13 10 361 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Letter TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1840-03-16_Letter_To_J_P_Harley_Poem.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'To J. P. Harley' (16 March 1840).</a> Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18400316 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. If you know no reason Why good wine in season Should ever be forgot Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'To J. P. Harley' Description An account of the resource From a letter to J. P. Harley (16 March 1840). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived 'To J. P. Harley.' Letter to J. P. Harley. 16 March 1840. The Letters of Charles Dickens. The Pilgrim Edition. Edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey. Volume 2 (1840-1841), p. 44. Oxford University Press, 1969. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1840-03-16 Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1840-03-16_Letter_To_J_P_Harley_Poem Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'To J. P. Harley' (16 March 1840). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1840-03-16_Letter_To_J_P_Harley_Poem">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1840-03-16_Letter_To_J_P_Harley_Poem</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. If you know no reason Why good wine in season Should ever be forgot https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/To_Daniel_Maclise/1840-06-02_Letter_To_Daniel_Maclise.pdf 664636d0f4fa15bb13bf01b2225e4243 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Letter Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18400602 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. My foot is in the house, My bath is on the sea, And, before I take a souse, Here’s a single note to thee. TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1840-06-02_Letter_To_Daniel_Maclise_Poem.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'To Daniel Maclise' (2 June 1840).</a> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'To Daniel Maclise' Description An account of the resource From a letter to Daniel Maclise (2 June 1840). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1840-06-02 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1840-06-02_Letter_To_Daniel_Maclise_Poem Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'To Daniel Maclise' (2 June 1840). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1840-06-02_Letter_To_Daniel_Maclise_Poem">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1840-06-02_Letter_To_Daniel_Maclise_Poem</a>. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived 'To Daniel Maclise.' Letter to Daniel Maclise. 2 June 1840. The Letters of Charles Dickens. The Pilgrim Edition. Edited by Madeline House and Graham Storey. Volume 2 (1840-1841), p. 79. Oxford University Press, 1969. Dickens, Charles. 'ALs to Daniel Maclise.' Letters, <a href="https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/28617">https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/28617</a>. Free Library of Philadelphia. Relation A related resource Parody of Lord Byron's 'To Thomas Moore', first stanza: My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea, But, before I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee! Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. My foot is in the house, My bath is on the sea, And, before I take a souse, Here’s a single note to thee. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. He was, he said, so confused by the warmth of the reception which he had met with, that he should have felt considerable difficulty in addressing a few words to them, if he were not relieved by the nature and subject of the toast which had been entrusted to him. The subject of the toast had been, indeed, exhausted by the chairman, The toast was ‘success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’, and although there were many gentlemen in that room who could more ably advocate the interests of that society, there was no one, however, no individual in Southwark – no one in London – no one in all England, more devoted to the success of Literary and Scientific Institutions, or who more desired to promote the welfare of the association to sustain which they were that day assembled. For he felt assured that such societies tended not only to enlarge the mind and awaken the best energies of our natures, but to improve and ameliorate the hearts of mankind. The chairman had alluded to the laying of the foundation stone of their building; but he would say, if they had never laid that stone – if they had met in a shed – nay, in the open fields – not only if the had no laid a foundation stone, but if they had not laid a single brick, nor an atom of straw, as the commencement of their edifice, still they had laid a moral foundation calculated to promote the best uses amongst what was styled the ‘many-headed’, but which by the aid of such institutions would soon be designated the ‘many-thoughted, monster’. The Revered Professor near him had adverted to the opinions of Lord Bacon. He also remembered a doctrine of that illustrious man, which was by no means inapplicable to the present subject, on the present occasion. He stated that the qualities of the loadstone were discovered by the test of the needles formed from the rod of iron – not of the bar itself. So in that and the like institutions, the few bright and brilliant individuals who originated them, drawn from the multitude, were those who ultimately consolidated their paramount utility as regarded the multitude itself. Had institutions similar to this existed long since, that one disgraceful leaf of dedication which formed the blot upon the literature of past ages, would have been torn from its pages. That huckstering, peddling, pandering to patronage for the sale of a book, the offspring of intellect and genius, would not now remain a stain upon their most brilliant productions. Oh! it was sickening to see a man whom God had made a poet, crouching to those whose only title to eminence was derived from the achievements of the great great grandfather of those little, little sons. The poet – for it was his natural avocation – was entitled to worship the stars; but when they contemplated him paying his adoration to stars and garters too, that was indeed a very different thing. If such institutions had existed in times gone by, Milton might have been appreciated in the age which he adorned, Otway might have lived and dined a few years longer, and he knew not but that even Wordsworth might have been drawn from the dust of those shelves where until lately he had lain unnoticed and unmarked. Nay, many of the illustrious dead, whose works were destined to illuminate posterity, might not have died the wretched inmates of the madhouse, or the asylum for the destitute. For these, and for many other reasons, he hailed with sincere gratification the brilliant prospects of their institution – for brilliant they were, despite the paltry, pitiful incumbrance of £1,000. Those prospects were still more encouraging, when looking around him he perceived gentlemen who entertained the most opposite views upon political questions joining together to sustain and support a society constituted for such objects. It was gratifying to find that this was a neutral ground upon which all shades of political opinions might mingle without a political compromise, proving satisfactorily – and a gratifying circumstance it was – the desire of those gentlemen rather to be elected by an enlightened constituency than to be representatives of ignorance and grovelling stupidity. It was also gratifying to see amongst them so many ladies, they who on all occasions bestowed a grace and charm upon society, but who, upon the present occasion, lent to it an additional lustre. They came there to advocate claims of the highest and purest order – they came there not only to promote the demands of society for increased means for the dissipation of knowledge and the advancement of literature, but also by such means to cement more closely the dearest bonds by which society was united – in bestowing an additional charm upon the hearth and fireside of all, and giving to their household gods an additional claim to their worship and adoration. Thus a new spirit would be infused into the heart of society – a new soul would be breathed into the huge brick and mortar body of the metropolis; and if they wanted a spur to their exertions – if they energies required excitement – let them but recollect that in the churchyard not far distant from that place our Chaucer was entombed, and that not a stone’s throw from that room Shakespeare’s own theatre once stood. He would not say another word, but would conclude by proposing ‘Success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’. Location The location Southwark London Venue Where the speech was given Bridge House Hotel Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18401202 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. He was, he said, so confused by