A curious dance round a curious tree / by Charles Dickens.

  • Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Date:
[1860]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A curious dance round a curious tree / by Charles Dickens. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    vigorously held him; but, the danger over, she lost her senses, and became one of the most ungovernable of the inmates of the asylum. Why was I there to see this poor creature, when I might have seen a Pantomimic woman gored to any extent by a Pantomimic ox, at any height of ferocity, and have gone home to bed with the comforting assurance that she had rather enjoyed it than otherwise ? The reason of my choice was this. I had received a notifi- cation that on that night there would be, in Saint Luke’s, “ A Christmas Tree for the Patients.” And further, that the “ usual fortnightly dancing” would take place before the distribution of the gifts upon the tree. So there I was, in the street, looking about for a knocker and finding none. There was a line of hackney cabriolets by the dead wall; some of the drivers asleep; some, vigilant; some, with their legs not inexpressive of “ Boxing,” sticking out of the open doors of their vehicles, while their bodies were reposing on the straw within. There were flaming gas-lights, oranges, oysters, paper lanterns, butchers, and grocers, bakers, and public-houses, over the way; there were omnibuses rattling by; there were ballad singers; street criers, street passengers, street beggars, and street music; there were cheap theatres within call, which you would do better to be at some pains to improve, my worthy friends, than to shut up—for, if you wall not have them with your own consent at their best, you may be sure that you must have them, without it, at their worst; there were wretched little chapels too, where the officiating prophets certainly were not inspired with grammar; there were homes, great and small, by the hundred thousand, east, west, north, and south ; all the busy ripple of sane life (or of life as sane as it ever is) came murmuring on from far away, and broke against the blank walls of the Madhouse, like a sea upon a desert shore. Abandoning further search for the non-existent knocker