The Pickwick Papers, morning on Rochester Bridge

The Pickwick Papers came out in monthly parts from 1836, when Dickens was twenty-four, and the series made his name. Sales of the parts climbed from a few hundred to tens of thousands as the story went on. Rochester and the Medway appear again in his last years of writing. Project Gutenberg carries the complete book.

Where this text comes fromThe sentence begins back to front. Bright and pleasant was the sky, rather than the sky was bright and pleasant, and the inversion is a joke: Dickens is writing a comic novel in the register of an epic, and the mock solemnity of the syntax is the whole point of the opening. Readers in 1836 recognized the tone immediately because they had been taught it at school in Latin verse. The passage puts a man on a bridge in that register and then lets him be entirely ordinary.

What you might not noticeThe passage uses the abbreviation Mr with a full stop after it, which means the sentence contains a period that does not end anything. That single mark is enough to break most automatic sentence counters. Source

What it trainsSix commas across two sentences of 334 characters, with the clauses arranged so that the verb often arrives before its subject. Copying inverted syntax is harder than it looks, because you cannot guess the next word from the shape of the sentence, and guessing is what fast typing relies on. Four words reach ten letters, contemplating, balustrades, appearance and reflective, and they are spread out rather than clustered. Six capitals, four of them inside sentences.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg