any theatre in my life from which I had not brought away some
pleasant association, however poor the theatre, and I protest, out
of my varied experience, I could not remember even one from which I
had not brought some favourable impression, and that, commencing
with the period when I believed the clown was a being born into the
world with infinite pockets, and ending with that in which I saw
the other night, outside one of the “Royal Saloons,” a playbill
which showed me ships completely rigged, carrying men, and
careering over boundless and tempestuous oceans. And now,
bespeaking your kindest remembrance of our theatres and actors, I
beg to propose that you drink as heartily and freely as ever a
toast was drunk in this toast-drinking city “Prosperity to the
General Theatrical Fund.”
SPEECH: LEEDS, DECEMBER 1, 1847.
[On the above evening a Soiree of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution
took place, at which about 1200 persons were present. The chair
was taken by Mr. Dickens, who thus addressed the meeting:]
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, – Believe me, speaking to you with a most
disastrous cold, which makes my own voice sound very strangely in
my ears – that if I were not gratified and honoured beyond
expression by your cordial welcome, I should have considered the
invitation to occupy my present position in this brilliant
assemblage in itself a distinction not easy to be surpassed. The
cause in which we are assembled and the objects we are met to
promote, I take, and always have taken to be, THE cause and THE
objects involving almost all others that are essential to the
welfare and happiness of mankind. And in a celebration like the
present, commemorating the birth and progress of a great
educational establishment, I recognise a something, not limited to
the spectacle of the moment, beautiful and radiant though it be –
not limited even to the success of the particular establishment in
which we are more immediately interested – but extending from this
place and through swarms of toiling men elsewhere, cheering and
stimulating them in the onward, upward path that lies before us
all. Wherever hammers beat, or wherever factory chimneys smoke,
wherever hands are busy, or the clanking of machinery resounds –
wherever, in a word, there are masses of industrious human beings
whom their wise Creator did not see fit to constitute all body, but
into each and every one of whom He breathed a mind – there, I would
fain believe, some touch of sympathy and encouragement is felt from
our collective pulse now beating in this Hall.
Ladies and gentlemen, glancing with such feelings at the report of
your Institution for the present year sent to me by your respected
Page 100
Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
President – whom I cannot help feeling it, by-the-bye, a kind of
crime to depose, even thus peacefully, and for so short a time – I
say, glancing over this report, I found one statement of fact in
the very opening which gave me an uncommon satisfaction. It is,
that a great number of the members and subscribers are among that
class of persons for whose advantage Mechanics’ Institutions were
originated, namely, persons receiving weekly wages. This
circumstance gives me the greatest delight. I am sure that no
better testimony could be borne to the merits and usefulness of
this Institution, and that no better guarantee could be given for
its continued prosperity and advancement.
To such Associations as this, in their darker hours, there may yet
reappear now and then the spectral shadow of a certain dead and
buried opposition; but before the light of a steady trust in them
on the part of the general people, bearing testimony to the
virtuous influences of such Institutions by their own intelligence
and conduct, the ghost will melt away like early vapour from the
ground. Fear of such Institutions as these! We have heard people
sometimes speak with jealousy of them, – with distrust of them!
Imagine here, on either hand, two great towns like Leeds, full of
busy men, all of them feeling necessarily, and some of them
heavily, the burdens and inequalities inseparable from civilized