25 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. He should, he said, do nothing so superfluous and so unnecessary as to descant upon his lordship’s many faithful, long, and great public services, upon the honour and integrity with which he had pursued his straightforward public course through every difficulty, or upon the manly, gallant, and courageous character which rendered him certain, in the eyes alike of friends and opponents, to rise with every rising occasion, and which, like the seal of Solomon in the old Arabian story, enclosed in a not very large casket the soul of a giant. – He felt perfectly certain that that would be the response; for in no English assembly that he had ever seen was it necessary to do more than mention the name of Lord John Russell to ensure a manifestation of personal respect and grateful remembrance. It being his pride and privilege to enroll the subject of the toast among his personal friends, he should take an early opportunity of telling him that he was not forgotten at the anniversary. He observed that under circumstances of the greatest difficulty, Mr. Russell had written descriptions of the Crimean campaign which rivalled in their brilliancy the greatest productions of the greatest novelists, and equalled in their fidelity and their regard for truth – as he had often heard testified by the best authorities – the most scholarly productions of the most deliberate historians. In giving them the toast of the Press, he said, it was very much the same thing as if he had asked them to drink to his own family. He was almost born and bred to the Press, his earliest working years having been passed in the House of Commons, and he must be base indeed, or have a very much shorter memory than he believed he possessed, if anything that concerned its honour or reputation could be indifferent to him, or if it were not one of the foremost efforts of his life to do anything he could to uphold its character. 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. 18571105 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. When I have the honour to fill this or any similar place, I never lend my poor aid to uphold the preposterous fiction that the brightest part of creation are not present, and that the starts of the firmament on my right, which shine upon our waking and sleeping dreams, are not distinctly visible in the sky. It seems to me the most inconsistent and ridiculous of all customs, when we are come to propose the first lady of the land, to forget that ladies are present; and I, therefore, setting an example, trust and hope that you will follow that example, when I address you as ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to offer you a toast which includes a great deal more than the two syllabic words in themselves; which, whilst they express our loyalty towards the lady who rules England, hardly expresses its loyalty to the ladies who rule us. We most happily associate the institutions under which we live with the domestic virtues and happiness of a lady who is at once the boast of the country and of our homes, ‘Her Majesty the Queen’. Ladies and Gentlemen, In this great commercial city, heaped up with riches on every side, to which hungry eyes are sometimes turned across the sea, those two great services the Army and Navy, even in times of profoundest peace, should never be forgotten. But I am sure you will agree with me that in these so different times they should in our ‘flowing cups’, be freshly remembered; remembered in connexion with the recent acts of gallantry that have won the admiration of the world; remembered in intimate connexion with a manly composure in the face of pestilence, and a Christian resignation under the shadow of death, only the be equalled by the modestly, gentleness, and the perfect and profound self-command always attendant upon their great bravery. I understand that there happens to be no officer of either service here to acknowledge my toast. It occurs to me, however, that this matters very little, for throughout the civilized world the members of both are at this moment practically thanking us. Wherever duty is to be done, they are thanking us; wherever fame and honour are to be gained, they are thanking us; wherever the sun shines they are thanking us; aye, even where the sun does not shine – in the long night of a polar winter – one of those services at least is now thanking us with a most eloquent speech. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to propose ‘The Army and Navy’. I must now solicit your attention for a few minutes to the cause of your assembling together – the main and real object of the evening’s gathering; for I suppose we are all agreed that the motto of these tables is not ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’; but, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we live’. It is because a great and good work is to live ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’, and to live a greater and better life with every succeeding tomorrow, that we eat and drink here at all. Conspicuous on the card of admission to this dinner, and on the title-page of this little book descriptive of the institution, is the word ‘Schools’. This set me thinking this morning, before I turned these pages about, what are the sorts of schools that I don’t like. I found them, on consideration, to be rather numerous. I don’t like to begin with – and to begin, as charity does, at home – I don’t like the sort of school to which I once went myself, the respected proprietor of which was by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know, who was one of the worst-tempered men perhaps that ever lived, whose business it was to make as much out of us and to put as little into us as possible, and who sold us at a figure which I remember we used to delight to estimate, as amounting to exactly £2. 4s. 6d. a head. I don’t like that sort of school, because I don’t see what business the master had to be at the top of it instead of the bottom, and because I never could understand the wholesomeness of the moral preached by the abject appearance and degraded condition of the teachers who plainly said to us by their looks every day of their lives, ‘Boys, never be learned; whatever you are, above all things, be warned from that in time by our sunken cheeks, by our poor pimply noses so cruelly eruptive in the frosty mornings, by our meagre diet, by our acid beer, and by our extraordinary suits of clothes, of which no human being can say whether they are snuff-coloured turned black, or black turned snuff-coloured, a point upon which we ourselves are perfectly unable to offer any ray of enlightenment, it is so very long since they were undarned and new’. I do not like that sort of school, because I have never yet lost my ancient suspicion touching that curious coincidence that the boy with four brothers to come always got the prizes. In fact, and in short, I do not like that sort of school, which is a pernicious and abominable humbug altogether. Again, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like that sort of school – a ladies’ school – with which the other school used to dance on Wednesdays, where the young ladies, as I look back upon them now, seem to me always to have been in new stays and disgrace – the disgrace chiefly concerning a place of which I know nothing at this day, that bounds Timbuctoo on the north-east – and where memory always depicts the youthful enthraller of my first affection as for ever standing against a wall, in a curious machine of wood, which confined her innocent feet in the first dancing position, while those arms, which should have encircled my jacket, those precious arms, I say, were pinioned behind her by an instrument of torture called a backboard, fixed in the manner of a double direction post. Again, I don’t like that sort of school, of which we have a notable example in Kent, which was established ages ago by worthy scholars and good men long deceased, whose munificent endowments have been monstrously perverted from their original purpose, and which, in their distorted condition, are struggled for and fought over with the most indecent pertinacity. Again, I don’t like that sort of school – and I have seen a great many such in these latter times – where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged, and where those bright childish faces, which it is so very good for the wisest among us to remember in after life, when the world is too much with us early and late, are gloomily and grimly scared out of countenance; where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines. Again, I don’t by any means like schools in leather breeches, and with mortified straw baskets for bonnets, which file along the streets in long melancholy rows under the escort of that surprising British monster, a beadle, whose system of instruction, I am afraid, but too often presents that happy union of sound with sense, of which a very remarkable instance is given in a grave report of a trustworthy school inspector, to the effect that a boy in great repute at school for his learning, presented on his slate, as one of the ten commandments, the perplexing prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not commit doldrum’. Ladies and gentlemen, I confess, also, that I don’t like those schools, even though the instruction given in them be gratuitous, where those sweet little voices which ought to be heard speaking in very different accents, anathematize by rote any human being who does not hold what is taught there. Lastly I do not like, and I did not like some years ago, cheap distant schools, where neglected children pine from year to year under an amount of neglect, want, and youthful misery far too sad even to be glanced at in this cheerful assembly. And now, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you will permit me to sketch in a few words the sort of school that I do like. It is a school established by the members of an industrious and useful order, which supplies the comforts and graces of life at every familiar turning in the road of our existence; it is a school established by them for the Orphan and Necessitous Children of their own brethren and sisterhood; it is a place giving an education where, while the beautiful history of the Christian religion is daily taught, and while the life of that Divine Teacher who Himself took little children on His knees is daily studied, no sectarian ill will nor narrow human dogma is permitted to darken the face of the clear heaven which they disclose. It is a children’s school, which is at the same time no less a children’s home, a home not to be confided to the care of cold or ignorant strangers, nor, by the nature of its foundation, in the course of ages to pass into hands that have as much natural right to deal with it as with the peaks of the highest mountains or with the depths of the sea, but to be from generation to generation administered by men living in precisely such homes as those poor children have lost; by men always bent upon making that replacement, such a home as their own dear children might find a happy refuge in if they themselves were taken early away. And I fearlessly ask you, is this a design which has any claim to your sympathy? Is this a sort of school which is deserving of your support. This is the design, this is the school, whose strong and simple claim I have to lay before you tonight. I must particularly entreat you not to suppose that my fancy and unfortunate habit of fiction has anything to do with the picture I have just presented to you. It is a sober matter of fact. The Warehousemen and Clerks’ Schools, established for the maintaining, clothing, and educating of the Orphan and Necessitous Children of those employed in the wholesale trades and manufactures of the United Kingdom, are, in fact, what I have just described. These schools for both sexes were originated only four years ago. In the first six weeks of the undertaking the young men themselves and quite unaided, subscribed the large sum of £3,000. The schools have been opened only three years, they have now on their foundation thirty-nine children, and in a few days they will have six more, making a total of forty-five. They have been most munificently assisted by the heads of great mercantile houses, numerously represented, I am happy to say, around me, and they have a funded capital of almost £14,000. This is wonderful progress, but the aim must still be upwards, the motto always ‘Excelsior’. You do not need to be told that five-and-forty children can form but a very small proportion of the Orphan and Necessitous Children of those who have been entrusted with the wholesale trades and manufactures of the United Kingdom: you do not need to be informed that the house at New Cross, rented for a small term of years, in which the schools are at present established, can afford but most imperfect accommodation for such a breadth of design. To carry this good work through the two remaining degrees of better and best, there must be more work, more co-operation, more friends, more money. Then be the friends, and give the money. Before I conclude, there is one other feature in these schools which I would commend to your special attention and approval. Their benefits are reserved for the children of subscribers; that is to say, it is an essential principle of the institution that it must help those whose parents have helped them, and that the unfortunate children whose father has been so lax, or so criminal, as to withhold a subscription so exceedingly small that when divided by weeks it amounts to only threepence weekly, cannot, in justice, be allowed to jostle out and shoulder away the happier children, whose father has had that little forethought, or done that little kindness which was requisite to secure for them the benefits of the institution. I really cannot believe that there will long be any such defaulting parents. I cannot believe that any of the intelligent young men who are engaged in the wholesale houses will long neglect this obvious, this easy duty. If they suppose that the objects of their love, born or unborn, will never want the benefits of the charity, that may be a fatal and blind mistake – it can never be an excuse, for, supposing them to be right in their anticipation, they should do what is asked for the sake of their friends and comrades around them, assured that they will be the happier and the better for the deed. Ladies and gentlemen, this little ‘labour of love’ of mine is now done. I most heartily wish that I could charm you now not to see me, not to think of me, not to hear me – I most heartily wish that I could make you see in my stead the multitude of innocent and bereaved children who are looking towards these schools, and entreating with uplifted hands to be let in. A very famous advocate once said, in speaking of his fears of failure when he had first to speak in court, being very poor, that he felt his little children tugging at his skirts, and that recovered him. Will you think of the number of little children who are tugging at my skirts, when I ask you, in their names, on their behalf, and in their little persons, and in no strength of my own, to encourage and assist this work? This is the fifth day of November – this is a very notorious and inauspicious a day to be publicly exhibited in a chair. And I must confess that I have several times this evening felt upon me an irresistible impulse to look about me on the table for my lantern and matches. I am, however, at this moment reassured by the circumstance that I have no mask to fall off; that I am exactly what you see me, deeply penetrated by your great enthusiasm in my behalf; that I am heartily obliged to you for your great kindness, and that you are most cordially welcome to my small services. 