3
It's a wise decision not to rush at Dickens's last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend ...Read the full article
This conversation is closed
- Skip to the latest comment
-
leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: I am really, really quite pleasantly surprised by this - serendipitously surprised even. I love the Victorians and am particularly taken by Mr Dickens. 'Our Mutual Friend' is also the one book of his canon that I haven't read yet, but only because I've just not got around to it. I 'fell in' with the Victorians years ago - first Wuthering Heights then the other Brontes. Then of course, Dickens, who I tried to read chronologically but went off track when I discovered his raspy relation with Thackeray et al - I read Bleak House then Vanity Fair for example, back to back and then together. Eventually I was overwhelmed and swallowed up by the social history of the time and read always with a practical (so I thought) guide to a novel - sometimes with another novel, sometimes with a commentary or chronicle. I read Burton with Darwin; I read Conan Doyle with Collins; I read Newman and Engles with Eliot and Hardy and Wilde with the Rossetti's and Tennyson and on and on. And somewhere along the line I crossed over - I took up with the Edwardians and the early Moderns and slung my hook with the Bloomsbury crowd and Joyce and Eliot and left the Victorians - Mr Dickens and 'Our Mutual Friend' behind. It has been years since I've been back - years and a century of literature, but I too am now riding into that opague veil - my years can be numbered by the down swing of the hammer. So thank you John Sutherland. Thank you. I think I'll send this post then steer the old mouse over to Amazon and pick up a copy. Peace and a good long weekend to all. Leo.
- Posted 28/06/08 at 10:30 AM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
-
Greg Atkin from Canada writes: The novel also provided us with the working title of The Wasteland: "He do the police in different voices." This is the tribute paid to Sloppy that keen listener of dialects who would real aloud the crime reports in the papers often playing different characters in the text.
- Posted 29/06/08 at 12:53 AM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
Comments are closed
Thanks for your interest in commenting on this article, however we are no longer accepting submissions. If you would like, you may send a letter to the editor.
Report an abusive comment to our editorial staff
close
Alert us about this comment
Please let us know if this reader’s comment breaks the editor's rules and is obscene, abusive, threatening, unlawful, harassing, defamatory, profane or racially offensive by selecting the appropriate option to describe the problem.
Do not use this to complain about comments that don’t break the rules, for example those comments that you disagree with or contain spelling errors or multiple postings.
