Popper, the rest of Dickens

I have read Our Mutual Friend, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. That was the last of Dickens, and while I am glad that I read this great serial novelist, I'm with Oscar Wilde: "You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell." The sentimentality was too much for me, and overall I prefer Anthony Trollope, and not just for the political or the academic novels. I admire Dickens' incessant railing on poverty -- I'll remember for a long time Lizzie's hatred of the river muck which was her family's living in Our Mutual Friend -- but it was like reading a soap opera. He is cinematic, he is witty, he is good at caricaturing characters. I grant that he knew how to write constant cliff hangers. Old Curiosity Shop ends with the death of its heroine, little Nell, and he made his readers wait not one monthly installment but two before finding out her fate. Apparently the longshoremen in New York shouted at the ship arriving with the British papers: "Is little Nell dead?" It was like 'who shot JR?' I'll never know that sort of fame with my writing, even if my fiction ever does get published or plays performed, but what can I say? I still don't like him. It was a slog to read him.

I also read Karl Popper's Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism.