Thursday, September 07, 2017

Reading Dickens

Most people read Dickens before they are out of their teens and seldom look at him again.  How mistakenly?  For Dickens’s work is like a wine that improves with age - the age not of the bottle but of the taster.  The richer the experience of the reader, the riper seems Dickens.  At sixteen one enjoys the extravagant impossibility of his caricatures; at thirty-five what one appreciates is their absolute fidelity to nature.
 - Aldous Huxley “The Critic in the Crib”

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