A Word from the Editor (Charles Dickens)

 

"Here then, ladies and gentlemen, we introduce to your special and particular notice

BENTLEY'S MISCELLANY."

  

                      -- Charles Dickens

Truth is bonnie Charles Dickens really did say that. Some think he said it about the frivolous journal founded in England, 1836, by Richard Bentley, but those who have more taste than learning will know that Dickens never would have praised that "Burlington Street Brigand," Richard Bentley, in the glowing terms which of course he actually meant for me. 

(I was wondering if somehow I was committing a copyright violation of something written these almost 200 years ago, and then I figured, heck, if I'm going to call my blog the same thing as the journal Dickens once edited, I might as well go whole hog and audaciously claim that everything Dickens wrote in his preface to that journal was really just prophetically dictated in application to what my blog would be and not at all relevant to the journal he was paid to edit.) 

Even if by some fantastic stretch of imagination someone should doubt Dickens meant to call your attention to my blog, which he knew would be spiffing, a few years after he started working for Richard Bentley they had a falling out, so in the end I daresay he would have actually preferred praising my journal here to his. And if the debatable notion that Dickens would like to transfer all his praise to my blog out of spite isn't enough to satisfy the copyright laws I may be violating by calling this series of miscellaneous things, then what possibly could?

Whatever the case, I felt like starting a blog explicitly devoted to eclectic things I'd like to write; and I'd once heard about Dickens working with a journal called "Bentley's Miscellany"; and I love the idea of appropriating Dickens' words to praise my work (without twisting his words in the last, though of course mangling his intent unfailingly); so in hopes that copyright really doesn't apply at all after 200 years no matter how far you push it, I begin.

(No promises that I'll dig into the original Miscellany with regularity. "Reading takes work!" -- Charles Dickens)

PS - One day maybe my technical abilities will be a little less Victorian, such that I can subtitle my blog this nifty little line I lifted from a learned website:

"Presenting a mix of stories, poetry, drollery, gossip, and political discourse"