the warmth of the reception which he had met with, that he should have felt considerable difficulty in addressing a few words to them, if he were not relieved by the nature and subject of the toast which had been entrusted to him. The subject of the toast had been, indeed, exhausted by the chairman, The toast was ‘success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’, and although there were many gentlemen in that room who could more ably advocate the interests of that society, there was no one, however, no individual in Southwark – no one in London – no one in all England, more devoted to the success of Literary and Scientific Institutions, or who more desired to promote the welfare of the association to sustain which they were that day assembled. For he felt assured that such societies tended not only to enlarge the mind and awaken the best energies of our natures, but to improve and ameliorate the hearts of mankind. The chairman had alluded to the laying of the foundation stone of their building; but he would say, if they had never laid that stone – if they had met in a shed – nay, in the open fields – not only if the had no laid a foundation stone, but if they had not laid a single brick, nor an atom of straw, as the commencement of their edifice, still they had laid a moral foundation calculated to promote the best uses amongst what was styled the ‘many-headed’, but which by the aid of such institutions would soon be designated the ‘many-thoughted, monster’. The Revered Professor near him had adverted to the opinions of Lord Bacon. He also remembered a doctrine of that illustrious man, which was by no means inapplicable to the present subject, on the present occasion. He stated that the qualities of the loadstone were discovered by the test of the needles formed from the rod of iron – not of the bar itself. So in that and the like institutions, the few bright and brilliant individuals who originated them, drawn from the multitude, were those who ultimately consolidated their paramount utility as regarded the multitude itself. Had institutions similar to this existed long since, that one disgraceful leaf of dedication which formed the blot upon the literature of past ages, would have been torn from its pages. That huckstering, peddling, pandering to patronage for the sale of a book, the offspring of intellect and genius, would not now remain a stain upon their most brilliant productions. Oh! it was sickening to see a man whom God had made a poet, crouching to those whose only title to eminence was derived from the achievements of the great great grandfather of those little, little sons. The poet – for it was his natural avocation – was entitled to worship the stars; but when they contemplated him paying his adoration to stars and garters too, that was indeed a very different thing. If such institutions had existed in times gone by, Milton might have been appreciated in the age which he adorned, Otway might have lived and dined a few years longer, and he knew not but that even Wordsworth might have been drawn from the dust of those shelves where until lately he had lain unnoticed and unmarked. Nay, many of the illustrious dead, whose works were destined to illuminate posterity, might not have died the wretched inmates of the madhouse, or the asylum for the destitute. For these, and for many other reasons, he hailed with sincere gratification the brilliant prospects of their institution – for brilliant they were, despite the paltry, pitiful incumbrance of £1,000. Those prospects were still more encouraging, when looking around him he perceived gentlemen who entertained the most opposite views upon political questions joining together to sustain and support a society constituted for such objects. It was gratifying to find that this was a neutral ground upon which all shades of political opinions might mingle without a political compromise, proving satisfactorily – and a gratifying circumstance it was – the desire of those gentlemen rather to be elected by an enlightened constituency than to be representatives of ignorance and grovelling stupidity. It was also gratifying to see amongst them so many ladies, they who on all occasions bestowed a grace and charm upon society, but who, upon the present occasion, lent to it an additional lustre. They came there to advocate claims of the highest and purest order – they came there not only to promote the demands of society for increased means for the dissipation of knowledge and the advancement of literature, but also by such means to cement more closely the dearest bonds by which society was united – in bestowing an additional charm upon the hearth and fireside of all, and giving to their household gods an additional claim to their worship and adoration. Thus a new spirit would be infused into the heart of society – a new soul would be breathed into the huge brick and mortar body of the metropolis; and if they wanted a spur to their exertions – if they energies required excitement – let them but recollect that in the churchyard not far distant from that place our Chaucer was entombed, and that not a stone’s throw from that room Shakespeare’s own theatre once stood. He would not say another word, but would conclude by proposing ‘Success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution Description An account of the resource Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution (2 December 1840). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1840-12-02 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution' (2 December 1840). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution</a>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. Mr. Charles Dickens made his acknowledgements, with a warm appeal in favour of the charity, and an eloquent indication of the benevolence of the institution. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18410512 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Literary Fund Anniversary Festival 1841 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Literary Fund Anniversary Festival (12 May 1841). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-05-12 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Literary Fund Anniversary Festival' (12 May 1841). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival</a>. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman/1841-08-07-The_Examiner_The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman.pdf 66ff4a4fd83d644f8b15d79beec6c22e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Newspaper Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) The Examiner Pseudonym The name under which the item was published W. TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1841-08-07_The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman.xml" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">'The Fine Old English Gentleman.' The Examiner (7 August 1841): p. 500.</a> Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18410807 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN. NEW VERSION. (To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners.) I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate; When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains, With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains, With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins; For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies, To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies, Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers' creed, The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed ... Oh the fine old English Tory times; When will they come again! In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark; Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark; And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. Oh the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! Those were the days for taxes, and for war's infernal din; For scarcity of bread, that fine old dowagers might win; For shutting men of letters up, through iron bars to grin, Because they didn't think the Prince was altogether thin, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! But Tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in the main; That night must come on these fine days, in course of time was plain; The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain; A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain, With the fine old English Tory days, All of the olden time. The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and brand; And poverty, and ignorance, shall well the rich and grand. So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time! W. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Fine Old English Gentleman' Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived British Newspapers Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-08-07 Type The nature or genre of the resource Song Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource British Newspapers Archive, <a href="https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000054/18410807/001/0004">https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000054/18410807/001/0004</a>. Some rights reserved. This work permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Fine Old English Gentleman.' The Examiner (7 August 1841): p. 500. