I am reading a book on life lessons, and the author quotes one of Charles Dickens’s characters, Sarah Gamp, from his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit: Sech is life. Vich likeways is the hend of all things. I didn’t understand it. So I googled the sentence, read the whole paragraph that includes it, and came to realize … Read more
What does the phrase in bold mean? This is given in the book “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens. The sentence: He was quite bald. His clothes were shabby but he had an air of great importance. His name was Mr Micawber. Answer It means that other people perceive him as important. He gives that impression, … Read more
Here is a sentence from Dickens: On somebody’s motion, we resolved to go downstairs to the dress-boxes, where the ladies were. This is a scene in a theatre, when drunk Copperfield with friends goes to some specific part of the building where ladies were. But I can’t find anywhere a definition of the word “dress-boxes”, … Read more
What exactly does this line by Dickens mean? “‘Yes, master, and I’ve never been in it much.’ (I had come out of Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might have been for something else; but it warn’t.)” Great Expectations, chapter 42, Magwitch to Pip and Herbert I’m not sure about … Read more
On page 59-60 She threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she despised them for having been won of me. My guess for the phrase is "as if she despised them for having lost to me". Answer The usage was more popular over a hundred years ago … Read more
I am currently reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. There is one sentence which has puzzled me. But the Doctor himself was the idol of the whole school: and it must have been a badly composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of men; with a simple faith in … Read more
In Chapter 20 of Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, what does the phrase I have bolded mean? Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as … Read more
In Book 1, Chapter 2 of A tale of two cities, Dickens wrote the following: “After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at his mare. In the story, the messenger had just gotten the message and … Read more
This is from the first chapter: My mother was sitting by the fire, but poorly in health, and very low in spirits, looking at it through her tears, and desponding heavily about herself and the fatherless little stranger, who was already welcomed by some grosses of prophetic pins, in a drawer upstairs, to a world … Read more
The last sentence from the following paragraph from Dickens is ambiguious for me; "He was only twenty-five years old, he said, and had grown recently, for it had been found necessary to make an addition to the legs of his inexpressibles. At fifteen he was a short boy, and in those days his English father … Read more
