Nobody but the writer of this little freak of fancy could possibly have rendered the Reading of it in public worthy even of toleration. Perhaps no Reading that could be selected presents within the same compass so many difficulties to the audience who are listening, and to the Reader who is hardy enough to adventure upon its delivery. The closing incidents of the narrative are in themselves so improbable, we had all but said so impossible! Polly, at once so quaint and so captivating, when her words are perused upon the printed page, is so incapable of having her baby-prattle repeated by anybody else, without the imminent risk, the all but certainty, of its degenerating into mere childishness. It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that “Barbox Brothers,” though it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated. Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how, quite abruptly, almost haphazard, it comes to be narrated.

The lumbering, middle-aged, grey-headed hero of it, in obedience to the whim of a moment, gets out of a night train at the great central junction of the whole railway system of England. A drenching rain-storm and a windy platform, darkness and solitude are, to begin with, the agreeable surroundings of this eccentric traveller. He is stranded there, not high and dry, anything but that—on the contrary, soaked through and through, and at very low level indeed—during what the local officials regard as their deadest time in all the twenty-four hours: what one of them, later on, terms emphatically their deadest and buriedest time.

Already, even here, before the tale itself is in any way begun, the Author of it, in his capacity as Reader, somehow, by the mere manner of his delivery of a descriptive sentence or two, contrived to realise to his hearers in a wonderfully vivid way the strange incidents of the traffic in a scene like this, at those blackest intervals between midnight and daybreak. Now revealing—“Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls, and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end.” Now, again—“Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they led, stopping when they stopped, backing when they backed.” One while the spectacle, conjured up by a word or two was that of—“Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters.” Another, with startling effect, it was—“An earthquake, with thunder and lightning, going up express to London.” Here it is that Barbox Brothers, in the midst of these ghostly apparitions, is eventually extricated from the melancholy plight in which he finds himself saturated and isolated in the middle of a spiderous web of railroads.

His extricator is—Lamps! A worthy companion portrait to that of cinderous Mr. Toodles, the stoker, familiar to the readers of Dombey. Characters, those two, quite as typical, after their fashion, of the later railway period of Dickens, as even Sam Weller, the boots, and Old Weller, the coachman, were of his earlier coaching period in the days of Pickwick. To see him, in his capacity as Lamps, when excited, take what he called “a rounder”—that is to say, giving himself, with his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, “an elaborate smear from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek, behind his left ear,” after which operation he is described as having shone exceedingly—was to be with him, again, at once, in his greasy little cabin, which was suggestive to the sense of smell of a cabin in a whaler. How it came to pass that Lamps sang comic songs, of his own composition, to his bed-ridden daughter Phoebe, by way of enlivening her solitude, and how Phoebe, while manipulating the threads on her lace-pillow, as though she were playing a musical instrument, taught her little band of children to chant to a pleasant tune the multiplication-table, and so fix it and other useful knowledge indelibly upon the tablets of their memory, the Author-Reader would then relate, as no other Reader, however gifted, who was not also the Author, would have been allowed to do, supposing this latter had had the hardihood to attempt the relation.

As the Reading advanced, the difficulties not only increased, they became tenfold, immediately upon the introduction of Polly. Dickens, however, conquered them all somehow. But to anybody else, setting forth the story histrionically, impersonating the characters as they appeared, these difficulties would by necessity have been insuperable or simply overwhelming. Catching the very little fair-haired girl's Christian name readily enough, when she comes up to him in the street, with the surprising announcement, “O! if you please, I am lost!” Barbox Brothers can't for the life of him conjecture what her surname is,—carefully imitating, though he does, the sound that comes from the childish lips, each time on its repetition. Hazarding “Trivits,” first of all, then “Paddens,” then “Tappi-tarver.” Eventually, when the two arrive hand-in-hand at Barbox Brothers' hotel, nobody there could make out her name as she set it forth, “except one chambermaid, who said it was Constantinople—which it wasn't.”

No wonder Barbox feels bigger and heavier in person every minute when he is being catechised by Polly! Asked by her if he knows any stories, and compelled to answer, “No! What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?” says Polly. Frightened nearly out of his wits at the dinner-table, when they are feasting together, by her getting on her feet upon her chair to reward him with a kiss, and then toppling forward among the dishes—he himself crying out in dismay, “Gracious angels! Whew! I thought we were in the fire, Polly!”—“What a coward you are, ain't you?” says Polly, when replaced.

Upon the next morning, when brought down to breakfast, after a comfortable night's sleep, passed by the child in a bed shared with “the Constantinopolitan chambermaid,” Polly, “by that time a mere heap of dimples,” poses poor, unwieldy Barbox by asking him, in a wheedling manner, “What are we going to do, you dear old thing?” On his suggesting their having a sight, at the Circus, of two long-tailed ponies, speckled all over—“No, no, no!” cries Polly, in an ecstasy. When he afterwards throws out a proposition that they shall also look in at the toy-shop, and choose a doll—“Not dressed,” ejaculates Polly; “No, no, no—not dressed!” Barbox replying, “Full dressed; together with a house, and all things necessary for housekeeping!” Polly gives a little scream, and seems in danger of falling into a swoon of bliss. “What a darling you are!” she languidly exclaims, leaning back in her chair: “Come and be hugged.” All this will indicate plainly enough the difficulties investing every sentence of this Reading, capped as they all are by the astounding denouement of the plot—Polly turning out to be (sly little thing!) the purposely-lost daughter of Barbox Brothers' old love, Beatrice, and of her husband, Tresham, for whom Barbox had not only been jilted, but by whom Barbox had been simultaneously and rather heavily defrauded.

Perhaps the pleasantest recollection of the whole Reading is, not Polly—the small puss turns out to be such a cunningly reticent little emissary—but her Doll, a “lovely specimen of Circassian descent, possessing as much boldness of beauty as was reconcileable with extreme feebleness of mouth,” and combining a sky-blue pelisse with rose-coloured satin trousers, and a black velvet hat, “the latter seemingly founded on the portraits of the late Duchess of Kent.” One is almost reconciled to Polly, however,—becoming oblivious for the moment of her connivance in her mother's secret device, and reminiscent only of her own unsophisticated mixture of prattle and impertinence—on learning, immediately after this elaborate description of the gorgeous doll of her choice, that “the name of this distinguished foreigner was (on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka.”