Charles Dickens dreams of his characters and his place in the literary canon. Credit: Photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty
Charles Dickens permeates London. No statue of him graces the city — in accordance with his wishes — but the characters he created are honoured.
Head east past the Tower and you can drink in the Artful Dodger; travel to Clerkenwell, following the course of the underground River Fleet, and you can take your refreshment in the Betsey Trotwood.
Climb up the stairs on the west side of London Bridge and you’re on Nancy’s Steps, where Nancy, knowing she invites her death in doing so, met young Oliver’s family, to allow the boy to be rescued. Look up in St George the Martyr’s Church on Borough High Street, and Little Dorrit is in the stained-glass window behind the altar.
Off Cornhill in the City, there is no visible homage to Scrooge. But when you have turned down St Michael’s Alley and entered Ball’s Court, you can’t imagine “the covetous old sinner” counting his money anywhere else. Walter Bagehot said that Dickens wrote about London “like a special correspondent for posterity”. But the city in time has also absorbed his artistry into its fabric.
One hundred and fifty years after the author’s death, there is perhaps no place in London where the ghost of the man himself can be felt as strongly as on Borough High Street. Dickens’s life was changed twice over on this street. When he was 12, his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea prison for debt. Left alone to paint pots in the riverside Blacking Warehouse, he pestered his parents to find him lodgings on Lant Street, which leads off the other side of the throughway so, each morning, he could breakfast with them in the prison.
Dickens’ shame of his knowledge of the Marshalsea, and the innocence he shed there, haunted him for the rest of his life. The place is rarely far from his novels. In Pickwick, it becomes the Fleet prison, in David Copperfield the King’s Bench. When it appears as itself in Little Dorrit, it becomes, at times, the whole of London. “The long bright rays” of the sun across the city are but “bars of the prison of this lower world”. Inside the Marshalsea, there is a freedom from the hurried anxiety the outer city breeds. Those Londoners inside its walls “have got to the bottom” and “can’t fall” any farther.
As he drew Little Dorrit to a close, Dickens went back to the grounds of the fallen Marshalsea, to “stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years”. If, by then, he was the most famous commoner in the country, that fame was born in a scene he set on Borough High Street, a little farther north in the White Hart Inn.
In that coaching inn, he introduced the world to young, street-wise Sam Weller, cleaning boots and sporting an old white hat. What had been the hitherto ramshackle Pickwick Papers, for which Dickens had initially been second-choice hired help to provide text for the illustrator Robert Seymour, became in June 1836, an astonishing publishing sensation. In the months after, people up and down the country bought Sam Weller and Samuel Pickwick paraphernalia and conjured verbal Wellerisms in imitation of Dickens’ cockney, wise-cracker.
Neither were the two ends of Borough High Street quite separate. Sam Weller was part Charles Dickens, with an “extensive and peculiar” knowledge of London, earned on the city’s streets where, neglected by his father, he had learned to ‘shift’ for himself.
Today, Dickens could still walk into the ruins of the Marshalsea. Indeed, turn down Angel Place – Angel Court as Dickens knew it – and you will find your feet not just where the Marshalsea stood as Dickens did in 1857, but on “paving-stones” that tell how Dickens trod the very path.
Look up and your eyes will see large metal mounts with text and pictures from Little Dorrit. Inside what is now a peaceful churchyard garden, where a London Plane tree reaches higher than the last remaining prison wall, the secret Dickens took to his grave is spelled out for all to read. There was so much other history to the Marshalsea. Wat Tyler set fire to the original jail during the Peasants’ Revolt. The playwright Ben Jonson was imprisoned there. But Dickens’s imagination made his family and his characters’ stories the only ones now memorialised.
Lant Street is still a residential street. When Dickens lodged there, it was part of an area known as the Mint, one of the most notorious slums in London with terrible sanitation. In Pickwick, Dickens wrote that a man wishing “to remove himself from temptation; to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of the window, we should recommend him by all means to go to Lant Street”. Today, Lant Street offers a swanky wine merchants, and there is private car parking bay on the market for £40,000.
The White Hart Inn no longer stands. But the next-door George Inn does. It is the last galleried coaching inn left in the metropolis, a solitary reminder of Sam Weller and Pickwick’s mode of departure for their adventures.
