It being Christmas, it was time to set out my grandmother‘s Dickens dishes. I‘ve used these as our Christmas dishes for many years but only read Dickens for the first time a few years ago. How marvelous that my favorite Christmas story, A Christmas Carol, was written by Dickens, on whose story (tagged) these dishes were clearly modeled.
The characters in this story are caricatures. There‘s the evil like Quilp and the good like Nell and Kit. Quilp is punished by drowning, like Quilp. And the good are punished by sickness, like Nell. What a horrible ending. Dickens has the longest sentences and writes about 400 pages more than necessary. It‘s baffling to me that Dickens can write something beautiful like A Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield, and then write something like this…