My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. Irresistibly the reader is drawn into the voice-exquisitely lyric, yet with a profound melancholy beneath-of the child Philip Pirrip-“Pip”-of Great Expectations: Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some distance, and will there poise and linger conveying to mere men the fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that this artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.Īnd equally characteristic of Dickens, a chapter opening in the lesser-regarded and uncompleted The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which a natural observation acquires a portentous metaphoric significance:
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. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun….įog everywhere. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Is Dickens the greatest of English novelists? Few would contest that he is the most English of great English novelists, and that his most accomplished novels- Bleak House, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend, and David Copperfield-are works of surpassing genius, thrumming with energy, imagination, and something resembling white-hot inspiration his gift for portraiture is arguably as great as Shakespeare’s, and his versatility as a prose stylist is dazzling, as in this famous opening of Bleak House: The life of almost any man possessing great gifts, would be a sad book to himself.
Charles Dickens in 1850, when he was writing David Copperfield
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