Never abandon the wholesome practice ofsaying your
own private prayers, night and morning.
My dear Copperfield, returned Traddles, smiling, I
havent gotanything to lend.
If there were easy money to be made out of dirty
words, a lotmore people would be making it.
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one
always knows that itis there. Perhaps the most meditative of his characters is Paul
Dombey,and his thoughts are mush. As a matter of course he is on the side of the
underdog,always and everywhere.
Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her
watch,which is still keeping Sydney time. It is because he is writing about people
who are growing. Not quite always, because atmoments he shows signs of a fairly
ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. Never abandon the wholesome practice ofsaying
your own private prayers, night and morning.
Secondly, notan epoch of expansion and liberty, but
an epoch of fear, tyranny, andregimentation.
Where he isChristian is in his quasi-instinctive
siding with the oppressed againstthe oppressors.
In them, English is treated as a spokenlanguage,
but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i. To accept civilization asit is practically means
accepting decay. The intellectual fociof the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin.
TROPIC OF CANCER was muchmore vividly present in my mind than it had been when I
first read it. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the
outsideworld.
The scene starts terrifyingly enough,from Pips
point of view.
Unfortunately I cannotquote; unprintable words
occur almost everywhere.
Never abandon the wholesome practice ofsaying your
own private prayers, night and morning.
The prose is astonishing,and in parts of BLACK
SPRING is even better. Theymay do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as
out of date asthe cab-horse.
Butin moral outlook no one could be more bourgeois
than the Englishworking classes. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone;he
would have made it five thousand cashboxes.
It is the gospelaccording to Smiles, instead of the
gospel according to Dickens.
Even the millionaire suffersfrom a vague sense of
guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.
The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reades heroes,
is a kind ofsuperman. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the
outsideworld.
My dear Copperfield, returned Traddles, smiling, I
havent gotanything to lend. Inany case he cannot properly be described as a
religious man.
If there were easy money to be made out of dirty
words, a lotmore people would be making it. As a matter of course he is on the side
of the underdog,always and everywhere.
But from then on, the original Micawber is
neverquite recaptured, in spite of desperate efforts.
It is the gospelaccording to Smiles, instead of the
gospel according to Dickens.