The Poetry of R.E. Slater: Dicken's Novels in Full Color

"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Dicken's Novels in Full Color

Gorgeous Vintage Illustrations of Dickens Novels in Full Color

http://flavorwire.com/432206/gorgeous-vintage-illustrations-of-dickens-novels-in-full-color/

by Michelle Dean

January 6, 2014

Dickens was a novelist so popular in his own time that it is nearly impossible to think of a modern analogue today. (Maybe Stephen King.) At the height of his powers, it’s sometimes written, perhaps one in ten Britons had read his novels. One of his most popular books then — though nowadays it falls behind Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and any number of others in name recognition — was The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens’ novels were, as you’ve probably heard before, been published as serials, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was in progress, the fate of its tragic heroine, Little Nell, convulsed both sides of the Atlantic. People wrote Dickens letters demanding that he let her survive. (Spoiler: he didn’t listen to them.)

The intense emotional pull of her plight perhaps explains why the illustration, below, presents Nell as unspeakably beautiful. This illustration is part of a set displayed in a late-19th-century abridgement of Dickens’ work which recently entered the public domain, and is available in the British Library’s photostream. Here are eight of the most beautiful pictures from that stream.

(click to enlarge any illustration)