Pickwick Abroad: A Companion to the Pickwick Papers — page 233: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BEFORE THE CURTAIN. As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheat- ing, fighting, dancing, and fiddling: there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen on the look-out, quacks (other quacks, plague take them!) bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinseled dancers and poor old rouged, tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind. Yes, this is Vanity F’arr; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying, ‘“‘ How are you ?” A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people’s hilarity. An episode of humor or kindness touches and amuses him here and there; a pretty child looking at a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing while her lover talks to her and chooses her fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the wagon, mumbling his bone with the honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more melancholy than mirthful. When you come home, you sit down, in a sober, contemplative, not uncharit- able frame of mind, and apply yourself to-your books or your business. I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of “ Vanity Fair.’ Some people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and families: perhaps they are right. But persons who think otherwise and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour and look at the performances. ‘There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse- riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some COMMICMOOOKSsE®