I like his references to his children. He writes: “Why a boy of that age should seem to have on
at all times a hundred and fifty pair of double-soled boots, and be always jumping a bottom stair with the whole hundred and fifty, I don’t know.”
“Will you give my small Admiral, on his personal application, one sovereign? I have told him to come to you for that recognition of his meritorious services.”
And to Miss Boyle: “The little Admiral has gone to visit America in the Orlando . . . he went away much gamer than any giant, attented by a chest in which he could easily have stowed himself and a wife and family of his own proportions” (28th Dec. 1861).
Dogs were to Dickens almost as dear as children. In 1863 he writes to Percy Fitzgerald like a flattered parent: “I have been most heartily gratified by the perusal of your article on my dogs. It has given me an amount and a kind of pleasure very unusual, and for which I thank you earnestly. . . . I should be delighted to see you here. . . . I and my two latest dogs, a St Bernard and a bloodhound, would be charmed with your company.”
At Boulogne, in 1856, he received a present of “the nicest of little dogs,” which its master, a cobbler, could not afford to pay tax for. The dog escaped and got killed, and “I must lie to him—the cobbler—for life, and say that the dog is fat and happy” (ii., p. 58).
In the winter of 1862 he was reading at Cheltenham. Macready was in the audience, and Dickens writes: “I found him quite unable to speak, and able to do nothing but square his dear old jaw all
on one side, and roll his eyes (half closed), like Jackson’s picture of him.” Macready said: “I swear to heaven that, as a piece of passion and playfulness—er—indescribably mixed up together, it does—er—no, really, Dickens! amaze me as profoundly as it moves me. . . . How is it got at—er—how is it done—er—how one man can—well? It lays me on my—er—back, and it is of no use talking about it!” (ii., p. 196).
Dickens seems to have been thought to have done a wrong to Jews in general by his character Fagin in Oliver Twist. He wrote, 10th July 1863, to a Jewish lady that it “unfortunately was true of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.” The real reply to her letter was Riah in Our Mutual Friend.
Of that book he says: “It is a combination of drollery with romance, which requires a great deal of pains and a perfect throwing away of points that might be amplified, but I hope it is very good” (ii., p. 225).