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 Warehousemen and Clerks' Schools Fourth Anniversary Dinner Description An account of the resource Speech and toasts at the Warehousemen and Clerks' Schools Fourth Anniversary Dinner (5 November 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 1857-11-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1857-11-05_Speech_Warehousemen-and-Clerks-Schools-Fourth-Anniversary-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 and toasts at the Warehousemen and Clerks' Schools Fourth Anniversary Dinner' (5 November 1857). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-11-05_Speech_Warehousemen-and-Clerks-Schools-Fourth-Anniversary-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1857-11-05_Speech_Warehousemen-and-Clerks-Schools-Fourth-Anniversary-Dinner</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. When I have the honour to fill this or any similar place, I never lend my poor aid to uphold the preposterous fiction that the brightest part of creation are not present, and that the starts of the firmament on my right, which shine upon our waking and sleeping dreams, are not distinctly visible in the sky. It seems to me the most inconsistent and ridiculous of all customs, when we are come to propose the first lady of the land, to forget that ladies are present; and I, therefore, setting an example, trust and hope that you will follow that example, when I address you as ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to offer you a toast which includes a great deal more than the two syllabic words in themselves; which, whilst they express our loyalty towards the lady who rules England, hardly expresses its loyalty to the ladies who rule us. We most happily associate the institutions under which we live with the domestic virtues and happiness of a lady who is at once the boast of the country and of our homes, ‘Her Majesty the Queen’. Ladies and Gentlemen, In this great commercial city, heaped up with riches on every side, to which hungry eyes are sometimes turned across the sea, those two great services the Army and Navy, even in times of profoundest peace, should never be forgotten. But I am sure you will agree with me that in these so different times they should in our ‘flowing cups’, be freshly remembered; remembered in connexion with the recent acts of gallantry that have won the admiration of the world; remembered in intimate connexion with a manly composure in the face of pestilence, and a Christian resignation under the shadow of death, only the be equalled by the modestly, gentleness, and the perfect and profound self-command always attendant upon their great bravery. I understand that there happens to be no officer of either service here to acknowledge my toast. It occurs to me, however, that this matters very little, for throughout the civilized world the members of both are at this moment practically thanking us. Wherever duty is to be done, they are thanking us; wherever fame and honour are to be gained, they are thanking us; wherever the sun shines they are thanking us; aye, even where the sun does not shine – in the long night of a polar winter – one of those services at least is now thanking us with a most eloquent speech. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to propose ‘The Army and Navy’. I must now solicit your attention for a few minutes to the cause of your assembling together – the main and real object of the evening’s gathering; for I suppose we are all agreed that the motto of these tables is not ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’; but, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we live’. It is because a great and good work is to live ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’, and to live a greater and better life with every succeeding tomorrow, that we eat and drink here at all. Conspicuous on the card of admission to this dinner, and on the title-page of this little book descriptive of the institution, is the word ‘Schools’. This set me thinking this morning, before I turned these pages about, what are the sorts of schools that I don’t like. I found them, on consideration, to be rather numerous. I don’t like to begin with – and to begin, as charity does, at home – I don’t like the sort of school to which I once went myself, the respected proprietor of which was by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to know, who was one of the worst-tempered men perhaps that ever lived, whose business it was to make as much out of us and to put as little into us as possible, and who sold us at a figure which I remember we used to delight to estimate, as amounting to exactly £2. 4s. 6d. a head. I don’t like that sort of school, because I don’t see what business the master had to be at the top of it instead of the bottom, and because I never could understand the wholesomeness of the moral preached by the abject appearance and degraded condition of the teachers who plainly said to us by their looks every day of their lives, ‘Boys, never be learned; whatever you are, above all things, be warned from that in time by our sunken cheeks, by our poor pimply noses so cruelly eruptive in the frosty mornings, by our meagre diet, by our acid beer, and by our extraordinary suits of clothes, of which no human being can say whether they are snuff-coloured turned black, or black turned snuff-coloured, a point upon which we ourselves are perfectly unable to offer any ray of enlightenment, it is so very long since they were undarned and new’. I do not like that sort of school, because I have never yet lost my ancient suspicion touching that curious coincidence that the boy with four brothers to come always got the prizes. In fact, and in short, I do not like that sort of school, which is a pernicious and abominable humbug altogether. Again, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t like that sort of school – a ladies’ school – with which the other school used to dance on Wednesdays, where the young ladies, as I look back upon them now, seem to me always to have been in new stays and disgrace – the disgrace chiefly concerning a place of which I know nothing at this day, that bounds Timbuctoo on the north-east – and where memory always depicts the youthful enthraller of my first affection as for ever standing against a wall, in a curious machine of wood, which confined her innocent feet in the first dancing position, while those arms, which should have encircled my jacket, those precious arms, I say, were pinioned behind her by an instrument of torture called a backboard, fixed in the manner of a double direction post. Again, I don’t like that sort of school, of which we have a notable example in Kent, which was established ages ago by worthy scholars and good men long deceased, whose munificent endowments have been monstrously perverted from their original purpose, and which, in their distorted condition, are struggled for and fought over with the most indecent pertinacity. Again, I don’t like that sort of school – and I have seen a great many such in these latter times – where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged, and where those bright childish faces, which it is so very good for the wisest among us to remember in after life, when the world is too much with us early and late, are gloomily and grimly scared out of countenance; where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines. Again, I don’t by any means like schools in leather breeches, and with mortified straw baskets for bonnets, which file along the streets in long melancholy rows under the escort of that surprising British monster, a beadle, whose system of instruction, I am afraid, but too often presents that happy union of sound with sense, of which a very remarkable instance is given in a grave report of a trustworthy school inspector, to the effect that a boy in great repute at school for his learning, presented on his slate, as one of the ten commandments, the perplexing prohibition, ‘Thou shalt not commit doldrum’. Ladies and gentlemen, I confess, also, that I don’t like those schools, even though the instruction given in them be gratuitous, where those sweet little voices which ought to be heard speaking in very different accents, anathematize by rote any human being who does not hold what is taught there. Lastly I do not like, and I did not like some years ago, cheap distant schools, where neglected children pine from year to year under an amount of neglect, want, and youthful misery far too sad even to be glanced at in this cheerful assembly. And now, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you will permit me to sketch in a few words the sort of school that I do like. It is a school established by the members of an industrious and useful order, which supplies the comforts and graces of life at every familiar turning in the road of our existence; it is a school established by them for the Orphan and Necessitous Children of their own brethren and sisterhood; it is a place giving an education where, while the beautiful history of the Christian religion is daily taught, and while the life of that Divine Teacher who Himself took little children on His knees is daily studied, no sectarian ill will nor narrow human dogma is permitted to darken the face of the clear heaven which they disclose. It is a children’s school, which is at the same time no less a children’s home, a home not to be confided to the care of cold or ignorant strangers, nor, by the nature of its foundation, in the course of ages to pass into hands that have as much natural right to deal with it as with the peaks of the highest mountains or with the depths of the sea, but to be from generation to generation administered by men living in precisely such homes as those poor children have lost; by men always bent upon making that replacement, such a home as their own dear children might find a happy refuge in if they themselves were taken early away. And I fearlessly ask you, is this a design which has any claim to your sympathy? Is this a sort of school which is deserving of your support. This is the design, this is the school, whose strong and simple claim I have to lay before you tonight. I must particularly entreat you not to suppose that my fancy and unfortunate habit of fiction has anything to do with the picture I have just presented to you. It is a sober matter of fact. The Warehousemen and Clerks’ Schools, established for the maintaining, clothing, and educating of the Orphan and Necessitous Children of those employed in the wholesale trades and manufactures of the United Kingdom, are, in fact, what I have just described. These schools for both sexes were originated only four years ago. In the first six weeks of the undertaking the young men themselves and quite unaided, subscribed the large sum of £3,000. The schools have been opened only three years, they have now on their foundation thirty-nine children, and in a few days they will have six more, making a total of forty-five. They have been most munificently assisted by the heads of great mercantile houses, numerously represented, I am happy to say, around me, and they have a funded capital of almost £14,000. This is wonderful progress, but the aim must still be upwards, the motto always ‘Excelsior’. You do not need to be told that five-and-forty children can form but a very small proportion of the Orphan and Necessitous Children of those who have been entrusted with the wholesale trades and manufactures of the United Kingdom: you do not need to be informed that the house at New Cross, rented for a small term of years, in which the schools are at present established, can afford but most imperfect accommodation for such a breadth of design. To carry this good work through the two remaining degrees of better and best, there must be more work, more co-operation, more friends, more money. Then be the friends, and give the money. Before I conclude, there is one other feature in these schools which I would commend to your special attention and approval. Their benefits are reserved for the children of subscribers; that is to say, it is an essential principle of the institution that it must help those whose parents have helped them, and that the unfortunate children whose father has been so lax, or so criminal, as to withhold a subscription so exceedingly small that when divided by weeks it amounts to only threepence weekly, cannot, in justice, be allowed to jostle out and shoulder away the happier children, whose father has had that little forethought, or done that little kindness which was requisite to secure for them the benefits of the institution. I really cannot believe that there will long be any such defaulting parents. I cannot believe that any of the intelligent young men who are engaged in the wholesale houses will long neglect this obvious, this easy duty. If they suppose that the objects of their love, born or unborn, will never want the benefits of the charity, that may be a fatal and blind mistake – it can never be an excuse, for, supposing them to be right in their anticipation, they should do what is asked for the sake of their friends and comrades around them, assured that they will be the happier and the better for the deed. Ladies and gentlemen, this little ‘labour of love’ of mine is now done. I most heartily wish that I could charm you now not to see me, not to think of me, not to hear me – I most heartily wish that I could make you see in my stead the multitude of innocent and bereaved children who are looking towards these schools, and entreating with uplifted hands to be let in. A very famous advocate once said, in speaking of his fears of failure when he had first to speak in court, being very poor, that he felt his little children tugging at his skirts, and that recovered him. Will you think of the number of little children who are tugging at my skirts, when I ask you, in their names, on their behalf, and in their little persons, and in no strength of my own, to encourage and assist this work? This is the fifth day of November – this is a very notorious and inauspicious a day to be publicly exhibited in a chair. And I must confess that I have several times this evening felt upon me an irresistible impulse to look about me on the table for my lantern and matches. I am, however, at this moment reassured by the circumstance that I have no mask to fall off; that I am exactly what you see me, deeply penetrated by your great enthusiasm in my behalf; that I am heartily obliged to you for your great kindness, and that you are most cordially welcome to my small services. