Tales from Dickens

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Title: Tales from Dickens

Author: Hallie Erminie Rives
Charles Dickens

Release date: September 28, 2009 [eBook #30127]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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TALES FROM DICKENS

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

Author of
The Castaway, Hearts Courageous
A Furnace of Earth, etc.

With Illustrations by Reginald B. Birch

[Illustration: David Copperfield and his friend, Mr. Micawber
_See page 112_]

Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers

GEORGE BAKER ROBBINS, JR.

CONTENTS

CHARLES DICKENS 1

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

I Little Nell 19
II The Wanderers 26
III The Search 35

OLIVER TWIST

I How Oliver Came to London and What He Found There 49
II Oliver's Adventures 58
III How Everything Turned Out Right for Oliver
in the End 65

BARNABY RUDGE

I Barnaby's Boyhood 77
II The Mysterious Stranger and Who He Was 83
III Barnaby Gets Into Trouble 89
IV Barnaby Prospers at Last 95

DAVID COPPERFIELD

I David's Early Ups and Downs 105
II Little Em'ly 115
III David and His Child-Wife 120
IV David Finds All Well at Last 124

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

I Pip and the Convict 131
II The Queer Miss Havisham 138
III Pip Discovers His Benefactor 147
IV Pip Comes to Himself 152

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

I Nicholas at Dotheboys Hall 161
II Nicholas Becomes an Actor 167
III Nicholas Comes to Kate's Rescue 171
IV What Happened to Everybody 175

DOMBEY AND SON

I Little Paul 183
II How Florence Lost Her Father 191
III How Florence Reached a Refuge 199
IV How Florence Found Her Father at Last 203

THE PICKWICK PAPERS

I The Pickwickians Begin Their Adventures. They
Meet Mr. Alfred Jingle, and Winkle Is Involved
in a Duel 213
II Tupman Has a Love-Affair With a Spinster, and
the Pickwickians Find Out the Real Character
of Jingle 218
III Mr. Pickwick Has an Interesting Scene With Mrs.
Bardell, His Housekeeper. Further Pursuit of
Jingle Leads to an Adventure at a Young Ladies'
Boarding School 224
IV Sam Weller Meets His Father, and the Pursuit of
Jingle Is Continued. Mr. Pickwick Makes a
Strange Call on a Middle-Aged Lady in Yellow
Curl Papers 230
V The Pickwickians Find Themselves in the Grasp of
the Law. The Final Exposure of Jingle, and a
Christmas Merrymaking 233
VI The Celebrated Case of Bardell Against Pickwick.
Sergeant Buzfuz's Speech and an Unexpected Verdict 238
VII Winkle Has an Exciting Adventure With Mr. Dowler,
and With the Aid of Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller
Discovers the Whereabouts of Miss Arabella Allen 242
VIII Mr. Pickwick's Experiences in the Debtors' Prison,
Where He Finds an Old Enemy and Heaps Coals
of Fire on the Head of Mrs. Bardell 248
IX Snodgrass Gets Into Difficulties, But Wins His
Lady-Love. The Adventures of the Pickwickians Come
to an End 252

LITTLE DORRIT

I How Arthur Came Home from China 261
II The Child of the Marshalsea 266
III What Riches Brought to the Dorrits 274
IV What Happened to Arthur Clennam 280
V "All's Well That Ends Well" 284

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT

I How Martin Left England 295
II Pecksniff and Old Chuzzlewit 302
III Jonas Gets Rid of an Enemy 308
IV What Came of Martin's Trip to America 313
V Old Chuzzlewit's Plot Succeeds 318

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

I What Happened to John Harmon 325
II Lizzie Hexam and the Dolls' Dressmaker 332
III The Rise and Fall of Silas Wegg 337
IV Bella and the Golden Dustman 343
V The End of the Story 348

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

I How Lucie Found a Father 357
II Darnay Caught in the Net 367
III Sydney Carton's Sacrifice 375

BLEAK HOUSE

I The Court of Chancery 383
II Lady Dedlock's Secret 390
III Little Joe Plays a Part 398
IV Esther Becomes the Mistress of Bleak House 405

HARD TIMES

I Mr. Gradgrind and His "System" 413
II The Robbery of Bounderby's Bank 420
III Harthouse's Plan Fails 427
IV Stephen's Return 432

THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD

I John Jasper 441
II The Coming of Neville Landless 444
III The Choirmaster's Dinner 449
IV Jasper Shows His Teeth 455

INDEX TO CHARACTERS 463

TALES FROM DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS

Charles John Huffham Dickens, the master story-teller, was born in
Landport, England, February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in one of
the offices of the Navy, and he was one of eight children.

When he was four years old, his father moved to the town of Chatham,
near the old city of Rochester. Round about are chalk hills, green
lanes, forests and marshes, and amid such scenes the little Charles's
genius first began to show itself.

He did not like the rougher sports of his school-fellows and preferred
to amuse himself in his own way, or to wander about with his older
sister, Fanny, whom he especially loved. They loved to watch the stars
together, and there was one particular star which they used to pretend
was their own. People called him a "very queer small boy" because he was
always thinking or reading instead of playing. The children of the
neighborhood would gather around him to listen while he told them
stories or sang comic songs to them, and when he was only eight years
old he taught them to act in plays which he invented. He was fond of
reading books of travel, and most of all he loved _The Arabian Nights_
and _Robinson Crusoe_.

He had a great affection for Chatham and Rochester, and after he began
to write stories that were printed, he often used to put these places
into them. It was at Chatham that poor little David in the story, _David
Copperfield_, lay down to sleep when he was running away from London to
find his aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood. It was to Rochester that Mr.
Pickwick in _Pickwick Papers_, rode with Jingle. Rochester was really
the "Cloisterham" where the wicked choir master, John Jasper, killed his
nephew, in _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. And it was in those very
marshes near by, that Magwitch, the escaped convict in _Great
Expectations_, so frightened little Pip. It is easy to see that the
young Charles Dickens noted carefully and remembered everything he saw,
and this habit was of great use to him all his life.

These happy years were not to last long. When he was nine years old, his
father became poor and the family was obliged to move to London, where
it lived in a shabby house in a poor suburb. Before another year had
passed, his father was put into prison for debt--the same prison in
which Little Dorrit, in the story of that name, grew up. A very bitter
period followed for the solitary ten-year-old boy--a time in which, he
long afterward wrote, "but for the mercy of God, he might easily have
become, for any care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little
vagabond." The earlier history of David in _David Copperfield_ is really
and truly a history of the real Charles Dickens in London. He was left
to the city streets, or to earn a hard and scanty living in a dirty
warehouse, by pasting labels on pots of blacking. All of this wretched
experience he has written in _David Copperfield_, and the sad scenes of
the debtors' prison he has put into _Pickwick Papers_ and into _Little
Dorrit_. Even Mrs. Pipchin, of whom he told in _Dombey and Son_, and Mr.
Micawber in _David Copperfield_, were real people whom he knew in these
years of poverty and despair. Dickens's life at this time was so
miserable that always afterward he dreaded to speak of it, and never
could bear even to walk in the street where the blacking warehouse of
his boyhood had stood.

Better days, however, came at last. He was able to begin school again,
and though the head-master was ignorant and brutal (just such a one as
Mr. Creakle in _David Copperfield_) yet Dickens profited by such
teaching as he received.

After two or three years of school, he found employment as clerk in a
lawyer's office. This did not content him and he made up his mind to
learn to write shorthand so as to become a reporter, in the Houses of
Parliament, for a newspaper. This was by no means an easy task. But
Dickens had great strength of will and a determination to do well
whatever he did at all, and he succeeded, just as David Copperfield did
in the story.

And like the latter, too, about this time Dickens fell in love. He did
not marry on this occasion, as did David, but how much he was in love
one may see by the story of David's Dora.

The theater had always a great attraction for Dickens. Throughout his
life he loved to act in plays got up and often written, too, by himself
and his friends. Some of his early experiences of this kind he has told
in the adventures of Nicholas Nickleby at Mr. Crummles's theater. But
his acting was for his own amusement, and it is doubtful if he ever
thought seriously of adopting the stage as a profession. If he did, his
success as a reporter soon determined him otherwise.

When he was twenty-one he saw his first printed sketch in a monthly
magazine. He had dropped it into a letter-box with mingled hope and
fear, and read it now through tears of joy and pride. He followed this
with others as successful, signed "Boz"--the child nickname of one of
his younger brothers. This was his beginning. He was soon on the road to
a comfortable fortune, and when at length _Pickwick Papers_ appeared,
Dickens's fame was assured. This was his first long story. It became,
almost at once, the most popular book of its day, perhaps, indeed, the
most popular book ever published in England. Soon after the appearance
of its first chapters, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth, daughter
of the editor of one of the London newspapers, who had helped him in his
career.

Many have tried to explain the marvelous popularity of _Pickwick
Papers_. Certainly its honest fun, its merriment, its quaintness, good
humor and charity appealed to every reader. More than all, it made
people acquainted with a new company of characters, none of whom had
ever existed, or could ever exist, and yet whose manners and appearance
were pictured so really that they seemed to be actual persons whom one
might meet and laugh with anywhere.

With such a success, and the money it brought him, Dickens had leisure
to begin the wonderful series of stories which endeared him to the whole
English-speaking world, and made him the most famous author of his day.
_Oliver Twist_ came first, and it was followed by _Nicholas Nickleby_
and _The Old Curiosity Shop_.

In the first two of these stories one may see most clearly the principle
that underlay almost all of Dickens's work. He was never content merely
to tell an interesting story. He wrote with a purpose. In _Oliver Twist_
that purpose was, first, to better the poorhouse system, and second, to
show that even in the lowest and wickedest paths of life (the life
wherein lived Fagin with his pupils in crime and Bill Sikes the brutal
burglar) there could yet be found, as in the case of poor Nancy, real
kindness and sacrifice. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ the purpose was to show
what terrible wrongs were done to children in country schools, numbers
of which at that time were managed by men almost as cruel and inhuman as
was Squeers in the story. It is good to learn that, as a result of this
novel, an end was made of many such boys' schools. True artist as he
was, Dickens seldom wrote without having in his mind the thought of
showing some defect in the law, or some wrong condition of affairs which
might be righted. No one could read _Pickwick Papers_ or _Little Dorrit_
without realizing how much wrong and misery was caused by the law which
made it possible to throw a man into prison for debt. Nor can one read
_Bleak House_ without seeing that the legal system which robbed quaint
Miss Flite of her mind and kept poor Richard Carstone from his fortune
till the fortune itself had disappeared, was a very wrong legal system
indeed. Often, too, Dickens's stories are, in a sense, sermons against
very human sins. In _The Old Curiosity Shop_ it is the sin of gambling
which brings about the death of Little Nell. In _Great Expectations_ it
is the sin of pride which Pip has to fight. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ the
evil and folly of selfishness is what Dickens had in mind.

With his increasing wealth, Dickens had, of course, changed his manner
of life. He lived part of the time in the country near London, in
Brighton, in Dover, and in France and Italy. He liked best, however, a
little English watering place called Broadstairs--a tiny fishing
village, built on a cliff, with the sea rolling and dashing beneath it.
In such a place he felt that he could write best, but he greatly missed
his London friends. He used to say that being without them was "like
losing his arms and legs."

The first great grief of his life came to him at this time, in the death
of his wife's sister, Mary Hogarth, a gentle, lovable girl of seventeen.
No sorrow ever touched him as this did. "After she died," he wrote years
afterward, "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with
a kind of quiet happiness, so that I never lay down at night without a
hope of the vision coming back." Hers was the character he drew in
Little Nell in _The Old Curiosity Shop_. When he came to the part of the
story which tells of Little Nell's death, he could scarcely write the
chapter. When he ended it he said, "It seems as though dear Mary died
but yesterday."

When he was less than thirty, Dickens was invited to visit Scotland, and
there he received his first great national tribute. A public banquet was
given him in Edinburgh, and he was much sought after and entertained. Up
to this time he had never seen the United States; he decided now to
visit this country and meet his American readers face to face.

He landed at Boston accompanied by his wife, in 1842, and visited many
of the greater cities of the Eastern states. Everywhere he was counted
the guest of the nation, and the four months of his stay were one
continual welcome. Unfortunately, however, Dickens had taken a dislike
to American ways, and this dislike appeared in many things he wrote
after his return to England. The pictures he drew of American life in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ were both unjust and untrue, and made him for a time
lose a large part of the good opinion which American readers had had for
him. Dickens soon came to regret the writing of these chapters, and
when, twenty-five years later, he visited the United States a second
time, he did all in his power to show his kindly feeling, and America
admired and loved him so much that it gradually forgot the incident in
the great pleasure with which it read his stories.

Dickens was a very active man, and his life was simple and full of work
and exercise. He rose early and almost every day might have been seen
tramping for miles along the country roads, or riding horseback with his
dogs racing after him. He liked best to wander along the cliffs or
across the downs by the sea. When he was in London he often walked the
streets half the night, thinking out his stories, or searching for the
odd characters which he put in them. This natural activity and
restlessness even led him sometimes to make political speeches, and
finally to the establishment of a new London newspaper--the _Daily
News_--of which he was the first editor. Before this, he had started a
weekly journal, in which several of his stories had appeared, but it had
not been very successful. It was not long before he withdrew also from
this second venture.

In the meantime he had met with both joy and sorrow. Several children
had been born to him. His much loved sister, his father, and his own
little daughter, the youngest of his family, had died. These sorrows
made him throw himself into his work with greater earnestness. He even
found leisure to organize a theatrical company (in which he himself
acted with a number of other famous writers of the time), which gave
several plays for the benefit of charity. One of these was performed
before Queen Victoria.

People have often wondered how Dickens found time to accomplish so many
different things. One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of
order. He was the most systematic of men. Everything he did "went like
clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not work
in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place. As a
consequence of this habit of regularity, he never wasted time.

The work of editorship was very pleasant to Dickens, and scarcely three
years after his leaving the _Daily News_ he began the publication of a
new magazine which he called _Household Words_. His aim was to make it
cheerful, useful and at the same time cheap, so that the poor could
afford to buy it as well as the rich. His own story, _Hard Times_, first
appeared in this, with the earliest work of more than one writer who
later became celebrated. Dickens loved to encourage young writers, and
would just as quickly accept a good story or poem from an unknown author
as from the most famous.

It was while engaged in this work that Dickens wrote the best one of all
his tales--_David Copperfield_, the one which is in so large a part the
history of his own early life.

This book brought Dickens to the height of his career. He was now both
famous and rich. He bought a house on Gad's Hill--a place near Chatham,
where he had spent the happiest part of his childhood--and settled down
to a life of comfort and labor. When he was a little boy his father had
pointed out this fine house to him, and told him he might even come to
live there some day, if he were very persevering and worked hard. And
so, indeed, it had proved.

Perhaps it is in connection with this house on Gad's Hill that the world
oftenest remembers Dickens now. Everyone, old and young throughout the
neighborhood, liked him. Children, dogs and horses were his friends. His
hand was open for charity, and he was always the champion of the poor,
the helpless and the outcast. Everyone, he thought, had some good in
him, and in all he met he was on the lookout to find it. The great
purpose underneath all his writings was after all to teach that every
man and woman, however degraded, has his or her better side. So earnest
was he in this that he was not pleased at all when a person praised one
of his stories, unless the other showed that he had grasped the lesson
that lay beneath it. The text of Dickens's whole life and work is best
expressed in his own words: "I hope to do some solid good, and I mean to
be as cheery and pleasant as I can." The wrongs and sufferings of the
young especially appealed to him, and perhaps the most beautiful speech
he ever made was one asking for money for the support of the London
Hospital for Sick Children. He spoke often in behalf of workingmen, and
once he spoke for the benefit of a company of poor actors, when, unknown
to him, a little child of his own was lying dead at home.

With such a tender heart for all the world, he was more than an
affectionate father to his own children, and gave much thought to their
happiness and education. In order that they should properly learn of
their own country, he went to the labor of preparing a _Child's History
of England_ for them, and at another time he wrote out the story of the
Gospels, to help them in their study of the New Testament. As the years
went by, his letters to his oldest son told of his own work and plans.
When his youngest son sailed away to live in Australia, he wrote: "Poor
Plorn is gone. It was a hard parting at the last. He seemed to me to
become once more my youngest and favorite child as the day drew near,
and I did not think I could have been so shaken."

When he moved to Gad's Hill it seemed as though Dickens had gained
almost all of the things men strive most for. But he was not to be happy
there--nor, perhaps, was he ever again to be really happy anywhere. He
and his wife were very different in all their tastes and habits, and had
never loved each other as well as people should when they marry.
Perhaps, after all, it would have been better if in his youth he had
married his Dora--the one whom he had pictured in the love-story of
David Copperfield and his child-wife. But, however this may be, Dickens
and his wife had not lived happily together, and now decided to part,
and from that time, though they wrote to each other, he never saw her
again. It is sad to reflect that he who has painted so beautifully for
others the joys and sorrows of perfect love and home, was himself
destined to know neither.

The years that followed this separation were years of constant labor for
Dickens. His restlessness, perhaps also his lack of happiness, drove him
to work without rest. He wrote to a friend: "I am quite confident I
should rust, break and die if I spared myself. Much better to die
doing." The idea of giving public readings from his stories suggested
itself to him, and he was soon engaged in preparation. "I must do
_something_," he wrote, "or I shall wear my heart away." That heart his
physician had declared out of order, and this effort was destined to
wear it away in quite another sense, though for some time Dickens felt
no ill effects.

He gave readings, not only in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland,
and everywhere he met with enormous success. The first series was hardly
over, when he was at work on a new story, and this was scarcely
completed when he was planning more readings. The strain of several
seasons of such work told on his health. A serious illness followed, and
afterward he was troubled with an increasing lameness--the first real
warning of the end.

In spite of his weakness, he decided on another trip to America, and
here, in 1867, he began a series of readings which left him in a far
worse condition. Often at the close of an evening he would become so
faint that he would have to lie down. He was unable to sleep and his
appetite entirely failed him. Yet his wonderful determination and energy
made him able to complete the task. A great banquet of farewell was
given to him in New York and he returned to England bearing the
admiration and love of the whole American people.

Before leaving England he had promised to give one other course of
readings there, and this promise, after a summer's quiet at home, he
attempted to fulfil. But he was too ill. He found himself for the first
time in his life feeling, as he said, "giddy, jarred, shaken, faint,
uncertain of voice and sight, and tread and touch, and dull of spirit."
He was obliged to discontinue the course and to rest.

This summer of 1869--the last summer of his life--was a contented and
even a happy one. At home, at first in London, and later in the house on
Gad's Hill, surrounded by his children and by the friends he loved best,
Dickens lived quietly, working at his last story which his death was to
leave for ever unfinished--The _Mystery of Edwin Drood_. He attempted
one more series of readings, and with their close bade farewell for ever
to his English audience.

He was seen in public but a few times more--once at the last dinner
party he ever attended, to meet the Prince of Wales and the King of the
Belgians, and once when the Queen invited him to Buckingham Palace. Soon
after, the end came.

One day as he entered the house at Gad's Hill, he seemed tired and
silent. As he sat down to dinner all present noticed that he looked very
ill. They begged him to lie down. "Yes, on the ground," he said--these
were the last words he ever uttered--and as he spoke he slipped down
upon the floor.

He never fully recovered consciousness, and next day, June 9, 1870,
Charles Dickens breathed his last. Five days later he was laid to rest
in Westminster Abbey, where are buried so many of the greatest of
England's dead. For days, thousands came to visit the spot, and rich and
poor alike looked upon his grave with tears.

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES.

