Victorian Gammon

I know that I’ve written about Dickens a few times now – my first ever post was about the dinosaur at the start of Bleak House – but, well, posts about his work pretty much write themselves. I’ve talked specifically about Nicholas Nickleby before, and I still maintain that the bit about The United Metropolitan

Goroo!

I think that the best characters in any Dickens novels are the unimportant ones. The ones that turn up for a page or two, the ones that could easily have been edited out but weren’t. The main characters drive the plot along but these characters provide the colour. For example, no spoilers but at one

Cheese Dreams

I’ve heard it said that eating cheese before you go to bed can give you nightmares but it’s not a fact backed up by science, as far as I can tell. Want to have a guess where it comes from? Yep, it was probably Dickens. The notion can be traced by to the publication of

Inspiration for Ice and Fire

I’m a big fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire books, the epic fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, and I hope the next one will be released soon. There has been (and continues to be) a lot of discussion about influences and I have two more ideas to throw into the

The United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company

Why the very name will get the shares up to a premium in ten days. In fairness, it does sound good. Dickens tends to come up with a great idea, talk about it for a page or two, then never mention it again. This is perhaps the best example – even if you never read

Dinosaurs in Dickens

The first few sentences of Bleak House go like this: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth[…] So far, so Dickens, right? But then he