Friday, December 29, 2017

Edmund Wilson



The selection from Edmund Wilson’s writings in  The Critical Tradition is from Dickens: The Two Scrooges(1941)

Edmund Wilson  (1895-1972) was a literary journalist. The following remark on Dickens'  Little Dorrit represents his ‘bread and butter’:

Arthur Clennam, ruined by the failure of Merdle, finally goes to the Marshalsea (debtor’s prison) himself; and there at last he and little Dorrit arrive at an understanding. The implication is that, prison for prison, a simple incarceration is an excellent school of character compared to the dungeons of Puritan theology, of modern business, of money-ruled Society, or the poor people of Bleeding Heart Yard who are swindled and bled by all these.

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