Chesterton makes between Thackeray and
Dickens, it is easy to see that he admires
the former, but loves the latter. Dickens
was the last voice of 'Merrie England'.
The topicality of Dickens's work might
have evaporated by 1906, but Chesterton
gave Dickens back to England; perhaps
not coincidentally, four years after the
foundation of The Dickens Fellowship.
Partly under his influence, Dickens was
able to grow - particularly for expatriate
English people - into the symbol of the
homeland, feeding memories of home and
cementing their communal kinship; one
need only think of those macabre, but in
this context highly significant pages from
Evelyn Waugh's 'A Handful of Dust'.
Whatever the changes the two world wars
brought to England, they were not enough
to bring about any essential change to this
special significance. The more everything
changed, the more Dickens remained
himself. An illusion, but a precious illusi
on.
In that same period, the Netherlands expe
rienced only one war, and of that only five
days of fighting. During the first world
war Holland was neutral. During the
second she was an occupied country. A
great deal has been written, and a great
deal of speculation has gone into the con
sequences of all this for our society. In
Holland the period between the two world
wars saw the culmination of a phenomenon
which had developed over the course of
many years. It is one of the most compli
cated phenomena in our society, and yet it
has only recently begun to be studied in
depth: the pillarisation, or compartmentali-
sation, of Dutch society - the division of
the nation along denominational lines.
Dutch political parties, the educational sy
stem and Holland's convoluted broadcas
ting system continue to be dominated by
these denominational divisions. As so
often before in Dutch history, in 1830,
1848, 1870 and 1917 - years of great
transformations elsewhere - here in the
Netherlands we were grateful to be able to
maintain those values and assumptions,
backed by Christian principles, which
were being attacked and destroyed abroad.
Thus, when the occupation ended, two
opposing forces emerged: one sought
restoration, while the other wanted change.
According to the first view, our younger
generation had become rootless, lacking
standards. The old strongholds of faith, of
Protestant and Catholic groups, no longer
provided them with a stable base. The
Resistance movement had briefly offered
the illusion of being able to cross the
boundaries - formerly unimaginable. But
in the anxiety caused by external threats
such as the loss of our former East Indian
colonies and the Cold War, people retur
ned to their former loyalties. The instituti
ons were still run by the older generation.
It was not until the Sixties that younger
people made their entrance into political
life. Resistance against this postwar resto
ration was only evident in the arts: in the
international Cobra movement, and in the
appearance of younger voices in literature,
such as Van het Reve and Hermans, and
the somewhat older Anna Blaman. She had
already made her debut before the war,
but she made her mark in 1948 with her
novel 'Eenzaam Avontuur' or Lonely
Adventure. These young artists were influ
enced by Céline and Sartre. Within the
young intellectual circles - the post-war
student generation - the work of the atheist
and anti-bourgeois essayist Ter Braak (who
died in 1940) was now widely read and
discussed for the first time.
Godfried Bomans had also briefly moved
in this circle; for a while, in fact, he had
even been an editor of the same Amster
dam student newspaper in which Ter
Braak had been involved.
Bomans experienced this environment as
chilly and uninviting, and hastily exchan-
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