As Pickwick made Dickens famous, the coaching inns were in decline. Indeed, the very year Pickwick began so did building work on London’s first railway, the London and Greenwich railway, with a terminus at the top of Borough High Street at London Bridge. Looming over the timbered George Inn today are the Shard’s enormous, hard, angular lines. Even if he never saw a building in London much more than a third of the size, Dickens could scarcely have been perplexed by the juxtaposition. As he wrote in the lines just before Sam Weller makes his first appearance, “in the Borough there still remain some half dozen old inns …. which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement, and the encroachment of private speculation.”
Indeed, the George and the Shard are not quite opposites, as in normal circumstances, the National-Trust-owned inn is as much part of the hospitality industry as the other businesses on the street. It is the vanished inns’ narrow alleys and battered arches that have eluded time. On Borough High Street, London is both a mercantile world city, its sky line financed by international capital, and a historical English city still attached to its origins.
A plaque marks where the White Hart Inn once received those who came into London via the Old Dover Road. Its inscription reads that the inn was “immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry VI and Dickens in Pickwick Papers’’. Undoubtedly, the company would have pleased Dickens immensely.
Dickens did not accidentally launch Sam Weller in an inn on Borough High Street. The street has had a good number of other names. It was Wellington Street to Dickens. It was also the Pilgrims’ Way from Southwark. In the Tabard, a little down from the White Hart, Chaucer’s narrator meets a company of pilgrims and decides to let them tell their stories. From the start, Dickens wanted to be remembered as integral to English literary history, and he could not conceive that achievement without place. He met his end at his home on Gads Hill, the place where Shakespeare had Falstaff, whom Dickens re-imagined as Wilkins Micawber, rob pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.
Dickens’ last years were torrid and unhappy. He judged his talent as deficient only against Shakespeare’s, but was well aware his genius was patronised and depreciated by his social betters. He had destroyed his family more surely than his father ever did in the Marshalsea, and, for all his appalling self-righteousness about his cruelty, he, almost certainly, deep-down knew it. As compensation, he craved his audience’s love on arduous readings tours, where he rendered intensely dramatic and emotional performances from his novels, including Nancy’s murder, that worsened his already failing health. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a death-wish hastened him to his end.
On occasion, during those valedictory years, his conscious mind protested a hatred for London. In his last competed novel, Our Mutual Friend, the city is a wasteland beyond collective regeneration.
But he could not keep away. Somewhere, there was still the Georgian city he had walked alone as a child-man during the Marshalsea days. On the last evening of his life, he finished dinner and said he wanted to take the train to London. He then had a fit and fell to the floor. Late the next afternoon, he died, his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, incomplete.
Edwin Drood is a story written by a man palpably drowning in mortality, one who has come back from London to the Kent of his childhood and, the circle of his life “very nearly traced”, finds that the “beginning and the end were drawing close together”. But London’s reality is part of the circle too. In the penultimate chapter, Dickens made his farewell to the city. The novel’s young characters take a boat up the Thames away from the city to an “everlastingly green garden”. But then came the return, and “all too soon, the great black city cast its shadows on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life” and what Dickens had long known was “unregainable and far away” is lost to them. What is left is “very gritty” London, where, as he might well have hoped, the stones themselves will remember him.
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and co-presenter of UnHerd’s These Times.
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SubscribeEve looks fine to me.
The biggest surprise is that they still got 7 million viewers.
Who is ‘they’?
The broadcaster who showed the contest??
The broadcaster who got seven million viewers, as stated at the start of Kathleen’s second paragraph. I thought all-female beauty contests were so passé that nobody watched them anymore.
The only time I ever watched one was when my classmate’s big sister (two years older than us) became Miss Connecticut. She was a very exotic, natural beauty who, though of German ancestry, looked Polynesian.
When she appeared, she was unrecognizable: her long, straight, silk waterfall hair was curled into an unmovable puffed-out fright wig, her glorious cheekbones were slathered in grandma rogue, eyelids painted in a neon green and struggling under the weight of ridiculous Minnelli lashes, all made the worse by a skin tight sequined gown that would have made Dolly Parton look restrained. She looked like a drag queen twice her age. It was as if the pageant people hated her for her genuine beauty.
Beauty pageants are embarrassing any way you look at them. Anyone remember that rocket surgeon’s speech about “such as maps, such as”?
What is a non-all-female beauty contest? I suppose body building competitions, but they have separate mens and women’s categories; and, at least so far, no ‘roid-powered men have chosen to ‘cross the floor’ (unlike in the related real sports of weightlifting and powerlifting). In any case, it seems that Ms France is open to males with the correct paperwork. Provided they aspire to work with children and hope for world peace, they should be fine.
