Reprinted Pieces

by Dickens, Charles

  Commissariat Department, godmother, and I am pretty well! Then she

  said to another, 'Who are YOU, my darling, and how do YOU do?' - 'I

  am the Head of the Medical Department, godmother, and I am pretty

  well.' Then, she said to some gentlemen scented with lavender, who

  kept themselves at a great distance from the rest, 'And who are

  YOU, my pretty pets, and how do YOU do?' And they answered, 'Weaw-

  are-the-aw-Staff-aw-Department, godmother, and we are very well

  indeed.' - 'I am delighted to see you all, my beauties,' says this

  wicked old Fairy, ' - Tape!' Upon that, the houses, clothes, and

  provisions, all mouldered away; and the soldiers who were sound,

  fell sick; and the soldiers who were sick, died miserably: and the

  noble army of Prince Bull perished.

  When the dismal news of his great loss was carried to the Prince,

  he suspected his godmother very much indeed; but, he knew that his

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  servants must have kept company with the malicious beldame, and

  must have given way to her, and therefore he resolved to turn those

  servants out of their places. So, he called to him a Roebuck who

  had the gift of speech, and he said, 'Good Roebuck, tell them they

  must go.' So, the good Roebuck delivered his message, so like a

  man that you might have supposed him to be nothing but a man, and

  they were turned out - but, not without warning, for that they had

  had a long time.

  And now comes the most extraordinary part of the history of this

  Prince. When he had turned out those servants, of course he wanted

  others. What was his astonishment to find that in all his

  dominions, which contained no less than twenty-seven millions of

  people, there were not above five-and-twenty servants altogether!

  They were so lofty about it, too, that instead of discussing

  whether they should hire themselves as servants to Prince Bull,

  they turned things topsy-turvy, and considered whether as a favour

  they should hire Prince Bull to be their master! While they were

  arguing this point among themselves quite at their leisure, the

  wicked old red Fairy was incessantly going up and down, knocking at

  the doors of twelve of the oldest of the five-and-twenty, who were

  the oldest inhabitants in all that country, and whose united ages

  amounted to one thousand, saying, 'Will YOU hire Prince Bull for

  your master? - Will YOU hire Prince Bull for your master?' To

  which one answered, 'I will if next door will;' and another, 'I

  won't if over the way does;' and another, 'I can't if he, she, or

  they, might, could, would, or should.' And all this time Prince

  Bull's affairs were going to rack and ruin.

  At last, Prince Bull in the height of his perplexity assumed a

  thoughtful face, as if he were struck by an entirely new idea. The

  wicked old Fairy, seeing this, was at his elbow directly, and said,

  'How do you do, my Prince, and what are you thinking of?' - 'I am

  thinking, godmother,' says he, 'that among all the seven-and-twenty

  millions of my subjects who have never been in service, there are

  men of intellect and business who have made me very famous both

  among my friends and enemies.' - 'Aye, truly?' says the Fairy. -

  'Aye, truly,' says the Prince. - 'And what then?' says the Fairy. -

  'Why, then,' says he, 'since the regular old class of servants do

  so ill, are so hard to get, and carry it with so high a hand,

  perhaps I might try to make good servants of some of these.' The

  words had no sooner passed his lips than she returned, chuckling,

  'You think so, do you? Indeed, my Prince? - Tape!' Thereupon he

  directly forgot what he was thinking of, and cried out lamentably

  to the old servants, 'O, do come and hire your poor old master!

  Pray do! On any terms!'

  And this, for the present, finishes the story of Prince Bull. I

  wish I could wind it up by saying that he lived happy ever

  afterwards, but I cannot in my conscience do so; for, with Tape at

  his elbow, and his estranged children fatally repelled by her from

  coming near him, I do not, to tell you the plain truth, believe in

  the possibility of such an end to it.

  A PLATED ARTICLE

  PUTTING up for the night in one of the chiefest towns of

  Staffordshire, I find it to be by no means a lively town. In fact,

  it is as dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see.

  It seems as if its whole population might be imprisoned in its

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  Railway Station. The Refreshment Room at that Station is a vortex

  of dissipation compared with the extinct town-inn, the Dodo, in the

  dull High Street.

