Posted on 05/22/2010 6:21:12 AM PDT by C19fan
On June 9, 1865, the 'tidal train', as the Victorians called the train which picked up cross-Channel passengers, was making its way from Folkestone to London, rattling through Kent at 50 miles per hour.
Between Headcorn and Staplehurst, a gang of platelayers was working on the line and had taken up 50 feet of track. Their foreman had miscalculated the time of the approaching train. A crash was inevitable. The train careered over a little bridge into a stream. Ten passengers were killed and 40 injured.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Thanks C19fan. The first ending to "Great Expectations" had Pip *not* getting the girl, but the outcry was so great (it was originally published as a chapter by chapter serial) that Dickens wrote the more familiar ending. |
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Supposedly the first ending was based on Dickens running into a woman he had a flame for in his youth; not sure if this was the same woman as in the article.
You know all that I thought and felt as I read this article.
It had been long understood that Dickens had had numerous flings. It is hinted that he may have married “the wrong sister.” He wasn’t much of a father to his sizable brood, either.
The writing in the article is pretty weak for a British newspaper.
First, “Great Expectations” is not unquestionably his “finest work.” In my opinion, “Bleak House” and “tale of Two Cities” are both better. “Nicholas Nickleby” is as good. Dickens’ biographer G.K. Chesterton (who was responsible for the Dickens entry in the Encyclopedia Brittanica) thought that “Pickwick Papers” was his best work.
Second, one does not say his wife who had “born” his children; the correct term is “borne.”
I stopped reading the article about half-way through because it was getting to be annoying.
Yeah.
It was four years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, brutality, and meanness.and the familiar one:
I had heard of the death of her husband (from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune.
I was in England again -- in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip -- when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another.
"I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!" (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.)
I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.
"We are friends," said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the bench. "And will continue friends apart". I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
And, how many people know G.K. Chesterton or his writings?
No one unless they make an X box game of Father Brown mysteries.
“And, how many people know G.K. Chesterton or his writings?”
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Orthodoxy!
What the Dickens!
and the title should be “teenaged mistress” not “teenage”
and it should be “cliched situation” not “cliche” —
don’t they have editors at English newspapers?
wow — first ending much much much better.
LOVE Chesteron, have almost all of his writing.
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