The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-01 00:00:00

"MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS,"

The New Christmas Number of " All the
Year Bound."

Another pleasant little surprise has been given to
his million readers by Mr. Charles Dickens in anti-
cipation of the coming Christmas. Last year the
enigmatical "nut to crack" was propounded in the
rather bewildering announcement of " Somebody's
Luggage." This year it has come to ns in qzite as
questionable a guise, just as oddly as its predecessor,
but coupled with a name so intensely Boz-like as to
afford a hint, as to the meaning of the intimation,
to the more discerning. " Mrs. Lirriper's Lodg-
ings"—now that we know them to be in plain
terms, nothing less than the new "Extra Christmas
Number" (price fourpence) of Mr. Charles Dickens's
popular weekly periodical of " All the Year Round"
.—are absolutely certain to be taken. Upon the
very first of the forty-eight double-columned pages
of the record here telling us all about them, we have
the address of these Lodgings. An address, very con-
veniently, as it happens, in our own immediate neigh-
bourhood. If not "In the Strand! in the Strand !"
at any rate leading out of it. Number Eighty-
one, Norfolk-street, Strand. That is the hence-
forth classic habitat of the dear, kind-hearted old
lady who lets these lodgings. Mrs. Lirriper, my
dear, as she tells us herself in that confidential
prattling gossip in which she relates, at the outset,
How she manages to Carryon the Business. There is
more of the nice old housekeeper of Mr.
Brownlow in "Oliver Twist" about Mrs.
Lirriper, than of the immortal M. Todgers
in " Martin Chuzzlewit." The latter, it will
be remembered, had rather too much of an eye for
the main chance to be entirely pleasant—her bread
too slack, her fish questionable, her anxiety about
the gravy little less than overwhelming. Whereas
Mrs. Lirriper just fairly endears herself to us from
first to last as one of the kindest old souls well
imaginable. Mrs. Lirriper, Major Jackman,
and " the Mite"—(Ms godson and her adopted
grandchild)—those three imaginary beings, lightly
though they are sketched off by the master hand
of Charles Dickens, we may add at once unhesi-
tatingly to the treasures stored up in the long and
wonderful portrait gallery in which are ranged the
masterpieces of that great delineator of his fellow
creatures. The lodging-house-keeper, the Major
who is her " parlour," and the little human waif
that they have both of them, the dear, delightful
old souls, taken lovingly to their heart of hearts !
Among the more elaborated works of the Artist from
whose hand they emanate, these may rank, let us say,
as some of those marvellous little chalk drawings, or
water-colour sketches, that are sometimes dashed
off with an apparently careless hand, but that con-
tain touches sometimes here and there transcending
any more ambitiously conceived and executed work
of art. Major Jackman—" Jemmy Jackman"—
who, " though he is far from tall, seems so when
he has his shirt-frill out, and his frockcoat on, and
his hat with the curly brims"—Major Bagstock
would undoubtedly never have condescended
to acknowledge in any military capacity
whatever. Yet is he welcome to us—old
trump as he is—in despite of his da-
bious payments to the good landlady, of his
suspiciously uncertain right to his title, of his lac-
quering his boots and waxing his old moustache.
As for " the Mite," that dear adopted imp of a boy
who is so small at one time that when he is on the
other side of the pembroke table you have to look
under it instead of over it to see him—we don't in
the least wonder at last when kind old Mrs. Lirri-
per announces to the Major that the Mite must go
away from them at last to a Boarding School, we
don't in the least wonder when he comes to tell us

that on making this same announcement, " Bold as
I spoke I saw two Majors and half a dozen
fireplaces !" To read on a little while before this
all about his marvellous achievements as a cal-
culator—in " umtraction" and " tickleication "—to
watch him multiplying fourteen sticks of firewood
by two bits of ginger and a larding needle, or
dividing pretty well everything else there was upon
the table by the heater of the Italian iron and a
chamber candlestick and getting a lemon over !—is,
really, as good as a play. So, too, is the account of
his memorable disappearance one day when they
thought he was lost—he, all the while, having
only missed his way by following the Monkey
—as the Sergeant of Police explains after-

wards, " him as sweeps the crossing on a round
table." The incident of the attempted suicide
of his young mother and of her premature death
at last in bed at dear, noble, tender-hearted Mrs.
Lirriper's—slightly touched into life though the
sketch is, it is worthy of the masterhand

At last it came in a solemn way—not in a flash but like
a kind of pale faint light brought very slow to the face.
She said something to me that had no sound in it, but I
saw she asked me :
" Is this death ?"
And I says "Poor dear poor dear, I think it is."
Knowingsomehow that she wanted me to move her weak
right hand, I took it and laid it on her breast and then
folded her other hand upon it, and she prayed a good good
prayer and I joined in it poor ma though there were no
words spoke. Then I brought the baby in its wrappers
from where it lay, and I says :
•' My dear this is sent to a childless old woman.
for me to take care of."
The trembling lip was put up towards my face for the
last time, and I dearly kissed it.
"Yes my dear" I says. " Please God I Me and the
Major.''

This

Idon't know how to tell it right, but I saw her soul
brighten and leap up, and get free and fly away in the
grateful look.

