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heroine doing it, not because she was had but because she was good, because she wanted to save her child from something worse than death. And Richard? Richard should not be a good and happy husband. Instead he should become a disillusioned drunk­ and and a criminal. For once Dickens would eschew romance: he would study relentlessly the forces that doom the poor to the loss of their bodies and their souls. Why not?—since the moral lesson could be made all the more powerful in that way. And so, calamity having thus been piled upon calamity, the contemplated return to the earlier mood of the story and the re-introduction of Sir Joseph Cowley were seen to be impossible, and the apocalyptic splendours originally planned for were dropped as unnecessary and ineffective.

I have not forgotten that it is Dickens whose mood I am here attempting to reconstruct, and I am not unaware that all this seems—for him—somewhat bitter. But not any more bitter, I believe, than the story itself, and we have his own explicit testimony that his experience in writing it was wholly unusual. “This book … has made my face white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn’t write it twice for something. … Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real;