But that writer is a wit, whatever
his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had
held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn
salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is
foremost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of wit
just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood
up), as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost." Or
rather than this:-
He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg
naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might
be expected--if his development received no untimely check--to be
completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.
Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gently
presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. "'For meat,' he
said with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove.'"
A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be
vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in
shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the
novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given
place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr.
Brown, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, thought that Dickens
committed vulgarities in his diction.
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