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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
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Listings for Reader:  

Walter Wilson

 

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Charles Dickens : The Pickwick Papers

'Mr Wilson had no more patience than we had with Little Nell and the atrocious Trotty Veck. He shovelled the sentiment and the trushery behind him, and started straight off with "Pickwick Papers". "Pickwick" is not a very mature Dickens and not very mature humour, but it semmed to us quite the funniest book we had ever met.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Wilson      Print: Book

  

Charles Dickens : Great Expectations

'I do not know whether Mr Wilson read "Pickwick" right through, but I certainly did. My copy bears a plate inside the cover [school prize details]... It was the first of a succession of Dickens volumes on Indian paper, in stiff blue covers, with the original Phiz and Seymour illustrations. In 1926, at the Secondary School, I received "Barnaby Rudge"; in 1927, "Dombey and Son"; in 1928, "Nicholas Nickleby". "Great Expectations, which followed "Pickwick" in Mr Wilson's scheme, I acquired in the red, cardboard-backed Nelson's Classics, price One Shilling and Sixpence, a series which became my regular source of Christmas and birthday presents from uncles and friends... These books were my winter reading between the ages of ten and fourteen... [continues]'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Wilson      Print: Book

  

Victor Hugo : Les Miserables

'Mr Wilson introduced us to another author - Victor Hugo... in 1925, "Les Miserables" gripped us even more than "Pickwick". Mr Wilson must have abridged it ruthlessly, but he made everything in nineteenth-century France sound as if it were happening in the England of our own day...The reading of "Les Miserables" bound us together in one common experience.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Wilson      Print: Book

 

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