OBEISANCE, ARISE FROM THE FLAMES

The finger of blame, when it comes to the regrettable demise of deference in society, doth spin like a Chicagoan weather vane on a turbulent April night. Nineteenth-century literary social realists — the Stendhals and Pushkins of this world — must shoulder some of the blame, as must Charles Dickens. Admittedly a wordsmith of great merit during his more flowery moments, that foremost man of English letters diverted readers’ sympathies in entirely the wrong direction in his depiction of the workhouse orphan Oliver Twist asking for more gruel: temerity, bordering on contempt, repackaged as a triumphant squeak from the worthy downtrodden — no wonder the cook “aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle”