Hard News: Just marketing to the base
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Love your work, blah blah blah, and have once or twice had cold water poured on my warm fuzzy preconceptions and assumptions in your unique manner.
Aww... and it doesn't hurt having to sharpen you own views on the stone of a vigorous view to the contrary either. Certainly a little more stimulating than shrieking "beneficiary basher" and "bludger pimp" across the ether at each other.
Though I wish I knew I was poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society before putting my hand in that particular blender. Would have gotten off more lightly if I'd muttered "pretentious Mills and Boon" in a stadium full of Janeites. :)
Kerry @ 10.09. Fair POV, but can you understand why it actually gets my hackles up when asked whether I have children? I don't. Neither does Helen Clark, if you really want to go there. But I haven't spent my life in an enclosed monastery, and if I ever said anything as downright psychotic as "raising kids is easy" then I'd deserve a virtual slap in the head.
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I do find the idea of an online shit-fight about Dickens quite amusing. And also quite nice.
I knew that post-grad work on Condition of England novels was going to pay off sometime.
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I knew that post-grad work on Condition of England novels was going to pay off sometime.
__Cranford__
-- now that's a disturbing (in all the right ways) wonderful novel if I've ever read one.In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. What could they do if they were there?
It's very funny, but like the best humour there's real desperation and pain not far below the surface. And it's also interesting how little really changes at the heart of things.
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I was poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society
Not here. Thing is the old windbag largely wrote about the era *before* the one his readership lived in. They were able to look back in a glow of self satisfaction on how much things had improved since "the old days".
Anyone else choked on "Little [bloody] Dorrit" at school?
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Anyone else choked on "Little [bloody] Dorrit" at school?
Not I. But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
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I do find the idea of an online shit-fight about Dickens quite amusing. And also quite nice.
Agreed. Nicer than the potential alternative definitely...
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Anyone else choked on "Little [bloody] Dorrit" at school?
Not I. But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
Yes, I see what Wilde was getting at, I don't like Dicken's style much either - very different style from the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Checkhov maintained that a writer could achieve much greater effect by writing as coldly and as objectively as possible about the most heart rending things. By understating the descriptions, he maintained, your reader would be far more moved by the descriptions of misery.
This doesn't detract from the reality of Dickens's descriptions - his work houses and factories were real and he knew about them first hand. And as someone pointed out, his descriptions of poverty were cleaned up to spare sensitive readers the uglier aspects of poverty.
Victor Hugo did not shy away from such descriptions and there is a nauseating passage in Les Miserables (__The Poor__) where beautiful Fantine has all her front teeth pulled (to sell - this is where false teeth came from in those days ) to pay for food for her child. Of course this leaves her less beautiful, and her life as a prostitute takes a turn for the even more horrible and degrading.
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Ok, off topic, but since we're discussing historic English authors, not ridiculously so - Geoffrey Chaucer Hath An Extreme Blog: Go England! It ys Rad!. I haven't laughed so much in weeks.
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Craig @ 4.12: Yes, I do understand why yr hackles might be raised by said question and I apologise unreservedly for any hurt caused. Put it down to my constant, weary amazement that people need it spelled out just what it's like to single parent. I hope you have opportunities to be 'Uncle Craig" for some kids - mentoring? Or even a bit of voluntary work in schools - i occasionally teach primary kids arty stuff like printmaking, they're great to be around & love attention from a visitor.
BTW - I can't resist the famous quote from yr mate GB Shaw - if you treat a guttersnipe like a lady, she will act like a lady.
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This doesn't detract from the reality of Dickens's descriptions - his work houses and factories were real and he knew about them first hand.
Yes, but I think Trollope (infamously) nailed what really gets on my last nerve about Dickens, in The Warden, in the figure of 'Mr Popular Sentiment':
Passing into the Strand, he saw in a bookseller’s window an announcement of the first number of the Almshouse; so he purchased a copy, and hurrying back to his lodgings, proceeded to ascertain what Mr. Popular Sentiment had to say to the public on the subject which had lately occupied so much of his own attention.
In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker. ‘Ridiculum acri Fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res.’ Ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, and monthly novels convince, when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers.
Of all reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr. Sentiment’s great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our friends a rattling, lively life; yes, live, and will live till the name of their calling shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and Mrs. Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify a detective police officer or a monthly nurse.
I think I prefer Trollope -- and find Checkhov funnier than he's given credit for -- because theirs are more complex, and more interesting, moral universes. They live in a place where, in the word's of Browning's Bishop Blougram:
Nay, friend, I meet you with an answer here--
That even your prime men who appraise their kindAre men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self,
Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street
Sixty the minute; what's to note in that?
