Tales from Dickens Universe, part 2

I am still here, fully ensconced in a strange world where everyone chuckles appreciatively at a reference to eating one’s own head and the biggest daily obstacle is that someone’s using a Norton edition when everyone else is using a Penguin. (The Norton, of course, was taken from the later completed novel editions, while the Penguin comes from the earlier serial edition first published in Bentley’s Miscellany. What, you didn’t realize how different they were? Oh ho, you’re in for a treat.)

It’s hard to think about anything other than Dickens, frankly – a trap this person clearly fell victim to while registering his or her car. Occasionally I get flashes of TV or new media -related ideas, among them, “Were Dickens’ sketches the YouTube videos of his day?”, “What is it we like about really long stories if it’s not plot?”, and, “If his insistence on repeated public readings of the most violent scene in his corpus, the scene in Oliver Twist when Sikes murders Nancy, did indeed contribute to Dickens’ premature death (as was argued by a lecturer this morning), do we need to worry about the health of such TV violence aficionados as the Davids Chase, Milch, or Simon?” (Answers: Yes, hmm, and I hope not.)

At the moment, though, television looks like a far-off vision of the future when seen from a world emphasizing daily Victorian teas and frequent discussion of the New Poor Law. Better luck tomorrow.