![]() No way to run a whorehouse, leave aside a developed empire. He writes about the absurdity of an army organisation that didn't see the mutiny of its own mercenaries approaching and nip it in the bud. He is Dickens the Man/Writer, stepping back just that pace he uses in the contemplation of social evil to lament, satirise, condemn and universally confound. Ten years after that first missive on the Mutiny, Dickens returns to the subject of empire in another letter to a friend but this time he doesn't assume the character of the commandant who would commit genocide. And finally there is no Man but that he has merged with the Writer. One may read endless biographies of Dickens - and there are some excellent ones - but a discernible theme in all of them is that the life and times, the acuteness of observation that seems to exist from the start have shaped a boy into a writer. The Writer and his sensibility is, through the invention of character, the holder of opinions. The man could never escape being the inventor of fiction. ![]() He may have, as himself, said: "I, Charles Dickens, citizen of a Britain I castigate as a social, political, chaotic, unjust hell on earth join with the rest of my fellowcountrymen to condemn the cruelties of those mutineers and their Rajas who killed innocent white women and children and demand that the perpetrators be brought to justice. Far be it from me to dissimulate and make excuses for genocidal diktats or views, but is there not a tiny note of irony detectable in this communication? A straight political opinion would not have been clothed in the persona of a projected character. The Writer is at the elbow of this Letterwriter who declares to the natives in their own language (the 'koi hai?' idiom of Urdu, presumably) that their extermination is a duty entrusted to him by God. He never wrote a novel set in the India of his era, but had he done would the character he wishes he was be called General Hang mall or Lord Dothebrowns? ![]() Here is Dickens wishing himself commander-in-chief of the East India Company's armies in India. ![]() His cruel stepfather was called Murdstone, his cruel school dubbed Dotheboys Hall. The early wish of the diatribe casts him in the role of one of his possible characters. Nowhere else has Charles Dickens expressed any such sentiment and though it was clearly the opinion of the man there is discernible in this startling, unchristian letter the hand of the writer, as distinct from the man, guiding the pen. It was not an uncommon British reaction to the events of 1857. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement (not in the least regarding them as if they lived in The Strand, London, or in Camden Town) should be to proclaim to them in their language that I considered my holding that appointment by leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested and that I was there for that purpose and no other, and was now proceeding with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth. "I wish that I were Commanderin-Chief in India. What Dickens wrote to Angella Burdett-Coutts in his first letter, alluding to what he wouldn't in a million Victorian years characterise as a War of Independence, was that the punishment for such rebellion and slaughter of innocents should be genocide. He was probably not primed by the British newspapers to react to the mass hangings in revenge of Indians, innocent and complicit, by the Company Bahadur. He wrote the first one very soon after the news of the slaughter of British women and children by the sepoy mercenaries of the East India Company and by the feudals of Cawnpore. I may contend that being Indian there is one count on which a pebble would be appropriate and tempting, and those are his two letters about the Indian mutiny. Yes, there are the skeletons in his vast cupboard of life - the mistress, the unloved wife, the deceptions and self-deceptions, the egotism, the touch of pompousness and self-satisfaction - but then who am I, on all counts to cast the first stone? ![]() Here are very few things Charles Dickens needs to ask forgiveness for. ![]()
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