Page:The Story of the Cheeryble Grants.djvu/34

14 and experienced no difficulty. But when I came face to face with Dickens’s own words I did experience a difficulty. The two statements were incompatible. I elected to assume a faint unconscious looseness of phraseology on the part of Forster rather than admit — as your leader accurately states the alternative — ‘a suppression of the truth and consequent suggestion of a falsehood’ on the part of Dickens. My reverent regard for his memory made that choice grateful to me, but I do not think it interfered with free, unbiassed judgment. Daniel Grant was one of the most conspicuous men in Manchester for years after 1848, when the above statement of Dickens was published; and while, eight years before, ‘every person who read the number in which the Cheerybles were mentioned, and who knew the Grants, immediately recognised that they were meant,’ yet nobody appears to have challenged Dickens’s statement. Moreover, of all the ‘friends of arts and letters’ about Manchester of the time — embracing Gilbert Winter, James Crossley, Harrison Ainsworth, and even Canon Parkinson, with his admirable ‘Old Church Clock,’ — not one of them had left a single line to prove that Dickens ever met the Grants personally in social intercourse. In 1893 I stated publicly how the question stood at that time.