On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am
conscious that they must seem shadowy. I have been able to
invest them with none of those characteristics which make the
persons of a book exist with a real life of their own; and,
wondering if the fault is mine, I rack my brains to remember
idiosyncrasies which might lend them vividness. I feel that
by dwelling on some trick of speech or some queer habit I
should be able to give them a significance peculiar to themselves.
As they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry;
they do not separate themselves from the background,
and at a distance seem to lose their pattern, so that you have
little but a pleasing piece of colour. My only excuse is that
the impression they made on me was no other. There was just
that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose
lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in
it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential,
but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in
the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family
in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a
harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a
rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which
a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking,
healthy children. Nothing could be more ordinary. I do not
know that there was anything about them to excite the
attention of the curious.

When I reflect on all that happened later, I ask myself if I
was thick-witted not to see that there was in Charles
Strickland at least something out of the common. Perhaps.
I think that I have gathered in the years that intervene between