MILESTONES

It’s been a rather momentous week for this small but significant country of ours in one way or another, with not one but two anniversaries for two of our our great national figures landing on consecutive days. On Monday came the anniversary of the succession of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne sixty years ago, and then the very next day came the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest writers that these islands has ever produced, a certain Mr Charles Dickens, an author that, I like to imagine at least, pretty much everyone has heard of, even if they’ve never actually read any of his books.

And what great books they were: “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield”, “Great Expectations”, “Nicholas Nickelby”, “The Old Curiosity Shop”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “Our Mutual Friend”, “Bleak House” (a personal favourite), and the sheer brilliance that is the festive favourite “A Christmas Carol”, to name but a few, giving us some of the most memorable characters in English Literature from Little Nell, to Ebenezer Scrooge by way of Wilkins Micawber and the forerunner of so many literary detectives, Inspector Bucket, who incidentally gives us the stylistic roots of much modern detective fiction. But then, Dickens gave us so many themes and characters and stories that have become so very familiar that it would leave our heritage feeling so much more threadbare without them.

Dickens, of course, was far more than a mere writer, because he was also something of what we might now think of as being an “activist” when it came to raising the profile of the needs and the struggles of the poor in Victorian society, a whole substrata that was tolerated but all but ignored by the people living in better circumstances, and whilst it was with his writing that brought attention to the problems which poverty brought to the Victorian slums, he also put his money where his mouth was and did his very best to make a difference.

But despite all the brutality and poverty that he was writing about, some cultures still like to think of Dickens’ England as being a rather twee and idyllic place, with images of the pretty dresses, the horses, the country houses and the carriages that they carry in their heads from tales by other authors and movies depicting those times as optimistic and clean and bright, and never the “Hard Times” depicted in his literature. I always think of “A Christmas Carol”, for example, depicting a very “cruel” world, but the Muppets managed to make it a cosy one. This, of course, is forgivable in a Muppet movie, but less so when people start to believe that the society being depicted was just like that only without the cute, furry animals. I think I mentioned to someone a few weeks ago about how I really feel disappointed by film adaptations of most of Dickens, because for me Dickens works best on the printed page, leaving me to make up the images, but that’s another rant for another day.

If we choose to ignore the brutality and horrific reality of the poverty that Dickens was usually writing about in his social commentary upon the age he was living in, we are truly missing a great deal of what he was trying to tell us about the world he was living in. Sadly it’s all recently become part of this idealised “Merrie Olde Englande” theme park thing that we do far too little to dispel these days because it brings the tourists in. I often wonder how disappointed those tourists are when they go home having had their eyes opened to the fact that modern Britain really isn’t much like it was (it it ever really was) in the films they have seen and the books they have read, and that the men don’t all walk around in our top hats and frock coats, the ladies are not swooning under layers upon layers of dresses with bustles and we do not have to hail a hansom cab to go about the business of the day. Sadly, the squallor and the urban poverty does stay with us, but, even as Merry New England prepares to spend a year in the international spotlight, those images of the pitched battles in the streets last August are far more likely to give an accurate snapshot of many of our streets, although, such is the strength of Dickens’ imagery that perhaps it will prevail and keep on drawing people here despite their inevitable disappointment when they see the litter and the fast food outlets and what scruffy herberts we really are nowadays.

So it is now 200 years since Dickens was born, and yet, somehow, it feels like it should have been much, much longer ago, as his books feel like they’ve been around forever. It’s a bit like finding out that Tower Bridge was only built at the back end of the nineteenth century or that the Houses of Parliament are only about 150 years old. You feel like it really should be more somehow, like these buildings so beloved of tourists and sightseers, should have had their corridors and passageways trodden by the earliest Norman Kings, or that Henry VIII should have let his gaze rest upon them as he contemplated quite what to do with his latest wife, but I suppose that that is  one of the great mysteries of historical significance; that everything that was around before you were born is somehow ancient and feels as if it has always been there, and everything new is, almost by definition, temporary and a little bit rubbish and probably won’t last. I’m sure that the Parisians thought that about the Eiffel Tower, just as I’m sure that the “temporary structures” of the London Eye or Millennium Dome will have people slapping preservation orders on them just as soon as they begin to look just a little bit worn out.

One of the outcomes of the tangled web that history has woven into the tale that is the succession to the throne of the English Monarchy is that, against all the odds, a young girl of twenty five years old would become Queen of England and Head of the Commonwealth way back in 1952, and yet here we are, sixty years later, and we now live in a country where the vast majority of its citizens have never known what it was like to have any other head of state and will probably be quite confused at having to come to terms with it as and when it inevitably occurs, and will certainly struggle to imagine what a difference it will make to them when it does.

60 years of having the same Queen on our banknotes and coins, the same letters on our pillar boxes, the same terminology for those letters marked O.H.M.S., and the same lyrics in our national anthem. It’s something to celebrate, and will no doubt bring even more of those lucrative tourists in this year, and send them away again, laden down with those souvenirs of their trip to England and Union Jack trinkets, pretty much all of them made in China of course, but it’s going to come as one heck of a shock to those of us living here, even, I imagine the most cynical of us about such matters, when the dreadful darkest of days that brings the greatest of changes finally dawns, a day, of course, we will no doubt celebrate the anniversary of later on, such is the perverse nature of these things.

Still, for the time being, and because we all love an anniversary, let’s make the most of the opportunity to celebrate the lives of these two great figures of British history before returning our noses to the grindstone and face up to the misery of the reality of living and working in this great nation at the start of this millennium. We don’t have it so bad, but then, it’s not really all that “great” any more, either...