Cocktail Talk: Martin Chuzzlewit
Okay, I’m gonna come out and say it (cause it’s a Friday before a long holiday weekend, and I don’t have time for any dilly-dallying, and you don’t have time for me to go on along a long, literary, meandering, essay about it): Charles Dickens kicks ass. Hah, search and spam engines, chew on that. Dickens, even, kicks a mule’s ass. And if you’re from Kansas that’ll make some sort of sense. Or not. Dickens is not only one of the (probably the, but again, I’m not taking up too much of your time today) greatest novelists ever, but also enjoyed his pubs and pub-denizens, had a fine home stock of booze, and was known to take a sip or two regularly. Like all good-minded people.
Anywho, the following quotes are from the lesser-known (but genius) book Martin Chuzzlewit. I thought they might be a good prelude to your long weekend, help get you going with the right frame of drinking mind, and might, might I say, induce you to read a little, too, while kicking up your holiday heels. But avoid the dullness. Cause you aren’t ever dull. Not you.
As to them, the man who can dream such iced Champagne, such claret, port, or sherry, had better go to bed and stop there.
He could hang about a bar-room discussing the affairs of the nation, for twelve hours together; and in that time could hold forth with more intolerable dullness, chew more tobacco, some more tobacco, drink more rum-toddy, mint-julep, gin-sling, and cock-tail than any private gentleman of his acquaintance. This made him an orator and man of the people.
—Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
