Alexandra

“He read the city. London in the 1830s was exploding with print. Newspapers, magazines, journals, quarterlies, weeklies, monthlies, and books of every genre were flying off the shelves, tossed on doorsteps, and hawked from the corners of nearly every street. He pored over newsstand copies of The Times, the Standard, and the Morning Post; he read, though did not fully comprehend, articles in academic journals like Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review; he read penny satirical papers like Figaro in London, melodramatic pseudo-news like colourful crime reports and a series on the dying confessions of condemned prisoners. For cheaper stuff, he entertained himself with the Bawbee Bagpipe. He stumbled on a series called The Pickwick Papers by someone named Charles Dickens, who was very funny but seemed to hate very much anyone who was not white. He discovered Fleet Street, the heart of London publishing, where newspapers came off the printing presses still hot. He went back there time and time again, bringing home stacks of yesterday’s papers for free from piles that were dumped on the corner. He didn’t understand half of what he read, even if he could decipher all the individual words. The texts were packed with political allusions, inside jokes, slang, and conventions that he’d never learned. In lieu of a childhood spent absorbing it all in London, he tried devouring the corpus instead, tried to plough through references to things like Tories, Whigs, Chartists, and Reformers and memorize what they were. He learned what the Corn Laws were and what they had to do with a Frenchman named Napoleon. He learned who the Catholics and Protestants were, and how the (he thought, at least) small doctrinal differences between the two were apparently a matter of great and bloody importance.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel