together. I am pretty well known to be rather an uncommon
man, and most people will understand that it must be a woman rather out
of the common who would come up to my mark. I have got no more to say.
Good-night!"

At five minutes past twelve next day, Mr. Bounderby directed his wife's
property to be carefully packed up and sent to Tom Gradgrind's, and then
resumed a bachelor's life.

Mr. James Harthouse, learning from Louisa's maid--a young woman greatly
attached to her mistress--that his attentions were altogether
undesirable, and that he would never see Mrs. Bounderby again, decided
to throw up politics and leave Coketown at once. Which he did.

Into how much of futurity did Mr. Bounderby see as he sat alone? Had he
any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby, of
Coketown, was to die in a fit in the Coketown street? Could he foresee
Mr. Gradgrind, a white-haired man, making his facts and figures
subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity, and no longer trying to grind
that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills? These things were to be.

Could Louisa, sitting alone in her father's house and gazing into the
fire, foresee the childless years before her? Could she picture a lonely
brother, flying from England after robbery, and dying in a strange land,
conscious of his want of love and penitent? These things were to be.
Herself again a wife--a mother--lovingly watchful of her children, ever
careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a
childhood of the body, as knowing it to be an even more beautiful thing,
and a possession any hoarded scrap of which is a blessing and happiness
to the wisest? Such a thing was never to be.

* * * * *

Little Dorrit

"Little Dorrit" was written at a time when the author was
busying himself not only with other literary work, but also
with semi-private theatricals. John Forster, Charles Dickens's
biographer and friend, even had some sort of fear at that time
that Dickens was in danger of adopting the stage as a
profession. Domestic troubles, culminating a year later in the
separation from his wife, also explain the restlessness and
general dissatisfaction which affected the great novelist in
the years 1855-57, when this story appeared. Hence there is no
surprise that "Little Dorrit" added but little to its author's
reputation. It is a very long