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. Mr C. Dickens now rose, and was received with reiterated bursts of cheering. In a speech which gracefully blended seriousness with pleasantry, he proposed: Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' Hall Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Newspaper Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) The Examiner 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. 18390720 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. The Members of the late Company of Covent Garden Theatre. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Banquet in Honour of William Macready Description An account of the resource Toast at a banquest in honour William Macready (20 July 1839). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Examiner (28 July 1839, iss. 1643), p. 475 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1839-07-20 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1839-07-20_Speech_Banquet-in-Honour-of-William-Macready 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. 'Toast at a banquest in Honour William Macready' (20 July 1839). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1839-07-20_Speech_Banquet-in-Honour-of-William-Macready">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1839-07-20_Speech_Banquet-in-Honour-of-William-Macready</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. The Members of the late Company of Covent Garden Theatre. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. He was, he said, so confused by the warmth of the reception which he had met with, that he should have felt considerable difficulty in addressing a few words to them, if he were not relieved by the nature and subject of the toast which had been entrusted to him. The subject of the toast had been, indeed, exhausted by the chairman, The toast was ‘success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’, and although there were many gentlemen in that room who could more ably advocate the interests of that society, there was no one, however, no individual in Southwark – no one in London – no one in all England, more devoted to the success of Literary and Scientific Institutions, or who more desired to promote the welfare of the association to sustain which they were that day assembled. For he felt assured that such societies tended not only to enlarge the mind and awaken the best energies of our natures, but to improve and ameliorate the hearts of mankind. The chairman had alluded to the laying of the foundation stone of their building; but he would say, if they had never laid that stone – if they had met in a shed – nay, in the open fields – not only if the had no laid a foundation stone, but if they had not laid a single brick, nor an atom of straw, as the commencement of their edifice, still they had laid a moral foundation calculated to promote the best uses amongst what was styled the ‘many-headed’, but which by the aid of such institutions would soon be designated the ‘many-thoughted, monster’. The Revered Professor near him had adverted to the opinions of Lord Bacon. He also remembered a doctrine of that illustrious man, which was by no means inapplicable to the present subject, on the present occasion. He stated that the qualities of the loadstone were discovered by the test of the needles formed from the rod of iron – not of the bar itself. So in that and the like institutions, the few bright and brilliant individuals who originated them, drawn from the multitude, were those who ultimately consolidated their paramount utility as regarded the multitude itself. Had institutions similar to this existed long since, that one disgraceful leaf of dedication which formed the blot upon the literature of past ages, would have been torn from its pages. That huckstering, peddling, pandering to patronage for the sale of a book, the offspring of intellect and genius, would not now remain a stain upon their most brilliant productions. Oh! it was sickening to see a man whom God had made a poet, crouching to those whose only title to eminence was derived from the achievements of the great great grandfather of those little, little sons. The poet – for it was his natural avocation – was entitled to worship the stars; but when they contemplated him paying his adoration to stars and garters too, that was indeed a very different thing. If such institutions had existed in times gone by, Milton might have been appreciated in the age which he adorned, Otway might have lived and dined a few years longer, and he knew not but that even Wordsworth might have been drawn from the dust of those shelves where until lately he had lain unnoticed and unmarked. Nay, many of the illustrious dead, whose works were destined to illuminate posterity, might not have died the wretched inmates of the madhouse, or the asylum for the destitute. For these, and for many other reasons, he hailed with sincere gratification the brilliant prospects of their institution – for brilliant they were, despite the paltry, pitiful incumbrance of £1,000. Those prospects were still more encouraging, when looking around him he perceived gentlemen who entertained the most opposite views upon political questions joining together to sustain and support a society constituted for such objects. It was gratifying to find that this was a neutral ground upon which all shades of political opinions might mingle without a political compromise, proving satisfactorily – and a gratifying circumstance it was – the desire of those gentlemen rather to be elected by an enlightened constituency than to be representatives of ignorance and grovelling stupidity. It was also gratifying to see amongst them so many ladies, they who on all occasions bestowed a grace and charm upon society, but who, upon the present occasion, lent to it an additional lustre. They came there to advocate claims of the highest and purest order – they came there not only to promote the demands of society for increased means for the dissipation of knowledge and the advancement of literature, but also by such means to cement more closely the dearest bonds by which society was united – in bestowing an additional charm upon the hearth and fireside of all, and giving to their household gods an additional claim to their worship and adoration. Thus a new spirit would be infused into the heart of society – a new soul would be breathed into the huge brick and mortar body of the metropolis; and if they wanted a spur to their exertions – if they energies required excitement – let them but recollect that in the churchyard not far distant from that place our Chaucer was entombed, and that not a stone’s throw from that room Shakespeare’s own theatre once stood. He would not say another word, but would conclude by proposing ‘Success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’. Location The location Southwark London Venue Where the speech was given Bridge House Hotel Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18401202 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. He was, he said, so confused by the warmth of the reception which he had met with, that he should have felt considerable difficulty in addressing a few words to them, if he were not relieved by the nature and subject of the toast which had been entrusted to him. The subject of the toast had been, indeed, exhausted by the chairman, The toast was ‘success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’, and although there were many gentlemen in that room who could more ably advocate the interests of that society, there was no one, however, no individual in Southwark – no one in London – no one in all England, more devoted to the success of Literary and Scientific Institutions, or who more desired to promote the welfare of the association to sustain which they were that day assembled. For he felt assured that such societies tended not only to enlarge the mind and awaken the best energies of our natures, but to improve and ameliorate the hearts of mankind. The chairman had alluded to the laying of the foundation stone of their building; but he would say, if they had never laid that stone – if they had met in a shed – nay, in the open fields – not only if the had no laid a foundation stone, but if they had not laid a single brick, nor an atom of straw, as the commencement of their edifice, still they had laid a moral foundation calculated to promote the best uses amongst what was styled the ‘many-headed’, but which by the aid of such institutions would soon be designated the ‘many-thoughted, monster’. The Revered Professor near him had adverted to the opinions of Lord Bacon. He also remembered a doctrine of that illustrious man, which was by no means inapplicable to the present subject, on the present occasion. He stated that the qualities of the loadstone were discovered by the test of the needles formed from the rod of iron – not of the bar itself. So in that and the like institutions, the few bright and brilliant individuals who originated them, drawn from the multitude, were those who ultimately consolidated their paramount utility as regarded the multitude itself. Had institutions similar to this existed long since, that one disgraceful leaf of dedication which formed the blot upon the literature of past ages, would have been torn from its pages. That huckstering, peddling, pandering to patronage for the sale of a book, the offspring of intellect and genius, would not now remain a stain upon their most brilliant productions. Oh! it was sickening to see a man whom God had made a poet, crouching to those whose only title to eminence was derived from the achievements of the great great grandfather of those little, little sons. The poet – for it was his natural avocation – was entitled to worship the stars; but when they contemplated him paying his adoration to stars and garters too, that was indeed a very different thing. If such institutions had existed in times gone by, Milton might have been appreciated in the age which he adorned, Otway might have lived and dined a few years longer, and he knew not but that even Wordsworth might have been drawn from the dust of those shelves where until lately he had lain unnoticed and unmarked. Nay, many of the illustrious dead, whose works were destined to illuminate posterity, might not have died the wretched inmates of the madhouse, or the asylum for the destitute. For these, and for many other reasons, he hailed with sincere gratification the brilliant prospects of their institution – for brilliant they were, despite the paltry, pitiful incumbrance of £1,000. Those prospects were still more encouraging, when looking around him he perceived gentlemen who entertained the most opposite views upon political questions joining together to sustain and support a society constituted for such objects. It was gratifying to find that this was a neutral ground upon which all shades of political opinions might mingle without a political compromise, proving satisfactorily – and a gratifying circumstance it was – the desire of those gentlemen rather to be elected by an enlightened constituency than to be representatives of ignorance and grovelling stupidity. It was also gratifying to see amongst them so many ladies, they who on all occasions bestowed a grace and charm upon society, but who, upon the present occasion, lent to it an additional lustre. They came there to advocate claims of the highest and purest order – they came there not only to promote the demands of society for increased means for the dissipation of knowledge and the advancement of literature, but also by such means to cement more closely the dearest bonds by which society was united – in bestowing an additional charm upon the hearth and fireside of all, and giving to their household gods an additional claim to their worship and adoration. Thus a new spirit would be infused into the heart of society – a new soul would be breathed into the huge brick and mortar body of the metropolis; and if they wanted a spur to their exertions – if they energies required excitement – let them but recollect that in the churchyard not far distant from that place our Chaucer was entombed, and that not a stone’s throw from that room Shakespeare’s own theatre once stood. He would not say another word, but would conclude by proposing ‘Success to the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution’. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution Description An account of the resource Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution (2 December 1840). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1840-12-02 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Banquet for Foundation-Laying of the Southwark Literary and Scientific Institution' (2 December 1840). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1840-12-02_Speech_Banquet-for-Foundation-Laying-of-the-Southwark-Literary-and-Scientific-Institution</a>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Location The location Birmingham Venue Where the speech was given Town 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. 18531230 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. My Good Friends, When I first imparted to the Committee of the projected Institute my particular wish that on one of the evenings of my readings here the main body of my audience should be composed of working men and their families, I was animated by two desires; first, by the wish to have the great pleasure of meeting you face to face at this Christmas time, and accompany you myself through one of my little Christmas books; and secondly, by the wish to have an opportunity of stating publicly in your presence, and in the presence of the Committee, my earnest hope that the Institute will, from the beginning, recognize one great principle – strong in reason and justice – which I believe to be essential to the very life of such an Institution. It is, that the working man shall, from the first unto the last, have a share in the management of the institution which is designed for his benefit, and which calls itself by his name. I have no fear of being misunderstood – of being supposed to mean too much in this. If there ever was a time when any one class could of itself do much for its own good, and for the welfare of society – which I greatly doubt – that time is unquestionably past. It is in the fusion of different classes, without confusion; in the bringing together of employers and employed; in the creating of a better common understanding among those whose interests are identical, who depend upon each other, and who never can be in unnatural antagonism without deplorable results, that one of the chief principles of a Mechanics’ Institution should consist. In this world a great deal of the bitterness among us arises from an imperfect understanding of one another. Erect in Birmingham a great Educational Institution, properly educational; educational of the feelings as well as of the reason; to which all orders of Birmingham men contribute; in which all orders of Birmingham can men meet; wherein all orders of Birmingham men are faithfully represented; and you will erect a Temple of Concord here which will be a model edifice to the whole of England. Contemplating as I do the existence of an Artisans’ Committee, which not long ago considered the establishment of the Institute so sensibly, and supported it so heartily, I earnestly entreat the gentlemen – earnest I know in the good work, and who are now among us – by all means to avoid the great shortcoming of similar institutions; and in asking the working man for his confidence, to set him the great example and give him theirs in return. You will judge for yourselves if I promise too much for the working man, when I say that he will stand by such an enterprise with the utmost of his patience, his perseverance, sense, and support; that I am sure he will need no charitable aid or condescending patronage; but will readily and cheerfully pay for the advantages which it confers; that he will prepare himself in individual cases where he feels it necessary; in a word, that he will feel his responsibility like an honest man, and will most honestly and manfully discharge it. I now proceed to the pleasant task to which I assure you I have looked forward for a long time. You have heard so much of my voice since we met tonight, that I will only say, in acknowledgment of this affecting mark of your regard, that I am truly and sincerely interested in you; that any little service to you I have freely rendered from my heart; that I hope to become an honorary member of your great Institution, and will meet you often there when it becomes practically useful; that I thank you most affectionately for this new mark of your sympathy and approval; and that I wish you many happy returns of this great birthday time, and many prosperous years. 