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-07-The_Examiner_The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-07-The_Examiner_The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman</a>. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-08-07_The_Examiner_The_Fine_Old_English_Gentleman Description An account of the resource Published in The Examiner (7 August 1841). Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. <div style="text-align: left;">THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN.</div> <div style="text-align: left;">NEW VERSION.</div> (To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners.) I'll sing you a new ballad, and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate; When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev'ry mistress, pimp, and scamp, at ev'ry noble gate, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and chains, With fine old English penalties, and fine old English pains, With rebel heads, and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins; For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! This brave old code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes, And ev'ry English peasant had his good old English spies, To tempt his starving discontent with fine old English lies, Then call the good old Yeomanry to stop his peevish cries, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, The good old times for hunting men who held their fathers' creed, The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed . . . Oh the fine old English Tory times; When will they come again! In those rare days, the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, But sweetly sang of men in pow'r, like any tuneful lark; Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark; And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. Oh the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! Those were the days for taxes, and for war's infernal din; For scarcity of bread, that fine old dowagers might win; For shutting men of letters up, through iron bars to grin, Because they didn't think the Prince was altogether thin, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again! But Tolerance, though slow in flight, is strong-wing'd in the main; That night must come on these fine days, in course of time was plain; The pure old spirit struggled, but its struggles were in vain; A nation's grip was on it, and it died in choking pain, With the fine old English Tory days, All of the olden time. The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, In England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and brand; And poverty, and ignorance, shall well the rich and grand. So, rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, Of the fine old English Tory days; Hail to the coming time! <div style="text-align: left;">W.</div> https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/The_Quack_Doctor_s_Proclamation/1841-08-14-The_Examiner_The_Quack_Doctors_Proclamation.pdf b65ff61e81f06b8c780ee564d4fa681d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Pseudonym The name under which the item was published W. Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18410814 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Tune – A Cobbler there was. An astonishing doctor has just come to town, Who will do all the faculty perfectly brown: He knows all diseases, their causes, and ends; And he ‘begs to appeal to his medical friends.’ Tol de rol: Diddle doll: Tol de rol, de dol, Diddle doll Tol de rol doll. He’s a magnetic doctor, and knows how to keep The whole of a Government snoring asleep To popular clamours; till popular pins Are stuck in their midriffs – and then he begins. Tol de rol. He’s a clairvoyant subject, and readily reads His countrymen’s wishes, conditions, and needs, With many more fine things I can’t tell in rhyme – And he keeps both his eyes shut, the whole of the time. Tol de rol. You mustn’t expect him to talk; but you’ll take Most particular notice the doctor’s awake, Though for aught from his words, or his looks that you reap, he Might just as well be most confoundedly sleepy. Tol de rol. Homëopathy too, he has practiced for ages; (You’ll find his prescriptions in Luke Hansard’s pages) Just giving his patient when maddened by pain, - Of Reform the ten thousandeth part of a grain. Tol de rol. He’s a med’cine for Ireland, in portable papers; The infallible cure for political vapours; A neat label round it his ‘prentices tie – ‘Put your trust in the Lord, and keep this powder dry!’ Tol de rol. He’s a corn doctor also, of wonderful skill, – No cutting, no rooting-up, purging, or pill – You’re merely to take, ‘stead of walking or riding, The sweet schoolboy exercise – innocent sliding. Tol de rol. There’s no advice gratis. If high ladies send His legitimate fee, he’s their soft spoken friend. At the great public counter with one hand behind him, And one in his waistcoat, they’re certain to find him. Tol de rol. He has only to add he’s the real Doctor Flam, All others being purely fictitious and sham; The house is a large one, tall, slated, and white, With a lobby; and lights in the passage at night. Tol de rol: Diddle doll: Tol de rol, de doll, Diddle doll Tol de rol doll. Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Newspaper Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) The Examiner TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1841-08-14_The_Examiner_The_Quack_Doctors_Proclamation.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'The Quack Doctor's Proclamation.' The Examiner (14 August 1841): p. 517.</a> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Quack Doctor’s Proclamation' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived British Newspapers Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-08-14 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource British Newspapers Archive, <a href="https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000054/18410814/001/0005">https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000054/18410814/001/0005</a>. Some rights reserved. This work permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-08-14-The_Examiner_The_Quack_Doctors_Proclamation Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Quack Doctor's Proclamation.' The Examiner (14 August 1841): p. 517. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-14-The_Examiner_The_Quack_Doctors_Proclamation">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-14-The_Examiner_The_Quack_Doctors_Proclamation</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in The Examiner (14 August 1841). Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Tune – A Cobbler there was. An astonishing doctor has just come to town, Who will do all the faculty perfectly brown: He knows all diseases, their causes, and ends; And he ‘begs to appeal to his medical friends.’ Tol de rol: Diddle doll: Tol de rol, de dol, Diddle doll Tol de rol doll.   He’s a magnetic doctor, and knows how to keep The whole of a Government snoring asleep To popular clamours; till popular pins Are stuck in their midriffs – and then he begins. Tol de rol.   He’s a clairvoyant subject, and readily reads His countrymen’s wishes, conditions, and needs, With many more fine things I can’t tell in rhyme  – And he keeps both his eyes shut, the whole of the time. Tol de rol.   You mustn’t expect him to talk; but you’ll take Most particular notice the doctor’s awake, Though for aught from his words, or his looks that you reap, he Might just as well be most confoundedly sleepy. Tol de rol.   Homëopathy too, he has practiced for ages; (You’ll find his prescriptions in Luke Hansard’s pages) Just giving his patient when maddened by pain, - Of Reform the ten thousandeth part of a grain. Tol de rol.   He’s a med’cine for Ireland, in portable papers; The infallible cure for political vapours; A neat label round it his ‘prentices tie – ‘Put your trust in the Lord, and keep this powder dry!’ Tol de rol.   He’s a corn doctor also, of wonderful skill, – No cutting, no rooting-up, purging, or pill – You’re merely to take, ‘stead of walking or riding, The sweet schoolboy exercise – innocent sliding. Tol de rol.   There’s no advice gratis. If high ladies send His legitimate fee, he’s their soft spoken friend. At the great public counter with one hand behind him, And one in his waistcoat, they’re certain to find him. Tol de rol.   He has only to add he’s the real Doctor Flam, All others being purely fictitious and sham; The house is a large one, tall, slated, and white, With a lobby; and lights in the passage at night. Tol de rol: Diddle doll: Tol de rol, de doll, Diddle doll Tol de rol doll. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/3/Subjects_For_Painters/1841-08-21_Subjects_for_Painters.jpeg 2a02fef116e99bbec6e0aeb736e18e81 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Pseudonym The name under which the item was published W. Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18410821 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. (After Peter Pindar.) To you, SIR MARTIN, and your co. R.A.’s, I dedicate in meek, suggestive lays, Some subjects for your academic palettes; Hoping, by dint of these my scanty jobs, To fill with novel thoughts your teeming nobs, As though I beat them in with wooden mallets. To you, MACLISE, who Eve’s fair daughters paint With Nature’s hand, and want the maudlin taint Of the sweet Chalon school of silk and ermine: To you, E. LANDSEER, who from year to year Delight in beasts and birds, and dogs and deer, And seldom give us any human vermin: – – To all who practice art, or make believe, I offer subjects they may take or leave. Great Sibthorp and his butler, in debate (Arcades ambo) on affairs of state, Not altogether ‘gone,’ but rather funny; Cursing the Whigs for leaving in the lurch Our d–d, good, pleasant, gentlemanly Church, Would make a picture – cheap at any money. Or Sibthorp as the Tory Sec.–at–War, Encouraging his mates with loud ‘Yhor! Yhor!' From Treas’ry benches’ most conspicuous end; As an expectant Premier without guile, Calls him his honourable and gallant friend. Or Sibthorp travelling in foreign parts, Through that rich portion of our Eastern charts Where lies the land of popular tradition; And fairly worshipp’d by the true devout In all his comings in and goings out, Because of the old Turkish superstition. Fame with her trumpet, blowing very hard, And making earth rich with celestial lard, In puffing deeds done through Lord Chamberlain Howe; While some few thousand persons of small gains, Who give their charities without such pains, Look up, much wondering what may be the row. Behind them Joseph Hume, who turns his pate To where great Marlbro’ House in princely state Shelters a host of lacqueys, lords, and pages, And says he knows of dowagers a crowd, Who, without trumpeting so very loud, Would do so much, and more, for half the wages. Limn, sirs, the highest lady in the land, When Joseph Surface, fawning cap in hand, Delivers in his list of patriot mortals; Those gentlemen of honour, faith, and truth, Who, foul-mouthed, spat upon her maiden youth, And dog-like did defile her palace portals. Paint me the Tories, full of grief and woe, Weeping (to voters) over Frost and Co., Their suff’ring, erring, much-enduring brothers. And in the background don’t forget to pack, Each grinning ghastly from its bloody sack, The heads of Thistlewood, Despard, and others. Paint, squandering the club’s election gold, Fierce lovers of our Constitution old, Lords who’re that sacred lady’s greatest debtors; And let the law, forbidding any voice Or act of Peer to influence the choice Of English people, flourish in bright letters. Paint that same dear old lady, ill at ease, Weak in her second childhood, hard to please, Unknowing what she ails or what she wishes; With all her Carlton nephews at the door, Deaf’ning both aunt and nurses with their roar, – Fighting already, for the loaves and fishes. Leaving these hints for you to dwell upon, I shall presume to offer more anon. Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Newspaper Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) The Examiner TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1841-08-21_The_Examiner_Subjects_For_Painters.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'Subjects For Painters.' The Examiner (21 August 1841): p. 532.</a> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Subjects For Painters' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived British Library Newspapers Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-08-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource British Library Newspapers, <a href="https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/BB3200992782/BNCN?u=loughuni&sid=BNCN&xid=784a4802" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/BB3200992782/BNCN?u=loughuni&sid=BNCN&xid=784a4802</a>. Some rights reserved. This work permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-08-21_The_Examiner_Subjects_For_Painters Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Subjects For Painters.' The Examiner (21 August 1841): p. 532. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-21_The_Examiner_Subjects_For_Painters">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-08-21_The_Examiner_Subjects_For_Painters</a>. Type The nature or genre of the resource Poem Description An account of the resource Published in The Examiner (21 August 1841). Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. (After Peter Pindar.)   To you, SIR MARTIN, and your co. R.A.’s, I dedicate in meek, suggestive lays, Some subjects for your academic palettes; Hoping, by dint of these my scanty jobs, To fill with novel thoughts your teeming nobs, As though I beat them in with wooden mallets.   To you, MACLISE, who Eve’s fair daughters paint With Nature’s hand, and want the maudlin taint Of the sweet Chalon school of silk and ermine: To you, E. LANDSEER, who from year to year Delight in beasts and birds, and dogs and deer, And seldom give us any human vermin: – – To all who practice art, or make believe, I offer subjects they may take or leave.   Great Sibthorp and his butler, in debate (Arcades ambo) on affairs of state, Not altogether ‘gone,’ but rather funny; Cursing the Whigs for leaving in the lurch Our d–d, good, pleasant, gentlemanly Church, Would make a picture – cheap at any money.   Or Sibthorp as the Tory Sec.–at–War, Encouraging his mates with loud ‘Yhor! Yhor!' From Treas’ry benches’ most conspicuous end; As an expectant Premier without guile, Calls him his honourable and gallant friend.   Or Sibthorp travelling in foreign parts, Through that rich portion of our Eastern charts Where lies the land of popular tradition; And fairly worshipp’d by the true devout In all his comings in and goings out, Because of the old Turkish superstition.   Fame with her trumpet, blowing very hard, And making earth rich with celestial lard, In puffing deeds done through Lord Chamberlain Howe; While some few thousand persons of small gains, Who give their charities without such pains, Look up, much wondering what may be the row.   Behind them Joseph Hume, who turns his pate To where great Marlbro’ House in princely state Shelters a host of lacqueys, lords, and pages, And says he knows of dowagers a crowd, Who, without trumpeting so very loud, Would do so much, and more, for half the wages.   Limn, sirs, the highest lady in the land, When Joseph Surface, fawning cap in hand, Delivers in his list of patriot mortals; Those gentlemen of honour, faith, and truth, Who, foul-mouthed, spat upon her maiden youth, And dog-like did defile her palace portals.   Paint me the Tories, full of grief and woe, Weeping (to voters) over Frost and Co., Their suff’ring, erring, much-enduring brothers. And in the background don’t forget to pack, Each grinning ghastly from its bloody sack, The heads of Thistlewood, Despard, and others.   Paint, squandering the club’s election gold, Fierce lovers of our Constitution old, Lords who’re that sacred lady’s greatest debtors; And let the law, forbidding any voice Or act of Peer to influence the choice Of English people, flourish in bright letters.   Paint that same dear old lady, ill at ease, Weak in her second childhood, hard to please, Unknowing what she ails or what she wishes; With all her Carlton nephews at the door, Deaf’ning both aunt and nurses with their roar, – Fighting already, for the loaves and fishes.   Leaving these hints for you to dwell upon, I shall presume to offer more anon. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Verse Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together the most complete set of Dickens's verse to date, supplementing the work of existing editions with previously uncollected poems Dickens contributed to albums, or wrote anonymously.</h4> Though such productions receive scant attention from scholars interested in his fiction and journalism, Dickens composed a surprising amount of verse. It was a genre in which he evidently felt much less at home (and financially rewarded) than when writing in prose. However, several poems gained popular favour during his lifetime; that so many were <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Song">written to be set to music</a> indicates the permeable boundary between metered verse functioning as poem or song in the nineteenth century, and may explain why some of Dickens’s poems were more enduringly popular than others. Notably, <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1836-05_Pickwick_Papers_The_Ivy_Green">'The Ivy Green'</a> from Pickwick Papers (1837), a story of time’s inexorable passing, was frequently republished in newspapers. Several poems written to young ladies of Dickens’s acquaintance are released on Dickens Search as part of the author’s poetic output for the first time, testifying to the author’s ability to write impromptu poetry and gallantly turn a phrase. Since keeping <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Autograph+Album&collection=&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">autograph albums</a> was a popular pastime for women in the Victorian era, it is possible that further examples of such activity remain to be discovered in various archives and private collections. When writing <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Letter&collection=3&type=&tags=&date_search_term=&submit_search=Search+For+Items">letters</a> to friends, Dickens occasionally included comedic poems for the recipient. Several of these are included. Considering the enormity of Dickens’s correspondence, likely more instances of this sort of poetic humour will result over time. