Thus, for instance, he hated that Little
Bethel to which Kit's mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it.
Newman could have told him it was hateful, because it had no root in
religious history; it was not even a sapling sprung of the seed of some
great human and heathen tree: it was a monstrous mushroom that grows in
the moonshine and dies in the dawn. Dickens knew no more of religious
history than Kit; he simply smelt the fungus, and it stank. Thus, again,
he hated that insolent luxury of a class counting itself a comfortable
exception to all mankind; he hated it as Kate Nickleby hated Sir
Mulberry Hawke--by instinct. Carlyle could have told him that all the
world was full of that anger against the impudent fatness of the few.
But when Dickens wrote about Kate Nickleby, he knew about as much of the
world--as Kate Nickleby. He did write _The Tale of Two Cities_ long
afterwards; but that was when he _had_ been instructed by Carlyle. His
first revolutionism was as private and internal as feeling sea-sick.
Thus, once more, he wrote against Mr. Gradgrind long before he created
him. In _The Chimes_, conceived in quite his casual and charitable
season, with the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Cricket on the Hearth_, he
hit hard at the economists.
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