CHARLES DICKENS AND THE OLD CLOTHESMEN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 127, 11 June 1853, Page 10

CHARLES DICKENS AND THE OLD CLOTHESMEN.

No small portion of the popularity of Mr. Dickens' writings has been due to-the spirit of liberality and of humanizing kindness that prevades them. He has been not only the advocate of the poor, but the champion of those whom the world has wrongfully stigmatised or cruelly outraged. There are, however, certain prejudices which it seems, Mr. Dickens cannot, with all his philanthropy, shake off; prejudices imbibed with other childish absurdities, in the nursery, and still secretly cherished by him in the maturity of his years and his reason.. In the pages of Household Words we seek for those sweet aud pleasant touches of nature that, in the words of her greatest poet,. " make the whole world kin I" there we expect to find humour without gall, observation without rancour, and pictures.of life undisfigured by pitiful caricature. Caricature we might, indeed, pardon, but when the caricaturist condescends to adopt the prejudices" of the vulgar, as Mr. Dickens does in an article entitled " Old Clothes," which appeared in a recent number of his periodical, we say that he dishonours his pen and degrades his talent. In this article he endeavours indirectly to render the Jew contemptible and odious to his readers. He draws a portrait of a Jew cloihesman as he. remembered him in his youth, " a dreadful old man,with a long tangled grey reddish beard,,a hawk nose, which, like the rebuke of the nautical damsel at Wapping Old Stairs, was never without a tear, and a bag of alarming size." He makes the bag an indispensable appendage to his Hebrew dealer in dilapidated costume, and, in the worst possible taste and feeling, inquires is it because Judas carried the bag that all the children of Israel are to trudge through London streets from morn till eve with sack on shoulder?" With Mr. Dickens the Jew old clotbesmun is the representative of the whole Jewish nation ; in that wretched and contemptible type he includes the-genius, the wisdom, and the wondrous energy that distinguish the remnant of a right royal and religious race, who have given to every branch of art, literature, and science some of its most distinguished ornaments. To be a Jew is to be an old clothesman, according to Mr. Dickens, who informs us that— " Carrying the bag, and crying 'ogh clo!"

seems a sort of noviciate, or apprenticeship, which all Hebrews are subjected to. They can flesh their maiden swords in the streets, without its being at all considered derogatory. I please myself with the theory, sometimes, that of the millionaires I see rolling by in carriages ; read of as giving magnificent balls and suppers; hear of as the pillars of commerce and the girders of public credit; many have iii their youth passed through the dusky probation of the bag • that keen chaffering about ragged paletots and threadbare trousers has prepared them, aud given them a sharper edge for the negotiation of the little bill and the sale of the undoubted specimens of the old masters. And from these to millions there were but few steps." The sneer may be relished by the vulgar and ignorant to whom it is addressed, but it will be repelled with indignation by every truly liberal and philosophic mind. When Mr. Dickens thus ungenerously and untruly describes the whole Jewish race, as a community of old clbthesmen, does he recollect that it is to the hatred of christian kings and priests that Israel owes her degradation ? " For ages," says a writer, in the Jewish Chronicle, " the Jews were not allowed} in. many parts of Europe, to follow any more ennobling pursuits ; and though this state of things is now, thanks to Divine Providence, among the things that were, still the space of a few generations is scarcely sufficient to eradicate entirely the habits of centuries. No wonder, then,, that some few of the lowest class of Jews still continue to follow the principal trade their ancestors once were driven to." Christian England has for centuries treated the Jewish, people as aliens ; they became objects of popular hatred,partly from superstition and partly from the odium attached to the practice of lending money on interest, one of the few means of obtaining a livelihood which the barbarous laws of the country permitted. Yet, despite the obstacles opposed to their progress, they have risen,.and are still rising, in the social scale all over the world. This nation of old clothesmen has sent from its vile ranks scholars, philosophers,, artists,, physicians, and merchants distinguished amongst the most eminent men of the world. Who does not reverence the names of Spinozaj MoseS Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Meldola,, and- Malibran ?. of the brave Massena,. Heine the cele- ! brated German poet?:—of Ricardo and Fould, the great English and French financiers ?—of Disraeli, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer,.who was himself born a Tew ?—of Rachel, .Braham, Grisi, Lablache, Ernst Moscheles, Benedict, Costa,. Hart the painter, Poole the dramatic author, the Rothschilds, Sir Francis Palsgrave, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, and a host of others of Jewish name ond reputation ? Mr. Dickens may visit]the Houndsditch of London, the Ghelto of Rome,.the Judenstrasse of Frankfort, or the Pera of Constantinople, and amuse | himself by heaping contempt and ridicule upon the descendants of the people whom Moses made a nation, and whose praises Miriam has sung. But let him wander from the refuse of the city, to the mansions of a Rothschild, a Montefiore, or a Saloman; let him mingle in the saloons of the palaces of the citiesof Europe, ..and he will find the charmers of the nation are the sweet singers of Israel, the descendants of . the masters of the commerce of the old world, the preservers of civilisation during the fall of old and the rise of new states r and who at the present moment are examples of genius r of endurance, and of unconquerable energy, rising above the prejudices of ages asserting their proper position amongst the men who affect to despise them.— London paper.