You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watch--he's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demirep
That loves and saves her soul in new French books--
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway: one step aside,
They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line
Before your sages,--just the men to shrink
From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad
You offer their refinement. Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there's a thousand diamond weights between? -
. . . the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Eh????? Peter the Great had been dead for over 90 years when Turgenev was born. Surely you're thinking of Alexander II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861). Right about Turgenev's influence, wrong Tsar.
Though I wish I knew I was poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society before putting my hand in that particular blender. Would have gotten off more lightly if I'd muttered "pretentious Mills and Boon" in a stadium full of Janeites. :)t
Oh FFS - there are plot-coincidences in pretty much all of Dickens's novels that are downright laughable, and apart from Joe Gargery of Great Expectations, Charlie was hard pressed to create a 'good' character who wasn't at least a little risibly mawkish. You're welcome to kid yourself that you've offended a bunch of effete 'Janeites' by your bold and forthright opinions, but equating Dickens's social conscience with that of Margaret Mitchell was an uncharacteristically cheap shot.
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poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society
Ironically - I brought him up in the first place, right? - I don't even *like* Dickens. Give me a nice concise Jane Austen any day. (And Jane's novels are filled with horribly disadvantaged female characters who are perfect arguments for why we should have the DPB!)
But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
Oh, I haven't heard that before! Funny.
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Posted at 9:50PM on 14 Aug 08. Permalink.
. . . the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Eh????? Peter the Great had been dead for over 90 years when Turgenev was born. Surely you're thinking of Alexander II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861). Right about Turgenev's influence, wrong Tsar.
Whoops, thank you Joe, you're right, I have the wrong Tsar, it was Alexander II and it was Turgenev's uncle who knew Peter the Great (he was the court jester apparently).
Peter the Great owned Pushkin's grandfather (great grandfather?) the Ethiopian prince about whom Pushkin wrote the story Peter the Great's Negro.
Craig, I heartily agree, Checkhov could be very funny, I liked his description in A Boring Story of a man surveying his daughter's fiance (who was eating lobster soup, and dressed in a yellow checked suit) who "thought he had more in common with a Zulu tribesman". Or his letter to his siblings (written as a 26 year old doctor in a tiny village overrun by several thousand old women on a religious pilgrimmage) "If I'd known there were this many old women in the world I'd have shot myself a long time ago..."
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Sue,
bit late on this but
Asking sickness beneficiaries to be examined by a total stranger to see if their story checks out (wouldn't you find it a little humiliating?)
invalids beneficiaries have to see a winz certified doctor every 2 years. If you disagree with the doctors decision you can ask to see another doctor. but if you are that ill for whatever reason do you have the strength to do that?
mostly no
But here's another part of the problem
the sickness benefit is design to only last s short while. if you are long term ill you are supposed to be on the invalids benefit, but that pays more than the sickness benefit and it also provides training grants.So many case managers don't even suggest that option to their clients who would be eligible.
Anyone with long term mental health issues should be on the invalids benefit, and they should also be receiving money to re train in something that they can do. but if you've got mental health issues dealing with winz is about number 1 on the list of things that make you worse.
I suspect also those of us unlucky enough to have far to much experience with WINZ are aware of how useless the current system is. We see it's flaws but we also see where it penalizes people so it evens out.
i know so many people who should have received help from their winz case manager but never got it. And only through advocates at places like dcm and the peoples resource center have these people been treated like human beings by winz.
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.i know so many people who should have received help from their winz case manager but never got it. And only through advocates at places like dcm and the peoples resource center have these people been treated like human beings by winz.
Sue , Never had a problem from the moment I woke up in Auckland Hospital through to meeting Winz. They approached me in Hospital to help. They advised me as to the many areas they could help. I never expected anything and the help which was both unexpected and beyond my wildest dreams (and they felt like being on acid) was very comforting in a time with a mortgage and inability to work etc. I don't know if my doctor was winz certified but never had a problem. Still, I thought I was very lucky to be alive so with so much help I suppose I could have felt I got good treatment however I got the impression , we do a bloody good job and our country (as small as it is) tries really hard to look after its people.
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Sue,
everyone using the services of winz should have the experience you had sofie. It's brilliant to hear that there are good people at winz who do care.
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You're welcome to kid yourself that you've offended a bunch of effete 'Janeites' by your bold and forthright opinions, but equating Dickens's social conscience with that of Margaret Mitchell was an uncharacteristically cheap shot.
What cheap shot was that, Joe. I know it's not terribly PC to be an admirer of Gone with the Wind (I certainly doubt it's lack of "social conscience" - or blandly agreeable political and scoiological sentiment, if you want to be less generous -- would win the Pullitzer nowadays). GWTW was informed by Mitchell's childhood memories of "a childhood spent in the laps of Civil War veterans", her work as a newspaperwoman, and considerable knowledge of and research into the history of her native Atlanta, I'd just be somewhat cautious about treating it as a reliable historical text. Even if I esteemed Dickens more than I do, I'd show the same caution.