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=51&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Epitaph">Epitaphs</a> Dickens wrote for friends and family, whether used or not, are included with Dickens's other verse for the first time. Users can also browse <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=94&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Play">verse from Dickens's plays</a>, including songs removed from The Strange Gentleman and Is She His Wife? Or, Something Singular! before performance. Care is necessary when verifying the accuracy of these poems, as some are misattributed to Dickens. Widespread reprintings of 'Dickens poems' in nineteenth-century newspapers are insufficient evidence for authorial attribution, owing to the mistakes intentionally or inadvertently made in ascribing authorship. An unusual example of a poem that is and is not by Dickens, the lines of 'Little Nell’s Funeral' are taken, with minimal alterations, from Chapter 72 of The Old Curiosity Shop. An instance of the strikingly lyrical quality of Dickens’s sentimental prose, they were divided into metered, unrhymed verse by M.A.H. for the 1849 collection Echoes of Infant Voices. Because Dickens did not intend for this passage to be structured in verse form, the poem is not included in the poetry collection of Dickens Search. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/poetry-dickens-didnt-write">Read our blog post for more on poetry Dickens didn't write.</a> Occasionally, Dickens will quote a poem by another author, as in his burlesque Is She his Wife? Or, Something Singular! (1836). The character Mr Felix Tapkins launches into a short hunting song beginning 'The wife around her husband throws/Her arms to make him stay'. As William Chappell noted in 1840, this is a well-known variant of 'A Hunting We Will Go' (1777), by Thomas Arne, though he misattributes its composition to Henry Fielding. Previous notable collections of some of Dickens's poetry include The Plays and Poems of Charles Dickens (1882) edited by Richard Herne Shepherd and The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens (1903) edited by Frederic G. Kitton. In 2025, we published <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-verse-of-charles-dickens.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Verse of Charles Dickens</a> (Edinburgh University Press), which includes an introduction and editorial apparatus for this verse.  Caution has been taken when ascertaining that each poem is indeed by Dickens. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or other poems written by Dickens. 1. The Verse of Charles Dickens. Edited by Lydia Craig and Emily Middleton. Edinburgh University Press, 2025; Robert Butterworth. 'The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers.' The Dickensian 516.118.1 (Spring 2022): pp. 43-56; Eva-Charlotta Mebius. 'Dreams of Dying Girls: The Poetry of Thomas J. Ouseley and Charles Dickens.' Dickens Quarterly 34.3 (September 2017): pp. 256-261; Robert C. Hanna. 'Before Boz; The Juvenilia and Early Writings of Charles Dickens, 1820-1833'. Dickens Studies Annual 40 (2009): pp. 231-364. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context verse Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig; Emily Middleton Poem Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Letter TEI File Link to TEI file <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1841-11-26_Epitaph_Katherine_Thomson.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">'Epitaph of Katherine Thomson' (26 November 1841).</a> Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18411126 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Sacred to the ashes of Katherine Thomson, For Sixty Years The dear Wife of George Thomson of Edinburgh. She died at Brompton on the Thirteenth of October 1841; Closing at the age of Seventy Five, a life of affectionate devotion and domestic excellence. Reader! The adjoining grave Is that of her Grandchild who died In the early bloom of womanhood. This Is the resting-place of one whose honoured head was gray. It is hard to lose Those whom we fondly love at any time; But it is a happy thing To believe That in Eternity There is perpetual youth and happiness For all. The will of God be done! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Epitaph of Katherine Thomson' Description An account of the resource From a letter to George Thomson (26 November 1841). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Sack, O. 'An Epitaph by Charles Dickens.' The Dickensian 10.9 (1914): 234-237. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-11-26 Type The nature or genre of the resource Epitaph Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-11-26_Epitaph_Katherine_Thomson Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Epitaph of Katherine Thomson' (26 November 1841). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/verse/ 1841-11-26_Epitaph_Katherine_Thomson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://dickenssearch.com/verse/1841-11-26_Epitaph_Katherine_Thomson</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. <div style="text-align: center;">Sacred to the ashes</div> <div style="text-align: center;">of</div> <div style="text-align: center;">Katherine Thomson,</div> <div style="text-align: center;">For Sixty Years</div> <div style="text-align: center;">The dear Wife</div> <div style="text-align: center;">of</div> <div style="text-align: center;">George Thomson</div> <div style="text-align: center;">of Edinburgh.</div> <div style="text-align: center;">She died at Brompton</div> <div style="text-align: center;">on the Thirteenth of October 1841; Closing</div> <div style="text-align: center;">at the age of Seventy Five,</div> <div style="text-align: center;">a life</div> <div style="text-align: center;">of affectionate devotion</div> <div style="text-align: center;">and domestic excellence. Reader!</div> <div style="text-align: center;">The adjoining grave</div> <div style="text-align: center;">Is that of her Grandchild</div> <div style="text-align: center;">who died</div> <div style="text-align: center;">In the early bloom of womanhood.</div> <div style="text-align: center;">This</div> <div style="text-align: center;">Is the resting-place</div> <div style="text-align: center;">of one</div> <div style="text-align: center;">whose honoured head</div> <div style="text-align: center;">was gray.</div> <div style="text-align: center;">It is hard to lose</div> <div style="text-align: center;">Those whom we fondly love</div> <div style="text-align: center;">at any time;</div> <div style="text-align: center;">But it is a happy thing</div> <div style="text-align: center;">To believe</div> <div style="text-align: center;">That in Eternity</div> <div style="text-align: center;">There is perpetual youth</div> <div style="text-align: center;">and happiness</div> <div style="text-align: center;">For all.</div> <div style="text-align: center;">The will of God be done!