Mar 3rd, 2025

Author: donich_admin

A confession…

When I was about eight years old, my parents acquired one of those beautifully bound “sets” of books which build every month into a collection which sit and look good on bookshelves, but rarely, if ever, actually get read. This particular set was “classics of literature” and as there weren’t that many books in our house and I was a voracious reader, I actually did at least try to read most of them. I seem to recall that quite a lot of them were Dickens, and I laboured through nearly all of them, starting with “David Copperfield” and “Great Expectations” and finally losing steam about half way through “Bleak House”. I have to say that I did not greatly enjoy any of them; they were over-lengthy, over-descriptive, too melodramatic, and every plot twist seemed to take about a million years to happen.

Then aged sixteen, we “took” Dickens as part of O level English. Our set book was Little Dorrit. I did not greatly enjoy it; it was over-lengthy, over-descriptive, too melodramatic, and every plot twist seemed to take about a million years to happen.

Then about five years ago I made a resolution to have another go – because I like other writers of the period such as Thackery and Trollop. I gamely repeated the ones I had read as a child and finished “Bleak House” this time. I still hated them all and for the same reasons as above. Plus in “Oliver Twist”, why, why, why can’t he actually bring himself to say what it is that Nancy does for a living???

So yesterday I read an article describing how “A Tale of two Cities” was completely unlike his other novels. Apparently it is short on descriptive passages and character exposition and strong on plot. I read the first bit of it this evening. What a complete load of crap it is – I haven’t read a more overblown, over-written, overly melodramatic piece of nonsense since the last time… Ah yes – since the last time I read a Dickens novel.

So now the only two I haven’t read are most of “A Tale of two Cities” plus “Our Mutual Friend”. I’ll pass on those two. I hate Dickens.