Word: dickensian
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Britain labored under a Dickensian midwinter gloom last week. Off went the garish neons of Piccadilly Circus. After twilight, Big Ben could be heard but not seen. Buckingham Palace was lit by candles and hand torches. Millions of Londoners went to and from work beneath dimmed streetlights. Thirty crews of firemen helped rescue people who were trapped in stalled elevators. Dramatizing the nation's power shortage, one BBC newscaster had to read his bulletin by candlelight. A general synod of the Church of England also was conducted-perhaps fittingly-by candlelight, but that was not what the prelates...
...Niven patina was somewhat rudely applied by a clutter of British public schools. At Heatherdown, where he was sent in 1916 when the family finances collapsed, he made a dubious reputation as a practical joker and was expelled for mailing a sick friend some dog droppings. Then came a Dickensian reform school for "difficult boys," followed by a cramming academy under the direction of a terrible-tempered grandson of Robert Browning. Even at stately Stowe, a school he really liked, "Old Stoic" Niven couldn't resist cheating in an exam. He barely made it into Sandhurst, Britain...
Three years ago freshmen parents received an HSA letter offering, for a not-so-slight fee, to surprise their offspring with boxes of goodies to help relieve the pressures of exam period. The letter, a classic of its genre, evoked Dickensian images of gaunt orphans on scholarships assembling goodies all night in dank cellars, while completing math problem sets with their toes. The goodies, of course, were actually preassembled by one of the many fly-by-night outfits which, with the help of inside units such as HSA, annually rip off students and their naive parents for millions of dollars...
...theme, Renek is spare, painful and hilariously funny. Heck's bank heist, his hair-raising rooftop and back-alley escape, not to mention a rollicking love scene with Lola in a huge beer vat, unroll with a vitality that can only be de scribed as up-to-date Dickensian. For Heck, the future is ambiguous. But Renek's account of his hero's battle with the dehumanizing forces of modern cit ies is a small but notable literary victory...
...sister in 1922. Contemporary Australians could justifiably answer Lawrence with the words of another British author, Anthony Burgess, who recently wrote: "This great, empty continent must surely become the New New World, and it is significant that the accents of the disillusioned New World now mingle with the cheerful Dickensian cockney of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney...The country breathes promise, and it is a wonderful place for bringing up big, brown, bare-toed children...