They may be passé but they are still a lot more viewable than the ‘female and trans identifying male’ versions.
Sad that even France has gone that mad.
Duh!
Surely the discussion here isn’t about the unarguable beauty of the winner. However bizarre, 7 million French people watched and voted… and were overridden by the elite … again.
Yes because they cannot be trusted to think for themselves. Kathleen Stick is essentially a member of the elite even though she has endured the consequences of disagreeing with the elite mono-thought when the mono thought was no longer totally to her advantage.
“Stick” was that a Freudian slip?
It definitely wasn’t intentional.
Then why didn’t you correct it if you wanted your comment to be taken seriously?
I didn’t correct the error because it had been commented upon. I don’t comment on Unherd to be taken seriously, I comment to explore and develop my ideas. Accordingly, I appreciate both positive and negative feedback though I rarely receive either. You have not suggested the female commentator who claims more than a handful is a waste, referring to breasts, would not be taken seriously. I suspect you just dislike my comments because you are a member of the herd and I am not.
My feedback, for what it’s worth, is that I routinely hit ‘i’ when I reach for ‘o’ on the keyboard, since they’re so close together. I would have thought this a common mistake; but the fact that others are proposing more abstruse explanations for the slip suggests that maybe it’s just me.
I googled slang for stick as I didn’t know what it was. Apparently, it means dull or uninteresting, so maybe it was Freudian. I find Kathleen Stock’s writing disappointing. I know many readers are fans but I would like her to write something with real depth to demonstrate women are as capable as men. I used to feel badly about my negative response to many writers for Unherd and relieved when I could respond positively. I now just think I have extremely high standards (Charles Stanhope achieves the standard: he is learned). I accept the onus is on me to produce something which I would consider good and I am working on it. Occasionally, my comments contain shadows or strands of my ideas and they usually receive a response which indicates there a few who would be interested to read my writing. I have only ever expected a small audience. I was once told by a psychiatrist, what I consider to be intelligence, others consider to be genius. I silently disagreed as I don’t think genius is that widespread: Einstein was a 20th century genius as was Jung, Niels Bohr and Max Planck, two of the founding fathers of Quantum Theory: Their thinking is the future. If I had continued in my area of mathematics then there would only have been at most 20 people who would have read my work. I don’t expect a large audience. I have no interest in playing to the gallery but I am not paid to write so I don’t have to.
Quality over quantity!
This is Reddit-level idiocy. Or grade-A trolling. Can’t tell
If you cannot disagree intelligently then you are the idiot.
7 millions watched this ???
And I never was told I could waste an evening watching.
As to being overridden……..we are so used to it. Article 49.3 takes care of everything whenever the government of the day can’t pass a law.
Unarguable beauty? Well, I would disagree with that statement. The only unarguable aspect in this is that she’s a real Female…
Thank God. I dread the day when a transwoman may win. We’ve pandered to the farce long enough.
I think Ève is darling. Also, generally and traditionally, French men prefer smaller breasts, apple-sized. The big boobs obsession is an Anglo-Saxon thing. The French are more attentive to the “chute des reins,” the small curve in the lower back or the beauty of the nape of the neck. Yes, really.
By the way, there’s no accent on her surname. It’s on the first letter of her given name, Ève, pronounced like the first syllable of the word ‘ever.’
Re breasts: “More than a handful’s wasted”
Or as the Irish would say mere “bee stings”.
After Vanessa Redgrave did a nude scene in Blow-Up, someone compared her figure to “two gingersnaps pinned to an ironing board.”
Perky is perfect!
As an Anglo-Saxon, i agree. One of the ugliest things a woman can do to herself is – for other than medical reasons, e.g. following breast surgery – to have her breasts artificially enhanced. This also stores up potential health issues in the future.
Apart from anything else, if she feels she needs her breasts enhanced to give her “more confidence” it’d say something about her that would be entirely unappealing, to me at least.
My children still laugh about a topless middle-aged Russian woman they saw on a beach in Spain when they were a lot younger. The huge veneer symmetry of her surgically enhanced breasts was so out of sorts with the rest of her otherwise aging body that it seemed almost impossible to look away.
No matter where you tried to look, they seemed to always be pointing straight at you. A bit like Mickey Mouse’s ears which always stay in the same forward-facing position regardless of which way Mickey turns his head.
