“..We live in hard times – and all the indications are that they may get much – even very much – harder.
No one, at any rate – would take a bet that they won’t.
The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up;-
- the homeless are increasing by the hour; -
-the formerly prosperous are laid off without so much as a thank you;-
- the young struggle to find any work at all;-
- beggars are making a comeback on the streets of cities as if they had been hiding all these years -
- waiting for the right moment to emerge from their subterranean lairs into the world above.
The February bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, then – could hardly come at a more appropriate moment in economic history -
- for Dickens was the revealer – the scourge – the prose poet – of urban destitution —
- a destitution that in our waking nightmares – we fear may yet return.
Dickens knew whereof he wrote.
It was his habit to walk miles through the streets of London – and no man—except perhaps Henry Mayhew—was more observant than he.
Often accused by his detractors of exaggerating reality –
- he claimed in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that he merely saw what others did not see – or chose not to see -
- and put it into plain words.
What was caricature to some was to him no more than the unvarnished truth.
He held up a mirror to his age.
The adjective “Dickensian” is more laden with connotation than the adjective that pertains to any other writer: Jamesian, for example, or Joycean, even Shakespearian.
We think of workhouses – of shabby tenements with bedding of rags – of schools where sadistic and exploitative schoolmasters beat absurdities into the heads of hungry children -
- of heartless proponents of the cold charity – of crooked lawyers spinning out their cases in dusty, clerk-ridden chambers.
We think of Oliver Twist asking for more – of Wackford Squeers exclaiming, “Here’s richness for you!” -
- as he tastes the thin slops his school doles out to his unfortunate pupils,
of Mrs. Gamp looking at her patient and saying, “He’d make a lovely corpse!”
If he had been only a social commentator though – Dickens would have been forgotten by all except specialist historians of his age.
But he is not forgotten; -
- he survives the notorious defects of his books —
- their sometimes grotesque sentimentality – their sprawling lack of construction – their frequent implausibility —
- to achieve whatever immortality literature can confer.
Over and over again – in passage after passage – the sheer genius of his writing shines from the page -
- and is the despair of all prose writers after him…”
(cont..)
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