es about Mrs. Jellyby and her philanthropic schemes show
Dickens at his best in his old and more familiar satiric manner. But in
the midst of the Jellyby pandemonium, which is in itself described with
the same _abandon_ and irrelevance as the boarding-house of Mrs. Todgers
or the travelling theatre of Mr. Crummles, the elder Dickens introduced
another piece of pure truth and even tenderness. I mean the account of
Caddy Jellyby. If Carstone is a truly masculine study of how a man goes
wrong, Caddy is a perfectly feminine study of how a girl goes right.
Nowhere else perhaps in fiction, and certainly nowhere else in Dickens,
is the mere female paradox so well epitomised, the unjust use of words
covering so much capacity for a justice of ultimate estimate; the
seeming irresponsibility in language concealing such a fixed and
pitiless sense of responsibility about things; the air of being always
at daggers-drawn with her own kindred, yet the confession of incurable
kinship implied in pride and shame; and, above all, that thirst for
order and beauty as for something physical; that strange female power of
hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men
virtue. Every touch in her is true, from her first bewildering outbursts
of hating people because she likes them, down to the sudden quietude and
good sense which announces that she has slipped into her natural place
as a woman. Miss Clare is a figure-head, Miss Summerson in some ways a
failure; but Miss Caddy Jellyby is by far the greatest, the most human,
and the most really dignified of all the heroines of Dickens.

With one or two exceptions, all the effects in this story are of this
somewhat quieter kind, though none of them are so subtly successful as
Rick Carstone and Caddy. Harold Skimpole begins as a sketch drawn with a
pencil almost as airy and fanciful as his own. The humour of the earlier
scenes is delightful--the scenes in which Skimpole looks on at other
people paying his debts with the air of a kindly outsider, and suggests
in formless legal phraseology that they might "sign something" or "make
over something," or the scene in which he tries to explain the
advantages of accepting everything to the apoplectic Mr. Boythorn. But
it was one of the defects of Dickens as a novelist that his characters
always became coarser and clumsier as they passed through the practical
events of a story, and this would necessarily be so with Skimpole, whose
position