Evidence: | 'My pal was a typical Cockney recidivist who sold fruit on a coster's barrow between convictions and went crook when sales dwindled to vanishing point... I was attracted to him in the first place by his amazing knowledge of Dickens. He spent every moment of leisure reading Dickens and had, in the course of a dozen or more years in prison, read little else. There was no single scrap of Dickens' work that he hadn't read, not once, or twice, but many times. Mention any character you liked and little B- would give you a verbal picture of him and his setting in the story in which he appeared. More than once at exercise he has walked behind me spouting whole pages dealing with his favourite characters, accompanying his copious quotations with a running commentary on their virtues and failings in a vein so humorous that I have more than once had to fall out to avoid startling the whole exercise by going off into peals of laughter.' |
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Century: | 1900-1945 | ||||||||||
Date: | unknown | ||||||||||
Country: | England | ||||||||||
Time: | n/a | ||||||||||
Place: | other location: in prison | ||||||||||
Type of Experience (Reader): |
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Type of Experience (Listener): |
|
Reader: | anon |
Age | Adult (18-100+) |
Gender | Male |
Date of Birth | n/a |
Socio-economic group: | Labourer (non-agricultural) |
Occupation: | costermonger and prisoner |
Religion: | n/a |
Country of origin: | England |
Country of experience: | England |
Listeners present if any: (e.g. family, servants,
friends, workmates) |
n/a |
Additional comments: | n/a |
Author: | Charles Dickens |
Title: | [works] |
Genre: | Fiction |
Form of Text: | Print: Book, Serial / periodical |
Publication details: | n/a |
Provenance: | borrowed (institution library) presumably from prison library |
Record ID: | 12545 | |
Source - | ||
Author: | Stuart Wood | |
Editor: | n/a | |
Title: | Shades of the Prison House | |
Place of Publication: | London | |
Date of Publication: | 1932 | |
Vol: | n/a | |
Page: | 395 | |
Additional comments: | n/a |
Citation: | Stuart Wood, Shades of the Prison House (London, 1932), p. 395, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=12545, accessed: 28 March 2024 |
Reading Experience Database version 2.0. Page updated: 27th Apr 2016 3:15pm (GMT)