  Why High Street? Why not rather Low Street, Flat Street, Low-

  Spirited Street, Used-up Street? Where are the people who belong

  to the High Street? Can they all be dispersed over the face of the

  country, seeking the unfortunate Strolling Manager who decamped

  from the mouldy little Theatre last week, in the beginning of his

  season (as his play-bills testify), repentantly resolved to bring

  him back, and feed him, and be entertained? Or, can they all be

  gathered to their fathers in the two old churchyards near to the

  High Street - retirement into which churchyards appears to be a

  mere ceremony, there is so very little life outside their confines,

  and such small discernible difference between being buried alive in

  the town, and buried dead in the town tombs? Over the way,

  opposite to the staring blank bow windows of the Dodo, are a little

  ironmonger's shop, a little tailor's shop (with a picture of the

  Fashions in the small window and a bandy-legged baby on the

  pavement staring at it) - a watchmakers shop, where all the clocks

  and watches must be stopped, I am sure, for they could never have

  the courage to go, with the town in general, and the Dodo in

  particular, looking at them. Shade of Miss Linwood, erst of

  Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy retreat is

  fitly chosen! I myself was one of the last visitors to that awful

  storehouse of thy life's work, where an anchorite old man and woman

  took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a

  gloomy sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age

  and shrouded in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled,

  frightened, and alone. And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead

  walls of this dead town, I read thy honoured name, and find that

  thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin Wool, invites inspection as a

  powerful excitement!

  Where are the people who are bidden with so much cry to this feast

  of little wool? Where are they? Who are they? They are not the

  bandy-legged baby studying the fashions in the tailor's window.

  They are not the two earthy ploughmen lounging outside the

  saddler's shop, in the stiff square where the Town Hall stands,

  like a brick and mortar private on parade. They are not the

  landlady of the Dodo in the empty bar, whose eye had trouble in it

  and no welcome, when I asked for dinner. Th
ey are not the turnkeys

  of the Town Jail, looking out of the gateway in their uniforms, as

  if they had locked up all the balance (as my American friends would

  say) of the inhabitants, and could now rest a little. They are not

  the two dusty millers in the white mill down by the river, where

  the great water-wheel goes heavily round and round, like the

  monotonous days and nights in this forgotten place. Then who are

  they, for there is no one else? No; this deponent maketh oath and

  saith that there is no one else, save and except the waiter at the

  Dodo, now laying the cloth. I have paced the streets, and stared

  at the houses, and am come back to the blank bow window of the

  Dodo; and the town clocks strike seven, and the reluctant echoes

  seem to cry, 'Don't wake us!' and the bandy-legged baby has gone

  home to bed.

  If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird - if he had only some

  confused idea of making a comfortable nest - I could hope to get

  through the hours between this and bed-time, without being consumed

  by devouring melancholy. But, the Dodo's habits are all wrong. It

  provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair

  for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of

  sideboard where a lonely China vase pines in a corner for its mate

  long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in

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  the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing

  in the larder. Even now, I behold the Boots returning with my sole

  in a piece of paper; and with that portion of my dinner, the Boots,

  perceiving me at the blank bow window, slaps his leg as he comes

  across the road, pretending it is something else. The Dodo

  excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of

  closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The

  loose little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy

  shapes. I don't know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass,

  beyond having met him once or twice in a dish-cover - and I can

  never shave HIM to-morrow morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to

  towels; expects me to wash on a freemason's apron without the

  trimming: when I asked for soap, gives me a stony-hearted something

  white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin marbles. The Dodo

  has seen better days, and possesses interminable stables at the

  back - silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless.

  This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can

  cook a steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its

  Sherry? If I were to send my pint of wine to some famous chemist

  to be analysed, what would it turn out to be made of? It tastes of

  pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds, vinegar, warm knives, any flat

  drinks, and a little brandy. Would it unman a Spanish exile by

  reminding him of his native land at all? I think not. If there

  really be any townspeople out of the churchyards, and if a caravan

  of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in this desert

  of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!

  Where was the waiter born? How did he come here? Has he any hope

  of getting away from here? Does he ever receive a letter, or take

  a ride upon the railway, or see anything but the Dodo? Perhaps he

  has seen the Berlin Wool. He appears to have a silent sorrow on

  him, and it may be that. He clears the table; draws the dingy

  curtains of the great bow window, which so unwillingly consent to

  meet, that they must be pinned together; leaves me by the fire with

  my pint decanter, and a little thin funnel-shaped wine-glass, and a

  plate of pale biscuits - in themselves engendering desperation.

  No book, no newspaper! I left the Arabian Nights in the railway

  carriage, and have nothing to read but Bradshaw, and 'that way

  madness lies.' Remembering what prisoners and ship-wrecked

  mariners have done to exercise their minds in solitude, I repeat

  the multiplication table, the pence table, and the shilling table:

  which are all the tables I happen to know. What if I write

  something? The Dodo keeps no pens but steel pens; and those I

  always stick through the paper, and can turn to no other account.

