Dickens (From The Northern Echo)

Dickens

5:03pm Monday 13th February 2012 in Letters

CHARLES DICKENS’ fans celebrated the bicentenary of the author’s birth on February 7 and what better time to draw parallels with today’s era of greedy bankers on high wages while the poor and disabled have to beg for handouts?

Most of Dickens’ novels focused on the injustices of the rich and poor.

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, a wealthy city man, when asked to give a donation to the underprivileged says: “Oh, but the state is dealing with everything. Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? Are there no treadmills?”

Dickens also had deep sympathy for people with physical problems and disabilities: Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend, his last finished novel, is a severely disabled young girl barely earning a living by making dolls’ clothes and in the opening chapter of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens’ main character travels to a school in York to rescue Smike, a mentally and physically handicapped young boy.

And yet here we are, 200 years on, and we are no further forward.

In fact, as a civilised society, we have gone backwards. We have a Government trying its hardest to cut money to families with disabled children, to disabled people, in fact to anyone with a disability, while allowing its city chums to enjoy their obscene bonuses.

We have many sick and disabled people clearly unable to work being bullied onto the Government’s work programme with threats of lengthy benefit sanctions if they fail to comply.

Had Dickens been writing novels today he would have a plethora of material to work with. Dickens was most certainly a hero of the poor as his many novels proved.

His literary works are more topical today than they have ever been.

Stephen Dixon, Redcar.