35 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 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. In proposing this toast, he said, he hoped it would not be at all supposed that he intended to hint that there was any connexion between a Hospital for Incurables, and the Houses of Lords and Commons. Yet it must be admitted that these houses had given symptoms of labouring under a lingering disease, with intermittent fever – with this difference, that it appeared the cold fits were very long, and the hot fits very short. Yet under the influence of gentle stimulants, the Legislature had occasionally assumed an appearance of being possessed of a strong and vigorous constitution. With the toast of the two Houses of Parliament he would couple the name of Lord Alfred Paget, who notwithstanding he had nearly met with a watery grave last night by his yacht being run down in the Channel, had been determined to be present that evening to support this great and noble charity. He approached the next toast, he said, with some trepidation, because he felt he could scarcely do justice to an institution which had for its object the finding a permanent home for a most deserving and afflicted class of the community. He had the high privilege to give a toast which recognized the immense social importance and the great Christian humanities of a hospital designed for the permanent care and comfort of those who, by disease, accident, or deformity, were hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life. It was to be remembered at the outset that it was the distinguishing feature of this institution that it entered into competition with none of the existing hospitals, but came in aid of every one of them. It did appear to him somewhat extraordinary that amongst the innumerable and valuable charities of this metropolis it had been so long without an institution for the relief of those who, in their helplessness, could not be relieved by any other hospital. There was no establishment for the treatment of the sick in this city from the doors of which some unfortunate persons altogether disqualified for the duties of life, were not driven away in consequence of the impossibility there was of rendering them that assistance which their state of health required. The institution was therefore no sooner in existence than, as might be expected, numbers of the most distinguished and experienced members of the medical profession recorded their conviction of its immense usefulness; and certificates had since been signed which placed it wholly and for ever beyond dispute. There were very many cases of great distress; of person who, brought up in a respectable position, were cut down by hopeless disease with no aid, no solace, in the dark hour of their affliction. It was to afford such a home, it was to relieve such parties that this charity was founded, and he trusted that it would grow, through the fostering care of the public, into one of the greatest of those benevolent institutions which did so much honour to the country. The Royal Hospital had scarcely achieved the second year of its existence; but nevertheless it had obtained ‘ a local habitation and a name’, in one of the prettiest places in the environs of London. There was nothing about the institution which partook of sectarianism; its principle was to know no distinction in religion; and there were not forty-four patients under its protective care. It divided itself into two branches, affording, first, to those objects of charity a home for life who had no other home; and, secondly, assisting with regular donations and kind counsels such patients as had friends to relieve them in part, and give them shelter, feeling that they could not bear that sharpest pain – the separation from those they loved. The necessity for such a hospital, which he could not but observe with regret, was shown by the circumstance that at the election within the last month, for ten recipients of the advantages of the charity, there were no less than 87 candidates, many of them having particular claims on the sympathy of the benevolent. He felt it was their duty to do everything that could be done to give these poor creatures even a chance of recovery – or, if not of recovery, of comfort in their closing days; and he trusted, therefore, that the institution would be liberally supported. In remembrance of those from whom they derived their birth; in remembrance of Him who said to the afflicted, ‘Take up thy bed and walk’; in remembrance of those whose pillows it might some day be their duty to smooth; in the name of those bright creatures upon whose breasts they hoped hereafter to rest their heads; for the love of God; for the love of man – which was one – he implored their aid on behalf of this infant institution, so that I might hereafter rank as a most beneficent giant. In conclusion he had great pleasure in proposing ‘Prosperity and Perpetuity to the Royal Hospital’. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given London 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. 18560605 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 Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner 1856 Description An account of the resource Chairman's toasts at the Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner (5 June 1856). 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 1856-06-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-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. 'Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner' (5 June 1856). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-06-05_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner</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. Dickens then gave ‘The President and the Vice-Presidents’, coupled with the name of a distinguished gentleman who was not more remarkable for his talent than he was for possessing the kindest and tenderest heart. He proposed the health of Dr. Connolly.  Finally, the chairman said that although he had been invited to take the Chair on the next occasion, he should recommend a change of diet. But he would accept the office on one condition, that in the event of the City of London re-electing the best sheriff from the time of the great Whittington, he would preside over the next meeting; but if the City took anybody else he must claim his right to take his seat as a private individual. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given London 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. 18570521 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, A few days ago I was called upon to fill up my proxy for the election of candidates to be admitted into the Royal Hospital – a Hospital established for the permanent care and comfort of those who by disease, accident, or deformity, are disqualified for the duties of life. Coming on that occasion to the perusal of the extended list of cases there set before me, I could not but feel – in common, I am sure, with many who are here – inexpressible pity for the vast number of persons who are in that forlorn condition. When I saw in that list no fewer than 121 cases, out of whom the subscribers to this charity at the next election can elect but ten, I thought, with a kind of despair, not only of the 111 who must suffer by rejection, but of the great crowd of incurables dispersed about this country of whom this society has never so much as heard, and who will never hear of it. Having that morning been busy about my own country rest and recreation, I could not but strongly feel the contrast between myself – then in the full enjoyment of health and the use of all my limbs – and that of so many of my fellow creatures, until I was glad to put this list aside, and make my escape from the reflections to which it gave rise. In one of my recent walks, I found myself in a pretty village in Surrey, which I had indeed often proposed to visit before, but had only paved the dusty road with good intentions – as I am sorry to say I have paved a worse place with a great deal of the same material – but on this morning I really found myself at the place. I inquired of a labourer for a house I wanted, and he told me, ‘When you can’t go any further, turn to your left, and there you’ll see a house with some writing wrote on the outside, which they tell me is its name; but you’ll know, because you can read, and I can’t read.’ At last I found it, and was shown into an agreeable sitting-room, which might be called a library. One sick man was lying on a sofa, and as soon as he saw me he opened the conversation, doing, as it were, the honours of the place. We spoke of the usual topics, talked of the weather, of our common enemy, the late wind, and of the progress of the crops, in the most pleasant and agreeable manner. He told me that that spot was above the cross of St. Paul’s – a fact of which he seemed excessively proud – and was altogether quite as cheerful as I was, or as I am. As I went upstairs, I got pleasant glimpses of the grounds, and of persons walking about in them, and met another sick man, quite as anxious for the arrival of dinner time as any of us in the London Tavern, and insisting that the cook’s clock must be ten minutes slow. I went upstairs into another sitting-room, where were a number of sick women of various ages grouped about on sofas and chairs, engaged in various feminine tasks, and all talking and smiling as they went on. There was one poor paralytic creature busy at her embroidery, delighted to have her work admired, and I could not help feeling great admiration that anything so orderly and straight could come out of a form so warped and cruelly afflicted. I very much doubt whether she was ever more contented in her whole life. Another woman, much older, having only a thumb and two fingers left to work with, was plodding away at her work, and very proud of what she was able to accomplish with such an imperfect complement of digits. She told me, that in her old healthy days she thought there was no greater pleasure than to sit and read all day, but that would not do now, and she had taken to this work for relief and comfort, and she had found relief and comfort here very much. One old lady, who said she had been awake all night, in great pain and trouble, was nevertheless wonderfully conversable and talkative. She said she was very comfortable on the whole; but had a certain tendency to revert to the subject of rheumatism (and no wonder). In another and smaller room there was an old lady who said she was seventy-five years of age, but she was determined to persevere, which I told her I thought was a capital thing to do. Two other young women, evidently enduring much bodily suffering, had a pleasant consciousness of good looks, and showed a desire to make the most of them. I declare to you that in all these people – and all the inmates of this house whom I saw – there was not only a hopefulness of manner, but a serenity of face, a cheerfulness and social habit that perfectly amazed me. And this was the Royal Hospital, and these its incurable inmates. Ladies and gentlemen, while I congratulated myself, as I need hardly tell you I did that morning most heartily, that this institution was able to give so much relief to sufferers in such very hopeless cases, I must not deceive you as to the Royal Hospital itself. It is not by any means what it ought to be. Its present temporary establishment is in a very inconvenient old house, by no means suitable, with rooms not half high enough, and not half ample enough. The beds are much too crowded together, and I [should] say ventilation is exceedingly difficult. The furniture is excessively inadequate to the requirements of the establishment; and a great number of appliances are needed which healthy people would, perhaps, call mawkish, but are of the gravest importance in the presence of sickness. In one comprehensive word, it wants money; and for that money, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of Christian charity, I have undertaken to appeal to you. I cannot possibly make this appeal sufficiently strong for my own satisfaction; but if I only rested it on this one consideration, that there is no hospital in London or throughout England to which this Royal Hospital is not a natural and necessary adjunct it would, I am sure, not be made in vain. The stronger the case for any of those excellent institutions which you may most favour, the stronger is this case. Every hospital knows what it is to be obliged to discharge incurable patients for whom it can do no more, and whom it cannot retain, and every member of the most generous and devoted of all professions – the medical profession – knows what it is to contemplate with pain the heartrending spectacle of those weary ones turning away from the friendly shelter of the infirmary, without any suitable resting-place, and in all probability to lay themselves down at the door of the poor-house. We know the goodness of the poor, and their readiness to help one another on all occasions. But if we do all we can to relieve them of the burden of incurable sufferers, we shall still leave them field enough for the exercise of their utmost virtues.  