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

Published 1840

_Scene_: London and Neighboring Towns

_Time_: 1840

CHARACTERS

"Little Nell" An orphan girl

Mr. Trent Her aged grandfather
Proprietor of "The Old Curiosity Shop"

"The Stranger" Mr. Trent's brother

Christopher Nubbles Little Nell's friend and protector
Known as "Kit"

Quilp A dwarf

Mrs. Quilp His wife

Mrs. Jarley Proprietress of "Jarley's Waxwork"

Brass A dishonest lawyer

Sally Brass His sister

Dick Swiveller Brass's clerk

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

LITTLE NELL

In a narrow side street in London there once stood a shabby building
called The Old Curiosity Shop, because all sorts of curious things were
kept for sale there--such as rusty swords, china figures, quaint
carvings and old-fashioned furniture.

A little old man named Trent owned the shop, and he looked as old as
anything in it. He was thin and bent, with long gray hair and bright
blue eyes, and his face was wrinkled and full of care. He had an orphan
grandchild who lived with him--a pretty little golden-haired girl whom
every one called Little Nell, who kept the shop clean and neat and
cooked the meals just as a grown woman would have done. She slept in a
back room in a bed so small it might almost have been a fairy's. She
lived a very lonely life, but she kept a cheerful face and did not
complain.

She had only one protector besides her grandfather, and that was a big,
awkward boy named Christopher Nubbles, called Kit for short. He had a
very large mouth and a turned-up nose, and when he spoke he had a habit
of standing sidewise and twisting his head back over his shoulder.
Everything he did seemed funny, and little Nell laughed at him all the
while, though she loved him almost as much as she did her grandfather.
He ran errands for them, and in the long winter evenings she used to
teach him to read and write.

Kit liked to be taught and even liked to be laughed at, and always ended
by laughing himself, with his mouth wide open and his eyes shut. He was
the best-natured lad in the world, and would have given his life to make
little Nell happy.

She was not as happy as she seemed to her grandfather's eyes. There was
some mystery about the old man that she could not understand. Almost
every night he left her to go to bed all alone in the shop, and went
away and did not come back till sunrise, when the door-bell woke her and
she let him in.

And, too, he always talked of the great fortune she was to have
sometime--if only some mysterious plan he was working on turned out
right--the carriages and fine frocks and jewels. But the plan seemed
always to go wrong, and the poor old man grew sadder and sadder as he
grew more feeble.

Often at night little Nell sat at the upper window, watching for him,
crying, and fearing that he might die or lose his mind; she never knew
that Kit used to stand in the shadow of an archway opposite and watch
to see that no harm came to her, till she vanished and he knew she had
gone to bed.

What troubled little Nell most of all was a strange visitor her
grandfather used to have. This was a hideous man named Quilp, with the
body of a dwarf and the head of a giant. His black eyes were sharp and
cunning, his face was always covered with a stubby beard and he had a
cruel smile that made him look like a panting dog. He had grizzled,
tangled hair, crooked finger nails, and wore a dirty handkerchief tied
around his neck, instead of a collar. He used to bring money to her
grandfather, and little Nell more than once saw him look at her and at
the contents of the shop in a gloating way that made her shiver.

Indeed, everybody who ever met Quilp was afraid of him, and most afraid
of all was his wife. He had a habit of drinking scalding tea and of
eating boiled eggs, shell and all, that quite terrified her. Besides, he
treated the poor woman cruelly. Sometimes, for instance, when she
displeased him, he made her sit bolt upright in a chair all night,
without moving or going to bed, while he sat smoking and making faces at
her.

Little Nell often had to carry messages from her grandfather to the
dwarf, and came to know that he had somehow fallen into Quilp's power.

The fact was that the old man had been borrowing money from the dwarf
for a long time, and had spent it on the great plan, which he had
thought sure to succeed, and he now owed the other much more than all
the shop and everything in it was worth.

Quilp had loaned the money because he thought when the wonderful plan
succeeded he would make the grandfather give him back very much more
than he had loaned him. But when the old man continually wanted to
borrow more money and yet paid none back, the dwarf grew suspicious and
tried hard to find out what the great plan was. To do this he used to
question little Nell and try to persuade her to tell how her grandfather
passed the time.

She would never tell him anything, but one day, when she had brought a
message to his house, the dwarf hid in a closet and listened while the
child told his wife how her grandfather, every night after Quilp had
brought him money, went out and did not come home till daybreak, and
always sadly then. You see, little Nell was in such trouble that she had
to tell somebody about it and ask advice, and the dwarf's wife had
always been very kind to her.

When Quilp heard the story he guessed the secret--that her grandfather,
hoping to win more for little Nell, had gambled away all the money. He
was full of rage and sent word that he would loan no more.

The old man was in great grief at this. His mind had not been strong for
a long time, or this foolish and wrong plan would never have misled
him, and now, at the thought that he would have no more chance to win
the fortune for his grandchild, he fell ill. The child did her best to
comfort him, but he told her that if Quilp deserted them they would be
no better than beggars.

"Let us be beggars then, and be happy," said little Nell, putting her
arms around his neck. "I would rather beg than live as we do now. If you
are sorrowful now, let me know it. If you are weaker, let me be your
nurse. It breaks my heart to see you so and not to know why. Let us
leave this place and sleep in the fields in the country and never think
of money again, and I will beg for us both."

Neither had heard the dwarf, who had stolen into the shop behind them.
Little Nell shrieked when she saw him, and her grandfather sent her into
her own room.

"So that is the way all the money I have loaned you has gone!" sneered
Quilp. "Your precious scheme to make a fortune was the gaming-table!"

The old man cried out at this, trembling, that he had done it all for
little Nell; that he had never staked a single penny for himself, or
without praying that it might win for her good. He told how he had begun
gambling months before, knowing he must soon die, hoping thus to leave
her enough to live on; how, after losing all his own savings, he had
borrowed and lost all that, too. And he begged the dwarf to loan him a
little more so that he might tempt luck again.

Any one but Quilp would have pitied the poor old man, but not he. He
refused, and thinking of a lie which would make the other yet more
miserable, he told him as he left that it was Kit who had told him where
the money was going.

The first Kit knew of this was that night when little Nell came to tell
him her grandfather was very ill, and that he raved continually against
Kit so that he must never come to the shop again. Kit was stupefied at
this, but there was no help for it, so little Nell went sorrowfully back
alone.

The Old Curiosity Shop belonged to the dwarf now and he at once moved
into the parlor. He took little Nell's own bed for himself and she had
to sleep on a pallet on the floor up stairs. She was busy nursing her
grandfather, for he was very ill for some time, and she scarcely ever
came down because she was so afraid of the dwarf.

Quilp was waiting for the old man to die, thinking that then he would
have the shop for his own, and meantime he did a hundred disagreeable
things, such as filling the house with strong tobacco smoke from a big
pipe he used all the time and driving every one away who came to ask how
the sick man was. He even drove off Kit when he came below the window to
beg little Nell to come and bring her grandfather to live at his own
mother's house.

The old man would certainly have died if little Nell had not nursed him
so faithfully, all alone, till he grew better and at length was able to
sit up.

But it was a bitter thing to live as they did, and one day little Nell
begged her grandfather to come away with her--to wander anywhere in the
world, only so it was under God's sky and away from every one that
pursued them--and he agreed.

So that night they dressed and stole down stairs very quietly in order
not to waken the dwarf who was snoring frightfully in the back room, and
went through the shop to the front door. The bolts were rusty and
creaked loudly, and, worst of all, they found the key was not in the
lock. Little Nell had to take off her shoes and creep into the back room
to get it out of the dwarf's pocket.

She was terribly frightened at the sight of Quilp, for he was having a
bad dream, and was hanging so far out of bed that he was almost standing
on his head; his ugly mouth was wide open, and his breath came in a sort
of growl. But she found the key at last, and they unlocked the door and
came safely into the dark street.

The old man did not know where to go, but little Nell took his hand and
led him gently away.

THE WANDERERS

It was a bright June morning. They walked through many city streets,
then through more scattered suburbs, and at last came to the open
country. That night they slept at a cottage where the people were kind
to them, and all the next day they walked on and on.

At sunset they stopped to rest in a churchyard, where two men were
sitting patching a Punch-and-Judy show booth, while the figures of
Punch, the doctor, the executioner and the devil were lying on the grass
waiting to be mended.

The men were mending the dolls very badly, so little Nell took a needle
and sewed them all neatly. They were delighted at this, and took the
pair to the inn where they were to show the Punch-and-Judy, and there
they found them a place to sleep in an empty loft.

The next day the wanderers went on with the showmen. Whenever they came
to a village, the booth was pitched and the show took place, and they
never left a town without a pack of ragged children at their heels. The
Punch-and-Judy show grew tiresome, but the company seemed better than
none. Little Nell was weary with walking, but she tried to hide it from
her grandfather.

The inn at which they lodged the next night was full of showmen with
trained dogs, conjurers and others, hurrying to a town where there was
to be a fair with horse-races, to which the Punch-and-Judy partners were
bound, and little Nell began to distrust their company.

To tell the truth, the others believed the child and the old man were
running away from their friends, and that a reward might be obtained for
giving them up. The way in which the men watched them frightened little
Nell, and when they reached the scene of the fair she had determined to
escape.

It was the second day of the races before a chance came, and then, while
the showmen's backs were turned, they slipped away in the crowd to the
open fields again.

These alarms and the exposure had begun to affect the old man. He seemed
to understand that he was not wholly in his right mind. He was full of
the fear that he would be taken from her and chained in a dungeon, and
little Nell had great trouble in cheering him.

At evening when they were both worn out, they came to a village where
stood a cottage with the sign SCHOOL in big letters in its window. The
pale old schoolmaster sat smoking in the garden. He was a sad, solitary
man, and loved little Nell when he first saw her, because she was like a
favorite pupil he once had. He made them sleep in the school-room that
night, and he begged them to stay longer next day, but little Nell was
anxious to get as far as possible from London and from the dwarf, who
she was all the time in fear might find them. So they bade the
schoolmaster good-by and walked on.

Another day's journey left them so exhausted they could scarcely keep
moving. They had almost reached another village when they came to a tiny
painted house on wheels with horses to draw it. At its door sat a stout
lady wearing a large bonnet, taking tea with a big drum for a table.

The lady, as it happened, had seen them at the fair, and had wondered
then to see them in company with a Punch-and-Judy show. Noticing how
tired they were, she gave them tea and then took them into the wagon
with her to help them on their way.

The inside of the wagon was like a cozy room. It had a little bed in one
end, and a kitchen in the other, and had two curtained windows. As the
wheels rattled on the old man fell asleep, and the stout lady made
little Nell sit by her and talk. In the wagon was a big canvas sign that
read:

"I am Mrs. Jarley," the woman said, "and my waxwork is gone to the next
town, where it is to be exhibited." She thought little Nell and her
grandfather were in the show business, too, and when she found they were
not, that they had no home, and did not even know where they were going,
she held up her hands in astonishment.

But it was easy to see that they were not ordinary beggars, and she was
kind-hearted and wanted to help them. So, after much thought, she asked
little Nell if they would take a situation with her. She explained that
the child's duty would be to point out the wax figures to the visitors
and tell their names, while her grandfather could help dust them.

They accepted this offer very thankfully (for almost all the money they
had brought was now spent), and when the wagon arrived at the place of
exhibition and the waxwork had been set up, Mrs. Jarley put a long wand
in little Nell's hand and taught her to point out each figure and
describe it:

"This, ladies and gentlemen," little Nell learned to say, "is Jasper
Packlemerton, who murdered fourteen wives by tickling the soles of their
feet," or, "this is Queen Elizabeth's maid of honor, who died from
pricking her finger while sewing on Sunday."

She was quick to learn and soon became a great favorite with the
visitors. Mrs. Jarley was kind, and but for the fact that her
grandfather's mind failed more and more every day little Nell would have
been quite happy.

One evening the two walked into the country beyond the town and a sudden
thunder-storm arose. They took shelter at an inn on the highroad, and
while they waited there some rough men began a noisy game of cards
behind a screen.

The talk and the chink of the money roused the old man's failing senses.
He imagined himself still gambling to win the old fortune for little
Nell. He made her give him the money she had earned from the waxwork,
joined the gamblers and in a few hours had lost it all. His insanity had
made him forget the presence of the child he so loved, and when the game
was done it was too late to leave the inn that night.

Little Nell had now only one piece of money left, a gold piece sewed in
her dress. This she had to change into silver and to pay a part for
their lodging. When she was abed she could not sleep for fear of the
wicked men she had seen gambling.

When at last she fell asleep she waked suddenly to see a figure in the
room. She was too frightened to scream, and lay very still and trembled.
The robber searched her clothing, took the rest of the money and went
out. She was dreadfully afraid he might return to harm her. If she could
get to her grandfather, she thought, she would be safe.

She opened the door softly, and in the moonlight saw the figure
entering the old man's room. She caught a view of his face and then she
knew that the figure was her own grandfather, and that, crazed by the
gambling scene, he himself had robbed her!

All that night little Nell lay and cried. She knew, to be sure, that her
grandfather was not a thief and that he did not know what he was doing
when he stole her money; but she knew, too, that if people found out he
was crazy they would take him away from her and shut him up where she
could not be with him, and of this she could not bear to think.

The next day, when they had gone back to the waxwork, she was in even
greater terror for fear he should rob Mrs. Jarley, their benefactress.
So, to lessen the chance of this, each day she gave him every penny she
earned. This, she soon knew, he gambled away, for often he was out all
night, and even seemed to shun her; so she was sad and took many long
walks alone through the fields.

One evening it happened that she passed a meadow where, beside a hedge,
a fire was burning, with three men sitting and lying around it. She was
in the shadow and they did not see her. One, she saw, was her
grandfather, and the others were the gamblers with whom he had played at
the inn on the night of the storm.

Little Nell crept close. They were tempting the poor daft old man to
steal the money from Mrs. Jarley's strong box, and while she listened
he consented.

She ran home in terrible grief. She tried to sleep, but could not. At
last she could bear it no longer. She went to the old man's room and
wakened him.

"I have had a dreadful dream," she told him, "a dream of an old
gray-haired man like you robbing people of their gold. I can not stay! I
can not leave you here. We must go."

To the crazy old man she seemed an angel. He dressed himself in fear,
and with her little basket on her arm she led him out of the house, on,
away from the town, into the country, far away from Mrs. Jarley, who had
been so kind to them, and from the new home they had found.

They climbed a high hill just as the sun was rising, and far behind them
little Nell caught a last view of the village. As she looked back and
thought how contented they had been there at first, and of the further
wandering that lay before them now, poor little Nell burst into tears.

But at length she bravely dried her tears lest they sadden her
grandfather, and they went on. When the sun grew warm they fell asleep
on the bank of the canal, and when they awoke in the afternoon some
rough canal men took them aboard their dirty craft as far as the next
town.

The men were well-meaning enough and meant the travelers no harm, but
after a while they began to drink and quarreled and fought among
themselves, and little Nell sat all night, wet with the rain, and sang
to them to quiet them.

The place to which they finally came was a town of wretched workmen who
toiled all day in iron furnaces for little wages, and were almost as
miserable and hungry as the wanderers themselves. No one gave them
anything, and they lived for three days with only two penny loaves to
eat (for all their money was now gone), and slept at night in the ashes
of some poor laborer's hut.

The fourth day they dragged themselves into the country again. Little
Nell's shoes were worn through to the bare ground, her feet were
bleeding, her limbs ached and she was deadly faint. They begged, but no
one would help them.

The child's strength was almost gone, when they met a traveler who was
reading in a book as he walked along. He looked up as they came near. It
was the kind old schoolmaster in whose school they had slept before they
met Mrs. Jarley in her house on wheels. When she saw him little Nell
shrieked and fell unconscious at his feet.

The schoolmaster carried her to an inn near by, where she was put to bed
and doctored under his care, for she was very weak. She told him all the
story of their wanderings, and he heard it with astonishment and wonder
to find such a great heart and heroism in a child.

He had been appointed schoolmaster, he told her, in another town, to
which he was then on his way, and he declared they should go with him
and he would care for them. He hired a farm wagon to carry little Nell,
and he and the old man walked beside it, and so they came to their new
place.

Next door to the school-house was the church. A very old woman, nearly a
hundred years old, had lived in a tenement near by to keep the keys and
open the church for services. The old woman was now dead, and the
schoolmaster went to the clergyman and asked that her place be given to
the grandfather, so that he and little Nell could live in the house next
to his own dwelling.

The child sewed the tattered curtains and mended the worn carpet and the
schoolmaster trimmed the long grass and trained the ivy before the door.
In the evening a bright fire was kindled and they all three took their
supper together, and then the schoolmaster said a prayer before they
went gladly to bed.

They were very happy in this new home. The old man lost the insane
thirst for gaming and the mad look faded from his eyes, but poor little
Nell grew paler and more fragile every day. The long days of hunger and
nights of exposure had sowed the seeds of illness.

The whole village soon grew to love her. Many came to visit her and the
schoolmaster read to her each day, so that she was content even when
she could no longer walk abroad as she had always done.

As she lay looking out at the peaceful churchyard, where so many whose
lives were over lay sleeping, it seemed to her that the painful past was
only an ugly vision. And at night she often dreamed of the roof opening
and a column of bright faces, rising far into the sky, looking down on
her asleep. The quiet spot outside remained the same, save that the air
was full of music and a sound of angels' wings.

So the weeks passed into winter, and though she came soon to know that
she was not long for earth, she thought of death without regret and of
heaven with joy.

III

THE SEARCH

It is not to be supposed, of course, that the flight of little Nell and
her grandfather from the Old Curiosity Shop was not noticed. All the
time, while they were wandering about homeless and wretched, more than
one went searching everywhere for them without success.

One of these was Quilp, the ugly dwarf. He had loaned the grandfather
more money than the shop would bring, and he made up his mind now that
the old man had a secret hoard somewhere, which might be his if he could
find it. He soon learned that if Kit knew anything about it he would
not tell, so he and his lawyer (a sleek, oily rascal named Brass) made
many plans for finding them. But for a long time Quilp could get no
trace.

Another who tried to find them was a curious lodger who roomed in
Brass's house. He seemed to have plenty of money but was very eccentric.
Nobody knew even his name and so they called him The Stranger.

He kept in his room a big box-like trunk, in which was a silver stove
that he used to cook his meals. The stove had a lot of little openings.
In one he would put an egg, in another some coffee, in another a piece
of meat and in the fourth some water. Then he would light a lamp that
stood under it, and in five minutes the egg would be cooked, the coffee
boiled and the meat done--all ready to eat.

He was the queerest sort of boarder! The strangest habit he had was
this: He seemed to be very fond of Punch-and-Judy shows, and whenever he
heard one on the street he would run out without his hat, make the
showmen perform in front of the house and then invite them to his rooms,
where he would question them for a long time. This habit used to puzzle
both Brass and Quilp, the dwarf, and they never could guess why he did
it.

The truth was, the mysterious Stranger was a long-missing brother of
little Nell's grandfather. A misunderstanding had come between them many
years before when both were young men. The younger had become a traveler
in many countries and had never seen his brother since. But he dreamed
often of the days when they had been children and at last he forgot the
thing that had driven them apart. He had come back now to England, a
rich man, to find the other had vanished with little Nell, his
grandchild. He had soon learned the story of their misfortune and how
the fear of Quilp had driven them away. After much inquiry he had
discovered they had been seen with a Punch-and-Judy show and now he was
trying to find the showmen. And finally, in this way, he did find the
very same pair the wanderers had met!

He learned from them all they could tell him--that the child and the old
man had disappeared at the fair, and that since then (so they had heard)
a pair resembling them had been seen with the Jarley waxwork exhibition.
The Stranger easily discovered where Mrs. Jarley was, and determined to
set out to her at once. But he remembered that his brother, little
Nell's grandfather, could not be expected to know him after all the
years he had been gone, and as for little Nell herself, she had never
seen him, and he was afraid if they heard a strange man had come for
them they would take fright and run away again. So he tried to find some
one they had loved to go with him to show that he intended only
kindness.

