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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
By Charles Dickens
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Contents
Book the First—Recalled to Life
CHAPTER I. The Period
CHAPTER II. The Mail
CHAPTER III. The Night Shadows
CHAPTER IV. The Preparation
CHAPTER V. The Wine-shop
CHAPTER VI. The Shoemaker
Book the Second—the Golden Thread
CHAPTER I. Five Years Later
CHAPTER II. A Sight
CHAPTER III. A Disappointment
CHAPTER IV. Congratulatory
CHAPTER V. The Jackal
CHAPTER VI. Hundreds of People
CHAPTER VII. Monseigneur in Town
CHAPTER VIII. Monseigneur in the Country
CHAPTER IX. The Gorgon’s Head
CHAPTER X. Two Promises
CHAPTER XI. A Companion Picture
CHAPTER XII. The Fellow of Delicacy
CHAPTER XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy
CHAPTER XIV. The Honest Tradesman
CHAPTER XV. Knitting
CHAPTER XVI. Still Knitting
CHAPTER XVII. One Night
CHAPTER XVIII. Nine Days
CHAPTER XIX. An Opinion
CHAPTER XX. A Plea
CHAPTER XXI. Echoing Footsteps
CHAPTER XXII. The Sea Still Rises
CHAPTER XXIII. Fire Rises
CHAPTER XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock
Book the Third—the Track of a Storm
CHAPTER I. In Secret
CHAPTER II. The Grindstone
CHAPTER III. The Shadow
CHAPTER IV. Calm in Storm
CHAPTER V. The Wood-Sawyer
CHAPTER VI. Triumph
CHAPTER VII. A Knock at the Door
CHAPTER VIII. A Hand at Cards
CHAPTER IX. The Game Made
CHAPTER X. The Substance of the Shadow
CHAPTER XI. Dusk
CHAPTER XII. Darkness
CHAPTER XIII. Fifty-two
CHAPTER XIV. The Knitting Done
CHAPTER XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever
Book the First—Recalled to Life
CHAPTER I.The Period
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season
of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we
had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going
direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short,
the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest
authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a
fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than
crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that
things in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as
at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made
for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost
had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages,
as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in
originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of
events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of
British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more
important to the human race than any communications yet received through
any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister
of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill,
making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian
pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements
as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with
pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the
rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his
view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough
that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees,
when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate,
to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certa...
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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
[Illustration]
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens
Contents
CHAPTER I. THE DAWN
CHAPTER II. A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO
CHAPTER III. THE NUNS’ HOUSE
CHAPTER IV. MR. SAPSEA
CHAPTER V. MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND
CHAPTER VI. PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER
CHAPTER VII. MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE
CHAPTER VIII. DAGGERS DRAWN
CHAPTER IX. BIRDS IN THE BUSH
CHAPTER X. SMOOTHING THE WAY
CHAPTER XI. A PICTURE AND A RING
CHAPTER XII. A NIGHT WITH DURDLES
CHAPTER XIII. BOTH AT THEIR BEST
CHAPTER XIV. WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?
CHAPTER XV. IMPEACHED
CHAPTER XVI. DEVOTED
CHAPTER XVII. PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL
CHAPTER XVIII. A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM
CHAPTER XIX. SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL
CHAPTER XX. A FLIGHT
CHAPTER XXI. A RECOGNITION
CHAPTER XXII. A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON
CHAPTER XXIII. THE DAWN AGAIN
THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
[Illustration]
Rochester castle
CHAPTER I.
THE DAWN
An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower
be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can
that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and
it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and
who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the
impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals
clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand
scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew
flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous
colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises
in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the
grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of
a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague period of
drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus
fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling
frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the meanest and closest of
small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain, the light of early day steals
in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon
a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also
dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a
haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a
kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean
hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a
lamp to show him what he sees of her.
“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper.
“Have another?”
He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.
“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,”
the woman goes on, as she chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my
head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack,
is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming
in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye, deary. Ye’ll remember
like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle high just
now? More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful! And ye’ll
remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the court;
but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing it?
Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?”
She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it, inhales
much of its contents.
“O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready
for ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off! I
see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have another
ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay
according.’ O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles, ye
see, deary—this is one—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I
takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I
fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year
afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it
takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.”
She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her
face.
He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone, draws
back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three companions. He
notices that the...
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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
THE PICKWICK PAPERS
By Charles Dickens
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CONTENTS
THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK
CLUB CHAPTER I. THE
PICKWICKIANS CHAPTER II. THE
FIRST DAY’S JOURNEY, AND THE FIRST EVENING’S ADVENTURES; WITH THEIR
CONSEQUENCES CHAPTER III. A
NEW ACQUAINTANCE—THE STROLLER’S TALE; A DISAGREEABLE INTERRUPTION,
AND AN UNPLEASANT ENCOUNTER CHAPTER
IV. A FIELD DAY AND BIVOUAC—MORE NEW FRIENDS
CHAPTER V. A SHORT ONE—SHOWING,
AMONG OTHER MATTERS CHAPTER VI. AN
OLD-FASHIONED CARD-PARTY—THE CLERGYMAN’S VERSES CHAPTER VII. HOW MR. WINKLE,
INSTEAD OF SHOOTING AT THE PIGEON
CHAPTER VIII. STRONGLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE POSITION
CHAPTER IX. A
DISCOVERY AND A CHASE CHAPTER X.
CLEARING UP ALL DOUBTS (IF ANY EXISTED) CHAPTER XI. INVOLVING ANOTHER
JOURNEY, AND AN ANTIQUARIAN DISCOVERY
CHAPTER XII. DESCRIPTIVE OF A VERY IMPORTANT PROCEEDING
CHAPTER XIII. SOME
ACCOUNT OF EATANSWILL; OF THE STATE OF PARTIES CHAPTER XIV. COMPRISING A BRIEF
DESCRIPTION OF THE COMPANY CHAPTER
XV. IN WHICH IS GIVEN A FAITHFUL PORTRAITURE
CHAPTER XVI. TOO FULL OF
ADVENTURE TO BE BRIEFLY DESCRIBED
CHAPTER XVII. SHOWING THAT AN ATTACK OF RHEUMATISM
CHAPTER XVIII. BRIEFLY
ILLUSTRATIVE OF TWO POINTS CHAPTER
XIX. A PLEASANT DAY WITH AN UNPLEASANT TERMINATION
CHAPTER XX. SHOWING HOW DODSON
AND FOGG WERE MEN OF BUSINESS
CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH THE OLD MAN LAUNCHES FORTH
CHAPTER XXII. MR. PICKWICK
JOURNEYS TO IPSWICH AND MEETS WITH A ROMANTIC CHAPTER XXIII. IN WHICH MR. SAMUEL
WELLER BEGINS TO DEVOTE HIS ENERGIES
CHAPTER XXIV. WHEREIN MR. PETER MAGNUS GROWS JEALOUS
CHAPTER XXV. SHOWING,
AMONG A VARIETY OF PLEASANT MATTERS, HOW MAJESTIC CHAPTER XXVI. WHICH CONTAINS A
BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE PROGRESS
CHAPTER XXVII. SAMUEL WELLER MAKES A PILGRIMAGE TO
DORKING CHAPTER XXVIII. A
GOOD-HUMOURED CHRISTMAS CHAPTER
CHAPTER XXIX. THE STORY OF THE GOBLINS WHO STOLE A
SEXTON CHAPTER XXX. HOW
THE PICKWICKIANS MADE AND CULTIVATED THE ACQUAINTANCE CHAPTER XXXI. WHICH IS ALL ABOUT
THE LAW, AND SUNDRY GREAT AUTHORITIES
CHAPTER XXXII. DESCRIBES, FAR MORE FULLY THAN THE COURT
NEWSMAN EVER CHAPTER XXXIII. MR.
WELLER THE ELDER DELIVERS SOME CRITICAL SENTIMENTS CHAPTER XXXIV. IS WHOLLY DEVOTED
TO A FULL AND FAITHFUL REPORT
CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH MR. PICKWICK THINKS HE HAD BETTER
GO TO BATH CHAPTER XXXVI. THE
CHIEF FEATURES OF WHICH WILL BE FOUND
CHAPTER XXXVII. HONOURABLY ACCOUNTS FOR MR. WELLER’S
ABSENCE CHAPTER XXXVIII. HOW
MR. WINKLE, WHEN HE STEPPED OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN CHAPTER XXXIX. MR. SAMUEL WELLER,
BEING INTRUSTED WITH A MISSION
CHAPTER XL. INTRODUCES MR. PICKWICK TO A NEW AND NOT
UNINTERESTING SCENE CHAPTER XLI.
WHAT BEFELL MR. PICKWICK WHEN HE GOT INTO THE FLEET
CHAPTER XLII. ILLUSTRATIVE,
LIKE THE PRECEDING ONE, OF THE OLD PROVERB CHAPTER XLIII. SHOWING HOW Mr.
SAMUEL WELLER GOT INTO DIFFICULTIES
CHAPTER LXIV. TREATS OF DIVERS LITTLE MATTERS WHICH
OCCURRED CHAPTER XLIV. DESCRIPTIVE
OF AN AFFECTING INTERVIEW CHAPTER
XLVI. RECORDS A TOUCHING ACT OF DELICATE FEELING
CHAPTER XLVII. IS CHIEFLY
DEVOTED TO MATTERS OF BUSINESS
CHAPTER XLVIII. RELATES HOW MR. PICKWICK, WITH THE
ASSISTANCE OF SAMUEL CHAPTER XLIX.
CONTAINING THE STORY OF THE BAGMAN’S UNCLE CHAPTER L. HOW MR. PICKWICK SPED
UPON HIS MISSION CHAPTER LI. IN
WHICH MR. PICKWICK ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE CHAPTER LII. INVOLVING A SERIOUS
CHANGE IN THE WELLER FAMILY CHAPTER
LIII. COMPRISING THE FINAL EXIT OF MR. JINGLE AND JOB
TROTTER CHAPTER LIV. CONTAINING
SOME PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO THE DOUBLE KNOCK CHAPTER LV. MR. SOLOMON PELL,
ASSISTED BY A SELECT COMMITTEE
CHAPTER LVI. AN IMPORTANT CONFERENCE TAKES PLACE
CHAPTER LVII. IN WHICH THE
PICKWICK CLUB IS FINALLY DISSOLVED
DETAILED CONTENTS
1. The Pickwickians 2. The first Day’s Journey, and the first
Evening’s Adventures; with their Consequences 3. A new
Acquaintance—The Stroller’s Tale—A disagreeable
...
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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1914 Chapman & Hall edition of
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Master Humphrey’s
Clock” by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK
Charles Dickens
p.
xiDEDICATION OF
“MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK”
TO
SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQUIRE.
My Dear Sir,
Let me have my Pleasures of Memory in connection with
this book, by dedicating it to a Poet whose writings (as all the
world knows) are replete with generous and earnest feeling; and
to a man whose daily life (as all the world does not know) is one
of active sympathy with the poorest and humblest of his kind.
Your faithful friend,
CHARLES DICKENS.
ADDRESS BY CHARLES DICKENS.
4th April, 1840.
Master Humphrey earnestly hopes, (and is almost tempted to
believe,) that all degrees of readers, young or old, rich or
poor, sad or merry, easy of amusement or difficult to entertain,
may find something agreeable in the face of his old clock.
That, when they have made its acquaintance, its voice may sound
cheerfully in their ears, and be suggestive of none but pleasant
thoughts. That they may come to have favourite and familiar
associations connected with its name, and to look for it as for a
welcome friend.
From week to week, then, Master Humphrey will set his clock,
trusting that while it counts the hours, it will sometimes cheat
them of their heaviness, and that while it marks the thread of
Time, it will scatter a few slight flowers in the Old
Mower’s path.
Until the specified period arrives, and he can enter freely
upon that confidence with his readers which he is impatient to
maintain, he may only bid them a short farewell, and look forward
to their next meeting.
p.
xivPREFACE TO THE FIRST VOLUME
When the Author commenced this
Work, he proposed to himself three objects—
First. To establish a periodical, which should enable
him to present, under one general head, and not as separate and
distinct publications, certain fictions that he had it in
contemplation to write.
Secondly. To produce these Tales in weekly numbers,
hoping that to shorten the intervals of communication between
himself and his readers, would be to knit more closely the
pleasant relations they had held, for Forty Months.
Thirdly. In the execution of this weekly task, to have
as much regard as its exigencies would permit, to each story as a
whole, and to the possibility of its publication at some distant
day, apart from the machinery in which it had its origin.
The characters of Master Humphrey and his three friends, and
the little fancy of the clock, were the results of these
considerations. When he sought to interest his readers in
those who talked, and read, and listened, he revived Mr. Pickwick
and his humble friends; not with any intention of re-opening an
exhausted and abandoned mine, but to connect them in the thoughts
of those whose favourites they had been, with the tranquil
enjoyments of Master Humphrey.
It was never the intention of the Author to make the Members
of Master Humphrey’s clock, active agents in the stories
they are supposed to relate. Having brought himself in the
commencement of his undertaking to feel an interest in these
quiet creatures, and to imagine them in their chamber of p. xvmeeting,
eager listeners to all he had to tell, the Author hoped—as
authors will—to succeed in awakening some of his own
emotion in the bosoms of his readers. Imagining Master
Humphrey in his chimney corner, resuming night after night the
narrative,—say, of the Old Curiosity
Shop—picturing to himself the various sensations of his
hearers—thinking how Jack Redburn might incline to poor
Kit, and perhaps lean too favourably even towards the lighter
vices of Mr. Richard Swiveller—how the deaf gentleman would
have his favourite and Mr. Miles his—and how all these
gentle spirits would trace some faint reflexion in their past
lives in the varying currents of the tale—he has insensibly
fallen into the belief that they are present to his readers as
they are to him, and has forgotten that, like one whose vision is
disordered, he may be conjuring up bright figures when there is
nothing but empty space.
The short papers which are to be found at the beginning of the
volume were indispensable to the form of publication and the
limited extent of each number, as no story of length or interest
could be begun until “The Clock was wound up and fairly
going.”
The Author would fain hope that there are not many who would
disturb Master Humphrey and his friends in their seclusion; who
would have them forego their present enjoyments, to exchange
those confidences with each other, the absence of which is the
foundation of their mutual trust. For when their occupation
is gone, when their tales are ended, and but their personal
histories remain, the chimney corner will be growing cold, and
the clock will be about to stop for ever.
One other word in his own person, and he returns to the more
gra...
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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST’S BARGAIN
CHAPTER I
The Gift Bestowed
Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be
true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as
right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong
so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while
to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be
fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; “but
that’s no rule,” as the ghost of Giles
Scroggins says in the ballad.
The dread word, Ghost, recalls
me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent
of my present claim for everybody is, that they were so far
right. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant
eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although
well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like
tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been,
through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating
of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he
looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful,
gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund
never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and
time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might
have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and
grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to
set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the
voice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and
part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew, far and
wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and
hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who
that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded
by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded
lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of
spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon
the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the
reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at
heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to
give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who
that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his
chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin
mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have
said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?
Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed
that everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he
lived on haunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,—an old,
retired part of an ancient endowment for students, once a brave
edifice, planted in an open place, but now the obsolete whim of
forgotten architects; smoke-age-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on
every side by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, like
an old well, with stones and bricks; its small quadrangles, lying
down in very pits formed by the streets and buildings, which, in
course of time, had been constructed above its heavy chimney
stacks; its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, which
deigned to droop so low when it was very feeble and the weather
very moody; its grass-plots, struggling with the mildewed earth
to be grass, or to win any show of compromise; its silent
pavements, unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the
observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked down from
the upper world, wondering what nook it was; its sun-dial in a
little bricked-up corner, where no sun had straggled for a
hundred years, but where, in compensation for the sun’s
neglect, the snow would lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else,
and the black east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when
in all other places it was silent and still.
His dwelling, at its heart and core—within
doors—at his fireside—was so lowering and old, so
crazy, yet so strong, with its worm-eaten beams of wood in the
ceiling, and its sturdy floor shelving downward to the great oak
chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the
town yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, yet so
thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door
was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and
empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in
the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches were
half-buried in the earth.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in
the dead winter time.
When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, with the going
down of the blurred sun. When it was just so dark, as that
the forms of thin...
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Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from Charles Scribner’s Sons “Works of
Charles Dickens” edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THE CHIMES
A Goblin Story
OF
SOME BELLS THAT RANG AN OLD YEAR OUT
AND A NEW YEAR IN
CHAPTER I—First Quarter.
There are not many people—and as it is desirable that a
story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual
understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I
confine this observation neither to young people nor to little
people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and
big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down
again—there are not, I say, many people who would care to
sleep in a church. I don’t mean at sermon-time in
warm weather (when the thing has actually been done, once or
twice), but in the night, and alone. A great multitude of
persons will be violently astonished, I know, by this position,
in the broad bold Day. But it applies to Night. It
must be argued by night, and I will undertake to maintain it
successfully on any gusty winter’s night appointed for the
purpose, with any one opponent chosen from the rest, who will
meet me singly in an old churchyard, before an old church-door;
and will previously empower me to lock him in, if needful to his
satisfaction, until morning.
For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and
round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of
trying, with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and
seeking out some crevices by which to enter. And when it
has got in; as one not finding what it seeks, whatever that may
be, it wails and howls to issue forth again: and not content with
stalking through the aisles, and gliding round and round the
pillars, and tempting the deep organ, soars up to the roof, and
strives to rend the rafters: then flings itself despairingly upon
the stones below, and passes, muttering, into the vaults.
Anon, it comes up stealthily, and creeps along the walls, seeming
to read, in whispers, the Inscriptions sacred to the Dead.
At some of these, it breaks out shrilly, as with laughter; and at
others, moans and cries as if it were lamenting. It has a
ghostly sound too, lingering within the altar; where it seems to
chaunt, in its wild way, of Wrong and Murder done, and false Gods
worshipped, in defiance of the Tables of the Law, which look so
fair and smooth, but are so flawed and broken. Ugh!
Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly round the fire! It has
an awful voice, that wind at Midnight, singing in a church!
But, high up in the steeple! There the foul blast roars
and whistles! High up in the steeple, where it is free to
come and go through many an airy arch and loophole, and to twist
and twine itself about the giddy stair, and twirl the groaning
weathercock, and make the very tower shake and shiver! High
up in the steeple, where the belfry is, and iron rails are ragged
with rust, and sheets of lead and copper, shrivelled by the
changing weather, crackle and heave beneath the unaccustomed
tread; and birds stuff shabby nests into corners of old oaken
joists and beams; and dust grows old and grey; and speckled
spiders, indolent and fat with long security, swing idly to and
fro in the vibration of the bells, and never loose their hold
upon their thread-spun castles in the air, or climb up
sailor-like in quick alarm, or drop upon the ground and ply a
score of nimble legs to save one life! High up in the
steeple of an old church, far above the light and murmur of the
town and far below the flying clouds that shadow it, is the wild
and dreary place at night: and high up in the steeple of an old
church, dwelt the Chimes I tell of.
They were old Chimes, trust me. Centuries ago, these
Bells had been baptized by bishops: so many centuries ago, that
the register of their baptism was lost long, long before the
memory of man, and no one knew their names. They had had
their Godfathers and Godmothers, these Bells (for my own part, by
the way, I would rather incur the responsibility of being
Godfather to a Bell than a Boy), and had their silver mugs no
doubt, besides. But Time had mowed down their sponsors, and
Henry the Eighth had melted down their mugs; and they now hung,
nameless and mugless, in the church-tower.
Not speechless, though. Far from it. They had
clear, loud, lusty, sounding voices, had these Bells; and far and
wide they might be heard upon the wind. Much too sturdy
Chimes were they, to be dependent on the pleasure of the wind,
moreover; for, fighting gallantly against it when it took an
adverse whim, they would pour their cheerful notes into a
listening ear right royally; and bent on being heard on stormy
nights, by some poor mother watching a sick child, or some lone
wife whose husband was at sea, they had been sometimes known to
beat a blustering Nor’ Wester; aye, ‘all to
fits,’ as Toby Veck said;—for though they chose to
call him Trotty Veck, his n...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1867/68 Chapman and Hall Works of
Charles Dickens, Volume 4, Christmas Books by
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
Public domain book cover
THE BATTLE OF LIFE
p. 239Part
the First
Once upon a time, it matters little
when, and in stalwart England, it matters little where, a fierce
battle was fought. It was fought upon a long summer day
when the waving grass was green. Many a wild flower formed
by the Almighty Hand to be a perfumed goblet for the dew, felt
its enamelled cup filled high with blood that day, and shrinking
dropped. Many an insect deriving its delicate colour from
harmless leaves and herbs, was stained anew that day by dying
men, and marked its frightened way with an unnatural track.
The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of
its wings. The stream ran red. The trodden ground
became a quagmire, whence, from sullen pools collected in the
prints of human feet and horses’ hoofs, the one prevailing
hue still lowered and glimmered at the sun.
Heaven keep us from a knowledge of the sights the moon beheld
upon that field, when, coming up above the black line of distant
rising-ground, softened and blurred at the edge by trees, she
rose into the sky and looked upon the plain, strewn with upturned
faces that had once at mothers’ breasts sought
mothers’ eyes, or slumbered happily. Heaven keep us
from a knowledge of the secrets whispered afterwards upon the
tainted wind that blew across the scene of that day’s work
and that night’s death and suffering! Many a lonely
moon was bright upon the battle-ground, and many a star kept
mournful watch upon it, and many a wind from every quarter of the
earth blew over it, before the traces of the fight were worn
away.
They lurked and lingered for a long time, but survived in
little things; for, Nature, far above the evil passions of men,
soon recovered Her serenity, and smiled upon the guilty
battle-ground as she had done before, when it was innocent.
The larks sang high above it; the swallows skimmed and dipped and
flitted to and fro; the shadows of the flying clouds pursued each
other swiftly, over grass and corn and turnip-field and wood, and
over roof and church-spire in the nestling town among the trees,
away into the bright distance on the borders of the sky and
earth, where the red sunsets faded. Crops were sown, and
grew up, and were gathered in; the stream that had been
crimsoned, turned a watermill; men whistled at the plough;
gleaners and haymakers were seen in quiet groups at work; sheep
and oxen pastured; boys whooped and called, in fields, to scare
away the birds; smoke rose from cottage chimneys; sabbath bells
rang peacefully; old people lived and died; the timid creatures
of the field, the simple flowers of the bush and garden, grew and
withered in their destined terms: and all upon the fierce and
bloody battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been
killed in the great fight. But, there were deep green
patches in the growing corn at first, that people looked at
awfully. Year after year they re-appeared; and it was known
that underneath those fertile spots, heaps of men and horses lay
buried, indiscriminately, enriching the ground. The
husbandmen who ploughed those places, shrunk from the great worms
abounding there; and the sheaves they yielded, were, for many a
long year, called the Battle Sheaves, and set apart; and no one
ever knew a Battle Sheaf to be among the last load at a Harvest
Home. For a long time, every furrow that was turned,
revealed some fragments of the fight. For a long time,
there were wounded trees upon the battle-ground; and scraps of
hacked and broken fence and wall, where deadly struggles had been
made; and trampled parts where not a leaf or blade would
grow. For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair
or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and
after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there,
were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that
plucked them.
The Seasons in their course, however, though they passed as
lightly as the summer clouds themselves, obliterated, in the
lapse of time, even these remains of the old conflict; and wore
away such legendary traces of it as the neighbouring people
carried in their minds, until they dwindled into old wives’
tales, dimly remembered round the winter fire, and waning every
year. Where the wild flowers and berries had so long
remained upon the stem untouched, gardens arose, and houses were
built, and children played at battles on the turf. The
wounded trees had long ago made Christmas logs, and blazed and
roared away. The deep green patches were no greener now
than the memory of those who lay in dust below. The
ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of
metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and
those who found them wondered ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the Charles Scribner’s Sons
“Works of Charles Dickens” edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org
Frontispiece to The Cricket on the Hearth
There are several editions of this ebook in the Project Gutenberg collection. Various characteristics of each ebook are listed to aid in selecting the preferred file.Click on any of the filenumbers below to quickly view each ebook.
20795 (Some black and white illustrations)
37581(Many fine black and white illustrations)
678 (Not illustrated)
THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
A Fairy Tale of Home
TO
LORD JEFFREY
THIS LITTLE STORY IS INSCRIBED
WITH
THE AFFECTION AND ATTACHMENT OF HIS
FRIEND
THE AUTHOR
December, 1845
CHAPTER I—Chirp the First
The kettle began it! Don’t tell me what Mrs.
Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may
leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn’t say
which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I ought
to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by
the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the
Cricket uttered a chirp.
As if the clock hadn’t finished striking, and the
convulsive little Haymaker at the top of it, jerking away right
and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn’t
mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket
joined in at all!
Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows
that. I wouldn’t set my own opinion against the
opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any
account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But, this
is a question of fact. And the fact is, that the kettle
began it, at least five minutes before the Cricket gave any sign
of being in existence. Contradict me, and I’ll say
ten.
Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have
proceeded to do so in my very first word, but for this plain
consideration—if I am to tell a story I must begin at the
beginning; and how is it possible to begin at the beginning,
without beginning at the kettle?
It appeared as if there were a sort of match, or trial of
skill, you must understand, between the kettle and the
Cricket. And this is what led to it, and how it came
about.
Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and
clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked
innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid
all about the yard—Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at
the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and
a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but
short), she set the kettle on the fire. In doing which she
lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water
being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort
of state wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of
substance, patten rings included—had laid hold of Mrs.
Peerybingle’s toes, and even splashed her legs. And
when we rather plume ourselves (with reason too) upon our legs,
and keep ourselves particularly neat in point of stockings, we
find this, for the moment, hard to bear.
Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It
wouldn’t allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it
wouldn’t hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs
of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and
dribble, a very Idiot of a kettle, on the hearth. It was
quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely at the
fire. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs.
Peerybingle’s fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and
then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause,
dived sideways in—down to the very bottom of the
kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made
half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which
the lid of that kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before
she got it up again.
It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying
its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly
and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, ‘I
won’t boil. Nothing shall induce me!’
But Mrs. Peerybingle, with restored good humour, dusted her
chubby little hands against each other, and sat down before the
kettle, laughing. Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and
fell, flashing and gleaming on the little Haymaker at the top of
the Dutch clock, until one might have thought he stood stock
still before the Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but
the flame.
He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the
second, all right and regular. But, his sufferings when the
clock was going to strike, were frightful to behold; and, when a
Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six
times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or
like a something wiry, plucking at his legs.
It was not until a violent commotion and a whirring noise
among the weights and ropes below him had quite subsided,...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
By Charles Dickens
0008m
Original
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 1
A
lthough I am an old man,
night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave home
early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even
escape for days or weeks together; but, saving in the country, I seldom go
out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel
the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living.
I have fallen insensibly into this habit, both because it favours my
infirmity and because it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on
the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets. The glare
and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine; a
glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop
window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the
daylight; and, if I must add the truth, night is kinder in this respect
than day, which too often destroys an air-built castle at the moment of
its completion, without the least ceremony or remorse.
That constant pacing to and fro, that never-ending restlessness, that
incessant tread of feet wearing the rough stones smooth and glossy—is
it not a wonder how the dwellers in narrows ways can bear to hear it!
Think of a sick man in such a place as Saint Martin’s Court, listening to
the footsteps, and in the midst of pain and weariness obliged, despite
himself (as though it were a task he must perform) to detect the child’s
step from the man’s, the slipshod beggar from the booted exquisite, the
lounging from the busy, the dull heel of the sauntering outcast from the
quick tread of an expectant pleasure-seeker—think of the hum and
noise always being present to his sense, and of the stream of life that
will not stop, pouring on, on, on, through all his restless dreams, as if
he were condemned to lie, dead but conscious, in a noisy churchyard, and
had no hope of rest for centuries to come.
Then, the crowds forever passing and repassing on the bridges (on those
which are free of toll at least), where many stop on fine evenings looking
listlessly down upon the water with some vague idea that by and by it runs
between green banks which grow wider and wider until at last it joins the
broad vast sea—where some halt to rest from heavy loads and think as
they look over the parapet that to smoke and lounge away one’s life, and
lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot tarpaulin, in a dull, slow, sluggish
barge, must be happiness unalloyed—and where some, and a very
different class, pause with heavier loads than they, remembering to have
heard or read in old time that drowning was not a hard death, but of all
means of suicide the easiest and best.
Covent Garden Market at sunrise too, in the spring or summer, when the
fragrance of sweet flowers is in the air, over-powering even the
unwholesome streams of last night’s debauchery, and driving the dusky
thrush, whose cage has hung outside a garret window all night long, half
mad with joy! Poor bird! the only neighbouring thing at all akin to the
other little captives, some of whom, shrinking from the hot hands of
drunken purchasers, lie drooping on the path already, while others,
soddened by close contact, await the time when they shall be watered and
freshened up to please more sober company, and make old clerks who pass
them on their road to business, wonder what has filled their breasts with
visions of the country.
But my present purpose is not to expatiate upon my walks. The story I am
...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Oliver Twist
OR
THE PARISH BOY’S PROGRESS
by Charles Dickens
Contents
I
TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH
II
TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST’S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD
III
RELATES HOW OLIVER TWIST WAS VERY NEAR GETTING A PLACE WHICH WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SINECURE
IV
OLIVER, BEING OFFERED ANOTHER PLACE, MAKES HIS FIRST ENTRY INTO PUBLIC LIFE
V
OLIVER MINGLES WITH NEW ASSOCIATES. GOING TO A FUNERAL FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE FORMS AN UNFAVOURABLE NOTION OF HIS MASTER’S BUSINESS
VI
OLIVER, BEING GOADED BY THE TAUNTS OF NOAH, ROUSES INTO ACTION, AND RATHER ASTONISHES HIM
VII
OLIVER CONTINUES REFRACTORY
VIII
OLIVER WALKS TO LONDON. HE ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD A STRANGE SORT OF YOUNG GENTLEMAN
IX
CONTAINING FURTHER PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE PLEASANT OLD GENTLEMAN, AND HIS HOPEFUL PUPILS
X
OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A SHORT, BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY
XI
TREATS OF MR. FANG THE POLICE MAGISTRATE; AND FURNISHES A SLIGHT SPECIMEN OF HIS MODE OF ADMINISTERING JUSTICE
XII
IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS BEFORE. AND IN WHICH THE NARRATIVE REVERTS TO THE MERRY OLD GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUTHFUL FRIENDS.