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 At a Reading in Birmingham Description An account of the resource Speeches at a Reading in Birmingham of A Christmas Carol (30 December 1853). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1853-12-30_Speech_At-a-Reading-in-Birmingham 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. 'At a Reading in Birmingham' (30 December 1853). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1853-12-30_Speech_At-a-Reading-in-Birmingham">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1853-12-30_Speech_At-a-Reading-in-Birmingham</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853-12-30 Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. My Good Friends, When I first imparted to the Committee of the projected Institute my particular wish that on one of the evenings of my readings here the main body of my audience should be composed of working men and their families, I was animated by two desires; first, by the wish to have the great pleasure of meeting you face to face at this Christmas time, and accompany you myself through one of my little Christmas books; and secondly, by the wish to have an opportunity of stating publicly in your presence, and in the presence of the Committee, my earnest hope that the Institute will, from the beginning, recognize one great principle – strong in reason and justice – which I believe to be essential to the very life of such an Institution. It is, that the working man shall, from the first unto the last, have a share in the management of the institution which is designed for his benefit, and which calls itself by his name. I have no fear of being misunderstood – of being supposed to mean too much in this. If there ever was a time when any one class could of itself do much for its own good, and for the welfare of society – which I greatly doubt – that time is unquestionably past. It is in the fusion of different classes, without confusion; in the bringing together of employers and employed; in the creating of a better common understanding among those whose interests are identical, who depend upon each other, and who never can be in unnatural antagonism without deplorable results, that one of the chief principles of a Mechanics’ Institution should consist. In this world a great deal of the bitterness among us arises from an imperfect understanding of one another. Erect in Birmingham a great Educational Institution, properly educational; educational of the feelings as well as of the reason; to which all orders of Birmingham men contribute; in which all orders of Birmingham can men meet; wherein all orders of Birmingham men are faithfully represented; and you will erect a Temple of Concord here which will be a model edifice to the whole of England. Contemplating as I do the existence of an Artisans’ Committee, which not long ago considered the establishment of the Institute so sensibly, and supported it so heartily, I earnestly entreat the gentlemen – earnest I know in the good work, and who are now among us – by all means to avoid the great shortcoming of similar institutions; and in asking the working man for his confidence, to set him the great example and give him theirs in return. You will judge for yourselves if I promise too much for the working man, when I say that he will stand by such an enterprise with the utmost of his patience, his perseverance, sense, and support; that I am sure he will need no charitable aid or condescending patronage; but will readily and cheerfully pay for the advantages which it confers; that he will prepare himself in individual cases where he feels it necessary; in a word, that he will feel his responsibility like an honest man, and will most honestly and manfully discharge it. I now proceed to the pleasant task to which I assure you I have looked forward for a long time. You have heard so much of my voice since we met tonight, that I will only say, in acknowledgment of this affecting mark of your regard, that I am truly and sincerely interested in you; that any little service to you I have freely rendered from my heart; that I hope to become an honorary member of your great Institution, and will meet you often there when it becomes practically useful; that I thank you most affectionately for this new mark of your sympathy and approval; and that I wish you many happy returns of this great birthday time, and many prosperous years. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speeches Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context speeches Description An account of the resource <h4>This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time. </h4> Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway. Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (The Speeches of Charles Dickens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in The Dickensian;<a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a> there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled. Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884: <blockquote>[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel – he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, pp. 273-74)</blockquote> However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like The Times. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say). Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points. Please <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact">contact us</a> with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens. 1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', The Dickensian 73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', The Dickensian 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods Speech Summary Occasionally speeches are summarised in sources in third person. Include that here, so that everything in the text transcription is only Dickens's words. Mr. Charles Dickens made his acknowledgements, with a warm appeal in favour of the charity, and an eloquent indication of the benevolence of the institution. Location The location London Venue Where the speech was given Freemasons' Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18410512 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Literary Fund Anniversary Festival 1841 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Literary Fund Anniversary Festival (12 May 1841). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1841-05-12 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Literary Fund Anniversary Festival' (12 May 1841). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1841-05-12_Speech_The-Literary-Fund-Anniversary-Festival</a>. 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 had been asked to perform this duty, he said, and he did it most cheerfully. Of the merits and advantages of the institution he was fully convinced; and in his desire to promote the success of such establishments he could assure them he was second to no man. He hoped they would not deem it presumptuous in him to say that he knew something of the classes for which this institution was intended. It was to provide for those classes refuge in sickness, and to restore them to peace of mind, health of body, and reinstatement in their positions in society. Its objects were so noble and so interesting, that to be successful it only required to be known in the highest and most active classes. He then proposed the health of their chairman, for who so fit to be their president as he who had sacrificed party spirit and politics that he might advance the cause and interests of the neglected and forlon, – who had boldly stood forward among seven hundred legislators, and maintained that women should not be compelled to do the work of harnessed brutes? To Lord Ashley the most oppressed and neglected classes would have to return thanks for ages to come. – ‘Lord Ashley, the chairman of the day.’ 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. 18430629 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 Dinner for the Sanatorium Description An account of the resource Dinner for the Sanatorium (29 June 1843). 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 1843-06-29 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1843-06-29_Speech_Dinner-for-the-Sanatorium 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. 'Dinner for the Sanatorium' (29 June 1843). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1843-06-29_Speech_Dinner-for-the-Sanatorium">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1843-06-29_Speech_Dinner-for-the-Sanatorium</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 Burlington House 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. 18700430 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. Mr. President, Your Royal Highness, My Lords and Gentlemen, I beg to acknowledge the toast with which you have done me the great honour of associating my name. I beg to acknowledge it on behalf of the brotherhood of Literature, present and absent, not forgetting an illustrious wanderer from the fold, whose tardy return to it we all hail with delight, and who now sits – or lately did sit – within a few chairs of you, on your left hand. I hope I may also claim to acknowledge the toast on behalf of the sisterhood of Literature also, although that ‘better half of human nature’ to which Mr. Gladstone rendered his graceful tribute is unworthily represented here, in the present state of its rights and wrongs, by the devouring monster, man. All the Arts and many of the Sciences bear witness that women, even in their present oppressed condition, can attain to quite as great distinction and can win quite as lofty names as man. Their emancipation (as I am given to understand) drawing very near, there is no saying how soon they may ‘push us from our stools’ at these tables, or how soon our better half of human nature, standing in this place of mine, may eloquently depreciate mankind, addressing another better half of human nature sitting in the president’s chair. The literary visitors of the Royal Academy tonight desire me to congratulate their hosts on a very interesting exhibition, in which risen excellence supremely asserts itself, and from which promise of a brilliant succession in time to come is not wanting. They naturally see with especial interest the writings and persons of great men – historians, philosophers, poets, and novelists – vividly illustrated around them here. And they hope they may modestly claim to have rendered some little assistance towards the production of many of the pictures in this magnificent gallery. For without the patient labours of some among them unhistoric history might have long survived in this place, and but for the researches and wanderings of others among them, the most preposterous countries, the most impossible peoples, and the absurdest superstitions, manners, and customs, might have usurped the place of truth upon these walls. Nay, there is no knowing, Sir Francis Grant, what unlike portraits you yourself might have painted if you had been left, with your sitters, to idle pens, unchecked restless rumours, and undenounced lying malevolence. I cannot forbear, before I resume my seat, adverting to a sad theme to which his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales made allusion, and to which the President referred with the eloquence of genuine feeling. Since I first entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends members of the Royal Academy who have been its grace and pride. They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already begin to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had seen, was a shadow and a dream. For many years, I was one of the two most intimate friends and most constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his chosen art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his prodigious fertility of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, ‘in wit a man, simplicity a child’, no Artist, of whatever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the Art-Goddess whom he worshipped. 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 Academy Banquet 1870 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Royal Academy Banquet (30 April 1870). 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 1870-04-30 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1870-04-30_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet 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 Academy Banquet' (30 April 1870). