Penelope's English Experiences by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
page 38 of 118 (32%)
page 38 of 118 (32%)
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Restitution of the King and Royal Family after many Years'
interruption which unspeakable Mercies were wonderfully completed upon the 29th of May in the year 1660!" "1660! We had been forty years in America then," soliloquised Francesca; "and isn't it odd that the long thanksgivings in our country must all have been for having successfully run away from the Gunpowder Treason, King Charles the Martyr, and the Restituted Royal Family; yet here we are, you and I, the best of friends, talking it all over." As we jog along, or walk, by turns, we come to Buckingham Street, and looking up at Alfred Jingle's lodgings say a grateful word of Mr. Pickwick. We tell each other that much of what we know of London and England seems to have been learned from Dickens. Deny him the right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and his pathos bathos--although you shall say none of these things in my presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America at least, knows more of England--its almshouses, debtors' prisons, and law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles and cheap- jacks and hostlers and coachmen and boots, its streets and lanes, its lodgings and inns and landladies and roastbeef and plum-pudding, its ways, manners, and customs,--knows more of these things and a thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies, and essays in the language. Where is there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living population, as one walks along the ways? |
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