Posts tagged "Charles Dickens"
Chesterton on Dickens: In Praise of Idiots and Imbeciles
Books / Literature

Chesterton on Dickens: In Praise of Idiots and Imbeciles

by David Zahl on Mar 8, 2012 • No Comments

From G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Dombey and Son, the 1907 ‘Everyman’ edition, xv and xvi, speaking about the character of Mr. Toots, who Dickens describes in the list at the beginning of the novel as “MR. P. TOOTS, a wealthy young gentleman, of good heart but inferior abilities”. In other words, Mr. Toots is a kind of omnipresent buffoon in the novel, from whom Chesterton derives an enormous truth:

“Toots may be considered as being in some ways the masterpiece of Dickens. Nowhere else did Dickens express with such astonishing insight and truth his main contention, which is that to…

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A Pop Culture Christmas List – but Seriously
Books / Christmas / Film / Literature / Religion / TV / Year In Review

A Pop Culture Christmas List – but Seriously

by Mockingbird on Dec 20, 2011 • No Comments

Kicking off our year-end wrap-ups, here’s one from our esteemed podcaster in the field, Paul Zahl:

Thinking about Dickens’ novella “The Haunted Man” and remembering the impact of that unusual Christmas story in a sermon many Christmas Eves ago in a galaxy far far away, I began to collect in my mind some top-ten Christmas delights, mostly from the weird or supernatural genre. Collecting these has long been a hobby, a backdoor entrance into the land of genuine Christmas repentance by way of the absurd, if you can call it that.

Here’s a little ‘top ten’ for the next week, from the…

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Charles Dickens’ Other Christmas Ghost Story: “The Haunted Man”
Christmas / Literature / Suffering

Charles Dickens’ Other Christmas Ghost Story: “The Haunted Man”

by David Zahl on Dec 14, 2011 • 5 Comments

Some say that Charles Dickens invented Christmas as we know it. At least, that A Christmas Carol rescued the celebration from post-Cromwell piety and prompted the Victorians to introduce many of the traditions that we have come to cherish: the tree, the presents, the holly and the ivy, etc. A little less well known is the fact that A Christmas Carol rescued Dickens’ career as well, proving so popular that he would go on to write four more Christmas novellas, three of which had supernatural elements but only one of which was an out-and-out ghost story a la A Christmas…

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PZ’s Desert Island Discs (But This Time It’s Books!)
Books / Literature / Religion / Suffering

PZ’s Desert Island Discs (But This Time It’s Books!)

by Mockingbird on Jul 25, 2011 • No Comments

I’m just now beginning to emerge from two years of living in the desert, the howling waste of inwardness that is caused by the box canyon of life.

I’m coming out of it.

In addition to the New Testament, ten books, in particular, have proven sustaining to me in the wilderness. If you read Mockingbird, many of them will be familiar to you. But I wanted to list them here, in one place, for the readers and supporters of Mockingbird, in hopes of their being useful to you. “For you the living, this Mash was meant, too.”

Each work, and three of them…

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A Christmas (Carol) Reflection
Christmas / Film / Literature / Theology

A Christmas (Carol) Reflection

by Nick Lannon on Jan 6, 2011 • 1 Comment

“Ah! You do not know the weight and length of strong chain you bear yourself! It was as full and as long as this seven Christmas eves ago and you have labored on it since. Ah, it is a ponderous chain!” – Jacob Marley

This is how Jacob Marley responds to Ebenezer Scrooge’s curiosity about the nature of the chain his ghost wears in Dickens’ more-than-classic “A Christmas Carol.” Having watched multiple versions of the film every year for my entire childhood, I thought I knew every in and out of the story.

This year, though, I was struck by something different.…

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Bible / Literature

From Charles Dickens’ Dombey And Son

by David Zahl on Jan 14, 2010 • 1 Comment

“Harriet complied and read — read the eternal book for all the weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth — read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame, palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride, indifference, or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce –” (pg 892, ht PZ)

When Dostoevsky Met Dickens
Books / Literature / Psychology

When Dostoevsky Met Dickens

by David Zahl on Dec 24, 2009 • 5 Comments

As an incredibly cool aside to our Dickens-inspired “Whole Duty Of Man” series, there was a great piece in the Washington Post entitled “Christmas Carol: Dickens’s Gift Keeps On Giving”. The whole article is worth your time, but I was especially struck by the final paragraph. [Update 11/8/11: A few extra lines of Dostoevsky's impressions were published in The NY Times' "Being Charles Dickens." I've included them below]:

In his book, [Dickens' biographer Michael] Slater records Fyodor Dostoevsky’s report of meeting [Charles] Dickens. The Russian novelist wrote that Dickens, “told me that all the good simple people in his novels… are…

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Hard Times, Recession Depression, and The Whole Duty of Man, Pt I
Business / Identity / Literature / Philosophy / Theology

Hard Times, Recession Depression, and The Whole Duty of Man, Pt I

by David Browder on Dec 17, 2009 • 10 Comments

“…his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man — not a part of man’s duty, but the whole.”
- Charles Dickens from Hard Times

As one who is sort of willingly/unwillingly lingering in the business arena, the recession and access to capital has been on my mind recently. The other day, a thought struck me as I wondered how my fellow…

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Setting Vengeance Against the New Testament in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit
Literature / Theology

Setting Vengeance Against the New Testament in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit

by David Zahl on Nov 18, 2009 • 1 Comment

In his working notes for Little Dorrit, called Number Plans, Dickens described the following scene under the heading, ‘Set the darkness and vengeance against the New Testament’. In it, the Mrs. Clennam character is attempting to justify a crime she has committed in the service of ‘fighting sin’, to the title character (ht PZ):

“I have done”, said Mrs. Clennam ,”what was given to me to do. I have set myself against evil… I have been an instrument of severity against sin. Have not mere sinners like myself been commissioned to lay it low in all time?”

“In all time?”…

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What Is Your Favorite Version of A Christmas Carol?
Christmas / Film / Literature

What Is Your Favorite Version of A Christmas Carol?

by David Zahl on Dec 10, 2008 • 2 Comments

Preparing for tonight’s Mockingbird Hour (last one of the year!) on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I’ve given a lot of thought to which film adaptation is best. Lord knows there’s no shortage of options. In animation we have Scrooge McDuck, Mr. Magoo, and The Flintstones, among others. Then in live-action, there’s The Muppets, Captain Picard, Bill Murray, George C. Scott, Alastair Sim, and Albert Finney. If I were pressed, I’d probably say my top three are the Disney one, the Muppet one and Scrooged. So… what’s your favorite/least favorite?

P.S. Who would have thought David Johansen of The New York…

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