X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE 179

206. How my parents could allow their young novice to be cast into the fiery furnace of the outer world in this helpless manner the reader may wonder, and only the Fates know; but there was this excuse for them, that they had never seen me the least interested or anxious about girls-never caring to stay in the promenades at Cheltenham or Bath, or on the parade at Dover; on the contrary, growling and mewing if I was ever kept there, and off to the sea or the fields the moment I got leave; and they had educated me in such extremely orthodox English Toryism and Evangelicalism that they could not conceive their scientific, religious, and George the Third revering youth, wavering in his constitutional balance towards French Catholics. And I had never said anything about the Champs Élysées! Virtually convent-bred more closely than the maids themselves, without a single sisterly or cousinly affection for refuge or lightning rod, and having no athletic skill or pleasure to check my dreaming, I was thrown, bound hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery furnace, or fiery cross, of these four girls,-who of course reduced me to a mere heap of white ashes in four days. Four days, at the most, it took to reduce me to ashes, but the Mercredi des cendres¹ lasted four years.

Anything more comic in the externals of it, anything more tragic in the essence, could not have been invented by the skilfullest designer in either kind. In my social behaviour and mind I was a curious combination of Mr. Traddles, Mr. Toots, and Mr. Winkle. I had the real fidelity and single-mindedness of Mr. Traddles, with the conversational abilities of Mr. Toots, and the heroic ambition of Mr. Winkle;-all these illuminated by imagination like Mr. Copperfield’s, at his first Norwood dinner.²

¹ [Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 53 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 316).]

² [For Thomas Traddles, a “sort of hermit” at Mr. Creakle’s school, see David Copperfield, ch. vii. For the “first Norwood dinner,” see ch. xxvi. Mr. Toots, one of Doctor Blimber’s pupils (Dombey and Son), was, it will be remembered, not remarkable for conversational ability.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]