BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!

Subject: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Rapparee
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 02:06 PM

200 years old today, and still nobody reads your stuff unless they have to.

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: olddude
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 02:25 PM

Well we all wait till the movie version comes out

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Will Fly
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 02:27 PM

Wrong, Rap! I've just recently read "Great Expectations", "A Christmas Carol" and "Bleak House". Wonderful books - and yet more to re-read on my bookshelf.

But then, I used to be a librarian...

Happy Birthday, CD!

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 02:28 PM

NPR had a story on Morning Edition today that was interesting.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 03:19 PM

For music content: Happy 200th birthday, Charles Dickens!, a Country Dance & Song Society blog post about Dickens and the dance "Sir Roger de Coverly". Also

Dickens on dance? You'll get a chuckle out of it. He published a number of sketches in monthly magazines under the name of "Boz," and these were collected and published in book form in 1836, when the author was 24. Here are a couple of our favorites:

    Country Fair Dance — a lively and vigorous scene at which the longways country dance has not yet been superseded by the quadrille, made fashionable in the upper reaches of society from about 1814 onward. Men stamp and shout, drink, smoke and fight—"all is primitive, unreserved, and unstudied."
    The Dancing Academy — a longer piece detailing the trials and tribulations of a young man who wishes to enter a (not very genteel) dancing society. To his surprise the dancing master is not foreign (many dancing masters pretended to be French or Italian as they thought it better for business). Since it is not a "dear" [i.e., expensive] academy it is by no means "select" [discriminating] since there are 75 pupils. Poor Augustus! Be careful, or you will be taken in! !" (And, no, there is no dance called the "arinagholkajingo," although wouldn't that make a great title?)

~ Becky in Tucson

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 03:20 PM

(the CDSS post includes links to text of Country Fair Dance and The Dancing Academy)

~ B in T

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: gnu
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 03:50 PM

It was the best of books, it was the worst of books.

I got depressed.. dunno if I even finished it.

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Will Fly
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 04:08 PM

Ah Gnu - you must have been reading "The Tale Of Two Cities".

What you should have been reading is "The Sale Of Two Titties" - much more fun...

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Rapparee
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 08:27 PM

Ah, Will. I spent 40+ years in bibliothecal endeavor. It is faintly possible that somewhere here in my retirement manse I have a copy of "Copperfield" or a tome of "Two Cities."

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Leadfingers
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 09:34 PM

Auntie Beeb is in Overkill mode over Dickens ! Radio Drams , and ALL sorts of stuff - Its getting RIGHT up my nose .

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 07 Feb 12 - 10:04 PM

I've read that when Masterpiece Theatre finishes showing Season 2 of Downton Abbey it will begin showing a new version of Great Expectations.

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 08 Feb 12 - 05:42 PM

How dare you Rapparee! Smacked bottom for you! I studied Dickens for A level and then at University, decades ago. I still read him, and get enormous pleasure from his books. I'm re-reading The Cricket on the Hearth just now. My favourite for all these years has to be Bleak House, a very complex and chewy novel. "The waters are out in Lincolnshire..." and that sinister 'spontaneous combustion'. Weird!

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 12:44 AM

I love Dickens too, Eliza. & am exercised here, as always, as to why people will open threads solely & purely to be negative about what others feel positively about.

But why should Rap be the only one allowed to get a smacked bottom? Its soooo unfair!

LoL xxx

〠☺〠~M~〠☺〠

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 12:48 AM

☝ɷɷɷɷɷɷɷɷ ☜

OUCH!

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 06:54 AM

LOL MtheGM! You're quite right, Smacked Bottoms should be freely available to those that want them. (Or as Nursie on Blackadder would say, "Mr and Mrs Smack will be paying a visit to Bottyland!) XXX

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Will Fly
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 07:07 AM

Wasn't it Mrs. and Mrs. Spank? :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Rapparee
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 02:43 PM

Whatever makes you think I don't like Dickens? I took a BA in English Literature, and studied the dickens out of Dickens in both high school and college and even when I was working on an MA. Why, I when I grow up I want to be like Heep and Marley (before he died) and Fagan and Murdstone and Steerforth and all of the Dickensian heroes. I thought Pip was a pip and noticed how Chuck wrote of the small things, like Little Nell, Little Dorritt, and Tiny Tim. I cheered when Barkis was willin' and booed when Silas was robbed of his...oops, that's George Eliot. That Victorian literature can run together on ya if you're not careful.

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: GUEST,Manuel
Date: 09 Feb 12 - 03:24 PM

In the good old days when I was less busy, I could afford to go back to A Tale of Two Cities every now and then. (Long sigh)

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: GUEST,Eliza
Date: 10 Feb 12 - 12:46 PM

Yes! It was Mr and Mrs Spank! And I'm very sorry, rapparee, I misunderstood your posting to mean that you yourself didn't read him unless you had to. Mea culpa.

Subject: RE: BS: Happy Birthday Chuck, you old Dickens!
From: Joe_F
Date: 10 Feb 12 - 09:06 PM

"...in the case of Dickens I see...the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is _generously angry_ -- in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

-- George Orwell (1939)