Humbug!

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens (1812). Come the Christmas season, you can't go for longer than an hour without hearing some reference to Scrooge, or Tiny Tim ("God bless us, each and every one"), or the Ghost of Christmas Past. It's too bad that this is the only way too many people will ever know Dickens' work. A Christmas Carol is a perfectly decent book, but it's not his only one! I'd have a hard time deciding on my favourite Dickens book. I think it would be a three-way tie between The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, and Martin Chuzzlewit. How can you not love an author who gives his characters names like Gradgrind, Podsnap, Pecksniff, or Turveydrop?