A Better Understanding

While reading chapter 7 of book 2, I realized how detailed Charles Dickens' writing is. When reading this old English kind of writing style, it can be very confusing to understand what is going on in the text. Dickens described some scenes so well, however, that it is easy to "paint yourself a picture" in your mind. A good example of his extraordinarily writing is on page 114:

"With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept around corners, with women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged."

In previous chapters, I was always confused on what was happening, but this paragraph, and even other parts of this chapter made a lot of sense to me. The verbs and adjectives that were used made it much easier for me to understand exactly how the carriage was moving through the streets, how the people were reacting, and for me, the end of this paragraph helped me understand how horrible the accident was, even though we don't know much about it at this point. 'Dashed, swept, and swooping,' are all words that explain the carriage, and 'clutching, screaming, and cry,' all explain the people's reactions. It is obvious that the carriage is moving too fast and that all of the pedestrians out on the streets are terrified.

The one sentence, however, that evoked the most emotion in me, was: "one of its wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry..." The word choice here seems very dark and it seems as though Dickens, once again, wants us to feel the pain that the victims in this scene are feeling. Dickens is fantastic at bringing emotion to the reader and at using word choice to help the reader better understand what is going on.