The Wednesday Quiz on Vacation

It's bye-week for the Wednesday Quiz, with top three winners UnWise Owl, la gringissima, and DrSchnell enjoying their various fabulous prizes and four and fifth place winners Kadonkadonk and Mrs.5000 seething with rage that only the top three spots get prize.

But while we wait for the Quiz to get its act together, here's something we can all endure together.

Dickens v. Bulwer-Lytton

Remember when I read Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii a while back? No? Well, that's cool. But in the ensuing discussion, B-L was compared and contrasted with Charles Dickens, and eventually a forceful recommendation was put forward that I should read Great Expectations.

So I read Great Expectations. Or, rather, listened to it on cassette tapes(!). And it was terrific, for the most part, with a somewhat muddy final reel that led to an ending which was, well, reasonably satisfying but also a little sappy. At which point, the reader on my cassettes said "Now, that's the ending that Dickens' buddy Edward Bulwer-Lytton talked him into writing. The following is the original ending that Dickens changed on Bulwer-Lytton's advice." Then, he read an alternative ending, a little darker, a little less improbable. Far out.

This led me to Google, naturally, where I ignored the little Pac-Man game in favor of checking out the relationship between Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton. And that's how I found the:

Is it Dickens or Bulwer-Lytton Quiz.

I haven't taken it yet. And obviously there are problems with this kind of thing -- how on earth could the guy who put it together resist the temptation to cherry-pick Bulwer-Lytton's best nuggets and Dickens' worst clunkers? But, I'm going to take it today. Let's see if we can really tell the difference between the guy who is still revered as a cultural touchstone, and the guy who has become a literary laughing-stock.