Your paragraph prompted me to take down from the shelf my copy of /Bleak House/ (in Al Guerard's edition) for the first time in years. You're quite right - with the surprising reference to "Megalosaurus," and the following comments on balloons and gas...
Do you find it surprising that it was Chesterton's book on Dickens, a century ago, that did much to establish the latter's reputation? /The Victorian Age in Literature/ stands athwart much of present-day opinion - if those authors are read at all...
On 8/15/10 6:53 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Chuck, the first paragraph alone of Bleak House may find its equals in
> Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, etc but there is nothing in English better
> than it -- and it takes the whole long fucking novel to explicate that
> paragraph -- which incidentally does not contain a single complete
> sentence. It is a huge cluster of subordinate clauses.
>
> Carrol
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