Salute to Charles Dickens
Image: Wikipedia I can't let today go by without a salute to Charles Dickens, born 200 years ago today in Portsmouth, England. My earliest ambition was to be a writer - an ambition that never entirely went away. It was nurtured by a love of reading. I owe this to several authors I discovered in childhood and especially Charles Dickens. I was given his 'A Christmas Carol' when I was about 10 years old. Encouraged by my father, I swiftly moved on through the Dickens novels on the bookshelves at home. By 12 years I had read Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers. In my early teens I got through most of the rest - a fact that now astonishes me. I loved Dickens for the same reason that I enjoy serialized TV drama - the cliffhangers. It was these that encouraged me to persevere through some very long sections of descriptive prose. Dickens' novels also opened my mind and heart to social justice issues of his time (and ours) and cont...