ABSTRACT
… What need can there be to tell the history of CHARLES DICKENS? His life is a part—intimate, affectionate, vital—of the experience—we might almost say the consciousness of his generation. His thoughts, sympathies, aims, have become graciously and grandly intermingled with its thoughts, sympathies, and aims. He lived not only before our eyes, but in our very hearts. He not only had a place there, but a home—a home, too, which he continually occupied, and which his presence made too glad and happy for memory to lose or eloquence explain. And now he is dead, and the home is darkened, and there reigns solemn stillness, broken only by sobs of unavailing woe. The gladness is turned to grief, and all the household mourns. For CHARLES DICKENS was the dear friend of men and women and children, even as he was the strong warm friend of humanity. The creations of his genius were our companions, and by them he told us how rich he was in the knowledge of human nature, how genuine was his humour, how kindly and universal his sympathies, how patient and noble his art. Those creations have an actual life of their own. They, too, have warm breath and radiant vitality. They have been our sweet familiar companions—dear to our hearts themselves, and making their parent dearer for the elevated pleasures they have afforded us. The CHEERYBLE Brothers, LITTLE NELL, TOM PINCH, DORA, PEGGOTTY, PICKWICK, and a crowd of other most human creatures, the product of a most human genius, seem now to gather about the soul, stricken with the mystery of the death of our friend their father, as though they were sensible of the dark shadow and participated in the solemn lamentation. They are as animated and as actual as he ever was; and now he is as incorporeal as they ever were… CHARLES DICKENS—the power, the teacher, the good friend, the great creator of more than a hundred beings who cannot die—is not dead. In those living beings he lives. By them he continues, and will through uncounted generations continue to influence mankind, softening the asperities of caste and class, redeeming poverty from shame, givingtenderness to compassion, suffusing justice with mercy, gently making the pietist ashamed of his hypocrisies, and stimulating all to broader charities, to more genuine nobleness, and more genial dignity.
