Chirp the Second Quotations

Chirp the second

"(Caleb) too had a Cricket on his Hearth; and listening sadly to its music when the motherless Blind Child was very young, that Spirit had inspired him with the thought that even her great deprivation might be almost changed into a blessing, and the girl made happy by these little means. For all the cricket tribe are potent spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not, in the unseen world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but the tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and of the Hearth address themselves to human kind".

Maybe this is the spirit of his departed wife? Maybe it is the spirit of his son- who has gone to the south Americas and is not missing presumed dead.



“What! You’re singing, are you?” said Tackleton.”I’m glad you can. I hope you can afford to work too. Hardly time for both, I should think?.
“If you could only see him, Bertha, how he’s winking at me!” whispered Caleb “Such a man to joke….."

An example of the bad natured character of Tackleton and Caleb’s covering up by pretending it is a joke.

"Where the old horse had already taken more than his day’s toll out of the turnpike trust, by tearing up the road with his impatient autographs"

In the late 18th century, turnpike trusts were set up to keep Britain’s roads. A toll was charged to anyone wishing to use the road. This was used to repair the roads. John Peerybingle would have had to pay a toll on that day in order to transport the goods. The horse had created damage to the road greater than the value of the toll his owner had paid that day.

"Tackleton led his intended mother in law to the post of honour. For the better gracing of this place at the high festival, the majestic old soul had adorned herself with a cap, calculated to inspire the thoughtless with sentiments of awe. She also wore her gloves. But let us be genteel or die!"

Mrs Fielding trying to be “posh”. Dickens has a laugh to himself about this.

"She (Mrs Fielding) then remarked that she would not allude to the past, and would not mention that her daughter had for some time rejected the suit of Mr Tackleton ;and that she would not say a great many other things which she did say , at great length. Finally she delivered it as the general result of her observation and experience, that those marriages which there was least of what is romantically and sillily called love, were always the happiest; and that she anticipated the greatest possible amount of bliss –not rapturous bliss ;but the solid, steady-going article- from the approaching nuptials".

May had been dragooned into marrying Tackleton, and has no feelings of love for him.

"Oh father, father!” cried the Blind Girl, bursting into tears. “Oh my hard, hard fate!”

Is Bertha, perhaps lamenting that she will be unable to get married due to her blindness? Maybe she had hidden a secret hope that she might have married Tackleton? She has been led to believe that he was a loving person.

"It was well for all of them that Dot, that beaming, useful, busy little Dot, -for such she was, whatever faults she had, and however you may learn to hate her in good time,- it was well for all of them , I say that she was there:
When will the reader learn to hate Dot?"

When she is spotted catching a few moment alone with a young man and Tackleton gossips that she is in love with him? Or is the author talking about another time outside the pages of the book, in the future?

"Have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart?"

Her Father Caleb says about Bertha. He has been making her believe that Tackleton is compassionate to them as a family.