</div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Location The location Boston Venue Where the speech was given Tremont Theatre Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18420129 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Ladies and gentlemen, I am assured by your presence here this morning that you have become acquainted with the nature of the welcome duty which I have to discharge, and which is most pleasantly commended to me in a double sense: firstly because it cannot fail to be gratifying to a worthy man who has established a strong claim upon my interest and esteem; and, secondly, because it affords me an opportunity of meeting you, whom I have a thousand reasons for longing to see, here, or anywhere. It may be known to you, perhaps, that passengers on board the Britannia Steamship which bore me and some four score others to these happy shores, held a meeting together the day before our arrival, the object of which to do honour to Captain Hewett, the able commander under whose guidance we had crossed the wide Atlantic. I, and two other gentlemen, (one of whom stands near me, and the other of whom is prevented by business from attending here today) had the honour to be deputed by that meeting to carry its intention into effect. In the execution of the trust reposed in us by our fellow passengers, we are most desirous to impress you with the fact that this is very far from being an ordinary or matter of course proceeding: that it is not a matter of form, but of good sound substance; that in presenting Captain Hewett with these slight and frail memorials, we are not following out a hollow custom, but are imperfectly expressing the warmest and most earnest feelings, being well assured that with God’s blessing we owe our safety and preservation under circumstances of unusual peril, to his ability, courage, and skill. You will please to understand that these tokens on the table are an acknowledgement, not in themselves, but in the feeling which dictates their presentation, of many long and weary nights of watching and fatigue, of great exertion of body, and much anxiety of mind, and of the prompt and efficient discharge of arduous duties such as do not often present themselves. In a word, this is anything but an extraordinary return for really extraordinary services; and we wish you to regard it in that light that our present may have the value which it was intended to bear, and which is far enough removed, Heaven knows, from its intrinsic worth or beauty. Captain Hewett, I am very proud and happy to have been selected as the instrument of conveying to you the heartfelt thanks of my fellow passengers on board the ship entrusted to your charge, and of entreating your acceptance of this trifling present. The ingenious artists who work in silver do not always, I find, keep their promises even in Boston. I regret that instead of two goblets, which there should be here, there is at present only one. This deficiency, however, will soon be supplied; and when it is, our little testimonial will be, so far, complete. You are a sailor, Captain Hewett, in the truest sense of the word; and the devoted admiration of the ladies, God bless them, is a sailor’s first boast. I need not enlarge upon the honour they have done you, I am sure, by their presence here. Judging of you by myself, I am certain that the recollection of their beautiful faces will cheer your lonely vigils upon the ocean for a long time to come. In all time to come, and in all your voyages upon the sea, I hope you will have a thought for those who wish to live in your memory by the help of these trifles. As they will often connect you with the pleasures of those homes and firesides from which they once wandered, and which, but for you, they might never have regained, so they that trust that you will sometimes associate them with your hours of festive enjoyment: and that when you drink from these cups, you will feel that the draught is commended to your lips by friends whose best wishes you have, and who earnestly and truly hope for your success, happiness, and prosperity in all the undertakings of your life. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Presentation to Captain Hewett Description An account of the resource A speech given at the presentation to Captain Hewett, Boston (29 January 1842). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1842-01-29 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1842-01-29_Speech_Presentation-to-Captain-Hewett Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Presentation to Captain Hewett (29 January 1842). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1842-01-29_Speech_Presentation-to-Captain-Hewett">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1842-01-29_Speech_Presentation-to-Captain-Hewett</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and gentlemen, I am assured by your presence here this morning that you have become acquainted with the nature of the welcome duty which I have to discharge, and which is most pleasantly commended to me in a double sense: firstly because it cannot fail to be gratifying to a worthy man who has established a strong claim upon my interest and esteem; and, secondly, because it affords me an opportunity of meeting you, whom I have a thousand reasons for longing to see, here, or anywhere.  It may be known to you, perhaps, that passengers on board the Britannia Steamship which bore me and some four score others to these happy shores, held a meeting together the day before our arrival, the object of which to do honour to Captain Hewett, the able commander under whose guidance we had crossed the wide Atlantic. I, and two other gentlemen, (one of whom stands near me, and the other of whom is prevented by business from attending here today) had the honour to be deputed by that meeting to carry its intention into effect. In the execution of the trust reposed in us by our fellow passengers, we are most desirous to impress you with the fact that this is very far from being an ordinary or matter of course proceeding: that it is not a matter of form, but of good sound substance; that in presenting Captain Hewett with these slight and frail memorials, we are not following out a hollow custom, but are imperfectly expressing the warmest and most earnest feelings, being well assured that with God’s blessing we owe our safety and preservation under circumstances of unusual peril, to his ability, courage, and skill. You will please to understand that these tokens on the table are an acknowledgement, not in themselves, but in the feeling which dictates their presentation, of many long and weary nights of watching and fatigue, of great exertion of body, and much anxiety of mind, and of the prompt and efficient discharge of arduous duties such as do not often present themselves. In a word, this is anything but an extraordinary return for really extraordinary services; and we wish you to regard it in that light that our present may have the value which it was intended to bear, and which is far enough removed, Heaven knows, from its intrinsic worth or beauty. Captain Hewett, I am very proud and happy to have been selected as the instrument of conveying to you the heartfelt thanks of my fellow passengers on board the ship entrusted to your charge, and of entreating your acceptance of this trifling present. The ingenious artists who work in silver do not always, I find, keep their promises even in Boston. I regret that instead of two goblets, which there should be here, there is at present only one. This deficiency, however, will soon be supplied; and when it is, our little testimonial will be, so far, complete. You are a sailor, Captain Hewett, in the truest sense of the word; and the devoted admiration of the ladies, God bless them, is a sailor’s first boast. I need not enlarge upon the honour they have done you, I am sure, by their presence here. Judging of you by myself, I am certain that the recollection of their beautiful faces will cheer your lonely vigils upon the ocean for a long time to come. In all time to come, and in all your voyages upon the sea, I hope you will have a thought for those who wish to live in your memory by the help of these trifles. As they will often connect you with the pleasures of those homes and firesides from which they once wandered, and which, but for you, they might never have regained, so they that trust that you will sometimes associate them with your hours of festive enjoyment: and that when you drink from these cups, you will feel that the draught is commended to your lips by friends whose best wishes you have, and who earnestly and truly hope for your success, happiness, and prosperity in all the undertakings of your life. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Location The location Boston Venue Where the speech was given Papanti's Hall Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18420201 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Gentlemen, If you had given the splendid entertainment to anyone else in the whole wide world – if I were tonight to exult in the triumph of my dearest friend – if I stood here upon my defence to repel any unjust attack – to appeal as a stranger to your generosity and kindness as the phrase people on the earth – I could, putting some restraint upon myself, stand among you as self possessed and unmoved as I should be alone in my own room in England. But when I have the echoes of your cordial greeting ringing in my ears; when I see your kind faces beaming and welcome so warm and earnest as never man had, I feel – it is my nature – so vanquished and subdued, that I have hardly fortitude enough to thank you. If your President, instead of pouring forth that delightful mixture of humour and pathos which you have just heard with so much delight had been but a caustic, ill-natured man – if he had only been a dull one – if I could only have doubted or distrusted him or you, I should have had my wits at my fingers’ ends, and, using them, could have held you at arm’s length. But you have given me no such opportunity; you take advantage of me in the tenderest point; you give me no chance of playing at company, or holding you at a distance, but flock about me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed, gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and allowable for each of us, on his own hearth, to express his thoughts in the