De Engelse schrijver Charles Dickens werd geboren op 7 februari 1812 in Landport. Zie ook alle tags voor Charles Dickens op dit blog.
Uit: Bleak House
“Mrs. Pardiggle, leading the way with a great show of moral determination, and talking with much volubility about the untidy habits of the people (though I doubted if the best of us could have been tidy in such a place), conducted us into a cottage at the farthest corner, the ground floor room of which we nearly filled. Besides ourselves, there were in this damp offensive room a woman with a black eye, nursing a poor little gasping baby by the fire; a man, stained with clay and mud, and looking very dissipated, lying at full length on the ground, smoking a pipe; a powerful young man, fastening a collar on a dog; and a bold girl, doing some kind of washing in very dirty water. They all looked up at us as we came in, and the woman seemed to turn her face toward the fire, as if to hide her bruised eye; nobody gave us any welcome. . . .
“Well, my friends,” said Mrs. Pardiggle; but her voice had not a friendly sound, I thought; it was much too business-like and systematic. “How do you do, all of you? I am here again. I told you, you couldn’t tire of me, you know. I am fond of hard work, and am true to my word.”
“There ain’t,” growled the man on the floor, whose head rested on his hand as he stared at us, “any more of you to come in, is there?”
Patrick Kennedy als Richard en Carey Mulligan als Ada in de BBC-serie “Bleak House”, 2005.
“No, my friend,” said Mrs. Pardiggle, seating herself on one stool and knocking down another. “We are all here.”
“Because I thought there warn’t enough of you, perhaps?” said the man, with his pipe between his lips as he looked round upon us.
The young man and the girl both laughed. Two friends of the young man, whom we had attracted to the doorway and who stood there with their hands in their pockets, echoed the laugh noisily.
“You can’t tire me, good people,” said Mrs. Pardiggle to these latter. “I enjoy hard work, and harder you make mine, the better I like it.”
“Then make it easy for her!” growled the man upon the floor. “I wants it done, and over. I wants a end of these liberties took with my place. I wants a end of being frawed like a badger. Now you’re a-going to pollpry and question according to custom I know what you’re a-going to be up to.”
Charles Dickens (7 februari 1812 – 9 juni 1870)