“And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.”
“So did these come and go, [...] so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be, without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die.”
“In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.”
Subsequently, Esther herself is stricken, suffering not only the skin problems associated with the disease, but also blindness. Given the virulence of both smallpox viruses, the British goverment in the 1850s, enacted a series of laws that made vaccination against smallpox compulsory.
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow; additional text by Philip V. Allingham. Via Victorianweb
note: #rfkjr wants to bring #smallpox back. Back to a time of ‘horse and buggy’. Back to this---it’s so unnecessarily. Unnecessary suffering for RFK Jr.’s ego & wealth.
“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.”
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.
As Engles pointed out in his Condition of the Working Classes, the prosperous classes lived segregated from the poor, which prevented them from encountering their sufferings. Dickens here forces his reader to see these sufferings
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."
[...]
On the Day of Judgment. I have discovered that the sixth seal mentioned in the Revelations is the Great Seal. It has been open a long time! Pray accept my blessing."
[...]
"Youth. And hope. And beauty. And Chancery. And Conversation Kenge! Ha! Pray accept my blessing!"
Thank you for this cartoon. It works on several levels ... I can fully understand Dickens being unremittingly grim in his writing but that doesn't make me enjoy it.
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!