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sympathetic and keeping up pretences. Sleary's Horseriding, in Hard Timesis all the more
potent a symbol of imaginative vitality because of its rough and ready deficiencies. Mr
Gradgrind's world needs to be opposed not by an ideal but by something realistically
conceived. Don't we learn more about Pip and Mr Wopsle, in Great Expectations, through
the good-natured irony with which the latter's disastrous performance in Hamlet is
described?
Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or state
a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the
question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared
yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions, said "toss up
for it"; and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should
such fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was
encouraged with loud cries of "Hear, hear!". When he appeared with
his stocking disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage,
by one very neat fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got
up with a flat iron), a conversation took place in the gallery respecting
the paleness of his leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the
ghost had given him. On his taking the recorders - very like a little
black flute that had just been played in the orchestra and handed
out at the door - he was called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia.
When he recommended the player not to saw the air thus, the sulky
man said, "And don't you do it, neither; you're a deal worse than
him"\ And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted Mr Wopsle
on every one of these occasions.
It is not merely in his fiction that Dickens seems to have favoured things towards
which he could hold an ironic attitude. It is not merely a matter of literary technique.
As he came more and more to identify himself with his art, Dickens seems almost to have
sacrificed his own tastes to that art, to have taken delight in his own private life in things
best viewed ironically, to have organized his tastes to suit their literary expression. Despite
what he says, I can't help feeling that he liked Frith's portrait of himself, simply because
it gave him the opportunity to say it. This is what he did say: "It is a little too much
(to my thinking) as if my next-door neighbour were my deadly foe, uninsured, and I had
just received tidings of his house being afire...."
His taste in comic and sentimental songs receives its vindication in many places
in his works, but nowhere more so than in the conversation of Dick Swiveller. Here he is
saying goodby to the deceiving Miss Wackles:
"My boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea, but before
I pass this door I will say farewell to thee," murmured Dick, looking
gloomily upon her.
"Are you going?" said Miss Sophy, whose heart sunk within
her at the result of her stratagem, but who affected a light
indifference notwithstanding.
"Am I going!" echoed Dick bitterly. "Yes, I am. What then?"
"Nothing, except that it's very early," said Miss Sophy; "but
you are your own master, of course".
"I would that I had been my own mistress too", said Dick,
"before I had ever entertained a thought of you. Miss Wackles, I
believed you true, and I was blest in so believing, but now I mourn
that e'er I knew, a girl so fair yet so deceiving".
