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The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.
Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.
It was one of those rare occasions when a game of cricket had not been interrupted by the weather, but would the Church be so forgiving?
Charles Dickens was very much frustrated with the behaviour of religious campaigners who declared that playing games on Sunday was a sin. During one Sunday evening walk, he stumbled across a meadow where there was a cricket match in full swing, not a stone’s throw from the parish church, and he trembled to think what the ecclesiastical authorities would say if they knew about it.
Jack Cade brought a protest to London with right on his side, but then threw it all away.
In 1450, King Henry VI was embroiled in the Hundred Years’ War with France. He was losing the war, and everyone knew it; but his noblemen were making a lot of money out of trampling on the rights of Englishmen in the war’s name. Kent was especially hard hit, and late that May Jack Cade emerged as the leader of the county’s discontent. This was how Charles Dickens told his story.
Whenever Charles Dickens felt his exhausting workload was starting to take its toll, he knew just what to do.
Charles Dickens corresponded regularly with a Swiss friend whom he had met in Lausanne, a M. de Cerjat. In one of his letters, written from his home near Rochester in Kent, Dickens shared with his friend the secret of his remarkably industrious working life — frequent trips to France.
Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
The Romans did bring some blessings to Britain, but none so great as the one they did not mean to bring.
In his Child’s History of England Dickens was consistently severe on the abuse of power. The Romans, who ruled here from the first century to the start of the fifth, did not escape his censure. He admitted they had exercised a degree of civilising influence, but in his judgment the most civilising influence in their time had been Christianity, for it exposed the frauds of Britain’s indigenous pagan elite, the Druids.
Pip receives a visitor from among the criminal classes, but his condescending attempt to play the gentleman rebounds spectacularly.
One night, Pip Pirrip, now twenty-three, opens the door of his London apartment and finds a rough-looking man of about sixty outside. This alarming visitor asks him to recall helping a sorry convict, hunted down by the police on the Kent marshes sixteen years before. Uncomfortably, Pip does, and also remembers that the convict had afterwards sent him two pounds. A thought befitting a gentleman then strikes him.