Old Age Day by Day March 25m 2013

My husband is up at our cabin, so I watched the last two episodes of "Little Dorrit" and the last two parts of "Our Mutual Friend", two of my favorite Dickens' novels and terrific BBC productions from a few years ago.  Dickens' greatness is still amazing to me.  He tackles the poor, the invisible and also the rich and their venality.  He's comic, melodramatic, tender and touching.  His plots are intricate and among the best ever devised.  I cry, laugh, and sigh.  "Little Dorrit" has a theme about how the rich ride on the backs of the poor, and it's as true today as it was then.  "Our Mutual Friend", his greatest novel, is about capitalism itself, and how the addiction to money undermines our very humanity.  It also includes some characters not unlike the hedge fund criminals, and it explicates economic bubbles lucidly.  Money is a corrupter in his world and ours.  His sympathy for those in its clutches never waivers.  I grew up reading and rereading "Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations", seeing them as romantic and idealistic.  They are more than that, but they helped give me the foundations for a moral code I constructed for myself.  And reading Dickens inclined me toward the mysteries I read - especially ones where there is a social injustice being addressed.  Dickens is sublime in portraying the dark side and the light, the grace and the curse.  He embraces all parts of humanity with a clear eye, an eye with a tear in it.