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Unread 02-11-2012, 10:12 AM
B.J. Preston B.J. Preston is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Eastern US
Posts: 514
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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).

Quote:
So he wasn't a poet...
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.


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.
OR

Quote:
Mr. Chadband moves softly and cumbrously, not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright.
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.
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...
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