Status Updates From Five Weeks in the Country

The beauty of the prelude had made him ache for the life he wished he was living. He didn't know what that life was, but this was not it, and this was his only life. There would be no second chances. He would die without being happy, without having known true love.

It was almost as if he wanted to be found out, to shed the old secrets so that he would have room for new ones. He knew that his childhood misfortune hadn't been his fault. It was his father's doing…But the past clung to him, just as the mildew and smoke and misery-stench of the Marshalsea rose from his jacket as he'd sat in the blacking-shop window…He would never escape the prison.

On the night Dickens first met Andersen, he had drunk a few drops over his usual habit…It was an argument for moderation. Or it would have been if those invitations hadn't burbled up from such a deep well of feeling. By the end of those dinners, he loved his new friends. He wanted them to meet his family and see his home.

Family life so often seemed like a play that Father was directing.