★★★★★ | Literature | Digital + Audio | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters you meet will eventually make sense. I was distrustful at first, my head spinning with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I was wrong to be critical of the master. By the end of this story, every character, no matter how minor, was reintroduced and I understood their purpose in the story. Sure, this involved a lot of happy coincidences for our protagonist, but it brought me happiness to have these loose threads woven together.
After spending 800 pages with these characters, some incredibly good, some evil, I am reluctant to part with them. Dickens is truly a master.
Highlights
We have all some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it! I never had this mysterious impression more strongly in my life, than before he uttered those words.
‘Whenever I have not had you, Agnes, to advise and approve in the beginning, I have seemed to go wild, and to get into all sorts of difficulty. When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come to peace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest!’
conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form.
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.’
‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Omer, ‘when a man is drawing on to a time of life, where the two ends of life meet; when he finds himself, however hearty he is, being wheeled about for the second time, in a speeches of go-cart; he should be over-rejoiced to do a kindness if he can. He wants plenty. And I don’t speak of myself, particular,’ said Mr. Omer, ‘because, sir, the way I look at it is, that we are all drawing on to the bottom of the hill, whatever age we are, on account of time never standing still for a single moment. So let us always do a kindness, and be over-rejoiced. To be sure!’