I wanted to have some physical reminders of him in my room aside from his books, so I painted his portrait. But I thought he would be lonely, so I gave him a friend. Chuck and Chuck. (If this is any way against the rules I am obliged to take it down)

Chap. 35 - Why does Miss Flite refer to Esther as Fitz-Jarndyce. What did I miss?

The shock factor and comedic timing of the mistaken identity was fantastic, but I wanted to see Cecilia get a happy ending too! She's the only Dickens character I can think of that doesn't get a satisfactory ending (but I haven't finished all of them yet so no spoilers!). That poor girl needs a friend. Does anyone else wish she had been introduced to the Cheeryble brothers or Kate? Sure, it would have added lots to an already long book, but I think it would have been worth it to give her a good ending (and who wouldn't want to spend more time with the cast of characters?).

PS--Yes, Smike's character had a bittersweet and beautiful ending! But I needed someone else for the meme and I felt that of all the options, he worked best.

I hope it's okay to share this here! I'm a long-time Dickens fan and create literary-inspired chocolate bars. I'm launching a Kickstarter campaign for our two newest flavors, The Maltese Falcon and Doctor Watson, on Tuesday, September 2nd: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gegallas/the-maltese-falcon-and-doctor-watson-chocolate-bars. A Christmas Carol will be available as a Kickstarter reward. I hope you'll check it out and help us spread the word. Thank you so much!!

¬ ACC takes place over Christmas Eve/ Christmas Day, and Scrooge wanted to "honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year" by the end of the novella.

¬ The last mention of his name was "Scrooge was better than his word", but interestingly, it is also the 363rd time the word Scrooge/Scrooge's is mentioned.

This got me thinking if these two ideas were linked: 363 accounts for all the days in a year (outside of a Christmas), which could be symbolic of how Scrooge successfully maintains a festivity throughout the entire year. He doesn't just "try", he exceeds our expectations, confirming that he has infact, transformed.

My teacher reckons Dickens wouldn't have had the time to consider stuff like this due to his tight deadline, but I've been using this book religiously for my GCSEs, and think it seems too intentional to be a coincidence. Either way, I was proud to spot this.

We get glimpses into past, present, and future, so the novella is already tied to the calendar, but I'd love to hear from some other perspectives!

Coincidence or Intention?

At serious risk of sounding stupid here, but I can’t seem to figure out how Mr Tulkinghorn actually finds out that Lady Dedlock has a secret child.

Like, I remember his investigation in the following broad discoveries:

1. Dedlock seems shocked by Nemo’s handwriting.
2. Dedlock disguises herself to see Nemo’s grave.
3. George’s letter confirms that Nemo is actually Captain Hawdon.

How does he use this information to correctly determine that Lady Dedlock is related to Esther? Am I missing something here?

As a non-expert in 19th-c. equity, I wonder did the discovery of the holographic will plausibly precipitate the final exhaustion of the estate in costs, or was that just one of Dickens' famous coincidences?

First of all, I'm at an absolute end around how Dickens' is taught in schools. There's almost a groan from any UK educated citizen around 'Great Expectations' and how 'boring' and 'flat' the novel is. I have a formal British education myself, but grew up internationally so missed the novel being taught as an exclusively tick box exercise via teachers. The novel is so modern, and fresh it's painful. A painful reminder that still in society today in 2025, we still harbour misconceptions around the criminal justice system and how class steers someone's fate. Here's a couple more reasons, why I believe the novel grapples with the larger concepts of life.

1. Dickens understood grief and trauma. He understood how grief can stop personal growth and leave someone reliving an event way after it happened. Miss Havisham is an allegory of trauma and how the mind can imprison someone. Dickens cited to have written this in 1861, long before long doctrines on PTSD or conversations around mental health. How that doesn't blow anyone's minds, is beyond me.

