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money with the Cheerybles and "became a rich and prosperous merchant," but as he immediately
retired into Devonshire, we can assume that he did not work very hard. Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass
"purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit." That is the spirit in which
most of Dickens's books end—a sort of radiant idleness. Where he appears to disapprove of young
men who do not work (Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn before his
reformation), it is because they are cynical and immoral or because they are a burden on somebody
else; if you are "good," and also self-supporting, there is no reason why you should not spend fifty
years in simply drawing your dividends. Home life is always enough. And, after all, it was the
general assumption of his age. The "genteel sufficiency," the "competence," the "gentleman of
independent means" (or "in easy circumstances")—the very phrases tell one all about the strange,
empty dream of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie. It was a dream of
complete idleness. Charles Reade conveys its spirit perfectly in the ending of Hard Cash. Alfred
Hardie, hero of Hard Cash, is the typical nineteenth-century novel-hero (public-school style), with
gifts which Reade describes as amounting to "genius." He is an old Etonian and a scholar of Oxford,
he knows most of the Greek and Latin classics by heart, he can box with prize-fighters and win the
Diamond Sculls at Henley. He goes through incredible adventures in which, of course, he behaves
with faultless heroism, and then, at the age of twenty-five, he inherits a fortune, marries his Julia
Dodd and settles down in the suburbs of Liverpool, in the same house as his parents-in-law:
They all lived together at Albion Villa, thanks to Alfred ... Oh, you happy little
villa! You were as like Paradise as any mortal dwelling can be. A day came,
however, when your walls could no longer hold all the happy inmates. Julia
presented Alfred with a lovely boy; enter two nurses, and the villa showed
symptoms of bursting. Two months more, and Alfred and his wife overflowed
into the next villa. It was but twenty yards off; and there was a double reason for
the migration. As often happens after a long separation, Heaven bestowed on
Captain and Mrs. Dodd another infant to play about their knees, etc. etc. etc.
This is the type of the Victorian happy ending—a vision of a huge, loving family of three
or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of
oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it implies. It is not
even a violent idleness, like Squire Western's. That is the significance of Dickens's urban background
and his non-interest in the blackguardly-sporting-military side of life. His heroes, once they had come
into money and "settled down," would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot,
fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home in
feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life:
The first act of Nicholas, when he became a rich and prosperous merchant, was
to buy his father's old house. As time crept on, and there came gradually about
him a group of lovely children, it was altered and enlarged; but none of the old
rooms were ever pulled down, no old tree was ever rooted up, nothing with
which there was any association of bygone times was ever removed or changed.
Within a stone's-throw was another retreat, enlivened by children's
pleasant voices too; and here was Kate ... the same true, gentle creature, the same