Well, and in the autumn sometime, Your Humble Blogger picked up Dombey and Son and started reading it. And put it down again quite quickly. The opening is pretty treacly, I must admit. Dombey is so awful; Dombey’s daughter is so good. I hate her. And Mrs. Dombey, so pathetic, and the boy, so sorrowful and sickly and saintly. I hate them all. And I couldn’t face getting through them to get to anything else, and I put it down.
Then, in the late winter, I picked it up again, and this time I got through the first bit with the Dombey family, and on to the rest of it. Walter Gay, and his Uncle Sol, and Cap’n Cuttle. Old Joe Bagstock, and Doctor Blimber, and Toots. Mrs. Cleopatra Skewton and her haughty daughter, and their circle of ancient juveniles. Good Mrs. Brown and her haughty daughter Alice. The Charitable Grinder, and how he is ground. It turns out to be quite wonderful. So that’s all right.
The one thing about Charles Dickens that occurred to me as I was reading it, though, is that while he quite correctly views Ignorance as one of the plagues that a rotten culture brings on itself, a disgrace to England, and a tragedy for the ignorant, the idea of any remedies for that Ignorance for the general populace seems to be beyond him. Specifically, any schools and teachers in his works are viewed as either evil, venal or incompetent. The best one can hope for is the wrongheaded benevolence Mr. M’Choakumchild of Hard Times, perhaps, along with Mr. Feeder here. The Dickens schools of Salem House, Dotheboy’s Hall, and Gradgrind’s model school are horrific places. Yes, Esther of Bleak House is educated at Greenleaf, which is viewed as a pretty reasonable place (the sisters Donny are not monsters, but are barely even characters), so there is a counter-example. And Esther is a teacher, or rather a tutor—I seem to remember other examples of private tutors that are not monsters or incompetents, but I can’t call any instances to mind right now. But the point is that while it is lovely to have an individual who can teach mind to mind, that’s not going to do much about the problem of Ignorance in England, is it?
Still, that’s Dickens for you. He’s devastating at wrong, but not much at right.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.