“Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.”—Popularly attributed to Charles Dickens (1812-1860)
Though I’ve seen this quotation all over the Internet, I have yet to pinpoint the exact source of it from the work (or even life) of Dickens. Yet I’m completely inclined to find its attribution to him entirely credible.
The subject of credit, you see, was a sore one for Dickens. His two improvident fictional patriarchs, David Copperfield’s comical Mr. Micawber and Little Dorrit’s far more serious William Dorrit, owed their origins, to one extent or another, to his father John. Indebtedness led Dickens pere to be thrown into Marshalsea Prison—and the future novelist, in a wound that never healed, to be forced to labor in a blacking factory as a tween.
As an adult, Charles needed all of his superabundant energy to maintain his wife and 10 children, but he could also show some asperity to those who, in turn, hit him up for funds. Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole, for instance, whose impracticality has a practiced quality that enables him to shamelessly sponge off friends, was based on the poet Leigh Hunt.
One suspects that Dickens would find tremendous fodder in the current American financial environment—particularly with the Federal Reserve, the secretive sachems who determine who gets a life preserver in the current shark-infested waters of finance—and who ends up gasping, sinking like a stone beneath the surface, without credit. He had mixed feelings about this country, but he would surely find in the America of our time—a world filled with chicanery and desperation—an eerie reflection of the Britain of his own age.
Though I’ve seen this quotation all over the Internet, I have yet to pinpoint the exact source of it from the work (or even life) of Dickens. Yet I’m completely inclined to find its attribution to him entirely credible.
The subject of credit, you see, was a sore one for Dickens. His two improvident fictional patriarchs, David Copperfield’s comical Mr. Micawber and Little Dorrit’s far more serious William Dorrit, owed their origins, to one extent or another, to his father John. Indebtedness led Dickens pere to be thrown into Marshalsea Prison—and the future novelist, in a wound that never healed, to be forced to labor in a blacking factory as a tween.
As an adult, Charles needed all of his superabundant energy to maintain his wife and 10 children, but he could also show some asperity to those who, in turn, hit him up for funds. Bleak House’s Harold Skimpole, for instance, whose impracticality has a practiced quality that enables him to shamelessly sponge off friends, was based on the poet Leigh Hunt.
One suspects that Dickens would find tremendous fodder in the current American financial environment—particularly with the Federal Reserve, the secretive sachems who determine who gets a life preserver in the current shark-infested waters of finance—and who ends up gasping, sinking like a stone beneath the surface, without credit. He had mixed feelings about this country, but he would surely find in the America of our time—a world filled with chicanery and desperation—an eerie reflection of the Britain of his own age.
The Dickens you say!
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