The Sun.
London, England, 1869-11-01 00:00:00

GLOBE THEATRE-ROYAL.

I 'THIS EvzsiNG. at 7, A HOUSEHOLD FAIRY. At 7.45.
NOT SUCH A FOOL AS AE LOOKS: Mr H. J. Byron. And
BREACH OF PROMISE. Mr J Clarke and Miss Hughes.

PRINCESS•'S THEATRE.

Tins EVENING, at 7. TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING : M
Ashley and the Misses Hants. With THE WILLOW COPSE
Mr. Benjamin Webster.

THEATRE-ROYAL, HOLBORN.

TIIIS EVES ING. at?, THE LOTTERY TICKET. After which,
THI4; GAMESTER : Mr. Barry Sullivan, Mrs. Hermann Vezin,
&c. And THE WATERNIAN.

ROYAL STRAND THEATRE.
Sole Lessee and Manageress, Mrs. Swanborough.
THIS EVENING. at 7.30. AMONG THE BREAKERS: Mr
Clarke. With THE TOODLES. And INO. Concluding with
THY CHOPS OF THE CHANNEL.

CBRISTY MINSTRELS. St. James's Hall, Every Night, at 8
Wednesdays and Saturdays, at 3 and 8 all the year round.

ZOOLOGICAL GAR DENS, Regent's-park, OPEN daily (ex-
cept Sundays). Admission, ls.; on Mondays, 6d. Children
under twelve, 6d.

ROYAL ALHAMBRA PALACE. THREE BALLETS
Promenade Concert. Band of 60. Begin at 8. ls. Box-office
open fromll to 4.

ittli.?4 if*

LONDON, MONDAY, NOV. 1, 1869.

There is now publishing in one of the popular
shilling magazines, more especially devoted to the
interests of light literature, a serial story so remark-
able in itself, and so beneficent in the humane pur-
pose its author has at heart in writing it, that it ap-
pears to us to be entitled at the bands of journalism
to more than merely the customary reference made
en passant to the varied contents of the monthly pe-
riodicals. A tale told for the vindication of some
especial moral is generally a failure as a work of art.
As a rule, it is almost by necessity wearisome. But
the pecularity at once noticeable in regard to the
fiction we are now referring to is this—that
while its whole aim and object are transpa-
rently visible and persistently avowed throughout,
it is never by any chance wearisome, and so far as a
production can be estimated accurately before it is
finished, and therefore before it can actually be re-
garded as a whole, it is, to our mind, peculiarly en-

titled to commendation in its particular character as
a work of art. It has to do, not as in the instance of
so many masterpieces from the hands of the greatest
imaginative writers dead or living, with epochs more
or less remote—with sixty years since as in
" Waverley," with eighteen centuries ago as in
" The Last Days of Pompeii"—it has to do
with the actual present: and, under no romantic
aspect, iu the very thick and crush of the ccuamon
workaday world. " Put Yourself in his Placa" is
the name of the story. The author of it is CHARLES
READE. The periodical in which it is appearing by
instalments is the magazine established by THA`HCE-
RAY, and known as the Cornhill. The novelist's
idea in penning this powerful and affecting narra-
tive may be expressed, perhaps, the most accurately,
by speaking of it, according to a familiar phrase,
and by applying that familiar phrase negatively. It
is the very opposite, then, we would say at
()nee, of the root-idea at the he trt of
the evil ambition of every demagogue—that of set-

ting class agaiust class. The question of strikes, and
of trades unions, and of rattening, and, so to speak,
of Broadheads, and Narrowhearts, are inextricably
intermingled with, are part and parcel of, as charming,
is pure, and yet as impassioned a love story as any
reader of fiction well could wish. The scenes lie
mostly in the streets and workshops and outlying

listricts of a great manufacturing town such as
Sheffield or as Birmingham. The hero of the
tale is introduced as a working man, grimed
with labour, toiling night or day (it matters
little to him which) at the forge and the

furnace, with the hammer and the file, and the other
blackened tools of his handicraft. Skilled in his

trade ; intelligent, gifted, inventive, though ho is ;
gentle born in part, though he eventually turns
out to be as heir to the proud old trada•hating
Squire, the head of the ancient house of the ItAuvs
—this superior artizan, who is the hero of the work,

is, for all that, Eo essentially and engrained a
working man himself, that when he is constrained,
•tit last, in spite of himself, to emerge into a more
decently civilised atmosphere (into just such an atmos-
phere as was described the other day by Mr.ROEBUCK),
he has to get transformed, just for all the world like
PIP, in " Great Expectations." Only, instead of going
like Pip to a village tailor, like Mr. TRABB—HENRT
Lrrru, the hero of " Put yourself in his place,"

goes to the London tailor, to the London hosier, to
the London hairdresser: and has even then to be
warned by his lady mother about the greater need
there is upon him, for example, to have a more sedulous
attention to the condition of his nails. In speaking
thus of the narrative, now appearing piecemeal in
the pages of the Cornhill, from the hand of
CHARLES READE, a novelist already famous
and of established repute in our literature

as the author?, among other books, of a great work
like " The Cloister and the Hearth," and of such

a minor work of exquisite beauty as " Christie John-

stone"—we are desirous, in the first place, simply to
realise the homely, matter of fact, workaday charac-
ter of the story he is now telling ; and, in the next
place, to direct attention more pointedly than in a
mere passing literary notice of it, to the noble,
generous, elevating, and practically beneficent
nature of the moral it is expressly designed
as a means of inculcating. If properly applied
it is calculated to do as much good between
the two great classes to whose common interests it
more especially refers, as even a well-contrived and
carefully considered Act of Parliament. Only,
while it takes the King, the Loral, and the Com-
mons, in turn and together, to produce the Act of
Parliament—it requires the genius of CHARLES
READE, prompted by a generous heart and guiding
'A skilful hand, to produce a work as noble and as
humanizing as the one we are fain thus earnestly to
commend to popular consideration. As a hundred
years ago the prints of IfooAßTuts " industrious
:uid Idle Apprentice" used to be hung up on thc
walls of our workshops—so, now, on the early com-
pletion and collective republication of the current
ierial story in the Cornhill, among the classes to
which that imaginative and yet very real narrative,
more especially applies, a cheap reissue of CHARLES
READE's " Put yourself in his Place," ought, in the
public interests and upon public grounds, to be scat-
tered broadcast.

A. REMARKABLE strike is now in progress in Paris.
The men who have " turned out " have no precise
counterparts in England, but they are most nearly
described as linen drapers. They are assistants in
the magasins de nouveautes, establishments which