I have always admired Charles' Dickens work and plan to read each of his stories. These short stories are really good if you don't want to read his novels right away. They're easy to read and I quite enjoyed them.

4★ although it's not my favourite, but, well, it’s Dickens!

This is an anthology, which is to say, a dickens of a lot of Dickens, pinched from here and there, a little something for everybody. I found some stories delightful, some interesting, and some sad. [Some were silly or downright dull, but that’s probably not Dickens, that’s me. But I'm not breaking up with him!] I made no attempt to read them all thoroughly, for various reasons.

He’d write a blog today, full of information and humour and philosophy. He is almost unable to separate those things, I think, and when something is on his mind, it turns up again and again.
There were some Christmas ones that seemed to be either precursors to or an echo of A Christmas Carol, and there were some characters in other stories who seemed as if I’d met them in other works.

This is from the introductory note:
“Charles Dickens began his first job at the age of twelve in a shoe polish factory, while his father and, for three months, his mother and siblings spent time in Marshalsea Prison due to their status as debtors. The sense of abandonment, humiliation, and responsibility that developed at such a young age would shape Charles Dickens’s character and influence his writing for his entire life.”

There is no mistaking how he feels about his characters.:
” Gabriel Grub was an ill-conditioned, cross-grained, surly fellow—a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself, and an old wicker bottle which fitted into his large deep waistcoat pocket—and who eyed each merry face, as it passed him by, with such a deep scowl of malice and ill-humour, as it was difficult to meet, without feeling something the worse for.”

He would have had a grand time slinging insults in today’s Parliament or Congress. I love this one!

”He was to his wife what the 0 is in 90—he was of some importance with her—he was nothing without her.”

I’m not a fan of the ghost stories or the fantasy, but I was very moved, as was Dickens, when he writes about “A Visit to Newgate”. The introductory note explains that this is one of a selection of pieces written when Dickens was a youthful reporter, some of which were published in 1836 as “sketches”.

He is appalled that we just walk right by places of immense suffering with scarcely a thought. He says everybody would be nervous walking past Bedlam (the nickname for the hospital for the insane), but they don’t think twice about prisoners inside Newgate. Here’s the narrator's breathless 186-word, single sentence rant.

“If Bedlam could be suddenly removed like another Aladdin’s palace, and set down on the space now occupied by Newgate, scarcely one man out of a hundred, whose road to business every morning lies through Newgate-street, or the Old Bailey, would pass the building without bestowing a hasty glance on its small, grated windows, and a transient thought upon the condition of the unhappy beings’ immured in its dismal cells; and yet these same men, day by day, and hour by hour, pass and repass this gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London, in one perpetual stream of life and bustle, utterly unmindful of the throng of wretched creatures pent up within it—nay, not even knowing, or if they do, not heeding, the fact, that as they pass one particular angle of the massive wall with a light laugh or a merry whistle, they stand within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose hours are numbered, from whom the last feeble ray of hope has fled for ever, and whose miserable career will shortly terminate in a violent and shameful death.”

GASP!

The narrator tours the prison, describes the men, the women, and then . . . the children. These are boys:

“There were fourteen of them in all, some with shoes, some without; some in pinafores without jackets, others in jackets without pinafores, and one in scarce anything at all. The whole number, without an exception we believe, had been committed for trial on charges of pocket-picking; and fourteen such terrible little faces we never beheld.—There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection. . .

We never looked upon a more disagreeable sight, because we never saw fourteen such hopeless creatures of neglect, before.”

Today, he would be an activist. He hoped for the best, but I think he’d be disappointed.

“Let us hope that the increased spirit of civilization and humanity which abolished this frightful and degrading custom, may extend itself to other usages equally barbarous; usages which have not even the plea of utility in their defence, as every year’s experience has shown them to be more and more inefficacious.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Dover Publications for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted. Fans of Dickens will have fun browsing through this.

If you enjoy Charles Dickens and don't have the time to devote to reading or re-reading one of his classics, this is a great volume to keep on your shelf and revisit from time to time. When I first began reading this collection, my intention was to read it cover to cover. After reading a few stories, I started skipping around and decided to read the stories in no particular order and take my time. I found this to be a much better way to enjoy this collection of short fiction. Charles Dickens is not an author to be rushed through. His works are best enjoyed when one can pay full attention and savor his wit an eccentricities.

The collection begins with stories of the supernatural, which is for the most part what we'd consider to be Victorian era ghost stories, not unlike the spirits in <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, although shorter in length. The second section are "Impressionistic Sketches", which are short pieces written mostly during his career as a young reporter. I wasn't sure what to expect from the category of Impressionistic Sketches, but they tend to describe characters of his time. Some of these were more engaging than others, and some I just didn't really enjoy. I skipped around in this section a lot because there didn't seem to be a theme throughout the section. The final section is "Dramatic Monologues" and includes excerpts from longer works.

Thank you to Netgalley and Dover publishing for providing me with a copy to review. I will be revisiting the stories in this volume for years to come.

I received a free electronic copy of this collection from Netgalley and Dover Publications. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.

This anthology was originally published on July 30, 1981 by Penguin Classics. An extensive compilation of Dickens short works, I found it interesting, but more for the details of daily life in those times than story line. While some were outstanding stories, others felt incomplete. Still and all, this is a book I am glad to have read, and one I will keep for research.