Fariha’s Reviews > Essays > Status Update
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that,
— Jan 10, 2026 08:02AM
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Fariha’s Previous Updates
Fariha
is on page 396 of 1369
But the process of Americanisation is going on all the same. The American ideal, the "he-man'', the "tough guy", the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody else on the jaw, now figures in probably a majority of boys' papers. In one serial now running in the Skipper he is always portrayed, ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
— 8 hours, 16 min ago
Fariha
is on page 396 of 1369
To what extent people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.
— 9 hours, 3 min ago
Fariha
is on page 395 of 1369
Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is how working-class people really do live. The major facts are simply not faced. It is admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs ; but then the dark clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead.
— 9 hours, 7 min ago
Fariha
is on page 381 of 1369
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society ; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence.
— Jan 14, 2026 05:37AM
Fariha
is on page 380 of 1369
The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of "having something to say". For you can only create if you can care.
— Jan 14, 2026 05:34AM
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of "low life"—life in a debtor's prison, for example—and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modem novel is a novel about a novelist.
— Jan 10, 2026 08:04AM
Fariha
is on page 336 of 1369
A time is coming when even the comparatively comfortable will suffer under the terror of lawless governments, created in their own choice or by their acquiescence....For it only needs a turn of the screw, an increase of tension, and the fragile and rather imaginary partitions by which the masses of all the world are allowed to cherish their divisions will blow away.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:33AM
Fariha
is on page 331 of 1369
In every country except those which are definitely outside the war-orbit, the supposed necessity to prepare for war is being systematically used to prevent every kind of social advance. It goes without saying that this happens in the Fascist countries, but "guns before butter" also rules in the democracies.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:23AM
Fariha
is on page 307 of 1369
Nevertheless, owing to the exceptionally high traditions of the Indian Civil Service, the law in India is administered far more fairly than might be expected and incidentally, far too fairly to please the business community. Mr Collis grasps the essential situation clearly enough; he recognises that the Burman has profited very little from the huge wealth that has been extracted from his country,
— Jan 04, 2026 08:47AM
Fariha
is on page 307 of 1369
The account of the trial makes curious reading—an Indian crowd roaring outside, Mr Collis wondering whether he would be knocked on the head the next moment, and the prisoner sitting in the dock reading a newspaper to make it clear that he did not recognise the jurisdiction of an English court. Mr Collis's sentence was ten days' imprisonment—a wise sentence, for it deprived Sen Gupta of a chance of martyrdom.
— Jan 04, 2026 08:37AM
Dickens sees human beings with the most intense vividness, but he sees them always in private life, as "characters", not as functional members of society ; that is to say, he sees them statically. Consequently his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches ; there is little attempt at development-the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.