It has occurred to me (no evidence, just a thought) that women display large breasts (or have them enhanced) in order to intimidate other women rather than to attract men.
Could well be right, in which case i’d find it very unappealing someone would feel the need to do that. What is truly pathetic though, is guys who encourage their partners to have their breasts enhanced.
Are there really a lot of guys who do that?
Absolutely not.!!
If women focussed their efforts on what men find attractive, their lives would be far simpler and less expensive. And men would be far happier.
As a woman, I would argue that it depends on the surgery and the woman’s body. I would be willing to bet a majority (as in over 50%) of singers and actresses have had some breast surgery and usually you can’t tell. Given the popularity of the procedure, we all probably work with and know many women who have had breast augmentation and we have no idea that they have had that done unless we have been told or unless the surgery is very obvious – enormous breasts disproportionate to the body.
“You” usually cannot tell? I would then say that “you” are a poor observer or have a poor knowledge of the female body. In 99% of the cases it’s quite obvious that a surgical “enhancement” has taken place. It’s not merely a case of size, but also shape and the unnatural manner in which it defies gravity…
Really? Push-up bras, layering of clothing… many different ways that the appearance of breasts can be changed through clothing or even make up.
Not every b**b job is an A cup going to an F, many are A to B or C to D or whatever. And many are on women who aren’t stick thin, so it isn’t as obvious.
It sends me on a trip down uncanny valley. I recently saw a girl – previously young and pretty – who had very clearly had her lips done. I have to be honest, it really creeped me out. And some older women who’ve had a lot done to their faces look like extras from a horror movie. Seriously ladies – don’t do it!
I think in most cases they don’t really do it for men, it’s more of an intra-female competition thing.
I think so too. In fact I think that explains a lot of female behaviour. Rather than enforcing female behaviour in some way (the common feminist view) I think men are simply bemused by it.
There’s a documentary series on Hulu called Botched, that’s about the plastic surgery practice of two surgeons in LA who specialize in rectifying the botched cosmetic surgery of other surgeons. It’s mind-boggling to see what people, men and women, are willing to go through to achieve a dream, some realistic others not so much.
Yes – in this matter French taste is genuinely more subtle. Yes to the nape of the neck too. Also big in Japan. I would suggest that cruder taste focusses very bluntly on primary and secondary sexual markers. More subtle taste less so.
Apparently, the Victorians and Edwardians knew about the sensitivity of the nape of the neck, so decent women were expected to always wear a high collar around their neck so they wouldn’t be easily seduced. It’s sad, indeed, that most men don’t seem to know how sensual a gentle touch on the neck can be. Sensuality has been trumped by sexuality like Trump’s brash advice to “grab them by the crotch” as the way to win.
In that, as in much else, our culture is pretty dumbed down. Though we may only be talking about aristocratic V & E taste. I have to say that women themselves are a pretty mixed bag on the sensuality front.
And who can have missed the way that many French film directors dwell on the female face, female mannerisms etc.
But so did Sergio Leone, albeit in a slightly different context.
I like her hairdo.
Exactly. I’m so bored with seeing the long, wavy, bleached blonde hair with black roots, the middle parting, spider eye lashes, talon nails and big boobs. How women all want to look the same is beyond me. Short hair is so refreshing to see.
I think you have described a trans woman.
Pretty enough girl, but too skinny; in my opinion. I like small boobs but I do like a little meat elsewhere. The most attractive thing about any woman though, is her personality. My late wife was not what you would call particularly attractive physically (She would pass in a crowd. Her words) but, for me, was the most beautiful woman in the known world purely on personality. That, and the foolish woman loved me.
You’re not the Mark Phillips by any chance?
Princess Anne isn’t dead and by any stretch of the imagination, she can’t be considered beautiful, poor girl.
Duplication.
Outstanding!
Hair shouldn’t be an issue, she looks fully anorexic.
She is well spoken – at least to my somewhat rusty ear for French. I think she is beautiful and I am genuinely perplexed over this ‘scandal.’ At least she is female – which is no longer guaranteed.
To me, Miss France looks like a tanned version of Twiggy, and she was the doyenne of elegant chic way back in the 60s.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“the all-female judging panel” – ou peut etre pas
Exactly. And Twiggy has still got it.
Eve probably cut her hair short because she expected her main competitor for the title to have a beard and balls.
