MAGIC OF DICKENS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 November 1939, Page 6

MAGIC OF DICKENS

POWER OF AWAKENING SYMPATHY. You could not be in the company of Dickens and his books without becoming more benevolent, without developing some sort of sympathetic imagination as to your fellow-men in this tragic world, writes the late Mr Ford Madox Ford in his posthumously published book, “The March of Literature.” If before he existed you had gone done to some riverside hotel at Greenwich to eat whitebait at its best, and if the waiter who served you had had a be-pimpled scarlet nose, an alcoholic sniff, a greasy red toupee, disgustingly shabby dress clothes, a smear of fat across his shirt front, and if, as a crowning offence, he had paddled about you in enormous walking shoes that he told you had come a fortnight before from the body of a merchant shipping mate washed up on the gravel below the hotel terrace .... well, you would have felt yourself justified if you had told the host of the place that you would never again dine there nor bring your friends, in spite of the exquisiteness of the whitebait and the beefsteak, oyster and kidney pudding, if he did not get rid of that fellow. But after you had read a good deal of Dickens that living caricature would have become a man to you; you would realise that a pair of large shoes from a washed-up corpse would, indeed, to that poor fellow with his fiat feet and bunions, be such a gift from heaven that it would be ungrateful not to mention it with exulting thankfulness. And you would go on to speculate on the desperate poverty of a being to whom his feet were his life and his daily bread and who could not afford supportable footwear, so that his only light from heaven and hope must come from the feet of a drowned corpse. So your imagination, working a la Dickens, might provide the poor man with a tubercular daughter and other pathetic circumstances, and in the end you would substitute a half-crown for the shilling you had intended for his tip and so secure for yourself a permanent seat at the table d'hote of a kingdom where there are many mansions.