Tweet
The fund promised high and unwavering annual returns, but you had to know someone to get in on it. And that was really all it took to attract credulous investors, that and the sterling reputation of the banker behind it, a financier revered in privileged circles as “the Man of the Age.”
“I’ve looked into it,” is how one investor reassured a friend who wondered what would happen if the fund should fail. “Name up everywhere, immense resources, high connections, government influence — can’t be done.”
It’s not Bernard L. Madoff’s fund, it’s the one created — and wrecked — by Mr. Merdle, the legendary London banker who brings masses of wealthy, well-meaning people to ruin in Charles Dickens’s classic “Little Dorrit.” And that uncanny parallel is one of many reasons that this adaptation by Andrew Davies, which begins on PBS this Sunday, is so timely.
Mr. Davies, whose interpretations of the classics include the 1995 BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice,” as well as “Middlemarch” and “Vanity Fair,” has become the Cecil B. DeMille of the A.P. English canon. Here he flushes out the similarities between The City of Victorian London and 21st-century Wall Street without losing sight of the larger vision of Dickens’s story.
“Little Dorrit” is particularly apt and enjoyable at this moment in history because the story focuses intently on something deeper and more universal than real estate bubbles or bank runs: unfairness.
And there are so many variations on injustice in the tale. Matthew Macfadyen, who starred in “MI-5” and the film version of “Pride and Prejudice,” plays Arthur Clennam, a fair-minded businessman who returns to England after decades in China and finds himself stymied by the Office of Circumlocution, a suffocating, impenetrable government agency.
William Dorrit, played magnificently by Tom Courtenay, is the title heroine’s father, a man of pride and breeding who has spent more than 20 years in the infamous Marshalsea debtors’ prison for unpaid bills he cannot remember, let alone ever repay, while wealthier, better-connected cheats and fat cats elude creditors in government sinecures, private clubs and villas overseas — too fat to fail.
LITTLE DORRIT
On most PBS stations on Sunday nights through April 26 (check local listings).
http://tv.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/art...8dorr.html?hpw
“I’ve looked into it,” is how one investor reassured a friend who wondered what would happen if the fund should fail. “Name up everywhere, immense resources, high connections, government influence — can’t be done.”
It’s not Bernard L. Madoff’s fund, it’s the one created — and wrecked — by Mr. Merdle, the legendary London banker who brings masses of wealthy, well-meaning people to ruin in Charles Dickens’s classic “Little Dorrit.” And that uncanny parallel is one of many reasons that this adaptation by Andrew Davies, which begins on PBS this Sunday, is so timely.
Mr. Davies, whose interpretations of the classics include the 1995 BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice,” as well as “Middlemarch” and “Vanity Fair,” has become the Cecil B. DeMille of the A.P. English canon. Here he flushes out the similarities between The City of Victorian London and 21st-century Wall Street without losing sight of the larger vision of Dickens’s story.
“Little Dorrit” is particularly apt and enjoyable at this moment in history because the story focuses intently on something deeper and more universal than real estate bubbles or bank runs: unfairness.
And there are so many variations on injustice in the tale. Matthew Macfadyen, who starred in “MI-5” and the film version of “Pride and Prejudice,” plays Arthur Clennam, a fair-minded businessman who returns to England after decades in China and finds himself stymied by the Office of Circumlocution, a suffocating, impenetrable government agency.
William Dorrit, played magnificently by Tom Courtenay, is the title heroine’s father, a man of pride and breeding who has spent more than 20 years in the infamous Marshalsea debtors’ prison for unpaid bills he cannot remember, let alone ever repay, while wealthier, better-connected cheats and fat cats elude creditors in government sinecures, private clubs and villas overseas — too fat to fail.
LITTLE DORRIT
On most PBS stations on Sunday nights through April 26 (check local listings).
http://tv.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/art...8dorr.html?hpw