“It may be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to, and live upon them; but it’s not my sort. The best kind of amends then, for having gone away, is to keep away, in my opinion.”
Esther describes a thunderstorm having taken shelter in a hunting lodge: “we sat, just within the doorway, watching the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning; and, while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed,
to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make creation new again.”
Illustration: Where Nemo has been buried
“Is this place of abomination, consecrated ground?’
‘I don’t know nothink of consequential ground,’ says Jo, still staring.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘WHICH?’ says Jo, in the last degree amazed.
‘Is it blessed?”
Dickens possessed copies of G. A. Walker’s Series of Lectures on the Actual Condition of the Metropolitan Graveyards (1846) which detail the dreadful conditions in London burial grounds.”
Mark 10:14 Suffer the little children to come unto me
The Visit to the Brickmaker's by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne) for Bleak House, Chapter VIII, "Covering a Multitude of Sins,"
In essence, Dickens here counters the belief frequently voiced by contemporary middle- and upper-class commentators that the poor "are different from us," they do not find the death of children all that upsetting, and they therefore must be almost a separate species.
The Little Old Lady Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) March 1852 Etching.
Passage Illustrated: Initiating the Wards into the Ways of Chancery
"Oh!" said she. "The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty when they find themselves in this place, and don't know what's to come of it."
[...]
...wetterte #Dickens in seinen "American Notes". "Die Sache selbst ist eine Übertreibung an Ekelhaftigkeit, die nicht zu überbieten ist."
"Was die #Politiker anbelangt, so kam €Dickens zu dem Schluss, dass sie, wie alle anderen in #Amerika auch, von Geld und nicht von Idealen motiviert waren.
"Ich bin enttäuscht", schrieb er in einem berühmten Brief. "Dies ist nicht die Republik, die ich mir vorgestellt habe."
Dutch town throws worlds largest #Dickens festival. The fesitval is expected to attract 125,000 visitors, and shows how his works live on to this day. They remain classics!
I have appeared in a stage version of some of his work, and once got paid a tiny amount for appearing as an extra in a #BBC adaptation. Great stories!
Today in Labor History December 2, 1867: British author Charles Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at Tremont Temple in Boston. He described his impressions of the U.S. in a travelogue, “American Notes for General Circulation.” In Notes, he condemned slavery and correlated the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. Despite his abolitionist sentiments, some modern commentators have criticized him for not condemning Britain’s harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. During his American visit, he also spent a month in New York, giving lectures, and arguing for international copyright laws and against the pirating of his work in America. The press ridiculed him, saying he should be grateful for his popularity here.
In fact, "working forty hours a week and affording to live" has ALWAYS been a leftist idea. Conservatives have fought tooth and nail against every single regulation on employers, from the eight hour day to child labor. Dickens talks about it in Hard Times.
Here is #Dickens sounding like he could have written this yesterday:
"Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made....They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke."
In fact, I was just thinking about this quote, and feel that I would like to share it in #ClimateDiary:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the
spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."
(opening sentence of Charles #Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities)