ABSTRACT
If the title of Mr Dickens’s last novel could fairly be taken to mean more than a slight foreshadowing of the plot therein developed, we could not easily bring ourselves to congratulate the author on a hit so curiously unhappy as that which a playful fancy will be prone to lay to his account. Of those who may have had the boldness to expect great things, even in these latter days, from the growing weakness of a once mighty genius, there can be few who have not already chewed the cud of a disappointment bitter in proportion to the sweetness of their former hopes. Doubtless there were some good easy souls who saw in Hard Times and Little Dorrit either the fitting outcome or the momentary eclipse of bygone triumphs won by the pen of ‘Boz.’ In A Tale of Two Cities, friendly critics of the latter class seemed to discover flashes of something that might, by courtesy, be taken for the well known brilliance of other days. But, after all, how many of those who have helped to carry Great Expectations into a fourth or even fifth edition, entered on the reading of it with any serious hope of finding in Pip’s adventures a worthy pendant to those of Pickwick or Martin Chuzzlewit? Would it not be far nearer the truth to say, that nine persons out of ten have approached these volumes with no other feeling than one of kindly regard for the most trivial utterances of an old favourite, or of curiosity, half painful, half careless, to see what further ravages timemight have yet in store for the mental frame of a novelist already past his prime?
