oh awesome! That's definitely good timing. Did you get the book Bagombo Snuff Box?

https://littlefreelibrary.org there are 150,000+ in 110+ countries with 465 visits per library. My personal Library is 60% stocked toward children, and 40% stocked with banned books. I've set a budget of $100 a month to buy and stock books. There is also the addition of donated books from community to support my LFL. Check out the world map at LFL you will find them in your own neighbor hood

I don't know if it's strange, but I love the way I ended up with every Vonnegut novel. I already owned about half of them when I walked into my local used book store one day. As I was perusing the shelves, I noticed the Vonnegut section was large. I pulled all the ones I didn't already own and went to buy them. The clerk told me someone had just sold them hundreds of books including all the Vonneguts. After I got home I was able to confirm that I now had all of the novels!

"All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope" The Count of Monte Christo

What do you mean?

Thank you for the confirmation! I wonder if I should try to read it again now that I am older and can put more things in context.

Oh, yes, Fagin is very much an antisemitic stereotype. Sadly, antisemitism was very common back then.

So many stupid people writing stupid things!

Dickens was a journalist at heart. He wrote about the living conditions of the lower classes he observed.

Which publishing company, they may either be a local little publisher of a great company, sells the most beautiful book covers? What is the most beautiful book of the company? From which publisher is your favourite book (cover)?

Mine for example is the edition of Pride and Prejudice from Chiltern publishing

There were no child labor laws during during the Victorian Era. Even today. When 1st world countries say they have safeguarded children against labor, it's more to mean they shafted some 3rd world country to do it. The practice of tying a rope to a child and lowering them into a narrow mine shaft with nothing but a candle down to check for gasses, ore and gold veins is still a thing in some parts of the world.

The Industrial Revolution was hard. And there were a lot of people living way below the poverty line in Victorian England. Children were a source of cheap labor and were "readily available". With families unable to provide for their brood. Workhouses provided room and board to keep adults and children off the streets. And those workhouses are very much how Charles Dickens portrayed them to be. If not worse. Between the abuse, the non-existent health care system, the many ways they were poisoning each other - it was a miracle to reach your 30s.

He os an anti hero because he was portrayed by the amazing Anthony Hopkins. He was so fantastic in that movie! The silence of the lambs speech gives me chills every time i see it!

Side note: loved his performance in Westworld. Totally sold that show for me!

People are horrible even today.

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. They all seemed like such nice people" -The Sun Also Rises

My wife was in the hospital at the time, and later would he again in a much worse way (shes better now). But this feeling of a once close group of people about to show themselves seemed scary and her parents did seem like such nice people.

Lord Ashley's report on child labor in the coal mining industry is available online and is from around the same time as Oliver Twist's publication.

To be honest, if you went back to the 60's or 70's, let alone the early 19thC, you would consider child treatment cruel by current standards. This is not any reference to abuse scandals, but actually what was considered normal and decent then. Parents smacking their children and teachers carrying out corporal punishment was acceptable and considered even necessary. Take a child out for a burger or pizza would be considered spoiling them.

It's only logical that the further we go back in time, the more standards seem more shocking.

I think the early industrial revolution period perhaps imposed unique pressures, not least that exploitation of the weaker was considered morally good. Even so, we don't care for children out of a sense of morality, but because we have an in-built biological programming to do so. I think what the moral standards of the early 19thC did, ironically with so much Christian virtue, was to dehumanise the weak and vulernable.

>Were people really so horrible back then?

Short answer: yes. Children were historically fairly disposable. Without vaccines and proper healthcare, every family rich or poor dealt with child mortality. Generally disease and living conditions were a primary cause of death for everyone in the big cities at the time.

Between a lack of birth control and a penchant for literally producing spare children, a lot of families ended up with a surplus of kids.

Combine that with the industrial revolution making work scarce and labour cheap and kids turn into quite a burden. Money, food and living space is tight but you still have a gaggle of kids that you need to keep alive.

So when parents die, as they will working dangerous jobs and living in shitty conditions, you end up with a whole lot of orphans.

Kids in general were put to work simply to contribute to their survival. But orphans in particular were essentially just disposable. Chimney sweepers, for example, would buy orphans because they fit through narrow chimneys. It was expected that most of them would die on the job long before they'd grow too big to do it. You'd just buy more orphans.

It wasn't slavery perse. They would just pay the orphanage a fee for getting them the most useful kids. And the kids were welcome to leave and starve or get killed thieving or prostituting themselves instead if they thought that was an easier life. Most didn't think so.

And yeah, those same kids ended up in organised crime as thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes and so on. The alternative was the workhouses where they were just put to work on whatever people were willing to hire a gang of children for. Workhouses generally meant abuse, hunger, beatings and other mistreatment as the adults basically just monetised the kids any way they could.

It was a time where the standard of living was pretty terrible in general. If you asked the adults of the time, they weren't being horrible to children. They were providing children with a way to survive.

People tend to be as kind and generous as conditions allow. And Victorian England was not an easy time for much of the population.

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I started it many years ago and never managed to finish it because of those exact same reasons. Also I found it very antisemitic but I was young and put may things into the wrong context. Just out of interest - did you get this impression also?

“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

I mean, I wouldn't say the average person was horrible, it was more the standards of life were so much worse that horrible things were deemed by overall society as "ok"

I'm fairly certain Dickens wrote to actively expose people to the horrors of child labor, which was perfectly legal at the time. As with most things, take it with a grain of salt. While I've no doubt people were that terrible, you have to remember that you're only seeing where the camera is pointing. While maybe not every situation was that bad, some were.

When I first started therapy, I randomly came across the line “…making the best relationship you can with the worst parts of yourself” in Women Who Run with the Wolves.

“love your solitude and turn the distress it brings you into resonant laments”

-Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke

This whole book is a gem, along with Duino Elegies

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too ut there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms

Especially -- The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places... Such a true thing, many are not stronger, just more or less broken. It's such a corrective to that nonsense that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."