Snippets from Dickens

From Little Dorrit

The debtors in the Marshalsea prison had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out

Time will show us, the post of honour and the post of shame. The general’s station and the drummer's. The peer’s statue in Westminster Abbey and the seaman’s hammock at the bottom of the deep. The mitre and the workhouse, the woolsack and the gallows, the throne and the guillotine. The travellers to all are on the Great High Road. But it has wonderful divergences and only time will show us whither each traveller is bound.

His brother Frederick of the dim eye, palsied hand, bent form, and groping mind, submissively shuffled at his side, accepting his patronage as he accepted every incident of the labyrinthian world in which he had got lost. 

Bishop, mentally perambulating among paths of peace, was altogether swallowed up in absence of mind.

Mrs General had no opinions. Her way of forming a mind was to prevent it from forming opinions. She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere. Even her propriety could not dispute that there was impropriety in the world; but Mrs General’s way of getting rid of it was to put it out of sight, and make believe that there was no such thing. This was another of her ways of forming a mind—to cram all articles of difficulty into cupboards, lock them up, and say they had no existence. It was the easiest way, and, beyond all comparison, the properest.

Mrs General was not to be told of anything shocking. Accidents, miseries, and offences, were never to be mentioned before her. Passion was to go to sleep in the presence of Mrs General, and blood was to change to milk and water. The little that was left in the world, when all these deductions were made, it was Mrs General’s province to varnish. In that formation process of hers, she dipped the smallest of brushes into the largest of pots, and varnished the surface of every object that came under consideration. The more cracked it was, the more Mrs General varnished it.

From Dombey & Son

(Mrs Dombey has died. giving birth to a son.)

That small world of Mr Dombey’s household subsided into their several places in the domestic system. That small world, like the great one outdoors, had the capacity for easily forgetting its dead; and when the cook said, “She was a quiet, tempered lady”. and the housekeeper said, “It was the common lot”, and the Butler said, “Who'd have thought it?”, and the housemaid said, “She could hardly believe it”, and the footman said, “It seemed exactly like a dream”, they had quite worn the subject out and began to think their mourning was wearing rusty too.

Domby sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great armchair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.