The hushed silence with which the concluding passages of this Reading were always listened to, spoke more eloquently than any applause could possibly have done, of the sincerity of the emotions it awakened. A cursory glance at the audience confirmed the impression produced by that earlier evidence of their rapt and breathless attention. It is the simplest truth to say that at those times many a face illustrated involuntarily the loveliest line in the noblest ode in the language, where Dryden has sung even of a warrior

“And now and then a sigh he heaved,
And tears began to flow.”

The subdued voice of the Reader, moreover, accorded tenderly with one’s remembrance of his own acknowledgment ten years after his completion of the book from which this story was extracted, that with a heavy heart he had walked the streets of Paris alone during the whole of one winter’s night, while he and his little friend parted company for ever! Charles Young’s son, the vicar of Ilminster, has, recently, in his own Diary appended to his memoir of his father, the tragedian, related a curious anecdote, illustrative, in a very striking way, of the grief the profound and overwhelming grief excited in a mind and heart like those of Lord Jeffrey, by the imaginary death of another of these dream-children of Charles Dickens. The editor of the Edinburgh Review, we there read, was surprised by Mrs. Henry Siddons, seated in his library, with his head on the table, crying. “Delicately retiring,” we are then told, “in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed,” Mrs. Siddons observed that Jeffrey raised his head and was kindly beckoning her back. The Diary goes on: “Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she apologised for her intrusion, and begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was seriously intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat.” Then came the acknowledgment prefaced by Lord Jeffrey’s remark that he was “a great goose to have given way so.” Little Nell was dead! The newly published number of “Master Humphrey’s Clock” (N was lying before him, in which he had just been reading of the general bereavement!

Referring to another of these little creatures’ deaths, that of Tiny Tim, Thackeray wrote in the July number of Fraser, for 1844, that there was one passage regarding it about which a man would hardly venture to speak in print or in public “any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart.”

It has been related, even of the burly demagogue, O’Connell, that on first reading of Nell’s death in the Old Curiosity Shop, he exclaimed his eyes running over with tears while he flung the leaves indignantly out of the window “he should not have killed her he should not have killed her: she was too good!”

Finally, another Scotch critic and judge, Lord Cockburn, writing to the Novelist on the very morrow of reading the memorable fifth number of “Dombey and Son,” in which the death of Little Paul is so exquisitely depicted offering his grateful acknowledgments to the Author for the poignant grief he had caused him added, “I have felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them.”

Hardly can it be matter for wonder, therefore, remarking how the printed pages would draw such tokens of sympathy from men like Cockburn, and Jeffrey, and Thackeray, and O’Connell, that a mixed audience showed traces of emotion when the profoundly sympathetic voice of Dickens himself related this story of the Life and Death of Little Dombey. Yet the pathetic beauty of the tale, for all that, was only dimly hinted at throughout, the real pathos of it, indeed, being only fully indicated almost immediately before its conclusion. Earlier in the Reading, in fact, the drollery of the comic characters introduced of themselves irresistible would have been simply paramount, but for the incidental mention of the mother’s death, when clinging to that frail spar within her arms, her little daughter, “she drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world.” Paul’s little wistful face looked out every now and then, it is true, from among the fantastic forms and features grouped around him, with a growing sense upon the hearer of what was really meant by the child being so “old-fashioned.” But the ludicrous effect of those surrounding characters was nothing less than all-mastering in its predominance.

There was Mrs. Pipchin, for example, that grim old lady with a mottled face like bad marble, who acquired an immense reputation as a manager of children, by the simple device of giving them everything they didn’t like and nothing that they did! Whose constitution required mutton chops hot and hot, and buttered toast in similar relays! And with whom one of Little Dombey’s earliest dialogues in the Reading awakened invariably such bursts of hearty laughter! Seated in his tall, spindle-legged arm-chair by the fire, staring steadily at the exemplary Pipchin, Little Paul, we were told, was asked [in the most snappish voice possible], by that austere female, What he was thinking about?

“You,” [in the gentlest childlike voice] said Paul, without the least reserve.

“And what are you thinking about me?”

“I’m thinking how old you must be.”

“You mustn’t say such things as that, young gentleman. That’ll never do.”

“Why not [slowly and wonderingly]?”

