Sober Reading

[poliphilo]

Sales of the great Victorian novelists have gone up 15% in the last few months- or so it says here. The implication is that these times echo those times- and that we're looking to the past to understand what's just happened to us.  A week ago Howard Jacobson in the Independent was urging us all to read Little Dorrit.  By the same token, I reckon we should all be reading Zola's la Curee (which I just did) not only for its insight into the  psychology and lifestyle of the super rich- but also because it goes beyond Dickens- who didn't really understand finance- in showing us just how the bastards operate.

It would be nice to think we we're all busily learning the lesson of the recession, but I don't for a moment suppose we will.  Dickens and Zola couldn't prevent this present catastrophe from happening.  Merdle died in vain.  Art comforts us after the event, but we're deaf to its warnings.   For the time being- while it's enforced on us- we'll be sober, sensible, ready to be schooled- but show us the flash of easy money and we'll rise to it again- as we always have done- stupid as fish. 

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Have you read Trollope's The Way We Live Now? That is so applicable to today's world that the BBC radio recently did a dramatisation in which they set it today. They had to change very little.

It has the Ponzi (sp?) schemes and dodgy share dealings and the ultra-rich and everything.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a book I keep meaning to read. One of these days it'll make it to the top of the list.

There's nothing new under the sun.

[mummm.livejournal.com]

How true...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We never learn, or so it seems....

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately that is VERY true.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

For the time being- while it's enforced on us- we'll be sober, sensible, ready to be schooled- but show us the flash of easy money and we'll rise to it again- as we always have done- stupid as fish.

You speak truth!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We know that greed is ugly and stupid- everything and everyone that's worth a damn tells us so- and yet.....

[sovay]

For the time being- while it's enforced on us- we'll be sober, sensible, ready to be schooled- but show us the flash of easy money and we'll rise to it again- as we always have done- stupid as fish.

Maybe at least for a little while we'll be literate fish . . .

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And maybe we'll get some good writing out of the situation too.

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

It may be that people are reading Victorian-era novels because they echo the times we're living in, but perhaps it's simply because those sort of books tend to be a) very lengthy and b) comparatively inexpensive and so offer a cheap way of whiling away a few evenings?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's an equally plausible explanation.

But whatever their motivation, I think it's a good thing that people should be reading Dickens and Trollope.

[algabal.livejournal.com]

I say let's read bad Victorian novels! Poor people didn't read Dickens or Zola. They read Mrs. Humphry Ward and Hall Caine (or so I presume).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know about poor people reading Zola, but I'm sure poor people read Dickens. Everybody (who could read) read Dickens. He was a great popular entertainer who- like Shakespeare- also happened to be a great artist.

My favourite minor(I wouldn't say "bad") Victorian novelists are Sheridan Le Fanu and Mrs Oliphant- both of whom wrote cracking tales of the supernatural.

Oh- and whatever happened to Charles Reade? He was still accepted as a classic when I was a child, but now seems totally forgotten. His huge historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth is one of the most thrilling things I've ever read.

And I'm forgetting Harrison Ainsworth- very silly, great fun.