Charles Dickens

[Wolfgang]

Every year for Christmas a group of friends and I go to the orphanages and read and enact out The Christmas Carol. I am a big fan of Charles Dickens too. I like Oliver Twist and Great expectations a lot. I dont get many Charles Dickens books around here.

If you go to http://www.gutenberg.org, you can find quite a lot ebooks by Charles Dickens. It may not be the same as reading a real book, but if you're interested in the stories, this should be enough.

[Moonraker]

There are also plenty of free books on Amazon for the Kindle.

[Farwa]

I love Charles Dickon's "Oliver Twist". It is such a lovely story. I am going to start "A Christmas Carol" this winter

[Lucky Star]

Don't neglect his other Christmas stories either. You can usually buy them in a collection form nowadays with A Christmas Carol included.

[Katharine]

Funny this thread has been revived today, as I read a few more pages of A Christmas Carol. I have to say, I'm finding it pretty hard going at times. Some descriptions are really good, but then I'll come across a sentence which I have to read several times before I understand what is meant. This morning there was one bit that I just couldn't make head nor tail of, so had to skim over it.

[Farwa]

Well, it's fun reading these classics, even if we have to puzzle over them for some time.
Thanks Lucky Star, I'll check his other Christmas stories as well.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Dickens does have a tendency to bombard his readers with long and complex descriptive sentences, forcing them to linger and drink in a scene before the narrative resumes. In cases like that I don't think it's necessary to grasp every phrase in order to get the gist of what's going on, so I'd do what you did, Katharine, and skim over it. Having said that, if it's a question of certain historical references having become obscure, I look to see whether there's an explanation in the notes as I like to satisfy my curiosity and learn something about the society of the time (I usually read an edition with footnotes or notes at the back).

[number 6]

I agree with you Anita. I've read his books at an early age & found them tedious to trawl through at times, Which put me off reading them in later years. They're great stories, but sometimes tiresome to read. That's why I think I latched on to Enid Blyton. Her stories are simple to read, With no over-emphasising. etc. Thats why She is still so popular today!

[Anita Bensoussane]

I enjoy the lingering and the pondering and I revel in Dickens' enjoyment of language, but I never begin reading a Dickens novel unless I know I'm going to have quite a lot of time to devote to it - if you have to keep putting the book aside it's easy to lose track of the plot and characters.

[Moonraker]

One of the benefits of reading from a Kindle is that you can put a cursor immediately behind the word you're struggling with, and a definition will appear at the top (or bottom) of the page.

[walter raleigh]

I'd definitely agree that one of the pleasures of reading Dickens is the way he revels in the English language. The opening of "Bleak House" is wonderfully strange and esoteric, and one of my favourite introductions to a novel.

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Brilliant! Dickens sweeps us across an extensive landscape, "zooming in" on colourful vignettes along the way, and his descriptions are so unexpected, yet so apt.

[walter raleigh]

It's wonderful isn't it? There's so much more in a similar vein in many of his books. Dickens can be a chore to read at times. I find his tendency to mawkish sentimentality sticks in the throat a little and some of his attempts at humour are embarassingly unfunny (although equally he can be hilarious cf. most of "Pickwick Papers"). But then you'll come across a paragraph or two like the above and it's all worth while. He's definitely one of my favourite writers, but as you allude to in a previous post Anita, you need to 'clear the decks', so to speak, before tackling one of his books.

[Moonraker]

All that talk about fog made me think of the BBC weatherman, back in the days of magnetic weather symbols. There was a large OG on the map, the F had obvioulsy fallen off. "Sorry about the F in fog," he said. And I also have Fog on the Tyne going round in my head!

[burlingtonbertram]

I only discovered Dickens three years ago and quickly had to buy them all (bar two still that I haven't yet got). Although I was a fan of A Christmas Carol since my teens, I really disliked Oliver Twist which I did at O-Level and that coloured my perception of him. I've never been a big fan of books/dramas about the urban poor; probably because their lives were so grim that I couldn't see any pleasure in experiencing them.

Things changed when I bought a late Victorian copy of Nicholas Nickleby and discovered the sheer joy of Dickens. The wonderful world of places and characters that grew out of real life and yet are so wholly grotesque somehow exceed real life but are so vivid. I had to buy more and fast.

My favourite character is Sam Weller from Pickwick Papers (Samivel Veller as his father might say).

The books I enjoyed most were The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend. My only objections to Dickens is his typically sentimental writing about young women and small children. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell? Didn't Chesterton say that it wasn't so much the death of Little Nell that he objected to but her life?