It is doubtless very agreeable to be born into privilege, to have the silver spoon, to be free of economic worries, to enjoy facilities denied to others. It took Mark Twain to set up a story in which the King was stripped of these benefits – even if only for a day – to discover how the other half or 99.99 per cent lived.
And the pauper made his discoveries too. In his time it took deceit, lying and cheating to get out of the economic prison that was the future for his kind. Oliver Twist discovered this for himself in Dickens’ story featuring Bill Sykes and a gang of apprentice starvelings led by Fagin.
In a brutal society in which an outlaw can have his ears cropped for being a poacher or a boy transported for stealing a loaf, penury spells enclosure, exclusion from polite society and dislocated ambition.
We have to remember the unhappy lot of many who read the Gospels for the first time. Few of Paul’s readers were wise, powerful or of noble birth. They could only imagine a life of leisure with opportunities to read, aspire and set to on a programme of self-improvement. John Hay’s poem ‘The Enchanted Shirt’ describes the King’s men searching for the shirt of a happy man; if the king could sleep in that one night all would be well. No such luck. The happy man they found had no shirt to his back.
But the pauper in Twain’s story was missing something: the opportunity to stand on his own two feet. Hay’s poem ‘Song of a Shirt’ makes the point.
ROBIN HOOD’S BAY
St Stephen’s church, Robin Hood’s Bay serves the parish of Fylingdales and was built in 1868-70 with a style set by the Oxford Movement. There is an older parish church that retains a three-decker pulpit. The Vicar is Simon Smale. The church is keen to provide patterns of worship acceptable to young people.
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