From Caracas to London

“Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression ever again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind” (Dickens, 1859).

Dickens, Dickens, Dickens. I could open a blog dedicated exclusively to his books and would have something different to say about them, every day, for years and years without end.

His prose is absolute perfection; his English, the most beautiful ever written. Reading him in his original form is both a pleasure and a privilege. Dickens’ storytelling is everything fiction should aim to be: full of depth, meaning, emotion and understanding of our human flaws and virtues. Poor and rich, young and old, educated and uneducated, Dickens characters invite us to step into their shoes and see life from their own individual experiences. We can relate to them in their struggle to find happiness and redemption, and certainly suffer with them as they stumble upon adversity and fail to achieve their dreams. Fiction has that unique power of allowing us, readers, to experience life from other people’s perspectives. It entices us to feel empathy, and in Dickens’ case, more often than not, it compels us to see the world through the eyes of the most disadvantaged: the poor and uneducated.

Dickens must have been a very unprejudiced man, which to me is an underlying virtue of any good writer. Approaching stories and characters without preconceptions facilitates objectivity and, more importantly, it injects humanness and life into the tales.

A Tale of Two Cities is my favourite of all Dickens’ books. It is a crude portrayal of the French Revolution but it is also a current and prophetic discussion about the class struggle and the dangerous dehumanisation process that societies undergo when the gap between rich and poor deepens to a point in which all links are lost between the two. This is a universal theme, which applies to many other forms of confrontation between groups, say religious, racial or cultural. Dickens’ underlying discourse never sounds like preaching, even though it is constantly denouncing injustice. The hero of A Tale of Two Cities is a well to do man and even though Dickens always favours the poor, his portrayal of the French Revolution -which was of course motivated by the persistent humiliation of the lower classes by the French aristocracy- is nothing less but a photographic depiction of the insanity and cruelty of the “revolutionaries” that led it. In any case, Dickens ultimate plea is that of peace and equanimity; it is a warning against revenge and resentment and an invitation to place humanity before political ideology and economic profit.

If you haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities, please don’t wait any longer to buy or borrow a copy. If you have teenage children, make them read it! Let’s not be swept away by the forceful tide of social media, or the speed of breaking news or the avalanche of advertisement. They have nothing to offer except for squalid opinions, soulless facts and deceitful truths. Literature, on the other hand, has always kept the answers to our fundamental questions hidden between its pages; it is up to us to search for them and find them. If only we read some more, we surely would be less prone to make the same mistakes over and over again.