Word: dickensian
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...that turns her trial into a modern-day government inquiry cum media event. For popular tastes there are Blithe Spirit, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and the Jule Styne musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Newton is also directing a Victorian melodrama, The Silver King, presented as a Dickensian panorama. The other novelty is Carl Sternheim's 1911 satire of German bourgeois class anxiety, The Unmentionables, adapted to McCarthy-era America. The laughs it now evokes are mostly sentimental recognition for bygone jingles, not the disquieting humor intended in the original play's dissection of the quest for respectability...
...narrator is an American woman residing in Britain who returns home to learn the true story of her grandfather, which he had recorded in coded diaries. Jonathan Carrick had been a "boughten boy," indentured when he was four for $15 to an ice-hearted tobacco farmer named Alvah Stoke. Dickensian is too amiable a word for Jonathan's ordeals. He slept on a dirt floor with the animals. He was horsewhipped and chained after he tried to run away. One night Alvah and a traveling salesman subdued Jonathan and with a copper wrench pulled all his teeth, which could...
...Boss was back with bluster intact, posing as Napoleon for a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED cover. Sportswriters welcomed him, for unlike the drab slumlords who run most teams, Steinbrenner is good copy: a reprobate of Dickensian, comic complexity. And like Saddam Hussein, the principal owner gets to gloat that he is in power while the fellow who humiliated him is out of a job. But the climate has changed since George and the Yanks were last on top. Bobby Bonds makes 10 times what Reggie Jackson did in 1978, and owners say they need a salary cap to restrain themselves from...
...punches are direct and (if you emerge unscathed) illuminating. Earlier this autumn, I was in front of an upscale Manhattan emporium, an indigent family, authentically caked in grime and clothed, literally, in rags, a stark contrast with the bored impolitically furclad matrons streaming out of the store. (Yes, the Dickensian parallel is deliberate...
While Cokane represents Dickensian farce, Lickcheese the rent-collector (John Drabik) represents Dickensian sentiment. Shaw is clumsy in his treatment of Lickcheese, and makes himself a little ridiculous by his continuous harping on the theme of hungry children and weeping women. The older Shaw knew how to tread lightly over such subjects...