The Dickensian

He was a quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw hat;
with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers,
but with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes.
He was gazing with a rather gloomy interest at the cluster,
one might almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew thicker
as our little pleasure boat crawled up into Yarmouth Harbour.
A boat entering this harbour, as every one knows, does not
enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps round
at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear.
The passage of the river seems almost too narrow for traffic,
and in consequence the bigger ships look colossal. As we passed
under a timber ship from Norway, which seemed to block up the heavens
like a cathedral, the man in a straw hat pointed to an odd wooden
figurehead carved like a woman, and said, like one continuing
a conversation, "Now, why have they left off having them.
They didn't do any one any harm?"

I replied with some flippancy about the captain's wife being jealous;
but I knew in my heart that the man had struck a deep note.
There has been something in our most recent civilisation which is
mysteriously hostile to such healthy and humane symbols.

"They hate anything like that, which is human and pretty," he continued,
exactly echoing my thoughts. "I believe they broke up all the jolly
old figureheads with hatchets and enjoyed doing it."

"Like Mr. Quilp," I answered, "when he battered the wooden Admiral
with the poker."

His whole face suddenly became alive, and for the first time
he stood erect and stared at me.

"Do you come to Yarmouth for that?" he asked.

"For what?"

"For Dickens," he answered, and drummed with his foot on the deck.

"No," I answered; "I come for fun, though that is much the same thing."

"I always come," he answered quietly, "to find Peggotty's boat.
It isn't here."

And when he said that I understood him perfectly.

There are two Yarmouths; I daresay there are two hundred
to the people who live there. I myself have never come
to the end of the list of Batterseas. But there are two to
the stranger and tourist; the poor part, which is dignified,
and the prosperous part, which is savagely vulgar.
My new friend haunted the first of these like a ghost;
to the latter he would only distantly allude.

"The place is very much spoilt now . . . trippers, you know,"
he would say, not at all scornfully, but simply sadly.
That was the nearest he would go to an admission of the monstrous
watering place that lay along the front,