XIII
SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES ARE INTRODUCED TO THE INTELLIGENT READER, CONNECTED WITH WHOM VARIOUS PLEASANT MATTERS ARE RELATED, APPERTAINING TO THIS HISTORY
XIV
COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER’S STAY AT MR. BROWNLOW’S, WITH THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG UTTERED CONCERNING HIM, WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND
XV
SHOWING HOW VERY FOND OF OLIVER TWIST, THE MERRY OLD JEW AND MISS NANCY WERE
XVI
RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED BY NANCY
XVII
OLIVER’S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO LONDON TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION
XVIII
HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS REPUTABLE FRIENDS
XIX
IN WHICH A NOTABLE PLAN IS DISCUSSED AND DETERMINED ON
XX
WHEREIN OLIVER IS DELIVERED OVER TO MR. WILLIAM SIKES
XXI
THE EXPEDITION
XXII
THE BURGLARY
XXIII
WHICH CONTAINS THE SUBSTANCE OF A PLEASANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN MR. BUMBLE AND A LADY; AND SHOWS THAT EVEN A BEADLE MAY BE SUSCEPTIBLE ON SOME POINTS
XXIV
TREATS ON A VERY POOR SUBJECT. BUT IS A SHORT ONE, AND MAY BE FOUND OF IMPORTANCE IN THIS HISTORY
XXV
WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY
XXVI
IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE; AND MANY THINGS, INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY, ARE DONE AND PERFORMED
XXVII
ATONES FOR THE UNPOLITENESS OF A FORMER CHAPTER; WHICH DESERTED A LADY, MOST UNCEREMONIOUSLY
XXVIII
LOOKS AFTER OLIVER, AND PROCEEDS WITH HIS ADVENTURES
XXIX
HAS AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, TO WHICH OLIVER RESORTED
XXX
RELATES WHAT OLIVER’S NEW VISITORS THOUGHT OF HIM
XXXI
INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION
XXXII
OF THE HAPPY LIFE OLIVER BEGAN TO LEAD WITH HIS KIND FRIENDS
XXXIII
WHEREIN THE HAPPINESS OF OLIVER AND HIS FRIENDS, EXPERIENCES A SUDDEN CHECK
XXXIV
CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE; AND A NEW ADVENTURE WHICH HAPPENED TO OLIVER
XXXV
CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER’S ADVENTURE; AND A CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE
XXXVI
IS A VERY SHORT ONE, AND MAY APPEAR OF NO GREAT IMPORTANCE IN ITS PLACE, BUT IT SHOULD BE READ NOTWITHSTANDING, AS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST, AND A KEY TO ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN ITS TIME ARRIVES
XXXVII
IN WHICH THE READER MAY PERCEIVE A CONTRAST, NOT UNCOMMON IN MATRIMONIAL CASES
XXXVIII
CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS. BUMBLE, AND MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW
XXXIX
INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY ACQUAINTED, AND SHOWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR WORTHY HEADS TOGETHER
XL
A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER
XLI
CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE
XLII
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER’S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF GENIUS, BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS
XLIII
WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE
XLIV
THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE FAILS.
XLV
NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION
XLVI
THE APPOINTMENT KEPT
XLVII
FATAL CONSEQUENCES
XLVIII
THE FLIGHT OF SIKES
XLIX
MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET. THEIR CON...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
DAVID COPPERFIELD
By Charles Dickens
0008
0009
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
TO
THE HON. Mr. AND Mrs. RICHARD WATSON,
OF
ROCKINGHAM, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO 1850 EDITION
PREFACE TO THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION
THE PERSONAL HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE OF DAVID COPPERFIELD THE YOUNGER
CHAPTER 1. — I AM BORN
CHAPTER 2. — I OBSERVE
CHAPTER 3. — I HAVE A CHANGE
CHAPTER 4. — I FALL INTO DISGRACE
CHAPTER 5. — I AM SENT AWAY FROM HOME
CHAPTER 6. — I ENLARGE MY CIRCLE OF ACQUAINTANCE
CHAPTER 7. — MY ‘FIRST HALF’ AT SALEM HOUSE
CHAPTER 8. — MY HOLIDAYS. ESPECIALLY ONE HAPPY AFTERNOON
CHAPTER 9. — I HAVE A MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY
CHAPTER 10. — I BECOME NEGLECTED, AND AM PROVIDED FOR
CHAPTER 11. — I BEGIN LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT, AND DON’T LIKE IT
CHAPTER 12. — LIKING LIFE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT NO BETTER, I FORM A GREAT RESOLUTION
CHAPTER 13. — THE SEQUEL OF MY RESOLUTION
CHAPTER 14. — MY AUNT MAKES UP HER MIND ABOUT ME
CHAPTER 15. — I MAKE ANOTHER BEGINNING
CHAPTER 16. — I AM A NEW BOY IN MORE SENSES THAN ONE
CHAPTER 17. — SOMEBODY TURNS UP
CHAPTER 18. — A RETROSPECT
CHAPTER 19. — I LOOK ABOUT ME, AND MAKE A DISCOVERY
CHAPTER 20. — STEERFORTH’S HOME
CHAPTER 21. — LITTLE EM’LY
CHAPTER 22. — SOME OLD SCENES, AND SOME NEW PEOPLE
CHAPTER 23. — I CORROBORATE Mr. DICK, AND CHOOSE A PROFESSION
CHAPTER 24. — MY FIRST DISSIPATION
CHAPTER 25. — GOOD AND BAD ANGELS
CHAPTER 26. — I FALL INTO CAPTIVITY
CHAPTER 27. — TOMMY TRADDLES
CHAPTER 28. — Mr. MICAWBER’S GAUNTLET
CHAPTER 29. — I VISIT STEERFORTH AT HIS HOME, AGAIN
CHAPTER 30. — A LOSS
CHAPTER 31. — A GREATER LOSS
CHAPTER 32. — THE BEGINNING OF A LONG JOURNEY
CHAPTER 33. — BLISSFUL
CHAPTER 34. — MY AUNT ASTONISHES ME
CHAPTER 35. — DEPRESSION
CHAPTER 36. — ENTHUSIASM
CHAPTER 37. — A LITTLE COLD WATER
CHAPTER 38. — A DISSOLUTION OF PARTNERSHIP
CHAPTER 39. — WICKFIELD AND HEEP
CHAPTER 40. — THE WANDERER
CHAPTER 41. — DORA’S AUNTS
CHAPTER 42. — MISCHIEF
CHAPTER 43. — ANOTHER RETROSPECT
CHAPTER 44. — OUR HOUSEKEEPING
CHAPTER 45. — MR. DICK FULFILS MY AUNT’S PREDICTIONS
CHAPTER 46. — INTELLIGENCE
CHAPTER 47. — MARTHA
CHAPTER 48. — DOMESTIC
CHAPTER 49. — I AM INVOLVED IN MYSTERY
CHAPTER 50. — Mr. PEGGOTTY’S DREAM COMES TRUE
CHAPTER 51. — THE BEGINNING OF A LONGER JOURNEY
CHAPTER 52. — I ASSIST AT AN EXPLOSION
CHAPTER 53. — ANOTHER RETROSPECT
CHAPTER 54. — Mr. MICAWBER’S TRANSACTIONS
CHAPTER 55. — TEMPEST
CHAPTER 56. — THE NEW WOUND, AND THE OLD
CHAPTER 57. — THE EMIGRANTS
CHAPTER 58. — ABSENCE
CHAPTER 59. — RETURN
CHAPTER 60. — AGNES
CHAPTER 61. — I AM SHOWN TWO INTERESTING PENITENTS
CHAPTER 62. — A LIGHT SHINES ON MY WAY
CHAPTER 63. — A VISITOR
CHAPTER 64. — A LAST RETROSPECT
PREFACE TO 1850 EDITION
I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in the first
sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this
formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it, is so recent and
strong; and my mind is so divided between pleasure and regret—pleasure in
the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many
companions—that I am in danger of wearying the reader whom I love, with
personal confidences, and private emotions.
Besides which, all that I could say of the Story, to any purpose, I have
endeavoured to say in it.
It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how sorrowfully the pen
is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how an
Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy
world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever.
Yet, I have nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which
might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in
the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.
Instead of looking back, therefore, I will look forward. I cannot close this
Volume more agreeably to myself, than with a hopeful glance towards the time
when I shall again put forth my two green leaves once a month, and with a
faithful remembrance of the genial sun and showers that have fallen on these
leaves of David Copperfield, and made me happy.
London,
October, 1850.
PREFACE TO THE CHARLES DICKENS EDITION
I REMARKED in the original Preface to this Book, that I did not find it easy to
get sufficiently far away from it, in the first sensations of having finished
it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to
require. My interest in it was s...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
Hard Times
and
Reprinted Pieces [0]
By CHARLES DICKENS
With illustrations by Marcus
Stone, Maurice
Greiffenhagen, and F. Walker
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
CONTENTS
BOOK THE
FIRST. SOWING
PAGE
CHAPTER I
The One Thing Needful
3
CHAPTER II
Murdering the Innocents
4
CHAPTER III
A Loophole
8
CHAPTER IV
Mr. Bounderby
12
CHAPTER V
The Keynote
18
CHAPTER VI
Sleary’s Horsemanship
23
CHAPTER VII
Mrs. Sparsit
33
CHAPTER VIII
Never Wonder
38
CHAPTER IX
Sissy’s Progress
43
CHAPTER X
Stephen Blackpool
49
CHAPTER XI
No Way Out
53
CHAPTER XII
The Old Woman
59
CHAPTER XIII
Rachael
63
CHAPTER XIV
The Great Manufacturer
69
CHAPTER XV
Father and Daughter
73
CHAPTER XVI
Husband and Wife
79
BOOK THE
SECOND. REAPING
CHAPTER I
Effects in the Bank
84
CHAPTER II
Mr. James Harthouse
94
CHAPTER III
The Whelp
101
CHAPTER IV
Men and Brothers
111
CHAPTER V
Men and Masters
105
CHAPTER VI
Fading Away
116
CHAPTER VII
Gunpowder
126
CHAPTER VIII
Explosion
136
CHAPTER IX
Hearing the Last of it
146
CHAPTER X
Mrs. Sparsit’s Staircase
152
CHAPTER XI
Lower and Lower
156
CHAPTER XII
Down
163
BOOK THE
THIRD. GARNERING
CHAPTER I
Another Thing Needful
167
CHAPTER II
Very Ridiculous
172
CHAPTER III
Very Decided
179
CHAPTER IV
Lost
186
CHAPTER V
Found
193
CHAPTER VI
The Starlight
200
CHAPTER VII
Whelp-Hunting
208
CHAPTER VIII
Philosophical
216
CHAPTER IX
Final
222
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-room
64
Mr. Harthouse Dining at the Bounderbys’
100
Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the Garden
132
Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell
Shaft
206
p. 3BOOK THE
FIRST
SOWING
CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL
‘Now, what I want is,
Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and
root out everything else. You can only form the minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any
service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up
my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up
these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’
The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a
school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized
his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on
the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by
the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his
eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage
in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin,
and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and
dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s
hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation
of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered
with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had
scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.
The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs,
square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take
him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn
fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.
p. 4‘In
this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but
Facts!’
The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person
present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the
inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in
order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them
until they were full to the brim.
CHAPTER II
MURDERING THE INNOCENTS
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man
of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man
who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and
nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for
anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily
Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of
scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir,
ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell
you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of
figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind,
or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind
(all supposititious, non-existent person...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall “Hard Times
and Reprinted Pieces” edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
HUNTED DOWN [1860]
I.
Most of us see some romances in
life. In my capacity as Chief Manager of a Life Assurance
Office, I think I have within the last thirty years seen more
romances than the generality of men, however unpromising the
opportunity may, at first sight, seem.
As I have retired, and live at my ease, I possess the means
that I used to want, of considering what I have seen, at
leisure. My experiences have a more remarkable aspect, so
reviewed, than they had when they were in progress. I have
come home from the Play now, and can recall the scenes of the
Drama upon which the curtain has fallen, free from the glare,
bewilderment, and bustle of the Theatre.
Let me recall one of these Romances of the real world.
There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection
with manner. The art of reading that book of which Eternal
Wisdom obliges every human creature to present his or her own
page with the individual character written on it, is a difficult
one, perhaps, and is little studied. It may require some
natural aptitude, and it must require (for everything does) some
patience and some pains. That these are not usually given
to it,—that numbers of people accept a few stock
commonplace expressions of the face as the whole list of
characteristics, and neither seek nor know the refinements that
are truest,—that You, for instance, give a great deal of
time and attention to the reading of music, Greek, Latin, French,
Italian, Hebrew, if you please, and do not qualify yourself to
read the face of the master or mistress looking over your
shoulder teaching it to you,—I assume to be five hundred
times more probable than improbable. Perhaps a little
self-sufficiency may be at the bottom of this; facial expression
requires no study from you, you think; it comes by nature to you
to know enough about it, and you are not to be taken in.
I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over
and over again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and
I have been taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by
friends than by any other class of persons. How came I to
be so deceived? Had I quite misread their faces?
No. Believe me, my first impression of those people,
founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true. My
mistake was in suffering them to come nearer to me and explain
themselves away.
II.
The partition which separated my
own office from our general outer office in the City was of thick
plate-glass. I could see through it what passed in the
outer office, without hearing a word. I had it put up in
place of a wall that had been there for years,—ever since
the house was built. It is no matter whether I did or did
not make the change in order that I might derive my first
impression of strangers, who came to us on business, from their
faces alone, without being influenced by anything they
said. Enough to mention that I turned my glass partition to
that account, and that a Life Assurance Office is at all times
exposed to be practised upon by the most crafty and cruel of the
human race.
It was through my glass partition that I first saw the
gentleman whose story I am going to tell.
He had come in without my observing it, and had put his hat
and umbrella on the broad counter, and was bending over it to
take some papers from one of the clerks. He was about forty
or so, dark, exceedingly well dressed in black,—being in
mourning,—and the hand he extended with a polite air, had a
particularly well-fitting black-kid glove upon it. His
hair, which was elaborately brushed and oiled, was parted
straight up the middle; and he presented this parting to the
clerk, exactly (to my thinking) as if he had said, in so many
words: ‘You must take me, if you please, my friend, just as
I show myself. Come straight up here, follow the gravel
path, keep off the grass, I allow no trespassing.’
I conceived a very great aversion to that man the moment I
thus saw him.
He had asked for some of our printed forms, and the clerk was
giving them to him and explaining them. An obliged and
agreeable smile was on his face, and his eyes met those of the
clerk with a sprightly look. (I have known a vast quantity
of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the
face. Don’t trust that conventional idea.
Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the
week, if there is anything to be got by it.)
I saw, in the corner of his eyelash, that he became aware of
my looking at him. Immediately he turned the parting in his
hair toward the glass partition, as if he said to me with a sweet
smile, ‘Straight up here, if you please. Off the
grass!’
In a few moments he had put on his hat and taken up his
umbrella, and was gone.
I beckoned the clerk into my room, and asked, ‘Who was
that?’
He ha...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
HOLIDAY ROMANCE
In Four Parts
PART I.
INTRODUCTORY ROMANCE PROM THE PEN OF
WILLIAM TINKLING, ESQ. [251]
This beginning-part is not made out
of anybody’s head, you know. It’s real.
