In Competition No. 2569 you were invited to describe a modern social ill of your choice in the style of Charles Dickens.
Ills singled out included bellowing down mobile phones in public, elusive plumbers, and that scourge of the modern age, the potato wedge. Many entries ably demonstrate what George Orwell describes as Dickens’s ‘undisguised repulsion’ at proletarian roughness. Josephine Boyle captures Dickens at his moralising best, while D.A. Prince, on bad language, nimbly slips in a topical slant: ‘Filth even on the answering devices of frail grandfathers…’. Great stuff.
Bravo to those narrowly pipped to the post: the above-mentioned, as well as Adrian Fry, Brian Murdoch, Paul Griffin, Frank McDonald and P.C. Parrish. Bill Greenwell’s impressive Bleak House pastiche takes as its subject the contemporary craze of ‘dogging’, which I had to look up and rather wished I hadn’t.
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