Hill on Dickens

From Howards End is on the Landing...

In the silly game of which authors to throw overboard from the lifeboat and which one - just one - to save, I would always save Dickens. He is mighty. His flaws are huge but magnificent - and all of a piece with the whole. A perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one. Yes, he is sentimental, yes, he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever...

That is just about how I feel at this moment coming upon the last hundred pages or so of David Copperfield. And with our thermometer hovering steadily at 32/33 degrees, I am completely feeling Hill's closing words to her chapter on Dickens...

Outside my window, the trees are bare. It is early dark but a silver paring of moon is bright in the sky, with a thousand frosty stars. The air smells of cold. A fox barks from the field.

Dickens for winter.

Throw another log on the fire.