Dedication

LETTER OF DEDICATION.

TO CHARLES JAMES WARD, ESQ.

IT has long been one of my pleasantest anticipations to look forward
to the time when I might offer to you, my old and dear friend, some
such acknowledgment of the value I place on your affection for me, and
of my grateful sense of the many acts of kindness by which that
affection has been proved, as I now gladly offer in this place. In
dedicating the present work to you, I fulfil therefore a purpose
which, for some time past, I have sincerely desired to achieve; and,
more than that, I gain for myself the satisfaction of knowing that
there is one page, at least, of my book, on which I shall always look
with unalloyed pleasure--the page that bears your name.

I have founded the main event out of which this story springs, on a
fact within my own knowledge. In afterwards shaping the course of the
narrative thus suggested, I have guided it, as often as I could, where
I knew by my own experience, or by experience related to me by others,
that it would touch on something real and true in its progress. My
idea was, that the more of the Actual I could garner up as a text to
speak from, the more certain I might feel of the genuineness and value
of the Ideal which was sure to spring out of it. Fancy and
Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the
work of Art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow
towards heaven by taking root in earth. Is not the noblest poetry of
prose fiction the poetry of every-day truth?

Directing my characters and my story, then, towards the light of
Reality wherever I could find it, I have not hesitated to violate some
of the conventionalities of sentimental fiction. For instance, the
first love-meeting of two of the personages in this book, occurs
(where the real love-meeting from which it is drawn, occurred) in the
very last place and under the very last circumstances which the
artifices of sentimental writing would sanction. Will my lovers excite
ridicule instead of interest, because I have truly represented them as
seeing each other where hundreds of other lovers have first seen each
other, as hundreds of people will readily admit when they read the
passage to which I refer? I am sanguine enough to think not.

So again, in certain parts of this book where I have attempted to
excite the suspense or pity of the reader, I have admitted as
perfectly fit accessories to the scene the most ordinary street-sounds
that could be heard, and the most ordinary street-events that could
occur, at the time and in the place represented--believing that by
adding to truth, they were adding to tragedy--adding by all the force
of fair contrast--adding as no artifices of mere writing possibly