I FOUND them dull, most of the thousands of words written to
mark the 200th birthday of English author Charles Dickens.
It was almost as if he had been re-categorised in history’s
library as a somewhat tedious celebrity rather than an author who used humour, pathos, social
observation and clever word-play to
agitate for social reform, especially the reduction of poverty.
No doubt more than one
Open Letter was addressed to Dickens, but this from biographer, Claire Tomalin, asks what he would
think of our times.She thinks he would be ‘daunted’ by the increasing
prison population in an age of decreasing crime
(Personally I think he would give the
Occupy Movement a better run than most of his fellow journalists.) LETTER
The Washington Post ran with a defence of Dickensian verbosity.
Whatever! WORDSMITH
The National Post had the obligatory ‘Ten things you might not
know about Charles Dickens’, proving numbers are more sacrosanct in popular
culture today than 200 years ago. TEN
The
Los Angeles Times tried to embarrass us by asking how many Dickens novels we
have read. (From
my experience, the answer for the average newspaper reader would be more than
the average newspaper journalist.) BOOKS
Confirming my theory of
new media, the most interesting analysis came as a comment to an article in the
Times of India.
Here is the comment in
its entirety,
Enjoy the Dickensian humanity.
Cheers
Bernie
Sid Harth (navanavonmilita) wrote:
I was a born poor,
tenth baby. Poverty is not such a big deal in India. More people are poor in
India that any other country of the world.
However, I as a
poor boy and Charles Dickens, as a celebrity writer, got along just fine.
Frankly, Charles tells, according to his writing and subsequent adaptations of
his stories, less than what it does to the human spirit.
It must be a fashion in England. Not in India.
Poverty existed then, as well as today, side by side with filthy riches.
For instance, the richest man in India, Mukesh
Ambani, built a mansion atop a hill. Spent one billion dollars, furniture,
decorating and other do-dads, not included, for four members of his family.
I called it, "the most ugly house on the
hill." It is not the modern architecture, I was talking about. It is OK by
me. It was his most arrogant placement of that house, practically darkening the
houses near his. Moreover, what view he has looking outside of his giant house
is no beautiful at all. Slums here. Slums there and slums everywhere.
What Charles Dickens did was to show the miserable
conditions of the poor. It shocked the society. If I write a book on poverty,
nobody would buy my book.
Sorry Charles.
...and I am Sid harth@topcogitoergosum.com
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