Thanks for this thread, Gregory.
I make it a point to revisit Dickens often (likewise, Shakespeare).
I feel my own speech actually improves when reading him (or listening – audible has some great readers of his works).
Then again (as others note), I think one could argue he truly was.
Paragraph 2 of
Bleak House (referred to obliquely above):
Quote:
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 the collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog dropping 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 of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
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And how's this for economy? One can grasp an entire character from two lines (again,
Bleak House):
Quote:
Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.
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OR
Quote:
Mr. Chadband moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright.
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OR
Quote:
He was short, cadaverous, and withered; with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders, and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if he were on fire from within.
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That last is some great early foreshadowing of the mysterious death by spontaneous combustion. Breaking waves, indeed.
Janet's story is interesting -- Dickens as life-saving, and life-sustaining.
And prolific! It's great to think there are works I have yet to explore...
.