The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules looks cute, Barbara. I've seen it in the stores and hesitated, but that looks like one of those Corrine Holt Sawyer fun things about entrepreneurial 80+ year olds. I'm glad to know somebody who has read it. I love those types of plots.
Karen, that's fascinating. I can see some "conventions," if they could be called that, creeping into the narrative, and I was wondering about them. Am really loving the book, tho I have to say trying to read it before going to sleep is like lifting weights, no joke, it's one of those Barnes and Noble Classic editions, in paperback and it's humble looking but HUGE. But I love the notes. They'll put some on the bottom of the page, I guess they are "Victorianisms?" and then in the Endnotes in the back they explain the references. I've gotten to where if I don't need the EndNote references immediately, once I finish the chapter I read them all then.
Here's an example of one for Krook's rag and bone shop. (Those rag and bone men have always fascinated me. Kirk Douglas's father was one) and I never really understood what they were.
Note for" Krook, Rag and Bottle WareHouse: According to Dickens's eldest son, Charley, Krook's establishment was based on a house located in Chichester Rents, off Chancery Lane. The bones Krook buys and sells...were from scraps of leftover food as well as livestock, bought for small sums, they were resold to soap makers."
Under blacking bottles, this fabulous information:
"blacking bottles: In 1824, when Dickens was twelve and his parents were in financial straits, he qas sent to work in Warren's Blacking Factory, where he pasted sables onto jars of blacking (used as boot polish). The traumatic episode figures prominently in Dickens's Autobiographical Fragment which he began and then abandoned in the 1840's. Later, he revisited it in Chapter 11 of David Copperfield. As he does here, he also dropped allusions to the episode elsewhere in his works-- in chapter 27 of Great Expectations, for example. However, until Dickens's close friend John Forster published the Autobiographical Fragment in his posthumous biography of Dickens, the episode was not publicly known. Since then, it has been widely addressed by critics and biographers."
Now I would not have known any of that and I found it fascinating. I remember the Rag and Bone Men from Philadelphia where I grew up and I never understood their function and I didn't after reading Kirk Douglas's autobiography but I do now. It's a feast, it really is.
