Several gamins have been contributed to our literature by Dickens quite as typical and quite as truthful in their way, each of them, as Hugo’s Gavroche. There is Jo the poor crossing-sweeper. There is the immortal Dodger. There is his pal the facetious Charley Bates. And there is that delightful boy at the end of “The Carol,” who conveys such a world of wonder through his simple reply of “Why, Christmas Day!” The boy who is “as big,” he says himself, as the prize turkey, and who gets off at last quicker than a shot propelled by the steadiest hand at a trigger! Scattered up and down the Boz fictions, there are abundant specimens of a genus that, in one instance, is actually termed by the Humorist, “a town-made little boy” this is in the memorable street scene where Squeers hooks Smike by the coat-collar with the handle of his umbrella. He is always especially great in his delineation of what one might call the human cock-sparrows of London. Kit, at the outset of his career, is another example; and Tom Scott yet another.

Sloppy carries us away into the suburbs, thereby taking us in a manner off the stones, and otherwise represents in his own proper person, buttons and all, less one of the dapper urchins we are now more particularly referring to, than the shambling hobbledehoy. Even in the unfinished story with which the Author’s voluminous writings were closed, there was portrayed an entirely novel specimen, one marked by the most grotesque extravagance, in the shape of that impish malignant, “the Deputy,” whose pastime at once and whole duty in life seemed to be making a sort of vesper cock-shy of Durdles and his dinner-bundle.

Conspicuous among these comic boys of Dickens may be remembered one who, instead of being introduced in any of the Novelist’s larger works, from the Pickwick Papers clown to Edwin Drood, interpolates himself, as may be said, among one of the groups of Christmas stories, through the medium of a shrill monologue. “The Boy at Mugby,” to wit, the one exhilarated and exhilarating appreciate of the whole elaborate system of Refreshmenting in this Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free, by which he means to say Britannia.

Laconically, “I am the Boy at Mugby,” he announces. “That’s about what I am.” His exact location he describes almost with the precision of one giving latitude and longitude explaining to a nicety where his stand is taken. “Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction,” in the height of twenty-seven draughts [he’s counted ’em, he tells us parenthetically, as they brush the First Class, hair twenty-seven ways], bounded on the nor’-west by the beer, and so on. He himself, he frankly informs you in the event of your ever presenting yourself there before him at the counter, in quest of nourishment of any kind, either liquid or solid will seem not to hear you, and will appear “in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body,” determined evidently not to serve you, that is, as long as you can possibly bear it! “That’s me!” cries the Boy at Mugby, exultantly, adding, with an intense relish for his occupation, “what a delightful lark it is!” As for the eatables and drinkables habitually set forth upon the counter, by what he generally speaks of as the Refreshmenters, quoth the Boy at Mugby, in a naif confidence, addressed to you in your capacity at once as applicant and victim, “when you’re telegraphed, you should see ’em begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sang-wiches under the glass covers, and get out the ha, ha! the sherry O, my eye, my eye! for your refreshment.” Once or twice in a way only, “The Boy at Mugby” was introduced among the Readings, and then merely as a slight stop-gap or interlude. Thoroughly enjoying the delivery of it himself, and always provoking shouts of laughter whenever this colloquial morsel was given, the Novelist seemed to be perfectly conscious himself that it was altogether too slight and trivial of its kind, to be worthy of anything like artistic consideration; that it was an “airy nothing” in its way, to which it was scarcely deserving that he should give more than name and local habitation.

Critically regarded, it had its inconsistencies too, both as a writing and as a Reading. There was altogether too much precocity for a genuine boy, in the nice discrimination with which the Boy at Mugby hit off the contrasting nationalities. The foreigner, for example, who politely, hat in hand, “beseeched Our Young Ladies, and our Missis,” for a “leetel gloss hoif prarndee,” and who, after being repelled, on trying to help himself, exclaims, “with hands clasped and shoulders riz: ’Ah! is it possible this; that these disdaineous females are placed here by the administration, not only to empoisen the voyagers, but to affront them! Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave? Or idiot?’” Hardly would a veritable boy, even an urchin so well “to the fore” with his epoch, as the Boy at Mugby, depict so accurately, much less take off, with a manner so entirely life-like, the astounded foreigner, any more than he would the thoroughly wide-awake and gaily derisive American. The latter he describes as alternately trying and spitting out first the sawdust and then the ha, ha! the sherry, until finally, on paying for both and consuming neither, he says, very loud, to Our Missis, and very good tempered, “I tell Yew what ’tis ma’arm. I la’af. Theer! I la’af, I Dew. I oughter ha’ seen most things, for I hail from the unlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on, through Jeerusalem and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe, Old World, and I am now upon the track to the Chief European Village; but such an Institution as Yew and Yewer fixins, solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain’t found the eighth wonder of Monarchical Creation, in finding Yew and Yewer fixins, solid and liquid, in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a nip and frizzle to the innermost grit! Wheerfore Theer! I la’af! I Dew, ma’arm. I la’af!” A calotype, or rather, literally, a speaking likeness, so true to the life as that, would be a trifle, we take it, beyond the mimetic powers and the keenly observant faculties even of a Boy whose senses had been wakened up by the twenty-seven cross draughts of the Refreshment Room at Mugby.

As to the fun made of the bandolining by Our Young Ladies, and of Our Missis’s lecture on Foreign Refreshmenting, and of Sniff’s corkscrew and his servile disposition, it is intentionally fooling, no doubt, but it is excellent fooling! As was admirably said in the number of Macmillan for January, 1871, by the anonymous writer of a Reminiscence of the Amateur Theatricals at Tavistock House, the remark following immediately after Charles Dickens’s version of the Ghost’s Song in Henry Fielding’s burlesque of Tom Thumb, “Nonsense, it may be said, all this; but the nonsense of a great genius has always something of genius in it.” Had not Swift his “little language” to Stella, to “Stellakins,” to “roguish, impudent, pretty M. D.?” Than some of which little language, quoth Thackeray, in commenting upon it, “I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching.” Again, had not Pope, in conjunction with the Dean, his occasional unbending also as a farceur, in the wilder freaks and oddities of Martinus Scriblerus? So was it here with one who was beyond all doubt, more intensely a Humorist than either, when he wrote or read such harmless sarcasms and innocent whimsicalities, as those alternately underlying, and overlaying the boyish fun of this juvenile Refreshmenter at Mugby Junction.