As a vivid contrast to which, take the. incidental
mention by Mrs. Lirriper before that when the
forsaken young mother is sickening for her death,
Mrs. Lirriper's mention then of the Parlour's
efforts to secure quiet for the poor invalid.
" What ever," exclaims the good old lady, " I should
have done without the Major when it got about
among the organ-men that quiet was our object is
unknown, for he made lion and tiger war upon
them to that degree that without seeing it I could
not have believed it was in any gentleman to have
such a power of bursting out with fire-irons walk-
ing sticks water-jugs coals potatoes off his table the
very hat off his head, and at the same time so
furious in foreign languages that they would
stand with their handles half turned fixed

like the Sleeping Ugly--for I cannot say Beauty."
Here, however, is a wonderfully droll description
of one of Mrs. Liri iper's experience of " Servant
Gals"—a description that we tray head, adopting
the happy phrase of old Joe Gargery :
CAROLINE—ON THE RAMPAGE!

A good-looking black-eyed girl was Caroline and a
comely-made girl to your cost when she did break out and
laid about her, as took place first and last through a new-
married couple come to see London in the first floor and the
lady very high and it was supposed not liking the good
looks of Caroline having none of her own to spare, but any-
how she did try Caroline though that was no excuse. So
one afternoon Caroline comes down into the kitchen flushed
and flashing, and she says to me " Mrs. Lirriper that woman
in the first has aggravated me past bearing," I says " Caro-
line keep your temper," Caroline says with a curdling
laugh " Keep my temper ? You're right Mrs. Lirriper, so
I will. Capital D her I" bursts out Caroline (you might
have struck me into the centre of the earth with a feather

when she said it) " I'll givo her a touch of the temper that
I keep I" Caroline downs with her hair my dear, screeches
and rushes upstairs, I following as fast as my trembling

. _
_ .
legs could bear me, but before I got into the room the
dinner cloth and pink and white service all dragged off upon
the fl ,or with a crash and the new married couple on their
backs in the fire-grate, him with the shovel and tongs
and a dish of cucumber across him and a mercy

was summer-time. "Caroline" I says "be calm,"
she catches off my cap and tears it in her

. .
teeth as she passes me, then pounces on the now married
lady makes her a bundle of ribbons takes her by the two

ears and knocks the back of her head upon the carpet Mur-
der screaming all the timePolioemen running down the street
and Wozenham's windows (judge of my feelings when I
came to know it) thrown up and Miss Wozenbam calling
out from the balcony with crocodile's tears " It's Mrs.
Lirriper been overcharging somebody to madness—she'll
be murdered—l always thought so—Pleesoman save her I"
My dear four of them and Caroline behind the chiffoniere
attacking with the poker and when disarmed ;Aim fighting
with her double fists, and down and up and up and down
and dreadful I But I couldn't bear to see the poor young
creature roughly handled and her hair torn when they got
the better of her, and I says " Gentlemen Policemen pray
remember that her sex is the sex of your ruothero and tai/3-

ters and your sweethearts, and God bless them and you I"
Aud there she was sitting down on the ground handcuffed,
taking breath against the skirting-board and them cool with
their coats in strips, and all she says was " Mrs. Lirriper I
am sorry as ever 1 touched you, for y,,u're a kind motherly
old thing," and it made me think that I had often wished I
had been a mother indeed and how would my heart have
felt if I had been the mother of that girl I
Several of Mrs. Lirriper's sayings approach, in
their character as novel axioms, the originalty of
those wonderful aphorisms of Mrs. Poyser in
Adam Bede. "Girls," says Mrs. Lirriper,
upcn one occasion, " are one of your
first and lasting troubles, being like your
teeth, which begin with convulsions, and never
cease tormenting you from the time you cut
them till they cut you." Or take again her
inveighing against a dirty face, upon the plea that
" naturally lodgers do not like good society to be
shown in with a smear of black across the nose or
a smudgy eyebrow." Her description, too, of
"Wandering Christians," as she calls them, is capital
—meaning those people who are perpetually inquir-
ing about lodgings without wanting them. Her de-
ceased husband, moreover, with " a voice as mellow
as a musical instrument made of honey and steel,"
who was always travelling a limekiln road, "a dry
road, Emma, my dear, where I have to lay the dust
with one drink or another all day long and half the
night"—every dot and line in the little vignette
portraiture is admirably humorous. The notion
upon which the whole series of little stories
—the stories, as one may say, in Mrs.
Lirriper's lodging-house, No. 81, Norfolk-
street, Strand—First Floor (going to Crow-
ley Castle); Side Room (attended by a Doctor),
Second Floor (keeping a Dog), Third Floor (know-
ing the Potteries), Best Attic (under a cloud), and
Parlours (adding a few words)—the notion, we say,
upon which the whole of these little stories are
strung together as a collection, is as ingenious as
ever, and yet as simple and natural as ever in the
scheme of it. The Parlour (that is the Major)
writes down the tales told to him from time to time
in confidence by the pick of Mrs. Lirriper's most
interesting lodgers, and he (the Major) does this at
the instance of Mrs. Lirriper herself, as a treat on
his return home for the Christmas holidays, as an
especial treat to the Schoolboy Mite—who is, how-
ever, no longer a mite, but a rosy checked urchin,
whose face in the December firelight outshines the
apples in the dish on the dessert table. Leaving those
three old cronies, Mrs. Lirriper, the Major, and the
Schoolboy, still clustered together round the hearth
in the firelight, we pass out across the threshold of
eighty-one Norfolk..street, Strand, with a charmed,
happy, laughing, tearful remembrance of Mrs.
Lirriper's Lodgings.