Couple of famous nits in David Copperfield:

-When Betsey Trotwood goes bankrupt, she rents out her little cottage in Dover and goes to live with David in London. Later she sells the house to the new tenants.
But at the end of the story, in his usual mad rush to give everyone their just desserts, Dickens has Miss Betsey 'return to her cottage at Dover' as if nothing had ever happened. Bet the new owner was ticked.

-When Dora's aunts interview David as a prospective suitor for their niece, his letter of introduction begins in one aunt's hand and mysteriously ends up in the other's.

NANJAO: What must be the single most incredible coincidence in literary history - both in terms of odds and impact on the story - occurs when Micawber passes by the Heeps' door just as David is taking tea with them.
Actually, throughout the story, characters keep more or less running into each other in London with suspicious ease. I mean, modern-day taxi drivers have to study for months to learn their way around this city, but all David has to do is turn a corner and hey! An old schoolmate!

-The almost hysterical distress Martha and Emily display as 'fallen women' (and their relatives display on their behalf) reads pretty quaintly today. Meanwhile, angel-in-the-flesh Agnes is too much in the opposite direction. Crusading reformer and wonderful 'character' writer Dickens may have been, but he was awfully hidebound where women and children were concerned.

Ooops -for 'children', read 'girls'. Or, more specifically, Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, whom I actually more or less had in mind.

Someone in college summed him up well. He liked to ramble. He was paid by the word. We have four hundred plus pages of Bleak House to read.


By the way, did anyone see A Muppet Christmas Carol. When Gonzo starts out with "Marley was dead..." he gets interrupted by Rizzo saying this is for kids. Gonzo assures him it is great literature and continues.

Yeah, that was cute. Typical Muppets, making a profound point and a goofy joke at the same time.

Poor William. Just be thankful you're not a co-worker of mine, who decided to take a college course on Herman Melville only to discover that his non-Moby Dick works are (he said) horribly dense and dull to the point of unreadability.

Anyhow. I find it helps to read Dickens as less a coherent storyteller and more as a creator of great individual scenes and characters. Even his most boring novels (of which I - and I believe some lit-crit types - freely concede that Bleak House is one) teem with life around the edges.

The dark narrator in Bleak House is pretty cool.

On Melville (I live in New Bedford where Ishmael first goes and the chamber of commerce may arrest me for saying this) Moby Dick is only partially readable.

The Mystery Of Edwin Drood remains a mystery as Dickens died before he finished the novel.

I started to read The Pickwick Papers and only got through the first 200 and odd pages or so.