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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsUncovered Charles Dickens article champions working class rights.
This is fantastic. Correllated to our modern day, imagine what he would say
to faith based initiatives and our current spate of class warfare. See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/25/charles-dickens-identified-author-article
Charles Dickens has been identified as the author of a previously unattributed article which attacks the middle classes for patronising the "working man".
"Who has not been outraged by observing that cheerfully patronising mode of dealing with poor people which is in vogue at our soup-kitchens and other depôts of alms?," runs the article, which was published anonymously on 18 April 1863 in the weekly magazine All the Year Round, under Charles Dickens's editorship. "There is a particular manner of looking at the soup through a gold double eye-glass, or of tasting it, and saying, 'Monstrous good monstrous good indeed; why, I should like to dine off it myself!' which is more than flesh and blood can bear."
. . .
"Any new Dickens material is exciting," said Drew. "It's not a new opinion [from him] but on the other hand, where an author has become as important as Dickens, it's as much about how he says things as what he's saying."
The article comments in depth on the proposal to establish dining-halls and kitchens for the use of poor people a move the author commends, as long as certain principles are adhered to. "The poor man who attends one of these eating-houses must be treated as the rich man is treated who goes to a tavern. The thing must not be made a favour of," he writes. "The officials, cooks, and all persons who are paid to be the servants of the man who dines, are to behave respectfully to him, as hired servants should; he is not to be patronised, or ordered about, or read to, or made speeches at, or in any respect used less respectfully than he would be in a beef and pudding shop, or other
house of entertainment. Above all, he is to be jolly, he is to enjoy himself, he is to have his beer to drink; while, if he show any sign of being drunk or disorderly, he is to be turned out, just as I should be ejected from a club, or turned out of the Wellington or the Albion Tavern this very day, if I got drunk there."
malaise
(269,365 posts)Thanks for this
I think Dickens would understand the rightwing attacks on political correctness,
a horrible euphemism for simple respect.
malaise
(269,365 posts)He would also understand the debtors prisons.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)His father had to pay the Man.
malaise
(269,365 posts)David Copperfield easily the closest book to his autobiography
ananda
(28,925 posts).. Steinbeck, Murrow, Chomsky, Ehrenreich, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers....
The only hope for this country is to have the plight of the poor and
working classes visibilized in a continual and big way.
malaise
(269,365 posts)and many others