microBoz

“

Love… is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.

Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens

Jan 29

'She is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart': Dickens's obsession with his wife's sister, which nearly destroyed him

Dickens must be whizzing round in his grave in Westminster Abbey. He had a horror of any sort of exposure of his privacy and in 1860, after the break-up of his marriage, he burned all his correspondence ‘because I could not answer for its privacy being respected when I should be dead’. Yet today, amid the brouhaha surrounding Dickens’s bicentennial year, his love life is the subject of increasing fascination.

Oct 20

“

I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (via acoustic-funeral)

(Reblogged from divine-despair)

Oct 19

Dickens in Love: How the Author's Romantic Life Affected His Novels

Two new books about the British writer make different conclusions about his relationships with women

Apr 28

“

She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was—anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.

David Copperfield, chap. 26 (via quotinglove)

(Reblogged from quotinglove-deactivated20130319)

Feb 14

“

Drink with me, my dear,” said Mr. Weller. “Put your lips to this here tumbler, and then I can kiss you by deputy.

The Pickwick Papers, chap. 25

“

You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.

“Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions” by Charles Dickens

“

I never had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.

Great Expectations, chap. 38

“

There lives at least one being who can never change — one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness — who lives but in your eyes — who breathes but in your smiles — who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.

The Pickwick Papers, chap. 8

“

Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.

Little Dorrit, chap. 50

Feb 13

First Valentine: Lasting legacy of 500-year-old love

It is a letter, written from a young woman to her love, and is the first mention of the word Valentine in the English language. And, for the first time, the descendants of Margery Brews and her betrothed John Paston have been traced.