I will not distress you by imagining what must be the conditions of these unhappy sufferers, lodged in hot and crowded attics, or what must be the misery which their presence brings to others; I will only end, as I began, by referring you to the list of applicants for admission at the next election. We live in an age of elections – at one time or another we almost all apply to be elected into clubs for pleasure or for profit – into great corporations, the House of Commons, and what not; and three-fourths of us associate our ambition with an election of some sort or other. Within how small a compass lies the ambition of these 121 applicants! If one of this number could but make an audible address to you here at this table, instead of me, how touchingly might he say, ‘Health has departed from us for ever – our place in the struggle for bread has been filled up by others, and we have faintly dropped out of the course. Give us only a quiet home, where we may endure what yet we have to undergo, and where, by our patient manner and our brightened faces, we may somewhat reward your kind interest on our behalf.’ Once they were busy and strong, but now they are hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life; let us discharge the first of these, and provide for them a resting-place, where they may be sheltered and cared for in their irremovable afflictions. I am sure we shall not reject their prayers, and that the time will come when this Hospital shall be nobly and bountifully endowed, so that no other qualification will be needed to ensure entrance within its walls but the presence of incurable disease. I call upon you to drink prosperity to the Royal Hospital. 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 Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner 1857 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner (21 May 1857). 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 1857-05-21 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-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 Royal Hospital for Incurables Annual Dinner' (21 May 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-05-21_Speech_Royal-Hospital-for-Incurables-Annual-Dinner</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, A few days ago I was called upon to fill up my proxy for the election of candidates to be admitted into the Royal Hospital – a Hospital established for the permanent care and comfort of those who by disease, accident, or deformity, are disqualified for the duties of life. Coming on that occasion to the perusal of the extended list of cases there set before me, I could not but feel – in common, I am sure, with many who are here – inexpressible pity for the vast number of persons who are in that forlorn condition. When I saw in that list no fewer than 121 cases, out of whom the subscribers to this charity at the next election can elect but ten, I thought, with a kind of despair, not only of the 111 who must suffer by rejection, but of the great crowd of incurables dispersed about this country of whom this society has never so much as heard, and who will never hear of it. Having that morning been busy about my own country rest and recreation, I could not but strongly feel the contrast between myself – then in the full enjoyment of health and the use of all my limbs – and that of so many of my fellow creatures, until I was glad to put this list aside, and make my escape from the reflections to which it gave rise.  In one of my recent walks, I found myself in a pretty village in Surrey, which I had indeed often proposed to visit before, but had only paved the dusty road with good intentions – as I am sorry to say I have paved a worse place with a great deal of the same material – but on this morning I really found myself at the place. I inquired of a labourer for a house I wanted, and he told me, ‘When you can't go any further, turn to your left, and there you'll see a house with some writing wrote on the outside, which they tell me is its name; but you'll know, because you can read, and I can't read.’ At last I found it, and was shown into an agreeable sitting-room, which might be called a library. One sick man was lying on a sofa, and as soon as he saw me he opened the conversation, doing, as it were, the honours of the place. We spoke of the usual topics, talked of the weather, of our common enemy, the late wind, and of the progress of the crops, in the most pleasant and agreeable manner. He told me that that spot was above the cross of St. Paul’s – a fact of which he seemed excessively proud – and was altogether quite as cheerful as I was, or as I am. As I went upstairs, I got pleasant glimpses of the grounds, and of persons walking about in them, and met another sick man, quite as anxious for the arrival of dinner time as any of us in the London Tavern, and insisting that the cook's clock must be ten minutes slow. I went upstairs into another sitting-room, where were a number of sick women of various ages grouped about on sofas and chairs, engaged in various feminine tasks, and all talking and smiling as they went on. There was one poor paralytic creature busy at her embroidery, delighted to have her work admired, and I could not help feeling great admiration that anything so orderly and straight could come out of a form so warped and cruelly afflicted. I very much doubt whether she was ever more contented in her whole life. Another woman, much older, having only a thumb and two fingers left to work with, was plodding away at her work, and very proud of what she was able to accomplish with such an imperfect complement of digits. She told me, that in her old healthy days she thought there was no greater pleasure than to sit and read all day, but that would not do now, and she had taken to this work for relief and comfort, and she had found relief and comfort here very much. One old lady, who said she had been awake all night, in great pain and trouble, was nevertheless wonderfully conversable and talkative. She said she was very comfortable on the whole; but had a certain tendency to revert to the subject of rheumatism (and no wonder). In another and smaller room there was an old lady who said she was seventy-five years of age, but she was determined to persevere, which I told her I thought was a capital thing to do. Two other young women, evidently enduring much bodily suffering, had a pleasant consciousness of good looks, and showed a desire to make the most of them. I declare to you that in all these people – and all the inmates of this house whom I saw – there was not only a hopefulness of manner, but a serenity of face, a cheerfulness and social habit that perfectly amazed me. And this was the Royal Hospital, and these its incurable inmates. Ladies and gentlemen, while I congratulated myself, as I need hardly tell you I did that morning most heartily, that this institution was able to give so much relief to sufferers in such very hopeless cases, I must not deceive you as to the Royal Hospital itself. It is not by any means what it ought to be. Its present temporary establishment is in a very inconvenient old house, by no means suitable, with rooms not half high enough, and not half ample enough. The beds are much too crowded together, and I [should] say ventilation is exceedingly difficult. The furniture is excessively inadequate to the requirements of the establishment; and a great number of appliances are needed which healthy people would, perhaps, call mawkish, but are of the gravest importance in the presence of sickness. In one comprehensive word, it wants money; and for that money, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of Christian charity, I have undertaken to appeal to you. I cannot possibly make this appeal sufficiently strong for my own satisfaction; but if I only rested it on this one consideration, that there is no hospital in London or throughout England to which this Royal Hospital is not a natural and necessary adjunct it would, I am sure, not be made in vain. The stronger the case for any of those excellent institutions which you may most favour, the stronger is this case. Every hospital knows what it is to be obliged to discharge incurable patients for whom it can do no more, and whom it cannot retain, and every member of the most generous and devoted of all professions – the medical profession – knows what it is to contemplate with pain the heartrending spectacle of those weary ones turning away from the friendly shelter of the infirmary, without any suitable resting-place, and in all probability to lay themselves down at the door of the poor-house. We know the goodness of the poor, and their readiness to help one another on all occasions. But if we do all we can to relieve them of the burden of incurable sufferers, we shall still leave them field enough for the exercise of their utmost virtues.  I will not distress you by imagining what must be the conditions of these unhappy sufferers, lodged in hot and crowded attics, or what must be the misery which their presence brings to others; I will only end, as I began, by referring you to the list of applicants for admission at the next election. We live in an age of elections – at one time or another we almost all apply to be elected into clubs for pleasure or for profit – into great corporations, the House of Commons, and what not; and three-fourths of us associate our ambition with an election of some sort or other. Within how small a compass lies the ambition of these 121 applicants! If one of this number could but make an audible address to you here at this table, instead of me, how touchingly might he say, ‘Health has departed from us for ever – our place in the struggle for bread has been filled up by others, and we have faintly dropped out of the course. Give us only a quiet home, where we may endure what yet we have to undergo, and where, by our patient manner and our brightened faces, we may somewhat reward your kind interest on our behalf.’ Once they were busy and strong, but now they are hopelessly disqualified for the duties of life; let us discharge the first of these, and provide for them a resting-place, where they may be sheltered and cared for in their irremovable afflictions. I am sure we shall not reject their prayers, and that the time will come when this Hospital shall be nobly and bountifully endowed, so that no other qualification will be needed to ensure entrance within its walls but the presence of incurable disease. I call upon you to drink prosperity to the Royal Hospital. 