WhatTheDickens?

As we have observed in class, drug advertising was a mainstay in the advertisements accompanying many of Dickens’ publications. Today, prescription drugs are heavily advertised on U.S. televisions. However, the “drugs” of Dickens’ day are quite different from the prescription drugs that are advertised in the U.S. While Dickens may have considered drug advertising to be a good source of income, modern drug advertising is highly controversial–so controversial, that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only western nations that allow it.

On average, drug companies spend far more on the sales and marketing of their drugs than they do on research and development. These ads have led to a 71% increase in prescription drug use since 1992, making prescription drug spending the third highest cost in the American health care system. Some people argue that prescription drug ads give patients more agency over their personal healthcare, but this opinion is controversial. Like most advertising, the goal of drug advertising for pharmaceutical companies is to bypass the physician-patient relationship and raise profits, not to bring agency to the consumer. Additionally, these ads generally focus on the benefits of these drugs, only briefly mentioning side effects, may promote drugs before completion of long-term safety tests, and promote over-consumption of unnecessary drugs. Almost all drug advertisements show patients as happy, laughing, or otherwise glamorizing the use of a given drug. Most people realize that these ads don’t necessarily reflect reality, but a subliminal validation of the drug still occurs.

The real question is: should direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads be legal? Overwhelmingly, most western countries seem to think “no,” and the WHO recommends against it. As data has shown, these ads also seem to lead to an increase in prescription drug spending (and therefore overall health costs), which is not a good thing. However, these large pharmaceutical companies are very wealthy and powerful–which is part of the reason why these ads are legal in the first place–and legislation to make these ads illegal will be very difficult to put in place.

In 2011, James Delingpole wrote an article for the Telegraph about the resurgence of Dickens’s popularity through various television interpretations of his novels in the UK. I found this article when looking into the BBC’s version of The Mystery of Edwin Drood after watching it in class. Interestingly, as I was reading the article, an advertisement popped up in the text separating the first few lines from the rest of the article, forcing me to watch a video advertising laundry detergent with no possibility of pausing the ad. As soon as the video was done, the ad disappeared. This is the first disappearing ad I have seen of this kind, and it certainly made me laugh to myself in the context of advertising we have been discussing in this class. Delingpole’s article addresses the fact that Dickens has become associated with cozy, family times and good will toward men, and that common phrases from his novels trigger patriotic feelings in the hearts of Englishmen. But Delingpole admits that Dickens was paid for his work, and monetary gains were a primary consideration in the way he released his novels in parts. What was interesting to me about this article was the author’s mutual disgust for and fascination with Dickens, as well as his own desire to watch a show like the Walking Dead rather than another TV adaptation of a Dickens story. By the end of the article, Delingpole asserts that, had Dickens been born today, he would certainly have been a screenwriter for a popular television show rather than wasting his time on something so monetarily valueless as a novel. I have to agree with Delingpole that Dickens would make an excellent screenwriter. I’m positive he would have created a show on par with some of today’s greats, like Game of Thrones. But I’m glad Dickens was a nineteenth century man, because as a screenwriter he would not be able to display his unique gift with words that accompanies his storytelling, allowing readers to interpret the Gradgrinds and Pips of his literary world as they will.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/charles-dickens/8982962/Charles-Dickens-good-on-paper-great-on-screen.html

Home for Thanksgiving, I find myself watching much for TV than I usually do. My parents have local news running in the background almost all morning, and as most local news stations do, they have local businesses and organizations on the news shows to gain publicity. Much to my surprise, this morning I was being advertised Charles Dickens! A city in Michigan called Holly (they’re really into Christmas) is having its 42nd annual Dickens festival. Volunteer actors will be performing “A Christmas Carol” 15 times in the next three weekends (outside, might I add) and there will be a “Run Like the Dickens 5k” in a few weeks. Dickens has, I realized after seeing this segment, become inextricably tied to the secular side of Christmas. If you ask anyone what play they’re taking their kids to during the holidays, it is likely “A Christmas Carol.” references to the ghosts in the story and Tiny Tim abound at the holidays. In my own childhood, my family would go to Greenfield Village (a giant outdoor historical museum) for something called Holiday Nights, where employees are dressed in period costumes from colonial times, there is ice skating, and storytellers leap around fires performing The Night Before Christmas or sections of “A Christmas Carol,” which is what drew me back around that fire on cold holiday evenings year after year.

Dickens worked so hard to be relevant during his own time, by changing how he published his novels, by collaborating with other authors, by publishing holiday stories every year, that I am curious to know what he would think of the relevance he still seems to have today. I read “A Christmas Carol” adapted for the stage in middle school, before we went and saw it performed. I watched the Oliver Twist musical in a music class. I didn’t ever actually read anything Dickens himself wrote until my senior year in high school, but he is such a part of our cultural consciousness that I still could have told you who he was and what he wrote with some degree of accuracy. Charles Dickens permeates the cultural knowledge of much of the English-speaking world, for the most part not through his large-scale character studies or social problem novels, but through one of his short Christmas stories.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a Carolina Panthers football game with my family. Of course, when you are watching football on TV, you expect to be bombarded with male-centric advertising at every possible moment. But I had forgotten that even at live sporting events advertising is constantly present, as if you were watching a televised broadcast.

Live events present an interesting situation for advertising–instead of airing commercials, companies “sponsor” portions of the game in exchange for their name being said over the intercom and logo being projected on the Jumbotron. There was not a single moment of this game that wasn’t bought and owned by some corporation, from the Crest “smile cam” to the cheerleaders’ time out routine being presented by Pepsi.  This type of advertising is much more subliminal than television advertising, as they aren’t really making a case for their own product. However, they still function in a productive way, as–generally speaking–the products advertised are ones that everyone needs: toothpaste, home security systems, banks, etc. With the exception of banners advertising for online fantasy football sites, which I assume are geared largely towards men, the advertisements largely don’t discriminate between adults of different genders, races, and ages. It is interesting to consider how advertising at stadiums will evolve in the future, and I suspect that it will become only more present as time goes on.

All through our discussion of Charles Dickens dying in the middle of releases of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, I have been reminded of one specific contemporary example in which people are worried about this occurring. George R.R. Martin is 67 years old and is not exactly the image of a healthy individual. He has also created an extremely enthralling world and story that is not yet finished. There are several mysteries that have yet to be answered, two more novels to write, and he has taken longer and longer to finish each book. The first three books only took three years in between. The fourth book took five years, and the fifth book took six years. Fans of the series are worried that if he continues with this pace, that he will die before he has the chance to finish the series.

Many people ask him about this interviews, and he of course is upset that people are so worried he is going to die, but he has also assured that someone knows the plot in case he does die. Since Game of Thrones, also known as A Song of Ice and Fire, has been made into an extremely popular TV series that has now surpassed the book, George R.R. Martin told the show-runners how it is supposed to end. He did not reveal how to get there, but told them where it ends. This makes me think of Charles Dickens and speculations that he might have told the advertisers how it ends so they could craft advertisements for upcoming sections. I find it interesting to view possibilities of who might know what happened to Edwin Drood in the context of what George R.R. Martin is doing now. Charles Dickens made a lot of money off of his advertisers, just how Martin is making a lot of money off of the show. It appears that the people who get to know the secrets are those who fund the telling of the secrets.

Another parallel I have found are fan theories. Many scholars have speculated about how Edwin Drood might have ended, and many fans are already speculating how Game of Thrones might end. There are several websites devoted to fan theories for both of these mysteries. I have included two of those below. I wonder if people were speculating even before Dickens died for fear that he might die before finishing the series, just as they are with Martin? These two situations seem quite similar and looking at this contemporary example allows us to ask more questions while providing more insight into the situation as a whole.

http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jon_Snow/Theories

http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/edwindrood/

I recently watched the 2004 BBC miniseries adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, a novel that was published in Household Words. According to some quick Internet searches, it appears that Charles Dickens thought Gaskell’s novel was too long (seems hypocritical considering how long all of Dickens’s novels are…), and Dickens was the one who suggested a name change from Margaret Hale to North and South.

Upon watching the four-part series, I thought the adaptation successfully focused on and complicated themes that we’ve been discussing throughout class this semester. There is a heavy emphasis on “North” (industrial town) versus “South” (pastoral idyll). While the repeated mentioning of the distinctions are a little much at first, the last part features Margaret Hale, who initially moves from the South to the North at the start of the series, going back to the South and realizing that things aren’t necessarily better there and that she can’t return there to fix all of her problems. The pastoral idyll is juxtaposed with the industrial town, but neither is superior to the other.

Another way I thought the adaptation complicated themes we’ve discussed is the way it features labor workers and mill owners. John Thornton, the mill owner, asks Margaret, “Or that you assume because I’m in trade I’m only capable of thinking in terms of buying and selling? Or that I take pleasure in sending my employees to an early grave?” Although I didn’t read Hard Times, I remember our class discussion focusing on this idea of mechanizing people and their relationships with one another. I liked that North and South suggests that the romantic and emotional component of a human being can exist in the cold industrial times.

