SPEECH: ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE,
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27, 1855.
I CANNOT, I am sure, better express my sense of the kind reception
accorded to me by this great assembly, than by promising to
compress what I shall address to it within the closest possible
limits. It is more than eighteen hundred years ago, since there
was a set of men who “thought they should be heard for their much
speaking.” As they have propagated exceedingly since that time,
and as I observe that they flourish just now to a surprising extent
about Westminster, I will do my best to avoid adding to the numbers
of that prolific race. The noble lord at the head of the
Government, when he wondered in Parliament about a week ago, that
my friend, Mr. Layard, did not blush for having stated in this
place what the whole country knows perfectly well to be true, and
what no man in it can by possibility better know to be true than
those disinterested supporters of that noble lord, who had the
advantage of hearing him and cheering him night after night, when
he first became premier – I mean that he did officially and
habitually joke, at a time when this country was plunged in deep
disgrace and distress – I say, that noble lord, when he wondered so
much that the man of this age, who has, by his earnest and
adventurous spirit, done the most to distinguish himself and it,
did not blush for the tremendous audacity of having so come between
the wind and his nobility, turned an airy period with reference to
the private theatricals at Drury Lane Theatre. Now, I have some
slight acquaintance with theatricals, private and public, and I
will accept that figure of the noble lord. I will not say that if
I wanted to form a company of Her Majesty’s servants, I think I
should know where to put my hand on “the comic old gentleman;” nor,
that if I wanted to get up a pantomime, I fancy I should know what
establishment to go to for the tricks and changes; also, for a very
considerable host of supernumeraries, to trip one another up in
that contention with which many of us are familiar, both on these
and on other boards, in which the principal objects thrown about
are loaves and fishes. But I will try to give the noble lord the
reason for these private theatricals, and the reason why, however
ardently he may desire to ring the curtain down upon them, there is
not the faintest present hope of their coming to a conclusion. It
is this:- The public theatricals which the noble lord is so
condescending as to manage are so intolerably bad, the machinery is
so cumbrous, the parts so ill-distributed, the company so full of
“walking gentlemen,” the managers have such large families, and are
so bent upon putting those families into what is theatrically
called “first business” – not because of their aptitude for it, but
because they ARE their families, that we find ourselves obliged to
organize an opposition. We have seen the COMEDY OF ERRORS played
so dismally like a tragedy that we really cannot bear it. We are,
therefore, making bold to get up the SCHOOL OF REFORM, and we hope,
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
before the play is out, to improve that noble lord by our
performance very considerably. If he object that we have no right
to improve him without his license, we venture to claim that right
in virtue of his orchestra, consisting of a very powerful piper,
whom we always pay.
Sir, as this is the first political meeting I have ever attended,
and as my trade and calling is not associated with politics,
perhaps it may be useful for me to show how I came to be here,
because reasons similar to those which have influenced me may still
be trembling in the balance in the minds of others. I want at all
times, in full sincerity, to do my duty by my countrymen. If I
feel an attachment towards them, there is nothing disinterested or
meritorious in that, for I can never too affectionately remember