He was not long in hearing of Kit, who had found a situation as footman,
and he gained his employer's leave to take the lad with him. When Kit
learned that The Stranger had discovered where little Nell was he was
overjoyed; but he knew he himself was not the one to go, because before
they disappeared she had told him he must never come to the Old
Curiosity Shop again and that her grandfather blamed him as the cause of
their misfortune. But Kit promised the Stranger that his mother should
go in his place, and went to tell her at once.

Kit found his mother was at church, but the matter was so urgent that he
went straight to the pew and brought her out, which caused even the
minister to pause in his sermon and made all the congregation look
surprised. Kit took her home, packed her box and bundled her into the
coach which the Stranger brought, and away they went to find the
wanderers.

Now Quilp had all along suspected that Kit and his mother knew something
of their whereabouts, and he had made it his business to watch either
one or the other. The dwarf, in fact, was in the church when Kit came
for his mother, and he followed. When she left with the Stranger he took
another coach and pursued, feeling certain he was on the right track.

But they were all too late. When the Stranger found Mrs. Jarley next day
she could only tell him that little Nell and her grandfather had
disappeared again, and he had to return with Kit's mother, much
discouraged, to London.

The part Kit had played in this made the dwarf hate him, if possible,
more than ever, and he agreed to pay Brass, his rascally lawyer, to ruin
the lad by making a false charge of theft against him.

One day, when Kit came to Brass's house to see the Stranger, who lodged
up stairs, the lawyer cunningly hid a five-pound note in the lad's hat
and as soon as he left ran after him, seized him in the street and
accused him of taking it from his office desk.

Kit was arrested, and the note, of course, was found on his person. The
evidence seemed so strong that the poor fellow was quickly tried, found
guilty and sentenced to prison for a long time.

All might have gone wrong but for a little maid-servant of Brass's, whom
the lawyer had starved and mistreated for years. He used to keep her
locked in the moldy cellar and gave her so little to eat that she would
creep into the office at night (she had found a key that fitted the
door) to pick up the bits of bread that Dick Swiveller, Brass's clerk,
had left when he ate his luncheon.

One night, while this little drudge was prowling about above stairs,
she overheard Brass telling his sister, Sally (who was his partner and
colder and crueler and more wicked even than he was), the trick he was
going to play. After Kit was arrested she ran away from Brass's house
and told her story to Kit's employer, who had all along believed in his
innocence.

Brass in the meantime had gone to Quilp to get his reward for this evil
deed, but the terrible dwarf now only laughed at him and pretended to
remember nothing at all about the bargain.

This so enraged the lawyer that, when he was brought face to face with
the little maid's evidence and found that he himself was caught, he made
full confession of the part Quilp had played, and told the whole story
to revenge himself on the dwarf.

Officers were sent at once to arrest Quilp at a dingy dwelling on a
wharf in the river where he often slept with the object of terrifying
his wife by his long absences. Here he had set up the battered
figurehead of a wrecked ship and, imagining that its face resembled that
of Kit whom he so fiendishly hated, he used to amuse himself by screwing
gimlets into its breast, sticking forks into its eyes and beating it
with a poker.

A few minutes before the officers arrived the dwarf received warning
from Sally Brass, but he had no time to get away. When he heard the
knocking on the gates and knew that the law he had so long defied was
at last upon him, he fell into a panic and did not know which way to
turn. He tried to cover the light of the fire, but only succeeded in
upsetting the stove. Then he ran out of the house on to the dock in the
darkness.

It was a black, foggy night, and he could not see a foot before him. He
thought he could climb over the wall to the next wharf and so escape,
but in his fright he missed his way and fell over the edge of the
platform into the swift-flowing river.

He screamed in terror, but the water filled his throat and the knocking
on the gates was so loud that no one heard him. The water swept him
close to a ship, but its keel was smooth and slippery and there was
nothing to cling to. He had been so wicked that he was afraid to die and
he fought desperately, but the rapid tide smothered his cries and
dragged him down--to death.

The waves threw his drowned body finally on the edge of a dismal swamp,
in the red glare of the blazing ruin which the overturned stove that
night made of the building in which he had framed his evil plots. And
this was the end of Quilp, the dwarf.

As for Kit, he found himself all at once not only free, but a hero. His
employer came to the jail to tell him that he was free and that everyone
knew now of his innocence, and they made him eat and drink, and
everybody shook hands with him. Then he was put into a coach and they
drove straight home, where his mother was waiting to kiss him and cry
over him with joy.

And last, but by no means least of all his new good fortune, he learned
then that the Stranger who had been searching so long for little Nell
and her grandfather had found certainly where they were and that Kit was
to go with him and his employer at once and bring them back again to
London.

They started the next day, and on the long road they talked much of
little Nell and the strange chance by which the lost had been found. A
gentleman who lived in the village to which they were now bound, who had
himself been kind to the child and to the old man whom the new
schoolmaster had brought with him, had written of the pair to Kit's
employer, and the letter had been the lost clue, so long sought, to
their hiding-place.

Snow began falling as the daylight wore away, and the coach wheels made
no noise. All night and all the next day, they rode, and it was midnight
before they came to the town where the two wanderers had taken refuge.

The village was very still, and the air was frosty and cold. Only a
single light was to be seen, coming from a window beside a church. This
was the house which the Stranger knew sheltered those they sought, but
both he and Kit felt a strange fear as they saw that light--the only one
in the whole village.

They left the driver to take the horses to the inn and approached the
building afoot. They went quite close and looked through the window. In
the room an old man bent low over a fire crooning to himself, and Kit,
seeing that it was his old master, opened the door, ran in, knelt by him
and caught his hand.

The old grandfather did not recognize Kit. He believed him a spirit, as
he thought many spirits had talked to him that day. He was much changed,
and it seemed as if some great blow or grief had crazed him. He had a
dress of little Nell's in his hand and smoothed and patted it as he
muttered that she had been asleep--asleep a long time now, and was
marble cold and would not wake.

"Her little homely dress!" he said. "And see here--these shoes--how worn
they are! You see where her feet went bare upon the ground. They told me
afterward that the stones had cut and bruised them. She never told me
that. No, no, God bless her! And I have remembered since how she walked
behind me, that I might not see how lame she was, but yet she had my
hand in hers and seemed to lead me still."

So he muttered on, and the cheeks of the others were wet with tears, for
they had begun to understand the sad truth.

Kit could not speak, but the Stranger did: "You speak of little Nell,"
he said. "Do you remember, long ago, another child, too, who loved you
when you were a child yourself? Say that you had a brother, long
forgotten, who now at last came back to you to be what you were then to
him. Give me but one word, dear brother, to say you know me, and life
will still be precious to us again."

The old man shook his head, for grief had killed all memory. Pushing
them aside, he went into the next room, calling little Nell's name
softly as he went.

They followed. Kit sobbed as they entered, for there on her bed little
Nell lay dead.

Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell! The schoolmaster told them of her
last hours. They had read and talked to her a while, and then she had
sunk peacefully to sleep. They knew by what she said in her dreams that
they were of her wanderings, and of the people who had helped them, for
often she whispered, "God bless you." And she spoke once of beautiful
music that was in the air.

Opening her eyes at last, she begged that they would kiss her once
again. That done, she turned to the old man with a lovely smile on her
face--such, he said, as he had never seen--and threw both arms about his
neck. They did not know at first that she was dead.

They laid little Nell to rest the next day in the churchyard where she
had so often sat. The old man never realized quite what had happened. He
thought she would come back to him some day, and that then they would go
away together. He used to sit beside her grave and watch for her each
afternoon.

One day he did not return at the usual hour and they went to look for
him. He was lying dead upon the stone.

They buried him beside the child he had loved, and there in the
churchyard where they had often talked together they both lie side by
side.

None of those who had known little Nell ever forgot her story. After the
death of the old man, his brother, the Stranger who had sought them so
long, traveled in the footsteps of the two wanderers to search out and
reward all who had been kind to them--Mrs. Jarley of the waxwork, the
Punch-and-Judy showmen, he found them all. Even the rough canal boatmen
were not forgotten.

Kit's story got abroad and he found himself with hosts of friends, who
gave him a good position and secured his mother from want. So that his
greatest misfortune turned out, after all, to be his greatest good.

The little maid whose evidence cleared Kit of the terrible charge
against him lived to marry Dick Swiveller, the clerk of Brass, the
lawyer, while meek Mrs. Quilp, after her husband's drowning, married a
clever young man and lived a pleasant life on the dead dwarf's money.

The fate of the others, whose wickedness has been a part of this story,
was not so pleasant. The two gamblers who tempted the old man to steal
Mrs. Jarley's strong box were detected in another crime and sent to
jail. Brass became a convict, condemned to walk on a treadmill, chained
to a long line of other evil men, and dragging wherever he went a heavy
iron ball. After he was released he joined his wicked sister, Sally, and
the two sank lower and lower till they might even be seen on dark nights
on narrow London streets searching in refuse boxes for bits of food,
like twin spirits of wickedness and crime.

When Kit had grown to be a man and had children of his own, he often
took them to the spot where stood what had been The Old Curiosity Shop
and told them over and over the story of little Nell. And he always
ended by saying that if they were good like her they might go some time
where they could see and know her as he had done when he was a boy.

THE ADVENTURES OF OLIVER TWIST

Published 1837

_Scene_: London and Neighboring Towns

_Time_: 1825 to 1837

CHARACTERS

Oliver Twist A foundling

Mr. Bumble The master of the poorhouse

Mrs. Bumble The mistress of the poorhouse

Monks Oliver's half-brother and his enemy

Mr. Brownlow Oliver's benefactor

Mrs. Maylie Oliver's benefactress

Miss Rose Mrs. Maylie's adopted niece
In reality Oliver's aunt

Fagin A Jew
Leader of a gang of thieves in London

Bill Sikes A burglar

Nancy Sikes's partner in crime

"The Artful Dodger" A youthful pickpocket

OLIVER TWIST

HOW OLIVER CAME TO LONDON AND WHAT HE FOUND THERE

Oliver Twist was the son of a poor lady who was found lying in the
street one day in an English village, almost starved and very ill. She
had walked a long way, for her shoes were worn to pieces, but where she
came from or where she was going nobody knew. As she had no money, she
was taken to the poorhouse, where she died the next day without even
telling her name, leaving behind her only a gold locket, which was
around her neck, and a baby.

The locket fell into the hands of the mistress of the poorhouse, who was
named Mrs. Bumble. It contained the dead mother's wedding-ring, and, as
Mrs. Bumble was a dishonest woman, she hid both locket and ring,
intending sometime to sell them.

The baby was left, with no one to care for it, to grow up at the
poorhouse with the other wretched orphan children, who wore calico
dresses all alike and had little to eat and many whippings.

Mr. Bumble, the master of the poorhouse, was a pompous, self-important
bully who browbeat every one weaker than himself and scolded and cuffed
the paupers to his heart's content. It was he who named the baby "Oliver
Twist." He used to name all the babies as they came along, by the
letters of the alphabet. The one before Oliver was named Swubble; then
came Oliver with a T; the next would be Unwin, the next Vilkins, and so
on down to Z. Then he would begin the alphabet all over again.

Little Oliver, the baby, grew without any idea of who he was. When he
was a year old he was sent to the poor-farm where an old woman took care
of orphan children for a very small sum apiece each week. This money,
which was paid by the town, was hardly enough to buy them food, but
nevertheless the old woman took good care to save the bigger share for
herself.

He lived there till he was a pale, handsome boy of nine years, and then
he was taken to the workhouse, where, with many other boys of his own
age or older, he had to work hard all day picking oakum.

The boys had nothing but thin gruel for their meals, with an onion twice
a week and half a roll on Sundays. They ate in a great stone hall, in
one end of which stood the big copper of gruel which Mr. Bumble ladled
out. Each boy got only one helping, and the bowls never needed washing,
because, when the meal was through, there was not a drop of gruel left
in them. After each meal they all sat staring at the copper and sucking
their fingers, but nobody dared ask for more.

One day they felt so terribly hungry that one of the biggest boys said
unless he got another helping of gruel he was afraid he would have to
eat the boy who slept next him. The little boys all believed this and
cast lots to see who should ask for more. It fell to Oliver Twist.

So that night after supper, though he was dreadfully frightened, Oliver
rose and went up to the end of the room and said to Mr. Bumble, "Please,
sir, I want some more."

Mr. Bumble was so surprised he turned pale. "What!" he gasped.

"Please, sir," said Oliver again, "I want some more."

Mr. Bumble picked up the ladle and struck Oliver on the head with it;
then he pounced on him and shook him. When he was tired shaking him, he
dragged him away and shut him up in a dark room, where he stayed a whole
week, and was only taken out once a day to be whipped. Then, to make an
example of him, a notice was pasted on the gate of the workhouse
offering a reward to anybody who would take poor Oliver away and do what
he liked with him.

The first one who came by was a middle-aged chimney-sweep, who wanted a
boy to climb up the insides of chimneys and clean out the soot. This was
a dangerous thing to do, for sometimes the boys who did it got burned
or choked with the smoke, and when Oliver found what they were going to
do with him and looked at the man's cruel face, he burst out crying, so
that a kind-hearted magistrate interfered and would not let the
chimney-sweep have him.

Mr. Bumble finally gave him to the village undertaker, and there he had
to mind the shop and do all the chores. He slept under the counter among
piles of empty coffins. The undertaker's wife beat him often, and
whenever he was not at work he had to attend funerals, which was by no
means amusing, so that he found life no better than it had been at the
workhouse. The undertaker had an apprentice, too, who kicked him
whenever he came near.

All this wretchedness Oliver bore as well as he could, without
complaining. But one day the cowardly apprentice began to say unkind
things of Oliver's dead mother, and this he could not stand. His anger
made him stronger even than his tormentor, though the latter was more
than a head taller and much older, and he sprang upon him, caught him by
the throat and, after shaking him till his teeth rattled, knocked him
flat on the floor.

The big bully screamed for help and cried that he was being murdered, so
that the undertaker and his wife came running in. Oliver told them what
the apprentice had said, but that made no difference. The undertaker
sent for Mr. Bumble, and between them they flogged him till he could
hardly stand and sent him to bed without anything to eat.

Till then Oliver had not shed a tear, but now, alone in the dark, he
felt so miserable that he cried for a long time.

There was nothing to do, he thought at last, but to run away. So he tied
up his few belongings in a handkerchief and, waiting till the first beam
of sunrise, he unbarred the door and ran away as fast as he could,
through the town into the country.

He hid behind hedges whenever he saw anybody, for fear the undertaker or
Mr. Bumble were after him, and before long he found a road that he knew
led to London. Oliver had never seen a city, but he thought where there
were so many people there would certainly be something for a boy to do
to earn his living, so he trudged stoutly on and before nightfall had
walked twenty miles. He begged a crust of bread at a cottage and slept
under a hayrick. The next day and night he was so very hungry and cold
that when morning came again he could scarcely walk at all.

He sat down finally at the edge of a village, wondering whether he was
going to die, when he saw coming along the queerest-looking boy. He was
about Oliver's age, with a snub nose, bow legs and little sharp eyes.
His face was very dirty and he wore a man's coat, whose ragged tails
came to his heels.

The boy saw Oliver's plight and asked him what the matter was, mixing
his words with such a lot of strange slang that Oliver could hardly
understand him. When Oliver explained that he had been walking a number
of days and was very hungry, the other took him to a shop near by,
bought him some bread and ham, and watched him eat it with great
attention, asking him many questions--whether he had any money or knew
any place in London where he could stay. Oliver answered no.

"Don't fret about that," said the other. "I know a 'spectable old
genelman as lives there wot'll give you lodgings for nothing if I
interduce you."

Oliver did not think his new host looked very respectable himself, but
he thought it might be as well for him to know the old gentleman,
particularly as he had nowhere else to go. So they set off.

It was night when they reached London, and it was so big and crowded
that Oliver kept close to his guide. He noticed, however, that the
streets they passed through were narrow and dirty and the houses old and
hideously filthy. The people, too, seemed low and wretched.

He was just wondering if he had not better run away when the boy pushed
open a door, drew Oliver inside, up a broken stairway and into a back
room.

Here, frying some sausages over a stove, was a shriveled old Jew in a
greasy flannel gown. He was very ugly and his matted red hair hung down
over his villainous face. In a corner stood a clothes-horse on which
hung hundreds of silk handkerchiefs, and four or five boys, as dirty and
oddly dressed as the one who had brought Oliver, sat about a table
smoking pipes like rough, grown men.

Oliver's guide introduced him to the Jew, whose name was Fagin, and the
boys crowded around him, putting their hands into his pockets, which he
thought a queer joke. Fagin grinned horribly as he shook hands with him
and told him he was very welcome, which did not tend to reassure him,
and then the sausages were passed around. The Jew gave Oliver a glass of
something to drink, and as soon as he drank it he became very sleepy and
knew nothing more till the following morning.

The next few days Oliver saw much to wonder at. When he woke up, Fagin
was sorting over a great box full of watches, which he hid away when he
saw Oliver was looking. Every day the boy who had brought him there,
whom they called "the Artful Dodger," came in and gave the Jew some
pocketbooks and handkerchiefs. Oliver thought he must have made the
pocketbooks, only they did not look new, and some seemed to have money
in them. He noticed, too, that whenever the Artful Dodger came home
empty-handed Fagin seemed angry and cuffed and kicked him and sent him
to bed supperless; but when he brought home a good number everything was
very jolly.

Whenever there was nothing else to do, the old Jew played a very curious
game with the boys. This was the way they played it:

Fagin would put a snuff-box in one pocket, a watch in another and a
handkerchief in a third; then he would walk about the room just as any
old gentleman would walk about the street, stopping now and then, as if
he were looking into shop-windows. All the time the boys followed him
closely, sometimes treading on his toes or stumbling against him, and
when this happened one of them would slip a hand into his pocket and
take out either the watch or the snuff-box or the handkerchief. If the
Jew felt a hand in his pocket he cried out which it was, and then the
game began all over again. At last Fagin made Oliver try if he could
take something out of his pocket without his knowing it, and when Oliver
succeeded he patted his head and seemed well pleased.

But Oliver grew very tired of the dirty room and the same game. He
longed for the open air and begged to be allowed to go out; so one day
the Jew put him in charge of the Artful Dodger and they went upon the
streets, Oliver wondering where in the world he was going to be taught
to make pocketbooks.

He was on the point of asking, when the Artful Dodger signed to him to
be silent, and slunk behind an old gentleman who was reading a book in
front of a book-stall. You can imagine Oliver's horror when he saw him
thrust his hand into the old gentleman's pocket, draw out a silk
handkerchief and run off at full speed.

In an instant Oliver understood the mystery of the handkerchiefs, the
watches, the purses and the curious game he had learned at Fagin's. He
knew then that the Artful Dodger was a pickpocket. He was so frightened
that for a minute he lost his wits and ran off as fast as he could go.

Just then the old gentleman found his handkerchief was gone and, seeing
Oliver running away, shouted "Stop thief!" which frightened the poor boy
even more and made him run all the faster. Everybody joined the chase,
and before he had gone far a burly fellow overtook Oliver and knocked
him down.

A policeman was at hand and he was dragged, more dead than alive, to the
police court, followed by the angry old gentleman.

The moment the latter saw the boy's face, however, he could not believe
it was the face of a thief, and refused to appear against him, but the
magistrate was in a bad humor and was about to sentence Oliver to
prison, anyway, when the owner of the book-stall came hurrying in. He
had seen the theft and knew Oliver was not guilty, so the magistrate was
obliged to let him go.

But the terror and the blow he had received had been too much for
Oliver. He fell down in a faint, and the old gentleman, whose name was
Mr. Brownlow, overcome with pity, put him into a coach and drove him to
his own home, determined, if the boy had no parents, to adopt him as his
own son.

OLIVER'S ADVENTURES

While Oliver was resting in such good hands, very strange things were
occurring in the house of Fagin. When the Artful Dodger told him of the
arrest the Jew was full of anger. He had intended to make a clever thief
of Oliver and compel him to bring him many stolen things; now he had not
only failed in this and lost the boy's help, but he was also afraid that
Oliver would tell all about the wicked practices he had seen and show
the officers where he had lived. This he thought was likely to happen at
any time, unless he could get the boy into his power again.