“Never you mind, sir [shorter and sharper than ever]. Remember the story of the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions.”

“If the bull [in a high falsetto voice and with greater deliberation than ever] was mad, how did he know that the boy asked questions? Nobody can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don’t believe that story.”

Little Dombey’s fellow-sufferers at Mrs. Pipchin’s were hardly less ludicrous in their way than that bitter old victim of the Peruvian mines in her perennial weeds of black bombazeen. Miss Pankey, for instance, the mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child who was instructed by the Ogress that “nobody who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven!” And her associate in misery, one Master Bitherstone, from India, who objected so much to the Pipchinian system, that before Little Dombey had been in the house five minutes, he privately consulted that gentleman if he could afford him any idea of the way back to Bengal! What the Pipchinian system was precisely, the Reader indicated perhaps the most happily by his way of saying, that instead of its encouraging a child’s mind to develop itself, like a flower, it strove to open it by force, like an oyster. Fading slowly away while he is yet under Mrs. Pipchin’s management, poor little Paul, as the audience well knew, was removed on to Doctor Blimber’s Academy for Young Gentlemen. There the humorous company gathered around Paul immediately increased. But, before his going amongst them, the Reader enabled us more vividly to realise, by an additional touch or two, the significance of the peculiarity of being “old fashioned,” for which the fading child appeared in everybody’s eyes so remarkable.

Wheeled down to the beach in a little invalid-carriage, he would cling fondly to his sister Florence. He would say to any chance child who might come to bear him company [in a soft, drawling, half-querulous voice, and with the gravest look], “Go away, if you please. Thank you, but I don’t want you.” He would wonder to himself and to Floy what the waves were always saying always saying! At about the middle of the 47th page of the Reading copy of this book about Little Dombey, the copy from which Dickens Read, both in England and America, there is, in his handwriting, the word “Pause.” It occurs just in between Little Dombey’s confiding to his sister, that if she were in India he should die of being so sorry and so lonely! and the incident of his suddenly waking up at another time from a long sleep in his little carriage on the shingles, to ask her, not only “What the rolling waves are saying so constantly, but What place is over there? far away! looking eagerly, as he inquires, towards some invisible region beyond the horizon!” That momentary pause will be very well remembered by everyone who attended this Reading.

One single omission we are still disposed to regret in the putting together of the materials for this particular Reading from the original narrative. In approaching Dr. Blimber’s establishment for the first time, we would gladly have witnessed the sparring-match, as one may say, on the very threshold, between Mrs. Pipchin the Ogress in bombazeen and the weak-eyed young man-servant who opens the door! The latter of whom, having “the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his countenance (it was mere imbecility)” as the Author himself explains parenthetically Mrs. Pipchin at once takes it into her head, is inspired by impudence, and snaps at accordingly. Of this we saw nothing, however, in the Reading. We heard nothing of Mrs. Pipchin’s explosive, “How dare you laugh behind the gentleman’s back?” or of the weak-eyed young man’s answering in consternation, “I ain’t a laughing at nobody, ma’am.” Any more than of the Ogress saying a while later, “You’re laughing again, sir!” or of the young man, grievously oppressed, repudiating the charge with, “I ain’t. I never see such a thing as this!” The old lady as she passed on with, “Oh! he was a precious fellow,” leaving him, who was in fact all meekness and incapacity, “affected even to tears by the incident.” If we saw nothing, however, of that retainer of Dr. Blimber, we were introduced to another, meaning the blue-coated, bright-buttoned butler, “who gave quite a winey flavour to the table-beer he poured it out so superbly!” We had Dr. Blimber himself, besides, with his learned legs, like a clerical pianoforte a bald head, highly polished, and a chin so double, it was a wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. We had Miss Blimber, in spectacles, like a ghoul, “dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages.” We had Mrs. Blimber, not learned herself, but pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. We had Mr. Feeder, clipped to the stubble, grinding out his classic stops like a barrel-organ of erudition. Above all, we had Toots, the head boy, or rather “the head and shoulder boy,” he was so much taller than the rest! Of whom in that intellectual forcing-house (where he had “gone through” everything so completely, that one day he “suddenly left off blowing, and remained in the establishment a mere stalk”) people had come at last to say, “that the Doctor had rather overdone it with young Toots, and that when he began to have whiskers he left off having brains.” From the moment when Young Toots’s voice was first heard, in tones so deep, and in a manner so sheepish, that “if a lamb had roared it couldn’t have been more surprising,” saying to Little Dombey with startling suddenness, “How are you?” every time the Reader opened his lips, as speaking in that character, there was a burst of merriment. His boastful account always called forth laughter that his tailor was Burgess and Co., “fash’nable, but very dear.” As also did his constantly reiterated inquiries of Paul always as an entirely new idea “I say it’s not of the slightest consequence, you know, but I should wish to mention it how are you, you know?” Hardly less provocative of mirth was Briggs’s confiding one evening to Little Dombey, that his head ached ready to split, and “that he should wish himself dead if it wasn’t for his mother and a blackbird he had at home.”

