What It Is

Dirty Dick and Little Nell are principal characters in Charles Dickens's "The old Curiosity Shop" a serial novel he self published in the Sunday newspapers. Wikipedia gives the whole plot summary and character descriptions if you card to find out more of the good orphan Nell, adopted by her grandfather,and the redempton of Dick, set upon their destruction by a wicked enemy of the grandfather. The search for Nell of course turns their would be tormentor and of course he falls in love with her but by the time she has completed some great and arduos fete for her grandfather, the Dick who was set to destroy her before he fell in love with her along the way, arrives of course too late to save her waning life. Queen Victoria praised the book highly. Like QV Dickens had something like 9 children he left because he despised their mother (hence all the good sweet and pitiable orphans in his books?) and QV didn't like very many of her children either though she ADORED Prince Albert he of the tobbaco tons and condom products (not the best salesperson for that, considering the progeny he insemanated in such a very short time (he died in his 30's, Victoria never recovered from her grief, wore widows' mourning Black the rest of her life and throughsound advisors and the Age Colonization ["OK now that we've visited explored seen and colonized it, let's just raise our flag there"] thus I believe making England the wealthiest nation on earth during her reign--and besides India, think of all the wealth they'd have acquired if they'd kept all those oil rich counties they ran in Africa, well any place they ran in Africa, the border city-states in China, Burma,Hong King, so many islands everywhere, the continent of Australia, Canada, sure it was the moral thing to do and an impossible financial burden but that would have only lasted a few more years, given all the wars and terrorism, treatment of females, and state of infrastructure, one wonders "Did it really make a better world for its people or for the whole world's, to leave them free but penniless and full of warlords, factions, clans, clear cut rainforests, the trade in opium, heroin, the black market trade that is killing every elephant tiger monkey great ape venomous snake, rhinoceros, every one of their natural resources to make a few into billionaires and the rest into little barely clothed children with bloated tummies from starvation and missing arms and legs from mines? Those people are they supposed to eat and drink and live on Freedom? What countries that were (stolen) "protectorates" are any better off? I know I've gone off subject. Would I rather live in Scotland or Saudi Arabia?--every country deserves its autonomy and natural resources, but in Asia the government is selling hand dug and panned mines run by mostly the same families for 2000 years because there ARE no environmental protections, labor is cheap,they can dynamite down as far as they want and leaved the former forests wastelands of caliche and the rivers the color of baby crap and full of toxins like mercury. These waters feed into aquifers, village wells, wildlife watering holes debturies years old. And finally the estuaries that lead to the ocean whose toxicity we have increased by 2% in the last 20 years. When people lived in abject poverty, wildlife flourished. Now that probably 50% of people live in abject poverty, in most parts of the world, 70% of endangered wildlife are on the verge 80-90% live on the edge of extinction.