I'm sorry to hear that, Trombo! I'll agree that some of his lengthy descriptive passages are tedious - fairly obviously written to fill up the pages for his latest episode to be pubilshed in the magazine that week - but I would advise that you 'skip read' those bits (there is sometimes important information contained within the descriptions!) The stories always come to a satisfactory end - now and again a bitmawkish, but that was Dickens satisfying his Victorian public. On the whole, and despite some stylistic deficiencies (from a modernist point of view!) he is a very fine writer and many of his ideas are as current today as they were then!
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I'm immortal until proven otherwise