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Such guests in a story may be uninvited, but they are never de trop. They earn their night's lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the marked truth about Our Mutual Friend, as a stage in the singular latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a slowly dying fire.
Fired by his new resolve, Jack settled himself in a cozy corner and lighted a pipe. With a stimulating interest he watched Dickens, who had finished his black-and-white, and was doing a water color from a sketch made that summer at Walberswick, a quaint fishing village on the Suffolk coast.
Who in the dickens do you cal'late she is?" That question was answered the very next day. Bos'n, carefully dressed by Georgianna under the captain's supervision, and weighted down with advice and counsel from the latter, started for the schoolhouse at a quarter to nine. Only a sense of shame kept Captain Cy from walking to school with her. He spent a miserable forenoon.
We commenced put'n' down a shaft, 'n' Tom Quartz he begin to wonder what in the Dickens it was all about. He hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, 'n' he was all upset, as you may say he couldn't come to a right understanding of it no way it was too many for him. He was down on it, too, you bet you he was down on it powerful 'n' always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness out.
His father, the late Mr John Dickens, in the earlier part of his life, enjoyed a post in the Navy Pay Department, the duties of which required that he should reside from time to time in different seaports: now at Plymouth, now at Portsmouth, and then at Sheerness.
Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social schools that have gone forward since he died.
Dickens also thus graphically depicts the unique experience of being carried over the mountain peaks on the aerial railway: "There are ten inclined planes; five ascending and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands.
As he paused on the step he half turned, and for the first time noticed the facial expression of his faithful follower. "What the dickens are you looking like that for?" he demanded. "I've been surprised, sir," conceded Mr. Wilks; "surprised and astonished." Wrath blazed again in the captain's eyes and set lines in his forehead. He was being pitied by a steward!
"Administrative Reform," such was the cry of the moment, and Dickens uttered it with the full strength of his lungs. He attended a great meeting held at Drury Lane Theatre on the 27th of June, in furtherance of the cause, and made what he declared to be his first political speech. He spoke on the subject again at the dinner of the Theatrical Fund.
His father and Lamert quarrelled about something about what, Dickens seems never to have known and he was sent home. Mrs. Dickens acted the part of the peacemaker on the next day, probably feeling that amid the shadowy expectations on which she and her husband had subsisted for so long, even six or seven shillings a week was something tangible, and not to be despised.
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