Generously Angry

Currently writing an essay on Hunger and Anger in the Works of Charles Dickens for Sight and Life magazine, drawing on George Orwell’s self-defining 1940 analysis of the great British novelist.

“Everything that happens” wrote Dickens, “[…] shows beyond mistake that you can’t shut out the world; that you are in it, to be of it; that you get yourself into a false position the moment you try to sever yourself from it; that you must mingle with it, and make the best of it, and make the best of yourself into the bargain.” Orwell saw Dickens in his mind’s eye as “… a man of about 40, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry.’

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