This story gives us a more sympathetic read of mill owners than Gaskell’s other novel, Mary Barton. We see Thorton struggle over financials; he also forms friendships with his mill workers and even ends up losing the mill. The fact that Margaret’s money is what bails him out at the end makes their situation even more special, although I assume a woman having that much inheritance and control wasn’t realistic of that time. However, North and South assigns flaws and redemptive qualities to men and women of various socioeconomic statuses, and it was a refreshing change of pace from some of the more cynical, anti-hero literature we’ve read in class (while still featuring a number of big deaths, which I’m beginning to think is a Gaskell signature).

Lately there has been a news story circulating that depicts a slightly ridiculous controversy that reveals a lot of our country’s expectations about how Christmas is supposed to be experienced. The controversy I am referring to is the current change of the Starbuck’s Coffee holiday cups. Every year Starbucks comes out with holiday cups in the winter winter season. This year, they decided to just make the cups red which angered some Christians. A Christian internet personality, Joshua Feuerstein, made a claim that this change is because Starbucks “hates Jesus”. He got #merrychristmasstarbucks to trend on several social media sites in an attempt to get Starbucks to add Christmas imagery back onto their cups.

The fact that there is so much disagreement and controversy over a cup just seems crazy. This controversy is about so much more than a cup though. The previous holiday cups did not even have religious symbols on them. Previous images found on the cup were reindeer, ornaments, and snowmen. Starbucks did not put nativity scenes on the cups. The symbols that were used are symbols often seen in Christmas advertising. They are a part of a lifestyle that includes a Christmas where children are told of reindeer, hang ornaments on a tree, and build snowmen. People associate these symbols with Christmas, because advertising associates these images with Christmas. These symbols have nothing to do with the original religious based reason for the holiday, but these are used in holiday advertising and are expected during this season.

We discussed in class how Charles Dickens did not advertise in his Christmas Carols, because his Christmas stories were advertisements. Christmas has been advertised as a lifestyle for years. These stories did not have a religious basis, but they advertised Christmas. I wonder if there would have been a backlash if he published a story not about Christmas when people expected a Christmas story from him. Christmas has been advertised for so long that people seem to believe it needs to be advertised. Some Christians are worried that not advertising Christmas could hurt Christianity. Dickens began a trend of advertising that appears will not end any time soon if Joshua Feuerstein has anything to say about it.

Here is an article about the corntroversy from CNN

http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/08/news/companies/starbucks-red-cups-controversy/

Modern advertising has become somewhat…creepy. When you google something today, it will most certainly come back to haunt you in the form of an advertisement personally tailored to your “interests.” For example, I’ve been thinking about purchasing a new pair of glasses from Warby Parker. I looked at their website, and landed on a particular brand that I put in my shopping cart, but still haven’t purchased because, well, I’m poor right now. Those glasses, the Durand style to be exact, now follow me everywhere I go around the internet. Every website has an ad on the side showcasing the Warby Parker Durand eyeglasses in Burnt Lemon Tortoise, screaming, “Michaela, buy me! Buy me! Have you forgotten the desire that prompted you to add me to your cart in the first place?!” This is highly annoying because I still want the glasses but can’t afford them right now; but it is also unnerving, because it means there is a company that believes itself to be keenly attune to my needs and desires as a consumer. This type of tailored advertising seems to rob me of my individuation from the machine, making me feel I’m caught up in a system that knows me intimately, but not by my own volition.

In Dickens’s time, advertisers certainly did not have the kind of Big Brother-esque power that Google has today. Even so, advertisers found ways to connect with their desired consumers through carefully pairing their advertisements to match both the type of reader associated with the text and also the content of the stories themselves. For example, the advertisements that go along with the first section of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood are for items that might be of interest to upper middle class educated men and women. They also can be associated with the contents of the story. Here is a list of some of the items advertised: cod liver oil, life insurance, wine and spirits, jewelry, portrait albums, writing papers, and books for purchase, including a household guide and the novels of Jane Austen. The cod liver oil was meant to combat physical weakness and ill health, something one might want to do after reading a tale so focused on death; life insurance would connect with a murder mystery story quite nicely. The jewelry ties in with Rosa’s ring, and the portrait album with her portrait hanging in Jasper’s room. Most of the advertisements, though, were for other books, showing that the advertisers knew their audiences and hoped to spur their interest in further reading after the completion of Dickens’s novel. Advertising in the nineteenth century was surely not as creepy as it is today, but that doesn’t mean that the advertisements were not very intentional in their placement and purpose.

