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May 18, 2021Liked by Eric Kraft

I just started reading “The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens” by Jenny Hartley. He enjoyed inventing joke sign- offs: ‘The Mask’, ‘Victoria’, ‘Anti Pusey’, ‘The Congreve of the 19th Century’, ‘Dick the Doomed’, ‘Philo Forecastle’, and Pitchcock,Swabber, Trillington, & Dawberry’. Hartley writes that “Each one of Dickens’s letters is a performance, finely calibrated to the nature of its recipient, as if he were talking to him or her.”

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“Each one of Dickens’s letters is a performance, finely calibrated to the nature of its recipient, as if he were talking to him or her,” sounds like Dudley Beaker.

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