Never had a problem reading Dickens before, but this one I never saw and it has me stumped - anyone have some insight? I can’t provide context because it was taken from Bartleby and I never read The Old Curiosity Shop - here it is:
“Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels
our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.” The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 12, p. 93 (1841).
Thanks!
It’s froma a passage that’s saying how cruel and untrue it is to compare the dotage of old age to a second childhood in the same way it is to compare sleep and death. The longer passage is:
“Our own old happy state” is childhood, and Dickens is saying it’s a foolish pride that causes us to give the name of childhood or childishness to old age.
I should clarify: Dickens isn’t just ripping on the elderly for no good reason, he’s trying to show how cruel senility and the loss of one’s physical strength and mental faculties are.
Wow, that makes a lot more sense in context. Thanks, pravnik!
Well its certainly a fairly common inscription on gravestones around these parts,
‘Not dead, just sleeping’
…and these inscriptions are almost always early Victorian, so it seems to me that there was a cultural phenomenon at the time that did equate death to sleeping and trying to deny, mortality.
There’s probably something more than that too, since the poor were seen as either deserving to be in that condition, or in some odd state of grace whereby their poverty would automatically get them into heaven.
Denial of death, especially early death might have been part of that culture.
it’s not denying mortality, it’s asserting the truth of the Resurrection.
this painting, 'The Doubt: “Can These Dry Bones Live?” ’ by Hnry Alexander Bowler (1824-1903)
presents the same question. The chestnut seeds germinating on the graveslab next to the open grave, and the word RESURGAM supply the answer.