Word: dombey
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...stood between the donkey and the sun [Dombey and Son]...I turned in a full circle. My rich young and handsome friends had disappeared. Changed. In their places were cardboard cutouts. I picked the thick paper men up [Pickwick Papers...
...city. When he pulled the reader along, says Wilson, he brought the first "cinematic mobility" to the English novel: long tracking shots, like Oliver Twist's escapades in grimy alleys, where the scenes flash by like some satanic carnival; wide panoramas, like the scene in the brickyard in Dombey and Son, where the city lies on the horizon like a vast, destructive machine; dreamlike overhead views, like the dawn in Little Dorrit, where the news of Financier Merdle's suicide spreads through the town like poison through an organism...
...detractors: "I think of some plumber who, waked by the rain, will smile at a vision of the world in which all the drains are miraculously cleaned and free . . . I think that the rain will wake some old lady, who will wonder if she has left her copy of Dombey and Son in the garden. Her shawl? Did she cover the chairs? And I know that the sound of the rain will wake some lovers, and that its sound will seem to be a part of that force that has thrust them into one another's arms. Then...
...Dombey and Son the Hon. Mrs. Skewton, mother of the second Mrs. Dombey, suffers from what is now known to be cerebral arteriosclerosis. Dickens accurately follows the relentless progress of the disease. First she suffered from tremor, and "the palsy played among the artificial roses [on her hat] like an almshouse full of superannuated zephyrs." After a stroke "she lay speechless and staring at the ceiling for days; sometimes making inarticulate sounds . . . giving no reply either by sign or by gesture, or in her unwinking eyes." Dickens describes her recovery, the change in her temperament-and the second stroke that...
Actually, the varied fare proved less a virtue than a vice. By Dickens standards, too much of Williams' material was close to mediocre. The brief annals of Paul Dombey exposed Dickens' mawkish side; a little-known ghost story, The Signalman, raised no goose pimples. Surprisingly, the one real nonhumorous success was a dramatic pastiche from A Tale of Two Cities. Even much of the humor was secondbest. Williams did score a bull's-eye with a minor yarn, Mr. Chops. If a showman as gifted as Emlyn Williams ever goes to work on the great comic figures...