If that's a 'cheap shot', I plead guilty. I prefer to say that I don't have much sympathy with the school of thought that views the novel as little more than a didactic tool for social reform.
And I'd also suggest, Joe, I'm not exactly insensible to Mitchell's depiction of social and political attitudes (especially regarding race and gender roles) that may have been unexceptional below the Mason-Dixon line in the 1860s and 70s, but are certainly offensive to liberal sensibilities in 2008. But I don't believe anyone wins if you want to whitewash everything in art and literature you find icky -- from smoking to Homeric sexism.
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Your cheap shot was equating Mitchell's escapist historical romance with Dickens's genuine engagement with the social ills of his own time. Now you go on to compound that by implying that anyone who sees some value in Dickens's social concerns is blinkered by a narrow view of literature "as little more than a didactic tool for social reform".
Dickens was first mentioned in this thread as an example of how art has influenced social change. It's a concept that you appear to find 'icky' (khrist you can be twee). With all due respect to your sensitivities it seems that you're taking further cheap shots by suggesting that those who don't share your views are guilty of wishing to "whitewash" certain depictions of the past. In my case that's rubbish - I didn't even imply such a viewpoint.
Play at straw peiople to your heart's content, it has nothing to do with me.
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Play at straw peiople to your heart's content, it has nothing to do with me.
Oh, get off the bloody cross, Joe. Easter's a while off yet.
Your cheap shot was equating Mitchell's escapist historical romance with Dickens's genuine engagement with the social ills of his own time.
I'd rather any daughter of mine emulate Scarlett O'Hara than any of Dickens' insipid drips. It's rather nice to see Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914-1939 back in print, because it's nice to be reminded that the kind of popular fiction you like to sneer at actually had a little more to say that the gatekeepers of "literature' care to acknowledge.
If you find "twee" objectionable, let me be bunt: Dickens is a self-indulgent, sexist, sermonising bore. You may find his "social concerns" bloody wonderful; I find them condescending, simplistic and vaguely inhuman. If that is what you find valuable, go to. There are hucksters in every age and sphere of life, and plenty of gullible shills to keep them busy.
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Winz case managers don't all appear to have good bedside manner, when dealing with clients, with mental illness. I know this from experience.
I wonder if, without being able to physically see the cases where mental health is the issue, that it clouds the judgement of the case workers and therefore the circle of assistance gets harder.E.g, Just as a jury has to decide on mental health in court, we notice how the opinions are varied and affect a charge I suspect winz staff are like that. The approval from above, for the case manager to grant your entitlement involves more than one person so hopefully, what with awareness campaigns, and a wider recognition about it, it can be an area that gets addressed. I'd rather that, than throw out what is working leaving staff back at square one. Resources there would benefit .
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Dickens was first mentioned in this thread as an example of how art has influenced social change.
Dickens may be useful to historians with the deatil of his descriptions. However it was scientists and statisticians like Edwin Chadwick who were the glory boys of Victorian social reform.
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You may find his "social concerns" bloody wonderful; I find them condescending, simplistic and vaguely inhuman.
I don't get it.(As usual. :)) Are you saying that the working classes in the 19th century actually had it peachy keen without welfare... or just that you don't like the way Dickens wrote about them?
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Are you saying that the working classes in the 19th century actually had it peachy keen without welfare... or just that you don't like the way Dickens wrote about them?
The latter. And I actually think, on the feminist tip (or just being someone who doesn't buy the madonna/whore dichotomy) George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant's 'Carlingford' chronicles had a damn sight more to say about the 'condition of Engliand' -- and English women -- than Dickens.
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Dickens may be useful to historians with the deatil of his descriptions.
I wouldn't underestimate the part where he makes the middle class aware of what the hell is going on. But that's just me.
I've been busy applying slices of ham to the screen to cover Craig's last few posts on this subject. He's entitled to his opinion, etc., ça va sans dire, but sometimes I'm just too sensitive. So before I start shouting "la-la-la-laaa I can't hear youuu" with hands firmly applied to my ears I just wanted to copypaste the following paragraph from Hard Times.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
Too fucking right, Charles. Too fucking right.
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Dickens may be useful to historians with the deatil of his descriptions. However it was scientists and statisticians like Edwin Chadwick who were the glory boys of Victorian social reform.
And if you really want your heart broken and ground into dust beneath your feet, journalist Henry Mayhew's __London Labour and the London Poor__ is still a role model of how careful observation, uncondescending interviews and statistics can be moree effective -- and affecting -- than any melodrama.
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