Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/160

 Two more characteristic instances may be cited. The first is concerning the failure of the firm of Dombey and Son.

"The world was very busy now, forsooth, and had a deal to say. It was an innocently credulous and a much ill-used world. It was a world in which there was no other sort of bankruptcy whatever. There were no conspicuous people in it, trading far and wide on rotten banks of religion, patriotism, virtue, honor. There was no amount worth mentioning of mere paper in circulation, on which anybody lived pretty handsomely, promising to pay great sums of goodness with no effects. There were no shortcomings anywhere, in anything but money. The world was very angry indeed; and the people especially who, in a worse world, might have been supposed to be bankrupt traders themselves in shows and pretenses, were observed to be mightily indignant."

The second is anent the Whelp, Tom Gradgrind.

"It was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up under the continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."

In character we have a range from the vulgar, vigorous sarcasm of Mr. Panks to the languid patrician banter of*