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-04-30_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-04-30_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Mr. President, Your Royal Highness, My Lords and Gentlemen, I beg to acknowledge the toast with which you have done me the great honour of associating my name. I beg to acknowledge it on behalf of the brotherhood of Literature, present and absent, not forgetting an illustrious wanderer from the fold, whose tardy return to it we all hail with delight, and who now sits – or lately did sit – within a few chairs of you, on your left hand. I hope I may also claim to acknowledge the toast on behalf of the sisterhood of Literature also, although that ‘better half of human nature’ to which Mr. Gladstone rendered his graceful tribute is unworthily represented here, in the present state of its rights and wrongs, by the devouring monster, man. All the Arts and many of the Sciences bear witness that women, even in their present oppressed condition, can attain to quite as great distinction and can win quite as lofty names as man. Their emancipation (as I am given to understand) drawing very near, there is no saying how soon they may ‘push us from our stools’ at these tables, or how soon our better half of human nature, standing in this place of mine, may eloquently depreciate mankind, addressing another better half of human nature sitting in the president’s chair. The literary visitors of the Royal Academy tonight desire me to congratulate their hosts on a very interesting exhibition, in which risen excellence supremely asserts itself, and from which promise of a brilliant succession in time to come is not wanting. They naturally see with especial interest the writings and persons of great men – historians, philosophers, poets, and novelists – vividly illustrated around them here. And they hope they may modestly claim to have rendered some little assistance towards the production of many of the pictures in this magnificent gallery. For without the patient labours of some among them unhistoric history might have long survived in this place, and but for the researches and wanderings of others among them, the most preposterous countries, the most impossible peoples, and the absurdest superstitions, manners, and customs, might have usurped the place of truth upon these walls. Nay, there is no knowing, Sir Francis Grant, what unlike portraits you yourself might have painted if you had been left, with your sitters, to idle pens, unchecked restless rumours, and undenounced lying malevolence. I cannot forbear, before I resume my seat, adverting to a sad theme to which his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales made allusion, and to which the President referred with the eloquence of genuine feeling. Since I first entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it has been my constant fortune to number amongst my nearest and dearest friends members of the Royal Academy who have been its grace and pride. They have so dropped from my side one by one that I already begin to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had seen, was a shadow and a dream. For many years, I was one of the two most intimate friends and most constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his chosen art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his prodigious fertility of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the frankest and largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, ‘in wit a man, simplicity a child’, no Artist, of whatever denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the Art-Goddess whom he worshipped. 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 Freemasons' Tavern Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18700405 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. According to the printed order of our proceedings, with such an appendix as the secretary has placed in my hands, a distinguished friend of mine on my right was to have proposed the next toast, the subject of which I will not anticipate. It was associated with another toast; but I have been informed that the subject of that other toast, a corporate body, would have considered themselves ‘snubbed’, – to use an expression that has been forwarded to me confidentially – if they had not been proposed separately. That corporation is the City of London. This is a body represented here by a most distinguished member. For that body we entertain the highest respect, and from it, I for one, have received unbounded hospitality and consideration. I am the more pleased to return this toast, because I have no doubt that this distinguished member of the Corporation unquestionably will now be delighted to tell us what the Corporation is going to do. I have not the slightest doubt that they are going to do something highly creditable to themselves, and something highly serviceable to the whole of the metropolis; and if the secret be not at present closely locked in the blue chamber, I shall be deeply obliged to the gentleman who immediately follows me, if he will let us into it in the same confidence in which I have observed his secret about ‘snubbing’. I beg to propose to you to drink, ‘The Corporation of London’. Ladies and Gentlemen, You have received me with so much cordiality, that I fear you believe that I really did once sit in a Lord Mayor’s state coach. Permit me to assure you, in spite of the information received by Mr. Alderman Cotton, that I never had the honour. Furthermore, I beg to assure you, that I never witnessed a Lord Mayor’s Show except from the point of view obtained by the other vagabonds upon the pavement. Now, ladies and gentlemen, in spite of this great cordiality of yours, I doubt if you fully know yet what a blessing it is to you that I occupy this chair tonight, because, having filled it on several previous occasions for the society in whose behalf we are assembled, and having said everything I could say about it, and being, moreover, the President of the Institution itself, I am placed tonight in the modest position of a host who has not so much to display himself as to call out his guests – perhaps even to try to induce some among them to occupy his place on another occasion. Therefore, you may be safely sure that, like Falstaff, but with a modification almost as large as himself, I shall try rather to be the cause of speaking in others than to speak myself tonight. Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a snuff shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand, who, having apparently taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line. It is an appropriate instance of the universality of the newsman’s calling that no toast we have drunk tonight – and no toast we shall drink tonight – and no toast we might, could, would, or should drink tonight, is separable for a moment from that great inclusion of all possible subjects of human interest which he delivers at our doors every day. Further it may be worthy the consideration of everybody here who has talked cheerfully to his or her neighbour since we sat down at table, what, in the name of Heaven, should we have talked about, and how on earth could we have possibly got on, if our newsman had only for this one single day forgotten us! Now, ladies and gentlemen, as our newsman is not by any means in the habit of forgetting us, let us try to form a little habit of not forgetting our newsman. Let us remember that his work is very arduous; that it occupies him early and late; that the profits he derives from us, are at the best, very small; that the services he renders to us are very great; that if he be a master, his little capital is exposed to all sorts of mischances, from anxieties and hazards; and if he be a journeyman, he himself is exposed to all manner of weathers, of tempers, and all manner of difficulties and unreasonable requirements. Let me illustrate this. I was once present at a social discussion, which originated by chance. The subject was, What was the most absorbing and longest-lived passion in the human breast? What was the passion so powerful that it would almost induce the generous to be mean, the careless to be cautious, the guileless to be deeply designing, the dove to emulate the serpent? A daily editor of vast experience and great acuteness, who was one of the company, considerably surprised us by saying, with the greatest confidence, that the passion in question was the passion of getting orders for the play. There had recently been a great and terrible shipwreck, and very few of the surviving sailors had escaped in an open boat. One of these, a young man, on making land came straight to London, and straight to the newspaper office, with his verbal account of how he had seen the ship go down before his eyes. That young man had witnessed the most fearful contention between the powers of fire and water for the destruction of the ship. He had rowed away among the floating dying, and the sinking dead; he had blistered by day, and he had frozen by night, with no shelter and no food. As he told his dismal tale, he rolled his haggard eyes about him, and when he had finished it, and it had been noted down from his lips, he was cheered and refreshed, and asked if anything could be done for him. Even then, the master passion was so strong that he faintly replied – would like an order for the play! My friend the editor admitted that this was rather a strong case; but he said that during his many years of experience he had constantly witnessed an incredible amount of self-prostration and abasement having no other object, and that almost invariably on the part of people who could well afford to pay. This made a great impression on my mind, and I really lived in this faith for some years, till it happened that, one stormy night I was kindly escorted from a bleak railway station to the little out-of-the-way town that it represented, by a sprightly and vivacious newsman. To him I propounded, as we went along under my umbrella – he being the most excellent company – the old question, What was the one absorbing passion of the human soul? He replied, without the slightest hesitation, that it unquestionably was the passion for getting your newspaper in advance of all your fellow creatures; and also, if you only hired it, to get it delivered at your own door at exactly the same time as another man who hired the same copy four miles off; and finally, the invincible determination on the part of both men not to believe the time was up when the boy called. Ladies and gentlemen, I have not had an opportunity of verifying this. I conferred with the managing committee; but I have no doubt my friend was perfectly right. Well, as a sort of beacon in a sufficiently dark life, and as an assurance that among a little body of working men there is a feeling of brotherhood and sympathy, which is worth much to all men, or they would herd with wolves; the newsvendors once upon a time established a provident and benevolent institution; and here it is. Under the provident head, certain small annuities are granted to old and hard-working subscribers; under the benevolent head, relief is afforded to temporary and proved distress. Under both heads, I am bound to say the help rendered is very sparing, but if you like it to be handsomer you have it in your power to make it so. Such as it is, it is most gratefully received, and does a deal of good. Such as it is, it is most discreetly and feelingly administered; and it is encumbered with no wasteful charges for management or patronage. You know upon old authority, that you may believe anything except facts and figures, but you really may believe the statistics that during the last year we have granted about £100 in pensions, and some £70 in temporary relief, and have invested in Government Securities some £400. Touching this matter of investments, it was suggested at the last anniversary dinner, on the high and kind authority of Sir Benjamin Phillips, that we might grant more pensions and invest less money. We urge, on the other hand, that we wish our pensions to be certain and unchangeable – which of course they must be if they are always paid out of our Government interest and never out of the capital. However, so amiable is our nature, that we profess our desire to grant more pensions and to invest more money too. The more you give us tonight – again so amiable is our nature – the more we promise to do in both departments. That the newsvendor’s work is greatly increased, and it is far more wearing and tearing than it used to be, you may infer from one fact. Not to mention that we live in railway times, it is stated in Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory for the present year, that during the last quarter of a century the number of newspapers published in London had more than doubled, while the increase in the number of people among whom they have to be disseminated is almost beyond calculation. I have stated the newsman’s simple case. I leave it in your hands, with the concluding observation that it has had the good fortune, within the last year, of attracting the sympathy and the active support of that eminent man of letters, whom I am proud to call my friend, who now represents the great republic of America at the British Court. Also that it has the honour of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name of Longfellow. I beg to propose to you to drink ‘Prosperity to the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution’. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Newsvendors' Benevolent and Provident Institution Annual Dinner 1870 Description An account of the resource Speech at the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution Annual Dinner (5 April 1870). 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 1870-04-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1870-04-05_Speech_Newsvendors-Benevolent-and-Provident-Institution-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 Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution Annual Dinner' (5 April 1870). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-04-05_Speech_Newsvendors-Benevolent-and-Provident-Institution-Annual-Dinner">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-04-05_Speech_Newsvendors-Benevolent-and-Provident-Institution-Annual-Dinner</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. According to the printed order of our proceedings, with such an appendix as the secretary has placed in my hands, a distinguished friend of mine on my right was to have proposed the next toast, the subject of which I will not anticipate. It was associated with another toast; but I have been informed that the subject of that other toast, a corporate body, would have considered themselves ‘snubbed’, – to use an expression that has been forwarded to me confidentially – if they had not been proposed separately. That corporation is the City of London. This is a body represented here by a most distinguished member. For that body we entertain the highest respect, and from it, I for one, have received unbounded hospitality and consideration. I am the more pleased to return this toast, because I have no doubt that this distinguished member of the Corporation unquestionably will now be delighted to tell us what the Corporation is going to do. I have not the slightest doubt that they are going to do something highly creditable to themselves, and something highly serviceable to the whole of the metropolis; and if the secret be not at present closely locked in the blue chamber, I shall be deeply obliged to the gentleman who immediately follows me, if he will let us into it in the same confidence in which I have observed his secret about ‘snubbing’. I beg to propose to you to drink, ‘The Corporation of London’. Ladies and Gentlemen, You have received me with so much cordiality, that I fear you believe that I really did once sit in a Lord Mayor’s state coach. Permit me to assure you, in spite of the information received by Mr. Alderman Cotton, that I never had the honour. Furthermore, I beg to assure you, that I never witnessed a Lord Mayor’s Show except from the point of view obtained by the other vagabonds upon the pavement. Now, ladies and gentlemen, in spite of this great cordiality of yours, I doubt if you fully know yet what a blessing it is to you that I occupy this chair tonight, because, having filled it on several previous occasions for the society in whose behalf we are assembled, and having said everything I could say about it, and being, moreover, the President of the Institution itself, I am placed tonight in the modest position of a host who has not so much to display himself as to call out his guests – perhaps even to try to induce some among them to occupy his place on another occasion. Therefore, you may be safely sure that, like Falstaff, but with a modification almost as large as himself, I shall try rather to be the cause of speaking in others than to speak myself tonight. Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a snuff shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand, who, having apparently taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line.  It is an appropriate instance of the universality of the newsman’s calling that no toast we have drunk tonight – and no toast we shall drink tonight – and no toast we might, could, would, or should drink tonight, is separable for a moment from that great inclusion of all possible subjects of human interest which he delivers at our doors every day. Further it may be worthy the consideration of everybody here who has talked cheerfully to his or her neighbour since we sat down at table, what, in the name of Heaven, should we have talked about, and how on earth could we have possibly got on, if our newsman had only for this one single day forgotten us! Now, ladies and gentlemen, as our newsman is not by any means in the habit of forgetting us, let us try to form a little habit of not forgetting our newsman. Let us remember that his work is very arduous; that it occupies him early and late; that the profits he derives from us, are at the best, very small; that the services he renders to us are very great; that if he be a master, his little capital is exposed to all sorts of mischances, from anxieties and hazards; and if he be a journeyman, he himself is exposed to all manner of weathers, of tempers, and all manner of difficulties and unreasonable requirements. Let me illustrate this. I was once present at a social discussion, which originated by chance. The subject was, What was the most absorbing and longest-lived passion in the human breast? What was the passion so powerful that it would almost induce the generous to be mean, the careless to be cautious, the guileless to be deeply designing, the dove to emulate the serpent? A daily editor of vast experience and great acuteness, who was one of the company, considerably surprised us by saying, with the greatest confidence, that the passion in question was the passion of getting orders for the play. There had recently been a great and terrible shipwreck, and very few of the surviving sailors had escaped in an open boat. One of these, a young man, on making land came straight to London, and straight to the newspaper office, with his verbal account of how he had seen the ship go down before his eyes. That young man had witnessed the most fearful contention between the powers of fire and water for the destruction of the ship. He had rowed away among the floating dying, and the sinking dead; he had blistered by day, and he had frozen by night, with no shelter and no food. As he told his dismal tale, he rolled his haggard eyes about him, and when he had finished it, and it had been noted down from his lips, he was cheered and refreshed, and asked if anything could be done for him. Even then, the master passion was so strong that he faintly replied – would like an order for the play! My friend the editor admitted that this was rather a strong case; but he said that during his many years of experience he had constantly witnessed an incredible amount of self-prostration and abasement having no other object, and that almost invariably on the part of people who could well afford to pay. This made a great impression on my mind, and I really lived in this faith for some years, till it happened that, one stormy night I was kindly escorted from a bleak railway station to the little out-of-the-way town that it represented, by a sprightly and vivacious newsman. To him I propounded, as we went along under my umbrella – he being the most excellent company – the old question, What was the one absorbing passion of the human soul? He replied, without the slightest hesitation, that it unquestionably was the passion for getting your newspaper in advance of all your fellow creatures; and also, if you only hired it, to get it delivered at your own door at exactly the same time as another man who hired the same copy four miles off; and finally, the invincible determination on the part of both men not to believe the time was up when the boy called. Ladies and gentlemen, I have not had an opportunity of verifying this. I conferred with the managing committee; but I have no doubt my friend was perfectly right. Well, as a sort of beacon in a sufficiently dark life, and as an assurance that among a little body of working men there is a feeling of brotherhood and sympathy, which is worth much to all men, or they would herd with wolves; the newsvendors once upon a time established a provident and benevolent institution; and here it is. Under the provident head, certain small annuities are granted to old and hard-working subscribers; under the benevolent head, relief is afforded to temporary and proved distress. Under both heads, I am bound to say the help rendered is very sparing, but if you like it to be handsomer you have it in your power to make it so. Such as it is, it is most gratefully received, and does a deal of good. Such as it is, it is most discreetly and feelingly administered; and it is encumbered with no wasteful charges for management or patronage. You know upon old authority, that you may believe anything except facts and figures, but you really may believe the statistics that during the last year we have granted about £100 in pensions, and some £70 in temporary relief, and have invested in Government Securities some £400. Touching this matter of investments, it was suggested at the last anniversary dinner, on the high and kind authority of Sir Benjamin Phillips, that we might grant more pensions and invest less money. We urge, on the other hand, that we wish our pensions to be certain and unchangeable – which of course they must be if they are always paid out of our Government interest and never out of the capital. However, so amiable is our nature, that we profess our desire to grant more pensions and to invest more money too. The more you give us tonight – again so amiable is our nature – the more we promise to do in both departments. That the newsvendor’s work is greatly increased, and it is far more wearing and tearing than it used to be, you may infer from one fact. Not to mention that we live in railway times, it is stated in Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory for the present year, that during the last quarter of a century the number of newspapers published in London had more than doubled, while the increase in the number of people among whom they have to be disseminated is almost beyond calculation. I have stated the newsman’s simple case. I leave it in your hands, with the concluding observation that it has had the good fortune, within the last year, of attracting the sympathy and the active support of that eminent man of letters, whom I am proud to call my friend, who now represents the great republic of America at the British Court. Also that it has the honour of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name of Longfellow. I beg to propose to you to drink ‘Prosperity to the Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution’. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 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 Liverpool Venue Where the speech was given Liverpool Mechanics' Institution 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. 18440226 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, It was rather hard of you to take away my breath before I spoke a word; but I would not thank you, even if I could, for the favour which has set me in this place or for the generous kindness which has greeted me so warmly; because my first strong impulse still would be – although I had that power – to lose sight of all personal considerations in the high intent and meaning of this numerous assemblage in the contemplation of the noble objects to which this building is devoted, of its brilliant and inspiring history, of that rough upward track, so bravely trodden, which it leaves behind, and that bright path of steadily increasing usefulness which lies stretched out before it. My first strong impulse still would be to exchange congratulations with you, as members of one united family, on the thriving vigour of this strongest child of a strong race. My first strong impulse still would be, though everybody here had twice as many hundreds of hands as there are hundreds of persons present, to shake them in the spirit every one, – always, allow me to say, excepting those hands (and there are a few such here) which, with the constitutional infirmity of human nature, I would rather salute in some more tender fashion. When I first had the honour of communicating with your Committee with reference to this celebration, I had some selfish hopes that the visit proposed to me might turn out to be one of condolence, or, at least, of solicitous inquiry; for they who receive a visitor in any season of distress are easily touched and moved by what he says, and I entertained some confident expectation of making a mighty strong impression upon you. But, when I came to look over the printed documents which were forwarded to me at the same time, and with which you are all tolerably familiar, these anticipations very speedily vanished, and left me bereft of all consolation but the triumphant feeling to which I have referred. For what do I find on looking over those brief chronicles of this swift conquest over ignorance and prejudice, in which no blood has been poured out, and no treaty signed but that one sacred compact which recognizes the just right of every man, whatever his belief, or however humble his degree, to aspire, and to have some means of aspiring, to be a better and a wiser man? I find that in 1825 certain misguided and turbulent persons proposed to erect in Liverpool an unpopular, dangerous, irreligious, and revolutionary establishment, called a Mechanic’s Institution; that, in 1835, Liverpool having somehow or other got on pretty comfortably in the meantime in spite of it, the first stone of a new and spacious edifice was laid; that in 1837 it was opened; that it was afterwards, at different periods, considerably enlarged; that, in 1844, conspicuous among the public beauties of a beautiful town, here it stands triumphant – its enemies lived down; its former students attesting in their various useful callings and pursuits the sound, practical information it afforded them; its members numbering considerably more than 3,000, and setting in for 6,000 at least; its library comprehending 11,000 volumes, and daily sending forth its hundreds of books into private homes; its staff of masters and officers amounting to half a hundred in themselves; its schools, conveying every sort of instruction, high and low, adapted to the labour, means, exigencies, and conveniences of nearly every class and grade of persons. I was here this morning, and in its spacious halls I found stores of wonders worked by nature in the air, in the forest, in the cavern, and in the sea; stores of the surpassing engines devised by science for the better knowledge of other worlds and the greater happiness of this; stores of those gentler works of art which, though achieved in perishable stone, by yet more perishable hands of dust, are in their influence immortal. With such means at their command, so well directed, so cheaply shared, and so extensively diffused, well may your Committee say, as they have done in one of their Reports, that the success of this establishment has far exceeded their most sanguine expectations. But, ladies and gentlemen, as that same philosopher whose words they quote – as Bacon tells us – instancing the wonderful effects of little things and small beginnings, that the influence of the loadstone was first discovered in particles of iron and not in iron bars, so they may lay it to their hearts that when they combined together to form the institution which has risen to this majestic height, they issued on a field of enterprise the glorious end of which they cannot even now discern. Every man who has felt the advantages of, or has received improvement in, this place, carries its benefits into the society in which he moves, and puts them out at compound interest; and what the blessed sum may be at last, no man can tell. Ladies and gentlemen, with that Christian prelate whose name appears on your list of honorary members; that good and liberal man who once addressed you within these walls, in a spirit worthy of his calling and of his High Master, I look forward from this place, as from a tower, to the time when high and low, and rich and poor, shall mutually assist, improve and educate each other. I feel, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a place, with its 3,200 members, and at least 3,200 arguments in every one, to enter on any advocacy of the principle of Mechanics' Institutions, or to discuss the subject with those who do or ever did object to them. I should as soon think of arguing the point with those untutored savages whose mode of life you last year had the opportunity of witnessing; indeed, I am strongly inclined to believe them by far the more rational of the two. Moreover, if the institution itself be not a sufficient answer to all such objections, then there is no such thing in fact or reason, human or divine. Neither will I venture to enter into those details of the management of this place which struck me most on the perusal of its papers; but I cannot help saying how much impressed and gratified I was, as everybody must be who comes to their perusal for the first time, by the extraordinary munificence with which this institution has been endowed by certain gentlemen. Amongst the peculiar features of management which made the greatest impression on me, I may observe that that regulation which empowers fathers, being annual subscribers of one guinea, to introduce their sons who are minors; and masters, on payment of the astoundingly small sum of five shillings annually, in like manner their apprentices, is not the least valuable of its privileges, and certainly not the least valuable to society. And, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot say to you what pleasure I derived from the perusal of an apparently excellent report in your local papers of a meeting held here some short time since, in aid of the formation of a girls' school in connexion with this institution. This is a new and striking chapter in the history of these institutions; it does equal credit to the gallantry and policy of this, and disposes one to say of it with a slight parody of the words of Burns, that Its 'prentice han' it tried on man, And then it taught the lasses, O. That those who are our best teachers, and whose lessons are oftenest heeded in after life, should be well taught themselves, is a proposition few reasonable men will gainsay; and, certainly, to breed up good husbands on the one hand, and good wives on the other, does appear as reasonable and straightforward a plan as could well be devised for the improvement of the next generation. This, and what I see before me, naturally brings me to our fairer members, in respect of whom I have no doubt you will agree with me that they ought to be admitted to the widest possible extent, and on the lowest possible terms; and, ladies, let me venture to say to you that you never did a wiser thing in all your lives than when you turned your favourable regard on such an establishment as this, for wherever the light of knowledge is diffused, wherever there is the clearest perception of what is beautiful, and good, and most redeeming amid all the faults and vices of mankind, there your character, your virtues, your graces, your better nature will be the best appreciated, and there the truest homage will be proudly paid to you. You show best, trust me, in the clearest light; and every ray that falls upon you at your own firesides, from any book or thought communicated within these walls, will raise you nearer to the angels in the eyes you care for most. I will not longer interpose myself, ladies and gentlemen, between you and the pleasure we all anticipate in hearing other gentlemen, and in enjoying those social pleasures with which it is a main part of the wisdom of this society to adorn and relieve its graver pursuits. We all feel, I am sure, being here, that we are truly interested in the cause of human improvement and rational education, and that we pledge ourselves —everyone as far as in him lies — to extend the knowledge of the benefits afforded in this place, and to bear honest witness in its favour. To those who yet remain without its walls, but have the means of purchasing its advantages, we make appeal, and in a friendly and forbearing spirit say, ‘Come in, and be convinced: “Who enters here, leaves doubt behind.”’ If you, happily, have been well taught yourself, and are superior to its advantages, so much the more should you make one in sympathy with those who are below you. Beneath this roof we breed the men who, in time to come, must be found working for good or evil in every quarter of society. If mutual forbearance among various classes be not found here, where so many men are trained up in so many grades to enter on so many roads of life, dating their entry from one common starting — point, as they are all approaching, by various paths, one common end, where else can that great lesson be imbibed? Differences of wealth, of rank, of intellect, we know there must be, and we respect them; but we would give to all the means of taking out one patent of nobility, and we define it in the words of a great living poet, who is one of us, and who uses his great gifts, as he holds them in trust, for the general welfare: Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. The height of the gratification to which you have raised me, places me in that situation of disadvantage to which I jocularly referred at the beginning of my address. Believe me, – believe me, the obligation, the delight, and pride in this case are all on my side — that it is a delight and happiness to me to connect myself with such an institution as yours. It is – as those who know me best, best know – a reward to which I attach the best and proudest value. I should be ashamed of myself, and care very little for those belonging to me, if I did not make all my children, as they grow up, feel and estimate the value of such institutions as Mechanics' Institutions, and become members of them. Which I will. In reference to one point referred to by the eloquent gentleman who has just addressed you, which is, the objection that used to be urged against such institutions that they might possibly confound the distinctions of society, and render people dissatisfied with the grades into which they have fallen, allow me to say that after mature consideration I am convinced there is no fear of that in England. The distinction of the different grades of society are so accurately marked, and so very difficult to pass, that I have not the slightest fear of any such result. In the path I have trodden, which has met with your approval, I will continue to tread so long as God grants me health and life; but I fear there is one quality for which my books have been praised, in which they will be terribly deficient in time to come, – and that is Heart. I felt a loss of heart when I first entered this room; more still when I went upstairs; and the last remnant of my heart went into that piano. Ladies and Gentlemen, – Good night. In certain words contained in a little book referred to so often and so kindly, allow me for once to quote myself and add, 'And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us Every One!' 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 Liverpool Mechanics' Institution Annual Soirée Description An account of the resource Speech at the Liverpool Mechanics' Institution Annual Soirée (26 February 1844). 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 1844-02-26 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1844-02-26_Speech_Liverpool-Mechanics-Institution-Annual-Soiree 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 Liverpool Mechanics' Institution Annual Soirée' (26 February 1844). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1844-02-26_Speech_Liverpool-Mechanics-Institution-Annual-Soiree">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1844-02-26_Speech_Liverpool-Mechanics-Institution-Annual-Soiree</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, It was rather hard of you to take away my breath before I spoke a word; but I would not thank you, even if I could, for the favour which has set me in this place or for the generous kindness which has greeted me so warmly; because my first strong impulse still would be – although I had that power – to lose sight of all personal considerations in the high intent and meaning of this numerous assemblage in the contemplation of the noble objects to which this building is devoted, of its brilliant and inspiring history, of that rough upward track, so bravely trodden, which it leaves behind, and that bright path of steadily increasing usefulness which lies stretched out before it. My first strong impulse still would be to exchange congratulations with you, as members of one united family, on the thriving vigour of this strongest child of a strong race. My first strong impulse still would be, though everybody here had twice as many hundreds of hands as there are hundreds of persons present, to shake them in the spirit every one, – always, allow me to say, excepting those hands (and there are a few such here) which, with the constitutional infirmity of human nature, I would rather salute in some more tender fashion. When I first had the honour of communicating with your Committee with reference to this celebration, I had some selfish hopes that the visit proposed to me might turn out to be one of condolence, or, at least, of solicitous inquiry; for they who receive a visitor in any season of distress are easily touched and moved by what he says, and I entertained some confident expectation of making a mighty strong impression upon you. But, when I came to look over the printed documents which were forwarded to me at the same time, and with which you are all tolerably familiar, these anticipations very speedily vanished, and left me bereft of all consolation but the triumphant feeling to which I have referred. For what do I find on looking over those brief chronicles of this swift conquest over ignorance and prejudice, in which no blood has been poured out, and no treaty signed but that one sacred compact which recognizes the just right of every man, whatever his belief, or however humble his degree, to aspire, and to have some means of aspiring, to be a better and a wiser man? I find that in 1825 certain misguided and turbulent persons proposed to erect in Liverpool an unpopular, dangerous, irreligious, and revolutionary establishment, called a Mechanic’s Institution; that, in 1835, Liverpool having somehow or other got on pretty comfortably in the meantime in spite of it, the first stone of a new and spacious edifice was laid; that in 1837 it was opened; that it was afterwards, at different periods, considerably enlarged; that, in 1844, conspicuous among the public beauties of a beautiful town, here it stands triumphant – its enemies lived down; its former students attesting in their various useful callings and pursuits the sound, practical information it afforded them; its members numbering considerably more than 3,000, and setting in for 6,000 at least; its library comprehending 11,000 volumes, and daily sending forth its hundreds of books into private homes; its staff of masters and officers amounting to half a hundred in themselves; its schools, conveying every sort of instruction, high and low, adapted to the labour, means, exigencies, and conveniences of nearly every class and grade of persons. I was here this morning, and in its spacious halls I found stores of wonders worked by nature in the air, in the forest, in the cavern, and in the sea; stores of the surpassing engines devised by science for the better knowledge of other worlds and the greater happiness of this; stores of those gentler works of art which, though achieved in perishable stone, by yet more perishable hands of dust, are in their influence immortal. With such means at their command, so well directed, so cheaply shared, and so extensively diffused, well may your Committee say, as they have done in one of their Reports, that the success of this establishment has far exceeded their most sanguine expectations. But, ladies and gentlemen, as that same philosopher whose words they quote – as Bacon tells us – instancing the wonderful effects of little things and small beginnings, that the influence of the loadstone was first discovered in particles of iron and not in iron bars, so they may lay it to their hearts that when they combined together to form the institution which has risen to this majestic height, they issued on a field of enterprise the glorious end of which they cannot even now discern. Every man who has felt the advantages of, or has received improvement in, this place, carries its benefits into the society in which he moves, and puts them out at compound interest; and what the blessed sum may be at last, no man can tell. Ladies and gentlemen, with that Christian prelate whose name appears on your list of honorary members; that good and liberal man who once addressed you within these walls, in a spirit worthy of his calling and of his High Master, I look forward from this place, as from a tower, to the time when high and low, and rich and poor, shall mutually assist, improve and educate each other. I feel, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not a place, with its 3,200 members, and at least 3,200 arguments in every one, to enter on any advocacy of the principle of Mechanics' Institutions, or to discuss the subject with those who do or ever did object to them. I should as soon think of arguing the point with those untutored savages whose mode of life you last year had the opportunity of witnessing; indeed, I am strongly inclined to believe them by far the more rational of the two. Moreover, if the institution itself be not a sufficient answer to all such objections, then there is no such thing in fact or reason, human or divine. Neither will I venture to enter into those details of the management of this place which struck me most on the perusal of its papers; but I cannot help saying how much impressed and gratified I was, as everybody must be who comes to their perusal for the first time, by the extraordinary munificence with which this institution has been endowed by certain gentlemen. Amongst the peculiar features of management which made the greatest impression on me, I may observe that that regulation which empowers fathers, being annual subscribers of one guinea, to introduce their sons who are minors; and masters, on payment of the astoundingly small sum of five shillings annually, in like manner their apprentices, is not the least valuable of its privileges, and certainly not the least valuable to society. And, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot say to you what pleasure I derived from the perusal of an apparently excellent report in your local papers of a meeting held here some short time since, in aid of the formation of a girls' school in connexion with this institution. This is a new and striking chapter in the history of these institutions; it does equal credit to the gallantry and policy of this, and disposes one to say of it with a slight parody of the words of Burns, that Its 'prentice han' it tried on man, And then it taught the lasses, O. That those who are our best teachers, and whose lessons are oftenest heeded in after life, should be well taught themselves, is a proposition few reasonable men will gainsay; and, certainly, to breed up good husbands on the one hand, and good wives on the other, does appear as reasonable and straightforward a plan as could well be devised for the improvement of the next generation. This, and what I see before me, naturally brings me to our fairer members, in respect of whom I have no doubt you will agree with me that they ought to be admitted to the widest possible extent, and on the lowest possible terms; and, ladies, let me venture to say to you that you never did a wiser thing in all your lives than when you turned your favourable regard on such an establishment as this, for wherever the light of knowledge is diffused, wherever there is the clearest perception of what is beautiful, and good, and most redeeming amid all the faults and vices of mankind, there your character, your virtues, your graces, your better nature will be the best appreciated, and there the truest homage will be proudly paid to you. You show best, trust me, in the clearest light; and every ray that falls upon you at your own firesides, from any book or thought communicated within these walls, will raise you nearer to the angels in the eyes you care for most. I will not longer interpose myself, ladies and gentlemen, between you and the pleasure we all anticipate in hearing other gentlemen, and in enjoying those social pleasures with which it is a main part of the wisdom of this society to adorn and relieve its graver pursuits. We all feel, I am sure, being here, that we are truly interested in the cause of human improvement and rational education, and that we pledge ourselves —everyone as far as in him lies — to extend the knowledge of the benefits afforded in this place, and to bear honest witness in its favour. To those who yet remain without its walls, but have the means of purchasing its advantages, we make appeal, and in a friendly and forbearing spirit say, ‘Come in, and be convinced: “Who enters here, leaves doubt behind.”’ If you, happily, have been well taught yourself, and are superior to its advantages, so much the more should you make one in sympathy with those who are below you. Beneath this roof we breed the men who, in time to come, must be found working for good or evil in every quarter of society. If mutual forbearance among various classes be not found here, where so many men are trained up in so many grades to enter on so many roads of life, dating their entry from one common starting — point, as they are all approaching, by various paths, one common end, where else can that great lesson be imbibed? Differences of wealth, of rank, of intellect, we know there must be, and we respect them; but we would give to all the means of taking out one patent of nobility, and we define it in the words of a great living poet, who is one of us, and who uses his great gifts, as he holds them in trust, for the general welfare: Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. The height of the gratification to which you have raised me, places me in that situation of disadvantage to which I jocularly referred at the beginning of my address. Believe me, – believe me, the obligation, the delight, and pride in this case are all on my side — that it is a delight and happiness to me to connect myself with such an institution as yours. It is – as those who know me best, best know – a reward to which I attach the best and proudest value. I should be ashamed of myself, and care very little for those belonging to me, if I did not make all my children, as they grow up, feel and estimate the value of such institutions as Mechanics' Institutions, and become members of them. Which I will. In reference to one point referred to by the eloquent gentleman who has just addressed you, which is, the objection that used to be urged against such institutions that they might possibly confound the distinctions of society, and render people dissatisfied with the grades into which they have fallen, allow me to say that after mature consideration I am convinced there is no fear of that in England. The distinction of the different grades of society are so accurately marked, and so very difficult to pass, that I have not the slightest fear of any such result. In the path I have trodden, which has met with your approval, I will continue to tread so long as God grants me health and life; but I fear there is one quality for which my books have been praised, in which they will be terribly deficient in time to come, – and that is Heart. I felt a loss of heart when I first entered this room; more still when I went upstairs; and the last remnant of my heart went into that piano. Ladies and Gentlemen, – Good night. In certain words contained in a little book referred to so often and so kindly, allow me for once to quote myself and add, 'And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us Every One!' 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 had also, the President announced, taken the Evans prize, of twenty pounds, founded, as they knew, by a manufacturer of Birmingham; and he noticed three circumstances in Mr. Caswell’s career with great pleasure. The first was that he was not yet twenty-one; the second was that in the right of taking the Evans prize he had received the appointment of analytical chemist in the Messrs. Chances’s great works; and the third was that he had done him the honour of affixing to his examination papers the motto he himself had suggested when he was in Birmingham the last time, ‘Courage, Persevere’. Location The location Birmingham Venue Where the speech was given Town 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. 18700106 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, When I last had the honour of presiding over the institution which again brings us together, I took occasion to remark upon a certain super-abundance of public speaking which seems to me to distinguish the present time. It will require very little self denial on my part to practise now what I preached then; firstly, because I said my little say that night; and secondly because we have a definite and highly interesting action before us tonight. We have now to bestow the rewards which have been brilliantly won by the most successful competitors in the society’s lists. I say the ‘most successful’, because tonight we should particularly observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor among my hearers may be certain that he has still won much – very much – and that he can well afford to swell the triumph of his rivals who has opposed him in the race. I have applied the word ‘rewards’ to these prizes, and I do so, not because they represent any great intrinsic worth in silver or gold, but precisely because they do not. They represent what is above all price. what can be stated in no arithmetical figures, and what is one of the great needs of the human soul – encouraging sympathy. They are an assurance to every student present or to come in your institution, that he does not work there neglected or unbefriended, but that he is watched, felt for, stimulated, and appreciated. Such an assurance, conveyed in the presence of this large assembly, and striking to the breast of the recipient that thrill which is inseparable from any great united utterance of feeling, is a reward, to my thinking, as purely worthy of the labour as the labour itself is worthy of the reward; and by a sensitive spirit can never be forgotten. Now, ladies and gentlemen, with your permission, I will at once proceed to the discharge of the delightful duty you have entrusted to me – the distribution of the prizes and certificates. The prizes are now all distributed, and I have discharged myself of the delightful task you have entrusted to me; and if the recipients of these prizes and certificates who have come upon this platform have had the genuine pleasure in receiving their acknowledgments from my hands that I have had in placing them in theirs, they are in a true Christmas temper tonight. I have the painful sense upon me that it is reserved for someone else to enjoy this great satisfaction of mind next time. It would be useless for the few short moments longer to disguise the fact that I happen to have drawn King this Twelfth Night, but that another sovereign will very soon sit on my inconstant throne. Tonight I abdicate, or, what is much the same thing in the modern annals of royalty, l am politely dethroned. This melancholy reflection, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to a very small point, personal to myself, upon which I will beg your permission to say a closing word. When I was here last autumn I made, in reference to some remarks of your respected member, Mr. Dixon, a short confession of my political faith, or perhaps I should better say, want of faith. It imported that I have very little faith in the people who govern us – please to observe ‘people’ there will be with a small ‘p’, but that I have very great confidence in the People whom they govern: please to observe ‘People’ there with a large ‘P’. This was shortly and elliptically stated; and was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some quarters inversely explained. Perhaps as the inventor of a certain extravagant fiction, but one which I do see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at the bottom of it, a fiction called ‘The Circumlocution Office’, and perhaps also as the writer of an idle book or two, whose public opinions are not obscurely stated – perhaps in these respects I do not sufficiently bear in mind Hamlet’s caution to speak by the card lest equivocation should undo me. Anyhow I complain of nobody, but simply in order that there may be no more mistake as to what I did mean, and as to what I do mean, I will restate my meaning, and I will do so in the words of a great thinker, a great writer, and a great scholar – whose life, unfortunately for mankind, was cut short – in his History of Civilization in England: They… may talk as they will about the reforms which government has introduced, and the improvements to be expected from legislation. But whoever will take a wider and more commanding view of affairs, will soon discover that such hopes are chimerical. They will learn that lawgivers are nearly always the obstructors of society, instead of its helpers; and that in the extremely few cases in which their measures have turned out well, their success has been owing to the fact that, contrary to their usual custom, they have implicitly obeyed the spirit of their time, and have been, as they always should be, the mere servants of the people, to whose wishes they are bound to give a public and legal sanction. I will only say to you, in acknowledgement of your great cordiality, and that of the three gentlemen who moved, seconded, and put the motion just carried, that you never can have a President more truly interested in you, or more determined, at the conclusion of his term, to remain your steady and faithful friend. With this sincere assurance I beg respectfully, but only officially, to bid you farewell. 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 Birmingham and Midland Institute Prize-Giving Description An account of the resource Speeches at the Birmingham and Midland Institute Prize-Giving (6 January 1870). 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 1870-01-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1870-01-06_Speech_Birmingham-and-Midland-Institute-Prize-Giving 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. 'Speeches at the Birmingham and Midland Institute Prize-Giving' (6 January 1870). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-01-06_Speech_Birmingham-and-Midland-Institute-Prize-Giving">https://dickenssearch.com/speeches/1870-01-06_Speech_Birmingham-and-Midland-Institute-Prize-Giving</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Ladies and Gentlemen, When I last had the honour of presiding over the institution which again brings us together, I took occasion to remark upon a certain super-abundance of public speaking which seems to me to distinguish the present time. It will require very little self denial on my part to practise now what I preached then; firstly, because I said my little say that night; and secondly because we have a definite and highly interesting action before us tonight. We have now to bestow the rewards which have been brilliantly won by the most successful competitors in the society’s lists. I say the ‘most successful’, because tonight we should particularly observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor among my hearers may be certain that he has still won much – very much – and that he can well afford to swell the triumph of his rivals who has opposed him in the race. I have applied the word ‘rewards’ to these prizes, and I do so, not because they represent any great intrinsic worth in silver or gold, but precisely because they do not. They represent what is above all price. what can be stated in no arithmetical figures, and what is one of the great needs of the human soul – encouraging sympathy. They are an assurance to every student present or to come in your institution, that he does not work there neglected or unbefriended, but that he is watched, felt for, stimulated, and appreciated. Such an assurance, conveyed in the presence of this large assembly, and striking to the breast of the recipient that thrill which is inseparable from any great united utterance of feeling, is a reward, to my thinking, as purely worthy of the labour as the labour itself is worthy of the reward; and by a sensitive spirit can never be forgotten. Now, ladies and gentlemen, with your permission, I will at once proceed to the discharge of the delightful duty you have entrusted to me – the distribution of the prizes and certificates. The prizes are now all distributed, and I have discharged myself of the delightful task you have entrusted to me; and if the recipients of these prizes and certificates who have come upon this platform have had the genuine pleasure in receiving their acknowledgments from my hands that I have had in placing them in theirs, they are in a true Christmas temper tonight. I have the painful sense upon me that it is reserved for someone else to enjoy this great satisfaction of mind next time. It would be useless for the few short moments longer to disguise the fact that I happen to have drawn King this Twelfth Night, but that another sovereign will very soon sit on my inconstant throne. Tonight I abdicate, or, what is much the same thing in the modern annals of royalty, l am politely dethroned. This melancholy reflection, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to a very small point, personal to myself, upon which I will beg your permission to say a closing word. When I was here last autumn I made, in reference to some remarks of your respected member, Mr. Dixon, a short confession of my political faith, or perhaps I should better say, want of faith. It imported that I have very little faith in the people who govern us – please to observe ‘people’ there will be with a small ‘p’, but that I have very great confidence in the People whom they govern: please to observe ‘People’ there with a large ‘P’. This was shortly and elliptically stated; and was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some quarters inversely explained. Perhaps as the inventor of a certain extravagant fiction, but one which I do see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at the bottom of it, a fiction called ‘The Circumlocution Office’, and perhaps also as the writer of an idle book or two, whose public opinions are not obscurely stated – perhaps in these respects I do not sufficiently bear in mind Hamlet’s caution to speak by the card lest equivocation should undo me. Anyhow I complain of nobody, but simply in order that there may be no more mistake as to what I did mean, and as to what I do mean, I will restate my meaning, and I will do so in the words of a great thinker, a great writer, and a great scholar – whose life, unfortunately for mankind, was cut short – in his History of Civilization in England: They… may talk as they will about the reforms which government has introduced, and the improvements to be expected from legislation. But whoever will take a wider and more commanding view of affairs, will soon discover that such hopes are chimerical. They will learn that lawgivers are nearly always the obstructors of society, instead of its helpers; and that in the extremely few cases in which their measures have turned out well, their success has been owing to the fact that, contrary to their usual custom, they have implicitly obeyed the spirit of their time, and have been, as they always should be, the mere servants of the people, to whose wishes they are bound to give a public and legal sanction. I will only say to you, in acknowledgement of your great cordiality, and that of the three gentlemen who moved, seconded, and put the motion just carried, that you never can have a President more truly interested in you, or more determined, at the conclusion of his term, to remain your steady and faithful friend. With this sincere assurance I beg respectfully, but only officially, to bid you farewell.