Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth 1845

[emma_in_dream]

This is the most schmaltzy story, the very epitome of Victorian mawkishness. It features the blind daughter of a toymaker who has been misled by her father her whole life as to her surroundings. Although she lives in a hovel and her father works for a harsh man, he tells her that they have a lovely house and that their grim master is always winking and nodding as he says mock harsh things.


I always have this balancing act with Dickens – he is such a good writer that I get suckered in to his stories and then the second I stop reading I fall about laughing at the ridiculously over the top sentimentality of it. I have to whisper that I feel the same way about the Christmas movie *Love Actually*.