach after his unworldly mother marries the cruel Edward Murdstone.Arthur sets out to help, pulling on the thread and unravelling Dorrit’s financial affairs to the betterment of all, only for Clennam himself to be hit by calamity and end up taking his place.Dickens was motivated to write his ghost story by a deeply felt outrage at the hardships of the urban poor he saw every day on the streets of Victorian London and the unfeeling avarice of the arch-capitalists of his age.Harold Skimpole – a sponging associate of Jarndyce who disingenuously insists on his state of childlike innocence to wheedle his way out of adult responsibility – and the ludicrous dancing master Turveydrop appear among another unforgettable supporting cast.In the winter of 1843, Dickens had visited Clerkenwell’s Field Lane Ragged School, a recently founded charitable institute for urchins.