You must believe this beginning-part more than what comes after,
else you won’t understand how what comes after came to be
written. You must believe it all; but you must believe this
most, please. I am the editor of it. Bob Redforth
(he’s my cousin, and shaking the table on purpose) wanted
to be the editor of it; but I said he shouldn’t because he
couldn’t. He has no idea of being an
editor.
Nettie Ashford is my bride. We were married in the
right-hand closet in the corner of the dancing-school, where
first we met, with a ring (a green one) from Wilkingwater’s
toy-shop. I owed for it out of my
pocket-money. When the rapturous ceremony was over, we all
four went up the lane and let off a cannon (brought loaded in Bob
Redforth’s waistcoat-pocket) to announce our
nuptials. It flew right up when it went off, and turned
over. Next day, Lieut.-Col. Robin Redforth was united, with
similar ceremonies, to Alice Rainbird. This time the cannon
burst with a most terrific explosion, and made a puppy bark.
My peerless bride was, at the period of which we now treat, in
captivity at Miss Grimmer’s. Drowvey and Grimmer is
the partnership, and opinion is divided which is the greatest
beast. The lovely bride of the colonel was also immured in
the dungeons of the same establishment. A vow was entered
into, between the colonel and myself, that we would cut them out
on the following Wednesday when walking two and two.
Under the desperate circumstances of the case, the active
brain of the colonel, combining with his lawless pursuit (he is a
pirate), suggested an attack with fireworks. This, however,
from motives of humanity, was abandoned as too expensive.
Lightly armed with a paper-knife buttoned up under his jacket,
and waving the dreaded black flag at the end of a cane, the
colonel took command of me at two P.M. on the eventful and appointed
day. He had drawn out the plan of attack on a piece of
paper, which was rolled up round a hoop-stick. He showed it
to me. My position and my full-length portrait (but my real
ears don’t stick out horizontal) was behind a corner
lamp-post, with written orders to remain there till I should see
Miss Drowvey fall. The Drowvey who was to fall was the one
in spectacles, not the one with the large lavender bonnet.
At that signal I was to rush forth, seize my bride, and fight my
way to the lane. There a junction would be effected between
myself and the colonel; and putting our brides behind us, between
ourselves and the palings, we were to conquer or die.
The enemy appeared,—approached. Waving his black
flag, the colonel attacked. Confusion ensued.
Anxiously I awaited my signal; but my signal came not. So
far from falling, the hated Drowvey in spectacles appeared to me
to have muffled the colonel’s head in his outlawed banner,
and to be pitching into him with a parasol. The one in the
lavender bonnet also performed prodigies of valour with her fists
on his back. Seeing that all was for the moment lost, I
fought my desperate way hand to hand to the lane. Through
taking the back road, I was so fortunate as to meet nobody, and
arrived there uninterrupted.
It seemed an age ere the colonel joined me. He had been
to the jobbing tailor’s to be sewn up in several places,
and attributed our defeat to the refusal of the detested Drowvey
to fall. Finding her so obstinate, he had said to her,
‘Die, recreant!’ but had found her no more open to
reason on that point than the other.
My blooming bride appeared, accompanied by the colonel’s
bride, at the dancing-school next day. What? Was her
face averted from me? Hah? Even so. With a look
of scorn, she put into my hand a bit of paper, and took another
partner. On the paper was pencilled, ‘Heavens!
Can I write the word? Is my husband a cow?’
In the first bewilderment of my heated brain, I tried to think
what slanderer could have traced my family to the ignoble animal
mentioned above. Vain were my endeavours. At the end
of that dance I whispered the colonel to come into the
cloak-room, and I showed him the note.
‘There is a syllable wanting,’ said he, with a
gloomy brow.
‘Hah! What syllable?’ was my inquiry.
‘She asks, can she write the word? And no; you see
she couldn’t,’ said the colonel, pointing out the
passage.
‘And the word was?’ said I.
‘Cow—cow—coward,’ hissed the
pirate-colonel in my ear, and gave me back the note.
Feeling that I must for ever tread the earth a branded
boy,—person I mean,—or that I must clear up my
honour, I demanded to be tried by a court-martial. The
colonel admitted my right to be tried. Some difficulty was
found in composi...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall “Hard Times
and Reprinted Pieces” edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
GEORGE SILVERMAN’S EXPLANATION
FIRST CHAPTER
It happened in this wise—
But, sitting with my pen in my hand looking at those words
again, without descrying any hint in them of the words that
should follow, it comes into my mind that they have an abrupt
appearance. They may serve, however, if I let them remain,
to suggest how very difficult I find it to begin to explain my
explanation. An uncouth phrase: and yet I do not see my way
to a better.
SECOND CHAPTER
It happened in this
wise—
But, looking at those words, and comparing them with my former
opening, I find they are the self-same words repeated. This
is the more surprising to me, because I employ them in quite a
new connection. For indeed I declare that my intention was
to discard the commencement I first had in my thoughts, and to
give the preference to another of an entirely different nature,
dating my explanation from an anterior period of my life. I
will make a third trial, without erasing this second failure,
protesting that it is not my design to conceal any of my
infirmities, whether they be of head or heart.
THIRD CHAPTER
Not as yet directly aiming at how
it came to pass, I will come upon it by degrees. The
natural manner, after all, for God knows that is how it came upon
me.
My parents were in a miserable condition of life, and my
infant home was a cellar in Preston. I recollect the sound
of father’s Lancashire clogs on the street pavement above,
as being different in my young hearing from the sound of all
other clogs; and I recollect, that, when mother came down the
cellar-steps, I used tremblingly to speculate on her feet having
a good or an ill-tempered look,—on her knees,—on her
waist,—until finally her face came into view, and settled
the question. From this it will be seen that I was timid,
and that the cellar-steps were steep, and that the doorway was
very low.
Mother had the gripe and clutch of poverty upon her face, upon
her figure, and not least of all upon her voice. Her sharp
and high-pitched words were squeezed out of her, as by the
compression of bony fingers on a leathern bag; and she had a way
of rolling her eyes about and about the cellar, as she scolded,
that was gaunt and hungry. Father, with his shoulders
rounded, would sit quiet on a three-legged stool, looking at the
empty grate, until she would pluck the stool from under him, and
bid him go bring some money home. Then he would dismally
ascend the steps; and I, holding my ragged shirt and trousers
together with a hand (my only braces), would feint and dodge from
mother’s pursuing grasp at my hair.
A worldly little devil was mother’s usual name for
me. Whether I cried for that I was in the dark, or for that
it was cold, or for that I was hungry, or whether I squeezed
myself into a warm corner when there was a fire, or ate
voraciously when there was food, she would still say, ‘O,
you worldly little devil!’ And the sting of it was,
that I quite well knew myself to be a worldly little devil.
Worldly as to wanting to be housed and warmed, worldly as to
wanting to be fed, worldly as to the greed with which I inwardly
compared how much I got of those good things with how much father
and mother got, when, rarely, those good things were going.
Sometimes they both went away seeking work; and then I would
be locked up in the cellar for a day or two at a time. I
was at my worldliest then. Left alone, I yielded myself up
to a worldly yearning for enough of anything (except misery), and
for the death of mother’s father, who was a machine-maker
at Birmingham, and on whose decease, I had heard mother say, she
would come into a whole courtful of houses ‘if she had her
rights.’ Worldly little devil, I would stand about,
musingly fitting my cold bare feet into cracked bricks and
crevices of the damp cellar-floor,—walking over my
grandfather’s body, so to speak, into the courtful of
houses, and selling them for meat and drink, and clothes to
wear.
At last a change came down into our cellar. The
universal change came down even as low as that,—so will it
mount to any height on which a human creature can
perch,—and brought other changes with it.
We had a heap of I don’t know what foul litter in the
darkest corner, which we called ‘the bed.’ For
three days mother lay upon it without getting up, and then began
at times to laugh. If I had ever heard her laugh before, it
had been so seldom that the strange sound frightened me. It
frightened father too; and we took it by turns to give her
water. Then she began to move her head from side to side,
and sing. After that, she getting no better, father fell
a-laughing and a-singing; and then there was only I to give them
both water, and they both died.
FOURTH CHAPTER
When I was lifted out of the cellar
by two men, of who...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Dombey and Son
by Charles Dickens
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Contents
CHAPTER I. Dombey and Son
CHAPTER II. In which Timely Provision is made for an Emergency that will sometimes arise in the best-regulated Families
CHAPTER III. In which Mr Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the Head of the Home-Department
CHAPTER IV. In which some more First Appearances are made on the Stage of these Adventures
CHAPTER V. Paul’s Progress and Christening
CHAPTER VI. Paul’s Second Deprivation
CHAPTER VII. A Bird’s-eye Glimpse of Miss Tox’s Dwelling-place: also of the State of Miss Tox’s Affections
CHAPTER VIII. Paul’s Further Progress, Growth and Character
CHAPTER IX. In which the Wooden Midshipman gets into Trouble
CHAPTER X. Containing the Sequel of the Midshipman’s Disaster
CHAPTER XI. Paul’s Introduction to a New Scene
CHAPTER XII. Paul’s Education
CHAPTER XIII. Shipping Intelligence and Office Business
CHAPTER XIV. Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home for the Holidays
CHAPTER XV. Amazing Artfulness of Captain Cuttle, and a new Pursuit for Walter Gay
CHAPTER XVI. What the Waves were always saying
CHAPTER XVII. Captain Cuttle does a little Business for the Young People
CHAPTER XVIII. Father and Daughter
CHAPTER XIX. Walter goes away
CHAPTER XX. Mr Dombey goes upon a Journey
CHAPTER XXI. New Faces
CHAPTER XXII. A Trifle of Management by Mr Carker the Manager
CHAPTER XXIII. Florence solitary, and the Midshipman mysterious
CHAPTER XXIV. The Study of a Loving Heart
CHAPTER XXV. Strange News of Uncle Sol
CHAPTER XXVI. Shadows of the Past and Future
CHAPTER XXVII. Deeper Shadows
CHAPTER XXVIII. Alterations
CHAPTER XXIX. The Opening of the Eyes of Mrs Chick
CHAPTER XXX. The interval before the Marriage
CHAPTER XXXI. The Wedding
CHAPTER XXXII. The Wooden Midshipman goes to Pieces
CHAPTER XXXIII. Contrasts
CHAPTER XXXIV. Another Mother and Daughter
CHAPTER XXXV. The Happy Pair
CHAPTER XXXVI. Housewarming
CHAPTER XXXVII. More Warnings than One
CHAPTER XXXVIII. Miss Tox improves an Old Acquaintance
CHAPTER XXXIX. Further Adventures of Captain Edward Cuttle, Mariner
CHAPTER XL. Domestic Relations
CHAPTER XLI. New Voices in the Waves
CHAPTER XLII. Confidential and Accidental
CHAPTER XLIII. The Watches of the Night
CHAPTER XLIV. A Separation
CHAPTER XLV. The Trusty Agent
CHAPTER XLVI. Recognizant and Reflective
CHAPTER XLVII. The Thunderbolt
CHAPTER XLVIII. The Flight of Florence
CHAPTER XLIX. The Midshipman makes a Discovery
CHAPTER L. Mr Toots’s Complaint
CHAPTER LI. Mr Dombey and the World
CHAPTER LII. Secret Intelligence
CHAPTER LIII. More Intelligence
CHAPTER LIV. The Fugitives
CHAPTER LV. Rob the Grinder loses his Place
CHAPTER LVI. Several People delighted, and the Game Chicken disgusted
CHAPTER LVII. Another Wedding
CHAPTER LVIII. After a Lapse
CHAPTER LIX. Retribution
CHAPTER LX. Chiefly Matrimonial
CHAPTER LXI. Relenting
CHAPTER LXII. Final
PREFACE OF 1848
PREFACE OF 1867
CHAPTER I.
Dombey and Son
Dombey
sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside,
and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a
low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his
constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast
him brown while he was very new.
Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty
minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made
man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very
bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat
crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time
and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in
good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human
forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed
with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take
delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as
a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.
Dombey, exulting in the long-looked-for event, jingled and jingled the heavy
gold watch-chain that depended from below his trim blue coat, whereof the
buttons sparkled phosphorescently in the feeble rays of the distant fire. Son,
with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be
squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly.
“The House will once again, ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
Reprinted Pieces
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Long Voyage
309
The Begging-letter Writer
317
A Child’s Dream of a Star
324
Our English Watering-place
327
Our French Watering-place
335
Bill-sticking
346
“Births. Mrs. Meek,
of a Son”
357
Lying Awake
361
The Ghost of Art
367
Out of Town
373
Out of the Season
379
A Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent
386
The Noble Savage
391
A Flight
397
The Detective Police
406
Three “Detective”
Anecdotes
422
I.—The Pair of Gloves
II.—The Artful Touch
III.—The Sofa
On Duty with Inspector Field
430
Down with the Tide
442
A Walk in a Workhouse
451
Prince Bull. A Fairy
Tale
457
A Plated Article
462
Our Honourable Friend
470
Our School
475
Our Vestry
481
Our Bore
487
A Monument of French Folly
494
The long voyage
p. 309THE
LONG VOYAGE
When the wind is blowing and the
sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit
by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and
travel. Such books have had a strong fascination for my
mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come
to pass that I never have been round the world, never have been
shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.
Sitting on my ruddy hearth in the twilight of New Year’s
Eve, I find incidents of travel rise around me from all the
latitudes and longitudes of the globe. They observe no
order or sequence, but appear and vanish as they
will—‘come like shadows, so depart.’
Columbus, alone upon the sea with his disaffected crew, looks
over the waste of waters from his high station on the poop of his
ship, and sees the first uncertain glimmer of the light,
‘rising and falling with the waves, like a torch in the
bark of some fisherman,’ which is the shining star of a new
world. Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory
horrors which shall often startle him out of his sleep at home
when years have passed away. Franklin, come to the end of
his unhappy overland journey—would that it had been his
last!—lies perishing of hunger with his brave companions:
each emaciated figure stretched upon its miserable bed without
the power to rise: all, dividing the weary days between their
prayers, their remembrances of the dear ones at home, and
conversation on the pleasures of eating; the last-named topic
being ever present to them, likewise, in their dreams. All
the African travellers, wayworn, solitary and sad, submit
themselves again to drunken, murderous, man-selling despots, of
the lowest order of humanity; and Mungo Park, fainting under a
tree and succoured by a woman, gratefully remembers how his Good
Samaritan has always come to him in woman’s shape, the wide
world over.