This last year, I’ve started watching Shameless, a Showtime television show based on a UK series by the same name. As we’ve progressed through this class, I’ve drawn a lot of similarities between the show and the books we’ve read in class, mostly because television is usually so allergic to depicting poverty that Shameless feels like a revelatory premise.

Shameless is a comedy-drama that centers on a poor family living in the South Side of Chicago. A review by The Boston Globe notes, “The Gallaghers of Chicago are poor, so the kids steal milk from a dairy truck and coupons from neighbors’ newspapers…While Frank blows his disability checks at local bars, his kids scrounge together money like Fagin’s crew from ‘Oliver Twist.’ To be sure, ‘Shameless’ feels like contemporary Dickens, portraying a forgotten underclass living close to the streets and the world of nonviolent crime.”

There is a lot of satire and comedy found in Shameless, just as there is in Oliver Twist, but I find the varying types of morality in the characters in both works to be the most intriguing. I would argue that the characters in Shameless are good in their intentions and sympathetic but continue to commit morally questionable actions because of the situations they live in. This type of contrast allows for a critique of the systematic deficiencies that make it hard to break the cycle of poverty. In Oliver Twist, Dickens offers a similar critique, making Oliver inherently good and Nancy complex but still likeable, in order to contrast with the harsh industrial life.

Show creator, John Wells, recalls, “‘When we first started pitching, everybody kept gravitating towards the South or putting it in a trailer park…We have a comedic tradition of making fun of the people in those worlds. The reality is that these people aren’t ‘the other’ — they’re people who live four blocks down from you and two blocks over.” Wells’s words also suggest at the upper middle class audience of his show, similar to the audience of novels in the Victorian era. People who can afford to subscribe to Showtime are not the ones living in poverty, so the social problems of the show are clearly directed at the upper middle class. Similarly to Dickens’s novels and novels like Mary Barton, the realism of the depiction of poverty aims to educate those not in that socioeconomic class.

Humanity has a fascination with death that stems from a fear of the unknown and the inevitable. This fascination is often played out in television and films where characters are subjected to horrible, bloody deaths (as in horror movies) or perhaps death from a prolonged sickness (as in a drama film). This idea of viewing the process of death, and especially viewing the dead in their altered state, is the subject of photographer Sally Mann’s selection of photographs entitled “Body Farm.” According to NPR, Mann went to the University of Tennessee’s forensic anthropology research facility to photograph the decomposing bodies being studied by the graduate students. Mann’s photographs are an attempt to examine the decaying human form in a way that brings a haunting beauty to the process of decomposition. The photographs are hard to look at, but certainly echo our culture’s obsession with experiencing death through viewing it. Mann stated, “There was something matter-of-fact about the way those bodies were laid out and how they were treated. I mean, they were a scientific experiment and very quickly I grew to see them that way…I had to sort of pull myself together and figure out a way to handle things I had never seen before and never anticipated ever seeing — these bodies in various stages of decomposition.”

In The Woman in White, Walter Hartright views the dead bodies of both of the men who have caused such horrible suffering for Laura, Marian, and himself. First, when Sir Percival is burned in the fire, Walter is called upon to identify him: “I looked up, along the cloth; and there at the end, stark and grim and black, in the yellow light–there, was his dead face” (Collins 521). So Walter gazes upon the decaying figure of Sir Percival, just as he will gaze on Count Fosco at the morgue in Paris. Walter describes the individual portions of Fosco’s dead body: he writes of the “broad, firm, massive face…the wound…exactly over his heart…[and the] two deep cuts in the shape of a T…” (Collins 623). Walter examines the flesh of his enemy, writing that he “forced himself to see these things…for a few moments” (Collins 624). Walter admits no pleasure in seeing his enemies in a state of decomposition, but one can infer his relief that his troubles have ended. Both Sally Mann and Walter Hartright put themselves in a position of viewing decomposing bodies; Mann uses the experience to create art, while Walter allows it to bring him relief and (perhaps) give him a sense of justice served.

Here is a link to Sally Mann’s photography (WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES)

Body Farm

Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. London: Penguin, 1999.

“Making Art Out of Bodies: Sally Mann Reflects on Life and Photography. NPR. 12 May                 2015. Website. “http://www.npr.org/2015/05/12/405937803/making-art-out-of-                 bodies-sally-mann-reflects-on-life-and-photography.”