This is the reason why it would not be worth while to try to tell the stories of the children in the novels of Dickens. The moment you got to the most exciting part of the story you would find that they weren’t children at all. They are quite grown up. The fact is that Dickens was not very much of a story-teller. We do not read him for the plot, which is often hard to follow. He gives us scenes, one after another, each one really complete in itself. When we sit down by the fire on a winter evening, some one says: “What shall we read? We haven’t time to read a book through--only a chapter.” Now the chances are that we choose a chapter from Dickens. And it’s very likely that we will choose some scene which we all are most familiar with. We come into an inn. The coach has just arrived, and there is a cheerful bustle. We hear the blowing of the horns and the cracking of the whips, and if Mr. Weller happens to be driver, or if Mr. Pickwick and his friends happen to be on board, we are sure that we will be left in a state of great good humor. Or we drop into a shabby little house, and climb the stairs till we come to a room where some of our friends are having a little dinner. They are making speeches to one another, and acting in a most extraordinary manner. It’s their way of having a good time, and we are glad that they can enjoy themselves over so little. We hear people quarrelling and crying and laughing, and we are curious to know what it is all about. The best of it is that Dickens always tells us. If a man is a villain, we see it at once; and if he is a good-hearted person, we give him credit for it. We do not have to read the book through to get the flavor of it. We go at once to the scenes that please us best. The scenes that are selected for this book are those in which children appear, and we want to see them as Dickens did. PIP III PIP AS I have said, almost all the Dickens people lived in London or went up to it sometimes. But all were not born there, and many of them, as children, lived in little villages. When they got to be seventeen or eighteen, they went to the great city to seek their fortunes. There was Pip. I don’t care so much for him after he grew up. When he got to London he became very much like other folks. I like him best when he was a small boy in the country. His name was Philip Pirrip. This was hard to pronounce, and puckered up the lips like “Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers.” The best he could make of it was Pip, and so everybody called him that for short. His father and mother had died, and he was brought up by his older sister, who had married Joe Gargery, the blacksmith. She was twenty years older than Pip and had forgotten how she felt when she was his age. This made trouble for them both.