Punch me harder
Lincoln Allison on the insufferable sentimentality, and indisputable power, of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”:
“Yet when the little mite pipes up with, ‘God bless us, every one’ can I harden my heart? Can I implore the author to kill him off in a coaching accident? Can I say, ‘Bah! Humbug! Boil the little bugger with onions!’ No, I cannot; my lower lip wobbles with everyone else’s.”