gentlemen are going for a time to lay aside their individual
prepossessions on other subjects, and, as good citizens, are to be
engaged in a design as patriotic as well can be. They have the
intention of meeting in a few days to advance this great object,
and I call upon you, in drinking this toast, to drink success to
their endeavour, and to make it the pledge by all good means to
promote it.
If I strictly followed out the list of educational institutions in
Birmingham, I should not have done here, but I intend to stop,
merely observing that I have seen within a short walk of this place
one of the most interesting and practical Institutions for the Deaf
and Dumb that has ever come under my observation. I have seen in
the factories and workshops of Birmingham such beautiful order and
regularity, and such great consideration for the workpeople
provided, that they might justly be entitled to be considered
educational too. I have seen in your splendid Town Hall, when the
cheap concerts are going on there, also an admirable educational
institution. I have seen their results in the demeanour of your
working people, excellently balanced by a nice instinct, as free
from servility on the one hand, as from self-conceit on the other.
It is a perfect delight to have need to ask a question, if only
from the manner of the reply – a manner I never knew to pass
unnoticed by an observant stranger. Gather up those threads, and a
great marry more I have not touched upon, and weaving all into one
good fabric, remember how much is included under the general head
of the Educational Institutions of your town.
SPEECH: LONDON, APRIL 30, 1853.
[At the annual Dinner of the Royal Academy, the President, Sir
Charles Eastlake, proposed as a toast, “The Interests of
Literature,” and selected for the representatives of the world of
letters, the Dean of St. Paul’s and Mr. Charles Dickens. Dean
Milman having returned thanks.]
MR DICKENS then addressed the President, who, it should be
mentioned, occupied a large and handsome chair, the back covered
with crimson velvet, placed just before Stanfield’s picture of THE
VICTORY.
Mr. Dickens, after tendering his acknowledgments of the toast, and
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
the honour done him in associating his name with it, said that
those acknowledgments were not the less heartfelt because he was
unable to recognize in this toast the President’s usual
disinterestedness; since English literature could scarcely be
remembered in any place, and, certainly, not in a school of art,
without a very distinct remembrance of his own tasteful writings,
to say nothing of that other and better part of himself, which,
unfortunately, was not visible upon these occasions.
If, like the noble Lord, the Commander-in-Chief (Viscount
Hardinge), he (Mr. Dickens) might venture to illustrate his brief
thanks with one word of reference to the noble picture painted by a
very dear friend of his, which was a little eclipsed that evening
by the radiant and rubicund chair which the President now so
happily toned down, he would beg leave to say that, as literature
could nowhere be more appropriately honoured than in that place, so
he thought she could nowhere feel a higher gratification in the
ties that bound her to the sister arts. He ever felt in that place
that literature found, through their instrumentality, always a new
expression, and in a universal language.
SPEECH: LONDON, MAY 1, 1853
[At a dinner given by the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House, on the
above date, Mr. Justice Talfourd proposed as a toast “Anglo-Saxon
Literature,” and alluded to Mr. Dickens as having employed fiction
as a means of awakening attention to the condition of the oppressed
and suffering classes:-]
“MR. DICKENS replied to this toast in a graceful and playful
strain. In the former part of the evening, in reply to a toast on
the chancery department, Vice-Chancellor Wood, who spoke in the
absence of the Lord Chancellor, made a sort of defence of the Court
of Chancery, not distinctly alluding to Bleak House, but evidently
not without reference to it. The amount of what he said was, that