Didn’t the Greatest British Novelist
Know About ‘Haircut Guys’?
I read the classic Charles Dickens tale, Oliver Twist, to Maddy, age 8, while she was home sick with the flu. Don’t get excited: it was a $1.99, dumbed-down, cheapo, condensed version with big type. I like buying “classics for kids” because the stories are great and, in this format, the vocabulary isn’t too tough to understand. So it’s a win-win.
There were a few old-fashioned pen-and-ink drawings illustrating the text. They showed the poor, bedraggled orphans, beggars and pickpockets of dreary 19th Century England.
At book’s end, I turned to Maddy, wondering what her final comment would be. How bad the poor had it, back then? The sociocultural implications of the workhouses of the Industrial Age? Child labor? How they all survived without (gasp) cars and (horrors!) cell phones?
Noooooo. Apparently thinking only of those illustrations, she asked with a frown:
“Didn’t they have ‘haircut guys’ in those days?”
----------------------------
PRAYER REQUEST: Safety for a newly-pregnant young woman who is going to Israel for a month with the Denver Theological Seminary . . . safe delivery of a healthy Cohen Michael, expected any day now . . . a great sales price on a “Granny Cottage” in Tennessee.
1 comment:
From some of the 'do's I see around, I wonder about some of the "haircut guys" we have these days.
Post a Comment