“Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations are actually good reads if you read it like it was written - they were serials.”
Yes, still a great concept. I imagine people must have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the next installment. Like I am about the TV Show “nashville” now!
Of Dickens I’ve read “A Tale of Two Cities”, but years ago I’d really have to read it again; “Great Expectations”, “A Christmas Carol” both of which I liked; “Pickwick Papers” which I loved, a few others I started by never got anywhere with them.
Now wait, I might be lying about that, lol! I don’t know if I started any of the rest of them...I might be thinking of seeing movies and reading the “Classic Comic Books”.
Those were pretty good, btw. Didn’t someone on this thread say they got a way with a book report based on one of those?
You’d think we could revive them in this age of the “graphic novel”.
It's like Pickwick but grittily realistic.
Handley Cross. Illustrated by the great John Leech (of Punch fame).
It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time--a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation.
- Kipling. An absolutely hilarious short story, btw, read it here: My Son's Wife
Great Expectations is a classic, and the tell tale sign is how often its been imitated.
Magwich was the benefactor all along, not Havisham. Then you have the ball-busting angle on it, and the power women have over men, despite the popular notion of it being a man’s world.
Even the Big Lebowski borrowed heavily from it - the old crabby guy in the wheelchair being penniless, but pulling all the strings.
Everybody borrows, but Dickens put the use of names as a clue to the characters true colors on the map.
I still love the name ‘Pumblechoke’. Nobody’s going to top that.