{"id":14218,"date":"2022-12-25T06:47:10","date_gmt":"2022-12-25T14:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14218"},"modified":"2022-12-25T06:47:10","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T14:47:10","slug":"why-dickens-haunts-us-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14218","title":{"rendered":"“Why Dickens Haunts Us”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maureen Dowd, Opinion Columnist, Sunday Review, Dec. 25, 2022<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 I had always been a bah humbug sort of person about Christmas.<\/p>\n

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Don\u2019t tell the ghost of Christmas future, \u201cBah, humbug.\u201d<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It seemed like a season of stress, as my parents scrambled to find the money to buy presents for five kids and have a big feast. I didn\u2019t like the materialism or the mawkishness<\/a>. Why should there be one week of the year when we were all supposed to be Hallmark happy?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re weird,\u201d my mother told me.<\/p>\n

Then I took a course on Charles Dickens at Columbia University with the estimable Prof. James Eli Adams<\/a>, and I began to fathom the magic. As Dickens said in his sketch, \u201cA Christmas Tree<\/a>,\u201d published in his journal \u201cHousehold Words<\/a>\u201d in 1850, \u201cOh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me.\u201d His biographer Peter Ackroyd wrote that \u201cDickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christmas morally radicalized Dickens. The disparity between the circumstances and fates of different people offended Dickens in the Christmas season. For him, it was a time to think about what we owe one another, how we live with one another; a time to have a proper sense of outrage about inequality and injustice, and to think about the past, present and future and how much they have to do with each other; a time to consider the good values we\u2019ve thrown away and the bad values \u2014 selfishness, egotism, social snobbery, condescension and the worship of money \u2014 that infiltrate the heart.<\/p>\n

Dickens became an outsider looking in when his middle-class life got disrupted by cold, grinding reality: His father went to debtors\u2019 prison and, at 12, Dickens had to leave school to work in a bootblacking factory in London.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n