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. In the interval, he said, perhaps the chairman would permit him to proceed with a motion which he had to submit to the meeting. The resolution went to recognize the necessity of the society being reincorporated under a new Charter, and he would state the grounds on which he moved it with all possible plainness. The existing Charter was so excessively ridiculous, so absurdly inconsistent, and so manifestly preposterous, that it ought to be abandoned by all men of sound mind, memory, and understanding. Whether the construction that had been put upon it by the Committee were legal or illegal he did not know; but this he did know, that it was sheer nonsense, and he was therefore of the opinion that steps ought to be taken to procure an amended Charter from the Government. He need scarcely remind them how this question arose. About seven years ago the administrative body of the Corporation, which then consisted of the Council and Committee together, ascertained that for thirty years or so all their proceedings had been illegal. The respected outlaws, on whose minds this conclusion had forced itself, immediately rushed off to the Attorney General, and, in the most laudable manner, exerted themselves otherwise to effect a reconciliation with the outraged majesty of the Law. The result of their deliberations was, that one of the governing bodies of the society called the Council, which had hitherto been recognized as having a right to sit and vote with the General Committee, was thenceforward entirely set apart as having no business to do so, was understood to be for ever banished from the light of the General Committee’s countenance, and had taken no part in the management of the society. Now, before he followed the Council into their extraordinary position in space, let him inquire under what authority these two bodies, the Council and the General Committee, had come into existence. Necessarily, under the authority of the Charter, which declared that there should always be a Council, General Committee, President, Vice-Presidents, and so forth, who, in the words of the Charter should have ‘the entire direction and management’ of the affairs of the institution. In the very next paragraph, the Charter referred to ‘Meetings of the Council’, regularly and plainly expressing, in the most roundabout and the most homely English, that the Council should meet. and that it should have as much share in the government of the institution as the General Committee or the other officers of the society had. This intention the Charter further most emphatically expressed by requiring that the Council should be a very notable body indeed, composed of the most potent, grave, and reverend signiors’ that the society could discover. It demanded as a qualification that they should have dissected for years every limb of the cases brought before the General Committee, and it regularly stipulated that the Council should be composed of the President and Vice-Presidents and not more than twenty other members of the Corporation, who should ‘have served for three years at least upon the General Committee’. The Council being, in this express manner, thus constituted and limited, he hoped they would excuse him for suggesting that outside the Literary Fund itself, and outside those two large establishments of St. Luke’s and Bedlam, there surely could not be in the metropolis a single human being who could for one moment doubt that the Council was intended to have a real existence, and ought to have something to do. But had it a real existence? Had it anything to do? Why, he appealed to facts which were within the knowledge of every gentleman at that table, and to his own personal experience too; for he had had the honour of being elected a member of that august body, and also of retiring from it as soon as he found out how it was situated.  Having forfeited his seat on the General Committee, he received a most obliging letter from the secretary, in which he could detect nothing like latent pleasantry or a practical joke, asking if he would like to be elected a member of the Council. He felt extremely diffident about aspiring to such an honour. He pictured to himself a body of sages, peaceably meeting, whose large consumption of midnight oil for the benefit of the society and in administration of the Literary Fund might possibly account for the great expenditure which had been incurred. After much thought he came to the conclusion that by study, and fasting, he might perhaps become fit for such companionship, and replied to the secretary that he would accept the office. So much was he impressed with the importance of the function, that for months afterwards he never left home without leaving word where he might be found, in the event of the Literary Fund wanting him to take counsel with them. He found, however, that they got on without requiring his assistance, and he was then induced to inquire when this Council met, where it met, and what it had to do when it did meet. To his inexpressible amazement he discovered that, according to the construction of the Charter, it never had met as a Council, that it never could and never did meet at any place whatsoever, that it had nothing to do, and that in short it was the only thing in all creation that had no end, purpose, or object in being in existence. I ask the meeting – Dickens continued – to consider what the public would say to such a mode of doing business in any other institution with similar pretensions: to a board of directors never meant to direct, to a body of highly qualified judges never allowed to judge, to a jury convened by solemn writ and summons, never to deliberate and find a verdict. Imagine a physician appointed never to prescribe – a surgeon, never to set a bone. Conceive a corps of firemen who are especially enjoined under no circumstances whatever to go within fifty miles of a fire, or imagine the picked officers of the Royal Humane Society particularly, and strictly, tied up by law from approaching the water. But this is the case of your Council at this moment – that Council which the Charter expressly mentions as one of the governing bodies which shall have ‘ the entire direction and management’ of the affairs of the institution. Now I beg to suggest that if no such pretence would be tolerated in any other institution under the sun, it is least likely to be endured once known and understood out of doors, in the case of a public institution having control over the very large sum of money which has been subscribed by the public, with one plain, distinct, and undeniable object. Firstly, because anything like a false pretence of any kind in such an institution, most properly and justly lays it open to particular suspicion; and, secondly, because the continued endurance of this ridiculous and absurd state of things will always suggest most infallibly and dangerously either that the Council is used as a shelf on which to place uncomfortable members of the General Committee, or as a means of propping up the faults of the concern with the mere names of eminent literary men, who have and can have really nothing to do with it.  I submit that this Charter is utterly defective and rotten, inasmuch as it appoints among the governing bodies of the institution a Council; inasmuch as it regulates and sets forth the duties and functions of the other governing bodies, but omits to name those of the Council; the consequence of which is, not only nonsense, as I have already said, but a distinct perversion both of the letter and the spirit of the Charter; and inasmuch as the Council does not discharge, and to the end of time never can discharge, these functions which we solemnly confide to it by the Charter, I have not only the hope – the present hope – but the ultimate certainty of setting this very foolish matter right; and, therefore, I beg to move:  That whether the General Committee’s construction of the existing Charter be legal or illegal (as to which there are differences of opinion), it is manifestly absurd, as constituting a body expressly to be elected from Members of the General Committee, with at least three years’ experience, called a Council, to which it confides no powers, and no duties, and which never meets, because it cannot even be called together, by any authority, for any purpose; and that it is, therefore, desirable to apply for a new Charter, and that a committee be specially appointed with this object. He could not accede to this suggestion, he said, since that Committee had already reported against any alteration. As to the present constitution of the Corporation not being inconvenient, all he had to say was that everything foolish was inconvenient <span class="NormalTextRun SCXW151248918 BCX0" data-ccp-charstyle="normaltextrun" data-ccp-charstyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"b16eb7e5-4c87-4983-b1da-6cea1ee4c271|34","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[201342446,"1",201342447,"5",201342448,"1",201342449,"1",469777841,"Aptos",469777842,"",469777843,"Aptos",469777844,"Aptos",201341986,"1",469769226,"Aptos",268442635,"22",469775450,"normaltextrun",201340122,"1",134233614,"true",469778129,"normaltextrun",335572020,"1",469778324,"Default Paragraph Font"]}">– a foolish arrangement just as a foolish person. He thought that members of the Council were now placed in a ridiculous position in relation to the public; and would be placed also in an inconvenient position when the truth, with respect to their want of duties or of power, became known. He should press his resolution, but would be ready to confer with the General Committee as to the names to be placed upon the special committee of the society.  Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund 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. 18550314 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting 1855 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (14 March 1855). 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 1855-03-14 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1855-03-14_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting' (14 March 1855). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1855-03-14_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1855-03-14_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting</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 Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund 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. 18560312 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. Sir, I shall not attempt to follow my friend Mr. Bell – who, in the profession of literature, represents upon this Committee a separate and distinct branch of the profession, that like: The last rose of summer Stands blooming alone, His lovely companions All faded and gone, – into the very ingenious maze of bramble-bushes with which he has contrived to beset this question. In the remarks I have to make I shall confine myself to four points. One, that it would appear from Mr. Bell's speech that the Committee find themselves in the painful condition of not spending enough money, and will presently apply themselves to the great reform of spending more. Two, that with regard to the house, it is a positive matter of history, that the house for which Mr. Williams was so anxious, was to be applied to uses to which it never has been applied, and which the administrators of the Fund decline to recognize. Three, that with respect to Mr. Bell’s endeavours to remove the Artists’ Benevolent Fund from the ground of analogy which it unquestionably occupies in reference to the Literary Fund, by alleging that it continually relieves the same people, I beg to say that Mr. Bell, as well as every gentleman sitting at that table, knows perfectly well, that it is the business of this Fund to relieve the same people over and over again; and, indeed, I hold in my hand a report for 1855, from which I find out that out of forty-eight cases relieved, thirty were those of persons relieved from the second to the tenth time.  I can only oppose to that statement my own experience when I sat on that committee, and when I have known persons relieved, as a matter of course, on many consecutive applications, without further inquiry being made. As to the suggestion that we should select the particular items of expenditure that we complain of, I think it is according to all experience that we should first affirm the principle that the expenditure is too large. If that be done by the meeting, then I will immediately proceed to the selection of the separate items. Now, in rising to support this resolution, I may state at once that I have scarcely any expectation of its being carried, and I am happy to think it will not. Indeed, I consider it the strongest point of the resolution's case that it should not be carried, for it would be impossible to convey to the public a more convincing proof of mismanagement, and the determination of the managers to mismanage it to the death, than would be involved in the recital for the second time within twelve months, that the attention of the Committee had been called to the incontrovertible facts of its great expenditure, and that at the same time the Committee had asserted that it considered the expenses were not unreasonable. I cannot conceive a stronger case for the responsibility of the reform urged for the second time and I rejoice that this statement of facts  and the assertion that the expenses are not unreasonable will go forth together. Now, to separate this question from details, let us remember what the Committee and their supporters asserted last year, and I hope will reassert this year: that it was rather a model kind of thing than otherwise now, that if you get £100 you are to spend £40 in management; and if you get £1000, of course you may spend £400 in giving the rest away. Now, in case there should be any ill-conditioned people here, who may ask what occasion there can be for all this expenditure, I will give you my experience. I went last year to a highly respectable place of resort, Willis’s Rooms, in St. James’s, to a Special General meeting of this Corporation, for the purpose of hearing and seeing all I could, and saying as little as I could prevail on myself not to say. Allowing for the absence of the younger and fairer portion of the female sex, the general appearance of the place was very much like Almack’s in the morning. A number of stately old dowagers were ranged in a row on one side, and old gentlemen sat on the other. The ball was opened with due solemnity by a real marquis, who walked a minuet with the Secretary, at