The Daily Charles Dickens: A Year of Quotes

Even the most dismal and gray day improves with a tantalizing quote from The Daily Charles Dickens, introduced and edited by James R. Kincaid. Day-by-day lines are taken from the author’s best known and also his less familiar novels, as well as his 1842 trip to America, in which he reflected on political troubles similar to those experienced today. Stories of the “New York Sewer,” the “New York Plunderer,” and the “New York Stabber” compare all too closely to our exaggerated TV channels’ news stories.

Dickens is immortal: his nineteenth-century writing, often on social issues, remains disturbingly relevant. While several of his novels have been translated to movies and musicals, these are mere shadows of the books from which they are drawn, books best read with a pencil near at hand to mark favorite dates. Who doesn’t remember “Barkis was willing,” the back-to-front marriage proposal from the taciturn coachman to David Copperfield’s nanny? Or, when traveling in Maryland where he records a dinner served by slaves, that he was “filled with a sense of shame and self-reproach”?

Dickens’s experiences and his interests suffuse his prolific writing. But despite all he wrote and his experiences, he admitted with characteristic humor, “I have never been round the world, never been ship-wrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.”

The pages of this compact hardback invite time to muse or hasten as the mood demands.