Charles Dickens was a fine writer but he tended to cast a veil of caricature over grim realities. For example in Nicholas Nickelby, Wackford Squeers was horrible but
Dotheboys Hall was probably not as horrible as the worst of the Yorkshire
schools Dickens was castigating. Although he showed his readers what was going on, he glossed over the grisly details via caricature. Caricature tends to do that.
As a contrast we have Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel The Fortunes of
Colonel Torlogh O'Brien published only a few years later. Here a grisly and prolonged description of death by the strappado leaves the reader in no doubt about the inhuman nature of this appalling torture. No veil of caricature here. Dickens would never have tackled it even in the most oblique manner.
Illustration by Phiz – somehow that seems to make the
contrast even more stark.
At the word, the men
let the rope go, and the living burthen which they had so lately raised, shot
downwards from his elevated position to the point at which, as we have said,
the rope was fixed; then; his descent was arrested with a dislocating shock
which wrenched his arms almost from the shoulder sockets. With a yell so
appalling that it dashed with a momentary horror, even the faces of the
executioners themselves, the miserable man testified the unendurable anguish of
the dreadful torture; rolling his head and his eyes around, in the delirium of his
fierce agony, he shrieked forth blasphemies and prayers in wild and terrible
incoherence.
“Pike him, an’ put him out of pain, for God’s sake, will yez?” cried one of the spectators, with the energy of horror, and wincing under the frightful spectacle.
“Pike him, an’ put him out of pain, for God’s sake, will yez?” cried one of the spectators, with the energy of horror, and wincing under the frightful spectacle.
Sheridan Le Fanu - The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O'Brien
(1847)
5 comments:
Just horrible.
Re Dickens. But he had to sell what he wrote. So Dotheboys had to be seen to be bad but to readers of the time they would have been aware that it could have been worse. Eton then sometimes made Dotheboys desirable. Had he gone in for reality in full I doubt that the market then would take it, he would have been just another sensation journalist and there were a lot of them about. That he actually made his material readable and within the feelings of a mass audience did mean that it was brought out into public awareness. It was Middle England he was writing for because that was where the readership was and very few of them at that time had the vote and were the ones campaigning for it's extension.
Makes one wonder when was a good time to live.
@James: maybe now? Perhaps like Douglas Adams' Arthur Dent, we're standing in our own light:
“I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!”
Sackers - it is and I'm not sure why Le Fanu made so much of it.
Demetrius - I agree, although Le Fanu chose to write for middle England too.
James and Sackers - yes, now is probably better than any other time.
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