A shadow on the wall in which my mind’s eye can discern
some traces of a rocky sea-coast, recalls to me a fearful story
of travel derived from that unpromising narrator of such stories,
a parliamentary blue-book. A convict is its chief figure,
and this man escapes with other prisoners from a penal
settlement. It is an island, and they seize a boat, and get
to the main land. Their way is by a rugged and precipitous
sea-shore, and they have no earthly hope of ultimate escape, for
the party of soldiers despatched by an easier course to cut them
off, must inevitably arrive at their distant bourne long before
them, and retake them if by any hazard they survive the horrors
of the way. Famine, as they all must have foreseen, besets
them early in their course. Some of the party die and are
eaten; some are murdered by the rest and eaten. This one
awful creature eats his fill, and sustains his strength, and
lives on to be recaptured and taken back. The unrelateable
experiences through which he has passed have been so tremendous,
that he is not hanged as he might be, but goes back to his old
chained-gang work. A little time, and he tempts one other
prisoner away, seizes another boat, and flies once
more—necessarily in the old hopeless direction, for he can
take no other. He is soon cut off, and met by the pursuing
party face to face, upon the beach. He is alone. In
his former journey he acquired an inappeasable relish for his
dreadful food. He urged the new man away, expressly to kill
him and eat him. In the pockets on one side of his coarse
convict-dress, are portions of the man’s body, on which he
is regaling; in the pockets on the other side is an untouched
store of salted pork (stolen before he left the island) for which
he has no appetite. He is taken back, and he is
hanged. But I shall never see that sea-beach on the wall or
in the fire, without him, solitary monster, eating as he ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Sketches by Boz
Illustrative of Every-Day Life
and Every-Day People
by Charles Dickens
With Illustrations by George Cruickshank and Phiz
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, ld.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1903
PREFACE
The whole of these Sketches were written and published, one by one, when I was
a very young man. They were collected and republished while I was still a very
young man; and sent into the world with all their imperfections (a good many)
on their heads.
They comprise my first attempts at authorship—with the exception of
certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten, and represented
with great applause to overflowing nurseries. I am conscious of their often
being extremely crude and ill-considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste
and inexperience; particularly in that section of the present volume which is
comprised under the general head of Tales.
But as this collection is not originated now, and was very leniently and
favourably received when it was first made, I have not felt it right either to
remodel or expunge, beyond a few words and phrases here and there.
OUR PARISH
CHAPTER I—THE BEADLE. THE PARISH ENGINE. THE SCHOOLMASTER
How much is conveyed in those two short words—‘The Parish!’
And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined
hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they
associated! A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages
to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure food from day to day; he has
barely sufficient to satisfy the present cravings of nature, and can take no
heed of the future. His taxes are in arrear, quarter-day passes by, another
quarter-day arrives: he can procure no more quarter for himself, and is
summoned by—the parish. His goods are distrained, his children are crying
with cold and hunger, and the very bed on which his sick wife is lying, is
dragged from beneath her. What can he do? To whom is he to apply for relief? To
private charity? To benevolent individuals? Certainly not—there is his
parish. There are the parish vestry, the parish infirmary, the parish surgeon,
the parish officers, the parish beadle. Excellent institutions, and gentle,
kind-hearted men. The woman dies—she is buried by the parish. The
children have no protector—they are taken care of by the parish. The man
first neglects, and afterwards cannot obtain, work—he is relieved by the
parish; and when distress and drunkenness have done their work upon him, he is
maintained, a harmless babbling idiot, in the parish asylum.
The parish beadle is one of the most, perhaps the most, important member
of the local administration. He is not so well off as the churchwardens,
certainly, nor is he so learned as the vestry-clerk, nor does he order things
quite so much his own way as either of them. But his power is very great,
notwithstanding; and the dignity of his office is never impaired by the absence
of efforts on his part to maintain it. The beadle of our parish is a splendid
fellow. It is quite delightful to hear him, as he explains the state of the
existing poor laws to the deaf old women in the board-room passage on business
nights; and to hear what he said to the senior churchwarden, and what the
senior churchwarden said to him; and what ‘we’ (the beadle and the
other gentlemen) came to the determination of doing. A miserable-looking woman
is called into the boardroom, and represents a case of extreme destitution,
affecting herself—a widow, with six small children. ‘Where do you
live?’ inquires one of the overseers. ‘I rents a two-pair back,
gentlemen, at Mrs. Brown’s, Number 3, Little King William’s-alley,
which has lived there this fifteen year, and knows me to be very hard-working
and industrious, and when my poor husband was alive, gentlemen, as died in the
hospital’—‘Well, well,’ interrupts the overseer, taking
a note of the address, ‘I’ll send Simmons, the beadle, to-morrow
morning, to ascertain whether your story is correct; and if so, I suppose you
must have an order into the House—Simmons, go to this woman’s the
first thing to-morrow morning, will you?’ Simmons bows assent, and ushers
the woman out. Her previous admiration of ‘the board’ (who all sit
behind great books, and with their hats on) fades into nothing before her
respect for her lace-trimmed conductor; and her account of what has passed
inside, increases—if that be possible—the marks of respect, shown
by the assembled crowd, to that solemn functionary. As to taking out a summons,
it’s quite a hopeless case if Simmons attends it, on behalf of the
parish. He knows all the titles of the Lord Mayor by heart; states the case
without a single stammer: and it is even reported that on one occasion he
ventured to m...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
Charles Dickens
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CONTENTS
BOOK THE FIRST — THE CUP AND
THE LIP Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11
Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 BOOK THE SECOND — BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Chapter 1 Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11
Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16
BOOK THE THIRD — A LONG LANE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4
Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7
Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13
Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16
Chapter 17 BOOK THE
FOURTH — A TURNING
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12
Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15
Chapter 16 Chapter 17
BOOK THE FIRST — THE CUP AND THE LIP
Chapter 1
ON THE LOOK OUT
In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need
to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two
figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of
iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was
closing in.
The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled
hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,
sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed,
pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack
in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look
out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his
boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance
beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a
waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for
delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no
clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most
intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was
running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad
sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern
foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of
his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But,
in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.
Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of
the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this
boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they
often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man
showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to
between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser
kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and
whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that
begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his steady
gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her
wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were
things of usage.
‘Keep her out, Lizzie. Tide runs strong here. Keep her well afore the
sweep of it.’
Trusting to the girl’s skill and making no use of the rudder, he eyed the
coming tide with an absorbed attention. So the girl eyed him. But, it
happened now, that a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into the
bottom of the boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore some
resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though
with diluted blood. This caught the girl’s eye, and she shivered.
‘What ails you?’ said the man, immediately aware of it, though so intent
on the advancing waters; ‘I see nothing afloat.’
The red light was gone, the shudder was gon...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1903 Chapman and Hall Sketches by
Boz edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
THE MUDFOG AND OTHER SKETCHES
CONTENTS
PAGE
Public Life of Mr. Tulrumble
495
Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog
Association for the Advancement of Everything
513
Section A. Zoology and Botany
Section B. Anatomy and Medicine
Section C. Statistics
Section D. Mechanical Science
Full Report of the Second Meeting of the
Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything
531
Section A. Zoology and Botany
Section B. Display of Models and Mechanical
Science
Section C. Anatomy and Medicine
Section D. Statistics
Supplementary Section, E. Umbugology and
Ditchwaterisics
The Pantomime of Life
551
Some Particulars Concerning a Lion
558
Mr. Robert Bolton
563
Familiar Epistle from a Parent to a Child
567
p.
495PUBLIC LIFE OF MR. TULRUMBLE
ONCE MAYOR OF MUDFOG
Mudfog is a pleasant town—a
remarkably pleasant town—situated in a charming hollow by
the side of a river, from which river, Mudfog derives an
agreeable scent of pitch, tar, coals, and rope-yarn, a roving
population in oilskin hats, a pretty steady influx of drunken
bargemen, and a great many other maritime advantages. There
is a good deal of water about Mudfog, and yet it is not exactly
the sort of town for a watering-place, either. Water is a
perverse sort of element at the best of times, and in Mudfog it
is particularly so. In winter, it comes oozing down the
streets and tumbling over the fields,—nay, rushes into the
very cellars and kitchens of the houses, with a lavish
prodigality that might well be dispensed with; but in the hot
summer weather it will dry up, and turn green: and,
although green is a very good colour in its way, especially in
grass, still it certainly is not becoming to water; and it cannot
be denied that the beauty of Mudfog is rather impaired, even by
this trifling circumstance. Mudfog is a healthy
place—very healthy;—damp, perhaps, but none the worse
for that. It’s quite a mistake to suppose that damp
is unwholesome: plants thrive best in damp situations, and why
shouldn’t men? The inhabitants of Mudfog are
unanimous in asserting that there exists not a finer race of
people on the face of the earth; here we have an indisputable and
veracious contradiction of the vulgar error at once. So,
admitting Mudfog to be damp, we distinctly state that it is
salubrious.
The town of Mudfog is extremely picturesque. Limehouse
and Ratcliff Highway are both something like it, but they give
you a very faint idea of Mudfog. There are a great many
more public-houses in Mudfog—more than in Ratcliff Highway
and Limehouse put together. The public buildings, too, are
very imposing. We consider the town-hall one of the finest
specimens of shed architecture, extant: it is a combination of
the pig-sty and tea-garden-box orders; and the simplicity of its
design is of surpassing beauty. The idea of placing a large
window on one side of the door, and a small one on the other, is
particularly happy. There is a fine old Doric beauty, too,
about the padlock and scraper, which is strictly in keeping with
the general effect.
In this room do the mayor and corporation of Mudfog assemble
together in solemn council for the public weal. Seated on
the massive wooden benches, which, with the table in the centre,
form the only furniture of the whitewashed apartment, the sage
men of Mudfog spend hour after hour in grave deliberation.
Here they settle at what hour of the night the public-houses
shall be closed, at what hour of the morning they shall be
permitted to open, how soon it shall be lawful for people to eat
their dinner on church-days, and other great political questions;
and sometimes, long after silence has fallen on the town, and the
distant lights from the shops and houses have ceased to twinkle,
like far-off stars, to the sight of the boatmen on the river, the
illumination in the two unequal-sized windows of the town-hall,
warns the inhabitants of Mudfog that its little body of
legislators, like a larger and better-known body of the same
genus, a great deal more noisy, and not a whit more profound, are
patriotically dozing away in company, far into the night, for
their country’s good.
Among this knot of sage and learned men, no one was so
eminently distinguished, during many years, for the quiet modesty
of his appearance and demeanour, as Nicholas Tulrumble, the
well-known coal-dealer. However exciting the subject of
discussion, however animated the tone of the debate, or however
warm the personalities exchanged, (and even in Mudfog we get
personal sometimes,) Nicholas Tulrumble was always the
same. To say truth, Nicholas, being an industrious man, and
...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
[Illustration]
Time and his Wife
The Uncommercial
Traveller
By CHARLES DICKENS
With Illustrations by Harry
Furniss and A. J. Goodman
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. His General Line of Business
CHAPTER II. The Shipwreck
CHAPTER III. Wapping Workhouse
CHAPTER IV. Two Views of a Cheap Theatre
CHAPTER V. Poor Mercantile Jack
CHAPTER VI. Refreshments for Travellers
CHAPTER VII. Travelling Abroad
CHAPTER VIII. The Great Tasmania’s Cargo
CHAPTER IX. City of London Churches
CHAPTER X. Shy Neighbourhoods
CHAPTER XI. Tramps
CHAPTER XII. Dullborough Town
CHAPTER XIII. Night Walks
CHAPTER XIV. Chambers
CHAPTER XV. Nurse’s Stories
CHAPTER XVI. Arcadian London
CHAPTER XVII. The Italian Prisoner
CHAPTER XVIII. The Calais Night Mail
CHAPTER XIX. Some Recollections of Mortality
CHAPTER XX. Birthday Celebrations
CHAPTER XXI. The Short-Timers
CHAPTER XXII. Bound for the Great Salt Lake
CHAPTER XXIII. The City of the Absent
CHAPTER XXIV. An Old Stage-coaching House
CHAPTER XXV. The Boiled Beef of New England
CHAPTER XXVI. Chatham Dockyard
CHAPTER XXVII. In the French-Flemish Country
CHAPTER XXVIII. Medicine Men of Civilisation
CHAPTER XXIX. Titbull’s Alms-Houses
CHAPTER XXX. The Ruffian
CHAPTER XXXI. Aboard Ship
CHAPTER XXXII. A Small Star in the East
CHAPTER XXXIII. A Little Dinner in an Hour
CHAPTER XXXIV. Mr. Barlow
CHAPTER XXXV. On an Amateur Beat
CHAPTER XXXVI. A Fly-Leaf in a Life
CHAPTER XXXVII. A Plea for Total Abstinence
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Time and his Wife
A Cheap Theatre
The City Personage
Titbull’s Alms-Houses
I
HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS
Allow me to introduce
myself—first negatively.
No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me,
no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No
round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no
pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is
personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with
great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of
public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my
opinion of its brandy or sherry. When I go upon my
journeys, I am not usually rated at a low figure in the bill;
when I come home from my journeys, I never get any
commission. I know nothing about prices, and should have no
idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into ordering
something he doesn’t want. As a town traveller, I am
never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and
volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a
number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country
traveller, I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be
encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a
branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge
of samples.
And yet—proceeding now, to introduce myself
positively—I am both a town traveller and a country
traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively
speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest
Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods
way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and
there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London—now about the
city streets: now, about the country by-roads—seeing many
little things, and some great things, which, because they
interest me, I think may interest others.
These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial
Traveller.
II
THE SHIPWRECK
Never had I seen a year going out,
or going on, under quieter circumstances. Eighteen hundred
and fifty-nine had but another day to live, and truly its end was
Peace on that sea-shore that morning.
So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright
light of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds,
that it was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or
to come, than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a
little off the shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the
shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning
windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all
slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing of
the sea, all seemed as much a part of the nature of the place as
the tide itself. The tide was on the flow, and had been for
some two hours and a half; there was a slight obstruction in the
sea within a few yards of my feet: as if the stump of a tree,
with earth enough about it to keep it from lying horizontally on
the water, had slipped a little from the land—and as I
stood upon the beach and observed it dimpling...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1903 Chapman and Hall Sketches by
Boz edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
SKETCHES OF YOUNG COUPLES
CONTENTS
PAGE
An Urgent Remonstrance, &c.
447
The Young Couple
451
The Formal Couple
455
The Loving Couple
458
The Contradictory Couple
463
The Couple Who Dote Upon Their Children
466
The Cool Couple
471
The Plausible Couple
474
The Nice Little Couple
478
The Egotistical Couple
481
The Couple Who Coddle Themselves
485
The Old Couple
489
Conclusion
493
p. 447An
Urgent Remonstrance, &c.
TO THE GENTLEMEN OF ENGLAND,
(BEING BACHELORS OR WIDOWERS,)
THE
REMONSTRANCE OF THEIR FAITHFUL FELLOW-SUBJECT,
Sheweth,—
That Her Most Gracious Majesty,
Victoria, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, did, on the
23rd day of November last past, declare and pronounce to Her Most
Honourable Privy Council, Her Majesty’s Most Gracious
intention of entering into the bonds of wedlock.
That Her Most Gracious Majesty, in
so making known Her Most Gracious intention to Her Most
Honourable Privy Council as aforesaid, did use and employ the
words—‘It is my intention to ally myself in marriage
with Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha.’
That the present is Bissextile, or
Leap Year, in which it is held and considered lawful for any lady
to offer and submit proposals of marriage to any gentleman, and
to enforce and insist upon acceptance of the same, under pain of
a certain fine or penalty; to wit, one silk or satin dress of the
first quality, to be chosen by the lady and paid (or owed) for,
by the gentleman.
That these and other the horrors
and dangers with which the said Bissextile, or Leap Year,
threatens the gentlemen of England on every occasion of its
periodical return, have been greatly aggravated and augmented by
the terms of Her Majesty’s said Most Gracious
communication, which have filled the heads of divers young ladies
in this Realm with certain new ideas destructive to the peace of
mankind, that never entered their imagination before.
That a case has occurred in
Camberwell, in which a young lady informed her Papa that
‘she intended to ally herself in marriage’ with Mr.
