According to the canons of literary art, a fact should be stated clearly once and for all.  It would be quite proper to mention the fact that Silas Wegg had a wooden leg; but this fact having been made plain, why should it be referred to again?  There is a sufficient reason based on sound psychology.  If the statement were not repeated, we should forget that Mr. Wegg had a wooden leg, and by and by we should forget Silas Wegg himself.  He would fade away among the host of literary gentlemen who are able to read “The Decline and Fall,” but who are not able to keep themselves out of the pit of oblivion.  But when we repeatedly see Mr. Wegg as Mr. Boffin saw him, “the literary gentleman with a wooden leg,” we feel that we really have the pleasure of his acquaintance.  There is not only perception of him, but what the pedagogical people call apperception.  Our idea of Mr. Wegg is inseparably connected with our antecedent ideas of general woodenness.

Again, we are introduced to “a large, hard-breathing, middle-aged man, with a mouth like a fish, dull, staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had been choked and had at that moment come to.”  This is Mr. Pumblechook.  He does not emerge slowly like a ship from below the horizon.  We see him all at once, eyes, mouth, hair, and character to match.  It is a case of falling into acquaintance at first sight.  We are now ready to hear what Mr. Pumblechook says and see what he does.  We have a reasonable assurance that whatever he says and does it will be just like Mr. Pumblechook.

We enter a respectable house in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.  We go out to dinner in solemn procession.  We admire the preternatural solidity of the furniture and the plate.  The hostess is a fine woman, “with neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features and majestic headdress.”  Her husband, large and pompous, with little light-colored wings “more like hairbrushes than hair” on the sides of his otherwise bald head, begins to discourse on the British Constitution.  We now know as much of Mr. Podsnap as we shall know at the end of the book.  But it is a real knowledge conveyed by the method that gives dinner-parties their educational value.  We forgive Dickens his superfluous discourse on Podsnappery in general.  For his remarks are precisely of the kind which we make when the party is over, and we sit by the fire generalizing and allegorizing the people we have met.

That Mr. Thomas Gradgrind was unduly addicted to hard facts might have been delicately insinuated in the course of two hundred pages.  We might have felt a mild pleasure in the discovery which we had made, and then have gone our way forgetting what manner of man he was.  What is Gradgrind to us or we to Gradgrind?  Dickens introduces him to us in all his uncompromising squareness—­“square coat, square legs, square shoulders, nay, his very neckcloth is trained to take him by the throat with