Something had occurred, too, meantime, that made Fagin almost crazy with
rage at losing him. It was this: A wicked man--so wicked that he was
afraid of thunder--who went by the name of Monks, had come to him and
told him he would pay a large sum of money if he could succeed in making
Oliver a thief and so ruin his reputation and his good name.

It was plain enough that for some reason the man hated Oliver, but,
cunning as Fagin was, he would never have guessed why. For Monks was
really Oliver's older half-brother!

A little while before this story began, Oliver's father had been obliged
to go on a trip to a foreign country, where he died very suddenly. But
before he died he made a will, in which he left all his fortune to be
divided between the baby Oliver and his mother. He left only a small sum
to his older son, because he knew that he was wicked, and did not
deserve any. The will declared Oliver should have the money only on
condition that he never stain his name with any act of meanness,
dishonor, cowardice or wrong. If he did do this, then half the money was
to go to the older son. The dying man also wrote a letter to Oliver's
mother, telling her that he had made the will and that he was dying; but
the older son, who was with him when he died, found the letter and
destroyed it.

So Oliver's poor mother, knowing nothing of all this, when his father
did not come back, thought at last that he had deserted her, and in her
shame stole away from her home, poor and ill-clad, to die finally in the
poorhouse.

The older brother, who had taken the name of Monks, hunted and hunted
for them, because he hated Oliver on account of their father's will, and
wanted to do him all the harm he could. He discovered that they had been
taken into the poorhouse, and went there, but this was after Oliver had
run away. He found, however, to his satisfaction, that the boy knew
nothing about his parentage or his real name, and Monks made up his mind
to prevent his ever learning.

There was only one person who could have told Oliver, and that one was
Mrs. Bumble. She knew through the locket she had kept, which had
belonged to Oliver's mother and which contained the dead woman's
wedding-ring with her name engraved inside it. When Mrs. Bumble heard
that a man named Monks was searching for news of Oliver, she thought it
a capital chance to make some money. She went, therefore, to Monks's
house and sold the locket and ring to him. These, Monks thought, were
the only proofs in the world that could ever show Oliver who he was, and
to make it impossible for him ever to see them, he dropped them through
a trap-door in his house down into the river, where they could never be
found.

But Monks did not give up searching for Oliver, and at last, on the very
day that Oliver was arrested, he saw him coming from Fagin's house with
the Artful Dodger.

From his wonderful resemblance to their dead father, he guessed at once
that Oliver was the half-brother whose very name he hated. Knowing the
other now to be in London, Monks was afraid that by some accident he
might yet find out what a fortune had been willed him. If he could only
make Oliver dishonest, Monks reflected, half their father's fortune
would become his own. With this thought in mind he had gone to Fagin
and had made him his offer of money to make the boy a thief.

Fagin, of course, had agreed, and now, to find his victim was out of his
power made the Jew grind his teeth with rage.

All these things made Fagin determined to gain possession of Oliver
again, and to do this he got the help of two others--a young woman named
Nancy and her lover, a brutal robber named Bill Sikes. These two
discovered that Oliver was at Mr. Brownlow's house, and lay in wait to
kidnap him if he ever came out.

The chance they waited for occurred before many days. Mr. Brownlow sent
Oliver to take some money to the very book-stall in front of which the
Artful Dodger had stolen the handkerchief, and Oliver went without
dreaming of any danger.

Suddenly a young woman in a cap and apron screamed out behind him very
loudly: "Oh, my dear little brother!" and threw her arms tight around
him. "Oh, my gracious, I've found him!" she cried. "Come home directly,
you naughty boy! For shame, to treat your poor mother so!"

Oliver struggled, but to no purpose. Nancy (for it was she) told the
people that crowded about them that it was her little brother, who had
run away from home and nearly broken his mother's heart, and that she
wanted to take him back.

Oliver insisted that he didn't know her at all and hadn't any sister,
but just then Bill Sikes appeared (as he had planned) and said the young
woman was telling the truth and that Oliver was a little rascal and a
liar. The people were all convinced at this, and when Sikes struck
Oliver and seized him by the collar they said, "Serves him right!" And
so Oliver found himself dragged away from Mr. Brownlow to the filthy
house where lived Fagin.

The wily old Jew was overjoyed to see them. He smiled such a fiendish
smile that Oliver screamed for help as loud as he could, and at this
Fagin picked up a great jagged club to beat him with.

Now, Nancy had been very wicked all her life, but in spite of this there
was a little good in her. She had already begun to repent having helped
steal the boy, and now his plight touched her heart. She seized the club
and threw it into the fire, and so saved him the beating for that time.

For many days Oliver was kept a prisoner. He was free to wander about
the mildewed old house, but every outer door was locked and every window
had closed iron shutters. All the light came in through small round
holes at the top, which made the rooms gloomy and full of shadows.
Spiderwebs were over all the walls, and often the mice would go
scampering across the floor. There was only one window to look out of,
and that was in a back garret, but it had iron bars and looked out only
on to the housetops.

He found only one book to read: this was a history of the lives of great
criminals and was full of stories of secret thefts and murders. For the
old Jew, having tortured his mind by loneliness and gloom, had left the
volume in his way, hoping it would instil into his soul the poison that
would blacken it for ever.

But Oliver's blood ran cold as he read, and he pushed the book away in
horror, and, falling on his knees, prayed that he might be spared from
such deeds and rescued from that terrible place.

He was still on his knees when Nancy came in and told him he must get
ready at once to go on a journey with Bill Sikes. She had been crying
and her face was bruised as though she had been beaten. Oliver saw she
was very sorry for him, and, indeed, she told him she would help him if
she could, but that there was no use trying to escape now, because they
were watched all the time, and if he got away Sikes would certainly kill
her.

Nancy took him to the house where Sikes lived, and the next morning the
latter started out, making Oliver go with him. Sikes had a loaded pistol
in his overcoat pocket, and he showed this to Oliver and told him if he
spoke to anybody on the road or tried to get away he would shoot him
with it.

They walked a long way out of London, once or twice riding in carts
which were going in their direction. Whenever this happened Sikes kept
his hand in the pocket where the pistol was, so that Oliver was afraid
to appeal for help. Late at night they came to an old deserted mansion
in the country, and in the basement of this, where a fire had been
kindled, they joined two other men whom Oliver had seen more than once
in Fagin's house in London.

The journey had been cold and long and Oliver was very hungry, but he
could scarcely eat the supper that was given him for fear of what they
intended to do with him in that lonely spot. He was so tired, however,
that he finally went fast asleep and knew nothing more till two o'clock
in the morning, when Sikes woke him roughly and bade him come with them.

It was foggy and cold and dark outside. Sikes and one of the others each
took one of Oliver's hands, and so they walked a quarter of a mile to
where was a fine house with a high wall around it. They made him climb
over the wall with them, and, pulling him along, crept toward the house.

It was not till now that Oliver knew what they intended--that they were
going to rob the house and make him help them, so that he, too, would be
a burglar. His limbs began to tremble and he sank to his knees, begging
them to have mercy and to let him run away and die in the fields rather
than to make him steal. But Sikes drew his pistol with a frightful oath
and dragged him on.

In the back of the house was a window, which was not fastened, because
it was much too small for a man to get through. But Oliver was so
little that he could do it easily. With the pistol in his hand, Sikes
put Oliver through the window, gave him a lantern and bade him go and
unlock the front door for them.

[Illustration: "The Artful Dodger" introducing Oliver Twist to Fagin

_See page 55_]

Oliver had made up his mind that as soon as he got beyond the range of
Sikes's pistol he would scream and wake everybody in the house, but just
then there was a sound from inside, and Sikes called to him to come
back.

Suddenly there was a loud shout from the top of the stairs--a flash--a
report--and Oliver staggered back with a terrible pain in his arm and
with everything swimming before his eyes.

He heard cries and the loud ringing of a bell and felt Sikes drag him
backward through the window. He felt himself being carried along
rapidly, and then a cold sensation crept over his heart and he knew no
more.

III

HOW EVERYTHING TURNED OUT RIGHT FOR OLIVER IN THE END

After a long, long time Oliver came to himself. The morning was
breaking. He tried to rise and found that his arm was wounded and his
clothes wet with blood.

He was so dizzy he could hardly stand, but it was freezing cold, and he
knew if he stayed there he must die. So he staggered on till he came to
a road where, a little way off, he saw a house. There, he thought, he
might get help. But when he came closer he saw that it was the very
house the men had tried to rob that night. Fear came over him then, and
he would have run away, but he was too weak.

He had just strength left to push open the gate, totter across the lawn
and knock at the door; then he sank in a faint on the steps.

In the house lived a lady named Mrs. Maylie, just as kind-hearted as was
Mr. Brownlow who had rescued Oliver at the police station, and with her
lived a beautiful girl whom she had adopted, named Rose. The servants,
when they came to the door, made sure Oliver was one of the robbers, and
sent at once for policemen to take him in charge; but Miss Rose, the
moment she saw what a good face the boy had and how little he looked
like a thief, made them put him to bed and send at once for the doctor.

When the good doctor arrived and saw Oliver, who was still unconscious,
he thought Miss Rose was right, and when the boy had come to himself and
told them how he had suffered, he was certain of it. They were both
sorry the policemen had been sent for, because the doctor was sure they
would not believe Oliver's story, especially as he had been arrested
once before. He would have taken him away, but he was too sick to be
moved.

So when the officers came the doctor told them that the boy had been
accidentally shot and had come to the house for assistance, when the
servants had mistaken him for one of the burglars. This was not exactly
the truth, but it seemed necessary to deceive the policemen if Oliver
was to be saved. Of course, the servant that had fired the pistol was
not able to swear that he had hit anybody at all, so the officers had to
go away without arresting anybody.

After this Oliver was ill for a long time, but he was carefully nursed,
especially by Miss Rose, who grew as fond of him as if she had been his
sister. As soon as he grew better she wrote a letter for him to Mr.
Brownlow, the old gentleman who had rescued him from the police station,
but to Oliver's grief she found that he had gone to the West Indies.

Thus the time passed till Oliver was quite well, and then Miss Rose
(first carefully instructing the servant who went with them not to lose
sight of him for a moment for fear of his old enemies) took him with her
for a visit to London.

Meantime there had been a dreadful scene in Fagin's house when Bill
Sikes got back to London and told the old Jew that the robbery had
failed and that Oliver was lost again. They were more afraid than ever
that they would be caught and sent to prison. Fagin swore at Sikes, and
Monks cursed Fagin, and between them all they determined that Oliver
must either be captured or killed.

While they were plotting afresh Nancy, who had been feeling sorrier and
sorrier for what she had done, overheard them, and so found out that
Monks was Oliver's half-brother and why he so hated him; and she made up
her mind to save the boy from his last and greatest danger.

So one evening, when she was alone with him, she gave Sikes some
laudanum in a glass of liquor, and when he was asleep she slipped away,
found Miss Rose and told her all about it. Bad as Nancy was, however,
she was not willing to betray Fagin or Bill Sikes, so she only told her
of Monks.

Miss Rose was greatly astonished, for she had never heard of him before,
but she pitied Nancy because she had tried to help Oliver, and, of
course, she herself wanted very much to help him discover who he was and
who his parents had been. She thanked Nancy and begged her to come to
see her again. Nancy was afraid to do this, because Bill Sikes watched
her so closely, but she promised that on the next Sunday at midnight she
would be on a certain bridge where Miss Rose might see her. Then Nancy
hurried back before Sikes should wake up.

Miss Rose was in trouble now, for there was no one in London with her
then who could help her. But the same afternoon, whom should Oliver see
at a distance, walking into his house, but Mr. Brownlow. He came back in
great joy to tell Miss Rose, and she concluded that the old gentleman
would be the very one to aid her. She took Oliver to the house, and,
sure enough, there was the boy's old benefactor.

Very glad, indeed, he was to hear what she told him. For the old
gentleman, when Oliver had disappeared with the money he had given him
to take to the bookseller, had been reluctant to think the boy he had
befriended was, after all, a liar and a thief. He had advertised for
him, but the only result had been a call from Mr. Bumble, who told him
terrible tales of Oliver's wickedness. To find now, after all this time,
that Oliver had not run away, and that Mr. Bumble's tales were lying
ones, was a joyful surprise to Mr. Brownlow.

After he had heard the whole, and when Oliver had gone into the garden,
Miss Rose told him of Nancy's visit and of the man Monks who still
pursued the boy to do him harm.

It was fortunate that she had come to Mr. Brownlow, for, as it happened,
he knew a great deal about Monks and his evil life. Years before the old
gentleman himself had been a friend of Oliver's father. He knew all
about his death in a foreign country, and had watched his older son's
career of shame with sorrow. The very trip he had made to the West
Indies had acquainted him with a crime Monks had committed there, from
which he had fled to England. But, while Mr. Brownlow knew of the
curious will Oliver's father had made, what had become of the baby to
which the latter referred he had never known. Now, from the story Miss
Rose told him, he was assured that Oliver was, indeed, this baby
half-brother of Monks.

But it was one thing to know this and quite another to enable Oliver to
prove it. The old gentleman was quick to see that they must get
possession of Monks and frighten him into confessing the fact--whose
only proofs had been lost when he threw the locket and ring into the
river. Mr. Brownlow, for this reason, agreed with Miss Rose that they
should both meet Nancy on the bridge on the coming Sunday to hear all
she had been able to find out.

They said not a word of this to Oliver, and when Sunday night came they
drove to the spot where Nancy had promised to meet them. She had kept
her word. She was there before them, and Mr. Brownlow heard her story
over again from her own lips.

But some one else was there, too, hidden behind a pillar, where he could
hear every word she said, and this listener was a spy of Fagin's.

Nancy had cried so much and acted so strangely that the old Jew had
grown suspicious and had set some one to watch her. And who do you
suppose this spy was? No other than the cowardly apprentice who had
bullied Oliver until he ran away from the undertaker's house. The
apprentice had finally run away, too, had come to London and begun a
wicked life. He was too big a coward to rob any one but little children
who had been sent to the shop to buy something, so Fagin had given him
spying work to do, and in this, being by nature a sneak, he proved very
successful.

The spy lay hid till he had heard all Nancy said; then he slipped out
and ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to Fagin. The latter
sent for Bill Sikes, knowing him to be the most brutal and bloodthirsty
ruffian of all, and told him what Nancy had done.

The knowledge, as the Jew expected, turned Sikes into a demon. He rushed
to where Nancy lived. She had returned and was asleep on her couch, but
she woke as he entered, and saw by his face that he meant to murder her.
Through all her evil career Nancy had been true to Sikes and would not
have betrayed him. But he would not listen now, though she pleaded with
him pitifully to come with her to some foreign country (as Miss Rose had
begged her to do), where they might both lead better lives. Fury had
made him mad. As she clung to his knees, he seized a heavy club and
struck her down.

So poor Nancy died, with only time for a feeble prayer to God for mercy.

Of all bad deeds that Sikes had ever done, that was the worst. The sun
shone through the window and lit the room where Nancy lay. He tried to
shut it out, but he could not. He grew suddenly afraid. Horror came
upon him. He crept out of the room, locked the door behind him, and
plunged into the crowded street.

He walked for miles and miles, here and there, without purpose.
Whichever way he went he could not rid himself of that horror. When
night came he crawled into a disused shed, but he could not sleep.
Whenever he closed his eyes he seemed to see Nancy's eyes looking at
him. He got up and wandered on again, desperately lonely for some one to
talk to.

He heard a man telling another about the murder as he read the account
in a newspaper, and knew that he must hide. He hastened then to a den he
knew in a house beside the river, dirty and dismal and the haunt of
thieves. Some of his old companions were there, but even they shrank
from him.

He had been seen to enter the place, however, and in a few minutes the
street was full of people, all yelling for his capture. He barred the
doors and windows, but they began to break down the shutters with
sledge-hammers.

He ran to the roof with a rope, thinking to let himself down on the side
next the river and so escape. Here he fastened one end of the rope to
the chimney, and, making a loop in the other end, put it over his head.

Just at that instant he imagined he saw Nancy's eyes again looking at
him. He staggered back in terror, missed his footing, and fell over the
edge of the roof. He had not had time to draw the noose down under his
arms, so that it slipped up around his neck, and there he hung, dead,
with a broken neck.

Meanwhile Mr. Brownlow had acted very quickly, so that Monks had got no
warning. He had had men watching for the latter and now, having found
out all he wanted to know, he had him seized in the street, put into a
coach and driven to his office, where he brought him face to face with
Oliver.

The old gentleman told Monks he could do one of two things: either he
could confess before witnesses the whole infamous plot he had framed
against Oliver, and so restore to him his rights and name, or else he
could refuse, in which case he would at once be arrested and sent to
prison. Seeing that Mr. Brownlow knew all about the part he had played,
Monks, to save himself, made a full confession--how he had planned to
keep his half-brother from his inheritance. And he also confessed what
no one there had guessed: that Miss Rose, who had been adopted in her
infancy, was really the sister of Oliver's dead mother--his aunt,
indeed. This was the happiest of all Oliver's surprises that day, for he
had learned to love Miss Rose very dearly.

Monks thus bought his own freedom, and cheap enough he probably thought
it, for before he had finished his story, word came that Fagin the Jew
had been captured by the police and was to be tried without delay for
his life.

Oliver no longer had anything to fear, and came into possession of his
true name and his fortune. Mr. Brownlow adopted him as his own son, and
moved to the village where Oliver had been cared for in the family of
Miss Rose, and where they all lived happily ever afterward.

The company of thieves was broken up with Fagin's arrest. Fagin himself
was found guilty, and died on the gallows shrieking with fear. Monks
sailed for America, where he was soon detected in crime and died in
prison.

The wicked apprentice, who had been the real cause of poor Nancy's
murder, was so frightened at the fate of Fagin that he reformed and
became a spy for the police, and by his aid the Artful Dodger, who
continued to pick pockets, soon found himself in jail.

As for Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, they, of course, lost their positions, and
sank from bad to worse till they finally became paupers and were sent to
the very same poorhouse where they had tortured little Oliver Twist.

BARNABY RUDGE

Published 1841

_Scene_: London and the Country

_Time_: 1775 to 1780

CHARACTERS

Barnaby Rudge A half-witted boy

Rudge His father
A murderer

Mrs. Rudge His mother

Geoffrey Haredale A country gentleman

Emma Haredale His niece

Sir John Chester An enemy of Haredale's

Edward Chester His son
In love with Emma Haredale

Varden A locksmith

Dolly Varden His daughter
A friend of Emma Haredale's

Simon Tappertit Varden's apprentice

Joe Willet The son of an innkeeper
In love with Dolly Varden

"Maypole Hugh" A giant hostler
In reality, the son of Sir John Chester

Lord George Gordon A deluded nobleman

Gashford His secretary

Dennis A hangman

"Grip" Barnaby's tame raven

BARNABY RUDGE

BARNABY'S BOYHOOD

Many years ago a gentleman named Haredale lived at a house called The
Warren, near London. His wife was dead and he had one baby daughter,
Emma.

One morning he was found murdered in his house, which had been robbed.
Both the gardener and the steward, Rudge, were missing, and some people
thought one had done it and some thought the other. But some days later
a disfigured body was found in a pond on the grounds which, by its
clothes and a watch and ring, was recognized as that of Rudge, the
missing steward. Then, of course, every one believed the gardener had
murdered both, and the police searched for him a long time, but he was
never found.

On the same day this cruel murder was discovered, a baby was born to
Mrs. Rudge, the wife of the steward--a pretty boy, though with a
birth-mark on the wrist as red as blood, and a strange look of terror on
the baby face. He was named Barnaby, and his mother loved him all the
more because it was soon seen he was weak-minded, and could never be in
his right senses. She herself, poor woman! seemed never able to forget
the horror of that day.