Smith of Stepney; and that another, and a very distressing case,
has occurred at Tottenham, in which a young lady not only stated
her intention of allying herself in marriage with her cousin
John, but, taking violent possession of her said cousin, actually
married him.
That similar outrages are of
constant occurrence, not only in the capital and its
neighbourhood, but throughout the kingdom, and that unless the
excited female populace be speedily checked and restrained in
their lawless proceedings, most deplorable results must ensue
therefrom; among which may be anticipated a most alarming
increase in the population of the country, with which no efforts
of the agricultural or manufacturing interest can possibly keep
pace.
That there is strong reason to
suspect the existence of a most extensive plot, conspiracy, or
design, secretly contrived by vast numbers of single ladies in
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and now
extending its ramifications in every quarter of the land; the
object and intent of which plainly appears to be the holding and
solemnising of an enormous and unprecedented number of marriages,
on the day on which the nuptials of Her said Most Gracious
Majesty are performed.
That such plot, conspiracy, or
design, strongly savours of Popery, as tending to the
discomfiture of the Clergy of the Established Church, by
entailing upon them great mental and physical exhaustion; and
that such Popish plots are fomented and encouraged by Her
Majesty’s Ministers, which clearly appears—not only
from Her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs traitorously getting married while holding office under
the Crown; but from Mr. O’Connell having been heard to
declare and avow that, if he had a daughter to marry, she should
be married on the same day as Her said Most Gracious Majesty.
That such arch plots, conspiracies,
and designs, besides being fraught with danger to the Established
Church, and (consequently) to the State, cannot fail to bring
ruin and bankruptcy upon a large class of Her Majesty’s
subjects; as a great and sudden increase in the number of married
men occasioning the comparative desertion (for a time) of
Taverns, Hotels, Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, will deprive
the Proprietors of their accustomed profits and returns.
And in further proof of the depth and baseness of such designs,
it may be here observed, that all proprietors of Taverns, Hotels,
Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, are (especially the last)
solemnly devoted to the Protestant religion.
For all these reasons, and many
others of no less gravity and import, an...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
BARNABY RUDGE
A TALE OF THE RIOTS OF ‘EIGHTY by Charles Dickens
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Etext Contributor’s Note:
I’ve left in archaic forms such as ‘to-morrow’ or ‘to-day’ as they
occured in my copy. Also please be aware if spell-checking, that within
dialog many ‘mispelled’ words exist, i.e. ‘wery’ for ‘very’, as intended
by the author.
D.L.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter the Last
PREFACE
The late Mr Waterton having, some time ago, expressed his opinion that
ravens are gradually becoming extinct in England, I offered the few
following words about my experience of these birds.
The raven in this story is a compound of two great originals, of whom I
was, at different times, the proud possessor. The first was in the bloom
of his youth, when he was discovered in a modest retirement in London, by
a friend of mine, and given to me. He had from the first, as Sir Hugh
Evans says of Anne Page, ‘good gifts’, which he improved by study and
attention in a most exemplary manner. He slept in a stable—generally
on horseback—and so terrified a Newfoundland dog by his
preternatural sagacity, that he has been known, by the mere superiority of
his genius, to walk off unmolested with the dog’s dinner, from before his
face. He was rapidly rising in acquirements and virtues, when, in an evil
hour, his stable was newly painted. He observed the workmen closely, saw
that they were careful of the paint, and immediately burned to possess it.
On their going to dinner, he ate up all they had left behind, consisting
of a pound or two of white lead; and this youthful indiscretion terminated
in death.
While I was yet inconsolable for his loss, another friend of mine in
Yorkshire discovered an older and more gifted raven at a village
public-house, which he prevailed upon the landlord to part with for a
consideration, and sent up to me. The first act of this Sage, was, to
administer to the effects of his predecessor, by disinterring all the
cheese and halfpence he had buried in the garden—a work of immense
labour and research, to which he devoted all the energies of his mind.
When he had achieved this task, he applied himself to the acquisition of
stable language, in which he soon became such an adept, that he would
perch outside my window and drive imaginary horses with great skill, all
day. Perhaps even I never saw him at his best, for his former master sent
his duty with him, ‘and if I wished the bird to come out very strong,
would I be so good as to show him a drunken man’—which I never did,
having (unfortunately) none but sober people at hand.
But I could hardly have respected him more, whatever the stimulating
influences of this sight might have been. He had not the least respect, I
am sorry to say, for me in return, or for anybody but the cook; to whom he
was attached—but only, I fear, as a Policeman might have been. Once,
I met him unexpectedly, about half-a-mile from my house, walking down the
middle of a public street, attended by a pretty large crowd, and
spontaneously exhibiting the wh...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1903 Chapman and Hall Sketches by
Boz edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
SKETCHES OF YOUNG GENTLEMEN
p. 402TO THE YOUNG LADIES
OF THE
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland;
ALSO
THE YOUNG LADIES
OF
THE PRINCIPALITY OF
WALES,
AND LIKEWISE
THE YOUNG LADIES
RESIDENT IN THE ISLES OF
Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, and Sark,
THE HUMBLE DEDICATION OF THEIR DEVOTED
ADMIRER,
Sheweth,—
That your Dedicator has perused,
with feelings of virtuous indignation, a work purporting to be
‘Sketches of Young Ladies;’ written by Quiz,
illustrated by Phiz, and published in one volume, square
twelvemo.
That after an attentive and
vigilant perusal of the said work, your Dedicator is humbly of
opinion that so many libels, upon your Honourable sex, were never
contained in any previously published work, in twelvemo or any
other mo.
That in the title page and preface
to the said work, your Honourable sex are described and
classified as animals; and although your Dedicator is not at
present prepared to deny that you are animals, still he
humbly submits that it is not polite to call you so.
That in the aforesaid preface, your
Honourable sex are also described as Troglodites, which, being a
hard word, may, for aught your Honourable sex or your Dedicator
can say to the contrary, be an injurious and disrespectful
appellation.
That the author of the said work
applied himself to his task in malice prepense and with
wickedness aforethought; a fact which, your Dedicator contends,
is sufficiently demonstrated, by his assuming the name of Quiz,
which, your Dedicator submits, denotes a foregone conclusion, and
implies an intention of quizzing.
That in the execution of his evil
design, the said Quiz, or author of the said work, must have
betrayed some trust or confidence reposed in him by some members
of your Honourable sex, otherwise he never could have acquired so
much information relative to the manners and customs of your
Honourable sex in general.
That actuated by these
considerations, and further moved by various slanders and
insinuations respecting your Honourable sex contained in the said
work, square twelvemo, entitled ‘Sketches of Young
Ladies,’ your Dedicator ventures to produce another work,
square twelvemo, entitled ‘Sketches of Young
Gentlemen,’ of which he now solicits your acceptance and
approval.
That as the Young Ladies are the
best companions of the Young Gentlemen, so the Young Gentlemen
should be the best companions of the Young Ladies; and extending
the comparison from animals (to quote the disrespectful language
of the said Quiz) to inanimate objects, your Dedicator humbly
suggests, that such of your Honourable sex as purchased the bane
should possess themselves of the antidote, and that those of your
Honourable sex who were not rash enough to take the first, should
lose no time in swallowing the last,—prevention being in
all cases better than cure, as we are informed upon the
authority, not only of general acknowledgment, but also of
traditionary wisdom.
That with reference to the said
bane and antidote, your Dedicator has no further remarks to make,
than are comprised in the printed directions issued with Doctor
Morison’s pills; namely, that whenever your Honourable sex
take twenty-five of Number, 1, you will be pleased to take fifty
of Number 2, without delay.
And your Dedicator shall ever pray,
&c.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Bashful Young Gentleman
403
The Out-and-out Young Gentleman
407
The Very Friendly Young Gentleman
410
The Military Young Gentleman
414
The Political Young Gentleman
418
The Domestic Young Gentleman
421
The Censorious Young Gentleman
424
The Funny Young Gentleman
427
The Theatrical Young Gentleman
431
The Poetical Young Gentleman
433
The ‘Throwing-off’ Young Gentleman
436
The Young Ladies’ Young Gentleman
439
Conclusion
443
p. 403THE
BASHFUL YOUNG GENTLEMAN
We found ourself seated at a small
dinner party the other day, opposite a stranger of such singular
appearance and manner, that he irresistibly attracted our
attention.
This was a fresh-coloured young gentleman, with as good a
promise of light whisker as one might wish to see, and possessed
of a very velvet-like, soft-looking countenance. We do not
use the latter term invidiously, but merely to denote a pair of
smooth, plump, highly-coloured cheeks of capacious dimensions,
and a mouth rather remarkable for the fresh hue of the lips than
for any marked or striking expression it presented. His
whole face was suffused with a crimson blush, and bore that
downcast, timid, retiring look, which betokens a man ill at ease
with himself.
There was nothing in these symptoms to attract more than a
passing remark, but our attention had been originally drawn to
the bashful young gentleman, on his first appearance in the
d...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman & Hall edition (The
Works of Charles Dickens, volume 28) by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
Book cover
SUNDAY UNDER THREE HEADS
By CHARLES DICKENS
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
DEDICATION
To The Right Reverend
THE BISHOP OF LONDON
My Lord,
You were among the first, some years ago, to expatiate on the
vicious addiction of the lower classes of society to Sunday
excursions; and were thus instrumental in calling forth
occasional demonstrations of those extreme opinions on the
subject, which are very generally received with derision, if not
with contempt.
Your elevated station, my Lord, affords you countless
opportunities of increasing the comforts and pleasures of the
humbler classes of society—not by the expenditure of the
smallest portion of your princely income, but by merely
sanctioning with the influence of your example, their harmless
pastimes, and innocent recreations.
That your Lordship would ever have contemplated Sunday
recreations with so much horror, if you had been at all
acquainted with the wants and necessities of the people who
indulged in them, I cannot imagine possible. That a Prelate
of your elevated rank has the faintest conception of the extent
of those wants, and the nature of those necessities, I do not
believe.
For these reasons, I venture to address this little Pamphlet
to your Lordship’s consideration. I am quite
conscious that the outlines I have drawn, afford but a very
imperfect description of the feelings they are intended to
illustrate; but I claim for them one merit—their truth and
freedom from exaggeration. I may have fallen short of the
mark, but I have never overshot it: and while I have pointed out
what appears to me, to be injustice on the part of others, I hope
I have carefully abstained from committing it myself.
I am,
My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most
obedient,
Humble Servant,
TIMOTHY SPARKS.
June, 1836.
I
AS IT IS
There are few things from which I
derive greater pleasure, than walking through some of the
principal streets of London on a fine Sunday, in summer, and
watching the cheerful faces of the lively groups with which they
are thronged. There is something, to my eyes at least,
exceedingly pleasing in the general desire evinced by the humbler
classes of society, to appear neat and clean on this their only
holiday. There are many grave old persons, I know, who
shake their heads with an air of profound wisdom, and tell you
that poor people dress too well now-a-days; that when they were
children, folks knew their stations in life better; that you may
depend upon it, no good will come of this sort of thing in the
end,—and so forth: but I fancy I can discern in the fine
bonnet of the working-man’s wife, or the feather-bedizened
hat of his child, no inconsiderable evidence of good feeling on
the part of the man himself, and an affectionate desire to expend
the few shillings he can spare from his week’s wages, in
improving the appearance and adding to the happiness of those who
are nearest and dearest to him. This may be a very heinous
and unbecoming degree of vanity, perhaps, and the money might
possibly be applied to better uses; it must not be forgotten,
however, that it might very easily be devoted to worse: and if
two or three faces can be rendered happy and contented, by a
trifling improvement of outward appearance, I cannot help
thinking that the object is very cheaply purchased, even at the
expense of a smart gown, or a gaudy riband. There is a
great deal of very unnecessary cant about the over-dressing of
the common people. There is not a manufacturer or tradesman
in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable
degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him,
in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly
on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and
children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.
The pampered aristocrat, whose life is one continued round of
licentious pleasures and sensual gratifications; or the gloomy
enthusiast, who detests the cheerful amusements he can never
enjoy, and envies the healthy feelings he can never know, and who
would put down the one and suppress the other, until he made the
minds of his fellow-beings as besotted and distorted as his
own;—neither of these men can by possibility form an
adequate notion of what Sunday really is to those whose lives are
spent in sedentary or laborious occupations, and who are
accustomed to look forward to it through their whole existence,
as their only day of rest from toil, and innocent enjoyment.
The sun that rises over the quiet streets of London on a
bright Sunday morning, shines till his setting, on gay and happy
faces. Here and there, so early as six o’clock, a
young man and woman in their best attire, may be ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman & Hall edition (The
Works of Charles Dickens, volume 28) by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
Book cover
To be Read at Dusk
By CHARLES DICKENS
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1905
One, two, three, four, five.
There were five of them.
Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the
summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the
remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty
quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and
had not yet had time to sink into the snow.
This is not my simile. It was made for the occasion by
the stoutest courier, who was a German. None of the others
took any more notice of it than they took of me, sitting on
another bench on the other side of the convent door, smoking my
cigar, like them, and—also like them—looking at the
reddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the bodies
of belated travellers, dug out of it, slowly wither away, knowing
no corruption in that cold region.
The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; the
mountain became white; the sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose;
and the air turned piercing cold. The five couriers
buttoned their rough coats. There being no safer man to
imitate in all such proceedings than a courier, I buttoned
mine.
The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a
conversation. It is a sublime sight, likely to stop
conversation. The mountain being now out of the sunset,
they resumed. Not that I had heard any part of their
previous discourse; for indeed, I had not then broken away from
the American gentleman, in the travellers’ parlour of the
convent, who, sitting with his face to the fire, had undertaken
to realise to me the whole progress of events which had led to
the accumulation by the Honourable Ananias Dodger of one of the
largest acquisitions of dollars ever made in our country.
‘My God!’ said the Swiss courier, speaking in
French, which I do not hold (as some authors appear to do) to be
such an all-sufficient excuse for a naughty word, that I have
only to write it in that language to make it innocent; ‘if
you talk of ghosts—’
‘But I don’t talk of ghosts,’ said
the German.
‘Of what then?’ asked the Swiss.
‘If I knew of what then,’ said the German,
‘I should probably know a great deal more.’
It was a good answer, I thought, and it made me curious.
So, I moved my position to that corner of my bench which was
nearest to them, and leaning my back against the convent wall,
heard perfectly, without appearing to attend.
‘Thunder and lightning!’ said the German, warming,
‘when a certain man is coming to see you, unexpectedly;
and, without his own knowledge, sends some invisible messenger,
to put the idea of him into your head all day, what do you call
that? When you walk along a crowded street—at
Frankfort, Milan, London, Paris—and think that a passing
stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and then that another
passing stranger is like your friend Heinrich, and so begin to
have a strange foreknowledge that presently you’ll meet
your friend Heinrich—which you do, though you believed him
at Trieste—what do you call that?’
‘It’s not uncommon, either,’ murmured the
Swiss and the other three.
‘Uncommon!’ said the German.
‘It’s as common as cherries in the Black
Forest. It’s as common as maccaroni at Naples.
And Naples reminds me! When the old Marchesa Senzanima
shrieks at a card-party on the Chiaja—as I heard and saw
her, for it happened in a Bavarian family of mine, and I was
overlooking the service that evening—I say, when the old
Marchesa starts up at the card-table, white through her rouge,
and cries, “My sister in Spain is dead! I felt her
cold touch on my back!”—and when that sister
is dead at the moment—what do you call
that?’
