Charles Dickens and Every Line Ever Read
Tower Bridge, London, September 2023
Through the course of a few days in London, most of my days were spent walking. Walking the alleys of one of the oldest cities in the world - a city that informed the legacies of so many cities and regions to come. This same city that was walked through by nation builders, early dreamers and literary alchemists. The foremost of such literary alchemists who stands out in my mind is Charles Dickens. His famous novel Great Expectations is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century. The irony is not lost upon me today, as millions of people from around the globe migrate to London with similarly Great Expectations. Dreams of a life built around advancement and security. A city populating millions, offering its furnishings to those who come to make of it what they will.
Charles Dickens is a name that today carries great esteem, but once was regarded as an undesirable. Born into extreme poverty, Dickens left school at 12 years old to work at a boot blackening factory. He earned a weekly sum of six shillings, the equivalent of about 4 cents today. Propelling from child to needed breadwinner, his early experiences colored his perceptions to come - and, he believes, informed the way others saw him. The world was not kind to this soot-covered boy dressed in rags. As he once wrote in the autobiographical fragment composed for his friend and biographer, John Forster, “it is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such a young age.”
His experiences as a castaway bred in him an ability to discern between harm and good. Tasked with navigating through a world that did not welcome him, Dickens developed an acumen for social awareness. His modus operandi became one of translating between whether a course of action, or a spoken word, would bring harm or good. He understood that not avoiding acts that would bring harm was harm in and of itself - as he wrote in Great Expectations, “in a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
From harm comes suffering. Practically every human being will experience suffering in one form or another at varying intervals in their lives. This is the inevitability of the human condition. But what forms from this suffering is an interesting link, an invisible cloth, that binds us all. For those who have grown to understand the source of their suffering, they develop a penchant for identifying whether an incoming source will bring suffering once more. Who will cause them to suffer - or who will shelter them from suffering. The same way a nascent child or an animal can feel the energy radiating from a human to determine whether they are friend or foe, whether approaching is harmful or safe. Self preservation is at all of our cores, and we are programmed to hold steadfast to that discernment between harm and good that enables us to, on the most primitive level, survive.
The key to that survival is community. We survive through people. The connections we build, the understandings we develop over time of another person. A person at first enters our orbit as a foreign entity, unknown to our established senses, our normal mode of operating. The puzzle is to fit them into the overall motif. The motif that already stands is composed of those familiar entities we have already made sense of. The ones we keep returning back to. The safe places, the steady shores. We carry them with us through every step through, say, a London alley.
Dickens had a masterful understanding of the power of certain human connections that transcend the range of limit. He understood that this is the very thing that brings the deepest meaning, the highest clarity. It is these connections that power our beings. And the ones who penetrate through to the innermost layer of our core - whether they existed within the motif at the very outset of our lives, or were slowly weaved in over time - become a part of us. They stick out in our minds, form imprints on our hearts. They become the fuel of our advocacy, or the thought we hark to when it feels difficult to push ahead. The threads of our motif that contribute to holding the overall motif together. To borrow from Dickens, “you have become part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read.”
