The Sun.
London, England, 1848-12-19 00:00:00

Nevertheless, we shut our eyes to all partiality. The
truthfulness of the reviewer looms upon us in a man-
ner altogether imperative. We sit down to examine
the midge with a microscope, and to dissect its fibres
with the keen and inexorable edge of criticism— our
sternness of temperament not unlike that dis-
played on loftier occasions by Brutus and
by Manlius. Grateful to Mr. Dickens for
the tears and laughter drawn from our innermost
" heart of hearts" by the subtle intonations of his genius,
we are not the less resolved to weigh accurately in
the balance, the merits and demerits of each of his
subsequent productions.
" The Haunted Man" will rank not an inch higher
than " The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth,"
or " The Battle of Life"—and those three, as every
reader in the United Kingdom knows, never attained
any very remarkable elevation. The four stories
will be viewed as nothing more than four pretty little
fictions, to be glanced tbrough overnight and to be
forgotten by the next morning. In none of them
are the extraordinary powers of Mr. Dickens,
whether in style or naturalness, whether in the
sad or in the humorous, revealed with their
wonted vigour. The light of his unquestionable
genius only glimmers out here and there, feebly and
at remote intervals. As in the appeal of Will Fern ;
as in the crooning of Tilly Stowboy ; as in the
comical ways of Clemency Newcome ; or—to come at
last to the volume which is this very day published
—as in the capital portraiture of Johnny and the
Moloch The conception of the plot in " The
Haunted Man" is perhaps its highest excellence. The
construction of the narrative is comparable, indeed,
to that which conduced to the transformation of
Ebene7er Scrooge from a curmudgeon into a philan-
thropist. Redlaw is the man who is haunted, and
haunted too by the " awful likeness of himself I" John
Leech has embodied the thrilling fancy of the author in
a masterly woodcut (p. 34), which is the very epitome
of Redlaw's contemplative and saturnine character.
To explain the working of the plot in a few sylla-
bles :—Redlaw (a renowned chemist, who lectures on
anatomy and medicine to a class of students in the
theatre of an old college) is haunted by his own
shadow. He repines perpetually at the recollection
of his miseries, and at last demands from his ghostly
visitor the privilege of losing all remembrance of his
sorrows, wrongs, and troubles. The spectre com-
plies. Redlaw is deprived of his memory, and finds
by experience that the loss of that faculty is a curse
rather than a blessing. As the ghost vanishes,
the chemist hears its voice ringing through
the darkness—" The gift that 1 have given,
you shall give again, go where you will. Without
recovering yourself the power that you have yielded
up, you shall henceforth destroy its like in all whom
you approach." Out of this comes all the confusion
and interest of the tale. And cut of the gentleness
of Milly—the only one who is spared by Redlaw the
diabolical influences of his presence— comes the un-
revelment of all the difficulties, and misunderstand-
ings, and contradictions of the plot. The work is
divided simply into three chapters, the first being
" The gift bestowed ;" the second, " The gift dif-
fused ;" and the third, " The gift reversed." That
is briefly the scheme of the narrative. It is admirable
for its originality, and thrice admirable for the
holy truth it inculcates. In a particular which
must often have bewildered the minds and
darkened. the consciences of the reflective,
it will tend inia noble and bewitching manner to " re•
concile the ways of God to man." It proves by
example, as well as by precept, that God is good in
giving us the memory a our aftlictions—"that me-
mory which was the memory of Christ upon the
cross !"—r. 184. "May I tell you," says Milly
(p. 177), " why it seems to me a good thing
for us to remember wrong that has been
done us ?" " Yes." " That we may forgive it !"
Further on she asks Redlaw, in the event of his re-
covering his lost faculty, " Would it not be a bless.
ing to you to recal at once a wrong and its forgive-
ness ?" Again, we repeat, the principle instilled
by the volume is exquisitely beautiful. It is
calculated to render the reader happier at
Christmas. Whatever faults we discover in
the story, and they are neither few nor
insignificant, are connected solely with the manner of
its composition. When we find "Boz" beginning a
chapter, for example, in this wise (p. 52)—" A small
man sat in a small parlour, partitioned off from a
small shop by a small screen, pasted all over with
small scraps of newspapers"—we marvel whether he
mistook this threadbare trickery of language for
the humorous. Why the most wretched hack of
all the comic scribblers of Holywell-street, of Grub-
street, and of Catnach's has used almost these very
identical words over and over again nape ad nay...learns
Or when we hear Mr. William Swidger dinning into
our ears perpetually, "That's exactly what
I say myself, Sir" (a phrase wholly devoid in
the abstract of the smallest vestige of drollery), we
call to mind the agonies of wearisomeness with which
we at last came to regard the habitual saying of even
Mark Tapley—" There's some credit in being jolly
under such circumstances." Mr. Philip Swidger is
also an intolerable bore With his long, garrulous
sentences always ending_" And I'm eighty-seven."
Other blemishes we shall not tarry over, but turn
rather to the more felicitous passages of" The Haunted
Man." Foremost then amongst them come Master
Johnny Tetterby and the immortal Moloch. The
first description of the couple is given after the ac-
count of the other small fry at " Tetterby and Co.,
Newsvenders :"

" Besides which, another little boy— the biggest
there, but still little—was tottering to and fro, bent on
one side, and considerably affected in his knees by the
weight of a large baby, which he was supposed, by a
fiction that obtains sometimes in sanguine families, to
be hushing to sleep. But oh! the inexhaustible regions
of contemplation and watchfulness into which this baby's
eyes were then only beginning to compose themselves
to stare, over his unconscious shoulder!
"It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate
altar the whole existence of this particular young
brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality
may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet,
in any one place, for five consecutive minutes and never
going to sleep when required. Tetterby's baby' was
as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or
the pot-boy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in
the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily
at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the tum-
blers or the monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little
too late for everything that was attractive, from Mon-
day morning until Saturday night. Wherever childhood
congregated to play, there was little Moloch making
Johnny fag and toil. Whenever Johnny desired to
stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not re-
main. Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch
was asleep, and must be watched. Whenever Johnny
wanted to stay at home, Moloch was awake, and wanted
to be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily persuaded that
it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the realm of
England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses
of things in general from behind its skirts, or over its
limp flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it
like a very little porter with a very large parcel, which
was not directed to anybody, and could never be deli-
vered anywhere."

" It was a peculiarity of this baby," says the author
further on, "to be always cutting teeth. Whether they
never came, or whether they came and vvent away again,
is not in evidence; but it had certainly cut enough, on
the showing of Mrs. Tetterby, to make a handsome
dental provision for the sign of the Bull and Mouth.
All sorts of objects were impressed for the rubbing of
its gums, notwithstanding that it always carried,
dangling at its waist (which was immediately under
its chin), a bone ring, large enough to have repre-
sented the rosary of a young man. Knife-handles,
umbrella-tops, the heads of walking- sticks selected from
the stock,
the fingers of the family in general, but espe-
cially of Johnny, nutmeg-graters, crusts, the handles of
doors, and the cool knobs on the tops of pokers, were
among the commonest instruments indiscriminately ap-
plied for this baby's relief. The amount of electricity
that must have been rubbed out of it in a week, is not to