It was not in the least like any of the other Portraits, and
was exceedingly admired, the head being much swollen. At the
Institution, the Debating Society discussed the new question, Was
there sufficient ground for supposing that the Immortal Shakespeare
ever stole deer? This was indignantly decided by an overwhelming
majority in the negative; indeed, there was but one vote on the
Poaching side, and that was the vote of the orator who had
undertaken to advocate it, and who became quite an obnoxious
character – particularly to the Dullborough ‘roughs,’ who were
about as well informed on the matter as most other people.
Distinguished speakers were invited down, and very nearly came (but
not quite). Subscriptions were opened, and committees sat, and it
would have been far from a popular measure in the height of the
excitement, to have told Dullborough that it wasn’t Stratford-upon-
Avon. Yet, after all these preparations, when the great festivity
took place, and the portrait, elevated aloft, surveyed the company
as if it were in danger of springing a mine of intellect and
blowing itself up, it did undoubtedly happen, according to the
inscrutable mysteries of things, that nobody could be induced, not
to say to touch upon Shakespeare, but to come within a mile of him,
until the crack speaker of Dullborough rose to propose the immortal
memory. Which he did with the perplexing and astonishing result
that before he had repeated the great name half-a-dozen times, or
had been upon his legs as many minutes, he was assailed with a
general shout of ‘Question.’
CHAPTER XXI – THE SHORT-TIMERS
Page 129
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
‘Within so many yards of this Covent-garden lodging of mine, as
within so many yards of Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral,
the Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the Courts of Justice, all
the Institutions that govern the land, I can find – MUST find,
whether I will or no – in the open streets, shameful instances of
neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of
paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive
cripples both in body and mind, a misery to themselves, a misery to
the community, a disgrace to civilisation, and an outrage on
Christianity. – I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as
any sum in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the
State would begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would
with the strong hand take those children out of the streets, while
they are yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a
part of England’s glory, not its shame – of England’s strength, not
its weakness – would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good
citizens, and many great men, out of the seeds of its criminal
population. Yet I go on bearing with the enormity as if it were
nothing, and I go on reading the Parliamentary Debates as if they
were something, and I concern myself far more about one railwaybridge
across a public thoroughfare, than about a dozen generations
of scrofula, ignorance, wickedness, prostitution, poverty, and
felony. I can slip out at my door, in the small hours after any
midnight, and, in one circuit of the purlieus of Covent-garden
Market, can behold a state of infancy and youth, as vile as if a
Bourbon sat upon the English throne; a great police force looking
on with authority to do no more than worry and hunt the dreadful
vermin into corners, and there leave them. Within the length of a
few streets I can find a workhouse, mismanaged with that dull
short-sighted obstinacy that its greatest opportunities as to the
children it receives are lost, and yet not a farthing saved to any
one. But the wheel goes round, and round, and round; and because
it goes round – so I am told by the politest authorities – it goes
well.’
Thus I reflected, one day in the Whitsun week last past, as I
floated down the Thames among the bridges, looking – not
inappropriately – at the drags that were hanging up at certain
dirty stairs to hook the drowned out, and at the numerous