Lucy Vickery

Competition: Distilling Dickens

issue 11 February 2012

In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick.

In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate agents have jumped on the bandwagon: ‘Dickens Mania Brings sales boost to Victorian Homes in the Capital’.)

The challenge attracted an enormous and impressive postbag. Well done, one and all. It is a tall order to boil down the great man’s works to 15 lines, and you didn’t shy away from the especially densely plotted doorstops such as Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.

Honourable mentions go to unlucky losers Nicholas Holbrook, G.W. Tapper, Carolyn Beckingham, Imke Thormählen and Janet Kenny. I am not awarding the bonus fiver this week, but the winners, printed below, pocket a well-deserved £25 each.

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