Roberto Salva writes that dickens is alive and well in Manila.
Dickens seemed to have written about the experience of the common Filipino. He seemed to describe in his novels the streets of our cities and the experience of our people. For although it was an empire where the sun never set, Victorian England was a developing country during Dickens’s time much like the Philippines now, where the sun always regally sets.
Dickens had one particular penchant which irked Chesterton, his best critic according to Harold Bloom, but which any Filipino would readily understand. To resolve the perennial problems of Wilkins Micawber, Dickens shipped him to Australia where the character met with much success and even became the governor of one area. Pip’s great expectation came from somebody who made fortunes abroad, impossible to do in his own country. When he was stuck in writing “Martin Chuzzlewit,” Dickens moved the setting of the story from England to America.
Dickens, like many Filipinos, understood that to be poor in a particular place may have something more to do with the place and what is there in that place than with one’s efforts; salvation could lie elsewhere.which is why so many of our relatives live or work overseas.
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