t there was nothing in common between the brandy and
water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the
problem of the poor not as a dead and definite business, but as a living
and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more
conservative than the modern sociologists, in some ways much more
revolutionary.

LITTLE DORRIT

In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
near to contending that _Little Dorrit_ is Dickens's best book. It was
the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man
was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in
high spirits.

REPRINTED PIECES

The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes