The Pickwick Papers, thrust into my hands at the age 13. It danced before my eyes, a great hokey-cokey of eccentrics, phony politicians, amorous widows and wily witty servants. A tear sprang to my eyes when I read the book`s closing words: ¨Some men like bats, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light¨.
When I first read it, I had no idea how hard-won that sunny vision had been for its 25 years-old author, only 12 years before, he had been a drudge in a shoe-polish factory, living in his own. He felt abandoned, humiliated, heart-broken. By a supreme effort of will, he turned away from the dark feelings that threatened to engulf him and threw himself into life with a blazing enthusiasm.
This alone would not be enough to make him my hero, though it is a heroic effort. The reason I love him so deeply is that, having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by some people, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice, from the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it, as I do.
This year is the 200th Dickens` anniversary, and events are planned all over. Here are some ideas for celebrating a writer who ¨could extract wisdom, pathos, humor from the most unlikely materials, and never failed to read the man underneath all the strange wrappage that habit, speech and association might have flung around him.¨
Type the adjective ¨Dickensian¨ into some web search and you will see that it has been used to describe from the ¨life of a 1930`s child star to Newt Gingrich`s thoughts on educational reform.¨
In a 2009 review, written just after the investor Madoff fraud: ¨Little Dorrit is particularly apt at this moment in history because the story focuses intently on something deeper and more universal than real estate bubbles or bank runs: Unfairness.¨
Phony - a person that is not genuine.
Wily - clever.
Witty - having the ability to say something in a clever and amusing way.
Drudge - who does hard, menial work.
Engulf - overwhelm someone.
Pathos - a quality that arouses pity or sadness.
Unfairness - injustice
