From The Puppet-Showman’s Album. Illustrated by Gavarni. London, no date.
Amongst the Sensation Novels, so skilfully condensed by Bret Harte, is a humourous parody of the most popular of Charles Dickens’s Christmas books. In it the leading characteristics and failings are admirably hit off, not only of Dickens, but also of Scott, Charles Lever, Marryat, Fennimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Thackeray, as will be seen from the following extracts:—
The Haunted Man.
A Christmas Story.
Part I.
THE FIRST PHANTOM.
Don’t tell me that it wasn’t a knocker. I had seen it often enough, and I ought to know. So ought the three o’clock beer, in dirty highlows, swinging himself over the railing, or executing a demoniacal jig upon the doorstep; so ought the butcher, although butchers as a general thing are scornful of such trifles; so ought the postman, to whom knockers of the most extravagant description were merely human weaknesses, that were to be pitied and used. And so ought, for the matter of that, etc., etc., etc.
But then it was such, a knocker. A wild, extravagant, and utterly incomprehensible knocker. A knocker so mysterious and suspicious that Policeman X 37, first coming upon it, felt inclined to take it instantly in custody, but compromised with his professional instincts by sharply and sternly noting it with an eye that admitted of no nonsense, but confidently expected to detect its secret yet. An ugly knocker; a knocker with a hard, human face, that was a type of the harder human face within. A human face that held between its teeth a brazen rod. So hereafter in the mysterious future should be held, etc., etc.