‘Or when the blood of San Gennaro liquefies at the
request of the clergy—as all the world knows that it does
regularly once a-year, in my native city,’ said the
Neapolitan courier after a pause, with a comical look,
‘what do you call that?’
‘That!’ cried the German.
‘Well, I think I know a name for that.’
‘Miracle?’ said the Neapolitan, with the same sly
face.
The German merely smoked and laughed; and they all smoked and
laughed.
‘Bah!’ said the German, presently. ‘I
speak of things that really do happen. When I want to see
the conjurer, I pay to see a professed one, and have my
money’s worth. Very strange things do happen without
ghosts. Ghosts! Giovanni Baptista, tell your story of
the English bride. There’s no ghost in that, but
something full as strange. Will any man tell me
what?’
As there was a silence among them, I glanced around. He
whom I took to be Baptista was lighting a fresh cigar. He
presently went on to speak. He was a Genoese, as I
judged.
‘The story of the English bride?’ said he.
‘Basta! one ought not to...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
LITTLE DORRIT
By Charles Dickens
0008m
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CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION
BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY
CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow
CHAPTER 2 Fellow Travellers
CHAPTER 3. Home
CHAPTER 4. Mrs Flintwinch has a Dream
CHAPTER 5. Family Affairs
CHAPTER 6. The Father of the Marshalsea
CHAPTER 7. The Child of the Marshalsea
CHAPTER 8. The Lock
CHAPTER 9. Little Mother
CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of
Government
CHAPTER 11. Let Loose
CHAPTER 12. Bleeding Heart Yard
CHAPTER 13. Patriarchal
CHAPTER 14. Little Dorrit’s Party
CHAPTER 15. Mrs Flintwinch has another Dream
CHAPTER 16. Nobody’s Weakness
CHAPTER 17. Nobody’s Rival
CHAPTER 18. Little Dorrit’s Lover
CHAPTER 19. The Father of the Marshalsea in two
or three Relations
CHAPTER 20. Moving in Society
CHAPTER 21. Mr Merdle’s Complaint
CHAPTER 22. A Puzzle
CHAPTER 23. Machinery in Motion
CHAPTER 24. Fortune-Telling
CHAPTER 25. Conspirators and Others
CHAPTER 26. Nobody’s State of Mind
CHAPTER 27. Five-and-Twenty
CHAPTER 28. Nobody’s Disappearance
CHAPTER 29. Mrs Flintwinch goes on Dreaming
CHAPTER 30. The Word of a Gentleman
CHAPTER 31. Spirit
CHAPTER 32. More Fortune-Telling
CHAPTER 33. Mrs Merdle’s Complaint
CHAPTER 34. A Shoal of Barnacles
CHAPTER 35. What was behind Mr Pancks on Little
Dorrit’s Hand
CHAPTER 36. The Marshalsea becomes an Orphan
BOOK THE SECOND: RICHES
CHAPTER 1. Fellow Travellers
CHAPTER 2. Mrs General
CHAPTER 3. On the Road
CHAPTER 4. A Letter from Little Dorrit
CHAPTER 5. Something Wrong Somewhere
CHAPTER 6. Something Right Somewhere
CHAPTER 7. Mostly, Prunes and Prism
CHAPTER 8. The Dowager Mrs Gowan is reminded that
‘It Never Does’
CHAPTER 9. Appearance and Disappearance
CHAPTER 10. The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken
CHAPTER 11. A Letter from Little Dorrit
CHAPTER 12. In which a Great Patriotic Conference
is holden
CHAPTER 13. The Progress of an Epidemic
CHAPTER 14. Taking Advice
CHAPTER 15. No just Cause or Impediment why these
Two Persons
CHAPTER 16. Getting on
CHAPTER 17. Missing
CHAPTER 18. A Castle in the Air
CHAPTER 19. The Storming of the Castle in the Air
CHAPTER 20. Introduces the next
CHAPTER 21. The History of a Self-Tormentor
CHAPTER 22. Who passes by this Road so late?
CHAPTER 23. Mistress Affery makes a Conditional
Promise,
CHAPTER 24. The Evening of a Long Day
CHAPTER 25. The Chief Butler Resigns the Seals of
Office
CHAPTER 26. Reaping the Whirlwind
CHAPTER 27. The Pupil of the Marshalsea
CHAPTER 28. An Appearance in the Marshalsea
CHAPTER 29. A Plea in the Marshalsea
CHAPTER 30. Closing in
CHAPTER 31. Closed
CHAPTER 32. Going
CHAPTER 33. Going!
CHAPTER 34. Gone
PREFACE TO THE 1857 EDITION
I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two
years. I must have been very ill employed, if I could not leave its merits
and demerits as a whole, to express themselves on its being read as a
whole. But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its
threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given
them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that
the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern
finished.
If I might offer any apology for so exaggerated a fiction as the Barnacles
and the Circumlocution Office, I would seek it in the common experience of
an Englishman, without presuming to mention the unimportant fact of my
having done that violence to good manners, in the days of a Russian war,
and of a Court of Inquiry at Chelsea. If I might make so bold as to defend
that extravagant conception, Mr Merdle, I would hint that it originated
after the Railroad-share epoch, in the times of a certain Irish bank, and
of one or two other equally laudable enterprises. If I were to plead
anything in mitigation of the preposterous fancy that a bad design will
sometimes claim to be a good and an expressly religious design, it would
be the curious coincidence that it has been brought to its climax in these
pages, in the days of the public examination of late Directors of a Royal
British Bank. But, I submit myself to suffer judgment to go by default on
all ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY,
Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes,
Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the Nickelby Family
by Charles Dickens
0011m
Original
0029m
Original
0047m
Original
0048m
Original
0049m
Original
0050m
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CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
This story was begun, within a few months after the publication of the
completed “Pickwick Papers.” There were, then, a good many cheap Yorkshire
schools in existence. There are very few now.
Of the monstrous neglect of education in England, and the disregard of it
by the State as a means of forming good or bad citizens, and miserable or
happy men, private schools long afforded a notable example. Although any
man who had proved his unfitness for any other occupation in life, was
free, without examination or qualification, to open a school anywhere;
although preparation for the functions he undertook, was required in the
surgeon who assisted to bring a boy into the world, or might one day
assist, perhaps, to send him out of it; in the chemist, the attorney, the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker; the whole round of crafts and
trades, the schoolmaster excepted; and although schoolmasters, as a race,
were the blockheads and impostors who might naturally be expected to
spring from such a state of things, and to flourish in it; these Yorkshire
schoolmasters were the lowest and most rotten round in the whole ladder.
Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of parents, and the
helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom few
considerate persons would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse
or a dog; they formed the worthy cornerstone of a structure, which, for
absurdity and a magnificent high-minded Laissez-Aller neglect, has rarely
been exceeded in the world.
We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified medical
practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it.
But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed
for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them!
I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the past
tense. Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling daily. A
long day’s work remains to be done about us in the way of education,
Heaven knows; but great improvements and facilities towards the attainment
of a good one, have been furnished, of late years.
I cannot call to mind, now, how I came to hear about Yorkshire schools
when I was a not very robust child, sitting in bye-places near Rochester
Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza;
but I know that my first impressions of them were picked up at that time,
and that they were somehow or other connected with a suppurated abscess
that some boy had come home with, in consequence of his Yorkshire guide,
philosopher, and friend, having ripped it open with an inky pen-knife. The
impression made upon me, however made, never left me. I was always curious
about Yorkshire schools—fell, long afterwards and at sundry times,
into the way of hearing more about them—at last, having an audience,
resolved to write about them.
...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT
by Charles Dickens
20012m
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20013m
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20041m
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
POSTSCRIPT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
PREFACE
What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth
to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives in a
prospect innumerable features and bearings non-existent to a short-sighted
person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may occasionally be a
difference of this kind between some writers and some readers; whether it
is always the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the
reader whose eye for colour is a little dull?
On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience, more curious
than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never
touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of that
character has incredulously asked me: “Now really, did I ever really, see
one like it?”
All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that Mr
Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever existed. I
will not offer any plea on his behalf to so powerful and genteel a body,
but will make a remark on the character of Jonas Chuzzlewit.
I conceive that the sordid coarseness and brutality of Jonas would be
unnatural, if there had been nothing in his early education, and in the
precept and example always before him, to engender and develop the vices
that make him odious. But, so born and so bred, admired for that which
made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning, treachery, and
avarice; I claim him as the legitimate issue of the father upon whom those
vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that their recoil upon that old
man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere piece of poetical justice, but
is the extreme exposition of a direct truth.
I make this comment, and solicit the reader’s attention to it in his or
her consideration of this tale, because nothing is more common in real
life than a want of profitable reflection on the causes of many vices and
crimes that awaken the general horror. What is substantially true of
families in this respect, is true of a whole commonwealth. As we sow, we
reap. Let the reader go into the children’s side of any prison in England,
or, I grieve to add, of many workhouses, and judge whether those are
monsters who disgrace our streets, people our hulks and penitentiaries,
and overcrowd our penal colonies, or are creatures whom we have
deliberately suffered to be bred for misery and ruin.
The American portion of this story is in no other respect a caricature
than as it is an exhibition, for the most part (Mr Bevan expected), of a
ludicrous side, only, of the American character—of that side which
was, four-and-twenty years ago, from its nature, the most obtrusive, and
the most likely to be seen by such travellers as Young Martin and Mark
Tapley. As I had never, in writing fiction, had any disposition to soften
what is ridiculous or wrong at home, so I then hoped that the good-humored
people of the United States would not be generally disposed to quarrel
...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
BLEAK HOUSE
by
Charles Dickens
CONTENTS
Preface
I. In Chancery
II. In Fashion
III. A Progress
IV. Telescopic Philanthropy
V. A Morning Adventure
VI. Quite at Home
VII. The Ghost's Walk
VIII. Covering a Multitude of Sins
IX. Signs and Tokens
X. The Law-Writer
XI. Our Dear Brother
XII. On the Watch
XIII. Esther's Narrative
XIV. Deportment
XV. Bell Yard
XVI. Tom-all-Alone's
XVII. Esther's Narrative
XVIII. Lady Dedlock
XIX. Moving On
XX. A New Lodger
XXI. The Smallweed Family
XXII. Mr. Bucket
XXIII. Esther's Narrative
XXIV. An Appeal Case
XXV. Mrs. Snagsby Sees It All
XXVI. Sharpshooters
XXVII. More Old Soldiers Than One
XXVIII. The Ironmaster
XXIX. The Young Man
XXX. Esther's Narrative
XXXI. Nurse and Patient
XXXII. The Appointed Time
XXXIII. Interlopers
XXXIV. A Turn of the Screw
XXXV. Esther's Narrative
XXXVI. Chesney Wold
XXXVII. Jarndyce and Jarndyce
XXXVIII. A Struggle
XXXIX. Attorney and Client
XL. National and Domestic
XLI. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Room
XLII. In Mr. Tulkinghorn's Chambers
XLIII. Esther's Narrative
XLIV. The Letter and the Answer
XLV. In Trust
XLVI. Stop Him!
XLVII. Jo's Will
XLVIII. Closing In
XLIX. Dutiful Friendship
L. Esther's Narrative
LI. Enlightened
LII. Obstinacy
LIII. The Track
LIV. Springing a Mine
LV. Flight
LVI. Pursuit
LVII. Esther's Narrative
LVIII. A Wintry Day and Night
LIX. Esther's Narrative
LX. Perspective
LXI. A Discovery
LXII. Another Discovery
LXIII. Steel and Iron
LXIV. Esther's Narrative
LXV. Beginning the World
LXVI. Down in Lincolnshire
LXVII. The Close of Esther's Narrative
PREFACE
A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a
company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under
any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the
shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought
the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its rate of
progress, but this was exaggerated and had been entirely owing to the
"parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it appeared, had been
until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no means
enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed—I believe by
Richard the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of
this book or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to
Mr. Vholes, with one or other of whom I think it must have
originated. In such mouths I might have coupled it with an apt
quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:
"My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed!"
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what
has been doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here
that everything set forth in these pages concerning the Court of
Chancery is substantially true, and within the truth. The case of
Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence,
made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to
end. At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the
court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from
thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in
which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand
pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no
nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is
another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was
commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than
double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in
costs. If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I
could rain them on these pages, to the shame of—a parsimonious
public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The
possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied
since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite
mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been
abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me
at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous
combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do
not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I
wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There
are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of
the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was ...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of
“Christmas Stories” by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THREE GHOST STORIES
by Charles Dickens
CONTENTS
The Haunted House
121
The Trial For Murder
303
The Signal-Man
312
p. 121THE
HAUNTED HOUSE.
IN TWO CHAPTERS. [121]
[1859.]
THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE.
Under none of the accredited
ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional
ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the
house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw
it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no
wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted
circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More
than that: I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was
not more than a mile distant from the railway station; and, as I
stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I had come, I
could see the goods train running smoothly along the embankment
in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly
commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to
utterly commonplace people—and there my vanity steps in;
but, I will take it on myself to say that anybody might see the
house as I saw it, any fine autumn morning.
The manner of my lighting on it was this.
I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to
stop by the way, to look at the house. My health required a
temporary residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew
that, and who had happened to drive past the house, had written
to me to suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the
train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had
sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the
sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find
the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that
I hadn’t been to sleep at all;—upon which question,
in the first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to
believe that I would have done wager by battle with the p. 122man who sat
opposite me. That opposite man had had, through the
night—as that opposite man always has—several legs
too many, and all of them too long. In addition to this
unreasonable conduct (which was only to be expected of him), he
had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had been perpetually
listening and taking notes. It had appeared to me that
these aggravating notes related to the jolts and bumps of the
carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking them,
under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head
whenever he listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a
perplexed aspect, and his demeanour became unbearable.
It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and
when I had out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron
country, and the curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between
me and the stars and between me and the day, I turned to my
fellow-traveller and said:
“I beg your pardon, sir, but do you observe
anything particular in me?” For, really, he appeared
to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or my hair, with a
minuteness that was a liberty.
The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as
if the back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said,
with a lofty look of compassion for my insignificance:
“In you, sir?—B.”
“B, sir?” said I, growing warm.
“I have nothing to do with you, sir,” returned the
gentleman; “pray let me listen—O.”
He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.
At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no
communication with the guard, is a serious position. The
thought came to my relief that the gentleman might be what is
popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for (some of) whom I
have the highest respect, but whom I don’t believe
in. I was going to ask him the question, when he took the
bread out of my mouth.
“You will excuse me,” said the gentleman
contemptuously, “if I am too much in advance of common
humanity to trouble myself at all about it. I have passed
the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time
now—in spiritual intercourse.”
“O!” said I, somewhat snappishly.
“The conferences of the night began,” continued
the gentleman, turning several leaves of his note-book,
“with this message: ‘Evil communications corrupt good
manners.’”
“Sound,” said I; “but, absolutely
new?”
“New from spirits,” returned the gentleman.
I could only repeat my rather snappish “O!” and
ask if I might be favoured with the last communication.
“‘A bird in the hand,’” said the
gentleman, reading his last entry with great solemnity,
“‘is worth two in the Bosh.’”
p.
123“Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I;
“but shouldn’t it be Bush?”
“It came to me, Bosh,” returned the gentleman.
