This would now be thirty-five years ago, I guess. In one summer issue The Village Voice decided to forego reviews of recently published books and instead invited a few reviewers to pick a classic work of literature and to review it as if it had just appeared. Someone whose name I forget simply reproduced the first paragraphs of Dickens Bleak House, as follows;

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincolns Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one anothers umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincolns Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

The reviewer then remarked simply: "If this is not enough to move you to go out immediately and buy this novel, may God have mercy on your soul!" It was enough for me, and that started my practice of reading through at least one of Dickens novels each summer, eventually reading again some that I had read in high school. I had liked them well enough then (certainly more than the ineffably boring Thackeray!), but I think that one has to grow up some really to appreciate him.My oldest sister died of breast cancer in 1977, at the age of 46. Among the tortures she was put through in the vain attempt to halt the spread of the disease, was an adrenalectomy. I brought her The Pickwick Papers to read while recovering in ths hospital from this very painful procedure. She said she had had to put the book down because it was making her laugh too muchvery painful. But when she was recovered a bit more, she read it with great joy and she told me: "I have never read a book that it saddened me so to finish. I didnt want it to end." So Dickens, and that glorious book are very precious to me.Someone said that Shakespeare and Dickens are the two great giants of English literature. Everyone else is on a lower level.