microBoz

People often sneer at fans of TV soaps for ­ believing that the characters are ‘real’. But isn’t that the power of a good story — captivating the imagination ever since men and women huddled round fires in caves? Just for that short time, the characters are alive.

And what happens to them matters.

After all, people wrote in their hundreds to Charles Dickens when he ‘let’ Little Nell die in The Old Curiosity Shop. Some never forgave him. That’s because stories may entertain, but they still carry much more punch than mere entertainment.

Already impressed, beyond all telling, by the silent building and the peaceful beauty of the spot in which it stood—majestic age surrounded by perpetual youth—it seemed to her, when she heard these things, sacred to all goodness and virtue. It was another world, where sin and sorrow never came; a tranquil place of rest, where nothing evil entered.