ABSTRACT
… It is not easy to realise at this moment how Mr Dickens will be missed. He was without any exception or any chance of approach the most popular author of the time. He was emphatically the novelist of the age. In his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in any contemporary records the character of our nineteenth century life. They will see us as we are, in our strength and our weakness, with all our social sores, and all the healing influences exerted to cure them. But Mr Dickens has not merely shown us to posterity, he has shown us to ourselves. His genial satire, his kindly and gentle humour, his hearty love of human nature, and his reverence for everything that is good and true, have all been exerted to make us think better of our neighbours, and more humbly of ourselves. In all his works there is a high moral aim, and we may surely add, a high moral teaching. There are few men who have written so much as Mr Dickens, and there can be none who, having written so much, could so truly look back upon their writings and feel that there was no line they would wish to blot. Mr Dickens was the one writer everybody read and everybody liked. His writings had become classics even during his lifetime. They are suited alike to all classes, and have been as welcome in the cottage as in the country house, in the Far West of America, and in the Australian bush as in our English homes. More than any other writer he has been the home favourite. People who never read any other novels, read Mr Dickens’s; many of his favourite characters are household words among us. Who has not laughed at Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller; or cried over little Little Nell or Paul Dombey; or formed good resolutions in company with Old Scrooge or Tony Veck? Even for the innocent pleasure, the genuine enjoyment, Mr Dickens has given to the generation which has had the privilege of reading his works as they have appeared, he would deserve to be reckoned amongthe benefactors of mankind. But the enjoyment Mr Dickens has given us has left no dissatisfaction behind it. A high and pure moral tone breathes through all his writings, his scorn is only for meanness, his contempt only for pretence, his denunciation and hatred only for the wrongs which oppress us and the evils which scourge us. For everything which tends to elevate the low or enlighten the ignorant, or rescue the outcasts of society, he not only had an enthusiastic admiration, but could communicate it to his readers. There were thousands to whom the reading of the Christmas Carol made a new era, or on whom the picture of the Brothers Cheeryble exerted the influence of a good example, or who learned in Mr Dombey or Mr Skimpole to see the undesirable features of their own characters. Mr Dickens was in fact a 512moralist; his novels were the parables of a teacher, and all that he taught was so taught that the youngest might learn. And now, alas! the pleasant, happy, genial teacher is no more. … His eloquent tongue and more eloquent pen will no longer rebuke our vices, or commend to us the charities of life; his satire will no longer shed its vivid light upon our favourite follies to make us ashamed of our littleness, and ashamed of ourselves; nor his broad and widening sympathy fall like gentle rain upon the dusty arena of our social conflict to cool the heat and purify the air….
