Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Dickensian byways

issue 25 February 2012

Is there room for yet another book on Dickens? Probably not, but we’ll have it anyway. The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is John Sutherland’s contribution to the great birthday festival — and possibly not his last, for since his retirement from academe, Sutherland has been nearly as industrious as the great man himself. This brief and lively ‘A-Z of England’s Greatest Novelist’ avoids all the obvious thoroughfares, and wanders instead along the byways and backstreets of Dickens’ s vast, sprawling achievement. This will be of no use to anyone who enjoyed the recent TV version of Great Expectations because it cut out all the subplots and extraneous detail, but for the rest of us, it’s a delight.

Entries include ‘Cannibalism’ (lots in Dickens, none at all in Thackeray for some reason), ‘Fog’ and ‘Mist’ (quite separate), ‘Bedding’ (an extraordinary tic through the books, and of course Dickens always liked his own bed to be facing north), ‘Onions’, ‘Rats’ and ‘Sausages’.

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