Little Dorrit
Upon its publication in 1857, Little Dorrit immediately outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughter and helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progress of the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction, David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift from which Dickens's other great attributes derive: his eye and ear, his near-universal empathy, his ability to entertain both a sense of the ridiculous and a sense of ultimate significance.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
5people
2015–2022years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Favorite Technical: The Pragmatic Programmer. This is something that I should have read much earlier.
Favorite Fiction: Pale Fire. Just pure astonishment. Left me speechless with how he made the language sing.
Also great (in no particular order):
- The Sewing Girl's Tale (non-fiction)
- The Odyssey (poem)
- Tropic of Cancer (novel)
- Tenth of December (short story collection).
- Endurance (non-fiction)
- The Billion Dollar Spy (non-fiction)
- Agent Sonya (non-fiction)
- Agent Running in the Field (novel)
- Little Dorrit (novel)
To be honest, I love most of the stuff I read this year. Only a handful of books I didn't like enough to read through.
- Charles Dickens perfectly described it in Little Dorrit when he described the Circumlocution Office[1].
Having worked with such people, I can confirm they still exist in the UK public sector and have only increased their power. They have an amazing ability to see a cloud in every silver lining. They detest any simple solution to anything.
- It's funny. Banks are widely perceived as corrupt; and lo and behold, the alternative systems to replace banking have been dragged by their heels through Banking 101.
Edit: Also funny, was the unrelated Matt Damon TV ads about how "Fortune Favors the Brave." Obviously it comes from Caesar, but it was also used in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit by a character encouraging what later turned out a Ponzi scheme...
- Thank you for sharing.
A while back, I fell in love with James Mahoney's illustrations of many Dickens' classics. That's when I realized there were no high quality digital copies of this Victorian master's ink drawings.
You can find the version of Oliver Twist I created here:
http://ahmadsoft.org/typesetting.html
You can compare the quality of the artwork with the nearest alternative, available here:
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mahoney/ot.html
I've also been working on typesetting Little Dorrit. Unfortunately, the text of both books have a lot of typographical errors that I'd like to correct at some point. Perhaps some future advance in machine learning will help me automate the process because I don't have the patience to do it all manually.
- Ulysses is definitely doable, but it marks a point when high-brow literature stopped being something every reasonable, intelligent, and educated person enjoys reading. It's a chore (less so than FW, of course), and of questionable value — yeah, it's cool to get all the references to Homer, etc., but I don't think anyone puts down Ulysses with anything other than a sense of relief of having scaled it as an obstacle. (Yes, I studied Ulysses. Voluntarily and on my own time. I don't mean to belittle Joyce's talent. Ulysses is obviously a huge accomplishment, beyond nearly all writers.)
Compare that with, say, Dickens. People would drop what they were doing to read the next installment of Little Dorrit.
