isl98602iraaz:Considering Britain, and Dickens, at year’s end

Dec. 22, 2011, 11:39 a.m. EST
Considering Britain, and Dickens, at year’s end
Charles Dickens was a ‘careful man of business’
ByKim Hjelmgaard, MarketWatch

An American Civil War-era portrait of Charles Dickens. Duplicate reflects original photo.
LONDON (MarketWatch) — It’s been a tumultuous 12 months for Britain.
A year that is ending, if Prime Minister David Cameron gets his way, with the island nation perhaps more isolated on the grand European project than it has ever been.
On just about every measure, the health of Britain’s economy is compromised.
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Unemployment at the highest level in 17 years. Consumer lending still constrained. The Bank of England ever-poised to pump more money into financial markets. Steep public-sector cuts. A High Street that is weakened by cash-strapped consumers and persistently aggressive inflation.
The benchmark FTSE 100 index is off by 9% year over year.
That may not be as bad as the 20% ballpark losses that the French and Germans are nursing on their domestic indexes.
The Italians, for that matter, are down around 30%.
And in Athens, the Greek stock market is closing in on a 60% drop for 2011.
But it’s bad enough.
What’s more, it’s all the anecdotal evidence needed to suggest that Britain is headed back into recession in 2012.
This time last year, a comparison of independent forecasts compiled by Her Majesty’s Treasury produced a 2% growth forecast for Britain in 2011. That same comparison now stands at 0.9% for 2011. For 2012, it is 0.4%.
Thursday’s slight revision higher by the Office for National Statistics for third-quarter 2011 GDP to 0.6% could be a blip.
Lesser great expectations
It’s a good time, in fact, to reconsider Charles Dickens.
“A Christmas Carol” is relevant this time of year, naturally.
The novelist will be turning 200 in early February.
Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, of course, wakes up a changed man on Christmas morning.
A man transformed and suddenly attuned to joy, compassion and all that.
Obviously Dickens himself wrote from a manifestly different time than ours, but there are parallels to today.
He was an investor, for one.
And, according to the Dickens scholar Paul Schlicke, a pretty shrewd one: “A careful man of business, investing throughout his career in steady government, Russian, and Indian stock, railway paper, and property.”
Just how shrewd can be seen in what he left his heirs.
By the time he died, Dickens amassed a sum not far short of $2 million in present-day values.
Not bad for a man driven by social conscience.
More impressive, this accumulation took place against the backdrop of an array of 19th-century investments gone bad by the British government.

An illustration from Charles Dickens’s
novel ‘A Christmas Carol.’
Loans to the new South American nations for silver mines that would prove barren. Insurance swindles. A great Railway Mania that eventually came crashing down to earth.
“The early decades of the 19th century saw an intense public interest in the growing institutions of capitalism, with their potential for both investment and speculation. Most people, of course, had nothing to invest, but those with even modest property very easily yielded to the fever of speculation, and adjusted themselves to the seemingly inevitable ten-year cycles of boom, crisis and depression,” Schlicke has written.
Next year in Britain is bound to be a banner year for something.
It may not be the economy.
Below are some Dickens quotes that could ring true:
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six, result misery. — David Copperfield
Welcome poverty! Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! — David Copperfield
Why should I disguise what you know so well, but what the crowd never dream of? We companies are all birds of prey; mere birds of prey. The only question is, whether in serving our own turn, we can serve yours too; whether in double-lining our own nest, we can put a single living into yours. — Martin Chuzzlewit
So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began to contract a quantity of debt. — Great Expectations
A mania prevailed, a bubble burst . . . four hundred nobodies were ruined — Nicholas Nickleby
I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can’t beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it. — Our Mutual Friend
The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan’s god was Compound Interest. — Bleak House