The Spider Community

I just love this entire passage:

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive.

A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate,and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air – like our own marsh mist.

Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness.

It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a table-cloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together.

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An epergne or centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests.

But, the blackbeetles took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another.

These crawling things had fascinated my attention and I was watching them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder. In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and she looked like the Witch of the place.

dining rm
“It’s a bride cake. Mine!”
A. A. Dixon (1905)
taken from www.victorianweb.org

The “Great” Exploration Begins

Loving reading to and listening to Dickens’ works. Listening to Great Expectations and The Christmas Carol both on audio at present.  Because I listen in bed when I’m going to sleep, and I sometimes hear the same chapters over and over again, I get to thinking about the story and characters. I miss dissecting literature for college classes too!

This blog is just a place for me to explore the different things I find interesting, funny, or profound in the works of Charles Dickens. He is a phenomenal writer. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to discover him.

Thanks for joining me!

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest. – Charles Dickens

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Pip’s Graves / St. James Church