Featured Article – The Staplehurst Railway Accident

The Staplehurst railway accident as depicted in the Illustrated London News

On June 9th of 1865, Charles Dickens had a brush with death.  While he survived, others weren’t as lucky.  Ten people died and forty were injured in the Staplehurst railway accident.

For years afterward Dickens would sometimes suffer from sudden feelings of anxiety when he was traveling by rail.

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Hard Times is unlike the rest of the novels of Charles Dickens in several ways.  It’s the shortest published novel by Charles Dickens.  Only Hard Times and Great Expectations were originally issued without illustrations. Additionally, Hard Times is the only novel by Dickens not to have scenes set in London.  Instead, it takes place in the fictional Coketown.

Hard Times was Dickens’s tenth novel. It first appeared in Dickens’s weekly periodical, Household Words. It was published in installments that began in April of 1854 and ran through August of that year.

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Featured Item – Funny Quotes

The dinner was as remarkable for the splendour and completeness of its appointments as the mansion itself, and the company were remarkable for doing it ample justice, in which respect Messrs Pyke and Pluck particularly signalised themselves; these two gentlemen eating of every dish, and drinking of every bottle, with a capacity and perseverance truly astonishing. They were remarkably fresh, too, notwithstanding their great exertions: for, on the appearance of the dessert, they broke out again, as if nothing serious had taken place since breakfast. ~ Nicholas Nickleby

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