VI
Further—and to conclude on this point—over and beyond its infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth. We have spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord Chancellor to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal experience in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the guilty or slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office—
Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of David Copperfield will take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be interesting [I do not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D. degree] to count the number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover an accoucheur who did not contrive to lose either the mother or the child, or both.