Page:Works of Charles Dickens, ed. Lang - Volume 29.djvu/14

vi ills, how vain appear the loftier aspirations of the satirist! Dickens had slight faith in "the Hotel Millennium."

In "Travelling Abroad," the small boy, with his dream of owning a certain house, is, of course, Dickens himself. He had fixed on Gadshill House, as a paradise, when his father lived at Chatham, and when he himself was about eight years old. He knew all about the Fat Knight's adventure even then, and he purchased the place in 1856. The essay on "City of London Churches" revives a question which often puzzles the reader of Dickens. In the Shepherd, in Stiggins, in Chadband, in the passage about the hero's youth in Little Dorrit, and in many other places, he displays his hatred of certain sides of Calvinism, and of Dissent. When did Dickens, as a boy, suffer so much from greasy tedious preachers, and from "tidings o' damnation"? Neither of his parents, neither Mr. Micawber nor Mrs. Nickleby, is recorded to have been of a gloomy piety. We do not know when or how Dickens was brought so much into unwilling contact with degenerate descendants of the Puritans. He detested them and ridiculed them: clearly he had endured much from them, but we do not know when, where, or wherefore. Was it at Wellington House Academy, under the rule of the Celtic Mr. Jones? As a child, in earlier days, he was carried "to platform assemblages," and slept under Boanerges. Who carried him to such scenes? Was it his teacher in childhood, "a young Baptist minister," Mr. Giles, whom he does not appear to have disliked? Probably the blame lies between Jones and Giles: Mr. Micawber was certainly no fanatic. Thus frightened away from some forms of Christianity, and only sentimentally attracted, at one moment, by the Church, Dickens worked out a creed of his own, sincere but informal. The arithmetical