race) to
ransom me and marry me."

In playful vein Dickens professes to record his disappointment at
failing to receive any recognition from a "native", in the person of a
phlegmatic greengrocer, when he revisits Rochester, and revives the
associations of haunts beloved in childhood.

"Nettled by his phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I had left
the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite unsoftened,
and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had I? Ah! and did
I find it had got on tolerably well without me? Such is the
difference (I thought when I had left him a few hundred yards
behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between going away
from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I reflected, to
be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest; I was
nothing to him; whereas he was the town, the cathedral, the bridge,
the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to me."

That is one side of the medal, but the other is displayed in _David
Copperfield_, when little Mr. Chillip, the doctor, welcomes David back
to England:

"'We are not ignorant, sir,' said Mr. Chillip, slowly shaking his
little head again, 'down in our part of the country, of your fame.
There must be great excitement here, sir,' said Mr. Chillip,
tapping himself on the forehead with his forefinger. 'You must find
it a trying occupation, sir!'"

A feature of Dickens's literary manner, so insistent that the most
superficial reader cannot miss it, is the individual and almost human
aspect which a street or a landscape, a house or a room, takes on in his
description. A typical example may be selected in Mr. Wickfield's
house--

"A very old house bulging out over the road; a house with long, low
lattice windows bulging out still farther, and beams with carved
heads on the ends bulging out too, so that I fancied the whole
house was leaning forward, trying to see who was passing on the
narrow pavement below."

It was the outcome of an acute nervous sensibility, amounting at times
to an almost neurotic irritability, such as peeps out from his
confession that the shape of Earl Grey's head, when he was a
Parliamentary reporter in the Gallery, "was misery to me and weighed
down my youth". This peculiarity of temperament had established itself
when, a little delicate and highly strung child, he used to tr