I never had any familiarity with anything Dickens except for “A Christmas Carol” well into my forties.
Then I read “A Tale of Two Cities”, and was struck by how much I enjoyed it. I immediately went out and read “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Bleak House”, “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Oliver Twist”.
Heh, I understood why people thought he was such a great writer. The only problem was, the more of him I read, the more alike all the books sound, in much the same way all of Tom Clancy’s books begin to meld into one another.
Books by Dickens do all have pretty much the same theme and even the same characters. For years my favorite was Nicholas Nickleby. Now I’m back to A Christmas Carol. I’ve been watching all the various movie versions. My favorite is the British version from, I think, 1957,