Charles Dickens
The Lamplighter

The Lamplighter

‘If you talk of Murphy and Francis Moore, gentlemen,’ said the lamplighter who was in the chair, ‘I mean to say that neither of ’em ever had any more to do with the stars than Tom Grig had.’

‘And what had he to do with ’em?’ asked the lamplighter who officiated as vice.

‘Nothing at all,’ replied the other; ‘just exactly nothing at all.’

‘Do you mean to say you don’t believe in Murphy, then?’ demanded the lamplighter who had opened the discussion.

‘I mean to say I believe in Tom Grig,’ replied the chairman. ‘Whether I believe in Murphy, or not, is a matter between me and my conscience; and whether Murphy believes in himself, or not, is a matter between him and his conscience. Gentlemen, I drink your healths.’

The lamplighter who did the company this honour, was seated in the chimney-corner of a certain tavern, which has been, time out of mind, the Lamplighters’ House of Call. He sat in the midst of a circle of lamplighters, and was the cacique, or chief of the tribe.

If any of our readers have had the good fortune to behold a lamplighter’s funeral, they will not be surprised to learn that lamplighters are a strange and primitive people; that they rigidly adhere to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors; that they intermarry, and betroth their children in infancy; that they enter into no plots or conspiracies (for who ever heard of a traitorous lamplighter?); that they commit no crimes against the laws of their country (there being no instance of a murderous or burglarious lamplighter); that they are, in short, notwithstanding their apparently volatile and restless character, a highly moral and reflective people: having among themselves as many traditional observances as the Jews, and being, as a body, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as the streets. It is an article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilisation shone in the first street-light maintained at the public expense. They trace their existence and high position in the public esteem, in a direct line to the heathen mythology; and hold that the history of Prometheus himself is but a pleasant fable, whereof the true hero is a lamplighter.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the lamplighter in the chair, ‘I drink your healths.’

‘And perhaps, Sir,’ said the vice, holding up his glass, and rising a little way off his seat and sitting down again, in token that he recognised and returned the compliment, ‘perhaps you will add to that condescension by telling us who Tom Grig was, and how he came to be connected in your mind with Francis Moore, Physician.’

‘Hear, hear, hear!’ cried the lamplighters generally.

‘Tom Grig, gentlemen,’ said the chairman, ‘was one of us; and it happened to him, as it don’t often happen to a public character in our line, that he had his what-you-may-call-it cast.’

‘His head?’ said the vice.

‘No,’ replied the chairman, ‘not his head.’

‘His face, perhaps?’ said the vice. ‘No, not his face.’ ‘His legs?’ ‘No, not his legs.’ Nor yet his arms, nor his hands, nor his feet, nor his chest, all of which were severally suggested.

‘His nativity, perhaps?’

‘That’s it,’ said the chairman, awakening from his thoughtful attitude at the suggestion. ‘His nativity. That’s what Tom had cast, gentlemen.’

‘In plaster?’ asked the vice.

‘I don’t rightly know how it’s done,’ returned the chairman. ‘But I suppose it was.’

And there he stopped as if that were all he had to say; whereupon there arose a murmur among the company, which at length resolved itself into a request, conveyed through the vice, that he would go on. This being exactly what the chairman wanted, he mused for a little time, performed that agreeable ceremony which is popularly termed wetting one’s whistle, and went on thus:

‘Tom Grig, gentlemen, was, as I have said, one of us; and I may go further, and say he was an ornament to us, and such a one as only the good old times of oil and cotton could have produced. Tom’s family, gentlemen, were all lamplighters.’

‘Not the ladies, I hope?’ asked the vice.

‘They had talent enough for it, Sir,’ rejoined the chairman, ‘and would have been, but for the prejudices of society. Let women have their rights, Sir, and the females of Tom’s family would have been every one of ’em in office. But that emancipation hasn’t come yet, and hadn’t then, and consequently they confined themselves to the bosoms of their families, cooked the dinners, mended the clothes, minded the children, comforted their husbands, and attended to the house-keeping generally. It’s a hard thing upon the women, gentlemen, that they are limited to such a sphere of action as this; very hard.

