I know what you’re thinking..EWWWWWW…now THAT is horrid, disgusting and certifiable. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Correction…I know what you’re thinking about me having a blog post called “My Favorite Dickens” because anyone who spends anytime talking books with me discovers I loathe Charles Dickens so much and so very hard. Just the thought of the time and school hours wasted on reading Bleak House and Great Expectations is maddening. Not even Gillian Anderson can make Bleak House tolerable. However I have to be grateful for the fact that Charles Dickens, that overrated blowhard who makes my eyes roll back so far in my head I almost need a trip to the UConn Health Center ER, is a link in a chain that created one of my recently discovered favorite authors, Monica Dickens.

For those who want to play family tree. Here it goes. Am very sick of typing Charles Dickens. So very sick. Charles Dickens spawns Henry Fielding Dickens who spawns Henry Charles Dickens who spawns Monica Enid Dickens.

Now usually (see Tigers in Red Weather), I don’t like certain writers and their extended writing spawn. But when trolling the fiction section of Book Barn and the library book sales bag days, I don’t always think about the writer’s last name and just zero in on certain publishers, figuring “oh gee…they haven’t done me wrong so far.” And oddly enough both these publishers (Virago Classics and Persephone Books are British and on my I Want Every Thing They Publish lists…such another post entirely…) And into my shopping bag went Monica Dickens’ Mariana in the Persephone Books reprint edition with the main thought “If I don’t like I can always try and sell it to Book Barn”.

And how very glad I am that my brain focused on “OMG Persephone Books” and “what a lovely cover” and didn’t process that an British writer named Dickens could be related to <shudders> HIM…because I would have missed out on a wonderful author. Like Stella Gibbons and Angela Thirkell, opening a Monica Dickens books, fiction or one of her memoirs, is like stepping through a door into the past. Only you don’t have to be of a certain class because even the best Stella Gibbons and Angela Thrikell isn’t that fond of the lower orders. It doesn’t matter if you’re curled up on Mr Couch rocking a tattered Marvel t-shirt or sprawled on Mr Bed, fighting a hacking cough and wishing you had sprung for a Miskatonic University sweatshirt because it’s gotten freezing and the layers of Mr Blankie and Mr Cardigan aren’t enough, you’re “Monty” putting on a battered looking hat, taking the bus to the employment agency to try out a career as a cook even though you can barely make scrambled eggs let alone a feast for 12 after being an epic failure at theater school. You’re the slightly older and maybe not wiser “Monty”, confused as to how to make a nurses cap out of a round of linen and scraping wax off hospital bed wheels while trying to survive as a nurse in training during World War II. Or you’re the older “Monty”, an established and beloved wife and mother, looking back on her life and career through the years.

And then you’re yourself again, coughing and hacking, lurching into the living room for your computer to see if the local libraries have any and I mean ANY more Monica Dickens books in their systems for an interlibrary loan. You will even accept one of her children’s horse books which in your head are akin to Noel Streatfeild’s Shoe books. You must have more Monica. And then when you’ve tracked down those few titles, ecstatic that they are available, wanting them that second and vowing to scour the library sales and your favorite used bookstores for more titles while filling an Amazon Wish List that you know no one will ever check because your family just doesn’t function that way, you pick up the book you just ended and start again from page one.