We should turn to Charles Dickens in hard times
The new BBC adaptation of Dickens's Little Dorrit has been hailed as the perfect accompaniment to credit-crunch Britain, but it is not the only novel in which we find Dickens speaking to us, or even speaking for us, in these uncertain financial times.
In all their painful, joyful, irrepressible life, his novels offer us glimpses of a world we think we have lost - a period of swirling fog and flickering gaslamps.
But the closer we get to this world, the more we start to recognise: the scramble for credit, financial scandal, panic. More recent novelists have attempted to write about the workings of international finance.
Saul Bellow's description of market speculation in Seize the Day or Don DeLillo's account of a financial meltdown seen through the eyes of a currency trader in Cosmopolis are compelling in their own way.
But there are good reasons why it is Dickens to whom we should now return. The centre around which the Victorian age revolved and Dickens's combination of ambition and anxiety make him unmistakably our contemporary. And not only can we find parallels in his novels with the current crisis, we can also learn from them how to survive and triumph over it.
One of the saddest scenes in Little Dorrit comes near the beginning of the novel, as we are introduced to William Dorrit, the longest-serving resident of the Marshalsea Prison.
Imprisoned more than 20 years ago for debt, he has been reduced to accepting pitiful handouts from "admirers" with names like "Snooks", "Old Gooseberry" and "the Dogs-meat Man".
It is a scene that Dickens wrote from the heart - and from memory. His own father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea when Charles was still a boy, and even if John Dickens seems to have been serenely unaffected by the experience, his son never came to terms with the shame he felt.
"I really believed at the time", he wrote later, "that they had broken my heart."
Read entire article at Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph (UK)
In all their painful, joyful, irrepressible life, his novels offer us glimpses of a world we think we have lost - a period of swirling fog and flickering gaslamps.
But the closer we get to this world, the more we start to recognise: the scramble for credit, financial scandal, panic. More recent novelists have attempted to write about the workings of international finance.
Saul Bellow's description of market speculation in Seize the Day or Don DeLillo's account of a financial meltdown seen through the eyes of a currency trader in Cosmopolis are compelling in their own way.
But there are good reasons why it is Dickens to whom we should now return. The centre around which the Victorian age revolved and Dickens's combination of ambition and anxiety make him unmistakably our contemporary. And not only can we find parallels in his novels with the current crisis, we can also learn from them how to survive and triumph over it.
One of the saddest scenes in Little Dorrit comes near the beginning of the novel, as we are introduced to William Dorrit, the longest-serving resident of the Marshalsea Prison.
Imprisoned more than 20 years ago for debt, he has been reduced to accepting pitiful handouts from "admirers" with names like "Snooks", "Old Gooseberry" and "the Dogs-meat Man".
It is a scene that Dickens wrote from the heart - and from memory. His own father had been imprisoned in the Marshalsea when Charles was still a boy, and even if John Dickens seems to have been serenely unaffected by the experience, his son never came to terms with the shame he felt.
"I really believed at the time", he wrote later, "that they had broken my heart."