Word: dickensian
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...depression years, the depredations of world war, the nationalization of the mines--these provide the backdrop against which Storey's characters move. The landscape Storey describes is not only social, but literary: beside the stolidity of a Lawrentian mining village, he sets the formal rigidity of a Dickensian public school, with its masters almost comic in their severity. Through this landscape flits the mystical figure of Stafford, Colin's foil, who, like Dickens' Steerforth, sloughs off the spoils of his prosperity and talent with the same ease with which they accrue...
...days, he rode 23 winners at Aqueduct Race Track, breaking Angel Cordero's New York State record of 22 victories for the same period, set two years ago. Standing small (5 ft. 1 in., 95 Ibs.) beside the thoroughbreds, his Dickensian face pale amid the splashing silks of his trade, Cauthen has captivated bettors and won the admiration of trainers and jockeys. Onetime Jockey Sammy Renick watched the young Kentuckian ride, and came away impressed. Says Renick: "He has great hands. Horses settle in and run kindly for him. Few jockeys have this touch. Steve hits the horse...
...Miller, who has a doctorate in social work, became head of Massachusetts' department of youth services and set out to reform the state's Dickensian juvenile prisons. Some 800 teenage inmates were locked in the concrete cottages of 10 institutions, where their keepers could have them kicked, beaten and put into solitary cells called "the tombs." Miller tried to turn these juvenile warehouses into "therapeutic communities" run by staffers who cared about rehabilitation...
...this ambiguity of sentiment. On the whole, though, Kubrick does not encourage any kind of emotional response, and he certainly doesn't give us enough accurate material to go on. The characters are like the puppets Thackeray describes in the prologue of Vanity Fair--neither rounded human figures nor Dickensian caricatures. Kubrick rarely creates human characters--Dr. Strangelove was a gallery of types, Lolita a collection of perverts, 2001 veered from the banal to the superhuman, and A Clockwork Orange was about the warping of humanity...
...Paris, Wilder, whose grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, sometimes plotted out his writing during church services, taught contentedly at a New Jersey prep school (Lawrenceville) and ended up a lifelong bachelor sharing a house with his sister Isabel in Hamden, Conn. Rotund, kind and twinkly to the point of Dickensian caricature, he was, as he pointed out, the sort of man whom "news vendors in university towns call 'Professor,' and hotel clerks, 'Doctor...