THE REV CHARLES CLARK.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CIII, Issue 12159, 24 March 1900, Page 7

THE REV CHARLES CLARK.

Owing, no doubt, to the showery weather last night, the body of the Choral Hall was barely filled by the audience that assembled to hear the Rev Charles Clark deliver the second of his illustrative recitals on Dickens and some of his works. The lecturer dwelt on the accuracy with which Dickens, from youth upwards, gathered up innumerable photographs of the people about him, to reproduce them later with his pen. He possessed, too, the keen and searching intuition which enabled him to see people as they were, to divine their homely joys and sorrows, and to detect the infinite pathos that wove its sober-coloured thread through the woof of apparently commonplace lives. That faculty was explained as arising out of the broad human sympathy of Dickens and the tenderness for all weak things that filled his great heart. Mr Clark recited with much power the pathetic passage describing the passing of little Paul Dombey, and also the story of the elopement scene in the “Christmas Stories.” “Bleak House” was eulogised as the best of all Dickens’s books. In concluding, Sir Clark paid a tribute of high praise to the writer who, in traversing so much ground, had not stooped to include in any of his books a single word that might not be read by women and children. To-night Mr Clark will deliver the third of these delightful lectures on Dickens.