n happiness by
example as well as by precept. This is, as I have said, not the saddest,
but certainly the harshest of his stories. It is perhaps the only place
where Dickens, in defending happiness, for a moment forgets to be
happy.

He describes Bounderby and Gradgrind with a degree of grimness and
sombre hatred very different from the half affectionate derision which
he directed against the old tyrants or humbugs of the earlier nineteenth
century--the pompous Dedlock or the fatuous Nupkins, the grotesque
Bumble or the inane Tigg. In those old books his very abuse was
benignant; in _Hard Times_ even his sympathy is hard. And the reason is
again to be found in the political facts of the century. Dickens could
be half genial with the older generation of oppressors because it was a
dying generation. It was evident, or at least it seemed evident then,
that Nupkins could not go on much longer making up the law of England to
suit himself; that Sir Leicester Dedlock could not go on much longer
being kind to his tenants as if they were dogs and cats. And some of
these evils the nineteenth century did really eliminate or improve. For
the first half of the century Dickens and all his friends were justified
in feeling that the chains were falling from mankind. At any rate, the
chains did fall from Mr. Rouncewell the Iron-master. And when they fell
from him he picked them up and put them upon the poor.

[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1858
From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.]

LITTLE DORRIT

_Little Dorrit_ stands in Dickens's life chiefly as a signal of how far
he went down the road of realism, of sadness, and of what is called
modernity. True, it was by no means the best of the books of his later
period; some even think it the worst. _Great Expectations_ is certainly
the best of the later novels; some even think it the best of all the
novels. Nor is it the novel most concerned with strictly recent
problems; that title must be given to _Hard Times_. Nor again is it the
most finely finished or well constructed of the later books; that claim
can be probably made for _Edwin Drood_. By a queer verbal paradox the
most carefully finished of his later tales is the tale that is not
finished at all. In form, indeed, the book bears a superficial
resemblance to those earlier works by which the young Dickens had set
the whole world laughing long ago. Much of the story refers to a remote
time early in the nineteenth c