most homely fashion, and to appear in his plainest garb, I have a fair claim upon you to let me do so tonight, for you have made my house an Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your breasts that common household lamp in which my feeble fire is all enshrined, and at which my flickering torch is lighted up, that straight my household gods take wing, and are transported here. And whereas it is written of that fairy structure that it never moved without two shocks – one when it rose, and one when it settled down – I can say of mine that, however sharp a tug it took to pluck it from its native ground, it struck at once an easy, and a deep and lasting root into this soil, and loved it as its own. I can say more of it, and say with truth, that long before it moved, or had a chance of moving, its master – perhaps from some secret sympathy between its timbers, and a certain stately tree that has its being hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and wide – dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air. And trust me, gentlemen, that if I had wandered here unknowing and unknown, I would – if I know my own heart – have come with all my sympathies clustering richly about this land and people – with all my sense of justice as keenly alive to their high claims on every man who loves God's image – with all my energies as fully been on judging for myself, and speaking out, and telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now when you rain down your welcomes on my head. Your President has alluded to those writings which have been my occupation for some years past; and have received his allusions in a manner which assures me – if I needed any such assurance – that we are old friends in the spirit, and have been in close communion for a long time. It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. I dare say that few persons have been more interested in mine than I; and if it be a general principle in nature the lover’s love is blind, and that a mother's love is blind, I believe it may be said of an author's attachment to the creatures of his own imagination, that it is a perfect model of constancy and devotion, and is the blindest of all. But the objects and purposes I have in view are very plain and simple, and may easily be told. I have always had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common stock of healthful cheerfulness and enjoyment. I have always had, and always shall have, an invincible repugnance to that mole-eyed philosophy which loves the darkness, and winks and scowls in the light. I believe that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature, claim some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces, and that it is good, and pleasant, and profitable to track her out, and follow her. I believe that to lay one's hand upon some one of those rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused, and to say to the proudest and most thoughtless, – these creatures have the same elements and capacities of goodness as yourselves, they are moulded in the same form, and made of the same clay; and though ten times worse than you, may, in having retained anything of their original nature amidst the trials and distresses of their condition, be really ten times better. – I believe that to do this is to pursue a worthy and not useless avocation. Gentlemen, that you think so too, your fervent greeting assures me. That this feeling is alive in the Old World as well as in the New, no man should know better than I – I, who have found such wide and ready sympathy in my own dear land. That in expressing it we are but treading in the steps of those great master-spirits who have gone before, we know by reference to all the bright examples in our literature, from Shakespeare downward. There is one other point connected with the labours (if I may call them so) that you hold in such generous team, to which I cannot help adverting. I cannot help expressing the delight, then more than happiness it was to me to find so strong interest awakened on this side of the water, in favour of that little heroine of mine, to whom your President has made allusion, who died in her youth. I had letters about that child, in England, from the dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest forests, and deepest solitudes of the Far West. Many a steady hand, hard with the axe and spade, browned by the summer's sun, has taken up the pen, and written to me a little history of domestic joy or sorrow, always coupled, I am proud to say, with something of interest in that little tale, or some comfort or happiness derived from it; and my correspondent has always addressed me, not as a writer of books for sale, resident some four or five thousand miles away, but as a friend to whom he might freely impart the joys and sorrows of his own fireside. Many a mother – I could reckon them now by dozens, not by units – has done the like, and has told me that she lost a child at such a time, and where she is buried, and how good she was, and how, in this or that respect, she resembled Nell. I do assure you that no circumstance of my life has given me a hundredth part of the gratification I have derived from this source. I was wavering at the time whether or not to wind up my Clock, and come and see this country, and this decided me. I felt as if it were a positive duty, as if I were bound to pack up my clothes, and come and see my friends; and even now I have such an odd sensation in connexion with these things, that you have no chance of spoiling me. I feel as though we were agreeing – as indeed we are, if we substitute for fictitious characters that classes from which they are drawn – about third parties, in whom we have a common interest. At every act of kindness on your part, I say to myself ‘That's for Oliver; I should not wonder if that were mean for Smike; I have no doubt that it is intended for Nell’; and so I become a much happier, certainly, but a more sober and retiring man than ever I was before. Gentlemen, talking of my friends in America, brings me back, naturally and of course, to you. Coming back to you, and being thereby reminded of the pleasure we have in store in hearing the gentleman who sit about me, I arrive by the easiest, though not by the shortest course in the world, at the end of what I have to say. But before I sit down, there is one topic on which I am desirous to lay particular stress. It has, or should have, a strong interest for us all, since to its literature every country must look for one great means of refining and improving its people, and one great source of national pride and honour. You have in America great writers – great writers – who will live in all time, and are as familiar to our lips as household words. Deriving (as they all do in a greater or lesser degree, in their several walks) their inspiration from the stupendous country which gave them birth, they diffuse a better knowledge of it, and a higher love for it, all over the civilised world. I take leave to say, in the presence of some of those gentlemen, that I hope the time is not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return for hours. Pray do not misunderstand me. Securing for myself from day to day the means of an honourable subsistence, I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to me incompatible. They cannot be, for nothing good is incompatible with justice. There must be an international arrangement in this respect: England has done her part, and I am confident the time is not far distant when America will do hers. It becomes the character of a great country; firstly, because it is justice; secondly, because without it you never can have, and keep, a literature of your own. Gentlemen, I thank you with feelings of gratitude such as are not often awakened, and can never be expressed. As I understand it to be the pleasant custom here to finish with a toast, I would beg to give you ‘America and England – and may there never be anything but the Atlantic between them’. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Young Men of Boston Public Dinner Description An account of the resource Speech at the Young Men of Boston Public Dinner (1 February 1842). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1842-02-01 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1842-02-01_Speech_Young-Men-of-Boston-Public-Dinner Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Speech at the Young Men of Boston Public Dinner' (1 February 1842). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1842-02-01_Speech_Young-Men-of-Boston-Public-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1842-02-01_Speech_Young-Men-of-Boston-Public-Dinner</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Gentlemen, If you had given the splendid entertainment to anyone else in the whole wide world – if I were tonight to exult in the triumph of my dearest friend – if I stood here upon my defence to repel any unjust attack – to appeal as a stranger to your generosity and kindness as the phrase people on the earth – I could, putting some restraint upon myself, stand among you as self possessed and unmoved as I should be alone in my own room in England. But when I have the echoes of your cordial greeting ringing in my ears; when I see your kind faces beaming and welcome so warm and earnest as never man had, I feel – it is my nature – so vanquished and subdued, that I have hardly fortitude enough to thank you. If your President, instead of pouring forth that delightful mixture of humour and pathos which you have just heard with so much delight had been but a caustic, ill-natured man – if he had only been a dull one – if I could only have doubted or distrusted him or you, I should have had my wits at my fingers’ ends, and, using them, could have held you at arm’s length. But you have given me no such opportunity; you take advantage of me in the tenderest point; you give me no chance of playing at company, or holding you at a distance, but flock about me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed, gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and allowable for each of us, on his own hearth, to express his thoughts in the most homely fashion, and to appear in his plainest garb, I have a fair claim upon you to let me do so tonight, for you have made my house an Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your breasts that common household lamp in which my feeble fire is all enshrined, and at which my flickering torch is lighted up, that straight my household gods take wing, and are transported here. And whereas it is written of that fairy structure that it never moved without two shocks – one when it rose, and one when it settled down – I can say of mine that, however sharp a tug it took to pluck it from its native ground, it struck at once an easy, and a deep and lasting root into this soil, and loved it as its own. I can say more of it, and say with truth, that long before it moved, or had a chance of moving, its master – perhaps from some secret sympathy between its timbers, and a certain stately tree that has its being hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and wide – dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air. And trust me, gentlemen, that if I had wandered here unknowing and unknown, I would – if I know my own heart – have come with all my sympathies clustering richly about this land and people – with all my sense of justice as keenly alive to their high claims on every man who loves God's image – with all my energies as fully been on judging for myself, and speaking out, and telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now when you rain down your welcomes on my head. Your President has alluded to those writings which have been my occupation for some years past; and have received his allusions in a manner which assures me – if I needed any such assurance – that we are old friends in the spirit, and have been in close communion for a long time. It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. I dare say that few persons have been more interested in mine than I; and if it be a general principle in nature the lover’s love is blind, and that a mother's love is blind, I believe it may be said of an author's attachment to the creatures of his own imagination, that it is a perfect model of constancy and devotion, and is the blindest of all. But the objects and purposes I have in view are very plain and simple, and may easily be told. I have always had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common stock of healthful cheerfulness and enjoyment. I have always had, and always shall have, an invincible repugnance to that mole-eyed philosophy which loves the darkness, and winks and scowls in the light. I believe that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature, claim some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces, and that it is good, and pleasant, and profitable to track her out, and follow her. I believe that to lay one's hand upon some one of those rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused, and to say to the proudest and most thoughtless, – these creatures have the same elements and capacities of goodness as yourselves, they are moulded in the same form, and made of the same clay; and though ten times worse than you, may, in having retained anything of their original nature amidst the trials and distresses of their condition, be really ten times better. – I believe that to do this is to pursue a worthy and not useless avocation. Gentlemen, that you think so too, your fervent greeting assures me. That this feeling is alive in the Old World as well as in the New, no man should know better than I – I, who have found such wide and ready sympathy in my own dear land. That in expressing it we are but treading in the steps of those great master-spirits who have gone before, we know by reference to all the bright examples in our literature, from Shakespeare downward. There is one other point connected with the labours (if I may call them so) that you hold in such generous team, to which I cannot help adverting. I cannot help expressing the delight, then more than happiness it was to me to find so strong interest awakened on this side of the water, in favour of that little heroine of mine, to whom your President has made allusion, who died in her youth. I had letters about that child, in England, from the dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest forests, and deepest solitudes of the Far West. Many a steady hand, hard with the axe and spade, browned by the summer's sun, has taken up the pen, and written to me a little history of domestic joy or sorrow, always coupled, I am proud to say, with something of interest in that little tale, or some comfort or happiness derived from it; and my correspondent has always addressed me, not as a writer of books for sale, resident some four or five thousand miles away, but as a friend to whom he might freely impart the joys and sorrows of his own fireside. Many a mother – I could reckon them now by dozens, not by units – has done the like, and has told me that she lost a child at such a time, and where she is buried, and how good she was, and how, in this or that respect, she resembled Nell. I do assure you that no circumstance of my life has given me a hundredth part of the gratification I have derived from this source. I was wavering at the time whether or not to wind up my Clock, and come and see this country, and this decided me. I felt as if it were a positive duty, as if I were bound to pack up my clothes, and come and see my friends; and even now I have such an odd sensation in connexion with these things, that you have no chance of spoiling me. I feel as though we were agreeing – as indeed we are, if we substitute for fictitious characters that classes from which they are drawn – about third parties, in whom we have a common interest. At every act of kindness on your part, I say to myself ‘That's for Oliver; I should not wonder if that were mean for Smike; I have no doubt that it is intended for Nell’; and so I become a much happier, certainly, but a more sober and retiring man than ever I was before. Gentlemen, talking of my friends in America, brings me back, naturally and of course, to you. Coming back to you, and being thereby reminded of the pleasure we have in store in hearing the gentleman who sit about me, I arrive by the easiest, though not by the shortest course in the world, at the end of what I have to say. But before I sit down, there is one topic on which I am desirous to lay particular stress. It has, or should have, a strong interest for us all, since to its literature every country must look for one great means of refining and improving its people, and one great source of national pride and honour. You have in America great writers – great writers – who will live in all time, and are as familiar to our lips as household words. Deriving (as they all do in a greater or lesser degree, in their several walks) their inspiration from the stupendous country which gave them birth, they diffuse a better knowledge of it, and a higher love for it, all over the civilised world. I take leave to say, in the presence of some of those gentlemen, that I hope the time is not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return for hours. Pray do not misunderstand me. Securing for myself from day to day the means of an honourable subsistence, I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem to me incompatible. They cannot be, for nothing good is incompatible with justice. There must be an international arrangement in this respect: England has done her part, and I am confident the time is not far distant when America will do hers. It becomes the character of a great country; firstly, because it is justice; secondly, because without it you never can have, and keep, a literature of your own. Gentlemen, I thank you with feelings of gratitude such as are not often awakened, and can never be expressed. As I understand it to be the pleasant custom here to finish with a toast, I would beg to give you ‘America and England – and may there never be anything but the Atlantic between them’.