The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)
Page 139
I have never known the wind to be in the East for a single moment, since the day when he took me to the porch to read the name. I remarked to him once that the wind seemed never in the East now: and he said, No, truly; it had finally departed from that quarter on that very day.
I think my darling girl is more beautiful than ever. The sorrow that has been in her face—for it is not there now—seems to have purified even its innocent expression, and to have given it a diviner quality. Sometimes, when I raise my eyes and see her, in the black dress that she still wears, teaching my Richard, I feel—it is difficult to express—as if it were so good to know that she remembers her dear Esther in her prayers.
I call him my Richard! But he says that he has two mamas, and I am one.
We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband, but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree, but I hear his praises, or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night, but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain, and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich?
The people even praise Me as the doctor’s wife. The people even like Me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite abashed. I owe it all to him, my love, my pride! They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake.
A night or two ago, after bustling about preparing for my darling and my guardian and little Richard, who are coming tomorrow, I was sitting out in the porch of all places, that dearly memorable porch, when Allan came home. So he said, “My precious little woman, what are you doing here?” And I said, “The moon is shining so brightly, Allan, and the night is so delicious, that I have been sitting here, thinking.”
“What have you been thinking about, my dear?” said Allan then.
“How curious you are!” said I. “I am almost ashamed to tell you, but I will. I have been thinking about my old looks—such as they were.”
“And what have you been thinking about them, my busy bee?” said Allan.
“I have been thinking, that I thought it was impossible that you could have loved me any better, even if I had retained them.”
“ ‘Such as they were’?” said Allan, laughing.
“Such as they were, of course.”
“My dear Dame Durden,” said Allan, drawing my arm through his, “do you ever look in the glass?”
“You know I do; you see me do it.”
“And don’t you know that you are prettier than you ever were?”
I did not know that; I am not certain that I know it now. But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Other Works by Charles Dickens
NOVELS
Oliver Twist (1838)
Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
Barnaby Rudge (1841)
Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)
Dombey and Son (1848)
David Copperfield (1850)
Bleak House (1853)
Hard Times (1854)
Little Dorrit (1857)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Great Expectations (1861)
Our Mutual Friend (1865)
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished, 1870)
SHORT STORIES
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848)
Christmas Stories (1850–67)
“To Be Read at Dusk” (1852)
“Hunted Down” (1859)
“George Silverman’s Explanation” (1867)
“Holiday Romance” (1868)
ESSAYS AND TRAVEL BOOKS
Sketches by “Boz” (1836)
Sketches of Young Gentlemen (1838)
Sketches of Young Couples (1840)
American Notes (1842)
Pictures from Italy (1846)
“The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices” (with Wilkie Collins, 1857)
Reprinted Pieces (1858)
The Uncommercial Traveller (1861)
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Butt, John, and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.
Cockshut, A.O.J. The Imagination of Charles Dickens. New York: New York University Press, 1962.
Ford, George. Dickens and His Readers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
——, and Lauriat Lane, eds. The Dickens Critics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872–4.
Gissing, George. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898.
Hardy, Barbara. The Moral Art of Dickens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
House, Humphry. The Dickens World. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
House, Madeleine, and others, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Pilgrim Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965-.
Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
Leavis, F. R., and Q. D. Leavis. Dickens the Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
Mackenzie, Norman, and Jeanne Mackenzie. Dickens: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Marcus, Steven. Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey. New York: Basic Books, 1965.
Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Orwell, George. Dickens, Dali and Others: Studies in Popular Culture. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946.
Wilson, Angus. The World of Charles Dickens. New York: Viking, 1970.
Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
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BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21223-0
A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21244-3
DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21189-7
GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21342-3
HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21016-5
OLIVER TWIST, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21102-1
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A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Dickens, 0-553-21176-5
THREE SOLDIERS, John Dos Passos, 0-553-21456-X
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21175-7
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 0-553-21444-6
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SISTER CARRIE, Theodore Dreiser, 0-553-21374-1
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MIDDLEMARCH, George Eliot, 0-553-21180-3
SILAS MARNER, George Eliot, 0-553-21229-X
SELECTED ESSAYS, LECTURES, AND POEMS, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 0-553-21388-1
TEN PLAYS BY EURIPIDES, Euripides, 0-553-21363-6
APRIL MORNING, Howard Fast, 0-553-27322-1
MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert, 0-553-21341-5
HOWARDS END, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21208-7
A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster, 0-553-21323-7
THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, Anne Frank, 0-553-57712-3
ANNE FRANK’S TALES FROM THE SECRET ANNEX, Anne Frank, 0-553-58638-6
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND OTHER WRITINGS, Benjamin Franklin, 0-553-21075-0
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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21331-8
JUDE THE OBSCURE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21191-9
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THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21269-9
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES, Thomas Hardy, 0-553-21168-4
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FOUR GREAT PLAYS: A DOLL’S HOUSE, GHOSTS, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, and THE WILD DUCK, Henrik Ibsen, 0-553-21280-X
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Henry James, 0-553-21127-7
THE TURN OF THE SCREW AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, Henry James, 0-553-21059-9
A COUNTRY DOCTOR, Sarah Orne Jewett, 0-553-21498-5
DUBLINERS, James Joyce, 0-553-21380-6
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce, 0-553-21404-7
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THE STORY OF MY LIFE, Helen Keller, 0-553-21387-3
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21190-0
THE JUNGLE BOOK, Rudyard Kipling, 0-553-21199-4
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LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, D. H. Lawrence, 0-553-21262-1
SONS AND LOVERS, D. H. Lawrence, 0-553-21192-7
WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence, 0-553-21454-3
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ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 0-553-24777-8
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DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Robert Louis Stevenson, 0-553-21277-X
KIDNAPPED, Robert Louis Stevenson, 0-553-21260-5
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DRACULA, Bram Stoker, 0-553-21271-0
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 0-553-21218-4
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THE INVISIBLE MAN, H. G. Wells, 0-553-21353-9
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, H. G. Wells, 0-553-21432-2
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LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman, 0-553-21116-1
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NIGHT, Elie Wiesel, 0-553-27253-5
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CHARLES DICKENS was born in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At the age of eleven, Dickens was taken out of school and sent to work in a London blacking warehouse, where his job was to paste labels on bottles for six shillings a week. His father, John Dickens, was a warmhearted but improvident man. When he was condemned to Marshalsea Prison for unpaid debts, he unwisely agreed that Charles should stay in lodgings and continue working while the rest of the family joined him in jail. This three-month separation caused Charles much pain; his experiences as a child alone in a huge city—cold, isolated, with barely enough to eat—haunted him for the rest of his life.