Edgar S Werner The American Publisher and Printer

19th century printer, publisher, editor and pioneer in elocution and speech correction who founded the influential journal "The Voice'.  How Werner was connected to Kerala? During 1950s and 60s The Kerala State School Curriculam heavily integrated classic British literature for its English language and non-detailed text requirements.  Abridged versions of novels by Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist) along with plays of Shakespeare were staples in highschool forms.

The specific story of the accentric carrier Barkis proposing to David's nurse Peggotty through the little David via the message " Barkis is willing" was a widely used comedic chapter in Indian secondary school English readers across the various states throughout the mid-to-late 20th century. 

I searched the net and found the text published by Edgar S Werner.  But the teacher who took the class went beyond the text.  Because of his teaching influence, I later got an  unabridged copy of the book.  But because of many of the archaic terms and expression I could not comprehend the classic fully.  Then came the internet and Google Search.  I found that simply reading and leaving does not make any impression.  My Blog classics retold is the result of my reading.

The scene where Peggotty suddenly bursts through the hedges to say tearful goodbye to little David as he travels to Salem House in Barkis's cart is one of the most memorable and emotional moments in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. It is written in such a cinematic style that film versions of David Copperfield fail impress the readers.  Such scenes are abound in the novel. In this scene Peggotty does not speak a single word.  Instead the sheer force of her silent, breathless love is told entirely through that unforgettable physical description:

"She took me in both her arms and squeezed me to her stays until the pressure on my nose was extremely painful, though I never thought of that till afterwards when I found it very tender. Not a single word did Peggotty speak.  Releasing one of her arms, she put it down in her pocket to the elbow, and brought out some paper bags of cakes, which she crammed into my pockets, and a purse which she put into my hand, but not one word she say.  After another and final squeeze with both arms, she got down from the cart, and ran away, and my belief is and has always been without a solitary button on her gown.  I picked up one, of several of that rolling about, and treasured it as a keepsake for a long time."

Cinematic adaptations almost always fail to capture Dickens's hyper-specific visual imagery.  Whether it is the famous 1935 MGM classics, the 1999 BBC adaptation featuring a young Daniel Radcliffe or even the highly stylized The Personal History of David Copperfield by Armando lannucci.  It is not the fault of film makers; they conceive the scenes and create it.  We are there in the theatre to simply see it.  There is a distinct unmatched richness to the classics that makes it entirely satisfying to revisit them.

From the mid 1970s the Indian state board curricula underwent a phased systematic shift.  Radhakrishnan Commission of 1948 was of the opinion that English should eventually ceas to be the medium of higher education with Indian/regional languages taking its place.  But the real intention of a section of nationalists was to push Hindi to the vacuum.  Their hallucination was that one nation one language would integrate a union of different nationalities.  They were copying this myth of integration from the Russian example, but they were not there to see Soviet myth burst like a bubble. But by their strenous efforts multiple peoples of Hindi states lost their mother tongue.  Here, among the drab functional and structural English, the students missed the richness of Engish classics.  Our printer publisher lobbies are very much worried about the fatherhood of the vernacular, and of late, they are hopping around school premises with sweet Malayalam.

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