A few months ago I began reading C. S. Lewis's Experiment in Criticism. I was trying to do an analytical reading, which is probably why I got no further than Chapter 2. Then my friend Elizabeth brought me a book by Robertson Davies that I had requested. More accurately, the book was a compilation of some work published posthumously. Lewis and Davies had some strikingly similar things to say about tastes in reading material. I also see a similarity between Davies organic-seeming theory of reading (in which you discover new authors by reading other authors) and echoes of a Robert Scholes essay I love entitled A Fortunate Fall? Thus it seems that the authors who appeal to me are operating from similar philosophies. Does that seem to suggest anything concerning their appeal?
It was because of my infatuation with Robertson Davies and my recent reading of Wilkie Collins (a contemporary and friend of Dickens) that I was recently inspired to try Dickens again. Unfortunately that particular experiment resulted in a wash since I chose what was probably the perfectly wrong book to begin. Pickwick Papers. The stars of Little Women loved, so why not I?
More on the referenced authors later, or so I hope.
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