ART. V.-1. Little Dorrit. By CHARLES DICKENS. London: 1857.

2. It is never too late to mend. A matter-of-fact Romance. By CHARLES READE. Fifth edition. London: 1857.

3. The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Author of 'Jane Eyre,' Shirley,' and Villette.' By E. C. GASKELL, Author of 'Mary Barton,' and Ruth.' 2 vols. 2 vols. London: 1857.

To give the young any direct instruction in morals or politics, unhappily forms no part of the customary and established system of modern English education. A youth may pass through our public schools and universities hearing little of his duties to society and to his country. Of classical and theological culture he will, indeed, experience no want, but he can receive no positive moral instruction except what comes to him through theological channels, or from the domestic influences of the society in which he lives. This defect in our higher education is in a great measure peculiar to the present generation. In the last century, a certain set of opinions upon subjects of a political and moral character formed part of the creed of every person of education. That the British Constitution combined the advantages and the defects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; that the alliance between Church and State secured the liberties of both; that English law was the perfection of reason, and the birthright of every Briton; that every man had by his representatives a share in the government of his country, and that it was his duty and his right to take a corresponding interest in its politics: these, and many other beliefs of a similar kind, were as much part of the training of a gentleman as the doctrine that verbum personale concordat cum nominativo. It certainly is as far from our intention, as it would be out of our power, to attempt to restore the currency of the old coin of political dogmatism, so effectually decried in Bentham's Book of Fallacies. But we think that negative and critical conclusions are not the only results at which we ought to arrive upon these subjects, and that they are worse suited than any others to be made the staple of popular education. It ought not to be our object to instil into the minds of the young a blind admiration, or a blind contempt, of the institutions under which they live. In this, as in all other branches of education, the rule of truth is the only safe rule; and truth is outraged if contempt and ridicule are the only feelings excited in the mind of an educated man by the contemplation of the political and social arrangements of his country.

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This doctrine, however, is much in favour amongst one class of writers who are, perhaps, the most influential of all indirect moral teachers-we mean contemporary novelists. The popularity of a form of literature which is at once a stimulant and an anodyne, and which engrosses the imagination, whilst it does not absolutely exclude the exercise of the understanding, needs no explanation; but there is another source of the educational influence of novels which most of us have felt, though it has not, we think, been usually recognised so explicitly as their other attractions. Through novels young people are generally addressed for the first time as equals upon the most interesting affairs of life. they see grown-up men and women described, and the occupations of mature life discussed, without any arrière pensée as to the moral effects which the discussion may have upon their Own minds. To an inquisitive youth, novels are a series of lectures upon life, in which the professor addresses his pupils as his equals and as men of the world. There, for the first time, the springs of human actions are laid bare, and the laws of human society discussed in language intelligible and attractive to young imaginations and young hearts. Such teachers can never be otherwise than influential, but in the present day their influence is enormously increased by the facilities which cheap publication affords to them. Upwards of a million of the cheap shilling volumes which ornament railway book-stalls are disposed of annually, and the effect of these publications on the whole mind of the community can hardly be exaggerated. Even Mr. Reade's novel, 'It is never too late to mend,' is advertised to have reached the twelfth thousand of its circulation, and we believe Mr. Dickens's tales sell about 40,000 copies on publication.

These facts furnish an apology, which we feel to be necessary, for devoting some attention to two books which justify the opinion we have formed on the influence exercised by such novels over the moral and political opinions of the young, the ignorant, and the inexperienced. That opinion is, that they tend to beget hasty generalisations and false conclusions. They address themselves almost entirely to the imagination upon subjects which properly belong to the intellect. Their suggestions go so far beyond their assertions that the author's sense of responsibility is greatly weakened, and by suppressing all that is dull, all that does not contribute to dramatic effect, and all that falls beyond a certain conventional circle of feelings, they caricature instead of representing the world. This applies even to those ordinary domestic relations, which are the legiti

mate province of novels. Love, marriage, friendship, grief, and joy are very different things in a novel from what they are in real life, and the representations of novelists are not only false, but often in the highest degree mischievous when they apply, not to the feelings, but to the facts and business transactions of the world. We propose to notice the two works before us, as an illustration of these observations, and we shall show before we conclude that Mrs. Gaskell's 'Life of Miss Brontë' is in some respects obnoxious to the same criticism, though it claims a place in another branch of literature.

We do not of course undervalue the part which fiction has often played in the inculcation of truth, and a thousand imaginary characters crowd upon the mind which reflect with signal brilliancy the noblest graces and the purest virtues of our race. Where are we to find greater refinement than in Sir Charles Grandison-greater ingenuity and perseverance than in Robinson Crusoe-more pathetic simplicity and devotedness than in Jeanie Deans? But there is a very wide distinction between creations wrought up to the true ideal, and attempts to copy life by throwing a false and distorted light on real incidents. The incidents may in themselves be things which have actually taken place, yet they sometimes give most erroneous and exaggerated impressions when they are pressed into the service of romance.

