In which I fall to musing upon the amount of information an average reader of Charles Dickens’ novels would have been expected to possess in his own time and how it compares to that which could be assumed of us today.
I was twelve when I first saw The Nutcracker performed. It was a community production presented in the high school auditorium by The Little Ballet Theater, the local ballet school in my hometown. The Sugarplum Fairy was portrayed by a girl in my class named Tricia. To be perfectly honest, she was the entire reason why the twelve-year-old son of a commercial fisherman in a Pacific Northwest fishing and logging town paid for a ticket and sat through the entire performance of the first ballet he had ever seen and about which he previously knew nothing more than that the name of it sounded very much like something he dreaded happening during dodgeball in P.E.