Geoffrey Haredale, the brother and heir of the murdered man, took up his
abode at The Warren and adopted the little Emma, his niece, as his own
daughter. He was kind to Mrs. Rudge also. Not only did he let her live
rent-free in a house he owned, but he did many a kind deed secretly for
her half-witted son as he grew older.

Barnaby Rudge grew up a strange, weird creature. His hair was long and
red and hung in disorder about his shoulders. His skin was pale, his
eyes bright and his clothes he trimmed most curiously with bits of gaudy
lace and bright ribbons and glass toys. He wore a cluster of broken
peacock feathers in his hat and girded at his side was the broken hilt
of an old sword without a blade. But strangest of all was a little
wicker basket he always carried on his back. When he set this down and
opened it, there hopped out a tame raven who would cock its head on one
side and say hoarsely and very knowingly:

"Hello! Hello! Hello! What's the matter here? Keep up your spirits.
Never say die. I'm a devil, I'm a devil, I'm a devil! Hurrah!"

Then it would whistle or make a noise like the drawing of a cork out of
a bottle, repeated a great many times, and flap its wings against its
sides as if it were bursting with laughter. This raven was named Grip
and was Barnaby's constant companion. The neighbors used to say it was
one hundred and twenty years old (for ravens live a very long time), and
some said it knew altogether too much to be only a bird. But Barnaby
would hear nothing said against it, and, next to his mother, loved it
better than anything in the world.

Barnaby knew that folks called him half-witted, but he cared little for
that. Sometimes he would laugh at what they said.

"Why," he would say, "how much better to be silly than as wise as you!
_You_ don't see shadowy people like those that live in sleep--not you.
Nor eyes in the knotted panes of glass, nor swift ghosts when it blows
hard, nor do you hear voices in the air, nor see men stalking in the
sky--not you. I lead a merrier life than you with all your cleverness.
_You're_ the dull men. _We're_ the bright ones. Ha, ha! I'll not change
with you, not I!"

Haredale, who had been so kind to Barnaby's mother, was a burly, stern
man who had few acquaintances and lived much alone. When first he came
to live at The Warren an enemy of his, Sir John Chester, had circulated
suspicious rumors about him, so that some came half to believe he
himself had had something to do with his brother's murder.

These whispers so affected Haredale that as time passed he grew gloomy
and morose and lived in seclusion, thinking only how he could solve the
mystery of the murder, and loving more and more the little Emma as she
grew into a beautiful girl. He neglected The Warren so that the property
looked quite desolate and ruined, and at length superstitious people in
the neighborhood came to mutter that it was haunted by the ghost of
Rudge, the steward, whose body had been found in the pond.

The old bell-ringer of the near-by church even said he had seen this
ghost once, when he went, late one night, to wind the church clock. But
of course others, who knew there were no such things as ghosts, only
smiled at these stories.

Sir John Chester, who so hated Haredale, was just as smooth and smiling
and elegant as the other was rough. Haredale had been Sir John's drudge
and scapegoat at school and the latter had always despised him. And as
the years went by Sir John came to hate him.

His own son Edward had fallen in love with Emma, Haredale's niece, and
she loved him in return. Sir John had been all his life utterly selfish
and without conscience. He had little money and was much in debt and
wanted his son to marry an heiress, so that he himself could continue
his life of pleasure. Edward, however, gave his father to understand
that he would never give up his love for Emma. Sir John believed that if
Haredale chose, he could make his niece dislike Edward, and because he
did not, Sir John hated Haredale the more bitterly.

Emma had a close friend named Dolly Varden, the daughter of a locksmith.
Dolly was a pretty, dimpled, roguish little flirt, as rosy and sparkling
and fresh as an apple, and she had a great many lovers.

One of these was her father's apprentice, who lived in the same house.
His name was Simon Tappertit--a conceited, bragging, empty-headed young
man with a great opinion of his own good looks. When he looked at his
thin legs, which he admired exceedingly, he could not see how it was
that Dolly could help worshiping him.

Tappertit had ambitions of his own and thought himself a great man who
was kept down by a tyrannical master, though the good-natured locksmith
was the kindest man in London. He had formed a society of apprentices
whose toast was, "Death to all masters, life to all apprentices, and
love to all fair damsels!" He was their leader. He had made them all
keys to fit their masters' doors, and at night, when they were supposed
to be asleep in bed, they would steal out to meet in a dirty cellar
owned by an old blind man, where they kept a skull and cross-bones and
signed high-sounding oaths with a pen dipped in blood, and did other
silly things. The object of the society was to hurt, annoy, wrong and
pick quarrels with such of their masters as happened not to please them.
With such cheap fooleries Tappertit had convinced himself that he was
fit to be a great general.

But with all his smirking, Dolly Varden only laughed at him. To tell the
truth, she was very fond of young Joe Willet, whose father kept the
Maypole Inn, very near The Warren where her friend Emma Haredale lived.
Joe was a good, brave fellow, and was head over ears in love with Dolly,
but Dolly was a coquette, and never let him know how much she cared for
him. Joe was not contented at home, for his father seemed to think him a
child and did not treat him according to his years, so that but for
leaving Dolly Varden he would long ago have run away to seek his
fortune.

Both Joe and Dolly knew how Edward Chester loved Emma Haredale, and they
used sometimes to carry notes from one to the other, since the hatred of
Sir John for Emma's uncle often prevented the lovers from meeting.

Sir John found this out, and bribed a hostler at the Maypole Inn to spy
for him and prevent, if he could, these letters passing. The hostler was
an uncouth, drunken giant that people called Maypole Hugh, as strong as
an ox, and cruel and cunning. Hugh watched carefully, and from time to
time would go to Sir John's house in London and report what he had
seen.

THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER AND WHO HE WAS

About this time residents in the neighborhood of The Warren and the
Maypole Inn began to tell tales of a mysterious man who roamed about the
country-side.

He was seen often and by many persons, always at night, skulking in the
shadow or riding furiously on a horse. He was fierce and haggard and
discourteous to travelers, wore a slouch hat which he never took off,
and generally kept the lower part of his face muffled in a handkerchief.
He always went alone. Some said he slept in church-yards, others that he
never slept at all, and still others that he was a wicked man who had
sold his soul to the Evil One.

One night he rested at the Maypole Inn, and a little while after he had
gone, Varden the locksmith, Dolly's father, as he drove home, found
Edward Chester lying in the road, having been wounded and robbed of his
money. Barnaby Rudge had seen the attack and was bending over him. He
had been too frightened to give aid, but from his description Varden
knew the robber was the stranger who had stopped at the inn.

The honest locksmith took Edward into his chaise, drove him to Barnaby's
house, which was near by, and left him in care of Mrs. Rudge, where a
doctor soon dressed the wound, which was not serious.

Next day Mr. Varden came to see how the wounded man was. As he sat
talking with Mrs. Rudge a tapping came at the window. She went to the
door. The locksmith heard her cry out, and sprang forward to find
standing there, to his astonishment, the robber of the night before. He
grasped at him, but the woman threw herself before him, clasped his arm
and besought him, for her life's sake, not to pursue the man.

The locksmith had known Barnaby's mother all his life, but so strange
was her action now (especially since she refused to answer any question,
begging him to ask her nothing) that he almost wondered if she herself
could be in league with a crime-doer. Her apparent agony touched him,
however, and, raising no alarm, he went home in great puzzle of mind.

He would have been far more disturbed if he had known the whole truth.
For the mysterious stranger he had seen, who by night had haunted the
neighborhood, was none other than Mrs. Rudge's husband, Barnaby's
father, the steward who everybody believed had been murdered with his
master, and whose body had been found in the pond.

Rudge himself had committed that wicked deed. He had killed both master
and gardener, and to cover the crime had put his own clothes, his watch
and ring on the latter's body and sunk it in the pond. When, on the
night of the murder, he told his wife what he had done, she had shrunk
fearfully from him, declaring that, although being his wife she would
not give him up to justice, yet she would never own him or shelter him.
He had fled then with the money he had stolen, and that night, while she
lay sick with horror, Barnaby had been born with his poor crazed brain,
the look of terror in his baby face and the birth-mark of blood on his
wrist.

For many years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could
not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had
driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless,
fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house
in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for
money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her
terrible secret, giving him every coin she could save, striving so that
Barnaby, unhappily born as he was, should never know the shame of having
his father suffer death on the gallows. When Rudge had come to her house
that day he had thought her alone, and she had saved him from capture
only by begging the locksmith to stay his hand.

After his hairbreadth escape from Varden, Rudge hid himself in a narrow
street. When the next dawn came, as he searched for some dark den in
which he might lie sheltered till another night, he saw Simon Tappertit
issuing with his noisy apprentice crew from the cellar in which they
held their meetings. He entered its door, made friends with the
villainous blind man who kept it and there established his headquarters.

Once more, one night after the wounded Edward had been taken to his own
home, Rudge hunted out his trembling wife and demanded money,
threatening to bring harm to Barnaby if she refused him, and she gave
him all she had.

But this time dread of him made her desperate. When morning came she
went to Haredale and told him that she and her son could no longer live
on his bounty. The next day, with Barnaby, who carried on his back his
beloved raven, Grip, she left the house afoot, telling no one where they
were going lest her husband find her out, and pushed far into the
country to find a home in some obscure village. And though Rudge, the
murderer, and the blind man (who was much more crafty and cunning than
many men with eyesight) searched for them everywhere, it was a long time
before they found any trace.

Perhaps Joe and Dolly Varden missed poor cheery Barnaby more than did
any one else. But several events occurred soon after this that gave them
other things to think of.

Maypole Hugh, the savage hostler, had continued his spying work for
Edward's father, and Sir John determined it was high time to break off
his son's attachment for Emma Haredale.

One day Dolly was carrying a letter from Emma at The Warren to Edward,
and as she passed through the fields, Hugh attacked her, throwing his
arms around her and pretending to make coarse love to her. She was
dreadfully frightened and screamed as loud as she could. Joe, as it
happened, was walking within sound of her voice, and ran like the wind
to her aid.

In another moment Hugh had leaped the hedge and disappeared and Dolly
was sobbing in her rescuer's arms. She was afraid to tell Joe who had
frightened her, for fear the hostler would take his revenge by harming
him, so she only said she had been attacked by a man whom she had never
seen.

In her scare she had forgotten all about the letter she had carried, and
now she discovered it was gone. It was nowhere to be found.

This, of course, was because Hugh had stolen it. It was to get the
letter that he had frightened her, and he was soon on his way to carry
it to Sir John. Dolly did not guess this. She wrote to Emma telling her
of the mishap, and this note Joe, to whom she intrusted it, knowing no
reason to distrust the hostler, gave to Hugh to deliver. So Sir John got
both missives in the end.

Emma Haredale, not understanding why Edward returned no answer to her
letter, was hurt, and thought him cold. Sir John, seizing his
opportunity, told her one day (pretending sorrow while he did so) that
his son, naturally fickle, had fallen in love with some one else, to
whom he was soon to be married.

Emma, not dreaming the father of the man she loved could be such a false
liar, believed him, and when Edward wrote her, speaking of his poverty
and telling her he was going to leave England to try to better his
prospects, she thought his manly letter only an excuse to part from her.

Proud, though heartbroken, she did not answer it, and so, thanks to his
father's selfish scheming, Edward sailed away to the West Indies,
hopeless and despairing.

Another left England at the same time whose going meant far more to
Dolly Varden. This was Joe. His father, the innkeeper, had been
restraining him more and more, until his treatment had become the jest
of the country-side, and Joe had chafed to the point of rebellion at the
gibes that continually met him. One day, at the jeer of an old enemy of
his, his wrath boiled over. He sprang upon him and thrashed him soundly
in the inn before the assembled guests. Then, knowing his father would
never forgive him, he went to his own room and barricaded the door. That
night Joe let himself down from his window and before daylight was in
London.

He went first to the locksmith's house to tell Dolly he had run away
and that he loved her, but Dolly being a flirt, only laughed. To tell
the truth, she was so very fond of Joe that she didn't like to show him
how sorry she was. So the poor fellow went away thinking she cared very
little (though as soon as he was out of sight she nearly cried her eyes
out), and enlisted as a soldier. That same night Joe started from London
to fight in the war in America. And it was a long time before either he
or Edward Chester was heard of again.

III

BARNABY GETS INTO TROUBLE

Five years went by, and Edward Chester remained in the West Indies and
prospered. For five years Joe Willet fought in the war in America. And
for five years Barnaby Rudge with his mother and Grip, the raven, lived
unmolested in their little village and were happy.

At the end of the five years three things happened at about the same
time: Edward started back to England from the West Indies with a fair
fortune in his pocket; Joe was sent back from America with one arm gone,
and Barnaby and his mother left their village home again, secretly, and
set out for London, hoping to lose themselves in its hugeness. The wily
blind man, the companion now of Rudge, the murderer, had found them
out!

He came one day and made Mrs. Rudge give him all the money she had been
able to lay by in these five years except a single gold piece. He told
her he would return in a week for more and that if she had not got it
then, he would entice Barnaby away to join in the evil life of his
father. So she left the village the very next morning, and she and
Barnaby trudged afoot all the weary way to the great city.

Though they knew nothing of it, there was great excitement in London.
Lord George Gordon, a well-meaning but crack-brained nobleman, led
astray by flatterers till he believed he had a God-given mission to
drive all Catholics out of England, had, sometime before this, begun to
hold meetings and to stir up the people with the cry of "No Popery!"

He declared that the religion of the country was in danger of being
overthrown and that the Pope of Rome was plotting to make his religion
supreme. And this idea he talked wherever he went. He was a slender,
sallow man who dressed in severe black and wore his hair smoothly
combed, and his bright, restless eyes and his look of uncertainty made
it clear that he was no man to lead, but was rather himself the misled
dupe of others.

One of these schemers who ruled him was his secretary, Gashford, a man
of ugly face, with beetling brows and great flapped ears. He had been a
thief and a scoundrel all his life, and had wormed himself into Lord
George's confidence by flattery. He easily fooled his master into
believing that the rabble who flocked to hear him, and the idle loungers
who yelled themselves hoarse at what he said, were crowds of honest
citizens who believed as he did, and were ready to follow his
leadership. Gashford had added to his followers even Dennis, the hangman
of London, and the foolish nobleman not knowing the ruffian's true
calling, thought him a man to trust.

For many weeks this banding together of all the lawless ragamuffins of
London had gone on, till one had only to shout "No Popery!" on any
street corner to draw together a crowd bent on mischief. Respectable
people grew afraid and kept to their houses, and criminals and street
vagabonds grew bolder and bolder.

As may be guessed, Simon Tappertit, the one-time apprentice of Varden
the locksmith, rejoiced at this excitement as at a chance to show his
talent for leadership. His apprentice society had now become the "United
Bulldogs," and he himself, helping the schemes of Gashford, strutted
about among the crowds with an air of vast importance.

Sir John Chester watched the trouble gathering with glee. His old enemy
Haredale, he knew, was a Catholic, and as this movement, if it grew bold
enough, meant harm to all of that religion, he hoped for its success. He
was too cunning to aid it publicly, but he sent Maypole Hugh, who was
still his spy, to Gashford; and the brawny hostler, who savagely longed
for fighting and plunder, joined with the secretary and with Dennis the
hangman to help increase the tumult.

A day had been set on which Lord George Gordon had vowed he would march
to Parliament at the head of forty thousand men to demand the passing of
a law to forbid all Catholics to enter the country. This vast
rabble-army gathered in a great field, under the command of these sorry
leaders--the misguided lord, Dennis the hangman, Tappertit, Hugh the
hostler, Gashford the secretary, and other rowdies picked for their
boldness and daring. The mob thus formed covered an immense space. All
wore blue cockades in their hats or carried blue flags, and from them
went up a hoarse roar of oaths, shouts and ribald songs.

Such was the scene on which Barnaby and his mother came as they walked
into London. They knew nothing of its cause or its meaning. Mrs. Rudge
saw its rough disorder with terror, but the confusion, the waving flags
and the shouts had got into Barnaby's brain. To him this seemed a
splendid host marching to some noble cause. He watched with sparkling
eyes, longing to join it.

Suddenly Maypole Hugh rushed from the crowd with a shout of recognition,
and, thrusting a flagstaff into Barnaby's hands, drew him into the
ranks.

His mother shrieked and ran forward, but she was thrown to the ground;
Barnaby was whirled away into the moving mass and she saw him no more.

Barnaby enjoyed that hour of march with all his soul, and the louder the
howling the more he was thrilled. The crowd surrounded the houses of
Parliament and fought the police. At length a regiment of mounted
soldiers charged them. Barnaby thought this brave work and held his
ground valiantly, even knocking one soldier off his horse with the
flagstaff, until others dragged him to a place of safety.

That night the drunken mob, grown bolder, tore down, pillaged and burned
all the Catholic chapels within their reach, and, with Hugh and Dennis
the hangman, poor crazed Barnaby ran at its head, covered with dirt, his
garments torn to rags, singing and leaping with delight. He thought he
was the most courageous of all, that he was helping to destroy the
country's enemies, and that when the fighting was over he and his mother
would be rich and she would always be proud that he was so noble and so
brave.

The golden cups, the candlesticks and the money they stole from the
burned chapels Hugh and the hangman buried under a heap of straw in the
tavern which they had made their headquarters, and left Barnaby to guard
the place. He counted this a sacred trust, and when soldiers came to
arrest all in the building he refused to fly in time. He even fought
them single-handed and felled two before he was knocked down with the
butt of a musket and handcuffed.

While he had been resisting, Grip had been busily plucking away the
straw from the hidden plunder; now his hoarse croak showed them the
hoard and they unearthed it all. At length, closing ranks around
Barnaby, they marched him off to a barracks, from which he was taken to
Newgate Prison, where a blacksmith put irons on his arms and legs, and
he and the raven were locked in a cell.

While Barnaby was guarding the tavern room, Hugh, egged on by his
master, Sir John Chester, had proposed the burning of The Warren, where
Haredale still lived with Emma, his niece, and Dolly Varden, now her
companion.

The crowd agreed gladly, since Haredale was a Catholic and that same day
in London had given evidence to the police against the rioters who had
burned the chapels. They rushed away, marched hastily across the fields,
tied the old host of the Maypole Inn to his chair, drank all the liquor
they could find and then rushed to The Warren. There they put the
servants to flight, burst in the doors, staved the wine-casks in the
cellar, split up the costly furniture with hammers and axes and set fire
to the building, so that it soon burned to the ground.

Haredale, in London, saw the red glare in the sky and rode post-haste to
the place, but found on his arrival only ruins and ashes. He believed
that Emma and Dolly had had time to escape to safety; but while he was
searching the grounds for some sign of them he saw in the starlight a
man hiding in a broken turret.

He drew his sword and advanced. As the figure moved into the light he
rushed forward, flung himself upon him and clutched his throat.

"Villain!" he cried in a terrible voice, "dead and buried as all men
supposed, at last, at last I have you! You, Rudge, slayer of my brother
and of his faithful servant! Double murderer and monster, I arrest you
in the name of God!"

Bound and fettered in his carriage, Haredale took Rudge back to London
and had him locked in Newgate Prison.

BARNABY PROSPERS AT LAST

Haredale searched vainly next day for Emma and Dolly Varden. He could
not believe they had lost their lives in the burning building, yet he
was filled with anxiety because of their disappearance. Could he have
known what had happened he would have been even more fearful.

Simon Tappertit had seen his chance at last to win for himself the
lovely Dolly, who had scorned him when he was an apprentice of the
locksmith. He had bribed Hugh and the hangman to aid him. While the mob
was occupied at the front of the house this precious pair had entered
from the back, seized the two girls and put them into a coach.

This they guarded at a distance till the burning was done; then, with
Tappertit on the box and surrounded by his ruffians, the coach was
driven into the city.

Emma had spent the day in the fear that her uncle had been killed with
other Catholics in London, and at this new and surpassing fright she had
fainted. Dolly, though no less concerned, had fought her captors
bravely, though vainly. Often in that long ride she wished that Joe, her
vanished lover, were there to rescue her as he had rescued her once from
Maypole Hugh.

