Word: dickensian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...values." Hillary Clinton told a New York audience last week that the "idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn't find jobs" was "unbelievable and absurd." Eager to be seen as the way of the future, the Newtonians found themselves tarred with images of the distant, Dickensian past...
Especially in his matter-of-fact approach to practical matters, Eighner depicts the stark reality of homelessness. For example, his detailed instructions on how to scavenge food safely from a dumpster points out the relentless struggle for basic survival far more effectively than any Dickensian description of gnawing hunger. The details of setting up camp in a public park or washing up in a bar's restroom gives the book a firm foundation in day-to-day reality, which is quite remarkable in itself and needs no further embellishment...
...World According to Garp (1978), the arrival of a new John Irving novel has been an occasion for intense interest and sometimes febrile arguments. Irving fans applaud his jam-packed plots, his innocent heroes (the line from Garp to Gump is not hard to draw) and his overt, Dickensian sympathy for damaged or endangered children. Critics retort that Irving's heart may be in the right place, but his head is not -- that he actually exploits for shock value the very characters whose welfare he pretends to champion...
Conservative activists are unmoved by images of Dickensian poorhouses, given the breakdown in families and the caseloads drowning the foster-care system. "Nothing could be worse than the current system," argues Robert Rector, a senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation. "The current system has already pulled the family apart. The system treats having a child out of wedlock as a favored life-style that's deliberately subsidized by the government. Nothing could be more harmful than that." True enough, but Clinton's point man Reed disagrees with the orphanage solution. "It's the kind of goofy social engineering that...
...that turns her trial into a modern-day government inquiry cum media event. For popular tastes there are Blithe Spirit, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and the Jule Styne musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Newton is also directing a Victorian melodrama, The Silver King, presented as a Dickensian panorama. The other novelty is Carl Sternheim's 1911 satire of German bourgeois class anxiety, The Unmentionables, adapted to McCarthy-era America. The laughs it now evokes are mostly sentimental recognition for bygone jingles, not the disquieting humor intended in the original play's dissection of the quest for respectability...