hero. This
summary proceeding was not originally intended. But, over and above its
popular acceptance, the book had interested some whose opinions Dickens
specially valued (Carlyle among them, I remember);[269] and upon Bulwer
Lytton objecting to a close that should leave Pip a solitary man,
Dickens substituted what now stands. "You will be surprised" he wrote
"to hear that I have changed the end of _Great Expectations_ from and
after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there.
Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the
book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and
supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the
change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in as
pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the
story will be more acceptable through the alteration." This turned out
to be the case; but the first ending nevertheless seems to be more
consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale,
and for this reason it is preserved in a note.[270]

CHRISTMAS SKETCHES.

Between that fine novel, which was issued in three volumes in the autumn
of 1861, and the completion of his next serial story, were interposed
three sketches in his happiest vein at which everyone laughed and cried
in the Christmas times of 1862, '3, and '4. Of the waiter in _Somebody's
Luggage_ Dickens has himself spoken; and if any theme is well treated,
when, from the point of view taken, nothing more is left to say about
it, that bit of fun is perfect. Call it exaggeration, grotesqueness, or
by what hard name you will, laughter will always intercept any graver
criticism. Writing from Paris of what he was himself responsible for in
the articles left by Somebody with his wonderful Waiter, he said that in
one of them he had made the story a camera obscura of certain French
places and styles of people; having founded it on something he had
noticed in a French soldier. This was the tale of Little Bebelle, which
had a small French corporal for its hero, and became highly popular. But
the triumph of the Christmas achievements in these days was Mrs.
Lirriper. She took her place at once among people known to everybody;
and all the world talked of Major Jemmy Jackman, and his friend the poor
elderly lodging-house keeper of the Strand, with her miserable cares
and rivalries and worries, as if they had both be