By JD
I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
…A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, who is grossly underrated.
By JD
Uncle Pumblechook: a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to.
…Charles Dickens figured fiction out a century and a half ago, and I’m not certain literature has progressed since. From Great Expectations.
By JD
Seriously. What is it with me and Dickens? Perhaps it’s because the novel I’m writing is effusive with physical, geographic complexity, but I’m getting obsessed with this cat.
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 collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping 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 sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
…from Bleak House, for which I may shuck off all my assignments to re-read this month. Once again via my favorite subreddit.
By JD
Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.
…Chuck Dickens, from David Copperfield. I should probably just admit that he’s my favorite writer, and, for that matter, that I’m procrastinating at this very second.
By JD
There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.
…Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickelby
It’s hard to believe that after so much time, I’m still in miraculous awe of Charles Dickens. Dude doesn’t get nearly enough props for the angle of his literary dangle.
Check out all the other usual suspects of prose porn in Ten Best Sentences from The American Scholar.