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Article: A summer of Charles Dickens.(THE HOME FORUM)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- July 18, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Robert Klose
My local library recently added a set of movies to its collection: BBC productions of the novels of Charles Dickens. I have never been much of a fan of Victorian English literature. It's always struck me as so, well, English in its stuffiest sense. The convoluted language is frequently opaque, not seeming to be anything that a real person could have actually said. Take this line from Thackeray's Vanity Fair: "Mofy! is that your snum? ... I'll gully the dag and bimbole the clicky in a snuffkin."
Now what am I supposed to make of that?
But Dickens has always been the exception. As an undergraduate, I marched through several ...