The Begging-Letter Writer Page #3

"The Begging-Letter Writer" is a short story by Charles Dickens that explores themes of poverty, social class, and the impact of charity. The narrative follows a writer who is asked to compose begging letters for the impoverished, revealing the struggles of the lower class and the complexities of compassion and deception. Through sharp wit and poignant observations, Dickens critiques societal attitudes toward the needy while illustrating the moral dilemmas faced by those on both sides of the begging letter. The story serves as a commentary on the human condition and the intricate relationships between wealth, desperation, and morality.

• Short story

								

and respect for whom has ensured a ready and generous reply.

Now, in the hope that the results of the real experience of a real person
may do something more to induce reflection on this subject than any
abstract treatise—and with a personal knowledge of the extent to which
the Begging-Letter Trade has been carried on for some time, and has been
for some time constantly increasing—the writer of this paper entreats the
attention of his readers to a few concluding words.  His experience is a
type of the experience of many; some on a smaller, some on an infinitely
larger scale.  All may judge of the soundness or unsoundness of his
conclusions from it.

Long doubtful of the efficacy of such assistance in any case whatever,
and able to recall but one, within his whole individual knowledge, in
which he had the least after-reason to suppose that any good was done by
it, he was led, last autumn, into some serious considerations.  The
begging-letters flying about by every post, made it perfectly manifest
that a set of lazy vagabonds were interposed between the general desire
to do something to relieve the sickness and misery under which the poor
were suffering, and the suffering poor themselves.  That many who sought
to do some little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of
preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening those
wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent knaves
cumbering society.  That imagination,—soberly following one of these
knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and comparing it with the
life of one of these poor in a cholera-stricken alley, or one of the
children of one of these poor, soothed in its dying hour by the late
lamented Mr. Drouet,—contemplated a grim farce, impossible to be
presented very much longer before God or man.  That the crowning miracle
of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of
the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead
to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them.
That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the
thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their
youth—for of flower or blossom such youth has none—the Gospel was NOT
preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices.  That of all
wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set
right.  And that no Post-Office Order to any amount, given to a
Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be
presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it.

The poor never write these letters.  Nothing could be more unlike their
habits.  The writers are public robbers; and we who support them are
parties to their depredations.  They trade upon every circumstance within
their knowledge that affects us, public or private, joyful or sorrowful;
they pervert the lessons of our lives; they change what ought to be our
strength and virtue into weakness, and encouragement of vice.  There is a
plain remedy, and it is in our own hands.  We must resolve, at any
sacrifice of feeling, to be deaf to such appeals, and crush the trade.

There are degrees in murder.  Life must be held sacred among us in more
ways than one—sacred, not merely from the murderous weapon, or the subtle
poison, or the cruel blow, but sacred from preventible diseases,
distortions, and pains.  That is the first great end we have to set
against this miserable imposition.  Physical life respected, moral life
comes next.  What will not content a Begging-Letter Writer for a week,
would educate a score of children for a year.  Let us give all we can;
let us give more than ever.  Let us do all we can; let us do more than
ever.  But let us give, and do, with a high purpose; not to endow the
scum of the earth, to its own greater corruption, with the offals of our
duty.
								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes