Word: dickensians
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...impossible to tell the time; there was no ouside light and we had no watches. Our cellmates had developed an acute sense of time; at an apparently random point, Dennis announced "lunch time". Shortly thereafter an orderly arrived bearing a bucket. The scene that followed was almost Dickensian; prisoners came to life all around, clamouring at the bars, thrusting out their food pots for lunch. Zac and I had no pots, but Blacka and Paul shared their food with us. Four years of boarding school food had not prepared me for the tepid stew of rotten meat and boiled yams...
...Leipzig's jumble of medieval churches and high-rises lies one of the most dismal landscapes in Europe. This is the heart of the rust belt: mile after mile of blackened smokestacks spew sulfurous coal smoke into the yellow sky; workers labor in ramshackle chemical and textile plants under Dickensian conditions of dirt and noise. To the east stretch crumbling tenements built 100 years ago; to the west sprawl ugly new developments virtually devoid of stores, cinemas or restaurants. Average monthly incomes would buy just $30 of goods in the West; "luxuries" ranging from women's shoes to oranges...
Those who stay behind dwell in a Latin version of Dickensian squalor. Managua is a succession of seedy shantytowns, abandoned buildings and lots where cows, goats and horses forage. Twice a week water is cut off, and rotating power blackouts add to the capital's desolation. In the countryside some farmers live well off their own land, while a few miles down the road naked children from a dusty village drink from and relieve themselves in the same brown stream...
Chastened authorities who inspected the two-story, four-bedroom Ecclesia house discovered 53 other children, ages three months to 16 years, living in Dickensian horror. Behind the building's curtain covered windows, the children were kept in rooms strewn with sleeping bags but no beds. There was only one working toilet, no refrigerator, and the only food was some tomatoes and a head of lettuce. The youngsters were malnourished, and most had bruises, welts and wounds. "It was Lisa Steinberg times 50," said Bart Wilson, a manager of the Oregon children's services division, alluding to the six-year...
...about the book, however, is that it is so entertaining. Holroyd manages to make each successive phase of Shaw's life seem significant of itself, rather than simply as a foretoken of what was to come or as raw material for the plays. Even minor figures often have a Dickensian vividness. Each romantic indiscretion has its own distinct flavor; Holroyd pinpoints which of Shaw's innumerable affairs he believes were consummated, and quotes bawdy letters in proof. Even more precisely evoked are Shaw's nonsexual passions for comrades in causes, from his schoolmate Matthew McNulty to his literary ally William...