A SUDDEN STROKE OF KINDNESS.

A SUDDEN STROKE OF KINDNESS. Two years ago at Christmas, I posted on how moved I am by the characters in Dickens who are generous and kind (and for that reason are sometimes dismissed by the critics as mere plot devices) and on how my father told me that I might encounter kindness in a big city at any time. THE UP SERIES is confined by its rules to what actually happens to the children in the course of their lives. Yet there is one “plot twist” in the THE UP SERIES—in the lives of these people that we have been following— that was as dramatic as I ever seen in any movie or play—a stroke of kindness that emerges out of the blue. If it had been Dickens, critics might have dismissed it as a contrivance. But kindness happened. God bless us, every one!