ABSTRACT
… It will be seen, we think, that there is not much ingenuity, and no nature in the plot of The Cricket on the Hearth. Its merit lies in its sentiment which is yet extremely liable to the charge of being mawkish and maudlin. The attempts at wit, which are numerous in the less serious parts of the story, are exceedingly forced and affected. The reader has perhaps met with a wearisome companion, whose every expression was manifestly intended to convey a bright idea. This is Mr Dickens’ wit. A horse stamping with his foot is, in Mr Dickens’ style, represented as ‘tearing up the road with his impatient autographs.’ A person placed in company unsuitable for him, is compared to ‘a fresh young salmon on the top of the great pyramid.’ Caleb Plummer’s house was ‘no better than a pimple on the prominent red brick nose of Gruff and Tackleton.’ Dot, going about with pattens on her feet, ‘worked innumerable impressions of the first proposition in Euclid allabout the yard.’ When the carrier comes home wet, we are told that there were ‘rainbows in his very whiskers.’ Of Tackleton we are informed that his selfishness ‘peered out of one little corner of one little eye like the concentrated essence of any number of ravens.’ All this is truly wretched, and is not merely not wit, but undeniable evidence of the absence of the power of being witty. Any puppy that smokes his cigar, and wears his hat on the side of his head, can weary you to death with stuff of this sort. Mr Dickens has powers in the pathetic—never indeed unmingled with great weakness—but his efforts at the brilliant are deplorable. John Peerybingle, his hero, sometimes came near a joke, but his biographer is never within sight of one.