‘I happen to know all about Tom, gentlemen, from the circumstance of his uncle by his mother’s side, having been my particular friend. His (that’s Tom’s uncle’s) fate was a melancholy one. Gas was the death of him. When it was first talked of, he laughed. He wasn’t angry; he laughed at the credulity of human nature. “They might as well talk,” he says, “of laying on an everlasting succession of glow-worms;” and then he laughed again, partly at his joke, and partly at poor humanity.

‘In course of time, however, the thing got ground, the experiment was made, and they lighted up Pall Mall. Tom’s uncle went to see it. I’ve heard that he fell off his ladder fourteen times that night, from weakness, and that he would certainly have gone on falling till he killed himself, if his last tumble hadn’t been into a wheelbarrow which was going his way, and humanely took him home. “I foresee in this,” says Tom’s uncle faintly, and taking to his bed as he spoke – “I foresee in this,” he says, “the breaking up of our profession. There’s no more going the rounds to trim by daylight, no more dribbling down of the oil on the hats and bonnets of ladies and gentlemen when one feels in spirits. Any low fellow can light a gas-lamp. And it’s all up.” In this state of mind, he petitioned the government for – I want a word again, gentlemen – what do you call that which they give to people when it’s found out, at last, that they’ve never been of any use, and have been paid too much for doing nothing?’

‘Compensation?’ suggested the vice.

‘That’s it,’ said the chairman. ‘Compensation. They didn’t give it him, though, and then he got very fond of his country all at once, and went about saying that gas was a death-blow to his native land, and that it was a plot of the radicals to ruin the country and destroy the oil and cotton trade for ever, and that the whales would go and kill themselves privately, out of sheer spite and vexation at not being caught. At last he got right-down cracked; called his tobacco-pipe a gas-pipe; thought his tears were lamp-oil; and went on with all manner of nonsense of that sort, till one night he hung himself on a lamp-iron in Saint Martin’s Lane, and there was an end of him.

‘Tom loved him, gentlemen, but he survived it. He shed a tear over his grave, got very drunk, spoke a funeral oration that night in the watch-house, and was fined five shillings for it, in the morning. Some men are none the worse for this sort of thing. Tom was one of ’em. He went that very afternoon on a new beat: as clear in his head, and as free from fever as Father Mathew himself.

‘Tom’s new beat, gentlemen, was – I can’t exactly say where, for that he’d never tell; but I know it was in a quiet part of town, where there were some queer old houses. I have always had it in my head that it must have been somewhere near Canonbury Tower in Islington, but that’s a matter of opinion. Wherever it was, he went upon it, with a bran-new ladder, a white hat, a brown holland jacket and trousers, a blue neck-kerchief, and a sprig of full-blown double wall-flower in his button-hole. Tom was always genteel in his appearance, and I have heard from the best judges, that if he had left his ladder at home that afternoon, you might have took him for a lord.

‘He was always merry, was Tom, and such a singer, that if there was any encouragement for native talent, he’d have been at the opera. He was on his ladder, lighting his first lamp, and singing to himself in a manner more easily to be conceived than described, when he hears the clock strike five, and suddenly sees an old gentleman with a telescope in his hand, throw up a window and look at him very hard.

‘Tom didn’t know what could be passing in this old gentleman’s mind. He thought it likely enough that he might be saying within himself, “Here’s a new lamplighter – a good-looking young fellow – shall I stand something to drink?” Thinking this possible, he keeps quite still, pretending to be very particular about the wick, and looks at the old gentleman sideways, seeming to take no notice of him.

‘Gentlemen, he was one of the strangest and most mysterious-looking files that ever Tom clapped his eyes on. He was dressed all slovenly and untidy, in a great gown of a kind of bed-furniture pattern, with a cap of the same on his head; and a long old flapped waistcoat; with no braces, no strings, very few buttons – in short, with hardly any of those artificial contrivances that hold society together. Tom knew by these signs, and by his not being shaved, and by his not being over-clean, and by a sort of wisdom not quite awake, in his face, that he was a scientific old gentleman. He often told me that if he could have conceived the possibility of the whole Royal Society being boiled down into one man, he should have said the old gentleman’s body was that Body.

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