In honor of Charles Dickens' birthday, here is the first paragraph of Bleak House, the adaptation of which we've been raving about for the last three weeks over at Romancing the Tome.
Chapter 1 — In Chancery
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and
the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November
weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly
retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to
meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from
chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as
big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine,
for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses,
scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper,
and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands
of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day
broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon
crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and
accumulating at compound interest. Continue reading here.
now *that's* a headline....
Posted by: cecil vortex | February 08, 2006 at 05:50 PM