2. 'What's a convict Joe?' 'Its a bad man'

The concept of a criminal or someone who has been cited as committing a crime is punishment more than the act of itself. This is still the exact same way as today. Think about how the cancellation of celebrities is now so widely referred to and how we demonise people so quickly, without all the information. Think about how we let political figures or authorities confirm how we feel about people without understanding or information on the community groups itself. We still have this inner judgement based on narratives about people, and 'what they have done'.

1. Money paves the way

Money is still the route we have to guide us through life, and buys us opportunities. Pip was 'allowed' to become a gentleman through the flow of money but always felt like an outsider. Additionally, I love how Dickens inferred Pip's relationship with money through overspending and living lavishly. This is so accurate and relatable to our society today where money confirms our luck, education and marriage opportunities.

1. Estella was a victim of her fate as much as Magwitch.

A educated, well groomed and cold young woman in 1861, is she reduced to property. Shipped off to be married through her wealth and connections. Brought up in a loveless and transactional environment, she had no voice. She was seen as a investment and encouraged to reduce all of her emotional needs and wants to secondary. Watch an Real Housewives show of your choice, you'll see the same transactional element happening in most of the women. However, the concept of your fate being decided on at birth and as a woman, your agency and currency is your looks and wealth.... well, we have platforms online built for that now. We have developed social media, where we curate our lives online and for the behest of anyone looking or 'liking' us. Magwitch's fate was decided due to his class, background and given no grounds for chance or change. In the UK, this is identical to many experiences of people still trying to survive in poverty.

Please bring this text to life! It needs to be connected with students and Dickens is current. His works are at the heart of our culture.

I'm 3/4 of the way through the book and I missed some characters that I didn't memorize. Can anyone explain?

Mainly John Wemmick, Pocket’s, Arthur Havisham (miss’s brother?), Pumblechook, Abel, Finnegan, Drummle.

I understand when reading, but I get lost.

I've wondered for a while now why Dickens chose the number 7 specifically. 7 is a very culturally significant number, so I can't imagine it was chosen by chance. My only idea as to why is that it links to Christian theology and the fact that in the Bible the number 7 symbolises completeness, or that culturally the number 7 generally is associated with luck although I'm not exactly sure how either of these could link to ACC. since this idea is built on a very weak foundation I was wondering if anybody has a different suggestion? I've also noticed that some species of oysters take up to 7 years to produce a pearl naturally, so that links to the 'solitary as an oyster' thing since Marley is a bad influence on Scrooge so once he died that influence had gone and it took 7 years for the pearl to form, but I don't think this would be the case either because I highly doubt the Victorians had this amount of scientific knowledge and if they did I can't imagine Dickens caring much about the science

This poster provides a good checklist of all the titles in Dickens’ collected works. It is only missing Miscellaneous Papers, Plays and Poems. Everything except for the Minor Works are all books in their own right. The minor works are usually included as additional material for the other books. For example, the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of Sketches by Box includes The Mudfog and Other Sketches, Sketches of Young Couples, and Sketches of Young Gentlemen. This poster is not meant to be a bibliography. For that, you can find one on wikipedia or Dickens related websites. Please note that ‘Curiosity’ is misspelled, sorry.

Help needed. Shall I read Donbey and son Or Barnaby Rudge. Your thoughts as always appreciated

As a huge Dickens fan who considers him to be my second-favourite author(after Dostoyevsky), I am honestly a little bewildered by this book.

I have read most of Dickens, the popular and the less popular of his works and have never struggled all that much. There were times when it wasn't easy going but not too often. With little Doritt, I am struggling heavily. I often don't understand entire passages and sentences which appear to me convoluted make me lose focus. I also notice that I can read much less of this book per day than I usually would for some other work, especially from Dickens's himself.

Has someone else struggled with this or am I just a peculiar case?

I'm coming to the end of The Warden, which I've enjoyed enormously, but I can't figure out if the last bit of this extract about "second-rate characters" is a compliment to Dickens or not?

From The Warden (1855)

"...saw in a bookseller's window an announcement of the first number of the "Almshouse;" so he purchased a copy, and hurrying back to his lodgings, proceeded to ascertain what Mr. Popular Sentiment had to say to the public on the subject which had lately occupied so much of his own attention.

