Category Archives: Our Mutual Friend

Children, Interdependence, Making An Impact, Seeing Another, Values

Bleak House

Leave a comment

“It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up.”                                                    Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

It’s an image that is haunting, and daunting, this observation from 1852 Victorian England:  the idea that some children- many children, in fact- in the very prime of their learning and forming years were forced to find their way to young adulthood through the hauling  and heaving of desperate poverty and abuse.  It was a reality distinctly at odds with the Victorians’ self-proclaimed progressive era of reform and improved societal standards.  Author Charles Dickens made his mark, in part, chronicling the sad realities of the time.

That was a long time ago.  The pokes at our collective conscience by Dickens have persisted since his time, as his works are among the most revered and widely-read in the English language.  As a result, we should have every reason to expect that, with the passage of time and a presumed greater enlightenment about healthy societies, our nurture of children might have changed since 1852.

Not so.

Dickens would find endless fuel for his anger today.  Even a short visit to the Mexico-U.S. border would engender sufficient affront for him to create two volumes the size of Bleak House.  The experiences of border children is little better than those endured in the streets of London more than 150 years ago.  The realities of the War in Yemen have claimed 85,000 children under the age of 5 since 2015,  more than enough to flame Dickens’ sense of outrage.  The outlook there suggests the potential demise of another 14 million people over the next several years.  And if the well-known writer deigned to travel to the U.S., he would be dismayed to learn that the British progeny has fostered more than 16 million hungry children in 2018.  If Dickens took a side trip down to Nicaragua, he would encounter children facing family upheavals, disappeared parents, and poverty that is among the worst in the entire Western Hemisphere.  He might begin to wonder whether his famous works really made any impact at all.

I’ve re-read a number of Dickens’ classics in recent years, including Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities.  I’m drawn to his characters and the ambience of the times in his writings.  But I also find myself distracted by the conditions encountered by many of his characters, especially the children.  The stories are uncomfortable.  The children’s circumstances are often abhorrent, to the point occasionally when I think that Dickens has likely exaggerated the realities faced by his young protagonists.  But I read on in the certain hope that things will get better by the tale’s end.

Dickens’ hopes for any kind of empathetic reforms or changed sensitivities as a result of his works would be shattered in the face of today’s world.  The travesties of Victorian England are comparatively small compared to the cold calculations of despots today. Reading fictional accounts of treachery and evil pales in comparison to the very real atrocities that we tolerate repeatedly on the world stage today.

A Christmas Carol delights audiences because of its ability to take us from the depths of human greed to the pinnacle of generosity and redemption.  It makes us feel good in the hope that it creates for eventual justice.  I wonder if Dickens would be inclined to write very different conclusions to his stories today….

 

 

 

 

Poverty, Poverty, Privilege, Privilege, Reflections, Servanthood, Wealth Disparity, Wealth Disparity

Our Mutual Enemy

Leave a comment

I’ve taken to re-reading the Charles Dickens classic tale, Our Mutual Friend.  It’s Dickens’ last work, a long piece of literature that captured my imagination as a young man and for some reason (perhaps the recognition that if I ever intended to re-read it, I’d better get going), I decided to tackle it again.  It’s full of lessons and observations about Victorian (and modern) life, as well as those long and circuitous sentences with which Dickens was so adept.

Dickens’ focus on the great disparities in Victorian London are well-known, such as in his tale,  A Christmas Carol.  But I ran across a passage in the current book that I simply couldn’t pass up for sharing.  One doesn’t really need to know the context of the story or the characters to understand the clarity of the message.  It reads like this:

In the meantime, a stray personage of meek demeanour, who had wandered to the hearthrug and got among the heads of tribes assembled there in conference with Mr. Podsnap, eliminated Mr. Podsnap’s flush and flourish by a highly unpolite remark; no less than a reference to the circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets, of starvation.  It was clearly ill-timed after dinner.It was not adapted to the cheek of the young person.  It was not in good taste.

“I do not believe it,” said Mr. Podsnap, putting it behind him.

The meek man was afraid we must take it as proved, because there were the Inquests and the Registrar’s returns.

“Then it was their own fault,” said Mr. Podsnap.

The man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the culprits in question- as if, in their wretched manner, they had made their weak protests against it-  as if they would have taken the liberty of staving it off if they could-  as if they would rather not have been starved upon the whole, if perfectly agreeable to all parties.

“There is not,” said Mr. Podsnap, flushing angrily, “there is not a country in the world, sir, where so noble a provision is made for the poor as in this country.”

The meek man was quite willing to concede that, but perhaps it rendered the matter even worse, as showing that there must be something appallingly wrong somewhere.

“Where?” said Mr. Podsnap.

The meek man hinted Wouldn’t it be well to try, very seriously, to find out where?

“Ah!” said Mr. Podsnap.  “Easy to say somewhere; not so easy to say where.  But I see what you are driving at.   I knew it from the first.  Centralization.  No.  Never with my consent.  Not English.”

An approving murmur arose from the heads of the tribes; as saying, “There you have him!  Hold him!”

He was not aware (the meek man submitted of himself) that he was driving at any ization.  He had no favorite ization that he knew of.  But he certainly was more staggered by these terrible occurrences than he was by names of howsoever so many syllables.  Might he ask, was dying of destitution and neglect necessarily English?

“You know what the population of London is, I suppose?” said Mr. Podsnap.

The meek young man supposed he did, but supposed that had absolutely nothing to do with it, if its laws were well-administered.

“And you know, at least I hope you know,” said Mr. Podsnap with severity, “that Providence has declared that you shall have the poor always with you?”

The meek man also hoped he knew that.

“I am glad to hear it,” said Mr. Podsnap with a portentous air.  “I am glad to hear it.It will render you cautious how you fly in the face of Providence.”

In reference to that absurd and irreverent conventional phrase, the meek man said, for which Mr. Podsnap was not responsible, he the meek man had no fear of doing anything so impossible; but-

But Mr. Podsnap felt that the time had come for flushing and flourishing this meek man down for good.  So he said:

“I must decline to pursue this painful discussion.  It is not pleasant to my feelings; it is repugnant to my feelings.  I have said that I do not admit these things.  I have also said that if they do occur (not that I admit it), the fault lies with the sufferers themselves.  It is not for ME- Mr. Podsnap pointed ME forcibly, as adding by implication though it may be all very well for YOU- “it is not for me to impugn the workings of Providence.  I know better than that, I trust, and I have mentioned what the intentions of Providence are.  Besides,” said Mr. Podsnap, flushing high up among his hair brushes, with a strong consciousness of personal affront, “the subject is a very disagreeable one.  I will go so far as to say it is an odious one.  It is not one to be introduced among our wives and young persons, and I-“

He finished with that flourish of his arm which added more expressively than any words: ” And I remove it from the face of the earth.”

It is an easy thing to simply banish disagreeable realities with a sweep of the arm.  Or to claim that something is true when it is not.  But doing so does not change the realities or absolve us from the human stewardship that we owe to one another as fellow-travelers on this earthly journey.  Dickens knew it.  And as unpleasant, repugnant, disagreeable and odious as it may be, so do we all….