Word: uriah
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mere Mannerisms. Half a dozen variations on this theme help to dispel any notion of Dickens as irrepressibly comic. Other "best stories" of Editor Zabel's choosing include second-rate ghost thrillers and third-rate detective stories. At novel length, Dickens could create memorable caricatures, e.g., Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Madame Defarge. In the short stories, his characters are mere mannerisms. In the novels, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller produce idiosyncratic dialogue; in the short stories there is only an endless chatty...
Shades of Uriah Heep. Not that it is all Willis Wayde's fault. When he first arrives at Clyde, Mass, from Denver, he is a likable youngster. But he is quickly made to feel that he and his parents are nomads from the great American desert west of Boston. His father, a brilliant, roving engineer, works at the Harcourt Mill. The Harcourts are a fine old feudal Yankee clan, and they soon inspire young Willis with the desire to be something he is not. He imitates their manners and their games, even buys (secondhand) their kind of clothes...
Willis Wayde's fiber proves much tougher than the thinning Harcourt strain, and Bess would like to love him-but how can she really love this solemn youngster who reminds her of Uriah Heep? She drops him for a gentleman who plays good tennis and wears the right kind of white ducks. At that point, a chilling transformation begins in Willis. Slowly his eagerness turns to cold ambition, his good manners into a calculating weapon, his yen to be like the Harcourts into an unconscious drive to destroy them...
Nothing has aroused me quite as much as Eamon McDonough's letter in TIME, Aug. 18, to the effect that with a choice between "Uriah Heep" Stevenson and "Tin Soldier" Ike, he will stay away from the polls on election day and pray for the future of the country . . . Mr. McDonough should go to church, as he suggests, and pray for himself or else go behind the Iron Curtain where he could have only one choice...
...country is faced with a choice between Uriah Keep ("I am aware that I am the 'umblest person going") and the Constant Tin Soldier ("He did not think it right to shout in uniform"). For myself, on election day I shall go not to the election booth but to the church pew and pray for the future of the country...