Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!

Happy 200th to the boy in the blacking factory.

I've just read Great Expectations—which for some reason I'd missed all these years—and I'm re-reading Bleak House.  Damn, that one's good.  Somehow, I've slithered out of A Tale of Two Cities.  At seven or so, I got so deep into David Copperfield that I missed my bus—and came to in a deserted schoolyard, frantic with abandonment.  At thirteen, I rewrote that book as The Persecution and Assassination of Charles Dickens as Performed by the Inmates, got my English class to stage it, and played the narrator in a Sibyl's robes and sunglasses.  Nearly every year, I curl up with A Christmas Carol.  It's like eating mince pies.

Dickens works splendidly theatrically, as well he knew—and half-killed himself performing.   He did the police in different voices.  I dearly love the RSC Nicholas Nickleby; I seriously like the Christine Edzard Little Dorrit and admire David Lean's Oliver Twist (except for that appalling Fagin—O Alec Guinness, what were you thinking?) and I smiled and sniffled at the school production of Oliver! my friends' daughters were in:  London kids playing London kids.  The elder girl was channeling Helena Bonham Carter as the Widow, and there was a hell of an eleven-year-old Nancy.

What do you like?  Or is Dickens like a slab of Christmas cake for you, all garish mixed fruits and stodge and icing sugar?

Nine