What happens around us can be of great interest if we were to observe closely. A man walking on the street with a limp, the teacher with his spectacles sitting his nose, random story of unusually verbose taxi driver, loud speech of the neighborhood politician, blaring songs celebrating festivals, a glamorous actress donning the large hoarding at the street corner, old buildings setting the backdrop are some of the observations that can give a humdrum life, a touch of drama and romance. The ability to observe is natural to children and as we grow older, we tend to lose this ability. The famous experiment of Plato, where he keeps a child secluded in a room till his adulthood and then lets him out to observe the world, talks of the wonder that the man feels towards the Sun and the moon, towards trees and rivers, towards day and night and towards fellow human beings. This bewildering variety is experienced as he looks at them for the first time and is awestruck by their sudden appearance. The impact is heightened since he has the understanding of an adult but experiences of a child.
On 9th June 1870, when Charles Dickens died at the age of 58, he still was like the Plato’s child grown into a man, his power of observation as keen and strong memory as unfailing as ever. He observed both persons and things both keenly and fully even as a child. His recollections of his own life and people around him come to life in most of his works most vividly. In David Copperfield, his memory of infancy takes the following shape: “The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all, and yes eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighborhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples.”
Charles Dickens as a child experienced both comfortable luxury and a sharp descent from that status into despairing poverty. His visits to the pawnbroker’s shop for selling his books and household furniture to prevent starvation and later his experiences of being a worker at the Blacking factory at the age of 12 were hard and unforgiving. All these incidents made severe impact on his small, sickly and weak body and left even deeper scars on his sensitive and impressionable mind.
Modern psychologists have invented the term “arrested development”. It signifies a state in which owing to some great shock in childhood or youth, or to prolonged error in nurture and education, the growth of the mind is stopped short before maturity, though the body continues to develop normally. This phrase exactly fits Charles Dickens. Like Peter Pan he never grew up and this was doubtless due to the shock of blacking warehouse. His mind remained brilliantly adolescent to the end of his life. He retained throughout his life, every characteristic of adolescence: extraordinarily keen powers of observation; the vivid ‘picture’ memory of childhood; a childish gusto in all he did; the adolescent habit of setting himself impossible tasks. All of his life, he never lost the tender affection of childhood nor its trustfulness nor its feeling of inferiority and dependence. He continuously longed for home and love and someone to comfort him. He never forgot how to laugh nor how to cry. Mr G K Chesterton described the childhood phase of the life of Charles Dickens’ as ‘A lost child can suffer like a lost soul’. In no words could the essence of his tragedy be more truly expressed.
On 9th June 1870, when Charles Dickens died at the age of 58, he still was like the Plato’s child grown into a man, his power of observation as keen and strong memory as unfailing as ever. He observed both persons and things both keenly and fully even as a child. His recollections of his own life and people around him come to life in most of his works most vividly. In David Copperfield, his memory of infancy takes the following shape: “The first objects that assume a distinct presence before me, as I look far back, into the blank of my infancy, are my mother with her pretty hair and youthful shape, and Peggotty with no shape at all, and yes eyes so dark that they seemed to darken their whole neighborhood in her face, and cheeks and arms so hard and red that I wondered the birds didn’t peck her in preference to apples.”
Charles Dickens as a child experienced both comfortable luxury and a sharp descent from that status into despairing poverty. His visits to the pawnbroker’s shop for selling his books and household furniture to prevent starvation and later his experiences of being a worker at the Blacking factory at the age of 12 were hard and unforgiving. All these incidents made severe impact on his small, sickly and weak body and left even deeper scars on his sensitive and impressionable mind.
Modern psychologists have invented the term “arrested development”. It signifies a state in which owing to some great shock in childhood or youth, or to prolonged error in nurture and education, the growth of the mind is stopped short before maturity, though the body continues to develop normally. This phrase exactly fits Charles Dickens. Like Peter Pan he never grew up and this was doubtless due to the shock of blacking warehouse. His mind remained brilliantly adolescent to the end of his life. He retained throughout his life, every characteristic of adolescence: extraordinarily keen powers of observation; the vivid ‘picture’ memory of childhood; a childish gusto in all he did; the adolescent habit of setting himself impossible tasks. All of his life, he never lost the tender affection of childhood nor its trustfulness nor its feeling of inferiority and dependence. He continuously longed for home and love and someone to comfort him. He never forgot how to laugh nor how to cry. Mr G K Chesterton described the childhood phase of the life of Charles Dickens’ as ‘A lost child can suffer like a lost soul’. In no words could the essence of his tragedy be more truly expressed.
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