Lamps are guttering and the nooks and alcoves fill with orphans and oddballs. Dickens is man of the moment: frock coat brushed, beard trimmed, and marital infidelities brushed under the Victorian dresser whenever he appears on daytime chat shows. No one reads the novels, of course, but you can’t move for memes, movies, and musical adaptations, and the most popular names for new-born kids are Charles, Oliver, Nancy, and Nell, with the occasional Sloppy and Tattycoram from parents who’ve scrolled through Wikipedia. The latter will be bullied when they reach school age but that’s what you get for ideas above your station. Stations, incidentally, are rammed like Frith’s teeming panoramas, with men in brushed frock coats with trimmed beards and marital infidelities prickling on their sweaty brows as they wait for trains that will never arrive. There are, inevitably, unsightly deaths of orphans and oddballs hunched in nooks and alcoves, but the PM, lost in his vast cravat like an extra rat from The Muppet Christmas Carol, assures us that negotiations with unions are going well and that they’ll all have exactly what they don’t want until they get tired of coming. Lamps are guttering but darkness, he assures us, is cheap.
Oz Hardwick