  What am I to do? Even if I could have the bandy-legged baby

  knocked up and brought here, I could offer him nothing but sherry,

  and that would be the death of him. He would never hold up his

  head again if he touched it. I can't go to bed, because I have

  conceived a mortal hatred for my bedroom; and I can't go away,

  because there is no train for my place of destination until

  morning. To burn the biscuits will be but a fleeting joy; still it

  is a temporary relief, and here they go on the fire! Shall I break

  the plate? First let me look at the back, and see who made it.

  COPELAND.

  Copeland! Stop a moment. Was it yesterday I visited Copeland's

  works, and saw them making plates? In the confusion of travelling

  about, it might be yesterday or it might be yesterday month; but I

  think it was yesterday. I appeal to the plate. The plate says,

  decidedly, yesterday. I find the plate, as I look at it, growing

  into a companion.

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  Don't you remember (says the plate) how you steamed away, yesterday

  morning, in the bright sun and the east wind, along the valley of

  the sparkling Trent? Don't you recollect how many kilns you flew

  past, looking like the bowls of gigantic tobacco-pipes, cut short

  off from the stem and turned upside down? And the fires - and the

  smoke - and the roads made with bits of crockery, as if all the

  plates and dishes in the civilised world had been Macadamised,

  expressly for the laming of all the horses? Of course I do!

  And don't you remember (says the plate) how you alighted at Stoke -

  a picturesque heap of houses, kilns, smoke, wharfs, canals, and

  river, lying (as was most appropriate) in a basin - and how, after

  climbing up the sides of the basin to look at the prospect, you

  trundled down again at a walking-match pace, and straight proceeded

  to my father's, Copeland's, where the whole of my family, high and

  low, rich and poor, are turned out upon the world from our nursery

  and seminary, covering some fourteen acres of ground? And don't

  you remember what we spring from:- heaps of lumps of clay,

  partially prepared and cleaned in Devonshire and Dorsetshire,

  whence said clay principally comes - and hills of flint, without

  which we should want our ringing sound, and should never be

  musical? And as to the flint, don't you recollect that it is first

  burnt in kilns, and is then laid under the four iron feet of a

  demon slave, subject to violent stamping fits, who, when they come

  on, stamps away insanely with his four iron legs, and would crush

  all the flint in the Isle of Thanet to powder, without leaving off?

  And as to the clay, don't you recollect how it is put into mills or

  teazers, and is sliced, and dug, and cut at, by endless knives,

>   clogged and sticky, but persistent - and is pressed out of that

  machine through a square trough, whose form it takes - and is cut

  off in square lumps and thrown into a vat, and there mixed with

  water, and beaten to a pulp by paddle-wheels - and is then run into

  a rough house, all rugged beams and ladders splashed with white, -

  superintended by Grindoff the Miller in his working clothes, all

  splashed with white, - where it passes through no end of machinerymoved

  sieves all splashed with white, arranged in an ascending

  scale of fineness (some so fine, that three hundred silk threads

  cross each other in a single square inch of their surface), and all

  in a violent state of ague with their teeth for ever chattering,

  and their bodies for ever shivering! And as to the flint again,

  isn't it mashed and mollified and troubled and soothed, exactly as

  rags are in a paper-mill, until it is reduced to a pap so fine that

  it contains no atom of 'grit' perceptible to the nicest taste? And

  as to the flint and the clay together, are they not, after all

  this, mixed in the proportion of five of clay to one of flint, and

  isn't the compound - known as 'slip' - run into oblong troughs,

  where its superfluous moisture may evaporate; and finally, isn't it

  slapped and banged and beaten and patted and kneaded and wedged and

  knocked about like butter, until it becomes a beautiful grey dough,

  ready for the potter's use?

  In regard of the potter, popularly so called (says the plate), you

  don't mean to say you have forgotten that a workman called a

  Thrower is the man under whose hand this grey dough takes the

  shapes of the simpler household vessels as quickly as the eye can

  follow? You don't mean to say you cannot call him up before you,

  sitting, with his attendant woman, at his potter's wheel - a disc

  about the size of a dinner-plate, revolving on two drums slowly or

  quickly as he wills - who made you a complete breakfast-set for a

  bachelor, as a good-humoured little off-hand joke? You remember

  how he took up as much dough as he wanted, and, throwing it on his

  wheel, in a moment fashioned it into a teacup - caught up more clay

  and made a saucer - a larger dab and whirled it into a teapot -

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  winked at a smaller dab and converted it into the lid of the