History of English Humour, Vol. 2L'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
History
History of English Humour, Vol. 2
L'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
English wit and humor -- History and criticism; Wit and humor -- History and criticism
"Which Mrs. Harris's own words to me was these, 'Sairey Gamp,' she
says, 'why not go to Margate? Srimps,' says that dear creetur, 'is
to your liking. Sairey, why not go to Margate for a week, bring
your constitution up with srimps, and come back to them loving arts
as knows and wallies you, blooming? Sairey,' Mrs. Harris says,
'you are but poorly. Don't denige it, Mrs. Gamp, for books is in
your looks. You must have rest. Your mind,' she says, 'is too
strong for you; it gets you down and treads upon you, Sairey. It is
useless to disguige the fact--the blade is a wearing out the
sheets.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'I could not undertake to
say, and I will not deceive you ma'am, that I am not the woman I
could wish to be. The time of worrit as I had with Mrs. Colliber,
the baker's lady, which was so bad in her mind with her first, that
she would not so much as look at bottled stout, and kept to gruel
through the month, has agued me, Mrs. Harris. But, ma'am,' I says
to her, 'talk not of Margate, for if I do go anywhere it is
elsewheres, and not there.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris solemn,
'whence this mystery? If I have ever deceived the hardest-working,
soberest, and best of women, mention it.' ... 'Mrs. Harris, then,'
I says, 'I have heard as there is an expedition going down to
Manjester and Liverpool a playacting, If I goes anywhere for change
it is along with that.' Mrs. Harris clasps her hands, and drops
into a chair, 'And have I lived to hear,' she says, 'of Sairey
Gamp, as always kept herself respectable, in company with
play-actors.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'be not alarmed, not
reg'lar play-actors--hammertoors.' 'Thank Evans!' says Mrs. Harris,
and bustizes into a flood of tears,"
Dickens saw with Hood the power to be obtained by uniting pathos with
humour. Such an intermixture at first appears inharmonious, but in
reality produces sweet music. There is something corresponding to the
course of external nature with its light and shade its sunshine and
showers, in this melancholy chased away by mirth, and joy merging into
sadness. Here, Dickens has held up the mirror, and shown a bright
reflection of the outer world. Out of many choice specimens, we may
select the following from the speech of the Cheap Jack--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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