IN THE BEGINNING: How To Be A Happy Hooker

Book the First--Recalled to Life

I. The Period

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way--
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with
a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer
than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,
that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,
as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not
kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty
yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in
it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were
sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which
the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing
their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman
in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of
"the Captain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the
mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and
then got shot dead himself by the other four, "in consequence of the
failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand
and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the
illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London
gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law
fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;
thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search
for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing
up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the
hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the
roads that lay before them.

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
sublime and prophetic.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had asked
at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to
write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given any
utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these:

"I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge,
long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of
the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease
out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people
rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in
their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil
of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural
birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

"I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful,
prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see
Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father,
aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his
healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their
friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing
tranquilly to his reward.

"I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of
their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping
for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their
course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know
that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul,
than I was in the souls of both.

"I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him
winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the
light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him,
fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name,
with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--then fair to
look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement--and I hear him
tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a
far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

My poînt is, while a good opening might be required, if it is not sustained, then the author will lose readers to the Page Fifteen Club, whose members are those who could not get beyond page15 of a given book.

Quote by Rumple_deWriter
Thanks, Alan. As always, your bibliographical brilliance is breathtaking.

VOLUME I

CHAPTER I

Lizzie Greystock


It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies,--who
were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two,--that
Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the
story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell
over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her. She was the
only child of old Admiral Greystock, who in the latter years of his
life was much perplexed by the possession of a daughter. The admiral
was a man who liked whist, wine,--and wickedness in general we may
perhaps say, and whose ambition it was to live every day of his life
up to the end of it. People say that he succeeded, and that the
whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the side even of his dying
bed.