‘I am most exceedingly and unfeignedly sorry to have been the unfortunate occasion of giving you a moment’s distress.’ In response, in Our Mutual Friend he created Jenny Wren - a woman with scoliosis and restricted growth who coped with the social and physical adversity of her condition. Dickens wrote back, apologising profusely.
#Tiny tim saying update
We are not in the Victorian age, and it is time to update our notions of disability.Īfter all, even Dickens adapted his descriptions of disabled people after having been told off by a lady of restricted growth, who threatened legal action.
Victorians defined disability as something that prevented you from participating in the new industrialised society or, more importantly, from working and contributing to society. Alcott ensuring Beth dies of some unknown disease. Just think of Rochester going blind in Jane Eyre, or Louisa M. At that time, any physical or mental impairment was seen as a burden - something that should be hidden and pitied - or a signal of retribution. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that Dickens - and many other 19th- and early 20th-century novelists - would use Tiny Tim in this way. This year’s cloying and depressing BBC Children in Need was a prime example. This is not because we don’t care but because if we continue to portray disabled people in the manner of Tiny Tim, or Clara, Heidi’s friend in a wheelchair, we are reinforcing in the public mind the idea that anyone in trouble is a tragic victim rather than the self-empowered and independent individual we would all like to be. But I am proposing that we might want to be more careful about how we portray those we are helping, and not turn them into objects of pity.
We all need to attend to our social consciences at some point in our lives. I am not suggesting for a moment that we should not help those who need it - financially or otherwise. Virtue seems to be attached to bragging these days. And just like Tiny Tim, these messages are designed to evoke the maximum pity (and make us give the maximum amount of money), telling us that if we don’t display empathy by ‘liking’ or sharing we are somehow heartless human beings.
#Tiny tim saying tv
These are the adverts we see on daytime TV and the links on social media featuring famished children and dismembered and traumatised people, not to mention blind folk staring vacantly into the camera, usually accompanied by agonisingly slow, depressing music. But while we may thoroughly enjoy the fictitious world of Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts, I am beginning to wonder if it might be time to say bah, humbug! to the old-fashioned pity fest surrounding Tiny Tim and his modern-day equivalents.
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