Barbara Kingsolver thanks Charles Dickens in ‘Acknowledgement’ for writing David Copperfield. Similarly, I’d need to thank Book Club Mom. I hadn’t heard of Kingsolver, but her blog made me want to read the book. 546 pages, what we used to call epics. But for Charles Dickens, with his newspaper serialisation, Copperhead would be labelled a short story. Dickens had a wonderful handle on people’s names. Like epigrams, he matched them to his...