Cup of Jo (Novel, vol. 1)

The lasting image of Jo that will not stop rattling around in my mind is the final image of Chapter 19, when, after an excruciating series of being kicked around and pushed off, told repeatedly to move on, and that no place is his, he sits on a corner near Blackfriar's Bridge and gazes up through the "red and violet-tinted cloud of smoke" to the cross at the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral. To Jo, it is emblematic of the confusion of the city, and to Dickens, of the ignorance and destitution of Jo, for the cross is "so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach." He will sit there, looking without understanding, the crowds streaming past him, until he is once again ordered to move on.

Yesterday, as I was walking around London, I looked out over theThames and saw, rising in the distance, the same cross that so befuddled Jo. I was at once giddy and in awe, contemplating in a rush all the historical and religious grandeur symbolized by the ancient cross atop the magnificent dome. I stood there and gazed at it on a perfectly clear day, and then remembered the scene where Jo does the same.

Jo's experience in London led me to consider my own experience in London, and in a larger sense, of my surroundings and environment wherever I be. Tourism is a funny phenomenon in this light. Whereas Jo moves on around London "stone blind and dumb" to every scrap of London life that goes on around him, I paid 11 pounds to take a bus from Oxford just to see the same objects he so blindly walked by. Obviously, with education, with class, comes the ability to be a tourist; but the monuments we both stare at are the same. It dawned on me that certain landmarks are held up as tourist attractions, and while I may know the history behind them or the significance of them, such knowledge derives almost solely from the long-ago classication of St. Paul's, or Buckingham Palace, or Big Ben, as culturally significant tourist attractions. I found myself wondering how much I really understood, and how ignorant I was to London. Only I'm here on a guise, as a tourist, whereas Jo was deposited here. But I have my symbols of class (camera, clothes, money) and this act of touring therefore spares me the critical scorn of native Londoners. Jo, on the other hand, draws its full ire.