She had determined when she reached the London streets to scream as
loudly as she could for help; but before they came to the city Hugh
climbed into the carriage and sat between them, threatening to choke
either if she made a noise.

In this wise they were driven to a miserable cottage, and in the dirty
apartment to which they were taken Dolly threw herself upon the
unconscious Emma and wept pitifully, unmindful of the jeers of Hugh and
of the hangman.

When Tappertit entered the room suddenly, Dolly, not knowing his part in
the plot, screamed with joy and threw herself into his arms crying:

"I knew it! My dear father's at the door! Heaven bless you for rescuing
us!"

But she saw in an instant her mistake, when the ridiculous braggart laid
his hand on his breast and told her, now that he no longer was an
apprentice but a famous leader of the people, he had chosen to be her
husband. With this announcement he left them.

Meanwhile Mrs. Rudge, day and night, had searched everywhere for
Barnaby. In one of the riots she was injured, and was taken to a
hospital, and while she lay there she heard with agony that her son had
been so active in the disturbances that a price had been put by the
Government on his head.

But in his present trouble Barnaby had unexpectedly found an old friend.
Joe Willet, just returned with one empty sleeve from his five years of
soldiering in America, had been with the soldiers in the barracks when
Barnaby had been brought there on his way to prison. He soon discovered
who the boy's rioting companions had been and took them word of his
plight, for he knew it meant death to Barnaby unless he escaped.

Maypole Hugh, Tappertit and the hangman were all itching for more
disorder, and this news gave them an excuse. They went out at once and
gathered the mob together to attack Newgate Prison and to release all
the prisoners. They themselves led the procession. The house of Varden,
Dolly's father, was on their way; they stopped there, and, in spite of
the lusty fight he made, carried the locksmith with them to compel him
to open the prison gates with his tools.

This he refused to do, and they would doubtless have killed him, but for
two men who dragged him from their clutches in the nick of time. These
two men were the one-armed Joe and Edward Chester, just returned from
the West Indies, whom the former had met by accident that day. They took
the locksmith to his home, while the raging crowd brought furniture from
neighboring houses and built a bonfire of it to burn down the great
prison gate.

From this same mob Haredale himself had a narrow escape. He was staying
at a house near by, which, belonging to a Catholic, was attacked. He
tried to escape across the roof, but was recognized from the street by
the giant Hugh. The cellar luckily had a back door opening into a lane,
and with the assistance of Joe and Edward, who had hastened to the rear
to aid him, he escaped that way.

Maypole Hugh, during this terrible time while the mob was burning houses
everywhere and the soldiers firing on the rioters in every quarter of
London, seemed to bear a charmed life. He rode a great brewer's horse
and carried an ax, and wherever the fight was thickest there he was to
be found.

Never had such a sight been seen in London as when the prison gate fell
and the crowd rushed from cell to cell, smashing the iron doors to
release the prisoners, some of whom, being under sentence of death, had
never expected to be free again. Rudge, the murderer, knowing nothing of
what the uproar meant, suffered tortures, thinking in his guilty fear
that the hordes were howling for his life. When he was finally released
and in the open street he found Barnaby beside him.

They broke off their fetters, and that night took refuge in a shed in a
field. Next day Rudge sent Barnaby to try to find the blind man, his
cunning partner, in whose wits he trusted to help them get away. Barnaby
brought the blind man, and brought also Hugh, whom he found wounded in
the street, but in so doing he was seen by Dennis, the hangman.

This villainous sneak, knowing that the daring of the rioters had
reached its limit, and that they must soon be scattered and captured,
and thinking to buy pardon for himself by a piece of treachery, without
delay brought soldiers, who surrounded the shed. The blind man,
attempting to run away, was shot dead, and the others, Rudge, Hugh and
poor, innocent Barnaby, were captured.

Then, well satisfied with his work, Dennis set out for the house where
Simon Tappertit had confined Emma Haredale and Dolly Varden. The hangman
wanted them well out of the way, so they could not testify that he had
helped to burn The Warren and to kidnap them. He had thought of a plan
to have them taken to a boat in the river and conveyed where their
friends would never find them, and to carry them off he chose Gashford,
Lord George Gordon's secretary, who was the more willing as he had
fallen in love with Emma's beauty.

But this wicked plan was never to be carried out. The very hour that
Gashford came on this pitiless errand, while he roughly bade Emma
prepare to depart, the doors flew open. Men poured in, led by Edward
Chester, who knocked Gashford down; and in another moment Emma was
clasped in her uncle's embrace, and Dolly, laughing and crying at the
same time, fell into the arms of her father. Their place of concealment
had been discovered a few hours before, and the three men had lost no
time in planning their capture.

Dennis the hangman, in spite of his previous treachery, caught in the
trap, was taken straight-way to jail, and Simon Tappertit, wounded and
raging, watched Dolly's departure from the floor, where he lay with his
wonderful legs, the pride and glory of his life, broken and crushed into
shapeless ugliness. The famous riots were over. Lord George Gordon was a
prisoner, hundreds were being arrested, and London was again growing
quiet.

Mrs. Rudge, poor mother! at last found Barnaby where he lay chained in
his cell and condemned to death. Day after day she never left him, while
Varden, the locksmith, and Haredale worked hard for his release. They
carried his case even to the King, and at the last moment, while he rode
on his way to execution, his pardon was granted.

Of the rest who died on the scaffold, Rudge, the murderer, was hanged,
cursing all men to the last; Maypole Hugh died glorying in his evil life
and with a jest on his lips, and Dennis, the hangman, was dragged to the
gallows cringing and shrieking for mercy.

A few weeks later Emma Haredale was married to Edward Chester and sailed
with him back to the West Indies, where he had established a flourishing
business.

Before this, however, his father, Sir John Chester, was well punished
for his hard heart and bad deeds by the discovery that Maypole Hugh, the
hostler, was really his own unacknowledged son, whose mother he had
deserted many years before. But even this blow, and the marriage of his
son Edward to the niece of his lifelong enemy, did not soften him. He
still hated Haredale with his old venom and loved to go to the ruins of
The Warren and gloat over its destruction.

On one of these visits he met and taunted Haredale beyond all endurance.
The two men drew their swords and fought a duel, which ended by
Haredale's running Sir John through the heart. Haredale left England at
once, entered a convent in a foreign country and spent his few remaining
years in penance and remorse.

Lord George Gordon, the poor deluded noble who had been the cause of all
this disorder, finally died, harmless and quite crazy, in Newgate
Prison. Simon Tappertit, in spite of his active part in the riots, was
luckier, for he got off with two wooden legs and lived for many years, a
corner boot-black.

Joe, of course, married Dolly Varden, and the locksmith gave her such a
generous marriage portion that he was able to set up in business,
succeeding his father as landlord of the old Maypole Inn, and there they
lived long and happily.

Barnaby Rudge, after the death of his father, gradually became more
rational and was everywhere a great favorite with old and young. He and
his mother lived always on the Maypole farm, and there were never two
more contented souls than they.

As for Grip, the raven, he soon forgot his jail experience and grew
sleek and glossy again. For a whole year he never uttered a word till
one sunny morning he suddenly broke out with, "I'm a devil, I'm a devil,
I'm a devil!" in extraordinary rapture. From that time on he talked more
and more, and as he was only one hundred and fifty years old when
Barnaby was gray headed (a mere infant for a raven) he is very probably
talking yet.

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

Published 1849-1850

_Scene_: London, Yarmouth, Dover and the Country

_Time_: 1812 to 1842

CHARACTERS

David Copperfield A fatherless boy

Miss Betsy Trotwood His aunt

Peggotty His nurse

Mr. Murdstone His stepfather

Miss Murdstone Mr. Murdstone's sister

Mr. Peggotty A fisherman
Peggotty's brother

Ham Their nephew

Mrs. Gummidge The widow of Mr. Peggotty's dead partner

"Little Em'ly" Peggotty's orphan niece

Barkis A cart driver
Later, Peggotty's husband

Mr. Creakle Proprietor of a boys' school

Tommy Traddles }
} Schoolmates and friends of David's
James Steerforth }

Mr. Micawber A London friend of David's
Always "waiting for something to turn up"

"Mr. Dick" A simple-minded relative of
Miss Betsy Trotwood's

Mr. Wickfield Miss Betsy's lawyer

Agnes His daughter

Uriah Heep His clerk
Later, his partner

Doctor Strong David's schoolmaster in Dover

Dora Spenlow The daughter of David's employer
and his "child-wife"

DAVID COPPERFIELD

DAVID'S EARLY UPS AND DOWNS

There was once a little boy by the name of David Copperfield, whose
father had died before he was born. The night he was born his
great-aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood--a grim lady with a black cap tied under
her chin and a great gold watch chain--came to the house to ask his
mother to name the baby, which she took for granted was a girl, after
her; but as soon as she found it was a boy she flounced out in anger and
never came back again.

The first thing David remembered was living in a big country house in
England with his pretty, golden-haired mother and with Peggotty, his
nurse, a red-faced, kindly woman, with a habit of wearing her dresses so
tight that whenever she hugged him some buttons would fly off the back.
He loved his mother dearly--so dearly that when a tall, handsome man
named Murdstone began to come to see her in the evenings David was
jealous and sad. Mr. Murdstone acted as if he liked him, and even took
him riding on his horse; but there was something in his face that David
could not like.

One summer day David was sent off with Peggotty for a two weeks' visit
to her brother's house in Yarmouth. Yarmouth was a queer fishing town on
the sea-coast, and the house they went to was the queerest thing in it.
It was made of an old barge, drawn up high and dry on the beach. It had
a chimney on one side and little windows, and there were sea-shells
around the door. David's room was in the stern, and the window was the
hole which the rudder had once passed through. Everything smelled of
salt water and lobsters, and David thought it was the most wonderful
house in the world.

He soon made friends with the family--Mr. Peggotty, a big fisherman with
a laugh like a gale of wind; Ham, his nephew, a big, overgrown boy who
carried David from the coach on his back, and Mrs. Gummidge, who was the
widow of Mr. Peggotty's drowned partner.

And, last of all, there was a beautiful little girl with curly hair and
a string of blue beads around her neck whom they called Little Em'ly.
She was an orphan niece of Peggotty's. None of these people belonged to
Mr. Peggotty, but, though he was only a poor fisherman himself, he was
so kind that he gave them all a home. David played with little Em'ly,
and went out in the boat with Mr. Peggotty, and enjoyed his visit
greatly, though he grew anxious to see his mother again.

He had no idea what had happened to her till he got back home with
Peggotty. Then he found why he had been sent off on his visit. While he
was away his mother had married Mr. Murdstone.

David found things sadly altered after this. Mr. Murdstone was a hard,
cruel master. He cared nothing for the little boy and was harsh to him
in everything. He even took away David's own cozy bedroom and made him
sleep in a gloomy chamber. When he was sad Mr. Murdstone called him
obstinate and locked him up and forbade his mother to pet or comfort
him.

David's mother loved him, but she loved her new husband, too, and it was
a most unhappy state of things. To make it worse, Mr. Murdstone's sister
came to live with them. She was an unlovely old maid with big black
eyebrows, and liked David no better than her brother did.

After this there were no more pleasant hours of sitting with his mother
or walking with her to church, for Mr. Murdstone and his sister kept
them apart. The only happy moments David spent were in a little upper
room where there was a collection of books left by his dead father. He
got some comfort from reading these.

Mr. Murdstone made David's mother give him hard tasks and lessons to do,
and when David recited them he and his sister both sat and listened. To
feel their presence and disapproval confused the little fellow so much
that even when he knew his lesson he failed.

One day when he came to recite he saw Mr. Murdstone finishing the
handle of a whip he had been making. This frightened him so that he
could scarcely remember a word. Mr. Murdstone grasped him then and led
him to his room to whip him.

Poor little David was so terrified that he hardly knew what he was
doing, and in his agony and terror, while the merciless blows were
falling, he seized the hand that held him and bit it as hard as he
could. Mr. Murdstone then beat him almost to death and locked him in the
room.

He was kept there for five days with only bread and milk to eat. Every
day he was taken down for family prayers and then taken back again, and
during prayers he was made to sit in a corner where he could not even
see his mother's face. He had to sit all day long with nothing to do but
think of Mr. Peggotty's house-boat and of little Em'ly and wish he was
there. The last night Peggotty, his nurse, crept up and whispered
through the keyhole that Mr. Murdstone was going to send him away the
next day to a school near London.

The next morning he started in a carrier's cart. His mother was so much
in awe of Mr. Murdstone that she hardly dared kiss David good-by, and he
saw nothing of Peggotty. But as he was crying, Peggotty came running
from behind a hedge and jumped into the cart and hugged him so hard that
all the buttons flew off the back of her dress.

The man who drove the cart was named Barkis. He seemed to be very much
taken with Peggotty, and after she had gone back David told him all
about her. Before they parted he made David promise to write her a
message for him. It was a very short message--"Barkis is willin'." David
didn't know in the least what the driver meant, but he promised, and he
sent the message in his very first letter.

Probably Peggotty knew what he meant, though, for before David came back
again Mr. Barkis and she were courting. However, that has not much to do
with this part of the story.

The school to which Mr. Murdstone had sent him was a bare building with
gratings on all the windows like a prison, and a high brick wall around
it. It was owned by a man named Creakle, who had begun by raising hops,
and had gone into the school business because he had lost all of his own
and his wife's money and had no other way to live. He was fat and spoke
always in a whisper, and he was so cruel and bad-tempered that not only
the boys, but his wife, too, was terribly afraid of him.

He nearly twisted David's ear off the first day, and he made one of the
teachers tie a placard to David's back (this, he said, was by Mr.
Murdstone's order) which read:

____________________
| |
| TAKE CARE OF HIM |
| HE BITES |
|____________________|

To have to wear this before everybody made David sorrowful and ashamed,
but luckily a good-natured boy named Tommy Traddles, who liked David's
looks, said it was a shame to make him wear it, and as Tommy Traddles
was very popular, all the other boys said it was a shame, too. So,
beyond calling him "Towser" for a few days, and saying "Lie down, sir!"
as if he were a dog, they did not make much fun of him while he wore it.

Besides Tommy Traddles, David liked best the head boy, James
Steerforth--the oldest boy in the school, and the only one Creakle did
not dare beat or mistreat. Steerforth took David under his wing and
helped him with his lessons, while in return David used to tell him
stories from the books he had read.

What with the beatings and tasks, David was glad enough when vacation
time came. But his home-coming was anything but pleasant. He found his
mother with a little baby, and she looked careworn and ill.

Mr. Murdstone, he saw at once, hated him as much as ever, and Miss
Murdstone would not let him even so much as touch his baby brother. He
was forbidden to sit in the kitchen with Peggotty, and when he crept
away to the upper room with the books Mr. Murdstone called him sullen
and obstinate. David was so miserable every day that he was almost glad
to bid his mother good-by, and as he rode away, to look back at her as
she stood there at the gate holding up her baby for David to see.

That was the last picture David carried in his heart of his pretty
mother. One day not long after, he was called from the school-room to
the parlor, and there Mr. Creakle told him that his mother was dead and
that the baby had died, too.

David reached home the next day. Peggotty took him into her arms at the
door and called his mother her "dear, poor pretty," and comforted him,
but he was very sad. It seemed to him that life could never be bright
again.

After the funeral Miss Murdstone discharged Peggotty and, probably not
knowing what else to do with him, let David go with the faithful old
servant down to the old house-boat at Yarmouth, where he had been
visiting when his mother was married to Mr. Murdstone.

The wonderful house on the beach was just the same. Mr. Peggotty and Ham
and Mrs. Gummidge were still there, with everything smelling just as
usual of salt water and lobsters; and little Em'ly was there, too, grown
to be quite a big girl. It seemed, somehow, like coming back to a dear
old quiet home, where nothing changed and where all was restful and
good.

But this happiness was not to last. David had to go home again, and
there it was worse than ever. He was utterly neglected. He was sent to
no school, taught nothing, allowed to make no friends. And at last Mr.
Murdstone, as if he could think of nothing worse, apprenticed him as a
chore boy in a warehouse in London.

The building where David now was compelled to work was on a wharf on the
river bank, and was dirty and dark and overrun with rats. Here he had to
labor hard for bare living wages, among rough boys and rougher men, with
no counselor, hearing their coarse oaths about him, and fearing that one
day he would grow up to be no better than they. He was given a bedroom
in the house of a Mr. Micawber, and this man was, in his way, a friend.

There was never a better-hearted man than Mr. Micawber, but he seemed to
be always unlucky. He had a head as bald as an egg, wore a tall, pointed
collar, and carried for ornament an eye-glass which he never used. He
never had any money, was owing everybody who would lend him any, and was
always, as he said, "waiting for something to turn up." With this
exception David had not a friend in London, and finally Mr. Micawber
himself was put in prison for debt, and his relatives, who paid his
debts to release him, did so on condition that he leave London. So at
length David had not even this one friend.

David bore this friendless and wretched life as long as he could, but at
length he felt that he could stay at the warehouse no longer and made up
his mind to run away.

The only one in the world he could think of who might help him
was--whom do you think? His great-aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood, who had
left his mother's house the night he was born because he did not happen
to be a girl. She was the only real relative he had in the world.

She lived, Peggotty had told him, in Dover, and that was seventy miles
away; but the distance did not daunt him. So one day he put all his
things into a box and hired a boy with a cart to take it to the coach
office. But the boy robbed him of all the money he had (a gold piece
Peggotty had sent him) and drove off with his box besides, and poor
David, crying, set out afoot, without a penny, in the direction he
thought Dover lay.

That evening he sold his waistcoat to a clothes-dealer for a few
pennies, and when night came he slept on the ground, under the walls of
Mr. Creakle's old school where he had known Steerforth and Tommy
Traddles. The next day he offered his jacket for sale to a half-crazy
old store-keeper, who took the coat but would not pay him at first, and
David had to sit all day on the door-step before the other would give
him the money.

The next four nights he slept under haystacks, greatly in fear of
tramps, and at length, on the sixth day, ragged, sunburned, dusty and
almost dead from weariness, he got to Dover.

He had to ask many people before he could find out where Miss Betsy
Trotwood lived. It was outside the town, in a cottage with a little
garden. Here she lived all alone, except for a simple-minded old man,
whom she called Mr. Dick, who was a relative of hers, and who did
nothing all day but fly big kites and write petitions to the king, which
he began every morning and never finished. All the neighbors thought
Miss Betsy Trotwood a most queer old woman, but those who knew her best
knew that she had a very kind heart under her grim appearance.

When David reached the house Miss Betsy was digging at some flowers in
the garden. All she saw was a ragged, dirty little boy, and she called
out, without even turning her head: "Go away; no boys here!"

But David was so wretched that he went right in at the gate and went up
behind her and said: "If you please, aunt, I'm your nephew."

His aunt was so startled at his looks and at what he said, that she sat
down plump on the ground; and David, his misery getting all at once the
better of him, sobbed out all the pitiful tale of his wrongs and sorrows
since his mother had died.

Miss Betsy Trotwood's heart was touched. She seized David by the collar,
led him into the house, made him drink something and then made him lie
down on the sofa while she fed him hot broth. Then she had a warm bath
prepared, and at last, very tired and comfortable, and wrapped up in a
big shawl, David fell asleep on the sofa.

That night he was put to bed in a clean room, and before he slept he
prayed that he might never be homeless and friendless again.

LITTLE EM'LY

Good fortune was with David now. His aunt wrote to Mr. Murdstone, and he
and his sister came, fully expecting to take the boy back with them,
but, instead, Miss Betsy told Mr. Murdstone plainly that he was a
stony-hearted hypocrite, who had broken his wife's heart and tortured
her son, and she ordered him and his sister from the house. David was so
delighted at this that he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her,
and from that moment Miss Betsy Trotwood began to love him as if he had
been her own son.

