s,
particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor's prison,
which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens
had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of
our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this
bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb
gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of Dickens
was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are
stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed,
as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the
humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour
and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble; he
made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. Dickens
has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?

It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
things t