Dickens Hack

OH! It is ON!

Colin thinks that Dickens is overly wordy, needlessly verbose, and hyper-vocabulised. Often to a detrimental, deterring, and deleterious extent.

Which is true, obviously, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t read him, right? Right? I mean, right?

Ross’ Show Notes

Dicken’s work is in the public domain (natch). Download any or all of his books at Project Gutenberg. They are downloadable in multiple formats for all of your ereaders, tablets, phones, watches, whatever.
Please consider donating to Project Gutenberg. I do, because these bastions of free information are facing more and more challenges as laws change.
What I didn’t tell Colin was that there are also free, unabridged, audiobooks of Dickens available at librivox.org. A surprising number of them are available in Dutch, so there you go. You can pick from several different readers, but I found that Mil Nicholson is the best, hands down.
If you like what I was saying about Dombey and Son, and want to know how that all pans out, then download the Mil Nicholson reading here. Make sure you have some hankies ready (Chapters 14 – onwards).
A Tale of Two Cities takes place 1775-1792. Barnaby Rudge in and around 1780. Little Dorrit begins in 1826, but as it was written in 1855 I don’t think that counts as Historical Fiction.
I found Barnaby Rudge probably the hardest to get through. The description of the riots was well worth the trudge through the first have of the book, though.
If “Barnaby Rudge” isn’t cockney rhyming slang for “trudge”, then it should be.
I just looked it up and “Barnaby Rudge” is cockney rhyming slang for “judge”. That’s kind of cool.
This website further informs me that “Oliver Twist” is “fist”.
@rosslawhead me on Twitter for questions, comments, or arguments.

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