OLIVER TWIST by Charles Dickens. Pepys London Diaries

"'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, 'the law is a ass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience'."
--from OLIVER TWIST by Charles Dickens

Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation–through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes–of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believable way, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered an alternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned Oliver Twist one of its author’s most loved works. This edition reprints the original Everyman's Library’s introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.

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 1949年《胡適日記》是王兆熙兄所贈的英國製 the Dataday Diary for 1949  。這是家百年老店*， 2012還存活。胡適用的應是Desk Diaries 系列的A51PASA53PS / WO5PAS  (該公司不知為什麼取Pepys London Diaries 系列? 因為這17世紀的名家用的代碼/密碼寫的日記，甚詳，不像胡適1949年逃亡上海，被共產黨當「戰犯」，被蔣介石說要他「去美國走走」；沒帶什麼書出來，所以上海幾家圖書館等找書讀。每天的日記多最多數行。換句話說這是最狼狽不堪的一年。

*About Us

In 1839, only a few months after Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, the TJ & J Smith partnership was formed in London to manufacture a range of fine diaries, almanacs, quill pens and special metallic paper.

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此一記事讓我想起故友劉仲庸。我想起約2006年劉仲庸先生為我從日本帶回新鄉重夫設計的《小行事/記事》本，我有點失望，沒有想像中的創意，其實我應該再努力研究一翻，可惜現在不知藏在什麼地方。