When ruminating on the conditions under which asylum seekers and Indigenous people in Australia are forced to live, one is tempted to exclaim, 'Were that Dickens was alive today!' The phrase itself has a characteristically Victorian ring, an unconscious tribute to Charles Dickens, the 200th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this week.
Dickens was an energetic social reformer as well as a novelist. He drew attention to his causes through his novels. It is not surprising that his work was translated and disseminated widely through the Soviet Union. They were presented as a realistic account of 20th century England. A cynical use of literature, but with literary fringe benefits.
I imagine that Dickens would have been thoroughly at home in today's culture. He would have been a natural in the world of soapies. My favorite among his novels, Bleak House, has all the makings of the genre. It was published in installments, left the reader hanging at the end of each chapter, had a multitude of small characters and sub-plots, all woven into the development of the story and neatly enough tied up by the end of the series.
The plot and characters of Bleak House also have the staples of soapies. The noble and the base are instantly recognised by their names. Lord and Lady Dedlock, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare, the Krooks, Mlle Hortense, Mr Tulkinghorn and Mr Bucket announce their dispositions before they appear.
Characters and plot are also larger than life. An impossibly noble benefactor and an impossibly sweet natured heroine, both apparently born without original sin, a promising but doomed love affair, a proud woman with a terrible secret, an implacable policeman with a deep concern for justice and dodgy ways of winning it, a gaggle of avaricious and smarmy lawyers engaged in an interminable suit, the chief lawyer whose incorruptibility is a natural consequence of his lack of flesh and blood humanity, a vicious French servant maid, a greedy landlord, a do-gooder neglectful of her family, and at the centre of the novel an aristocratic couple whose social self-understanding finally crumbles as their own reality is made public.
As good soapies do, Bleak House allows the reader to know how various other halves live. Prisons, poorhouses, the unsanitary lanes where the homeless sleep and Lady Dedlock's life ends. These are set against the felicity of the heroine who finally finds a