Humanity’s Children: Charles Dickens, James Baldwin, Boyhood, and Moonlight

Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry Charles Dickens was an artist, an entertainer, and a social critic; and in his stories and books he portrayed youth in all its courage, compassion, and cunning, resources that were necessary in the challenging world in which boys and girls found themselves. There have been, for instance, several screen versions of his novel Great Expectations (1861), virtually one for every generation: in Great Expectations, a boy, Pip, growing up in harsh circumstances, is kind to a desperate man and is taken up by a high-born woman, the maddened spinster Miss Havisham, with a pretty but spoiled ward, Estella, before the boy is given a gift to help him make his way in the world. Honore de Balzac (1799 – 1850), born in Tours and educated in Vendome, studied law in Paris, was the author of books exploring the range of French life and society, in the city and the provinces, public and private, encompassing about one hundred novels and stories, including the French Revolution story about royalists, Les Chouans (1829), and Colonel Chabert (1832), Eugene Grandet (1833), Pere Goriot (1834), and Cousin Bette (1946), the latter about love, betrayal, and vengeance, made into a 1998 dark comedy film starring Jessica Lange. The author of Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), and Youth (1856), novels inspired by his life, Count Tolstoy—who doubted Shakespeare’s value—would write about his experience with military service and the larger society, in works such as War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), as well as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1889).