which the audience were much affected. Then another party advanced, who, I am sorry to say, was only a member of the House of Commons – but a gentleman highly connected – and he gracefully took the floor. To him, however, succeeded a distinguished lord, then a bishop, then the son of a distinguished lord; after which the minor church rose, with a member of the Stock Exchange and the Bar; and, at last, in an interval of the theatricals, a man more immediately connected with Literature, though not of course considered very respectable, was allowed to step in and sustain the part of Pangloss, in the adventures of Candide, and delight the audience by explaining that this was the best of all possible societies, conducted under the best of all possible managements, at the least of all possible expenditure from the best of all possible funds. It is in these things – it is in our fondness for being so stupendously genteel, by keeping up such a fashionable appearance, by giving way to the vulgar and common social vice of hanging on to great connexions at any price – that the money goes. Why, sir, the very last distinguished writer of fiction whom you caught for your public dinner, told you, in return for drinking his health, somewhere towards the small hours of the morning, that he felt like the servant in plush who is permitted to sweep the stage down, when there are no more great people to come on; and  I myself, at a dinner some twelve years ago, felt like a sort of Rip Van Winkle reversed, who had gone to sleep backwards for a hundred years; and, waking, found that Literature instead of being emancipated, had to endure all manner of aristocratic patrons, and was lying at the feet of people who did nothing for it, instead of standing alone and appealing to the public for support. Why, this Bloomsbury house is another part of the same desire for show, and the officer who inhabits it. (I mean, of course, in his official capacity, for, as an individual, I much respect him.) When one enters the house it appears to be haunted by a series of mysterious looking ghosts, who glide about in some extraordinary occupation; and, after the approved fashion of ghosts, but seldom condescend to disclose their business. What are all these meeting and inquiries wanted for? As for the authors, I say, as a writer by profession, that the long inquiry said to be necessary to ascertain whether an applicant deserves relief, is a preposterous pretence, and that working literary men would have a far better knowledge of the cases coming before the board than can ever be attained by that Committee. Further, I say openly and plainly, that this Fund is pompously and unnaturally administered at great expense, instead of being quietly administered at small expense: and that the secrecy to which it lays claim as its great attribute, is not kept; for through those ‘two respectable householders’, to whom reference must be made to enlighten the ignorance of the Committee, the names of the most deserving applicants leak out, and are, to numbers of people, perfectly well known. The members have now got before them a plain statement of fact as to these charges; and it is for them to say whether they are unreasonable, or justifiable, becoming, and decent. I beg most earnestly and respectfully to put it to those gentlemen who belong to this institution, that they must now decide, and cannot help deciding, what the Literary Fund is, and what it is not – what it is for, and what it is not for. The question raised by the resolution is whether this is a public corporation for the relief of men of genius and learning, who may be reduced to distress by unavoidable calamities or deprived by enfeebled faculties or declining life of the power of literary exertion; or whether it is a snug, traditional, and conventional party, bent upon maintaining its own usages with a vast amount of unnecessary parade, upon its own annual puffery at costly dinner tables, and upon a course of expensive toadying once every twelve months, to one or two members of the aristocracy, with a view to recruiting its finances. This is the question that you must decide today, and it is a question from which you cannot escape. 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting 1856 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (12 March 1856). 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 1856-03-12 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1856-03-12_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting' (12 March 1856). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-03-12_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1856-03-12_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Sir, I shall not attempt to follow my friend Mr. Bell – who, in the profession of literature, represents upon this Committee a separate and distinct branch of the profession, that like:   The last rose of summer   Stands blooming alone,   His lovely companions   All faded and gone,   – into the very ingenious maze of bramble-bushes with which he has contrived to beset this question. In the remarks I have to make I shall confine myself to four points. One, that it would appear from Mr. Bell's speech that the Committee find themselves in the painful condition of not spending enough money, and will presently apply themselves to the great reform of spending more. Two, that with regard to the house, it is a positive matter of history, that the house for which Mr. Williams was so anxious, was to be applied to uses to which it never has been applied, and which the administrators of the Fund decline to recognize. Three, that with respect to Mr. Bell’s endeavours to remove the Artists’ Benevolent Fund from the ground of analogy which it unquestionably occupies in reference to the Literary Fund, by alleging that it continually relieves the same people, I beg to say that Mr. Bell, as well as every gentleman sitting at that table, knows perfectly well, that it is the business of this Fund to relieve the same people over and over again; and, indeed, I hold in my hand a report for 1855, from which I find out that out of forty-eight cases relieved, thirty were those of persons relieved from the second to the tenth time.  I can only oppose to that statement my own experience when I sat on that committee, and when I have known persons relieved, as a matter of course, on many consecutive applications, without further inquiry being made. As to the suggestion that we should select the particular items of expenditure that we complain of, I think it is according to all experience that we should first affirm the principle that the expenditure is too large. If that be done by the meeting, then I will immediately proceed to the selection of the separate items.  Now, in rising to support this resolution, I may state at once that I have scarcely any expectation of its being carried, and I am happy to think it will not. Indeed, I consider it the strongest point of the resolution's case that it should not be carried, for it would be impossible to convey to the public a more convincing proof of mismanagement, and the determination of the managers to mismanage it to the death, than would be involved in the recital for the second time within twelve months, that the attention of the Committee had been called to the incontrovertible facts of its great expenditure, and that at the same time the Committee had asserted that it considered the expenses were not unreasonable. I cannot conceive a stronger case for the responsibility of the reform urged for the second time and I rejoice that this statement of facts and the assertion that the expenses are not unreasonable will go forth together. Now, to separate this question from details, let us remember what the Committee and their supporters asserted last year, and I hope will reassert this year: that it was rather a model kind of thing than otherwise now, that if you get £100 you are to spend £40 in management; and if you get £1000, of course you may spend £400 in giving the rest away. Now, in case there should be any ill-conditioned people here, who may ask what occasion there can be for all this expenditure, I will give you my experience. I went last year to a highly respectable place of resort, Willis’s Rooms, in St. James’s, to a Special General meeting of this Corporation, for the purpose of hearing and seeing all I could, and saying as little as I could prevail on myself not to say. Allowing for the absence of the younger and fairer portion of the female sex, the general appearance of the place was very much like Almack’s in the morning. A number of stately old dowagers were ranged in a row on one side, and old gentlemen sat on the other. The ball was opened with due solemnity by a real marquis, who walked a minuet with the Secretary, at which the audience were much affected. Then another party advanced, who, I am sorry to say, was only a member of the House of Commons –  but a gentleman highly connected – and he gracefully took the floor. To him, however, succeeded a distinguished lord, then a bishop, then the son of a distinguished lord; after which the minor church rose, with a member of the Stock Exchange and the Bar; and, at last, in an interval of the theatricals, a man more immediately connected with Literature, though not of course considered very respectable, was allowed to step in and sustain the part of Pangloss, in the adventures of Candide, and delight the audience by explaining that this was the best of all possible societies, conducted under the best of all possible managements, at the least of all possible expenditure from the best of all possible funds. It is in these things – it is in our fondness for being so stupendously genteel, by keeping up such a fashionable appearance, by giving way to the vulgar and common social vice of hanging on to great connexions at any price – that the money goes. Why, sir, the very last distinguished writer of fiction whom you caught for your public dinner, told you, in return for drinking his health, somewhere towards the small hours of the morning, that he felt like the servant in plush who is permitted to sweep the stage down, when there are no more great people to come on; and  I myself, at a dinner some twelve years ago, felt like a sort of Rip Van Winkle reversed, who had gone to sleep backwards for a hundred years; and, waking, found that Literature instead of being emancipated, had to endure all manner of aristocratic patrons, and was lying at the feet of people who did nothing for it, instead of standing alone and appealing to the public for support. Why, this Bloomsbury house is another part of the same desire for show, and the officer who inhabits it. (I mean, of course, in his official capacity, for, as an individual, I much respect him.) When one enters the house it appears to be haunted by a series of mysterious looking ghosts, who glide about in some extraordinary occupation; and, after the approved fashion of ghosts, but seldom condescend to disclose their business. What are all these meeting and inquiries wanted for? As for the authors, I say, as a writer by profession, that the long inquiry said to be necessary to ascertain whether an applicant deserves relief, is a preposterous pretence, and that working literary men would have a far better knowledge of the cases coming before the board than can ever be attained by that Committee. Further, I say openly and plainly, that this Fund is pompously and unnaturally administered at great expense, instead of being quietly administered at small expense: and that the secrecy to which it lays claim as its great attribute, is not kept; for through those ‘two respectable householders’, to whom reference must be made to enlighten the ignorance of the Committee, the names of the most deserving applicants leak out, and are, to numbers of people, perfectly well known.  The members have now got before them a plain statement of fact as to these charges; and it is for them to say whether they are unreasonable, or justifiable, becoming, and decent. I beg most earnestly and respectfully to put it to those gentlemen who belong to this institution, that they must now decide, and cannot help deciding, what the Literary Fund is, and what it is not – what it is for, and what it is not for. The question raised by the resolution is whether this is a public corporation for the relief of men of genius and learning, who may be reduced to distress by unavoidable calamities or deprived by enfeebled faculties or declining life of the power of literary exertion; or whether it is a snug, traditional, and conventional party, bent upon maintaining its own usages with a vast amount of unnecessary parade, upon its own annual puffery at costly dinner tables, and upon a course of expensive toadying once every twelve months, to one or two members of the aristocracy, with a view to recruiting its finances. This is the question that you must decide today, and it is a question from which you cannot escape.  