Sunday, February 7, 2010
Birthdays
It's astonishing that Charles Dickens would be 200 years old today. (And that Jane Austen's first book was published 199 years ago, but it's not her birthday today so she's a subject for some other time.) One does rather hope for some kind of eternal consciousness, in general and personally, of course, but specifically so that people like Dickens know the hugeness of their impact and the many many generations of very different and changing people who have read and enjoyed their work. May we all be living in the best of times even if it occasionally feels like the worst of times - which he would say was appropriately balanced, I think - and may our houses not be bleak yet our expectations always great.
Interesting time overlap there, I tend to think of JA as being way further back than Dickens. Maybe because when I was young in England Dickens was so big a part of the culture it was almost as if he still lived. Of course the Victorian era was within living memory. Is there any writer who comes close to Dickens in creating characters that are so real? Maybe Shakespeare but it was such a different world he inhabited that it distances us somewhat from his 'people'.
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