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Happy 210th Birthday to Charles Dickens

Posted by (northern CA) on

Charles Dickens was born this day in 1812 in Portsmouth.

He had a very popular public performance career doing readings of his work around England and in the USA,
and continues to generate a lot of foot traffic at his burial spot in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poets%27_Corner

Dickens was just a handful of years older than Marx and Engels and he grew up in the same environment, witnessing the gulf between the classes in English society, but Dickens used fiction to shine a light on it rather than theory

https://fathersonholygore.com/marxism-charles-dickens-class-mobility-in-great-expectations/

Who are your favorites in Poets Corner?

Posted by
2768 posts

Dickens invented a lot of words that we take for granted today,
like

boredom

doormat

flummox
and of course a lot of words made from the names of his characters, too...

Posted by
4598 posts

I wonder how many of us had our first exposure to Charles Dickens through A Christmas Carol and didn't even know it was a famous book by a famous author? The Disney version with Scrooge McDuck was an annual event at our house and my first exposure. I'm not sure now if I really knew about Dickens until A Tale of Two Cities was required reading in high school and I fell in love with the story. It's thanks to that book that it was a big deal when I visited Poets Corner. I have to admit, my answer to the question has to be Dickens by default because I didn't recognize many others unless it was via a Disney reference such as Rudyard Kipling and CS Carroll. I was looking forward to seeing A.A. Milne's name there; as I just expected he would have been buried there and was surprised he wasn't. I have fond memories of reading the Winnie the Pooh tales with my Mom when I was a boy.

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