ghosts, but seldom condescend to disclose their business. What are
all these meetings and inquiries wanted for? As for the authors, I
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say, as a writer by profession, that the long inquiry said to be
necessary to ascertain whether an applicant deserves relief, is a
preposterous pretence, and that working literary men would have a
far better knowledge of the cases coming before the board than can
ever be attained by that committee. Further, I say openly and
plainly, that this fund is pompously and unnaturally administered
at great expense, instead of being quietly administered at small
expense; and that the secrecy to which it lays claim as its
greatest attribute, is not kept; for through those “two respectable
householders,” to whom reference must be made, the names of the
most deserving applicants are to numbers of people perfectly well
known. The members have now got before them a plain statement of
fact as to these charges; and it is for them to say whether they
are justifiable, becoming, or decent. I beg most earnestly and
respectfully to put it to those gentlemen who belong to this
institution, that must now decide, and cannot help deciding, what
the Literary Fund is for, and what it is not for. The question
raised by the resolution is whether this is a public corporation
for the relief of men of genius and learning, or whether it is a
snug, traditional, and conventional party, bent upon maintaining
its own usages with a vast amount of pride; upon its own annual
puffery at costly dinner-tables, and upon a course of expensive
toadying to a number of distinguished individuals. This is the
question which you cannot this day escape.
SPEECH: LONDON, NOVEMBER 5, 1857.
[At the fourth anniversary dinner of the Warehousemen and Clerks
Schools, which took place on Thursday evening, Nov. 5th, 1857, at
the London Tavern, and was very numerously attended, Mr. Charles
Dickens occupied the chair. On the subject which had brought the
company together Mr. Dickens spoke as follows:-]
I MUST now solicit your attention for a few minutes to the cause of
your assembling together – the main and real object of this
evening’s gathering; for I suppose we are all agreed that the motto
of these tables is not “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die;” but, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we live.” It is
because a great and good work is to live to-morrow, and to-morrow,
and to-morrow, and to live a greater and better life with every
succeeding to-morrow, that we eat and drink here at all.
Conspicuous on the card of admission to this dinner is the word
“Schools.” This set me thinking this morning what are the sorts of
schools that I don’t like. I found them on consideration, to be
rather numerous. I don’t like to begin with, and to begin as
charity does at home – I don’t like the sort of school to which I
once went myself – the respected proprietor of which was by far the
most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know; one of the
worst-tempered men perhaps that ever lived, whose business it was
to make as much out of us and put as little into us as possible,
and who sold us at a figure which I remember we used to delight to
estimate, as amounting to exactly 2 pounds 4s. 6d. per head. I
don’t like that sort of school, because I don’t see what business
the master had to be at the top of it instead of the bottom, and
because I never could understand the wholesomeness of the moral
preached by the abject appearance and degraded condition of the
teachers who plainly said to us by their looks every day of their
lives, “Boys, never be learned; whatever you are, above all things
be warned from that in time by our sunken cheeks, by our poor
pimply noses, by our meagre diet, by our acid-beer, and by our
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extraordinary suits of clothes, of which no human being can say