ABSTRACT
This halcyon world, into which the fogs of the island realm could not penetrate, was the land of childhood. English discretion blinked at the life of carnal desires, forcing the adult sons and daughters of Britain to assume a virtue if they had it not. In this realm, where Dickens was free to do as he liked, unhampered by the dictates of his Victorian conscience, he accomplished imperishable things. The parts of his books where he is describing the years of childhood are invariably beautiful. He takes them by the hand as though they were invalids, and weaves a garland of goodness around their heads, crowning them as it were with an aureole. They are sacred to him, because they for ever inhabit the paradise of childhood. The exalted merges with the sentimental, tragedy with comedy, truth with fiction, till they form something new and strange. For he loved them as the purest incarnations of the human essence.
