“And in his last look as we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me. I was glad to see it. I felt for my old self as the dead may feel if they ever revisit these scenes. I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.”
“So did these come and go, [...] so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be, without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die.”
“In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore.”
“It may be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he never was a credit to, and live upon them; but it’s not my sort. The best kind of amends then, for having gone away, is to keep away, in my opinion.”
Esther describes a thunderstorm having taken shelter in a hunting lodge: “we sat, just within the doorway, watching the storm. It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning; and, while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed,
to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make creation new again.”
Illustration: Where Nemo has been buried
“Is this place of abomination, consecrated ground?’
‘I don’t know nothink of consequential ground,’ says Jo, still staring.
‘Is it blessed?’
‘WHICH?’ says Jo, in the last degree amazed.
‘Is it blessed?”
Dickens possessed copies of G. A. Walker’s Series of Lectures on the Actual Condition of the Metropolitan Graveyards (1846) which detail the dreadful conditions in London burial grounds.”
Mark 10:14 Suffer the little children to come unto me
The Visit to the Brickmaker's by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne) for Bleak House, Chapter VIII, "Covering a Multitude of Sins,"
In essence, Dickens here counters the belief frequently voiced by contemporary middle- and upper-class commentators that the poor "are different from us," they do not find the death of children all that upsetting, and they therefore must be almost a separate species.
The Little Old Lady Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) March 1852 Etching.
Passage Illustrated: Initiating the Wards into the Ways of Chancery
"Oh!" said she. "The wards in Jarndyce! Ve-ry happy, I am sure, to have the honour! It is a good omen for youth, and hope, and beauty when they find themselves in this place, and don't know what's to come of it."
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