the hardships that might still be in store for him, sharpened by what he
had gone through; and this, though in its effect for the present
imperfectly understood, became by degrees a passionate resolve, even
while he was yielding to circumstancesnot to be what circumstances
were conspiring to make him. All that was involved in what he had
suffered and sunk into, could not have been known to him at the time;
but it was plain enough later, as we see; and in conversation with me
after the revelation was made, he used to find, at extreme points in his
life, the explanation of himself in those early trials. He had derived
great good from them, but not without alloy. The fixed and eager
determination, the restless and resistless energy, which opened to him
opportunities of escape from many mean environments, not by turning off
from any path of duty, but by resolutely rising to such excellence or
distinction as might be attainable in it, brought with it some
disadvantage among many noble advantagesOf this he was himself aware,
but not to the full extent. What it was that in society made him often
uneasy, shrinkings and over-sensitive, he knew; but al] the danger he
ran in bearing down and over-mastering the feeling, he did not know. A
too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to
the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self imposed
burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that
direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and
aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone
of fiercenesssomething in his nature that made his resolves
insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed.
So rare were these manifestationshowever, and so little did they
prejudice a character as entirely open and generous as it was all times
ardent and impetuous, that only very infrequently, toward the close of
the middle term of a friendship which lasted without the interruption of
a day for more than three-and-thirty years, were the ever unfavourably
presented to me. But there they were; and when I have seen strangely
present, at such chance intervalsa stern and even cold isolation of
self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost feminine and the
most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as though his
habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk, for the time
under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had dealt to him
in those early years. On more than one occasion indeed 1 had
confirmation of this. "I must entreat you, he wrote to me in June 1862,
to pause for an instant, and go back to what You know of my childish
days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something of the
character formed in me then, and lost under happier circumstances
should have reappeared in the last five years. The never to be forgotten
misery of that old time, bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a
certain ill-clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the
never to be forgotten misery of this later time.
Terecht concludeerde Lucas: the shabby genteel people, about whom he know, from
whom he came". En wij mogen er aan toevoegen whom he belonged to".
BRONNEN
1John Lucas, Charles Dickens; The Major Novels, Penquin Books, 1952, p.9.
2. Thee Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 11
3. Bleak House, ch.6.
4. Little Dorrit Book I, ch. 12.
5. The Pickwick Papers ch.43.
6. David Copperfield ch. 27.
7. Albion's Peopie, English Society 1714-18T5. - London, New York Longman Group UK Limited,
1992. - 269p., index - ISBN 0-582-08916-6.
