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chandlers, costumiers, detectives, doctors, domestic servants, dry-salters, engineers, engine-drivers, farmers, fishermen, gamekeepers, grocers, greengrocers, haberdashers, hop-growers, jailers and turnkeys, labourers, lamplighters, lawyers, law-stationers, locksmiths, manufacturers, merchants, medical students, money-lenders, notaries, ostlers, pawnbrokers, parish-clerks, plasterers, porters, post-masters, pot-boys, reporters, robemakers, saddlers, sailors, sextons, shipwrights, stewards, stokers, stonemasons, sugarbakers, tailors, teachers, tobacconists, toymakers and merchants, umbrella-makers, undertakers, watermen, weavers, wharfingers, wheelwrights. The list might be made longer, but that perhaps is long enough to make you realise how amply provided with trades and tradesmen are the teeming streets of Dickens's imagination. And where in all the crowd is your hero of romance? Barkis, the carrier, no doubt, was willing, but it takes more than willingness to make the ideal lover. Nor did Dickens content himself with the ordinary trades. He loved to collect specimens of bizarre callings. There is Jo the

crossing-sweeper, and Wegg the balladmonger, and Boffin the dustman; he has a hangman and a resurrection-man; he has two balloonists, a bird-fancier, and a beggingletter writer; an astrologer and a pugilist,— Mr. Toots's friend the Game Chicken; dancing-masters, jugglers, cheap-jacks, showmen with a giant and a dwarf and a kept poet, a verger and a pew-opener, a stenographer and a statistician, a shoe-binder and a maker of nautical instruments; nor let me by any means forget Mr. Venus, articulator of bones. 'You're casting your eye round the shop, Mr. Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working-bench. My young man's bench. A wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones atop.' Mr. Venus, it is true, as became his mythological name, had his little romance with Rogue Riderhood's daughter. Now Pleasant Riderhood had no call to be squeamish. She was meagre and of muddy complexion, looked twice her age, and had a swivel eye. Yet

even this apology for a girl had the hardihood to cast the good man's calling in his teeth, intimating that she neither regarded herself, nor wished to be regarded, in a bony light.

Another out-of-the-way trade in the same novel, and a prettier fancy, is that of Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker. When Charley Hexam and Bradley Headstone called at Jenny Wren's house to look for Hexam's sister Lizzie, the quaint little 'person of the house' put them to guess the name of her trade and they had to give it up. Who but Dickens, indeed, would ever have thought of such a trade? Who but Dickens, did I say? Why, by an uncommonly curious coincidence M. Alphonse Daudet did actually hit upon precisely the same pretty fancy, for his Désirée Delobelle. He had been especially particular about a trade for her. She was the daughter of an actor; and he determined that the theatricality of the father should in the crippled girl take the form of sentimental reverie, and that she must have some pretty and poetical business suggesting a luxury in contrast with her own poor sur

roundings. Dolls' dressmaking, the very thing! Poor and deformed herself, she could gratify her natural tastes for refinement and elegance, and dress her dreams instead of herself in silks and gold lace. It was M. Daudet's custom to compose his novels out loud, and he told André Gill one day about his little dolls' dressmaker. From him he learnt for the first time to his great dismay that there was already a dolls' dressmaker known to the world of fiction in a novel by Dickens, which M. Daudet happened not to know. The parallel was exact, the conception was the same and had been carried out with all the English novelist's sympathy with the poor, with all his féerie de la rue. M. Daudet knew that he had often before this been likened to Dickens, before he had read a line of him, and long before he had been told by a friend who had been in England that David Copperfield took a friendly interest in Le Petit Chose. He had much the same early experiences as Dickens, and shared his sympathy with the poor and wretched. Save so far as this community of experience and sympathy explained it, the

coincidence about the dolls' dressmaker was pure chance. He recognised, however, that he would have to sacrifice his specially selected trade. How find another so ideally suitable, aussi poétiquement chimérique? He felt with Balzac that such things could not be evolved out of a writer's inner consciousness. So he did what Balzac and Dickens often did in the like cases. He roamed the streets with his eyes open and climbed many a dark and dank staircase. At last he was rewarded. He saw a sign whose inscription dazzled him, faded though the gold letters were, Oiseaux et mouches pour modes. And a trade had been found, fairy-like and fantastic enough for pauv' petite Mam'zelle Zizi.

Balzac's Comédie Humaine teems like the world of Dickens with all sorts and conditions of men. A répertoire compiled by two pious and industrious Balzaciens takes between five and six hundred ample French octavo pages merely to enumerate his characters with the briefest possible description of them. From this source the curious might readily lengthen Dickens's extensive

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