Monument time

Over the past few weeks we have been enjoying a rerun of the BBC serialisation of Dickens' 'Bleak House', which we missed first time around. And which for some reason, we now watch with advertisements on the Drama channel, otherwise channel 20.

The only thing wrong with it, as far as I am concerned, is that the actor playing Mr. Skimpole, one Nathaniel Parker, fails to pull off the important acting trick of playing a pain without being one. I find him very irritating and it is a complete puzzle to me how or why Mr. Jarndyce puts up with him.

I have now been moved to buy the book, this despite having got on very badly with Dickens in the past, only managing to trudge through one or two of his many books. This one I acquired, free of postage and packing, from a secondhand book operation in Doncaster, via Abebooks, for the sum of £2.75 or so. A shabby but decent hardback edition from Nelson, perhaps a hundred years old - and it looks as if it has sat on some dusty shelf for a good part of that time. A slightly cheaper version, but very much the same format as the Oxford Classics which my father used to buy. Printed on cheap but thin paper, which means that the pages open properly and stay open - unlike many newer books, even those which pass for hardbacks these days.

The next point is that is it runs to 928 pages broken into 67 chapters. So I think it qualifies as a third monument, to go with 'Clarissa' and 'The Faerie Queene'. And the first few pages suggest that it might well be, inter alia, a funny book. Funny, that is, a good sense.

The next point is that, the day after I bought the book, a YouGov survey wanted me to rate on a five point scale a series of things, I think mostly sports and TV personalities of whom I had never heard. But the first of the series was 'Bleak House'. Has YouGov been talking to Google? Or Amazon? This last being the present owner of Abebooks.

And the last point is that, in the same first few pages, I came across the word 'eke', which I have learned from 'The Fairie Queene' is an antique word meaning also. Which indeed is the sense in which Dickens used the word. And I did not get the impression from the context that he was making a point or making some clever allusion. He was just using a word for 'also'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-second-monument.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleak_House_(2005_TV_serial).

Reference 3: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442632/.