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near home she might take farewell of me and deprive me of the
opportunity, I avoided the most frequented ways and took the most
intricate. Thus it was not until we arrived in the street itself that
she knew where we were. Clapping her hands with pleasure, and
running on before me for a short distance, my little acquaintance
stopped at a door, and remaining on the step till I came up, knocked
at it when I joined her.
A part of this door was of glass, unprotected by any shutter;
which I did not observe, at first, for all was very dark and silent
within, and I was anxious (as indeed the child was also) for an answer
to her summons. When she had knocked twice or thrice, there was a
noise as if some person were moving inside, and at length a faint light
appeared through the glass which, as it approached very slowly - the
bearer having to make his way through a great many scattered articles
- enabled me to see, both what kind of person it was who advanced,
and what kind of place it was through which he came.
He was a little old man with long grey hair, whose face and
figure, as he held the light above his head and looked before him as
he approached, I could plainly see. Though much altered by age, I
fancied I could recognise in his spare and slender form something of
that delicate mould which I had noticed in the child. Their bright blue
eyes were certainly alike, but his face was so deeply furrowed, and
so very full of care, that here all resemblance ceased.
The place through which he made his way at leisure, was one
of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch
in odd corners of this town, and to hide their musty treasures from
the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail
standing like ghosts in armour, here and there; fantastic carvings
brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds;
distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry,
and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams. The
haggard aspect of the little old man was wonderfully suited to the
place; he might have groped among old churches, and tombs, and
deserted houses, and gathered all the spoils with his own hands. There
was nothing in the whole collection but was in keeping with himself;
nothing that looked older or more worn than he.
But before moving from the gentle familiar Gothicism of this to consider evidence
for the anti-Romantic Dickens in the same novel, let me say in a summary fashion that it
seems to me reasonable to postulate that Dickens's Romanticism draws on three poetic
sources: from the blackest parts of the blackest, most Gothicky plays of Shakespeare -
principally Hamlet and Macbethboth plays with ghosts and frequent inspirations for
epigraphs and snatches of quotation in the early Gothic novelists; from familiar pre-
Romantic anthology pieces of eighteenth-century poetry (Gray's "Elegy", Goldsmith's "The
Deserted Village", the more accessible popular bits of Pope), which contribute to the soft-
Romantic side of Dickens; and more recent Romantic poetry, possibly some Wordsworth,
but mainly Shelley and Byron, the more lugubrious texts of the second-generation Romantics,
their charnel-house poetry, and the poetry of ruins and lost illusions. This latter is the
same kind of poetry which inspired the young Brontes. One might have expected to find
the influence of Blake, since he and Dickens share a point of view towards mercantile
society and the repressions that it enforces, both social and psychological, but I don't
