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Nicholiana Directory 02
Page 06
What, again, is one to make of Dickens, with his love of private theatricals, his florid waistcoats and watch-chains, his sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life? He, again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods. Then, too, Dickens's later desertion of his work in favour of public readings and money-making is curious to note. He was like Shakespeare in this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life, which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.
Cn. Flavius, the son of a Freedman, and Secretary to Appius Claudius, divulged the forms and times to be observed in legal proceedings. These the Patricians had hitherto kept secret; they alone knew the days when the courts would be held, and the technical pleadings according to which all actions must proceed. But Flavius, having become acquainted with these secrets, by means of his patron, published in a book a list of the formularies to be observed in the several kinds of actions, and also set up in the forum a whited tablet containing a list of all the days on which the courts could be held. In spite of his ignominious birth, he was made a Senator by Appius Claudius, and was elected Curule AEdile by the people.
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