The gentleman then informed me that...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
The Seven Poor Travellers, by Charles Dickens
Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of “Christmas
Stories” by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS—IN THREE CHAPTERS
CHAPTER I—IN THE OLD CITY OF ROCHESTER
Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, being
a Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor as
I hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of explanation
is due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?
RICHARD WATTS, Esq.
by his Will, dated 22 Aug. 1579,
founded this Charity
for Six poor Travellers,
who not being ROGUES, or PROCTORS,
May receive gratis for one Night,
Lodging, Entertainment,
and Fourpence each.
It was in the ancient little city of Rochester in Kent, of all the
good days in the year upon a Christmas-eve, that I stood reading this
inscription over the quaint old door in question. I had been wandering
about the neighbouring Cathedral, and had seen the tomb of Richard Watts,
with the effigy of worthy Master Richard starting out of it like a ship’s
figure-head; and I had felt that I could do no less, as I gave the Verger
his fee, than inquire the way to Watts’s Charity. The way
being very short and very plain, I had come prosperously to the inscription
and the quaint old door.
“Now,” said I to myself, as I looked at the knocker,
“I know I am not a Proctor; I wonder whether I am a Rogue!”
Upon the whole, though Conscience reproduced two or three pretty
faces which might have had smaller attraction for a moral Goliath than
they had had for me, who am but a Tom Thumb in that way, I came to the
conclusion that I was not a Rogue. So, beginning to regard the
establishment as in some sort my property, bequeathed to me and divers
co-legatees, share and share alike, by the Worshipful Master Richard
Watts, I stepped backward into the road to survey my inheritance.
I found it to be a clean white house, of a staid and venerable air,
with the quaint old door already three times mentioned (an arched door),
choice little long low lattice-windows, and a roof of three gables.
The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beams
and timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly garnished with
a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red-brick
building, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign.
Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of work in Rochester, in the old
days of the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Normans; and down to the
times of King John, when the rugged castle—I will not undertake
to say how many hundreds of years old then—was abandoned to the
centuries of weather which have so defaced the dark apertures in its
walls, that the ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had pecked its eyes
out.
I was very well pleased, both with my property and its situation.
While I was yet surveying it with growing content, I espied, at one
of the upper lattices which stood open, a decent body, of a wholesome
matronly appearance, whose eyes I caught inquiringly addressed to mine.
They said so plainly, “Do you wish to see the house?” that
I answered aloud, “Yes, if you please.” And within
a minute the old door opened, and I bent my head, and went down two
steps into the entry.
“This,” said the matronly presence, ushering me into
a low room on the right, “is where the Travellers sit by the fire,
and cook what bits of suppers they buy with their fourpences.”
“O! Then they have no Entertainment?” said I.
For the inscription over the outer door was still running in my head,
and I was mentally repeating, in a kind of tune, “Lodging, entertainment,
and fourpence each.”
“They have a fire provided for ’em,” returned the
matron—a mighty civil person, not, as I could make out, overpaid;
“and these cooking utensils. And this what’s painted
on a board is the rules for their behaviour. They have their fourpences
when they get their tickets from the steward over the way,—for
I don’t admit ’em myself, they must get their tickets first,—and
sometimes one buys a rasher of bacon, and another a herring, and another
a pound of potatoes, or what not. Sometimes two or three of ’em
will club their fourpences together, and make a supper that way.
But not much of anything is to be got for fourpence, at present, when
provisions is so dear.”
“True indeed,” I remarked. I had been looking about
the room, admiring its snug fireside at the upper end, its glimpse of
the street through the low mullioned window, and its beams overhead.
“It is very comfortable,” said I.
“Ill-conwenient,” observed the matronly presence.
I liked to hear her say so; for it showed a commendable anxiety to
execute in no niggardly spirit the intentions of Master Richard Watts.
But the room was really so well adapted to its purpose that I protested,
quite enthusiastically, against her disparagement...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
The Holly-Tree, by Charles Dickens
Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of “Christmas
Stories” by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE HOLLY-TREE—THREE BRANCHES
FIRST BRANCH—MYSELF
I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful
man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody
ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is
the secret which I have never breathed until now.
I might greatly move the reader by some account of the innumerable
places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called
upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty
of, solely because I am by original constitution and character a bashful
man. But I will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with the
object before me.
That object is to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries
in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man
and beast I was once snowed up.
It happened in the memorable year when I parted for ever from Angela
Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery that
she preferred my bosom friend. From our school-days I had freely
admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself; and, though
I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference to be natural,
and tried to forgive them both. It was under these circumstances
that I resolved to go to America—on my way to the Devil.
Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but resolving
to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my blessing and
forgiveness, which the steam-tender for shore should carry to the post
when I myself should be bound for the New World, far beyond recall,—I
say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and consoling myself as I
could with the prospect of being generous, I quietly left all I held
dear, and started on the desolate journey I have mentioned.
The dead winter-time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers
for ever, at five o’clock in the morning. I had shaved by
candle-light, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that
general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged which I have
usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such circumstances.
How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came
out of the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty north-east
wind, as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-topped
houses; the bleak, star-lighted sky; the market people and other early
stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen blood; the hospitable
light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and public-houses that were
open for such customers; the hard, dry, frosty rime with which the air
was charged (the wind had already beaten it into every crevice), and
which lashed my face like a steel whip.
It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year.
The Post-office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool,
weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the
intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into consideration,
and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot (which I need not
name) on the farther borders of Yorkshire. It was endeared to
me by my having first seen Angela at a farmhouse in that place, and
my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a wintry leave of
it before my expatriation. I ought to explain, that, to avoid
being sought out before my resolution should have been rendered irrevocable
by being carried into full effect, I had written to Angela overnight,
in my usual manner, lamenting that urgent business, of which she should
know all particulars by-and-by—took me unexpectedly away from
her for a week or ten days.
There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there
were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with
some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded
as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat on
the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get into
a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the Peacock
at Islington, where I was to join this coach. But when one of
our Temple watchmen, who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street for
me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days past
been floating in the river, having closed up in the night, and made
a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I began to
ask myself the question, whether the box-seat would not be likely to
put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness. I was heart-broken,
it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen
to death.
When I got up to the Peacock,—where I found everybody drinking
hot purl, in self-preservation,—I asked if there were an inside
seat to spare. I then d...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
cover
Great Expectations
[1867 Edition]
by Charles Dickens
Contents
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
Chapter XIX.
Chapter XX.
Chapter XXI.
Chapter XXII.
Chapter XXIII.
Chapter XXIV.
Chapter XXV.
Chapter XXVI.
Chapter XXVII.
Chapter XXVIII.
Chapter XXIX.
Chapter XXX.
Chapter XXXI.
Chapter XXXII.
Chapter XXXIII.
Chapter XXXIV.
Chapter XXXV.
Chapter XXXVI.
Chapter XXXVII.
Chapter XXXVIII.
Chapter XXXIX.
Chapter XL.
Chapter XLI.
Chapter XLII.
Chapter XLIII.
Chapter XLIV.
Chapter XLV.
Chapter XLVI.
Chapter XLVII.
Chapter XLVIII.
Chapter XLIX.
Chapter L.
Chapter LI.
Chapter LII.
Chapter LIII.
Chapter LIV.
Chapter LV.
Chapter LVI.
Chapter LVII.
Chapter LVIII.
Chapter LIX.
[Illustration]
Chapter I.
My
father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than
Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As
I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of
them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first
fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their
tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea
that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the
character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the
Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and
sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which
were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory
of five little brothers of mine,—who gave up trying to get a living,
exceedingly early in that universal struggle,—I am indebted for a belief
I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their
hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound,
twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the
identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon
towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place
overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this
parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that
Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the
aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond
the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered
cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was
the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was
the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and
beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little
devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no
hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who
had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by
flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and
glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by
the chin.
“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror.
“Pray don’t do it, sir.”
“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”
“Pip, sir.”
“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it
mouth!”
“Pip. Pip, sir.”
“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the
place!”
I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the alder-trees
and pollards, a mile or more from the church.
The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied
my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church
came to itself,—for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head
over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet,—w...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, by Charles Dickens
Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall “Christmas Stories”
edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE PERILS OF CERTAIN ENGLISH PRISONERS
CHAPTER I—THE ISLAND OF SILVER-STORE
It was in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and forty-four,
that I, Gill Davis to command, His Mark, having then the honour to be
a private in the Royal Marines, stood a-leaning over the bulwarks of
the armed sloop Christopher Columbus, in the South American waters off
the Mosquito shore.
My lady remarks to me, before I go any further, that there is no
such christian-name as Gill, and that her confident opinion is, that
the name given to me in the baptism wherein I was made, &c., was
Gilbert. She is certain to be right, but I never heard of it.
I was a foundling child, picked up somewhere or another, and I always
understood my christian-name to be Gill. It is true that I was
called Gills when employed at Snorridge Bottom betwixt Chatham and Maidstone
to frighten birds; but that had nothing to do with the Baptism wherein
I was made, &c., and wherein a number of things were promised for
me by somebody, who let me alone ever afterwards as to performing any
of them, and who, I consider, must have been the Beadle. Such
name of Gills was entirely owing to my cheeks, or gills, which at that
time of my life were of a raspy description.
My lady stops me again, before I go any further, by laughing exactly
in her old way and waving the feather of her pen at me. That action
on her part, calls to my mind as I look at her hand with the rings on
it—Well! I won’t! To be sure it will come in,
in its own place. But it’s always strange to me, noticing
the quiet hand, and noticing it (as I have done, you know, so many times)
a-fondling children and grandchildren asleep, to think that when blood
and honour were up—there! I won’t! not at present!—Scratch
it out.
She won’t scratch it out, and quite honourable; because we
have made an understanding that everything is to be taken down, and
that nothing that is once taken down shall be scratched out. I
have the great misfortune not to be able to read and write, and I am
speaking my true and faithful account of those Adventures, and my lady
is writing it, word for word.
I say, there I was, a-leaning over the bulwarks of the sloop Christopher
Columbus in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore: a subject
of his Gracious Majesty King George of England, and a private in the
Royal Marines.
In those climates, you don’t want to do much. I was doing
nothing. I was thinking of the shepherd (my father, I wonder?)
on the hillsides by Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a
rough white coat in all weathers all the year round, who used to let
me lie in a corner of his hut by night, and who used to let me go about
with him and his sheep by day when I could get nothing else to do, and
who used to give me so little of his victuals and so much of his staff,
that I ran away from him—which was what he wanted all along, I
expect—to be knocked about the world in preference to Snorridge
Bottom. I had been knocked about the world for nine-and-twenty
years in all, when I stood looking along those bright blue South American
Waters. Looking after the shepherd, I may say. Watching
him in a half-waking dream, with my eyes half-shut, as he, and his flock
of sheep, and his two dogs, seemed to move away from the ship’s
side, far away over the blue water, and go right down into the sky.
“It’s rising out of the water, steady,” a voice
said close to me. I had been thinking on so, that it like woke
me with a start, though it was no stranger voice than the voice of Harry
Charker, my own comrade.
“What’s rising out of the water, steady?” I asked
my comrade.
“What?” says he. “The Island.”
“O! The Island!” says I, turning my eyes towards
it. “True. I forgot the Island.”
“Forgot the port you’re going to? That’s
odd, ain’t it?”
“It is odd,” says I.
“And odd,” he said, slowly considering with himself,
“ain’t even. Is it, Gill?”
He had always a remark just like that to make, and seldom another.
As soon as he had brought a thing round to what it was not, he was satisfied.
He was one of the best of men, and, in a certain sort of a way, one
with the least to say for himself. I qualify it, because, besides
being able to read and write like a Quarter-master, he had always one
most excellent idea in his mind. That was, Duty. Upon my
soul, I don’t believe, though I admire learning beyond everything,
that he could have got a better idea out of all the books in the world,
if he had learnt them every word, and been the cleverest of scholars.
My comrade and I had been quartered in Jamaica, and from there we
had been drafted off to the British settlement of Belize, lying away
West and North of the Mosquito coast. At Belize there had been
great al...
|
Author: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
A Message from the Sea, by Charles Dickens
Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall “Christmas Stories”
edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
A MESSAGE FROM THE SEA
CHAPTER I—THE VILLAGE
“And a mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever
I saw in all the days of my life!” said Captain Jorgan, looking
up at it.
Captain Jorgan had to look high to look at it, for the village was
built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was
no road in it, there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level
yard in it. From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular
rows of white houses, placed opposite to one another, and twisting here
and there, and there and here, rose, like the sides of a long succession
of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed up the village or climbed
down the village by the staves between, some six feet wide or so, and
made of sharp irregular stones. The old pack-saddle, long laid
aside in most parts of England as one of the appendages of its infancy,
flourished here intact. Strings of pack-horses and pack-donkeys
toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders, bearing fish, and coal,
and such other cargo as was unshipping at the pier from the dancing
fleet of village boats, and from two or three little coasting traders.
As the beasts of burden ascended laden, or descended light, they got
so lost at intervals in the floating clouds of village smoke, that they
seemed to dive down some of the village chimneys, and come to the surface
again far off, high above others. No two houses in the village
were alike, in chimney, size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree,
anything. The sides of the ladders were musical with water, running
clear and bright. The staves were musical with the clattering
feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen
urging them up, mingled with the voices of the fishermen’s wives
and their many children. The pier was musical with the wash of
the sea, the creaking of capstans and windlasses, and the airy fluttering
of little vanes and sails. The rough, sea-bleached boulders of
which the pier was made, and the whiter boulders of the shore, were
brown with drying nets. The red-brown cliffs, richly wooded to
their extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms reflected
in the bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a November
day without a cloud. The village itself was so steeped in autumnal
foliage, from the houses lying on the pier to the topmost round of the
topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a bird’s-nesting,
and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber. And mentioning
birds, the place was not without some music from them too; for the rook
was very busy on the higher levels, and the gull with his flapping wings
was fishing in the bay, and the lusty little robin was hopping among
the great stone blocks and iron rings of the breakwater, fearless in
the faith of his ancestors, and the Children in the Wood.
Thus it came to pass that Captain Jorgan, sitting balancing himself
on the pier-wall, struck his leg with his open hand, as some men do
when they are pleased—and as he always did when he was pleased—and
said,—
“A mighty sing’lar and pretty place it is, as ever I
saw in all the days of my life!”
Captain Jorgan had not been through the village, but had come down
to the pier by a winding side-road, to have a preliminary look at it
from the level of his own natural element. He had seen many things
and places, and had stowed them all away in a shrewd intellect and a
vigorous memory. He was an American born, was Captain Jorgan,—a
New-Englander,—but he was a citizen of the world, and a combination
of most of the best qualities of most of its best countries.
For Captain Jorgan to sit anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat
and blue trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking
distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking
with the fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery,
and the tides, and the currents, and the race of water off that point
yonder, and what you kept in your eye, and got into a line with what
else when you ran into the little harbour; and other nautical profundities.
Among the men who exchanged ideas with the captain was a young fellow,
who exactly hit his fancy,—a young fisherman of two or three and
twenty, in the rough sea-dress of his craft, with a brown face, dark
curling hair, and bright, modest eyes under his Sou’wester hat,
and with a frank, but simple and retiring manner, which the captain
found uncommonly taking. “I’d bet a thousand dollars,”
said the captain to himself, “that your father was an honest man!”
“Might you be married now?” asked the captain, when he
had had some talk with this new acquaintance.
“Not yet.”
“Going to be?” said the captain.
“I hope so.”
The captain’s keen glance f...
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