The Battle Of Life: Charles Dickens

[poliphilo]

Well, well, well...

I look at it through my pink spectacles and think, what a lovely, lovely story.

I look at it through my green spectacles and think, but I don't believe a word of it.

Rose-tinted spectacles: You're judging it by the standards of realism and it's a fable. Dickens is a fabulist.

Green-tinted spectacles: There's fable and there's deliberate untruth. Dickens is misrepresenting human nature.

Rose: What a cynic you are. It's Shakespearean. Think Cymbeline.

Green: Shakespearean, my arse! Think Little Nell with knobs on...

Enough of that....

It must be the least regarded of Dickens' major works. Eleanor Farjeon- in her introduction to the Christmas Books- dismisses it in a line. And yet it's not something Dickens tossed off in an idle hour; it's a carefully constructed work of art, with splendid set-pieces and a clutch of variously delightful comic characters. Perhaps the final reveal is a little hard to take...

And off we go again....

Comments

[cmcmck]

Tong church, not so far from us, purports to have Little Nell's grave in the churchyard.

Clearly the money grabbing sexton can't have read the story- Tong church it was, but in the body of the church.......

[poliphilo]

It's ages since I read The Old Curiosity Shop. I should give it another whirl. I think I've got more sympathy with Dickens' sentimental streak than I did when I was a kid.

I've always thought it was cheeky of Oscar Wilde to make that crack about Little Nell when some of his own stories- The Happy Prince, the Selfish Giant- are as sentimental as they come.

[cmcmck]

So's The Canterville Ghost but it still has the power to make me cry.

[poliphilo]

And why not?