erify while _Hard Times_ was in hand; and this was a strike
in a manufacturing town. He went to Preston to see one at the end of
January, and was somewhat disappointed. "I am afraid I shall not be able
to get much here. Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the
placards pro and con; and the cold absence of smoke from the
mill-chimneys; there is very little in the streets to make the town
remarkable. I am told that the people 'sit at home and mope.' The
delegates with the money from the neighbouring places come in to-day to
report the amounts they bring; and to-morrow the people are paid. When I
have seen both these ceremonies, I shall return. It is a nasty place (I
thought it was a model town); and I am in the Bull Hotel, before which
some time ago the people assembled supposing the masters to be here, and
on demanding to have them out were remonstrated with by the landlady in
person. I saw the account in an Italian paper, in which it was stated
that 'the populace then environed the Palazzo Bull, until the padrona of
the Palazzo heroically appeared at one of the upper windows and
addressed them!' One can hardly conceive anything less likely to be
represented to an Italian mind by this description, than the old,
grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red brick house with a narrow
gateway and a dingy yard, to which it applies. At the theatre last night
I saw _Hamlet_, and should have done better to 'sit at home and mope'
like the idle workmen. In the last scene, Laertes on being asked how it
was with him replied (verbatim) 'Why, like a woodcock--on account of my
treachery.'" (29th Jan.)

The home incidents of the summer and autumn of 1855 may be mentioned
briefly. It was a year of much unsettled discontent with him, and upon
return from a short trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins, he flung
himself rather hotly into agitation with the administrative
reformers,[184] and spoke at one of the great meetings in Drury-lane
Theatre. In the following month (April) he took occasion, even from the
chair of the General Theatrical Fund, to give renewed expression to
political dissatisfactions.[185] In the summer he threw open to many
friends his Tavistock House Theatre, having secured for its "lessee and
manager Mr. Crummles;" for its poet Mr. Wilkie Collins, in an "entirely
new and original domestic melodrama;" and for its scene-painter "Mr.
Stanfield, R.A."[186] _The Lighthouse_, by Mr. Wilkie Collins, was then
produced,