My grandmother has a large library where among encyclopedias and dictionaries there are also many interesting books. She has a big collection of foreign literature including English authors. It's a pity that most of them are in Armenian and I couldn't read them in original. But my dear darling computer helps me and now I read them online. I read "Oliver Twist" and "David Copperfield" and I liked them - the Dickens heroes, I was one of them. I walked with them in dirty, muddy streets of old dark London, I was in the orphanhouse, I worked in the workhouse, I was poor and forgotten, I was disadvantaged and ignored. I was hopeless and helpless like them. While reading I lost the sence of reality and I wished they were my friends and I could help them. Then I understood: Dickens teaches us to have sympathy with the other people as well...
... There is a teenager girl who needs sympathy too. She is my schoolmate and lives next door in the same house I live. Her name is Armineh. She has nice green eyes which are very often wet. She is lonely and sad. She never plays in the yard and never goes on an excursion with the class. She isn't allowed. Her father is very strict and she can't do against his wishes. Even then, when from the balcony she sees him coming home, she hide herself quickly for she knows he will be angry. And her mother has no influence with her husband. When he is out the mother isn't allowed to open the door when somebody knocks at. Nobody in their family dares to make noise, to make a sound of footsteps when the father is at home. For every little reason Armineh is punished being grounded with no telephone, with no computer. I myself freeze before Armineh's father, Mr. Sahakyan because so cold, so indifferent is his face. Every day at nine his driver comes to take him to his office and I see that he hardly nods him. He never greets the neighbours and they say he is stonehearted. And it occured to me that Mr. Sahakyan is very much like Mr. Dombey (Ch. Dickens "Dombey and Son"). Like Florence she loves her father with unreturnable love. Like Florence - Mr. Dombey's daughter, Armineh needs her father's love and attention, needs encouraging and help. But Armineh's father wants to make his daughter a robot, a motionless machine, who must study very hard to get room at the top. He never takes care of his daughters feelings, of her opinion.
I wonder - how can a man of the twenty-first century be so like the man from the nineteenth century?
Mr. Sahakyan reminds me Mr. Dombey. I can't say that Mr. Dombey is a hero of the very meaning of the word. He is just one of the thousand Dickencian characters who are very realistic. Mr. Dombey is the result of his society and traditions of Victorian England. But what about Mr. Sahakyan? Is he nowdays Mr. Dombey?...
All the Dickens charachters, and Mr. Dombey too, are unforgettable, because they are thrudy discribed. Armenian readers know and read Dickens. He was famous in his lifetime and he is famous till now, too. And it is as true, as the Thames flows through London.