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. As, he said, he should not speak seven minutes, he hoped he should not incur the sacred wrath of the gentlemen in the middle of the room who were so impatient of any waste of time when those opposed to the Committee spoke, but who did not feel the slightest annoyance however long the speeches of the honourable gentlemen at the table might be. He, however, wished it to be distinctly understood that if he were going to speak seven hours instead of seven minutes, although he did not represent Literature in the attitude in which it was there most favourably received – namely, in the person of a suppliant certified by two householders – he should most strenuously though respectfully maintain his claim to be heard in this place above all others; for, in whatever manner it was treated elsewhere, there, at all events, every other consideration should yield to its dignity.  As to the denial of Mr. Bell as to the analogy to be drawn between the Literary Fund and the Artists’ Benevolent Fund, he at once took issue with him; he was very well acquainted with both funds, and protested that he knew of no difference between them, and of no reason whatever why this society should not be managed as cheaply as the other. With reference to the claims of Mr. Blewitt, and Mr. Dilke’s frequent acknowledgement of those claims, he impressed upon the meeting that there had been no change in the sentiments of his friend. All that they wanted was, that this society should avail themselves of the valuable services of Mr. Blewitt, in a wider and more efficient manner; and they had declared again and again that nothing would delight them more than to double or even treble Mr. Blewitt’s salary, on the society’s extending his sphere of operations. He passed over the somewhat lengthy case of Mr. Haydn, which, he submitted, with all due deference, had nothing whatever to do with the present discussion, and would endeavour to bring the attention of the meeting to the point at issue. The question as to the existence or not of the House fund, was not a question of 1821, but of last year; because, on the second Wednesday of last March, they – the conspiring reformers – were put down by the solemn assertion that there was a House fund of some £6,400. The subscription for that fund was a complete failure. He took it upon himself to say that it did not exceed £600. And the way in which this imaginary sum was got at was as follows: – the Prince Regent allowed two hundred guineas a year to pay the rent of the house inhabited by the society, paid yearly or half-yearly; but the sums paid for the rent had been put down as an accumulated fund, precisely as if they had it in hand at the present moment, – so the extraordinary statement made last year as to the existence of this sum, never had any real foundation. If statements were so rashly made in that expensive little room he thought it would not be long before the society itself would fall into disrepute.  He would, with their permission, give a short illustration of the mode in which this question had been dealt with. Let him suppose the case of a clerk in the receipt of one hundred pounds a year, paid half-yearly, and every farthing of which was anticipated before he received it. His having received that income twenty years, would not make him the possessor of £2,000. But he would carry the case further. Let them suppose a family picture representing an estimable old gentleman bestowing the hand of his only daughter upon the man of her heart, and saying to them, while tears of generosity coursed down his cheeks, My darling Emma, my dear Edward! take my blessing upon you each; and with my blessing accept my twenty years’ receipts of my rent at £200 a year, which your filial affection will at once enable you to perceive are equal to £4,000 Consols, in perpetuity.’ Or let them, without any derogation of dignity, just fancy themselves for a moment upon an Old Bailey jury, – would they, or would they not decide that such a representation was a false one? His assertion was, most distinctly, that they (the reform party) were put out of court last year on an utterly false pretence; and that part of the resolution, at all events, every gentleman in the room was bound to consider before he decided.   Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund 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. 18570311 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting 1857 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (11 March 1857). 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 1857-03-11 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting' (11 March 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-03-11_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting</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 Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund 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. 18580310 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. In response to that very graceful appeal, will you allow me to say at once that I have not only the pleasure of assuring you that I am not going to make a speech, but I have also the pleasure of hoping that the course I am going to take will be equally satisfactory to both parties in the room. This may appear, at first sight, rather a romantic expectation, but I will show you in half a dozen words what a practical expectation it is. On the former occasions we have met here, the majority who supported the Committee in the existing state of things – of which majority the committee itself formed so influential, so satisfied, so laudatory, and so very large a part – have very strongly objected to drawing a comparison between this institution and any like institution in the known world. Now, no such comparison shall be heard from me today. Upon former occasions I have observed that dry details which are utterly inseparable from questions of figures are extremely unpalatable here, and apt to be received with considerable resentment; and I hope my abstinence and resolve thereon will be quite agreeable to both parties. I will only plainly say on that head (if there be any member of the Literary Fund attending here for the first time) that if under any circumstances I were to venture to enter in detail into the last accounts, I am quite sensible that it would look like the wanderings of a lunatic if I were to point out in detail how a fund of this kind had drawn forty-one charitable drafts on the society’s bankers, at a cost of £13 each– absolutely more, in three cases, than the sum drawn for; how upon these forty-one cases there was a cost of more than forty-five per cent; while only fifteen of those cases were new ones after all – all the others having already been relieved from once to eight times. Well now, for that reason, and for the promotion of general good will amongst us, I will confine myself to the assertion of a principle. Before the public, who, as I said on a previous occasion, are indeed the real judges of this matter, I entertain the single wish to fasten upon myself, and those who act with me in this matter, the distinct assertion of a plain principle; and to fasten on the Committee, and those who support them, the distinct assertion of a principle equally plain and manifest. Now, the very moderate amendment I have to move is this:  That the accounts of the Literary Fund, showing a systematic expenditure of from 40 l. to 45 l. in the giving away of every 100 l. of grants, are not quite satisfactory; that such an appropriation of money, subscribed with a clearly defined charitable object, is not quite right; that its continuance as a distinctive feature of the Literary Fund is not so consistent with the professions of the Literary Fund as to tend to uphold that Institution in general confidence; that such continuance, therefore, ought not to be sanctioned from year to year, and is now protested against. Very well; this resolution will, no doubt, be duly seconded, duly put from the Chair, and duly negatived. The majority will be glad to negative it, I shall be content to have it negatived, and we shall all be satisfied. It will then be distinctly proclaimed ‘that the accounts of the Literary Fund, showing a systematic expenditure of from 40 l. to 45 l. in the giving away of every 100 l. of grants’, are ‘quite satisfactory’; and, further, that the continuance of ‘such an appropriation of money, subscribed with a clearly defined charitable object’, is ‘quite right’, that ‘its continuance as a distinctive feature of the Literary Fund’’ is so consistent with its professions as ‘to tend to uphold that institution in the general confidence’; and, ‘that such continuance, therefore’, should ‘be sanctioned from year to year’, and is not ‘protested against.’ Now, to the acceptance of this responsibility for myself, and to the putting of their responsibility on the Committee, I have steadily resolved to confine myself today. I am here wholely and solely for that purpose, and no consideration whatsoever shall induce me to swerve from it. In connexion with two friends who are now near me, I have written a letter and caused it to be equally circulated amongst all members of this society without any distinction, and we have had it printed, in which we have set forth what seem to us to be very grave, self-evident objections to the administration and expenditure. If any champion of that administration and expenditure will impugn any one of those statements in writing, as we have done, upon his own personal honour, upon his personal responsibility, and with the fixed association of answer to assertion which belongs to productions in print, we will immediately answer him, and prove that case whatever it may be. But I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am not skirmishing to escape here from the one unqualified declaration that the present system of expenditure in the Literary Fund, as a charitable institution, is in principle and practice quite right, is calculated to attract public confidence, and does not require revision. We will not permit ourselves, under any circumstances whatsoever, to be led away from that, and therefore I can communicate to you, Lord Stanhope, the very comfortable intelligence, that after the resolution I have read has been put and disposed of, not one other word will be heard in this room from my lips, and not one from Mr. Dilke, and not one from Mr. Forster, until this time next year. We assume, as we are bound in courtesy to assume, that our opponents have no greater desire to shrink from a broad open, manly acceptance of their responsibility, than we have desired to shrink from ours. Here in this resolution, read affirmatively and read negatively, are two responsibilities, for and against. Let each side please to take its own, and let both sides go on their way rejoicing. 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 Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting 1858 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (10 March 1858). 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 1858-03-10 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1858-03-10_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Annual General Meeting (10 March 1858). