Word: dickensian
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...images at once turned into political battle flags. To the strains of Brahms' Fourth Symphony in London's Queen Elizabeth Conference Center, Neil Kinnock, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, strode onto the podium to describe a joyless, divided Britain, an "economically and socially disabled" country afflicted with Dickensian misery. Two hours later, at Conservative Party headquarters near Westminster Abbey, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the helm for the past eight years, evoked a very different nation, one with "revived spirit and restored reputation," a land that could boast of being Western Europe's "fastest-growing economy." The previous...
With a huge lead in the polls, Margaret Thatcher' s Tories begin the election campaign touting the country' s "revived spirit," while Labor depicts a land of Dickensian misery and the Alliance aims for the middle. -- South Africa' s Conservative Party, the new official opposition, makes State President P. W. Botha sound like a moderate. -- Fiji faces an uncertain future...
...into the 19th century the emotions of parenthood were hypothetically involved when children were abandoned to baby farms, workhouses and, most frequently, to wet nurses, who assumed the duties of motherhood for two to five years of a child's life. In Dickensian realities, the only emotion expended by institutions like workhouses was greed. The relationship that probably comes closest to the Baby M. case was that between a governess and her charges, whom she was technically hired to tutor and discipline, but for whom, more often than not, she provided tenderness and affection as well. Rochester paid Jane Eyre...
This is little Newt, the only survivor of the human colony. The role is endearingly played by Carrie Henn, 10, winner of a talent search among American girls living in England, where Aliens was filmed. She looks like a Dickensian waif and turns out to have the soul of one as well, brave and clever but never self-sentimentalizing. She is discovered as a silent little creature, scuttling through air ducts too small for the aliens to penetrate, living an almost rodent-like existence. Her plight would be enough to touch anyone's heart, but in this context, only Ripley...
...statistics presumably lie somewhere in those files, but the report describes the system as Dickensian. "The contents, when you can get to them, are still paper, the paper is still sometimes wrong, often incomplete and always clumsy, and it takes three days to put files back . . . Sometimes the files can't be found; they've been misplaced in some bureaucratic limbo. And even if the paper system were improved (it) would still be wholly useless for answering larger questions . . . to create a basis for national immigration policies...