R2E Excerpt #36: Dreaming Dickens

To sleep, perchance to write Victorian novels in your dreams. I actually did that during my lazy afternoons in Paris. What a freak, right?

WHEN I WASN’T FALLING IN LOVE—with Paris, with random enchantresses on the street, with phantoms from my recent past—I was reading. A lot. But I wasn’t picking up A Sport and a Pastime or The Tropic of Cancer at Shakespeare and Company. Great Expectations and David Copperfield were more my speed, because their heroes were more likely to be virgins rather than deflower them. 

In the passage that follows, Dickens was writing about his Great Expectations lead character Pip and his friend Herbert Pocket, but I mentally swapped in myself, and my Irish friend Seamus, into it, and copied out the quote in my tiny handwriting: “When we gradually fell into keeping late hours and late company, I noticed that [Herbert Pocket] looked about him with a desponding eye at breakfast time; that he began to look about him more hopefully at mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner; that he seemed to decry capital in the distance rather clearly after dinner; that he all but realized capital towards…