The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens

This book is attractively presented with short introductory passages before each chapter.In the course of this Dickens' life- story is concisely told. But what surprised me was that the Dickens' texts themselves were not brief aphoristic or humorous 'lines' but rather true excerpts of paragraph length or more. And that many of these were at least in my reading of them not that humorous or witty at all. However the long passages produced do truly give a sense of what Dickens writing was all about. And thus this volume serves as a kind of small introductory guide to the work of Dickens. Here is a brief sample, one of the most famous of Dickens' passages. 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure ninetten six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and- and in short you are for ever floored. As Iam !' ( Mr. Micawber. 'David Copperfield.'