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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Because," said Bart, excited by his effort and danger, "because to myself I staked all my future on reaching you in that old hulk, and I won. Had it sunk, I had made up my mind to go with her, and, like Mr. Mantalini, in Dickens's last novel, 'become a body, a demnition moist unpleasant body."
The disgrace, if disgrace it could be called, lies only in ignorance. A number of years ago a young man who was the prospective heir to a fortune this charming story is in Charles Dickens's wonderful novel, "Great Expectations" went up to London for the express purpose of learning to be a gentleman.
Almost everything is calculated to assert and re-assert the savage morality of Dickens's protest against a particular social evil. The whole theme is that which another Englishman as jovial as Dickens defined shortly and finally as the law's delay. The fog of the first chapter never lifts. In this twilight he traced wonderful shapes.
And the enthusiasm thus awakened among Charles Dickens's first London audience can hardly be wondered at, when we recall to mind Thackeray's expression of opinion in regard to that very same story of the Christmas Carol immediately after its publication, when he wrote in Fraser, July, 1844, under his pseudonym of M. A. Titmarsh: "It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man and woman who-reads it a personal kindness;" adding, "The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, 'God bless him!" Precisely in the same way, it may here be said, in regard to that first night of his own public reading of it in St.
He quotes none: he says "I was told," orally, that is. When he writes, five years later , "Landless was, I THINK, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer," he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of Dickens's, but to a defective memory; and he knows it. He says that a nephew was to be murdered by an uncle. The criminal was to confess in the condemned cell.
Of the two, perhaps, the latter, still existing, seems to fit Dickens's description best. The charming Kentish village of Cobham was familiar to Dickens in his early boyhood days, as was the whole delightful countryside surrounding it. That he loved it throughout his whole life there is ample evidence in his letters.
Great Expectations, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth.
When we stopped to change horses, the quiet was almost oppressive. Soon after nine we espied the welcome lantern of Gad's Hill Place and the open gates. And so ended Dickens's last pilgrimage to Canterbury. There was another interesting spot near Gad's Hill which was one of Dickens's haunts, and this was the "Druid-stone," as it is called, at Maidstone.
Sources of history, guides of philosophical retrospection, they may come some time to be; yet one cannot check a feeling of pity for the future historian who, in searching the "Pickwick Papers" for antiquities, finds himself bothered and confused by all the undisciplined witches of Mr. Dickens's imagination.
He left the University in 1847. From his fourteenth to his twenty-first year the books that he read with the most profit were Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," under the influence of which he wrote his first story, Pushkin, Schiller's "Robbers," Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches;" and to a less degree he was affected by the New Testament, Rousseau, Dickens's "David Copperfield," and the historical works of the American Prescott.
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