loved so well too. So I mean to
carry the story on, through all the branches and offshoots and
meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the
house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his
only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be
this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last,
and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his
bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself which goes on in all
such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his
injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at
last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly
unjust. . . . I rely very much on Susan Nipper grown up, and acting partly
as Florence's maid, and partly as a kind of companion to her, for a
strong character throughout the book. I also rely on the Toodles, and on
Polly, who, like everybody else, will be found by Mr. Dombey to have
gone over to his daughter and become attached to her. This is what cooks
call 'the stock of the soup.' All kinds of things will be added to it,
of course." Admirable is the illustration thus afforded of his way of
working, and very interesting the evidence it gives of the genuine
feeling for his art with which this book was begun.

The close of the letter put an important question affecting gravely a
leading person in the tale. . . . "About the boy, who appears in the last
chapter of the first number, I think it would be a good thing to
disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy
connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and
naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish
light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty,
and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every-day, miserable
declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life; to exhibit
something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy
nature; and to show how the good turns into bad, by degrees. If I kept
some little notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it
might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you
think it may be done, without making people angry? I could bring out
Solomon Gills and Captain Cuttle well, through such a history; and I
descry, anyway, an opportunity for good scenes between Captain Cuttle
and Miss Tox. This que