A very pretty girl and so, contrary to ethnic diversity quotas, it seems at the very last aesthetic justice was done.
The winner looked absolutely ravishing with her pixie cut and is possibly the most beautiful thing ever to have come out of the dismal Calais/Pas-du-Nord.
It’s now called Hauts-de-France, and the most beautiful thing there is undoubtedly Amiens Cathedral.
Having reached the age where the John Lewis kitchen department now holds more interest for me than the Ann Summers shop, I kind of see where you’re coming from.
I do like Kathleen Stock pointing out that a young woman who epitomises an ideal of beauty from classic French cinema has caused a stir by winning Miss France.
And I agree, she looks fantastic.
She has a joi de vie that shines through.
It’s the Nord/Pas-de-Calais, but yes it is quite dismal. Although Cap Gris Nez is spectacular.
Thanks again KS for pinning down the ultimate ridiculousness of stuff and explaining it lucidly.
She’s a pretty woman, even without a figure or face that is strong on “traditional womanliness”. The politicization around this seems like kind of a farce, though it sounds like Eve Gilles has played into that herself. No great outrage has been committed against curviness or French standards of beauty. All women striking enough to walk under a bright spotlight in such a painted pageant will find plenty of admirers, unearned advantages, and often-unwanted attention too.
I think the greatest outrage is that no truly voluptuous women of any race have been able to win one of these things since about 1965. Just kidding, it is not a outrage at all, just my vote for curvy ladies who also have faces that draw one’s gaze upward, where it can more politely rest.
Perhaps some of us can next get upset about how grotesque the Mr. Universe contestants have looked, especially in the post-Schwarzenegger era.
“On second thoughts, then, it seems that this controversy is less a dispute about whether general beauty standards for women should be more “diverse”, and more like an argument between Crufts’ judges about whether a spaniel’s ears should be well-feathered or not”
This line just made me spit my coffee trying to suppress a laugh in a city centre McDonalds.
I’m getting looks now from the weird collection of people you get in these places this early in the morning.
Now if Eddie Izzard had been crowned Miss France that would be a news story
Exactly. He’s hardly French.
Ms France surely
He’s hardly female which should be a greater obstacle
As a guy, my first reaction to this picture was “Damn, she’s hot.” Really, all the women in these contests that reach the national level are in the top tenth of a percent in terms of beauty. Choosing one among them is an exercise in the picking of nits if ever there was one. If the judges thought picking this lady would send some sort of message about body positivity, is that really any more ridiculous or subjective than any of the other criteria for these contests?
I find it stunning that people are complaining about wokeness here when there are so many other really good examples to criticize that have far more importance than a beauty contest. Wokeness was getting out of hand, so perhaps the woke backlash is now getting out of hand as well. Someone should formulate some kind of theory of escalating disproportionate responses to explain this phenomenon.
Ya the fuss does seem much ado about nothing and good for publicity too. Perhaps what is more mindboggling is that beauty pageants for females still get so much attention. Hard to imagine the same scale of beauty pageant for hetereo males. Historically, guys have long hair too. So it’s really up to the person or to the relationship who wants to have long hair who wants to have short hair or in whatever combination they discuss/decide. There’s better things to focus on. Like the author said, it seems like a specific pageant discussion, not relevant to the rest. I think Miss France is stunningly gorgeous though. X
It all seems to be a bit of a storm in a B cup to me
B cup? Barely an A, surely…
At least an actual woman won a female beauty pageant. Who though that saying something out loud would have a place in discourse? The only thing tedious about it is the winner’s need to make some sort of social statement on her choice of hairstyle.
It’s not just about short hair. The whole point of Stock’s article is that Eve is small-breasted and broke the mold (so to speak) of what beauty queen winners are traditionally like.
Yes – she’s more like a model – ie a female ideal of thinness rather than a male. I believe the panel of judges was all female.
I’ll be dropping out of here in a couple of days.
Thanks everyone, for the chat and discussions.
Why are you dropping out?
I’m considering it.
It’s gotten a bit repetitive. And I’m just not finding that I’m interested enough to click the links in the daily email now . . . kiss of death for anything web-based.
I’ve appreciated your signature contributions, with their sometimes odd humor.
Yes – I’d like to see more opening up of thinking in the comments. Instead people just dig their heals in. We are not writing policy on here. Nobody’s opinions are going straight into party policy anywhere. But we could contribute to widening debate and discussion. Instead people down vote anything they don’t want to hear but can’t actually answer.
