I bloody love Charles Dickens. Burying myself in his pages combines the all consuming thrill of a rollercoaster with the soul filling satisfaction of a large, well cooked, three course meal. He crafts his characters with such incredible colour and depth of feeling it makes you feel your own life is so comparatively grey-scale, then takes them on journeys with them using the tastiest, most succulent words the English language has to offer.

I am currently nearing the end of David Copperfield, and it feels as if I am about to loose a good friend. A friend who has been an incredible companion over the past two months and will be dearly missed. I’ve loved opening up the book and loosing myself in a world far more dramatic and eventful than my own.

This is my fourth Dickens book and as they have gone on they have only got better. I have previously read Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and Our Mutual Friend and by the end of my lifetime I intended to have read the lot.

For me, the best thing about Dickens is the pictures. The scenes flash so vividly before my minds eye that I find I can recall the rooms in David Copperfield’s childhood home, as well as, if not better than, many places that I have visited in the past week. Looking back, it is like I was really there. He uses such exquisite language, and indeed, so much of it, that every detail is complete, and not just the physical but also the emotional manifestation of the space is impressed deep upon my mind.

I think people are often introduced to Dickens in the wrong way. The text can at some points be rather dense and the points often long drawn out. He was, after all, writing to a strict word count, he had to fill out the requisite pages of the magazine, in which the chapters of his books were released in regular instalments. When reading, the capturing power of the prose needs to outweigh the other forces our brains present us with. We need to push through at the beginning to let ourselves be sucked into his world. If instead, we are pushed, it doesn’t quite have the same effect. Taking away the joy of discovering his worlds for ones self takes away the magic.

When these stories came out, they were not dry and dusty tombs, quite the opposite, they were the soap operas of their day. Each chapter ends leaving you wanting more. I must admit I am quite jealous of the people who got to read these them they came out. For one, they could enjoy them like a good TV series, where between each episode there was at least a week to discuses the latest developments with other readers. Second, they were living in the time these novels were set! I find it refreshing to view the world from the perspectives of the characters in these books as I read them today, but imagine how prescient they would have been at the time. Not least with the general level of character in the world being so much higher back then (or at least, so it seems to me).

Anyway, if you haven’t read any Dickens yet, try him, he’s pretty good. I got a bit carried away with the language in this one, I had just finished reading and was feeling all inspired.