ARTS / ROYAL Literature: Charles Dickens bicentenary celebrations: Service at Westminster Abbey
ARTS / ROYAL Literature: Charles Dickens bicentenary celebrations: Service at Westminster Abbey; Right Reverend Michael Dickens Whinney (Great Great Grandson of Dickens) speaking SOT
- Reads a parable from the gospel of Sanit Luke
CUTAWAY
Prince of wales and the Duchess of Cornwall
Dr Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) speaking SOT
- It's difficult to tell the truth about human beings. Every novelist knows this in a special way, and when Dickens sets out to tell the truth about human beings he does it outrageously, by exaggeration, by caricature. The figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques. We have, we think, never met anyone like them; and then we think again.
The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive. The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine. And Dickens' generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered. Even his villains are exuberant. It was George Orwell who pointed out that when Mr Murdstone sets David Copperfield one of those appalling sums in his unhappy childhood, it is couched in terms of calculating numbers of Double Gloucester cheeses. Orwell points out that a real Murdstone would never have thought of the cheeses: it's part of that overflow, that unnecessary, excessive sense of what is human that takes us from page to page in Dickens, eyebrows raised and breath bated.
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685759394
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ITN
Date created:
07 February, 2012
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00:03:42:10
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r07021211_17617.mov
- 200th Anniversary,
- Arts Culture and Entertainment,
- British Royalty,
- Celebration,
- Charles Dickens,
- Colour Image,
- Film - Moving Image,
- Literature,
- People,
- Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom,
- Raw Footage,
- Reading,
- Real Time - Footage,
- Religious Service,
- Rowan Williams,
- Royalty,
- Talking,
- Text,
- UK,
- Vicar,
- Video with Sound,
- Wales,
- Westminster Abbey,