Over the Christmas holidays, a friend told me of a movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens. I watched the movie at his recommendation. I was not disappointed. It endeared Dickens to me again. His passionate commitment to his craft stagger the imagination. Why? Because of what he endured (some of which was self-inflicted). The trials he endured are now legendary. His permanence in the canon of great literature is justified. Reading of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Pip, Joe, Sydney Carton, and on and on … these characters live in the literary mind just as much as Macbeth, Puck, and Juliet Capulet.

I have a handful of writers of whom I never tire. To be sure, Dickens is there. I’m now enjoying this bio of him and his work, too. Read books about Dickens, if you can. But by all means, read the works of Charles Dickens, and be enriched by them and deepened through them.