Python 3.4 using urlopen to get web content via pr

Question

Using the example below i am trying to get web conents from behind a proxy server but so far am unsuccessful.

proxies = {'http': 'http://proxy:8080'}
from urllib.request import urlopen
with urlopen('http://sixty-north.com/c/t.txt', proxies) as story:
    story_words = []
    for line in story:
        line_words = line.split()
        for word in line_words:
            story_words.append(word)

story_words

Any idea where I am going wrong? If I remove the proxies argument I get:

[WinError 10060] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond

If I enter proxies argument I get:

ValueError: Content-Length should be specified for iterable data of type {'http': 'http://proxy:8080'}

Am using PyCharm as the IDE and if I check internet connection from within the PyCharm settings, it succeeds.

Thanks for any suggestion.