Letters: A tale of two eras – Dickens's resonance today
The 200th birthday of Charles Dickens is a reminder that the old argument about whether the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx was always incomplete because it missed out Dickens (Report, 6 February). Labour's pioneers in the 1890s and 1900s often recounted how they had been introduced to social justice by reading Dickens in their childhoods and youth. His triumph was that he could open a door to a different set of humanitarian values that challenged arid economics and stifling respectability even when he was being polemical. Hard Times, for instance, conveyed both a critique of schooling without education, and possibly the first exposure of an opportunist political spin doctor, contrasted with the human warmth of Coketown's workers.
It's not difficult to read something of the past in the present, thanks to Dickens. What would he have made of a 21st century with the Tories and Liberals back in power, smugly presiding over high streets filling up with pawnshops as the fastest growing sector of the retail economy? Dickens's message, noted by one of his early Labour readers, Will Crooks, would undoubtedly have been to encourage us all to stand up to the millionaire coalition Bumbles and ask for more!
Cllr Nigel Todd
Labour, Newcastle city council
The literary scholar Ruth Richardson believes a London tradesman called Goodge may have inspired the surname of Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge (Dickens scholar discovers ghosts of neighbours past, 2 February). She seems unaware that the original Scrooge was a Scot. In 1841 Charles Dickens visited the Canongate churchyard in Edinburgh's Royal Mile and spotted a memorial slab to Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, "meal man" (ie corn merchant). Misreading "meal" as "mean", the author was struck by the thought that a man might be such a miser that his meanness was commemorated on his grave marker. A Christmas Carol appeared two years later in 1843.
Harry D Watson
Edinburgh