laughter, which told the
world that there is, after all, something which an Englishman will not
swallow.

The Modern Scrooge

Mr. Vernon-Smith, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting,
author of "A Higher London" and "The Boyg System at Work," came to the
conclusion, after looking through his select and even severe library,
that Dickens's "Christmas Carol" was a very suitable thing to be read to
charwomen. Had they been men they would have been forcibly subjected
to Browning's "Christmas Eve" with exposition, but chivalry spared
the charwomen, and Dickens was funny, and could do no harm. His fellow
worker Wimpole would read things like "Three Men in a Boat" to the poor;
but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle, or (what was
the same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in their
vulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature.
Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order,
of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite
fitted for charwomen on Christmas Eve.

He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes of
warning and criticism. He explained that Dickens was not a writer of the
first rank, since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold.
He also feared that they would find the characters of Dickens terribly
exaggerated. But they did not, possibly because they were meeting them
every day. For among the poor there are still exaggerated characters;
they do not go to the Universities to be universified. He told the
charwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad wicked old miser
like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as each of the
charwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who was
exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, the
lecture as a whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, and
towards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction,
talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying
quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane)
always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely
austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all
go to heaven just as we can all go to a classical concert, but if we
did it would bore us. Realizing that he was taking his flock far out of
their depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly,