laughter when the baby is boiled or sat upon, would be at all
diverted by such an occurrence off the stage. Nor is the decent
workman in the gallery, who is transported beyond the ignorant
present by the delight with which he sees a stout gentleman pushed
out of a two pair of stairs window, to be slandered by the
suspicion that he would be in the least entertained by such a
spectacle in any street in London, Paris, or New York. It always
appears to me that the secret of this enjoyment lies in the
temporary superiority to the common hazards and mischances of life;
in seeing casualties, attended when they really occur with bodily
and mental suffering, tears, and poverty, happen through a very
rough sort of poetry without the least harm being done to any one –
the pretence of distress in a pantomime being so broadly humorous
as to be no pretence at all. Much as in the comic fiction I can
understand the mother with a very vulnerable baby at home, greatly
relishing the invulnerable baby on the stage, so in the Cremorne
reality I can understand the mason who is always liable to fall off
a scaffold in his working jacket and to be carried to the hospital,
having an infinite admiration of the radiant personage in spangles
who goes into the clouds upon a bull, or upside down, and who, he
takes it for granted – not reflecting upon the thing – has, by
uncommon skill and dexterity, conquered such mischances as those to
which he and his acquaintance are continually exposed.
I wish the Morgue in Paris would not come here as I lie awake, with
its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and
the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that other swollen
saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed over-ripe
figs that I have seen in Italy! And this detestable Morgue comes
back again at the head of a procession of forgotten ghost stories.
This will never do. I must think of something else as I lie awake;
or, like that sagacious animal in the United States who recognised
the colonel who was such a dead shot, I am a gone ‘Coon. What
shall I think of? The late brutal assaults. Very good subject.
The late brutal assaults.
(Though whether, supposing I should see, here before me as I lie
awake, the awful phantom described in one of those ghost stories,
who, with a head-dress of shroud, was always seen looking in
through a certain glass door at a certain dead hour – whether, in
such a case it would be the least consolation to me to know on
philosophical grounds that it was merely my imagination, is a
question I can’t help asking myself by the way.)
The late brutal assaults. I strongly question the expediency of
advocating the revival of whipping for those crimes. It is a
natural and generous impulse to be indignant at the perpetration of
inconceivable brutality, but I doubt the whipping panacea gravely.
Not in the least regard or pity for the criminal, whom I hold in
far lower estimation than a mad wolf, but in consideration for the
general tone and feeling, which is very much improved since the
whipping times. It is bad for a people to be familiarised with
such punishments. When the whip went out of Bridewell, and ceased
to be flourished at the carts tail and at the whipping-post, it
began to fade out of madhouses, and workhouses, and schools and
families, and to give place to a better system everywhere, than
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
cruel driving. It would be hasty, because a few brutes may be
inadequately punished, to revive, in any aspect, what, in so many
aspects, society is hardly yet happily rid of. The whip is a very
contagious kind of thing, and difficult to confine within one set
of bounds. Utterly abolish punishment by fine – a barbarous
device, quite as much out of date as wager by battle, but
particularly connected in the vulgar mind with this class of
offence – at least quadruple the term of imprisonment for