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1858-03-10_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1858-03-10_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Annual-General-Meeting</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. In response to that very graceful appeal, will you allow me to say at once that I have not only the pleasure of assuring you that I am not going to make a speech, but I have also the pleasure of hoping that the course I am going to take will be equally satisfactory to both parties in the room. This may appear, at first sight, rather a romantic expectation, but I will show you in half a dozen words what a practical expectation it is. On the former occasions we have met here, the majority who supported the Committee in the existing state of things – of which majority the committee itself formed so influential, so satisfied, so laudatory, and so very large a part – have very strongly objected to drawing a comparison between this institution and any like institution in the known world. Now, no such comparison shall be heard from me today. Upon former occasions I have observed that dry details which are utterly inseparable from questions of figures are extremely unpalatable here, and apt to be received with considerable resentment; and I hope my abstinence and resolve thereon will be quite agreeable to both parties. I will only plainly say on that head (if there be any member of the Literary Fund attending here for the first time) that if under any circumstances I were to venture to enter in detail into the last accounts, I am quite sensible that it would look like the wanderings of a lunatic if I were to point out in detail how a fund of this kind had drawn forty-one charitable drafts on the society's bankers, at a cost of £13 each– absolutely more, in three cases, than the sum drawn for; how upon these forty-one cases there was a cost of more than forty-five per cent; while only fifteen of those cases were new ones after all – all the others having already been relieved from once to eight times. Well now, for that reason, and for the promotion of general good will amongst us, I will confine myself to the assertion of a principle. Before the public, who, as I said on a previous occasion, are indeed the real judges of this matter, I entertain the single wish to fasten upon myself, and those who act with me in this matter, the distinct assertion of a plain principle; and to fasten on the Committee, and those who support them, the distinct assertion of a principle equally plain and manifest. Now, the very moderate amendment I have to move is this:  That the accounts of the Literary Fund, showing a systematic expenditure of from 40 l. to 45 l. in the giving away of every 100 l. of grants, are not quite satisfactory; that such an appropriation of money, subscribed with a clearly defined charitable object, is not quite right; that its continuance as a distinctive feature of the Literary Fund is not so consistent with the professions of the Literary Fund as to tend to uphold that Institution in general confidence; that such continuance, therefore, ought not to be sanctioned from year to year, and is now protested against. Very well; this resolution will, no doubt, be duly seconded, duly put from the Chair, and duly negatived. The majority will be glad to negative it, I shall be content to have it negatived, and we shall all be satisfied. It will then be distinctly proclaimed ‘that the accounts of the Literary Fund, showing a systematic expenditure of from 40 l. to 45 l. in the giving away of every 100 l. of grants’, are ‘quite satisfactory’; and, further, that the continuance of ‘such an appropriation of money, subscribed with a clearly defined charitable object’, is ‘quite right’, that ‘its continuance as a distinctive feature of the Literary Fund'’ is so consistent with its professions as ‘to tend to uphold that institution in the general confidence’; and, ‘that such continuance, therefore’, should ‘be sanctioned from year to year’, and is not ‘protested against.’ Now, to the acceptance of this responsibility for myself, and to the putting of their responsibility on the Committee, I have steadily resolved to confine myself today. I am here wholely and solely for that purpose, and no consideration whatsoever shall induce me to swerve from it. In connexion with two friends who are now near me, I have written a letter and caused it to be equally circulated amongst all members of this society without any distinction, and we have had it printed, in which we have set forth what seem to us to be very grave, self-evident objections to the administration and expenditure. If any champion of that administration and expenditure will impugn any one of those statements in writing, as we have done, upon his own personal honour, upon his personal responsibility, and with the fixed association of answer to assertion which belongs to productions in print, we will immediately answer him, and prove that case whatever it may be. But I wish it to be distinctly understood that I am not skirmishing to escape here from the one unqualified declaration that the present system of expenditure in the Literary Fund, as a charitable institution, is in principle and practice quite right, is calculated to attract public confidence, and does not require revision. We will not permit ourselves, under any circumstances whatsoever, to be led away from that, and therefore I can communicate to you, Lord Stanhope, the very comfortable intelligence, that after the resolution I have read has been put and disposed of, not one other word will be heard in this room from my lips, and not one from Mr. Dilke, and not one from Mr. Forster, until this time next year. We assume, as we are bound in courtesy to assume, that our opponents have no greater desire to shrink from a broad open, manly acceptance of their responsibility, than we have desired to shrink from ours. Here in this resolution, read affirmatively and read negatively, are two responsibilities, for and against. Let each side please to take its own, and let both sides go on their way rejoicing. 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. As his speech, he said, was in the report which he had presented to the chairman, he would not be able to renew the gratification which the learned gentleman, the seconder of the amendment, said he felt at hearing his speeches. He regarded, moreover, the complaint of the lamentable deficiency of their funds, after the astounding and unanswered statement made by Mr. Dilke of their financial resources, as about the most bitterly ironical thing which the human mind could conceive of that society. The honourable gentleman who had moved the amendment had appeared, in common with other gentlemen who had addressed the meeting, to approach the proposal entirely in the character of a lender; but let him approach it in the character of a borrower, and put the question to them as a matter of feeling, whether they could not conceive the case of a high-spirited literary man, who would refuse to apply for a gift of money but who would be willing to come to the Fund for a loan to assist him in his difficulties. The noble lord had said, ‘Oh! he can regard it as a loan, and can pay it back again in the form of a donation.’ But, he would ask, was there a man in that room, who, having received a loan of, say, a hundred pounds, would have the audacity to put down his name in the list of subscribers as a donor to the society of one hundred pounds, when he repaid it? The suggestion was founded on a perfect misconception of the literary character and honour of the country which it was amazing to hear from such lips. A gentleman in the room interrupted to say that it was understood that Chateaubriand had done so. DICKENS. <span class="NormalTextRun SCXW266286389 BCX0" data-ccp-charstyle="normaltextrun" data-ccp-charstyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"a910b0d7-d005-48fc-ba31-8678fc05619c|36","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[201342446,"1",201342447,"5",201342448,"1",201342449,"1",469777841,"Aptos",469777842,"",469777843,"Aptos",469777844,"Aptos",201341986,"1",469769226,"Aptos",268442635,"22",469775450,"normaltextrun",201340122,"1",134233614,"true",469778129,"normaltextrun",335572020,"1",469778324,"Default Paragraph Font"]}">– Then he did extremely wrong. JOHN MURRAY. – I would do so, too. DICKENS – Then you would be extremely wrong, likewise. With respect to the proposal of the Committee to establish a place for the reunion of literary men, it had been objected by one honourable gentleman that the Athenaeum and other clubs already existed, to which literary men might resort. Why, there was also a fine building known as the London Tavern, which was equally open and accessible to literary men. But did they think that Mr. Bathe, the respectable and enterprising owner of that establishment, would keep his house open for such a purpose? The accommodation proposed to be provided by the committee was of a character suited to the requirements of persons who were altogether unable to avail themselves of privileges such as those to which he had referred. It had been said that the committee wished to take a very large proportion of the £30,000 belonging to the Fund, and appropriate it to other purposes. Nothing of the sort was intended; and the committee had expressly stated in their report that the funds required would be supplied by those persons who would avail themselves of the privilege of the proposed new institution. The object of the literary institution was to induce literary men at home and abroad to take a greater interest in the society, and in case of success the committee anticipated that the increased interest would ensure a corresponding increase in contributions to the Literary Fund; and they proposed that the experiment should first be made on a very small scale, and at almost nominal expense, and then, if unfortunately they should fail in exciting among the profession an increased interest in the objects of the institution, and so did not gain an accession of subscribers, no possible harm would have been done, and the project need not be carried any further. Mr. Milnes had asked the advocates of the scheme why they did not found such a society as they wanted; but they might just as reasonably ask him, and the other conductors of that institution, why this was not done by them as they had their £30,000 of reserved fund, their £200 a year, with which to fulfil these original intentions of the founders that they now altogether blinked.  He would ask any gentleman present to consider whether the Literary Fund was capable of an extended interest among Literary men? Let him look around the room, and, – he said it without any disrespect – at the representatives of Literature on the platform, and ask himself whether he could not imagine a better representation of Literature, brought together under the name of the Literary Fund. The alterations proposed in the report, in the mode of assisting literary men, were suggested by literary men animated with a feeling in favour of their art, who desired to do it good; and actuated also by an earnest desire to rouse up this slumbering society and make it do more for Literature than it had ever yet done, or was likely to do, if left to itself. They knew well that being awakened was, at all time, and under any circumstances, an extremely disagreeable process. – They all knew this, for they objected to it every day of their lives.But beyond all question the Literary Fund had overslept itself by a great number of years, and it was absolutely necessary to knock it up; and, please God, they would get it out of bed by some means or other.   Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Royal Literary Fund 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. 18550616 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 Royal Literary Fund Special General Meeting 1855 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Literary Fund Special General Meeting (16 June 1855). 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 1855-06-16 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1855-06-16_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Special-General-Meeting 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 Royal Literary Fund Special General Meeting' (16 June 1855). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1855-06-16_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Special-General-Meeting">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1855-06-16_Speech_Royal-Literary-Fund-Special-General-Meeting</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. Why, he asked, should the gentlemen be ensconced before their smoking edibles and glittering decanters, and the ladies be compelled to sit above, behind that ‘blistering screen’, and look on contentedly all the while? Even in the Sandwich Isles or Otaheite the savages would not expel the fair sex from their banquets. Why should not these things be altered? For his part, if the committee would promise to introduce ladies next year, or the year after, to the dinner-table at the annual festival, and place one on each side of the Chair, he would not have the least objection to act as president. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' 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. 18600308 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 suppose I may venture to say that it is pretty well known to everybody that all people, whenever they are brought together at dinner in private society for the declared purpose of discussing any particular matter or business, it invariably happens that they never can by any ingenuity be brought to approach that business, and that they invariably make it the one sole object and ground on which they cannot be trapped into the utterance of a syllable. This being the curious concurrent experience of all mankind, it is the cautious custom of this particular dinner to place its business in the very front of the evening’s engagements. It commits it to paper, and places it in black and white before the unhappy chairman whilst he speaks. It guards him with a long row of distinguished gentlemen on either hand to keep him up to the mark and force him to approach the thing from which everybody knows he has a secret tendency to retreat; and there is a voice at his ear – a sonorous voice – which, like the warning voice of the slave of old, reminds him in all stages of the pageant that he is but a mortal chairman, and that it is the common lot of all his race to ‘speak and to die’. