Witzend
Ditto to Cider with Rosie, and the Barchester novels. Mr Slope long ago joined P&P’s Mr Collins as the two most ghastly fictional men I’ve ever ‘met’ but I think Trollope definitely takes the prize for the most wonderful physical description of someone who would make you shudder.
... seconded!
Mr Collins, ugh, inwardly quaking.
I have also read and re-read all of Dickens' novels.
The opening chapter of Bleak House, 'In Chancery' is so evocative - it's a London that still existed to some extent when I was child...
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
One of the finest descriptions of 'old' London to be found in literature.