He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had been put into a grinding mill, looked as if he would have ground immediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head. The little play of feature that his face presented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the chisel, and said, “I really can not be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is.”
He tried to explain the reason for his peculiarities to Rosa:
“I mean,” he explained, “that young ways were never my ways. I was the only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was born advanced in life myself. No personality is intended toward the name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth of people seem to have come into existence buds, I seem to have come into existence a chip. I was a chip—and a very dry one—when I first became aware of myself.”
Dickens takes a front rank among the educators who have tried to save the child from “child-quellers,” and preserve for them the right to a free, rich, real childhood. The saddest sight in the world to him was a child such as he pictured in A Tale of Two Cities: “The children of St. Antoine had ancient faces and grave voices.”
In Barbox Brothers Mr. Jackson said of himself: “I am, to myself, an unintelligible book, with the earlier chapters all torn out and thrown away. My childhood had no grace of childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from such a lost beginning?”
Dickens tried to save all children from such a beginning.
CHAPTER VII.
INDIVIDUALITY.