The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces

Delightful--and pertinent a century and a half later. Who knew the Victorians ate so well, even in an abandoned Inn (the Railroad had circumvented this old coach-house): "The stopperless cruets on the spindle-shanked sideboard were in a miserably dejected state: the anchovy sauce having turned blue some years ago, and the cayenne pepper (with a scoop in it like a small model of a wooden leg) having turned solid." Not politically correct, because of his use of the French "sauvage", still CD is hilarious on funeral customs in a chapter titled French Funerals: "The waste for which the funeral customs of many tribes of savages are conspicuous, has attended these civilised obsequies; and once, and twice, have I wished in my soul that if the show more waste must be, they would let the undertaker bury the money, and let me bury the friend."
The most telling piece this time through is "Medicine Men of Civilization," a fine cross-cultural analysis, and satire which shines a spotlight on our recent American presidential election (Romney-Obama) and on the petrified Congress (in the stony wooden scale): "It is a widely diffused custom among savage tribes, when they meet to discuss any affair of public importance, to sit up all night making horrible noise, dancing, blowing shells, and (in cases where they are familiarwith fire-arms) flying out into open spaces and letting off guns. Our legislative assembles might take a hint from this.... The uselessness of arguing with any supporter of a Government or an Opposition, is well known. Try dancing. It is better excercise, and has the unspeakable reccomendation that it couldn't be reported....A council of six hundred savage gentlemen entirely independent of tailors, sitting on their hams in a ring, and occasionally grunting, seem to me, according to my travels, somehow to do what they come together for; whereas that is not at all the general experience of six hundred civilised gentlemen very dependent on tailors and sitting on mechanical contrivances. show less

Interesting collection of Dickens' writings. Some are droll, some are informative, some are dull. The man was nothing if not prolific. But I prefer his novels.