The Argosy — page 354: what you’re looking at

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

282 THE TENDENCY OF DICKENS'S WORKS. ‘| BE great difficulty in this essay is to know which to draw out of the many different threads that must necessarily be woven into the drapery of my subject. The works of Dickens are so many-sided in their views of life, so limitless in their portraiture of character, so teeming with artistic and poetic fancies, so glistening with bright sparks of humour, that it is hard to decide where to begin, and harder still to know where to end. It is a relief to fall back at once on the aim which actuated the author in all he wrote, and that was—doing good to his fellow men. His aim was single, but the means by which he attained it were many and varied. We will take the broadest and most palpable. Each of his works presents in turn a vivid picture of some great social evil, some wrong shared by many, or some individual weak- ness ; and so correct are the outlines, so detailed and careful the filling in, so true a perspective does he give, that it is impossible for any average common sense not to detect his real meaning at once. They form an art gallery which we may wander through alone, and learn the great lessons of morality and humanity such as the Great Master, whom Charles Dickens humbly followed, loved to teach. The first great wrong he pictured was the Workhouse System, in “Oliver Twist.” Most of us know the tale. Poverty and suffering on one hand, as personified in little Oliver Twist and his wretched com- panions ; ignorance in authority and its natural development, as seen in the matron and the beadle. And then that Board of Guardians! Many of them men with so exalted an idea of their own position, as guardians of such a philanthropic and beneficent institution, that they never noticed the wretched details of misery and wrong which they Swept with their very garments. We know that Dickens’s vivid delineation of this great wrong was substantially correct at the time he drew it, and how far the present improved state of affairs is due to his pen we can only surmise. His next book was ‘“ Nicholas Nickleby.” The social evil here depicted was the cruelty and injustice secretly practised in some Yorkshire Schools, the picture of which was so lifelike that one schoolmaster wrote Dickens a threatening letter on account of the exposure. There is no doubt that the effect of this book was to do away with these schools altogether. There are many more personal lessons to be learnt from the characters in ‘‘ Nicholas Nickleby”: a lesson of benevolence from the Brothers Cheeryble, who, having worked their way upwards through COniiclooolkks (GO) mn