A Christmas and New Year’s Story

Though totally unlike any of Dickens’s Christmas stories of former years, this is by no means inferior to the best of them. It may not be so highly imaginative as the first of his productions of the kind, but it evinces even greater depth.

Cunningly interwoven with the main plot of A House To Let are three stories. The story of The Manchester Marriage contains two or three unexaggerated sketches of character. One of them, that of Mr. Openshaw, as new to fiction as it is true to life. To what artist we are indebted for the sketch few readers can fail to discover. It is entirely worthy of her reputation.

We have a foil to its pathos in the humors of a showman, whose dwarf went into society with eleven thousand pounds won in a lottery, and came out of society again with as much knowledge of life as that sum purchased.

In delicate and simple verse there is a story told—in verse that might be read aloud by cottage firesides, and come home to all hearts in the fireside circle—of a woman’s heart first sacrificing and then sacrificed, but ever pure and true.