Charles Dickens

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Charles Dickens’

25
Brimstone and Treacle Charles Dickens

Mrs Squeers has lost the school spoon, and is uncomfortably frank about its importance.

Impoverished young gentleman Nicholas Nickleby has accepted a position as junior master at Dotheboys Hall, a remote Yorkshire school managed by Mr Wackford Squeers and his wife. On his arrival, Nicholas is treated to a rapid initiation into the school’s educational vision.

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26
Experience Does It Charles Dickens

Wilkins Micawber had little to give David Copperfield at their parting, save two words of advice.

Wilkins Micawber has just been released from a spell in prison for debt, and has resolved to take his wife away from London to Plymouth, leaving David Copperfield to find new lodgings. There is little that Mr Micawber can give David in leave-taking, except two words of heartfelt advice.

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27
Fair Rosamund Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens tells the story of King Henry II and the enchantingly beautiful Rosamund Clifford.

The story of Rosamund Clifford, mistress of a young Henry II, is one of the great romances of English literature. Disappointingly (or perhaps not, since it is a bitter tragedy) apart from the most essential facts it is a legend. The best one can do is to ask one of our great novelists, Charles Dickens, to let us down gently.

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28
The Bashful Young Gentleman Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens sketches for us the shyly ingratiating youth who gets himself in a tangle in the presence of Beauty.

Charles Dickens’s ‘Sketches’ is a collection of character portraits in words, supposedly written for young ladies to prepare them for going about in society. His word-painting is of such dexterity that bashful young gentlemen everywhere will raise their hats to him - if they haven’t left them behind in the street.

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29
The Arts of Fair Rowena Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens believed that Britain’s Saxon invaders gained power by force of arms – but not by weapons.

Whether or not the fifth-century Saxon warlords Hengist and Horsa were historical figures (St Bede and JRR Tolkien both thought so), the Saxon invasions, and General Flavius Aetius’s failure to respond to Roman Britain’s heartbreaking appeals in the late 440s, were quite real.

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30
The Train of a Life Charles Dickens

In Charles Dickens’s tale set around Mugby Junction, a man sees his life flash by like a ghostly train.

At the start of his railway-themed story ‘Mugby Junction’, Charles Dickens wants to tell us about the lead character, whom we know thus far only as a man with two black cases labelled ‘Barbox Brothers’. He is standing with the station’s sole member of staff on the otherwise deserted, rain-soaked platform at three o’clock in the morning.

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