Today is the 198th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Yay! Dickens is one of my favorite writers, in case you don’t know me or somehow missed this fact.
I celebrated this impending event in three ways over the past week:
1. I finished reading Hard Times on Sunday. I’d been reading it for the class on the Victorian Period that I’m auditing this semester. I enjoyed it, but it’s not my favorite work.
2. I watched an episode of Dr. Who in which the Doctor and Rose travel back in time to 1869 London and meet Charles. It was the first episode of Dr. Who that I’d ever seen, and I truly enjoyed their portrayal of Dickens, and the fact that he frequently references his own work. 🙂
3. I ripped out pages from my spare copy of Great Expectations and decopauged a composition notebook. It’s now awesome, and I can take notes or write stories or something in a notebook covered with scenes from one of my favorite books.
So, today, in celebration of his birth, I’ll leave you with some of my favorite quotes from Dickens. He is prolific and perspicacious and completely awesome, and I think in two years, I should plan to travel to England on the 200th anniversary of his birth. 🙂
From Great Expectations (when Pip first meets Estella, I believe):
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
From A Tale of Two Cities:
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
Sidney Carton’s vision of Paris in A Tale of Two Cities:
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long, long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
From A Christmas Carol:
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.
Happy Birthday, Charles! Thanks for enriching my life!