that was to come after.

From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
thing--we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a _Clarion_ review) is very largely due to
our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one
of the democracy.

There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
in the growing and changing lights of o