A
suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors,
something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love
of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of his
discoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has its
part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially
those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example,
of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)
in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the
Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and of
Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at Master
Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his
voice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a
scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life
Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of
somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-
head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything
else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such
exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently
grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and
Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a
spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.
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