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There are offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields, offices of extreme wealth, which, were they common lodging-houses, would be instantly condemned by the County Council. Powells was such a one and Sir George had a reputed income of twenty thousand a year. At Powells the old Dickensian tradition was kept vigorously alive by every possible means. Dirt and gloom were omnipresent.
Doubtless it was unduly critical, even of the America of that day; yet curiously enough it may well be the text for a true reconciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, as in other things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself exaggerated. It is also true that, while it is over-emphasised, it is not allowed for.
Winkle, the Christmas guest of Mr. Wardle; and there is indeed something Dickensian in his union of domesticity with exuberance. He jumped about me, barking like a small battery, under the impression that I was going for a walk; but I could not, alas, take him with me on a stroll to Palestine.
In addition to his regular calling he filled or was supposed to fill the office of "town constable" and pound-keeper. A sort of village "Dogberry." Incidentally it might be mentioned that he also could have laid claim to be a "wictim of circumstances"; having but recently contracted much the same sort of hymeneal bargain as did the Dickensian character.
The unpretentious roadside inn still exists to-day, unaltered since the above-mentioned memorable occasion. It cherishes its Dickensian association by curiously and oddly announcing on its signboard that: "Charles Dickens and Party lunched here 1827. B. C. Hooper." It is within a mile of Berkeley Road Station on the Bristol Road, and about the same distance from the town of Berkeley.
Surely, this man with black whiskers and mustache was not just like the singing-master at Sugar-Grove school-house, who had "red-top hay on to his upper lip," and yet and yet "Gentlemen," said Parkins his Dickensian name would be Smirkins "I want to play a little game just for the fun of the thing. It is a trick with three cards. I put down three cards, face up.
For some years after we were more or less definitely in touch as a group, although later Peter and myself having drifted Eastward and hob-nobbing as a pair had been finding more and more in common and had more and more come to view Dick for what he was: a character of Dickensian, or perhaps still better, Cruikshankian, proportions and qualities.
The combination of Irvingesque romantic glamor and Dickensian bitter-sweet humor, applied to picturesquely novel material, with the addition of a trick ending, was fantastically popular. Harte's star was, briefly, in the ascendant. The East, however, was financially unappreciative. Harte wrote an unsuccessful novel and collaborated with Mark Twain on an unremunerative play.
The inn, however, where the post-chaise stopped to change horses is not mentioned by name, but may have been the Castle Hotel there; at any rate, the "Castle" has a Dickensian interest, for it was here that a public dinner was given to Dickens in December, 1858, when he was presented with a gold repeater watch of special construction as a mark of gratitude for his reading of the Christmas Carol, given a year previously in aid of the funds of the Coventry Institute.
There are other passages which make one think of George Eliot, who indeed might have been writing at the very time; there are even faint and faltering suggestions of Ibsenic "duty to ourselves." Mr. His mother, with something more of the Dickensian type-character, can stand by her unpleasant self, and came ten years before "the Campaigner."
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