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the one hundred and twenty-second anniversary festival of the Royal Society of Musicians. One hundred and twenty years have passed since the casual contemplation by two gentlemen standing at a coffee-house door of two poor boys driving a pair of milch asses through the London streets within half a mile of the place where we are now assembled, led to its establishment. These two boys were the sons of a deceased musician; and the two rich hearts that took pity on them were the hearts of two deceased musicians; and the noble soul that came spontaneously to their aid was the soul of a deceased musician, known among the natural nobility of the art by but one ‘Handel’ to his name, and that a very glorious one, and derived – as I take it – directly from God. Now, ladies and gentlemen, that ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ hammered so soundly upon the iron of his order while it was hot, that he struck out of it the sound of self-respect, independence, and prosperity, which are present in this society at the moment while I speak. During the remaining nineteen years of his life he wrought for it at the forge of his art with a true faith and vigour; and, when he died, he left it the princely bequest of £1,000. We see now what good seed is, and what good music is. One hundred and twenty-two years have gone; the ruffles and powder have gone; the white capes, great coats, and huge cravats and top boots have gone; but the good seed is here in the shady and flourishing tree under which we sit tonight; and the good music is here, ever young in the young ears, and on the young lips and fingers, of every new generation. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my custom when I have the honour to hold such a position as this, to offer to those amongst the company who may not be personally acquainted with the society under consideration, those recommendations in its behalf which have been most powerful with myself. Will you allow me to sum up under a few heads the reasons that I have for regarding with particular sympathy and respect this Royal Society of Musicians? First, because it is a real thing – it is in fact as well as in name a society of musicians: not a heterogeneous concourse of nondescripts with here and there a musician smuggled in to justify the misuse of an art, but a society of professional men bound together in the love of their common art, and with the objects important to their art. Because these gentlemen come together, as they only usefully and independently could come together as a benefit society, making timely provision if not for their own old age, distress or infirmity, certainly for those casualties in the lives of their brethren, and for their widows, and their orphan children. Because it not only grants money for the education and apprenticeship of those poor children, but afterwards preserves a parental care over them in this way – that when they have done well in their apprenticeship, it encourages them to come back and to be rewarded for having done well, and to stimulate them to continue to tread the paths of truth and duty. Because it is not an exclusive society, but concedes to its newest members the privileges of its oldest, and freely admits foreigners as members who are really domiciled in England as practitioners of music. Because it manages its own affairs, and manages them in a manner so excessively irrational and unpopular that it pays only two small salaries for real services, while the governors actually pay the expenses of their meetings out of their own pockets. Ladies and gentlemen, you have no notion of what confusion would be carried into a certain literary society if the ferocious person who addresses you in his own plain way, were to get up there and to propose the Musicians in these respects as an example for imitation. Lastly, ladies and gentlemen, I recommend the society to such of this assembly as do not know it, because it is a society of artists who begin by putting their own shoulders to their own wheel. Every member of this body stands pledged to every other to exercise his talents gratuitously at any performance whatsoever given in aid of the society’s objects. Every member is formally and distinctly reminded on his enrolment that he accepts the responsibility of a great work connected with the labour of his art, and to that he is understood to pledge himself thenceforth. Now these, ladies and gentlemen, are the main features of the body of professional men that pass tonight the one hundred and twenty-second milestone on the road of its life – the main features except one, and that is that the annual income derived from one source, the annual subscription of its members, is not much more than a tithe of the money annually expended in the execution of its excellent objects. Turning over the book just now, with the words ‘One hundred and twenty-second night’ printed on its outside, I feel in a half kind of fancy, remembering the wonderful things which music has of course suggested to me from my earliest childhood. I feel a kind of fancy that I might have gone back to the one hundred and twenty-second night of the great Arabian Nights, and have heard Dinarzade saying, about half an hour before daybreak, ‘Sister Scheherazade, if you are still awake, and my lord the Sultan will permit, I beg you to finish the story of– the British musicians.’ To which Scheherazade replies that she would willingly proceed, but that to the best of her belief it was a story without an end, because she considered that as long as mankind lived, and loved, and hoped, so long music, which draws them upward in all their varying and erring moods, could never cease out of the world. So the Sultan, who changed his name for the purpose for the time, girded on, not his scimitar, but a scythe, and went out graciously resolving that the story should have its one hundred and twenty-second night, and that the brotherhood should live for ever. Ladies and gentlemen, these may appear to you vagrant ideas, but music is suggestive of all fancies. You know it can give back the dead; it can place at your side the congenial creature dear to you who never lived. You know that the blind see in it; the bedridden have hope in it; the dead hear it. We all hear it from the sound of the varying seasons, to the beating of the waters upon which our Saviour walked. Let me, in conclusion, entreat you to listen also to one strain which will certainly be heard through all the sweet sounds of tonight, and which will be simply this – no less, no more. The hand cannot always keep its hold upon the bow, the string, the keys; the breath will sometimes fail. It is the inevitable result of the skilful combination of many instruments that there must be some players who can never hope to attain a great success or great reward, but who are nevertheless quite inseparable from, and necessary to your delight. And so, if you listen to it, the strain will say: ‘I am one of those; I have been young and now am old; my hand has lost its mastery; my breath has failed. Now for the love of the much that music has done for you, do that little for me.’ I beg propose to you to drink ‘Prosperity to the Royal Society of Musicians’. 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 Royal Society of Musicians Anniversary Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Society of Musicians Anniversary (8 March 1860). 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 1860-03-08 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1860-03-08_Speech_Royal-Society-of-Musicians-Anniversary 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 Royal Society of Musicians Anniversary' (8 March 1860). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1860-03-08_Speech_Royal-Society-of-Musicians-Anniversary">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1860-03-08_Speech_Royal-Society-of-Musicians-Anniversary</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, I suppose I may venture to say that it is pretty well known to everybody that all people, whenever they are brought together at dinner in private society for the declared purpose of discussing any particular matter or business, it invariably happens that they never can by any ingenuity be brought to approach that business, and that they invariably make it the one sole object and ground on which they cannot be trapped into the utterance of a syllable. This being the curious concurrent experience of all mankind, it is the cautious custom of this particular dinner to place its business in the very front of the evening's engagements. It commits it to paper, and places it in black and white before the unhappy chairman whilst he speaks. It guards him with a long row of distinguished gentlemen on either hand to keep him up to the mark and force him to approach the thing from which everybody knows he has a secret tendency to retreat; and there is a voice at his ear – a sonorous voice – which, like the warning voice of the slave of old, reminds him in all stages of the pageant that he is but a mortal chairman, and that it is the common lot of all his race to ‘speak and to die’. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the one hundred and twenty-second anniversary festival of the Royal Society of Musicians. One hundred and twenty years have passed since the casual contemplation by two gentlemen standing at a coffee-house door of two poor boys driving a pair of milch asses through the London streets within half a mile of the place where we are now assembled, led to its establishment. These two boys were the sons of a deceased musician; and the two rich hearts that took pity on them were the hearts of two deceased musicians; and the noble soul that came spontaneously to their aid was the soul of a deceased musician, known among the natural nobility of the art by but one ‘Handel’ to his name, and that a very glorious one, and derived – as I take it – directly from God. Now, ladies and gentlemen, that ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’ hammered so soundly upon the iron of his order while it was hot, that he struck out of it the sound of self-respect, independence, and prosperity, which are present in this society at the moment while I speak. During the remaining nineteen years of his life he wrought for it at the forge of his art with a true faith and vigour; and, when he died, he left it the princely bequest of £1,000. We see now what good seed is, and what good music is. One hundred and twenty-two years have gone; the ruffles and powder have gone; the white capes, great coats, and huge cravats and top boots have gone; but the good seed is here in the shady and flourishing tree under which we sit tonight; and the good music is here, ever young in the young ears, and on the young lips and fingers, of every new generation. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my custom when I have the honour to hold such a position as this, to offer to those amongst the company who may not be personally acquainted with the society under consideration, those recommendations in its behalf which have been most powerful with myself. Will you allow me to sum up under a few heads the reasons that I have for regarding with particular sympathy and respect this Royal Society of Musicians? First, because it is a real thing – it is in fact as well as in name a society of musicians: not a heterogeneous concourse of nondescripts with here and there a musician smuggled in to justify the misuse of an art, but a society of professional men bound together in the love of their common art, and with the objects important to their art. Because these gentlemen come together, as they only usefully and independently could come together as a benefit society, making timely provision if not for their own old age, distress or infirmity, certainly for those casualties in the lives of their brethren, and for their widows, and their orphan children. Because it not only grants money for the education and apprenticeship of those poor children, but afterwards preserves a parental care over them in this way – that when they have done well in their apprenticeship, it encourages them to come back and to be rewarded for having done well, and to stimulate them to continue to tread the paths of truth and duty. Because it is not an exclusive society, but concedes to its newest members the privileges of its oldest, and freely admits foreigners as members who are really domiciled in England as practitioners of music. Because it manages its own affairs, and manages them in a manner so excessively irrational and unpopular that it pays only two small salaries for real services, while the governors actually pay the expenses of their meetings out of their own pockets. Ladies and gentlemen, you have no notion of what confusion would be carried into a certain literary society if the ferocious person who addresses you in his own plain way, were to get up there and to propose the Musicians in these respects as an example for imitation. Lastly, ladies and gentlemen, I recommend the society to such of this assembly as do not know it, because it is a society of artists who begin by putting their own shoulders to their own wheel. Every member of this body stands pledged to every other to exercise his talents gratuitously at any performance whatsoever given in aid of the society's objects. Every member is formally and distinctly reminded on his enrolment that he accepts the responsibility of a great work connected with the labour of his art, and to that he is understood to pledge himself thenceforth. Now these, ladies and gentlemen, are the main features of the body of professional men that pass tonight the one hundred and twenty-second milestone on the road of its life – the main features except one, and that is that the annual income derived from one source, the annual subscription of its members, is not much more than a tithe of the money annually expended in the execution of its excellent objects. Turning over the book just now, with the words ‘One hundred and twenty-second night’ printed on its outside, I feel in a half kind of fancy, remembering the wonderful things which music has of course suggested to me from my earliest childhood. I feel a kind of fancy that I might have gone back to the one hundred and twenty-second night of the great Arabian Nights, and have heard Dinarzade saying, about half an hour before daybreak, ‘Sister Scheherazade, if you are still awake, and my lord the Sultan will permit, I beg you to finish the story of– the British musicians.’ To which Scheherazade replies that she would willingly proceed, but that to the best of her belief it was a story without an end, because she considered that as long as mankind lived, and loved, and hoped, so long music, which draws them upward in all their varying and erring moods, could never cease out of the world. So the Sultan, who changed his name for the purpose for the time, girded on, not his scimitar, but a scythe, and went out graciously resolving that the story should have its one hundred and twenty-second night, and that the brotherhood should live for ever. Ladies and gentlemen, these may appear to you vagrant ideas, but music is suggestive of all fancies. You know it can give back the dead; it can place at your side the congenial creature dear to you who never lived. You know that the blind see in it; the bedridden have hope in it; the dead hear it. We all hear it from the sound of the varying seasons, to the beating of the waters upon which our Saviour walked. Let me, in conclusion, entreat you to listen also to one strain which will certainly be heard through all the sweet sounds of tonight, and which will be simply this – no less, no more. The hand cannot always keep its hold upon the bow, the string, the keys; the breath will sometimes fail. It is the inevitable result of the skilful combination of many instruments that there must be some players who can never hope to attain a great success or great reward, but who are nevertheless quite inseparable from, and necessary to your delight. And so, if you listen to it, the strain will say: ‘I am one of those; I have been young and now am old; my hand has lost its mastery; my breath has failed. Now for the love of the much that music has done for you, do that little for me.’ I beg propose to you to drink ‘Prosperity to the Royal Society of Musicians’. 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. 'most earnest, eloquent, and touching, It took a review of my enterprise at Covent Garden, and summed up with an eulogy of me that quite overpowered me.' Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Piazza Coffee House, Covent Garden Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Diary 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. 18390330 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) The Diaries of William Charles Macready 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 Shakespeare Club Dinner Description An account of the resource Speech given at the Shakespeare Club dinner, London (30 March 1839). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Macready, William Charles. The Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833-1851. Vol. 1. Ed. William Toynbee. New York: Putnam's, 1912. pp. 504-505. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1839-03-30 Type The nature or genre of the resource Speech Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1839-03-30_Speech_Shakespeare_Club_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. 'Shakespeare Club Dinner' (30 March 1839). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1839-03-30_Speech_Shakespeare_Club_Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1839-03-30_Speech_Shakespeare_Club_Dinner</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. 'He began by saying that we were met to celebrate an event, a great event. Not, as some thought, merely the birthday of a dramatist and an actor. We met on that day to celebrate a great deal more. We met on that day to celebrate the birthday of a vast army of living men and women, who would live for ever with an actuality greater than that of the men and women whose external forms we saw around us, and whom we knew ourselves – types of humanity, the inner working of whose souls was open to us, as were the faces of ordinary men. To-day was born a Prince of Denmark, who would live for ever as the type of man whose mind was "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and whose life-story was fore-shadowed by his appearance from the moment he came before us as "a broken glass of fashion, a mould of form," pale and worn with weeping for his father's death, and remotely suspicious of its cause, and not with "his hair crisply curled short as if he were going to an everlasting dancing-master's party at the Danish court," as "most Hamlets since the great Kemble have been bound to do." A Prince of Denmark who will live for ever, even though he be remembered by no more than the words that ask, [quotes from "Whether 'tis nobler to "a consummation Devoutly to be wished"]. On this day was born not only this lasting embodiment of deep insight into life and its problems, but also "Laughter holding both his sides." On this day was born Falstaff, who, like one who takes the chair on such an occasion as this, has to be the cause of speaking in others. And on this day the famous Justice Shallow, who, though you may not admire his qualities, will live in the memory of all who laugh at him, and all who try to personate him on the stage. "'Tis the heart, Master Page, 'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the time, with my long sword I would have made you four tall fellows skip like rats." But on this day, that saw the birth of Justice Shallow, as well as of the "merry knight," that "mountain of flesh," of whom Prince Hal said (as we all would now say had Falstaff not been born): "I could have better spared a better man," there was also born Queen Mab: [quotes from "She is the fairies' midwife to "as they lie asleep"]. And on this day was born that weaver who felt as out of place among fairies as "a lion among ladies": [quotes from "God shield us! A lion among ladies" to "a man as other men are"]. On this day, too, was born Macbeth, the type of all who show how the first fall into evil leads even men capable of noble thoughts down, eventually, into the lowest depths; Macbeth, who said: [quotes from "If it were done" to "jump the life to come"]. To-day was born a certain Signior Benedick of Padua –that is, not the Benedick of this or that theatrical company, but the constant occasion of merriment among the persons represented in Much Ado about Nothing: "all mirth," as Don Pedro has it, "from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot"; and who may well inspire mirth in all. This day was born a Duke who, exiled from the "painted pomp" of his "envious court", could utter words teaching what I hold to be a vital truth, "above all, that nothing is high because it is in a high place, and that nothing is low because it is in a low one." This is the lesson taught us in the great book of Nature and the lesson uppermost in the mind of that inspired man who tells us that there are – Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. Today was born a villain, for whose birth we may yet be glad, because he was not the ordinary villain of the stage. For Iago can be portrayed without "frowning, sneering diabolically, grinning, and elaborately doing everything else that would induce Othello to run him through the body very early in the play" Shakespeare's Iago is a man who could and did make friends, who could dissect his master's soul without flourishing his scalpel as if it were a walking-stick; who could overpower Emilia by other arts than a sign-of-the-Saracen's-Head grimness; who could be a boon companion without, ipso facto, warning all beholders off by the portentous phenomenon; who could sing a song and clink a can naturally enough, and stab men really in the dark – not in a transparent notification of himself as going about seeking whom to stab. On this day was born the ideal embodiment of woman's passionate love, to whom her lover in his passion idealised as the sun at the dawn rising to – [quotes from "Kill the envious moon" to "And none but fools do wear it"]. And on this day was born a fool, not dressed in vestal livery, but dressed in motley, who "laid him down and basked him in the sun, and as quoted by the melancholy Jacques (whose words are in-woven in this tablecloth before me: "All the world's a stage") described, for all time, the qualities, the privileges and the duties of the satirist of him who, like this fool, "should be so deep contemplative" as to make the sage "ambitions for a motley suit." "Invest me in my motley: give me leave to speak my mind, and I will, through and through, cleanse the foul body of whole infected world, if they will but patiently receive my medicine." In like manner Dickens dealt with many more of Shakespeare's characters, each time acting and speaking the lines with consummate art and skill. Dickens went on to say that this was also the birthday of the English novel. "Every writer of fiction, although he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes, in effect, for the stage. He many never write plays, but the truth and passions which are in him must be more or less reflected in the great mirror which he holds up to Nature." Furthermore, he reminded us that it was the birthday of some of those present –of Compton, of Vanderhoff, of Wallack. For their art and fame would not have been but for the birth of whim whose birthday they were celebrating. He would go further, and say that it was the birthday of that club. For if there had never been a Shakespeare there never would have been a Garrick, and if there had never been a Garrick there would never have been a Garrick club.' Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Garrick Club Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Periodical Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Pall Mall Magazine 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. 18540422 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 Shakespeare's Birthday at the Garrick Club Description An account of the resource Speech given at the Garrick Club (22 April 1854). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived O'Dowd, James. 'A Shakespeare Birthday: A Reminiscence of Charles Dickens.' Pall Mall Magazine (April 1906): 423-28. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1854-04-22 Type The nature or genre of the resource Speech Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1854-04-22_Speech_Shakespeares_Birthday_at_the_Garrick_Club 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. 'Garrick Club' (22 April 1854). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1854-04-22_Speech_Shakespeares_Birthday_at_the_Garrick_Club">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1854-04-22_Speech_Shakespeares_Birthday_at_the_Garrick_Club</a>.