David loved her in return. He drove out with her and helped Mr. Dick fly
his kites and was very grateful. And at length his aunt placed him in a
school in Dover and found him pleasant lodgings there in the house of
her lawyer, Mr. Wickfield.

It was a different sort of school from what his first had been. His
teacher was a Doctor Strong, and the school-boys were not the
frightened, ill-treated lot he had known at Mr. Creakle's house. He was
happy there, but his happiest hours of all were those spent, after
school was out, at Mr. Wickfield's. The lawyer had an only daughter,
Agnes, just David's age, a sweet, gentle girl, who seemed to live for
her father, and whom David came to consider before long almost as a
sister.

One person connected with the lawyer's household whom he did not like so
well was Uriah Heep. Heep was a high-shouldered, red-headed, bony young
man, with no eyebrows or eyelashes, and with long skeleton fingers. He
dressed all in black, and his hands were clammy and cold, like a fish,
so that it chilled one to touch them. He never smiled--the nearest he
could come to it was to make two creases down his cheeks. He was always
cringing and pretending to be humble, but really he was a sneak and a
scoundrel at heart. David detested him without knowing why, the more so
when he came to see that Heep was gaining an influence over Agnes's
father. All the while, too, Heep pretended to like David, though David
knew very well he did not.

So time went on. David studied hard and was a favorite with both pupils
and teachers. At length he was head boy himself, and at seventeen his
school life was finished.

He parted regretfully from Doctor Strong and from Agnes, and after
paying his aunt, Miss Betsy Trotwood, a visit, he started off to
Yarmouth to see his old nurse, now the wife of Barkis, the driver, and
just as fond of David as ever. On his way through London, as it
happened, David met the old school-fellow whom he had so liked, James
Steerforth, and, loath to part with him so quickly, he proposed that the
latter accompany him to Yarmouth.

Steerforth agreed and they went together. They took dinner at Peggotty's
and spent the first evening in the old house-boat, where Mr. Peggotty
still lived with Ham and Mrs. Gummidge and little Em'ly, the latter now
grown to be a lovely girl and engaged to marry Ham. They spent some
weeks there, each amusing himself in his own way, and soon Steerforth
was as popular as David had always been, for he sang beautifully and
talked entertainingly, and all, from Mr. Peggotty to little Em'ly,
thought they had never seen so brilliant and handsome a lad.

If David could have read the thoughts that were in Steerforth's mind he
would have grieved that he had ever brought him to that peaceful,
innocent spot. For Steerforth had changed since the old school-days when
David had been so fond of him. He had learned wickedness, and now, while
he was exerting himself in every way to make the Peggottys like and
admire him, in his heart he was trying to fascinate little Em'ly and to
steal her love that she had given to Ham, till she would leave her home
and run away with him to a foreign country. This, however, David could
not guess, nor could any of the others, who regretted when the two
friends' visit was over.

Now that his school-days were finished David's aunt had planned for him
to study law in an office in London, and accordingly David began his new
life there, very near the street where he had once toiled, a wretched,
friendless helper, in the dirty warehouse on the dock. He found Tommy
Traddles, who had stood his friend at Mr. Creakle's school, studying now
to be a lawyer also, and boarding, curiously enough, at the house of Mr.
Micawber, who had drifted back to London, still as poor and as hopeful
as ever and still "waiting for something to turn up."

In spite of these and all his new acquaintances, David was very lonely
at first and missed Agnes, who all through his life at Doctor Strong's
school had been his friend and adviser.

He saw her once when she was visiting in London, and then she had bad
news to tell him; her father had been steadily failing in health and
business, and little by little Uriah Heep, his red-headed clerk with the
clammy hands, had got him and his affairs into his power and made
himself a partner in the firm. David guessed that Heep had planned to
entrap her father so as to compel Agnes herself to marry him, and this
suspicion made David despise the clerk more and more. But he knew of no
way to help.

All this time he often saw Steerforth, but never guessed how often the
latter had been secretly to see little Em'ly or of the wicked part he
was playing. But one day David heard that Barkis, Peggotty's husband
(whose early courtship he himself had aided when he took her the message
"Barkis is willin'") had died, and David went at once to Yarmouth to try
to comfort his old nurse in her loss.

While he was there the blow came which caused such sorrow to all who
lived in the old house-boat. Little Em'ly, the pride and joy of Mr.
Peggotty's tender heart, ran away with Steerforth.

She left a letter, begging them to forgive her, especially her uncle,
Mr. Peggotty--and bidding them all good-by. It broke Mr. Peggotty's
heart, and Ham's, too. And David was scarcely less sorrowful. Because,
for what he had done, Steerforth, whose friendship had been so much to
him, could never be his friend again.

But nothing could change Mr. Peggotty's love for little Em'ly. He
determined to start out and search throughout the world for her; and,
meantime, Ham and Mrs. Gummidge were to stay there in the old home, to
keep it looking just the same, with a lighted candle in the window every
night, so that if little Em'ly by any chance came back it would be
bright and warm to welcome her. Mr. Peggotty's parting words to David
were:

"I'm a-going to seek her far and wide. If any hurt should come to me,
remember that the last word I left for her was, 'My unchanged love is
with my darling child, and I forgive her.'"

III

DAVID AND HIS CHILD-WIFE

Though Agnes always held a large place in his heart, David was very
impressionable. In the next few years he thought himself in love a good
many times, but when finally he met Dora Spenlow, the daughter of one of
the members of the law firm with which he was studying, he knew that all
his other love-affairs had been only fancies. Dora was blue-eyed, with
cheeks like a pink sea-shell, and looked like a fairy. David fell head
over ears in love with her the first time he ever saw her. He lost his
appetite, and took to wearing tight gloves and shoes too small for him,
and he used to put on his best clothes and walk around her house in the
moonlight and do other extravagant things.

They found a good deal of trouble in their love-making, for Dora was
under the care of none other than the terrible sister of Mr. Murdstone,
who had made David so miserable in his childhood, but he and Dora used
to meet sometimes, and they sent each other letters through one of
Dora's girl friends. David, perhaps, would not have done this if he had
thought he would have a fair chance to win Dora; but with his old enemy,
Miss Murdstone, against him, he was afraid to tell her father of his
love. But one day he told it to Dora, and she promised to marry him.

Good luck, however, never comes without a bit of bad luck. Soon after
this David came home to his rooms one night to find his aunt, Miss Betsy
Trotwood, there, with her trunk and Mr. Dick, kites and all. She told
David she had no other place to go; that she had lost all of her money
and was quite ruined.

This was misfortune indeed, for it seemed to put his hope of marrying
Dora a great deal further away; but David faced the situation bravely
and began at once to look for something to do outside of the law office
to earn money enough to support them all.

In this trouble Agnes was his true friend. He had written her already of
his love for Dora and she had advised him. Through her now he found
employment as secretary to his old schoolmaster, Doctor Strong, who had
given up the school at Dover and had moved to London. He told Dora, of
course, all about his changed prospects, but Dora was like a little
butterfly who knew only how to fly about among flowers; she hardly knew
what poverty meant, and thought he was scolding when he told her.

David worked hard in the morning at Doctor Strong's, in the afternoons
at the law office, and in the evenings he studied shorthand so he might
come to be a newspaper reporter. And all this while he wrote to Dora
every day.

It was one of these letters that at last betrayed their secret. Dora
dropped it from her pocket and Miss Murdstone picked it up. She showed
it to Dora's father and he sent at once for David and told him angrily
that he could never marry his child and that he must not see Dora any
more. And David went home disconsolate.

This might have ended their engagement for ever, but that same day
Dora's father dropped dead of heart-disease. Instead of being rich he
was found to have left no money at all, and Dora was taken to live with
two aunts on the outskirts of London. David did not know what was best
to do now, so he went to Dover to ask Agnes's advice.

He was shocked at the changes he found there. Her father looked ill and
scarcely seemed himself. Uriah Heep, his new partner, with his ugly,
fawning way and clammy hands, was living in their house and eating with
them at their table. He had obtained more and more power over Mr.
Wickfield and gloried in it. And the other seemed no longer to dare to
oppose Uriah in anything.

But in spite of all this, Agnes talked bravely and cheerfully with
David. Under her direction, he wrote a letter to Dora's aunts, declaring
his love and asking permission to call, and they, pleased with his
frankness, gave their permission. Before the year was out David began to
earn money with his shorthand, reporting speeches in Parliament for a
newspaper. He had discovered besides that he could write stories that
the magazines were glad to buy. So one day David married Dora and they
went to housekeeping in a tiny house of their own.

Life seemed very sweet to them both, though Dora, while she was the most
loving little wife in the world, knew no more about housekeeping than a
bird. The servants stole the silver spoons, and the storekeepers
overcharged them, and the house was never tidy or comfortable. For a
while David tried to make Dora learn these things, but when he chid her
the tears would come, and she would throw her arms around his neck and
sob that she was only his child-wife after all, and he would end by
kissing her and telling her not to mind. She was most like a beautiful
toy; and like a toy, she seemed made only to play with, just as she
played with her dog Jip, instead of helping and encouraging David in his
work.

But at length Dora fell ill--so ill that they knew she was too frail and
weak to get well and strong again. David carried her down stairs every
day, and every day the burden grew lighter. She never complained, but
called him her poor, dear boy, and one day she whispered that she was
only his child-wife and could never have been more, so that it was
better as it was!

Agnes came, and was there when Dora died. But for her comfort all the
world would have been blank for poor David as he sat alone, longing for
the child-wife who could never be his again!

DAVID FINDS ALL WELL AT LAST

More than once during this life of David's with his child-wife he had
seen Mr. Peggotty. The brave old man had searched Europe for little
Em'ly in vain; then he had come back to London, feeling somehow that
some day she would stray there. He used to walk the streets by night,
looking at every face he passed. In the room where he lived he kept a
candle always lighted and one of her dresses hanging on a chair for her.

After Dora's death David joined in the search, and at length they did
find poor little Em'ly. Steerforth had treated her cruelly and finally
deserted her, and she had crept back to London heartbroken and
repentant, hoping for nothing but to die within sight of those who had
loved her so.

But nothing had dimmed Mr. Peggotty's love. Wretched as she was, he
caught her in his arms, held her to his breast as he had done so often
when she was a child, and told her she was still his own little Em'ly,
just as she had always been.

She was ill, but he nursed her back to health. Then he went to Yarmouth
to fetch Mrs. Gummidge, and they and the little Em'ly that had been
found took passage for Australia, where they might forget the dark past
and find happiness in a new life.

But before they sailed fate had brought to naught the villainous plot
that had been woven by Uriah Heep about Agnes and her father. And the
one whom they had most to thank for this was Mr. Micawber.

Heep had met Mr. Micawber once, when the latter, as usual, was in money
difficulties, and, thinking to make a tool of him, had hired him for his
clerk. Little by little Heep had then got the other into his debt, till
Mr. Micawber saw no prospect before him but the debtors' prison.

Threatening him with this, Heep tried to compel him to do various bits
of dirty and dishonest work, at which the other's soul revolted until at
length he made up his mind to expose his employer. So, pretending
obedience, Mr. Micawber wormed himself into all of the sneaking Heep's
affairs, found out the evidence of his guilt, and finally taking all the
books and papers from the office safe, sent for David and his friend
Tommy Traddles and told them all he had discovered. They found it was by
forgery that Heep had got Agnes's father into his power in the first
place, and that among others whom he had robbed was David's aunt, Miss
Betsy Trotwood, whose fortune he had stolen.

David and Tommy Traddles sent for Miss Betsy and for Agnes and her
father, and they faced Uriah all together. He tried to brazen it out,
but when he saw the empty safe he knew that all was known. They told
him the only way he could save himself from prison was by giving back
the business to Agnes's father, just as it had been years before, when
David had lived there, and by restoring to Miss Betsy Trotwood every
cent he had robbed her of. This he did with no very good grace and with
an especial curse for David, whom he seemed to blame for it all.

In reward for Mr. Micawber's good services, Miss Betsy and Agnes's
father paid off all his debts and gave him money enough to take him and
his family to Australia. They sailed in the same vessel that carried Mr.
Peggotty and little Em'ly.

Before it sailed little Em'ly had written a letter to Ham, whose
promised wife she had been before she ran away with Steerforth, begging
his forgiveness, and this letter she had asked David to give him after
they had gone. Accordingly one day he went to Yarmouth to do this.

That night a terrible storm arose. The wind was so strong that it
uprooted trees and threw down chimneys and rolled waves mountain high on
the sand where stood the old deserted house-boat of the Peggottys. Next
morning David was awakened with the news that a Spanish ship had gone
ashore and was fast going to pieces, and he ran to the beach, where all
the town was gathered.

He could see the doomed vessel plainly where the surf broke over her.
Her masts had snapped short off and at every wave she rolled and beat
the sand as if she would pound herself to fragments. Several figures
were clinging to the broken masts, and one by one the waves beat them
off, and they went down for ever.

At length but one was left, and he held on so long that a shout of
encouragement went up from the throng. At this Ham, the bravest and
strongest of all the hardy boatmen there, tied a rope about his waist
and plunged into the sea to try to save him. But it was not to be. The
same huge wave that dashed the vessel to pieces threw the rescuer back
on the sand, dead. The body of the man he had tried to save was washed
ashore, too, and it was that of James Steerforth, who had so wronged
little Em'ly!

So poor, great-souled Ham died, honest and faithful to the last, giving
his life for the man who had injured him. And so, too, James Steerforth
met his fate on the very spot where he had done such evil, for his
corpse was found among the fragments of the old Peggotty house-boat,
which the tempest tore down that night.

After this David went abroad and stayed three years. He lived in
Switzerland, and wrote novels that were printed in London and made him
famous there.

And now, alone, he had time to think of all that made up his past. He
thought of Dora, his child-wife, and sorrowed for her, and of the
Peggottys and little Em'ly; but most of all he found himself thinking
of Agnes, who, throughout his youth, had seemed like his guiding star.

So one day he went back to England and told her, and asked her if she
would marry him. And with her sweet face on his breast she whispered
that she had loved him all her life!

David and Agnes lived long and happily, and their children had three
guardians who loved them all--Miss Betsy Trotwood, David's old nurse,
Peggotty, and white-haired Mr. Dick, who taught them to fly kites and
thought them the greatest children in the world. Tommy Traddles, when he
had become a famous lawyer, often visited them, and once, too, Mr.
Peggotty, older, but still hale and strong, came back from Australia to
tell them how he had prospered and grown rich, and had always his little
Em'ly beside him, and how Mr. Micawber had ceased to owe everybody money
and had become a magistrate, and many other things.

David had one thing, however, to tell Mr. Peggotty, and that was of a
certain prisoner he had seen in one of the country's greatest prisons,
sentenced for life for an attempt to rob the Bank of England, and whose
name was--Uriah Heep.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Published 1860-1861

_Scene_: London, Neighboring Towns and the Country

_Time_: 1830 to 1860

CHARACTERS

Philip Pirrip An orphan boy
Known as "Pip"

Joe Gargery A blacksmith

"Mrs. Joe" His wife
Pip's sister

Uncle Pumblechook Joe's pompous uncle

Wopsle Clerk of the village church
Later, an actor

Orlick A workman of Joe's

Biddy A girl friend of Pip's and Mrs. Joe's nurse
Later, Joe's wife

Abel Magwitch A convict

Miss Havisham An eccentric woman once disappointed
in love

Estella Her ward
In reality, Magwitch's daughter

Compeyson Miss Havisham's former suitor and deceiver
A convict

Mr. Jaggers Lawyer for Miss Havisham and
for Magwitch

Wemmick His clerk

Mr. Pocket Pip's tutor

Mrs. Pocket His wife

Herbert Pocket His son. Pip's comrade in London

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

PIP AND THE CONVICT

In England, in a lonely village not far from London, there once lived a
little orphan boy named Philip Pirrip, whom everybody called, for short,
"Pip." His parents had died when he was a baby, and he had been brought
up by his older sister, the wife of Joe Gargery, a blacksmith whose
forge looked out across wide marshes and a river that flowed through
them.

Joe, the blacksmith, was a fair-faced man with flaxen whiskers and very
bright blue eyes. He was a mild, honest, good-natured, sweet-tempered,
easy-going, foolish, dear fellow, tender-hearted and kind to little Pip
and yet a Hercules for strength.

Very different, indeed, was "Mrs. Joe," as everybody spoke of her. She
was tall and bony and had black hair, a red skin and a continual habit
of scolding. She may have loved Pip in her way, but that way was a very
cross-grained one. She treated Joe, the big blacksmith, and Pip, the
little boy, just alike, and they were both equally in dread of her. This
made them quite like partners. Whenever Pip came into the house he used
to look at Joe's fingers; if Joe crossed them that was a sign Mrs. Joe
was cross and that Pip was to look out for himself.

Joe had an uncle named Pumblechook, who was a corn seller in the next
town and a pompous old hypocrite. He had a way of standing Pip before
him, rumpling up his hair and asking him hard questions out of the
multiplication table. And whenever he told a story of any one who was
ungrateful or wicked he would glower at Pip in a way that made him feel
very uncomfortable.

Another who came as often and was almost as dismal to see was Wopsle,
the clerk, who read the lesson in church every Sunday. He had an idea he
would make a great actor and used to recite whole pages from Shakespeare
when he could find any one to listen to him.

Worst of all was a workman of Joe's named Orlick. He was a loose-limbed,
swarthy, slouching giant with a hangdog look. He used to tell Pip that
the devil lived in a certain corner of the forge, and once in every
seven years the fire had to be rekindled with a live boy. Orlick at
heart disliked everybody--especially harmless little Pip--and often
quarreled with Mrs. Joe.

Beside the blacksmith, the only one who understood Pip was a little girl
named Biddy, about his own age and an orphan, too. She liked him and
used to help him with his lessons at school.

But in spite of Joe and Biddy, Pip was sometimes so lonely and miserable
that he would steal off alone to the village churchyard, where his
father and mother lay buried, to cry.

One afternoon--it was the day before Christmas--Pip was more wretched
than usual, and was sitting crying among the graves when suddenly a
rough voice spoke behind him. "Keep still, you little imp!" it said, "or
I'll cut your throat!" With the words a man rose up from behind a
tombstone and seized him.

He was a fearful-looking man, dressed all in gray clothes, with a great
iron band riveted on his leg. His shoes were torn, he had no hat and
wore a ragged, dirty handkerchief tied around his head. He was soaked
with water, caked with mud and limped and shivered as he walked. He set
Pip on a tombstone and tilted him so far back that the church steeple
seemed to turn a somersault, growling at him in a terrible voice.

Pip had never been so frightened in his life. With a trembling voice he
begged his captor to spare him. The man asked him his name and where he
lived, and told him he would let him go on one condition. He had to
promise to come next morning at daybreak to a certain spot in the
marshes and to bring a file and something to eat. And the man said if
Pip did not do so, or if he told any one what he was going to do, he
would catch him again and cut out his heart and eat it.

This terrible threat frightened poor little Pip more than ever. His
voice shook so that he could hardly promise, and when the man set him
down he ran home as fast as his legs would carry him.

The evening was a miserable one. Pip thought he would save his own
supper for the man in case he should not be able to get into his
sister's pantry, so instead of eating his bread and butter he slipped it
down his trouser-leg.

Before long a great gun began to boom, and he asked Joe what it was. The
blacksmith told him that in the river across the marshes were anchored
some big hulks of ships, like wicked Noah's arks, where convicts were
kept prisoners, and that the gun was a signal that some of these
convicts had escaped. Then Pip knew the man he had promised to help was
a criminal--perhaps a murderer--who had got away and was hiding from the
soldiers.

All night he did not sleep. He hated to steal the food, but he felt
certain he would be killed if he did not. So at dawn he slipped down
stairs, got a file from the forge, unlocked the pantry, took some bread
and cheese and a pork pie that Uncle Pumblechook had sent for Christmas
dinner, and ran out through the foggy morning to the marshes.

