and that would be the death of him. He would never hold up his
head again if he touched it. I can’t go to bed, because I have
conceived a mortal hatred for my bedroom; and I can’t go away,
because there is no train for my place of destination until
morning. To burn the biscuits will be but a fleeting joy; still it
is a temporary relief, and here they go on the fire! Shall I break
the plate? First let me look at the back, and see who made it.
COPELAND.
Copeland! Stop a moment. Was it yesterday I visited Copeland’s
works, and saw them making plates? In the confusion of travelling
about, it might be yesterday or it might be yesterday month; but I
think it was yesterday. I appeal to the plate. The plate says,
decidedly, yesterday. I find the plate, as I look at it, growing
into a companion.
Page 116
Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
Don’t you remember (says the plate) how you steamed away, yesterday
morning, in the bright sun and the east wind, along the valley of
the sparkling Trent? Don’t you recollect how many kilns you flew
past, looking like the bowls of gigantic tobacco-pipes, cut short
off from the stem and turned upside down? And the fires – and the
smoke – and the roads made with bits of crockery, as if all the
plates and dishes in the civilised world had been Macadamised,
expressly for the laming of all the horses? Of course I do!
And don’t you remember (says the plate) how you alighted at Stoke –
a picturesque heap of houses, kilns, smoke, wharfs, canals, and
river, lying (as was most appropriate) in a basin – and how, after
climbing up the sides of the basin to look at the prospect, you
trundled down again at a walking-match pace, and straight proceeded
to my father’s, Copeland’s, where the whole of my family, high and
low, rich and poor, are turned out upon the world from our nursery
and seminary, covering some fourteen acres of ground? And don’t
you remember what we spring from:- heaps of lumps of clay,
partially prepared and cleaned in Devonshire and Dorsetshire,
whence said clay principally comes – and hills of flint, without
which we should want our ringing sound, and should never be
musical? And as to the flint, don’t you recollect that it is first
burnt in kilns, and is then laid under the four iron feet of a
demon slave, subject to violent stamping fits, who, when they come
on, stamps away insanely with his four iron legs, and would crush
all the flint in the Isle of Thanet to powder, without leaving off?
And as to the clay, don’t you recollect how it is put into mills or
teazers, and is sliced, and dug, and cut at, by endless knives,
clogged and sticky, but persistent – and is pressed out of that
machine through a square trough, whose form it takes – and is cut
off in square lumps and thrown into a vat, and there mixed with
water, and beaten to a pulp by paddle-wheels – and is then run into
a rough house, all rugged beams and ladders splashed with white, –
superintended by Grindoff the Miller in his working clothes, all
splashed with white, – where it passes through no end of machinerymoved
sieves all splashed with white, arranged in an ascending
scale of fineness (some so fine, that three hundred silk threads
cross each other in a single square inch of their surface), and all
in a violent state of ague with their teeth for ever chattering,
and their bodies for ever shivering! And as to the flint again,
isn’t it mashed and mollified and troubled and soothed, exactly as
rags are in a paper-mill, until it is reduced to a pap so fine that
it contains no atom of ‘grit’ perceptible to the nicest taste? And
as to the flint and the clay together, are they not, after all
this, mixed in the proportion of five of clay to one of flint, and
isn’t the compound – known as ‘slip’ – run into oblong troughs,