Hear hear!
Don’t forget to turn on and tune in first.
A bonus cultural reference. Nice.
For a break or permanently?
I do find myself coming here less and less, but my subscription just auto renewed, so I need to justify it.
Can you say “attention seeking”?
I don’t follow this kind of thing at all, but, er, what is the point of the all female judges panel here? Is it ‘beautiful’ as opposed to ‘hot’ and are the standards different in a visual sense? Were the judges lesbian? And, I have no idea, but would that make a difference to whether someone was regarded as beautiful?
You can certainly be sexy and hot without necessarily being beautiful, and I think that goes for women as much as men.
Women judges resulted in ZERO change in beauty culture, yawn. Anorexia model.
She reflects a more female ideal of beauty – like a fashion model – which actually reflects the fact that the judges were female. At least the judges were not swayed by political correctness.
I find her a bit thin, but not anorexic. She looks like she could have been athletic in her look with a bit more muscle mass. I’m afraid a lot of French women look like they need a good meal. And they pick at their food rather than eat it.
The worst aspect of this is the overriding of the public vote by the judges. If this happened on Strictly there would be fighting on the streets and nail bombs in the BBC.
50% public, 50% judges, that’s the rules
I checked out the women who got second and third places. More attractive but Afro-Caribbean. Whether deliberately or not, an element of racism may have slipped into the judges decision. Also, the sex of the judges may have had an influence. Female standards of beauty ( for women) tend to be thinner than men’s.
Obviously all of them are very attractive women.
Love short hair. Don’t like her short hair. Don’t give a fig about these ludicrous beauty competitions.
I think her hair is pretty, but honestly, she looks sick, she must be around 4% fat, which is bad for women’s health. “Miss” contests aren’t supposed to promote the same model of women as the catwalk industry. There’s no doubt this young woman “belongs” on catwalks, but a “Miss” contest, not so much.
Oh please, she’s a drop-dead gorgeous, hopelessly thin woman who happens to have short hair. This is hardly some huge departure from the norm. She’s a model.
True, but she’s not modeling she’s in a beauty pageant that’s the difference. There’s a standard look for beauty pageant contestants and she doesn’t have it but won nevertheless.
Each to their own and all that but she’s so thin! Whatever happened to ‘buxom’?
What happened to ‘buxom’ is this: its original meaning was ‘lively’, or ‘vivacious’, but because it has only a one letter difference from ‘bosom’, it has become confused with ‘big breasted.’ And so it now remains.
Actually, a two letter difference but nice try on a theory.
This seems one of the daftest squabbles of the year (and there are a few contenders for that competition). The lady is very pretty and I can’t imagine that many men (and women) would not be delighted to have her as a partner.
We don’t like using judgement. Every decision has to be made on the basis of some rules. Surely, if there are to be beauty pageants, the judges on the day just decide who they think is the prettiest; within certain boundaries, there is no way of ranking beauty. It’s become the same at work; if firms want to hire someone, they seem to have to jump through all sorts of hoops in a pretence that we have a systematic way of selecting candidates. In reality, we can just hope that those making decisions have integrity and are open minded.
Surely beauty is in the eye of the beholder and one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Are beauty standards declared and enforced, or studied and described? In a sane society it is the latter. But nowadays, nothing can be left to the hoi polloi to determine for themselves, they have to be pummeled in the face by the educated crowd with the proper etiquette.
I didn’t know a thing about this and I’ve only seen this one picture of the Miss France winner.but she looks full of a vigorous and charismatic personality.
Always amusing to witness the French twisting themselves in knots. In my eyes the winner looks very attractive, albeit a similar observation that this straight male would make about the author of the article. In future years if it isn’t a bloke in a frock that is causing controversy it will be the inclusivity of the morbidly obese. At least the French don’t appear to have embraced the trout-lips look so commonplace in the UK amidst young women.
The first two sentences of the article says it all. Europe is in cultural and economic decline. Get rid of the European Union, cut ties with the USA and stop allowing the Neo-Cons to force you into wars and ruin your economy.
Is there such a thing as objectively ugly or objectively beautiful? Isn’t this a subjective thing? Also a cultural thing?
Thinness, I think, is more or less contemporaneous. Also, I also think that in some other cultures plumpness is most appreciated.
It’s appreciated in the Black culture. Black women are allowed to be fat white women aren’t. Voluptuous yes, though the last voluptuous, beautiful white woman was Anna Nicole Smith and that was many years ago. You can’t be too thin or too rich, rich women say. It’s a class thing.
