Bacon, Bronte & Cronin | the ‘BBC’s & their Pens ❤️
Pen is mightier than the sword, goes the dictum!
Yes! Dear Reader, most of us woulda sure known Bacon, Francis Bacon - as the Father of English Essays!
Aphoristic in style, and rhythmic in cadence, he had pioneered a writing style that continues to be the norm for essayists all over the world even today.
But most of us wouldn’t possibly have known Baconji - the novelist!
Indeed, his novel, The New Atlantis, of utopian import, envisions an ideal society [Bensalem], where the inhabitants are endowed with such lovely qualities as – generosity, enlightenment, dignity, splendour, piety, public spirit, etc.
A novel that has had the power and the verve, the vigour and the mettle to envision a brave new world - in North America – a land that abounds with liberty and freedom of religion, a land that practices greater rights for its women, a land that doesn’t have slavery, a land without debtors’ prisons, a land where there is a separation of church and state, a land that promotes freedom of expression etc.
No wonder, Francis Bacon’s thoughts and ideas have had a great influence in the drafting of the American Constitution.
Well, suchmuch is the case with Cronin, dear reader!
Come, join me on Cronin-mode on the legend’s birthday today!
A.J. Cronin, - physician turned writer, ladies and gentlemen!
Cronin’s Citadel (1937), gives us a first-hand account of the atrocious and arbitrary medical ethics of the medical doctors during his days.
Well, Dr. Cronin’s experience as a doctor practicing amongst the coal mining communities in South Wales, had really helped him much-o-much in getting a first-hand account of the health problems faced by miners and their occupational health hazards, which was to have a powerful influence in his life later on.
Hence, when he was elevated as the Medical Inspector of Mines for Great Britain, he heavily drew on his experience as a doctor and penned them down on paper for posterity.
The Citadel is a case in point.
A novel that has played a pivotal and a powerful role in the establishment of the National Health Service [NHS] in Great Britain.
The NHS, prospectively, imposed a big ban on medical doctors from minting money from their patients, because the entire health care system was, from thence on, funded by the government, with the Department of Health and Social Care, overseeing the administration of the funding.
The NHS then, seeks to provide free healthcare to all legal residents of England!
In short, quality health care at almost no expense for the patient, became a possibility in Great Britain, just because of the visionary power of Cronin’s pen!
Suchmuch is the might of the pen! Mightier even than the sword!
Well, the novel deals with a doctor by name Andrew Manson, an idealistic, efficient and newly qualified doctor who takes up duty as an assistant doctor to Dr. Page, in quite unhygienic conditions all around him in a remote mining village.
Having resolved to improve the living conditions as well as the health conditions of his patients, who were chiefly miners, Dr. Manson researches much on his specialized area of lung disease.
Soon his research gets recognized and he gets elevated to the Mines Fatigue Board in London. But eventually he soon resigns and sets up private medical practice where his ‘business’ booms out of proportion!
The lure of easy money traps his conscience into a darky cage, and he is soon on a roll, wading into the wallets of his wealthy patients from thence on!
No spoilers for y’all, though!
However, me thought of giving such thought-stimulating quotes from the doctor’s pen for us all!
What power and might, dear reader, therein lies in these lines!
Says Doctor Andrew Manson –
We’re not nearly liberal enough. If we go on trying to make out that everything’s wrong outside the profession and everything is right within, it means the death of scientific progress.
We’ll just turn into a tight little trade protection society.
It’s high time we started putting our own house in order, and I don’t mean the superficial things either.
Go to the beginning, think of the hopelessly inadequate training doctors get.
When I qualified I was more of a menace to society than anything else.
All I knew was the names of a few diseases and the drugs I was supposed to give for them.
I couldn’t even lock a pair of midwifery forceps. Anything I know I’ve learned since then.
But how many doctors do learn anything beyond the ordinary rudiments they pick up in practice.
They haven’t got time, poor devils, they’re rushed off their feet. That’s where our whole organisation is rotten.
For years we’ve been bleating about the sweated conditions under which our nurses work, the wretched pittances we pay them. Well?
They’re still being sweated, still paid pittances.
That’s just an example. What I really mean is deeper than that.
We don’t give our pioneers a chance.
Dear reader, the above lines make us ponder much on some of the habituated actions that we’ve been accustomed to, the most part of our lives, ain’t they?
Most of what Cronin’s mouthpiece Dr. Andrew has said, was said from a deep sense of conviction and an equally stronger sense of being uncomfortable with the appalling situations around him!
Makes me to spontaneously ruminate on the lovely Jane’s beautifully chiselled power-lines in Jane Eyre.
And yes! For these Jane-lines that follow, I wish a hundred Nobel Prizes were given!
Says Jane -
The restlessness was in my nature…
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
This feeling – this exact feeling of being unsettled and unnerved at the stagnancy, the fetters, the restrictions, the red-tapisms, etc that one find around them, is the one great prompt and provocation for your pen!
The pen of an able and noble literary soul!
Over the course of your career, dear reader, have you ever come across such a feeling of being unsettled, rattled, shaken, jolted or unnerved at some of the apathetic situations prevailing in your workdom?
What pray, is your pen doing on this aspect, dear gentle reader?
If you feel that your lovely little heart is ‘inditing a good matter’ deep within you, and your ‘tongue is the pen of a ready writer’, start out rightaway!
There’s a Bacon, a Bronte or a Cronin waiting to come out of you, and shake the world, nay, transform the world - for the better!
That’s because the pen is mightier!
PS: If you check out to the right side of this, our blog, you’ll notice a space where I’ve listed out on the lovely blogs that I’ve so loved reading.
A Dazzling Style of the Stargirly types!
A Dashing Style of the Gilbertian types!
A Charming Style of the Baconian types!
An Impactful Style of the Bronte-ian types!
An Influential Style of the Cronian types! etc!
These cute an lovely literary souls have done such able and noble justice to their reading, to their thoughts, to their ideas, through their cute bloggy space out there on the web!
That’s because they have the conviction that the pen is mightier, dear reader!
To give a beautiful perspective to the world we dwell in, - through the power of their pen - from the books or people or things they’ve known, out of their own felt-experience!
An experience that’s transformative, liberative and therapeutic as well!
That’s something I call, the true-blue nobility of an incorrigible literary being!
And who pray, is that incorrigible literary being!?
You, me & we! 😊
PS: If you have a lovely blog, do send it across to me. Shall gladly link it to our blogspace on the web for the literary world out there!
