Explore "The Mudfog and Other Sketches" by Charles Dickens on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
BEFORE we plunge headlong into this paper, let us at once confess to a fondness for pantomimes-to a gentle sympathy with clowns and pantaloons-to an unqualified admiration of harlequins and columbines-to a chaste delight in every action of their brief existence, varied and many-coloured as those actions are, and inconsistent though they occasionally be with those rigid and formal rules of propriety which regulate the proceedings of meaner and less comprehensive minds. We revel in pantomimes-not because they dazzle one's eyes with tinsel and gold leaf; not because they present to us, once again, the well-beloved chalked faces, and goggle eyes of our childhood; not even because, like Christmas-day, and Twelfth-night, and Shrove-Tuesday, and one's own birthday, they come to us but once a year; -our attachment is founded on a graver and a very different reason.
A pantomime is to us, a mirror of life; nay, more, we maintain that it is so to audiences generally, although they are not aware of it, and that this very circumstance is the secret cause of their amusement and delight.