Record Number: 12545

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Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'My pal was a typical Cockney recidivist who sold fruit on a coster's barrow between convictions and went crook when sales dwindled to vanishing point... I was attracted to him in the first place by his amazing knowledge of Dickens. He spent every moment of leisure reading Dickens and had, in the course of a dozen or more years in prison, read little else. There was no single scrap of Dickens' work that he hadn't read, not once, or twice, but many times. Mention any character you liked and little B- would give you a verbal picture of him and his setting in the story in which he appeared. More than once at exercise he has walked behind me spouting whole pages dealing with his favourite characters, accompanying his copious quotations with a running commentary on their virtues and failings in a vein so humorous that I have more than once had to fall out to avoid startling the whole exercise by going off into peals of laughter.'

Century:

1900-1945

Date:

unknown

Country:

England

Time

n/a

Place:

other location: in prison

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

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Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

anon

Age:

Adult (18-100+)

Gender:

Male

Date of Birth:

n/a

Socio-Economic Group:

Labourer (non-agricultural)

Occupation:

costermonger and prisoner

Religion:

n/a

Country of Origin:

England

Country of Experience:

England

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

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Text Being Read:

Author:

Charles Dickens

Title:

[works]

Genre:

Fiction

Form of Text:

Print: Book, Serial / periodical

Publication Details

n/a

Provenance

borrowed (institution library)
presumably from prison library

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Source Information:

Record ID:

12545

Source:

Print

Author:

Stuart Wood

Editor:

n/a

Title:

Shades of the Prison House

Place of Publication:

London

Date of Publication:

1932

Vol:

n/a

Page:

395

Additional Comments:

n/a

Citation:

Stuart Wood, Shades of the Prison House, (London, 1932), p. 395, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=12545, accessed: 09 May 2025

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Additional Comments:

None