Archivo

“The Dark Side of Dickens”

A review of Michael Slater’s biography Charles Dickens published in 2010. Hitchens compares Slater’s book very unfavorably to earlier biographies (notably Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens from 1990). In the process we learn that Dicken’s work did actually draw directly from his childhood (“the feeble male parent, the death of a sibling, the...school where the master who slashed the boys with a cane”). Hitchens also posits that this childhood may have something to do with “…the very real constraints on Dicken’s legendary compassion.” Hitchens throws in a few anecdotes for illustration. Dickens is “the man who had a poor women arrested for using filthy language in the street” and “made remarks about [blacks] that may have shocked even the pathologically racist [Thomas] Carlyle.” Hitchens compares Dickens unfavorably to his contemporaries, George Eliot in particular, but also acknowledges ‘the first real test is that of spending a long…evening in the alehouses…and here it has to be in the company of Dickens and no one else.” I think, even here, he’s being pejorative in his praise.

New learning: Dickens wrote, in response to the Indian rebellion of 1857, that he would  use all “merciful and swiftness of execution…to exterminate [these people from] the face of the earth.” Nice guy. Interesting blog from Countercurrents on the 200^th anniversary of Dicken’s birth: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya100212.htm.

New phrase: chiaroscuro = the use of strong contrast between light and dark in art.