Count Smorltork Rises

On the second Wednesday in December, the Dickens Pickwick Club gathers at the ancient George & Vulture – an 18th-century warren of port, oak panels, and old City gossip – for its annual feast of camaraderie, Stilton, steak-and-kidney pie, and booming speeches. This year, my turn arrived: I had to deliver the Himself in the guise of Count Smorltork, Dickens’s “famous foreigner” and virtuoso mangler of the English tongue. What followed was a night of uncommon joviality, literary lineage, personal history, and a foreign Count’s triumphant but catastrophic attempt at English.