Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman & Hall edition (_The Works of Charles Dickens_, volume 28) by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org [Picture: Book cover] THE LAMPLIGHTER * * * * * By CHARLES DICKENS * * * * * LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LD. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1905 * * * * * ‘IF you talk of Murphy and Francis Moore, gentlemen,’ said the lamplighter who was in the chair, ‘I mean to say that neither of ’em ever had any more to do with the stars than Tom Grig had.’ ‘And what had _he_ to do with ’em?’ asked the lamplighter who officiated as vice. ‘Nothing at all,’ replied the other; ‘just exactly nothing at all.’ ‘Do you mean to say you don’t believe in Murphy, then?’ demanded the lamplighter who had opened the discussion. ‘I mean to say I believe in Tom Grig,’ replied the chairman. ‘Whether I believe in Murphy, or not, is a matter between me and my conscience; and whether Murphy believes in himself, or not, is a matter between him and his conscience. Gentlemen, I drink your healths.’ The lamplighter who did the company this honour, was seated in the chimney-corner of a certain tavern, which has been, time out of mind, the Lamplighters’ House of Call. He sat in the midst of a circle of lamplighters, and was the cacique, or chief of the tribe. If any of our readers have had the good fortune to behold a lamplighter’s funeral, they will not be surprised to learn that lamplighters are a strange and primitive people; that they rigidly adhere to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors; that they intermarry, and betroth their children in infancy; that they enter into no plots or conspiracies (for who ever heard of a traitorous lamplighter?); that they commit no crimes against the laws of their country (there being no instance of a murderous or burglarious lamplighter); that they are, in short, notwithstanding their apparently volatile and restless character, a highly moral and reflective people: having among themselves as many traditional observances as the Jews, and being, as a body, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as the streets. It is an article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilisation shone in the first street-light maintained at the public expense. They trace their existence and high position in the public esteem, in a direct line to the heathen mythology; and hold that the history of Prometheus himself is but a pleasant fable, whereof the true hero is a lamplighter. ‘Gentlemen,’ said the lamplighter in the chair, ‘I drink your healths.’