Whatever Happened to Personality?

“Modern critics say that Charles Dickens exaggerated. He did not. He happened to live in a world that had not heard of standardization in men or material. What we now call eccentricity was in his day the normal expression of a man’s personality; it was an unself-conscious world; a world in which a man was not afraid of being himself. To-day, even in remote villages, outside influences react on a man and tend to whittle down personality to a common denominator. Here and there, however, tucked away in unlikely places, you may find the last outposts of the Dickens world…”

-- H. V. Morton in The Call of England