CHAPTER X.
DICKENS.
The apothecary of romance is almost invariably pale and lean, with head nearly destitute of hirsute covering, and a man of retiring habits and sad demeanour. This is perhaps because he gets little chance to make the wherewithal to make him fat, and has few opportunities to seek enjoyment and recreation.
Dickens’ chemist, whom he describes in his pathetic little story The Haunted Man, is no exception to this rule. “Who could have seen his hollow cheek, his sunken, brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well knit and well proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging like tangled seaweed about his face,—as if he had been through his whole life a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
“Who could have observed his manner—taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind—but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?
“Who could have heard his voice—slow-speaking, deep and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set himself against and stop—but might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?
“Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory,—for he was, as the world knew far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,—who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp, a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids) trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour;—who that had seen him then, his work done and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?”
In the Pickwick Papers the author describes in one of his happiest veins, the troubles of a chemist who is suddenly called to serve on a common jury—to try indeed the celebrated case of “Bardell versus Pickwick”.
“‘Answer to your names, gentlemen, that you may be sworn,’ said the gentleman in black.
“‘Richard Upwitch.’