ARTS / ROYAL Literature: Charles Dickens bicentenary celebrations: Service at Westminster Abbey

ARTS / ROYAL Literature: Charles Dickens bicentenary celebrations: Service at Westminster Abbey; - Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings. He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead. He wants them to live. He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be. In Hard Times, he left us, of course, one of the most unforgettable pictures of what education looks like if it forgets that exuberance and excess, and treats human beings as small containers for information and skill. And that sense of the grotesque is, strange as it may sound to say it, one of the things that makes Dickens a great religious writer. As we've heard [in an earlier reading from The Life of Our Lord] he could write simply and movingly about Christ. He could, in A Christmas Carol, leave us one of the greatest modern myths arising out of the Christian story. But he had relatively little time for conventional religion, and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human which he was interested in. 'Mr Chadband he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin' to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn't make out nothink on it.' [Extract from Bleak House] The Chadbans and the Jellybys and all those other (again, I'm afraid) unforgettably exuberant hypocrites in his books – these are the people on whom at the end of the day, he wishes judgement to be passed. But that sense of excess in the human spirit and the human heart also leads on to another side of Dickens—equally serious, equally religious, much more disturbing—that side of Dickens which makes him indeed a novelist to stand alongside the very greatest imaginative spirits in Europe; and this is Dickens' sen...
ARTS / ROYAL Literature: Charles Dickens bicentenary celebrations: Service at Westminster Abbey; - Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings. He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead. He wants them to live. He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be. In Hard Times, he left us, of course, one of the most unforgettable pictures of what education looks like if it forgets that exuberance and excess, and treats human beings as small containers for information and skill. And that sense of the grotesque is, strange as it may sound to say it, one of the things that makes Dickens a great religious writer. As we've heard [in an earlier reading from The Life of Our Lord] he could write simply and movingly about Christ. He could, in A Christmas Carol, leave us one of the greatest modern myths arising out of the Christian story. But he had relatively little time for conventional religion, and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human which he was interested in. 'Mr Chadband he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangsby's and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin' to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn't make out nothink on it.' [Extract from Bleak House] The Chadbans and the Jellybys and all those other (again, I'm afraid) unforgettably exuberant hypocrites in his books – these are the people on whom at the end of the day, he wishes judgement to be passed. But that sense of excess in the human spirit and the human heart also leads on to another side of Dickens—equally serious, equally religious, much more disturbing—that side of Dickens which makes him indeed a novelist to stand alongside the very greatest imaginative spirits in Europe; and this is Dickens' sen...
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07 February, 2012
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