ssages in Ruskin, where he denounces similar tragedies
due to our inhuman disregard of what is happening at our doors.

Though the most valuable part of his work was the effective appeal to
the hearts of his brother men, Dickens had the practical wisdom to
suggest definite remedies in some cases. He saw that the districts in
the East End of London, even with a heavy poor rate, failed to supply
adequate relief for their waifs and strays, while the wealthy
inhabitants of the West End, having few paupers, paid on their riches a
rate that was negligible, and he boldly suggested the equalization of
rates. All London should jointly share the burden of maintaining those
for whose welfare they were responsible and should pay shares
proportioned to their wealth. This wise reform was not carried into
effect till some thirty or forty years later; but the principle is now
generally accepted. Though in this case, as in his famous attack on the
Court of Chancery in _Bleak House_, Dickens failed in obtaining any
immediate effect, it is unquestionable that he influenced the minds of
thousands and changed the temper in which they looked at the problem of
the poor. In this nothing that he wrote was more powerful than the
series of Christmas Books, in which his imagination, with the power of a
Rembrandt, threw on to a smaller canvas the lights and shades of London
life, the grim background of mean streets, and the cheerful virtues
which throw a glamour over their humble homes. His advocacy of these
social causes came to be known far and wide and contributed a second
element to the popularity won by his novels; long before his death
Dickens stood on a pinnacle alone, loved by the vast reading public
among those who toil in our towns and villages, and wherever English is
read and understood. He was not only their entertainer, but their friend
and brother; he had been through his days of sorrow and suffering and he
had kept that vast fund of cheerfulness which overflowed into his books
and gladdened the lives of so many thousands. When he died in 1870 after
a year of intermittent illness, following on his breakdown over the
public readings, there was naturally a widespread desire that he should
be buried in Westminster Abbey, as a great Englishman and a true
representative of his age. During life he had expressed his desire for a
private funeral, unheralded in the press, and he had thought of two or
three quiet churches in the neighbourhood o