He had not got quite there when he came on a man in gray, sitting on the
ground, with an iron fetter on his leg. Pip thought he was the one he
was in search of, but as soon as the other turned his face he saw by a
bruise on the cheek that he was not. This second man in gray, as soon
as he saw him, sprang to his feet and ran away.

Greatly wondering, Pip went on, and at the right spot he found the man
who had frightened him in the graveyard. He seemed now to be almost
starved, for he snatched the food and ate it like a hungry dog. He asked
Pip if he had seen any one else on his way there, and Pip told him of
the other man in gray who also wore an iron on his leg.

He asked Pip to describe the other, and when Pip told of the bruised
cheek, the man he was feeding flew into a rage. He began to curse, and,
seizing the file, set to filing like mad at his fetter. Pip could see
that he hated the other convict, and was sorry he had escaped; but he
had fulfilled his promise now, so he turned and ran home again, and the
last thing he heard was the rasp of the file as the man worked madly at
the iron.

Very guilty Pip felt all that Christmas morning. He went to church with
Joe, and after service Uncle Pumblechook, Wopsle, the clerk, and other
company came to dinner. He could not enjoy the good things to eat, for
he knew now his sister must discover that the pork pie was gone. Just as
she went to get it he got up from the table to run away, but as he
opened the door he ran plump into a file of soldiers.

He was sure at first they had come to arrest him for helping the
convict, but he was soon relieved, when the officer at their head
explained that they were on their way to search the marshes for the
escaped men and wanted the blacksmith to mend a broken handcuff.

In the flurry of their arrival the pork pie was forgotten, while Joe
mended the handcuff in the forge. When the soldiers left, the blacksmith
set Pip on his broad shoulder, and he and Wopsle went striding with them
to see the result of the hunt.

It was sunset as the party entered the marshes, and the searchers opened
out into a wide line. On a sudden all stopped, for a confused shouting
had come from the distance. They ran toward it, cocking their guns, and
Wopsle and Joe, with Pip on his shoulder, followed. The shouts became
plainer and plainer. All at once they came to a ditch and in it the
convict Pip had fed and the one with the bruised cheek were struggling
fiercely together.

The soldiers seized and handcuffed them both, the man with the bruised
cheek pale and trembling, the other boasting that he had dragged the man
he hated back to captivity, even though it cost him his own freedom.

While the soldiers were preparing to take their prisoners back, Pip's
convict saw the boy standing there with Joe. Pip hoped he would not
think he had had anything to do with bringing the soldiers. He was
pretty sure the man did not, because he presently told the officer, in
every one's hearing, that the night before he had broken into a house
where a blacksmith lived, near a church, and had stolen a pork pie. Joe
heard this and so Pip knew that he himself would be clear of any blame.

The convicts were taken back to their cells and Joe and Pip went home to
tell the company of their adventure. But neither then nor ever afterward
did Pip find courage to tell Joe the part he had played; for Pip loved
the honest blacksmith and did not want him to think him worse than he
really was.

Time went on and Pip grew older and bigger, and though he never forgot
the adventure of the churchyard, yet the memory of it grew dimmer. In
the next few years only one thing happened to recall it to him.

One evening Mrs. Joe sent Pip to the village inn, The Three Jolly
Bargemen, with a message. Pip found Joe there, sitting with a
stranger--a secret-looking man, who held his head on one side and kept
one eye perpetually shut as if he were taking aim with a gun. This man,
when he heard Pip's name, looked at him with a curious wink, and when no
one but Pip was looking he took out of his pocket, to stir his drink
with, the very file Pip had stolen from Joe's forge.

Pip knew that minute that the man was a friend of the convict he had
aided. When Pip left the inn the stranger called him back and gave him a
shilling wrapped up in a piece of paper.

When he got home Mrs. Joe (who took the prize away from him) discovered
that the piece of paper was in reality two bank-notes, and both Joe and
she wondered at it. The blacksmith tried next day to find the stranger
to restore the money, but he had left the inn.

So it always remained a mystery--to all but Pip of course, who knew in
his heart that the convict had remembered his aid and had taken this
means of repaying him.

THE QUEER MISS HAVISHAM

One day, when Pip was considerably older, Uncle Pumblechook brought Mrs.
Joe word that a Miss Havisham, a lady who lived in his own town, had
heard of Pip, and wanted him to come to her house to see her.

Miss Havisham was a very queer lady, indeed; so queer that some said she
was crazy. But she was rich, and for this reason Mrs. Joe scrubbed Pip
and dressed him in his best clothes and sent him off in care of Uncle
Pumblechook, who took him as far as Miss Havisham's gate.

Miss Havisham, when a beautiful young lady, had been engaged to marry a
man named Compeyson, whom she loved very much. He was a wicked,
heartless villain, however, and had made her love him only that he might
persuade her to give him great sums of money.

The marriage day finally was fixed, her wedding-clothes were bought, the
house was decorated for the ceremony, the bride-cake was put on the
table in the dining-room and the guests arrived. But Compeyson, the
bridegroom, did not come.

Miss Havisham was dressing for the wedding when she received a cruel
note from him telling her he did not intend to marry her. She had put on
her white wedding gown and her lace veil and one of her satin
slippers--the other lay on the dressing-table. It was exactly twenty
minutes to nine o'clock when she read the note.

She fainted and afterward lay for a long time ill. When she recovered
she laid the whole place waste. She never afterward let the light of day
into the old mansion. The shutters were closed, candles were kept always
lighted, and all the clocks in the house were stopped at exactly twenty
minutes to nine o'clock. Not a thing in any room was changed. The
bride-cake rotted on the table, the decorations faded on the walls, and
day after day Miss Havisham sat in the dressing-room clad in her wedding
gown and veil, with one slipper on, the dead flowers on her table and
the trunks for her wedding journey scattered about half-packed. In time
she became shrunken and old and the white satin and lace became faded
yellow, but she never varied this habit of life.

Soon after her love disappointment she had written to her lawyer in
London, who was named Jaggers, asking him to find a baby girl for her
to adopt as her own. Now Mr. Jaggers had just defended in court a man
named Abel Magwitch, the tool of Compeyson, who had broken Miss
Havisham's heart. Compeyson had tempted Magwitch into passing some
stolen money and they had both been arrested. At the trial Compeyson
(sneak and liar as he was!) threw all the blame on his comrade, who was
duller and less sharp than he, and as a consequence, while Compeyson got
a light sentence, Magwitch, though really the more innocent of the two,
had been sent to the prison-ship for a term of many years. These two
men, by the way, were the pair who escaped from the hulks into the
marshes. Magwitch was Pip's convict of the churchyard, and Compeyson was
the one he had dragged back to capture. This Magwitch, at the time of
his arrest, had a baby daughter, who had fallen into Mr. Jaggers's care,
and in answer to Miss Havisham's request the lawyer had sent the little
girl to her, telling her nothing whatever of the child's parentage.

Miss Havisham had named the child Estella, and, seeing she would be a
very beautiful woman, had determined to bring her up heartless and cold,
to ruin as many men's lives as possible, so as to avenge her own wrongs
and broken heart.

So Estella had grown up in the dismal house, Miss Havisham's only
companion. Day by day she became more lovely, and even while she was
still a little girl, the same age as Pip, Miss Havisham was impatient
to begin teaching her her lesson.

This was the reason Pip had received his invitation to Miss Havisham's
house. Though he had no idea of it, he was intended only as practice for
little Estella, who under Miss Havisham's teaching was growing up very
fond of admiration and very cold-hearted, too.

Pip thought Miss Havisham the strangest lady he had ever seen, and the
yellow satin, the candle-lighted rooms, and the stopped clocks seemed to
him very odd. But Estella was so pretty that from the first moment he
saw her he had no eyes for anything else. Even though she called him
clumsy and common, and seemed to delight in hurting his feelings, Pip
fell in love with her and could not help himself. Miss Havisham made
them play together and told him to come again the next week.

Pip went home in very bad humor on account of all the hurts which
Estella had given his feelings. Uncle Pumblechook, being very curious to
know all about his trip, bullied and questioned him so (beginning as
usual with the multiplication table) that Pip, perfectly frantic, told
him the most impossible tales. He said Miss Havisham was in a black
coach inside the house, and had cake and wine handed to her through the
coach window on a golden plate, and that he and she played with flags
and swords, while four dogs fought for veal cutlets out of a silver
basket.

But when Uncle Pumblechook told Joe these wonders, Pip was remorseful.
He went to the forge and confessed to Joe that he had been telling a
falsehood, and promised he would never do so again.

This visit was the first of many that Pip paid to the gloomy house whose
shutters were always closed. Next time he went he was taken into the
chamber where the decayed wedding-cake sat on the table. The room was
full of relatives of Miss Havisham (for it was her birthday), who spent
their lives flattering and cringing, hoping when she died she would
leave them some money.

After a time Pip went into the garden and there he met another relative
in the person of a pale young gentleman about his own age, but larger,
who promptly lowered his head, butted Pip in the stomach and invited him
to fight. Pip was so sure nobody else's head belonged in the pit of his
stomach that he obliged him at once, and as practice at the forge had
made him tough, it was not many minutes before the pale young gentleman
was lying on his back, looking up at him out of an exceedingly black eye
and with a bleeding countenance.

When Estella let Pip out of the gate that day he guessed that she had
seen the encounter and that somehow it had pleased her, for she gave him
her cheek to kiss. Yet he knew that at heart she thought him only a
coarse, common boy, fit to be treated rudely and insolently. This
thought rankled more and more in him. He made up his mind to study and
learn, and he got faithful little Biddy to teach him all she knew.

Pip saw no more of the pale young gentleman, though for almost a year he
went to Miss Havisham's every other day. Each time he saw Estella and
found himself loving her more and more. But she was always unkind, and
often, when she had been ruder than usual, he saw that Miss Havisham
seemed to take delight in his mortification. Sometimes she would fondle
Estella's hand, and he would hear her say:

"That's right! Break their hearts, my pride and hope! Break their hearts
and have no mercy!"

One day Miss Havisham sent for Joe, the blacksmith, and gave him a bag
of money, telling him that he was not to send Pip to her any more, but
that he should put him to work and teach him the trade of blacksmithing.
So Uncle Pumblechook took Pip to town that very day and had him bound to
Joe as an apprentice.

This was just what Pip had once looked forward to with pleasure. But now
it made him wretched. Through Estella's jeers he had come to feel that
blacksmithing was common and low. As he helped Joe to blow the forge
fire, he thought constantly of Estella's looks of disdain, yet in spite
of all he longed to see her.

On his first half-holiday he went to call on Miss Havisham. But there
was no Estella. Miss Havisham told him she had sent her abroad to be
educated as a lady, and when the miserable tears sprang to Pip's eyes,
she laughed.

When he got home he confided in Biddy. He told her how he loved Estella,
and that he wanted more than anything else in the world to be a
gentleman. Meanwhile he began to study hard in any spare time he had,
and Biddy helped him all she could.

Pip might have fallen in love with Biddy if he had not had Estella
always in his mind. Orlick, Joe's helper, indeed, thought he had done
so, and it made him hate Pip more than ever, for he was in love with
Biddy himself. He grew morose and quarrelsome and spoke so roughly to
Mrs. Joe one day that she was not satisfied till the blacksmith took off
his singed apron and knocked the surly Orlick flat in the coal dust.

This was a costly revenge for Mrs. Joe, however. Orlick never forgave
it, and a few nights after, when no one was at home but herself he crept
in behind her in the kitchen and struck her a terrible blow on the head
with a piece of iron.

Hours afterward Joe found her lying senseless, and though she lived to
recover a part of her senses, she never scolded or spoke again. She grew
well enough at last to sit all day in her chair, but was so helpless
that Biddy came to the house to be her nurse. It chanced that a prisoner
had escaped from the prison-boats on the night Mrs. Joe was injured,
and he was thought to be the one who attacked her. But Pip suspected
Orlick all the while.

So time went on. Once a year, on his birthday, Pip went to see Miss
Havisham, but he never saw Estella there. And nothing else of particular
importance occurred till he had been for four years Joe's apprentice.

One night, as Pip sat with Joe before the fire in The Three Jolly
Bargemen, they were called out by a gentleman whom Pip remembered to
have seen once at Miss Havisham's. It was, as a matter of fact, Mr.
Jaggers, her lawyer, who had sent Estella to her as a baby.

The lawyer walked home with them, for he had a wonderful piece of news
to relate. It was that an unknown benefactor, whose name he was not
permitted to tell, intended when he died to leave Pip a fortune. In the
meantime he wished to have him educated to become a gentleman, and as a
lad of Great Expectations, and, the better to accomplish this, he wished
Pip to go without delay to London.

This great good fortune seemed so marvelous that Pip could hardly
believe it. He had never imagined Miss Havisham intended to befriend
him, but now he guessed at once that she was this unknown benefactor.
And he jumped next to another conclusion even more splendid--that she
intended him sometime to marry Estella and was even then educating her
for him. Pip went home almost in a dream, too full of his own prospects
to see how sad Biddy was beneath her gladness for him, or how sorrowful
the good news made Joe.

That night Estella's face came before him, more full of disdain than
ever. As he thought of her and of the fine gentleman he was to be, the
humble kitchen and forge seemed to grow commoner and meaner by contrast.
He began to become a little spoiled and disdainful himself.

The news soon spread about, and every one who had looked down upon Pip
now gave him smiles and flattery. Uncle Pumblechook wept on his shoulder
and (instead of telling him, as usual, that he was sure to come to a bad
end) reminded him that he had always been his favorite.

Mr. Jaggers had given Pip a generous amount of money to buy new clothes
with, and these tended to make him more spoiled than ever. He began to
feel condescending toward Biddy, and found himself wondering whether,
when he should be rich and educated, Joe's manners would not make him
blush if they should meet.

And even when the day came for him to bid them good-by and he climbed
aboard the coach for London, he thought more of these things and his own
good luck than of the home he was parting from for ever, or of the true
and loving hearts he was leaving behind him.

This was an ignoble beginning for Pip and one that he came afterward to
remember with shame!

III

PIP DISCOVERS HIS BENEFACTOR

Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer in whose care Pip found himself in London, was
sharp and secret, and was so feared by criminals that they would never
go near his house, though he never locked his door, even at night.

He had a crusty clerk named Wemmick, as secret as he and a deal queerer.
Wemmick lived in a little wooden cottage that he called The Castle, and
which had its top cut out like a fort. It had a ditch all around it with
a plank drawbridge. When he got home from the office in the evening he
pulled up the drawbridge and ran up a flag on a flagstaff planted there.
And exactly at nine every night he fired off a brass cannon that he kept
in a latticework fortress beside it.

Wemmick was the first one Pip met in London, and the clerk took him to
the rooms where Mr. Jaggers had arranged for Pip to live, with the son
of a gentleman who was to be his teacher. This gentleman was a Mr.
Pocket, a relative (as Pip discovered) of Miss Havisham, which fact made
him all the more certain that she was his unknown friend. Mr. Pocket's
son was named Herbert, and the minute he and Pip first saw each other
they burst out laughing. For Herbert was none other than the pale young
gentleman who, years before in Miss Havisham's garden, Pip had last
seen looking up at him out of a very black eye.

They were excellent friends from that hour. They occupied the rooms
together when they were in London, and Pip also had a room of his own at
Mr. Pocket's house in the country.

Mr. Pocket was a helpless scholarly man who depended on Mrs. Pocket to
manage everything, and she depended on the servants. There were seven
little Pockets of various ages tumbling about the house, and Mrs.
Pocket's only idea of management seemed to be to send them all to bed
when any one of them was troublesome. At such times Mr. Pocket would
groan, put his hands in his hair, lift himself several inches out of his
chair and then let himself down again.

In spite of his oddities, however, Mr. Pocket was an excellent teacher,
and Pip in some ways made progress. But his Great Expectations taught
him bad habits. He found it so easy to spend money that he soon
overstepped the allowance Mr. Jaggers had told him was his, and not only
had got into debt himself, but had led Herbert, who was far poorer, into
debt also.

Joe came to see him only once, and then Pip's spoiled eyes overlooked
his true, rugged manliness and noted more clearly his awkward manners
and halting speech. Joe was quick to see this difference in the Pip he
had known and he did not stay long--only long enough to leave a message
from Miss Havisham: that Estella had returned from abroad and would be
glad to see him if he came.

Pip lost no time in making this visit, and started the very next day.
The old house looked just the same, but a new servant opened the gate
for him: it was Orlick, as low-browed and sullen and surly as ever, and
Pip saw at the first glance that his old hatred was still smoldering.

Miss Havisham was in her room, dressed in the same worn wedding dress,
and beside her, with diamonds on her neck and hair, sat Estella. Pip
hardly knew her, she had grown so beautiful. But she was proud and
wilful as of old, and though he felt the old love growing stronger every
moment, he felt no nearer to her than in those past wretched days of his
boyhood. Before he left, Miss Havisham asked him eagerly if Estella was
not more lovely, and, as he sat by her alone, she drew his head close to
her lips and whispered fiercely:

"Love her, love her, love her! If she favors you, love her! If she tears
your heart to pieces, love her, love her, love her!"

Though this visit took him so near the old forge, Pip did not go to see
Joe and Biddy. Indeed, only once in the months that followed did he see
them--when he went to attend the funeral of Mrs. Joe.

After that he had no need to leave the city to see Estella, for Miss
Havisham soon sent her to live in London. From there she required her to
write letters weekly, telling how many men she had fascinated and made
wretched. Pip saw her constantly and tortured himself with the growing
belief that Miss Havisham's training (the purpose of which he had begun
to guess) was really succeeding in crushing her heart, and was leaving
her with no power to love any one.

Thus, between hope and despair, Pip became of age. Mr. Jaggers now told
him that a certain large sum was his to spend each year. He was deeply
in debt and a great part of his first year's portion went to pay his
creditors. But with the remainder he did a good and unselfish deed: he
bought secretly a share in a good business for Herbert, so that his
comrade became a partner in it.

A great blow was now to fall upon Pip without warning--something that
changed the whole course of his life. One rainy night, when Herbert was
away from London, as he sat alone in their rooms, a heavy step stumbled
up the stair and a man entered. He was coarse and rough-looking and
tanned with exposure, with a furrowed bald head, tufted at the sides
with gray hair.

There was something strangely familiar to Pip in his face, but at first
he did not recognize him. Seeing this, the stranger threw down his hat,
twisted a handkerchief around his head, took a file from his pocket and
walked across the room with a curious shivering gait that brought back
to Pip's mind, like a lightning flash, the scene in the churchyard so
many years ago, when he had sat perched on a tombstone looking in
terror at that same man's face. And he knew all at once that the man was
the escaped convict of that day!

It was a strange tale the new-comer told then, one that Pip's heart sank
to hear. Miss Havisham had not been his benefactor after all. The one
whose money had educated him, had set him there in London to live the
life of a gentleman, the one to whom he was indebted for every penny he
owned, was Abel Magwitch, a criminal--the convict for whom he had once
stolen food years before!

Pip sank into a chair trembling as Magwitch, in a hoarse voice, told his
story. He told how the man Compeyson had led him into crime and then
deserted him. How he had hated the other so fiercely that after they
both had escaped from the prison-hulks he had dragged Compeyson back to
imprisonment even at the loss of his own liberty. How for that attempt
to escape he had been sentenced to transportation for life, and had been
sent to Botany Bay in Australia, where in time he became in a measure
free, though forbidden under penalty of death to return to England. How
he had never forgotten the little Pip who had tried to aid him, and how
he had sworn that he would repay him many times over. How he had taken
to sheep-raising and prospered, and became a rich man. How he had
written to Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer who had defended him, and paid him to
find Pip and educate him. And how at last he had dared even the death
penalty to come to England to see how he fared.

His voice shook as he told how he had slaved through all the years,
looking forward only to this moment when he should come back to see the
little Pip whom he had made into a gentleman.

Poor Pip! It was an end to all his dreams of Miss Havisham and of
Estella. He shrank from Magwitch, horrified at the bare thought of what
he owed to him. He forced himself to utter some trembling words and set
food b

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