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His anger. at their spoiling seems to unsheathe itself and stretch out from him, like a rapier. Hamnet can feel the tip of it wander about the room, seeking an opponent, and he thinks for a moment of his mother's hazel strip, and the way it pulls itself towards water, except he is not an underground stream and his grandfather's anger is not like the quivering divining rod at all. It is cutting, sharp, unpredictable.

Him standing here, at the back of the house, calling for the people who had fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use spoon, to blow on broth before he ate it, to take care crossing the street, to let sleeping dogs lie, to swill out a cup before drinking, stay away from deep water.
It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Every life has its kernel, its hub. It’s epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry.

[To travel to Ramsay’s, Colllins] hired a steam-yacht, the Phyllis, that was moored in the harbour; he described it as "a lovely little steam-launch... the admiration of nautical mankind..." He used to say that the perfection of enjoyment could only be found "when you are at sea in a luxurious well-appointed steam-yacht in lovely summer weather."

“So long as you have his book open, you are spell-bound... the book enchains you, but you detest it while it enchains." The "chain”…is one of the key metaphors…-the chain of events, the chain of connections, the chain binding the reader to the tale. This mesmeric power can be associated with Collins's interest in clairvoyance and animal magnetism together with the other hidden powers of the mind.

Collins…liked to invoke the notion of "King Public." When he was once told that his novels were read "in every back-kitchen in England" he considered it to be a compliment rather than an insult. He was always attempting to find new ways of appealing to the public... Even towards the end of his life he was eager to engage the attention of "the halfpenny public."

Dickens' [published a] ferocious reaction to the Indian Mutiny of that year…was supposed to celebrate the heroism of the English... Collins persuaded him that the native revolt should be set on an imaginary island in the Caribbean rather than in India and, in his contribution, he mitigated the racist frenzy of his collaborator with a narrative at once more comic and more sympathetic.

He [Dickens] did have slight misgivings about his junior partner [Collins], however. He once told Wills that Collins sometimes betrayed a tendency to be "unnecessarily offensive to the middle class."

Dickens was also mildly irritated by Collins's general untidiness; while Dickens lived in perfect neatness and order, Collins's room was always messy with random objects strewn all over the place.

[Augustus Egg] and Collins would converse about the work they saw, much to Dickens's impatience; he had no particular interest in the Old Masters, and considered artistic discourse to be so much humbug. "To hear Collins learnedly holding forth to Egg…about reds, and greens, and things 'coming well with other things, and lines being wrong, and lines being right, is far beyond the bounds of all caricature."

Dickens proposed that they should all grow moustaches; …Collins enquired, four years later, whether "the most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?" Dickens's moustache grew luxuriant, but those of Collins and of Egg did not "take." Dickens compared that of Collins to the eyebrows of his one-year-old child.

But he never once contemplated matrimony. …It was not a risk he cared to undertake, and instead he engaged in what might be described as two illicit relationships. In an article he declared that "the general idea of the scope and purpose of the institution of marriage is a miserably narrow one"…In his novels, too, he dilates upon the injustices and defects of the married state. It was one of his principal themes.

"Not quite so fast," interposed Mr. Ablewhite. "I have a last word to say, which I should have said some time since, if this" — he looked my way, pondering what abominable name he should call me - "if this Rampant Spinster had not interrupted us.”

"Miss Jane Ann Stamper be -!"
It is impossible for me to write the awful word, which is here represented by a blank. I shrieked as it passed his lips; I flew to my little bag on the side table; I shook out all my tracts; I seized the one particular tract on profane swearing, entitled, "Hush, for Heaven's Sake!"

…sermon was preached by my gifted friend on the heathen indifference of the world to the sinfulness of little sins. For more than an hour his eloquence …thundered through the sacred edifice. …"Has it found is. way to your heart, dear?" …"No; it has only made my head ache."This might have been discouraging to some people, but, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, nothing discourages Me.

Festival of the British-Ladies’-Servsnts’-Sunday-Sweetheart-Supervision-Society

…the famous anonymous work…entitled The Serpent at Home. … The chapters best adapted to female perusal are "Satan in the Hair Brush"; "Satan behind the Looking Glass"; "Satan under the Tea Table", "Satan out of the Window" - and many others.
…I handed it to her open, a a marked passage - one continuous burst of burning eloquence! Subject: Satan among the Sofa Cushions.

The hall was dirty, and the chair was hard; but the blessed consciousness of returning good for evil raised me quite above any trifling considerations of that kind. The tract was one of a series addressed to young women on the sinfulness of dress. In style it was devoutly familiar. Its title was "A Word With You On Your Cap-Ribbons."

I hear you are likely to be turned over to Miss Clack, after parting with me. In that case, just do me the favour of not believing a word she says, if she speaks of your humble servant.

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason. ... This roused my spirit, and made me put a bold face on it before Sergeant Cuff. Profit, good friends, I beseech you, by my example. It will save you from many troubles of the vexing sort. Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!

Scum and slime shone faintly in certain places, where the last of the light still caught them on the two great spits of rock jutting out, north and south, into the sea. It was now the time of the turn of the tide: and even as I stood there waiting, the broad brown face of the quicksand began to dimple and quiver - the only moving thing in all the horrid place.

The last of the evening light was fading away; and over all the desolate place there hung a still and awful calm. The heave of the main ocean on the great sandbank out in the bay, was a heave that made no sound. The inner sea lay lost and dim, without a breath of wind to stir it. Patches of nasty ooze floated, yellow-white, on the dead surface of the water.

As a speaker at charitable meetings the like of him for drawing your tears and your money was not easy to find. … The last time I was in London, my mistress gave me two treats. She sent me to the theatre to see a dancing woman who was all the rage; and she sent me to Exeter Hall to hear Mr. Godfrey. The lady did it, with a band of music. The gentleman did it, with a handkerchief and a glass of water.

They simply confined themselves to making a mess; and all they spoilt, to do them justice, was the panelling of a door.

Mr. Franklin's universal genius, dabbling in everything, dabbled in what he called "decorative painting." He had invented, he informed us, a new mixture to moisten paint with, which he described as a "vehicle." What it was made of, I don't know. What it did, I can tell you in two words - it stank.

Their lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see -… how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something - and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they’re only making a mess in the house.

I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?

“…whatever happened to it was so bad he never told it true. Which was his right. Some things are so much yours, you just have to keep 'em to yourself.”