Austen vs Dickens: drawing room or the streets?

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JANE AUSTEN vs DICKENS go head to head — and every jab is rooted in real history.

JANE AUSTEN

I need but three or four families in a country village, and I will show you the whole of human nature in a single misjudged proposal.

DICKENS

Three families? Madam, London alone holds a million souls starving in the fog, and every one of them deserves a page.

JANE AUSTEN

You crowd your pages with orphans and villains to make the reader weep; I make her recognize herself, which is far harder.

DICKENS

And while your Bennets fret over husbands, my Oliver asks for more supper - one of us wrote for the drawing room, the other for the world outside its window.

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