TPPM (9): Dickens on Sloth

[Tim Strzechowski]

[...] "(Dickens, visiting in 1842, remarked, "After walking about in it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.") Spiritual matters were not quite as immediate as material ones, like productivity! Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or spiritual good as against a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general not reversible -- that is, against clock time, which got everybody early to bed and early to rise."


[...] "[T]o-night we should particularly observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves, besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor among my hearers may be certain that he has still won much very much and that he can well afford to swell the triumph of his rivals who have passed him in the race." [...]
http://www.mostweb.cc/Classics/Dickens/speeches/speeches43.html


And for those who enjoy Dickens, let us not forget the narcaleptic Fat Boy from The Pickwick Papers:

http://www.dickens-literature.com/The_Pickwick_Papers/53.html

http://www.talkaboutsleep.com/sleepdisorders/Snoring_apnea_dickens.htm


Any Dickensian characters that can be described as suffering from acedia?
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