14
guidance for five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at
last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was
altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination
had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced
by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a
monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.
"Grovelling sensualities." One forgets that Dickens is capable of that kind of
power, too. Deception belongs also to the Bounderby world, Bounderby lies
about his mother from the beginning. He boasts that he was brought up in a
gutter, and abandoned by his mother. Mrs. Sparsit lives on the empty pretences
of her past splendour (encouraged of course by Bounderby)and exploits him as
much as he exploits her - it's a great comic pair, in fact. A pair of mutual
deceivers
If Bounderby had been a conqueror, and Mrs. Sparsit a captive
Princess whom he took about as a feature in his state processions,
he could not have made a greater flourish with her than he habi
tually did. Just as it belonged to his boastfulness to depreciate
his own extraction, so it belonged to it to exalt Mrs. Sparsit's.
In the measure that he would not allow his own youth to have been
attended by a single favourable circumstance, he brightened Mrs.
Sparsit's juvenile career with every possible advantage, and
showered wagonloads of early roses all over that lady's path. "And
yet, Sir," he would say, "how does it turn out after all? Why, here
she is at a hundred a year (I give her a hundred, which she is
pleased to term handsome), keeping the house of Josiah Bounderby
of Coketown.'" (p. 43).
Dickens adds a littl further down: "It was one of the most exasperating attribute:
i
of Bounderby, that he not only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to
sing them. There was a moral infection of claptrap in him."
Beautiful phrase: There was a moral infection of claptrap in him. Infection.
Of a kind that too few politicians are aware of. It is a moral infection that
one is particularly conscious of in the idle aristocrat and cynic, James
Harthousewho
had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoon, and found it a bore; and
had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister
abroad, and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem,
and got bored there; and had then gone yachting about the world,
and got bored everywhere.