Wonderful fun used to be made by the Beader of the various incidents at the entertainment given upon the eve of the vacations by Doctor and Mrs. Blimber to the Young Gentlemen and their Friends, when “the hour was half-past seven o’clock, and the object was quadrilles.” The Doctor pacing up and down in the drawing-room, full dressed, before anybody had arrived, “with a dignified and unconcerned demeanour, as if he thought it barely possible that one or two people might drop in by-and-by!” His exclaiming, when Mr. Toots and Mr. Feeder were announced by the butler, and as if he were extremely surprised to see them, “Aye, aye, aye! God bless my soul!” Mr. Toots, one blaze of jewellery and buttons, so undecided, “on a calm revision of all the circumstances,” whether it were better to have his waistcoat fastened or unfastened both at top and bottom, as the arrivals thickened, so influencing him by the force of example, that at the last he was “continually fingering that article of dress as if he were performing on some instrument!” Thoroughly enjoyable though the whole scene was in its throng of ludicrous particulars, it merely led the way up appreciably and none the less tenderly, for all the innocent laughter, to the last and supremely pathetic incidents of the story as related thenceforth (save only for one startling instant) sotto voce, by the Reader.

The exceptional moment here alluded to, when his voice was suddenly raised, to be hushed again the instant afterwards, came at the very opening of the final scene by Little Dombey’s death-bed, where the sunbeams, towards evening, struck through the rustling blinds and quivered on the opposite wall like golden water. Overwhelmed, as little Paul was occasionally, with “his only trouble,” a sense of the swift and rapid river, “he felt forced,” the Reader went on to say, “to try and stop it to stem it with his childish hands, or choke its way with sand and when he saw it coming on, resistless, he cried out!” Dropping his voice from that abrupt outcry instantly afterwards, to the gentlest tones, as he added, “But a word from Florence, who was always at his side, restored him to himself” the Reader continued in those subdued and tender accents to the end.

The childs pity for his fathers sorrowing, was surpassed only, as all who witnessed this Reading will readily recollect, by the yet more affecting scene with his old nurse. Waking upon a sudden, on the last of the many evenings, when the golden water danced in shining ripples on the wall, waking mind and body, sitting upright in his bed

“And who is this? Is this my old nurse?” asked the child, regarding with a radiant smile a figure coming in.

“Yes, yes. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor blighted child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed and taken up his wasted hand and put it to her lips and breast, as one who had some right to fondle it. No other woman would have so forgotten everybody there but him and Floy, and been so full of tenderness and pity.”

The child’s words coming then so lovingly: “Floy! this is a kind good face! I am glad to see it again. Don’t go away, old nurse! Stay here! Good bye!” prepared one exquisitely for the rest. “Not goodbye?” “Ah, yes! good-bye!”

Then the end! The child having been laid down again with his arms clasped round his sister’s neck, telling her that the stream was lulling him to rest, that now the boat was out at sea and that there was shore before him, and Who stood upon the bank! Putting his hands together “as he had been used to do at his prayers “ not removing his arms to do it, but folding them so behind his sister’s neck “Mamma is like you, Floy!” he cried; “I know her by the face! But tell them that the picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!”

Then came two noble passages, nobly delivered.

First when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners

“The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion Death!”

And lastly with a tearful voice

“Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!”

Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection, the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley’s comes back anew as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem “as though it were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace.” The little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple, who “not only blessed his father’s needy home, but softened the rude stranger’s hardened conscience,” were severally referred to by the preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application. But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist’s imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.