Dickens’ words a beacon amid the fog of our times
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- Published on Friday, 10 February 2012 16:21
- Written by Simon Lee
The Pope’s Lenten message, released last week, reflects on a phrase from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works”.
Benedict explains that the Greek verb translated here as to be ‘concerned’ is “katanoein’, which means to scrutinise, to be attentive, to observe carefully and take stock of something”.
Much of the celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens has
revolved around precisely this approach of the great novelist to the human condition.
The other great anniversary of the week and of this year, the diamond jubilee of the Queen’s Accession, has also begun with a focus on this quality of being attentive to others. More surprisingly in a monarch, perhaps, than in a novelist, media coverage has emphasised how much Queen Elizabeth II has noticed about people and communities in her 60 years of visiting so many parts of the country, the Commonwealth and the wider world.
Although the Pope did not make these connections, Vatican Radio did note the Queen’s jubilee and went on to mark the bicentenary of the novelist’s birth quite splendidly by recalling the imaginary letter of Pope John Paul I to Charles Dickens.
When he was Patriarch of Venice, in the early 1970s, Cardinal Albino Luciani
“accepted the curious assignment of writing each month for the Messenger of St Anthony a letter to some illustrious figure”.
Published as the book Illustrissimi, the first letter is to Charles Dickens.
It is worth pausing here to recall that not only was the future Pope John Paul I writing monthly in a magazine but so was Dickens. Just as some of the companion publications to The Universe come out every month, so 40 years ago in Italy Catholics were treated each month to a
letter from the Patriarch of Venice to a wide range of people, such as other novelists in Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott, saints, politicians, a Universe columnist in GK Chesterton, who did so much to raise the reputation of Charles Dickens, and fictional characters, including a separate letter to Dickens’ creations, the four members of the Pickwick Club.
Pope John Paul I chose Dickens to start the series because he had read his Christmas books “as a boy, and I enjoyed them immensely because they are filled with love for the poor and a sense of social regeneration; they are warm with imagination and humanity”.
These qualities came through in many of the tributes this week and the themes will continue throughout the bicentenary. In particular, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, spoke with great
insight at the wreath-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the 200th anniversary on Tuesday February 7.
Even though the archbishop conceded that Dickens, “had relatively little time for conventional religion and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human, which he was interested in”, he
declared that Dickens was “a great religious writer”.
Archbishop Williams was at his most
exuberant in identifying Dickens’ own exuberance: “Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings. He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead. He wants them to live. He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury singled out Bleak House as being Dickens at
“perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that” and drew attention to the ending with Sir Leic-ester Dedlock, “At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration”.
This intrigued me because my own favourite passage is the very beginning of Bleak House: “London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord High Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.”
It is not that different from our February weather but in the middle of the 19th century we know that London was bedevilled by fog. His opening chapter to Bleak House sees through the fog, so to speak, to give us not only an evocative image of the atmosphere but to use it as a metaphor to describe the way in which the long-winded, expensive process of the law had come to obscure justice.
There is, “Fog everywhere … fog up the river … fog down the river … fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.
“At the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of Heaven and earth”.
This is pretty much the contemporary view, 160 years later, of the law. In the middle of the book we are told that: “The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.”
Even if Dickens had not summed it up in that one memorable line, we would have worked that out for ourselves as the unfathomable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce wends its way slowly through the book, with the costs eating up the estate.
While we can shake our heads at the law and lawyers, however, there is a sense in which this critique can be applied to many professions and vocations, from politics to literature, the media or the Church. The conjunction of these great anniversaries and Pope Benedict’s Lenten message calls for something deeper; ‘katanoein’.
It is time “to scrutinise, to be attentive, to observe carefully and take stock”.