'Little Dorrit' is not one of the most pleasing or interesting of Mr. Dickens's novels. The plot is singularly cumbrous and confused-the characters rather uninteresting-and the style often strained to excess. We are not however tempted, by the comparative inferiority of this production of a great novelist, to forget the indisputable merits of Mr. Dickens. Even those who dislike a good deal of the society to which he introduces his readers, and who are not accustomed to the language of his personages, must readily acknowledge that he has described modern English low life with infinite humour and fidelity, but without coarseness. He has caught and reproduced that native wit which is heard to perfection in the repartees of an English crowd: and though his path has often lain through scenes of gloom, and poverty, and wretchedness, and guilt, he leaves behind him a spirit of tenderness and humanity which does honour to his heart. We wish he had dealt as fairly and kindly with the upper classes of society as he has with the lower; and that he had more liberally portrayed those manly, disinterested, and energetic qualities which make up the character of an English gentleman. Acute observer as he is, it is to be regretted that he should have mistaken a Lord Decimus

for the type of an English statesman, or Mr. Tite Barnacle for a fair specimen of a public servant. But in truth we cannot recall any single character in his novels, intended to belong to the higher ranks of English life, who is drawn with the slightest approach to truth or probability. His injustice to the institutions of English society is, however, even more flagrant than his animosity to particular classes in that society. The rich and the great are commonly held up to ridicule for their folly, or to hatred for their selfishness. But the institutions of the country, the laws, the administration, in a word the government under which we live, are regarded and described by Mr. Dickens as all that is most odious and absurd in despotism or in oligarchy. In every new novel he selects one or two of the popular cries of the day, to serve as seasoning to the dish which he sets before his readers. It may be the Poor Laws, or Imprisonment for Debt, or the Court of Chancery, or the harshness of Mill-owners, or the stupidity of Parliament, or the inefficiency of the Government, or the insolence of District Visitors, or the observance of Sunday, or Mammon-worship, or whatever else you please. He is equally familiar with all these subjects. If there was a popular cry against the management of a hospital, he would no doubt write a novel on a month's warning about the ignorance and temerity with which surgical operations are performed; and if his lot had been cast in the days when it was fashionable to call the English law the perfection of reason, he would probably have published monthly denunciations of Lord Mansfield's Judgment in Perrin v. Blake, in blue covers adorned with curious hieroglyphics, intended to represent springing uses, executory devises, and contingent remainders. We recommend him to draw the materials of his next work from Dr. Hassall on the Adulteration of Food, or the Report on Scotch Lunatics. Even the catastrophe in Little Dorrit' is evidently borrowed from the recent fall of houses in Tottenham Court Road, which happens to have appeared in the newspapers at a convenient

moment.

Mr. Reade is less well known as a writer, but after publishing two popular, though not very edifying stories, he has at last composed a novel of much greater length, which affords a convincing proof of the temptation to falsify and misrepresent the facts upon which such stories are founded. This book has propagated through the length and breadth of the country imputations against the Government, the judges, and private individuals, so grave, so unjust, so cruel, that we think it is the duty of criticism to expose them.

By examining the justice of Mr. Dickens's general charges,

and the accuracy of Mr. Reade's specific accusations, we shall endeavour to show how much injustice may be done, and how much unfounded discontent may be engendered, by these onesided and superficial pictures of popular abuses.

It is not a little curious to consider what qualifications a man ought to possess before he could, with any kind of propriety, hold the language Mr. Dickens sometimes holds about the various departments of social life. Scott, we all know, was a lawyer and an antiquarian. Sir Edward Lytton has distinguished himself in political life, and his books contain unquestionable evidence of a considerable amount of classical and historical reading. Mr. Thackeray hardly ever steps beyond those regions of society and literature which he has carefully explored. But in Mr. Dickens's voluminous works, we do not remember to have found many traces of these solid acquirements; and we must be permitted to say, for it is no reflection on any man out of the legal profession, that his notions of law, which occupy so large a space in his books, are precisely those of an attorney's clerk. He knows what arrest for debt is, he knows how affidavits are sworn. He knows the physiognomy of courts of justice, and he has heard that Chancery suits sometimes last forty years; though he seems not to have the remotest notion that there is any difference between suits for the administration of estates and suits for the settlement of disputed rights, and that the delay which is an abuse in the one case, is inevitable in the other. The greatest of our statesmen, lawyers, and philosophers would shrink from delivering any trenchant and unqualified opinion upon so complicated and obscure a subject as the merits of the whole administrative Government of the empire. To Mr. Dickens the question presents no such difficulty. He stumbles upon the happy phrase of the Circum'locution Office' as an impersonation of the Government; strikes out the brilliant thought, repeated just ten times in twentythree lines, that whereas ordinary people want to know how to do their business, the whole art of Government lies in discovering 'how not to do it; and with these somewhat unmeaning phrases he proceeds to describe, in a light and playful tone, the government of his country.

Everybody has read the following chapter of Little Dorrit ;' but we are not equally sure that everybody has asked himself what it really means. It means, if it means anything, that the result of the British constitution, of our boasted freedom, of parliamentary representation, and of all we possess, is to give us the worst government on the face of the earth-the clatter of a mill grinding no corn, the stroke of an engine drawing no water.