David Copperfield, Charles Dickens [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

a little bit of something at a cook’s-shop, or a little lobster at the fishmongers, and bring it here, and make a splendid supper, chatting about what we have seen. Now, you know, Copperfield, if I was Lord Chancellor, we couldn’t do this!”

“You would do something, whatever you were, my dear Traddles,” thought I, “that would be pleasant and amiable. And by the way,” I said aloud, “I suppose you never draw any skeletons now?”

“Really,” replied Traddles, laughing, and reddening, “I can’t wholly deny that I do, my dear Copperfield. For being in one of the back rows of the King’s Bench the other day, with a pen in my hand, the fancy came into my head to try how I had preserved that accomplishment. And I am afraid there’s a skeleton⁠—in a wig⁠—on the ledge of the desk.”

After we had both laughed heartily, Traddles wound up by looking with a smile at the fire, and saying, in his forgiving way, “Old Creakle!”

“I have a letter from that old⁠—Rascal here,” said I. For I never was less disposed to forgive him the way he used to batter Traddles, than when I saw Traddles so ready to forgive him himself.

“From Creakle the schoolmaster?” exclaimed Traddles. “No!”

“Among the persons who are attracted to me in my rising fame and fortune,” said I, looking over my letters, “and who discover that they were always much attached to me, is the selfsame Creakle. He is not a schoolmaster now, Traddles. He is retired. He is a Middlesex Magistrate.”

I thought Traddles might be surprised to hear it, but he was not so at all.

“How do you suppose he comes to be a Middlesex Magistrate?” said I.

“Oh dear me!” replied Traddles, “it would be very difficult to answer that question. Perhaps he voted for somebody, or lent money to somebody, or bought something of somebody, or otherwise obliged somebody, or jobbed for somebody, who knew somebody who got the lieutenant of the county to nominate him for the commission.”

“On the commission he is, at any rate,” said I. “And he writes to me here, that he will be glad to show me, in operation, the only true system of prison discipline; the only unchallengeable way of making sincere and lasting converts and penitents⁠—which, you know, is by solitary confinement. What do you say?”

“To the system?” inquired Traddles, looking grave.

“No. To my accepting the offer, and your going with me?”

“I don’t object,” said Traddles.

“Then I’ll write to say so. You remember (to say nothing of our treatment) this same Creakle turning his son out of doors, I suppose, and the life he used to lead his wife and daughter?”

“Perfectly,” said Traddles.

“Yet, if you’ll read his letter, you’ll find he is the tenderest of men to prisoners convicted of the whole calendar of felonies,” said I; “though I can’t find that his tenderness extends to any other class of created beings.”

Traddles shrugged his shoulders, and was not at all surprised. I had not expected him to be, and was not surprised myself; or my observation of similar practical satires would have been but scanty. We arranged the time of our visit, and I wrote accordingly to Mr. Creakle that evening.

On the appointed day⁠—I think it was the next day, but no matter⁠—Traddles and I repaired to the prison where Mr. Creakle was powerful. It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old.

In an office that might have been on the ground floor of the Tower of Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were presented to our old schoolmaster; who was one of a group, composed of two or three of the busier sort of magistrates, and some visitors they had brought. He received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone years, and had always loved me tenderly. On my introducing Traddles, Mr. Creakle expressed, in like manner, but in an inferior degree, that he had always been Traddles’s guide, philosopher, and friend. Our venerable instructor was a great deal older, and not improved in appearance. His face was as fiery as ever; his eyes were as small, and rather deeper set. The scanty, wet-looking grey hair, by which I remembered him, was almost gone; and the thick veins in his bald head were none the more agreeable to look at.

After some conversation among these gentlemen, from which I might have supposed that there was nothing in the world to be legitimately taken into account but the supreme comfort of prisoners, at any expense, and nothing on the wide earth to be done outside prison-doors, we began our inspection. It being then just dinnertime, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner’s dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity and precision of clockwork. I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that the “system” required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, “the system” put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but the system, to be considered.

As we were going through some of the magnificent passages, I inquired of Mr. Creakle and his friends what were supposed to