Giants

According to a writer in The Daily Telegraph today there is a queer sort of dispute going on in Ireland over the bones of a man named Charles Byrne who was a giant: more than eight feet tall. His skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgery. The question is, should it be displayed at all since his wish was that his body should be buried at sea in a lead box? Thomas Muinzer, a legal academic from Belfast says "it is now time to honour Byrne's last wish and make retrospective amends for the continued unseemly display which satisfies morbid curiosity without any intellectual or scientific purpose".
I have no views on this except to say that I don't believe Byrne himself feels anything or cares about what happens to his skeleton. But there are others who like to sanctify bones of certain famous people, particularly if they were themselves exceedingly religious.
The man-giant recalled to mind a giant mentioned in a Dickens novel.
Mr Vuffin runs a circus with a giant, a lady with no arms or legs and a man, named Sweet William, who could put small lozenges into his eyes and bring them out of his mouth.
Vuffin is having a chat with a man named Short in a pub.
"How's the giant?" said Short when they all sat smoking round the fire.
"Rather weak upon the legs," returned Vuffin. "I begin to be afraid he's going at the knees
"That's a bad oulook," said Short. "What becomes of old giants?" he asked.
"They're usually kept in caravans to wait upon the dwarfs," said Mr Vuffin.
Isn't it amazing how Dickens can imbue a thoroughly sad state of affairs with a lightness of empathetic touch that lifts the spirits and makes the baleful characters human beings?

Monica Dickens

Why haven't I ever read Monica Dickens? Probably because I tend not to read women writers - except Jane Austen and a few detective novelists.... O yes, and one or two by Joanna Trolloppe. Now I am tempted to, just having read a review of one of her books in The Spectator: "The Winds of Heaven". It's about a woman with three grown-up children whose "ghastly" husband dies leaving her with nothing but depts, no house, a few clothes. She loses all feeling of dignity. She is "like a child who has got lost on a church outing". Her daughters devise a plan: she will live with each in turn for a while in the summer and, in the winter, she can live on the Isle of Wight at a friend's hotel - at a cut price.
So, as one of offspring puts it, she is "passed around from one to another like a mangy cheese". Nicely put! Or "a surplus piece of furniture". Very nice! She is simply not wanted.
Then, in the great tradition of female romance best represented these days by our old freinds Mills and Boon, a man comes on the scene. But not one of your clean-cut, handsome, chisel-featured men of fortune who will love you like an ape as well as care for you like a father; no, her Lohengrin is a "grossly overweight, diabetic department-store beds salesman who moonlights as a writer of sixpenny thrillers" (Hah! thought there's be a sliver of culture in there somewhere trying to get out).
But, says the reviewer, there's more than " a splendidly happy ending: the novel ontains everything a publisher could ask for", there's also "the universal figure, a sorrowful outsider.... at odds with an unfeeling world".
Reminds me of Ozu's "Tokyo Story" and E. Eynon Evans's play with the same theme.
Can't wait to read it.
Wasn't she a grandaughter of Charles Dickens or something?