Women are allowed to be fat in all cultures. But men do not always consider them attractive. There is no “Black culture”. That’s a piece of “othering”. The cultures of black people vary enormously around the globe. Generally speaking men like fat women in situations of relative poverty, where thinness is a sign of being poor. A fat wife is a status symbol (as is a woman who does not have to work). Otherwise relative thinness is the preference.
If food is plentiful then thinness acts as a class marker and a sign of self control. sometimes to a degree that men will consider “too thin”.
In general black men in the US prefer larger women and are less tolerant of very thin women. This does not mean that they like overweight women, let alone women who are obese.
*It’s appreciated in the black culture. Black women are allowed to be fat White women aren’t.
I seem to remember Henry Miller writing a chapter extolling a Greek gran of questionable objective pulchritude. Perhaps we should similarly take the high road when attempts are made to provoke us.
That is not to criticise the French lady who – I would agree with Kathleen – is undeniably attractive, albeit in the Audrey Hepburn mode.
“Gazing at a truly beautiful face is a source of huge pleasure, and always will be.” This line from Kathleen Stock resonated with me. In recent decades I have become conscious of this. Though I suppose I had always been affected in that way without being consciously aware of it. Seeing a beautiful actress in a movie (or, perhaps more rarely, a beautiful women in real life), especially when she is smiling . . . it’s very affecting. It calls to mind an old line here in the USA: “Beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks.” The unwritten part that follows could be, “Just keep smiling at me out of that beautiful face.”
I married a beauty queen. The fourth time to divorce court expunged any such sentiments I might have been holding to.
As Rod Stewart said about marriage:
“Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and just give her a house.”
I can’t see anything wrong with Ms. Gilles’ looks: she looks like a legitimate beauty contest candidate to me–even a potential winner–without any help from ‘le wokeisme.’ She’s in the mould of Audrey Hepburn, who to my knowledge was never considered an offense against aesthetics. I claim no expertise in the history of beauty contests, and am in no position to contest the accuracy of the restrictive judging criteria mentioned in the article. Whatever’s at the root of these criteria, though, they clearly have little to do with beauty, which has always accommodated diversity. If you Googled a list of the world’s most beautiful actresses, for example, the range of appearances in your search solution set would confirm just how elastic the concept of beauty is. My guess is that Ms. Gilles probably turns her fair share of heads when she walks down the street.
This article is a load of pseudo-intellectual guff about nothing.
At least she was a woman.
I loved Eve’s look, it’s so refreshing to see short hair again, I hope it becomes a trend. I’m so bored with women all looking the same nowadays. I remember when Twiggy, with small breasts and short hair, was considered beautiful, which she was. I’m infuriated that transmen are allowed into women’s beauty pageants pretending to be women and expecting us to go along with the deceit.
She looks fine to me. It’s too bad the yokels who voted can’t appreciate the benefit to the institution of appearing to share the correct definition of beauty. Note to the organizers. It’s probably better just to rig the vote. It’s a great tool. If the winner gets 100% of the vote, it sends the right message.
“Gazing at a truly beautiful face is a source of huge pleasure, and always will be” Absolutely. As in the case of my Brazilian friend Adele, a transsexual who made so beautiful a woman. even pre-op, that I never guessed at her identity till she herself told me. In secret. (And I never stopped thinking of her as female, as my use of pronouns shows.) I’m afraid that the stereotype of the mannish, square-built, over-made-up tranny, like all stereotypes, can let you down. I agree with much of Ms.Stock says, but absolute, over-simple assumptions, with no space for variation or doubt, always make an ASS of U and ME. Well, not me, at least, as long as I can help it.
‘there was now quite literally nothing to see here’
Naughty. And very funny.
For once this is political incorrectness gone mad.
I think the lassie looks fantastic.
So do I. Unfortunately I am over 60 so probably not polically correct to say so.
On the positive side, she is approachable. I’ve dated women as pretty as her and prettier, which I could never claim about conventional Miss Anything winners.
Maybe defenders of the ordinary will be able to spin this attribute into something worth having, even a paradigm of some sort.
Short hair on a woman is very sexy. Just think of Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle.
I did not need to read any further than this. Thank you, Ms. Stock. Brilliant.
“showing hidden camera images” A very disappointing link.
Rubensesque is not a compliment in my book.