Carl’s Reviews > Bleak House > Status Update

I let Dickens — with his enjoyable loops of language and colorful characters and wry humor and insightful drawings of both goodness and badness — get away with things I wouldn’t accept from other writers. His “crime”? Depicting a coincidence-ridden, impossibly interwoven England, apparently with a population of about 300, 293 of which are introduced in the book.

My distaste for Harold Skimpole may exceed even that which I harbor for other Dickens villains. He’s Pumblechookian, not Compeysonian. What does it say about me that he irks me as much of more than those who are actively evil?