Trollope, Dickens and...Terry Pratchett

Even while the genius writer that was Terry Pratchett was still alive, he was compared to Charles Dickens.

Well, after going through "a Trollope a month", i.e. a book by Anthony Trollope, a 19th century writer, I am now challenging myself with "a Dickens a month". After kicking off with Nicholas Nickleby in January, published in serial from from 1838 to 1839, I'm now on Barnaby Rudge from 1841, a much better book than I was led to believe, given that there hasn't been a dramatization of it since 1960*

And I can see what they mean with the comparison. As with Pratchett, the plots of Dickens' novels just zip along, while some of the characters from the books by Dickens would fit very comfortably into the Discworld. Characters such as Newman Noggs from Nicholas Nickleby, for example, a minor character but an important one as he forms a kind of benevolent link between various characters. Even the name is redolent of those in the Discworld, such as Rufus Drumknott, Agnes Nitt, Sacharissa Cripslock and Lupine Wonse. To mention but a few.

If you want a longer list of the wonderful names that Terry Pratchett came up with, look no further:
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/List_of_Pratchett_characters

Yesterday evening, while consulting The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as edited by Margaret Drabble, I came up with a way to produce new and wonderful names, names that sound so good, it would be worth writing a story just to use them: open the book at a random page, find a name that can be used as a first name, then open the book at another random page and use the first surname you see.

You end up with names such as Ida Catnach, Kay Pfefferkorn, Tucker Meynell, Hesiod Blackmore, Blake Kentigern and Powys Priestley. Be honest, you could imagine coming across them in some novel, couldn't you? Especially one by Dickens.

* I have to correct this. This information was taken from the wonderful imdb.com website. I have since read that there was a stage adaptation as well as a BBC radio adaptation of this book since then.