Frost on Dickens

Below, a passage from today’s article by Tobias Langdon at The Occidental Observer:


Charles Dickens understood liberal pathology

In the twenty-first century, liberals pride themselves on their sophistication and discernment. In fact, they’re as naïve and prone to self-deceit as liberals were in the nineteenth century. If you want proof of that, just turn to Charles Dickens and his character Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her own children in favour of Blacks in far-off Africa:

We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby’s presence, one of the poor little things fell downstairs—down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child’s head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!…

The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very untidy but very dirty. We were obliged to take notice of that with our sense of sight, even while, with our sense of hearing, we followed the poor child who had tumbled downstairs: I think into the back kitchen, where somebody seemed to stifle him.

But what principally struck us was a jaded and unhealthy-looking though by no means plain girl [Mrs Jellyby’s daughter Caddy] at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink. And from her tumbled hair to her pretty feet, which were disfigured with frayed and broken satin slippers trodden down at heel, she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right place.

“You find me, my dears,” said Mrs. Jellyby, snuffing the two great office candles in tin candlesticks, which made the room taste strongly of hot tallow (the fire had gone out, and there was nothing in the grate but ashes, a bundle of wood, and a poker), “you find me, my dears, as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies and with private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species all over the country. I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger… No, Peepy! Not on my account!”

Peepy (so self-named) was the unfortunate child who had fallen downstairs, who now interrupted [his mother] by presenting himself, with a strip of plaster on his forehead, to exhibit his wounded knees, in which Ada and I did not know which to pity most—the bruises or the dirt. Mrs. Jellyby merely added, with the serene composure with which she said everything, “Go along, you naughty Peepy!” and fixed her fine eyes on Africa again. [From Dickens’ novel Bleak House, 1853]

Dickens was a liberal who didn’t allow his emotions to over-rule his intellect, which is why he satirized figures like Mrs Jellyby.
 

Jack Frost commented:

The interposition of the Dickens character Mrs. Jellyby is provocative. Her behavior towards her own children contradicts evolutionary theory, doesn’t it? She would seem to have her counterpart in those other nineteenth century do-gooders across the pond, the American abolitionists, who were more concerned with the supposed plight of the negro slave than they were with their own posterity’s.

They were the ones who set loose the negro land sharks to swim among the white fish, and they did it without being “controlled” by Jews, unless Christianity is conceded to be such a means of control.

Or can we point to any other Jewish cause of these phenomena other than the long-standing influence of Christianity in creating a culture of moral masochism? Who were the Jews behind the Mrs. Jellybys and the Harriet Beecher Stowes of this world besides Jesus and his apostles?