I'm here. Thanks for the name drop and thanks again for getting this group together.

The wine cask scene - let's see. It was a moment of vivid, sudden action after all the previous exposition, which helps it to stand out. Having recently driven to New Bedford and wandered the cobblestone streets there, I was primed to imagine all that deep red wine running between the stones. (They are not easy to walk on and they certainly don't do any favors to car tires, and I can only imagine they made things worse for horses and wooden carriage wheels. But they do give the city a great deal of charm.)

The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size.

Dickens laid on the foreshadowing of coming violence and blood running in the streets a little thick here.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

Reading from the comfort of my sofa with me e-book, though, this scene was the first that really drove home how desperate and poor these people were. Scooping up the wine with bare fingers until they wore tracks into the mud, chomping on the wine-soaked barrel staves, all the cadaverous starving people who were probably more desperate for the calories the wine could provide than for its inebriating qualities - yeah, suddenly we can see the pressure the country is under.

Dickens only mentions the "muddy wine-lees," but lets not forget all the manure and offal that were running down those 18th century streets too. This is where the chamber-pots got emptied. That mud between the stones was probably 80% sewage.

The shoemaker chapter that followed was a lot of fun, too. It finally made sense of all the stuff Dickens dumped on us in the beginning. And the psychological portrait of the doctor imprisoned for all those years felt surprisingly modern.