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.
As I sat in my Astoria hotel room yesterday afternoon looking out on a flock of Western and Glaucous-winged Gulls that was perched on a deteriorating portion of a long-abandoned dock that the Columbia River had yet to fully claim, I suddenly found myself wondering what would have been had I taken up bird watching […]