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.

Of all such reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr. Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our friends a rattling, lively life — yes, live, and will live till the names of their callings shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and Mrs. Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify detective police officer or a monthly nurse.

"The Almshouse" opened with a scene in a clergyman's house. Every luxury to be purchased by wealth was described as being there. "

Taken from https://victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/dickens.html

This popped into my brain the other day.

Maybe I’m daft but I did not at all see what was coming when Mr. Jarndyce invited Esther to help prepare Allen Woodcourt’s home and revealed the name of the house, thus uniting the two together but I got chills when I read it. Marvelous ending that more than redeemed parts of this long read that proved a bit tough to stick with at times. Now I must commit to reading it again! Were any other readers completely surprised by that passage or did you see it coming?

After a brief period reading other works i picked up the old curiosity shop. Little Nell is delightful. Daniel is less so ! The writing is exquisite. I think I am in for a treat Who agrees ?

Has anybody noticed that Ralph Nickleby bears a striking resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge? Both are money hungry men of business, same business as far as I can tell, and both life’s are irrevocably changed by the death, real or imaginary, of a young character. I wonder if Dickens had Ralph Nickleby in mind when he was writing A Christmas Carol? Would love to hear any thoughts on this.

When I first started reading Nicholas Nickleby, I thought it was a serious books that would be super philosophical like The Art of War or something, but Nicholas Nickleby is actually so goofy. Don't get me wrong, it's really insightful, but it's a lot sillier than I thought a Victorian Era book would be.

For starters, the names. Like who on earth is Wackford Squeers and why is he teaching in Dotheboys Hall💀. And Fanny Squeers is actually so stupid. But like, in a good way. I cringed so hard when she tried to impress Nicholas in the classroom and at the tea party by pretending to be faint or something. And then don't even get me started on Mrs. Nickleby. She has to be even sillier than Fanny Squeers, and when I find out she was based off of Dickens' own mom, and when Dickens' mom read about Mrs. Nickleby she asked him "if any such woman exists". BEAUTIFUL.

So, overall, I loved it! I'm definitely gonna read more Dickens. I wish I could reread this book like I haven't already read it before.

Hello! I have read Dickens before. Works like A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations and a bit of A Tale Of Two Cities but it was a abridged version so I didn't read it fully.

Now all I have read from Dickens so far was in translation, however I do read in English and I'm not that slow either.

But as my first English book from him I chose Bleak House and it seems that I just can't move with the book. So far I have read around 79/80 pages and I did enjoy it. I understand it's a classic and it can be harder to read also the characters are a lot! That's why I made a whole list of the characters and who they are too! But still, I'm so stuck with this book. I'm disappointed in myself too because I can't move forward.

So I'm wondering is it because I'm just that bad in English that I can't make any progress with this book or do the natives also have this problem with reading classics sometimes? And how can I move forward? What should I do? Thank you!

Has/does anyone else read Dickens as it was published, serially in weekly segments? I’ve been doing this with A Tale of Two Cities, and am enjoying the experience. Each week I read 1 or 2 chapters, and I see how there are cliffhangers and “one-off” side stories, and it is very entertaining.

I will probably read David Copperfield like this, starting in December or so. Let me know if you want to join me on a weekly schedule!

I started with Oliver Twist, great expectations, and David Copperfield. I loved all three and was really starting to consider myself a fellow “Dick head” like all of y’all but a tale of two cities just didn’t do it for me… the final 1/4 of the book was pretty good but that’s it. Help! What should I read next??

I'm 350 pages into it and I am close to giving up on it, but it's hailed as such a masterpiece I want to keep going and understand why. Is there something i'm missing? Does it get less dry and does a real story start to develop going forward? I understand it's a long novel and they take a bit of time to set up but I'm finding it quite dry and lifeless so far and I've heard this book be described as the total opposite so I want to keep going but lack motivation right now.