Comments on: Happy Birthday to our Mutual Friend

By: Blake

Blake — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:02:53 +0000

It makes me sad that this post got so few comments, and it makes me sadder that I couldn’t think of anything to add myself.

I did buy myself a few new versions of old favorite stories, just in honor of the old guy. Astonishing to see just how many good looking and apparently recent adaptations are now available on DVD.

By: Charles Dickens at 200 | Cranach: The Blog of Veith

Charles Dickens at 200 | Cranach: The Blog of Veith — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:15:53 +0000

[...] Yesterday, February 7, was the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. (As well as being the birthday of our oldest daughter.) His novels are still gloriously readable after all these years, combining seriousness and humor in a way that has not been equaled since. Here is a worthy tribute, which compares the novelist to Augustine: Happy Birthday to our Mutual Friend » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog. [...]

By: Heroes

Heroes — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:14:58 +0000

And that “its” is “it’s.”

Good night!

By: Heroes

Heroes — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:03:25 +0000

Ahh! I see what you are saying! You’re talking about the character, not the book!

In that case, its “bicentenary.”

(Why waste an editorial opportunity?)

By: Heroes

Heroes — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:54:40 +0000

Let’s not forget the first sentence! (The ones you cite are two and three.) But an easy mistake to make.

By: pentamom

pentamom — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:12:38 +0000

If there’s any unifying theme, it’s the theme of humanity in all its glorious messiness, capable of good and evil, virtue and inconsistency, etc. And that is certainly a theme in itself.

That seems a much more coherent theme than some ideological straitjacket in which all men or women of a certain class must either be villains or paragons, or at best “shining exceptions.”

It strikes me as extremely strange that anyone would equate failure to divide people up into neat categories based on external social characteristics, and create characters representing them as such, with a lack of a consistent outlook. Anyone who would start from that assumption has been drinking deeply from the same stream that brought us Marx.

By: sallyr

sallyr — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:17:55 +0000

To stave off the soul-killing effects of law school, I made it a point to read a book by Dickens every semester. I owe a debt of gratitude for his stories that kept a little flame of humanity glowing through an otherwise difficult span.

While it’s true that it’s hard to find a unifying philosophical theme, his writing does demonstrate a remarkable kind of respect for the irreducible dignity of human beings. High, low, rich, poor, deformed, beautiful, silly, serious – they are all paid the respect of a kind of sympathetic attention due to a human being engaged in a great drama, whether they are aware of it or not.