But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world, a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that—or rather the inference from it—in my next lecture, which shall deal, in Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But, for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth: yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world—as the proud parent said of his son’s fiddle—“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own head!”
“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey, in The Old Curiosity Shop) “although I am an old man.”
So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his mind, Dickens walks by night—not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite Arabian Nights, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed, and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this town; with which let me conclude to-day:
The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows,
Is his painstaking for the good of all:
Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
Not laughing from a melancholy gall,
Not hating from a soul that overflows
With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall:
But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind,