Dickens probably wrote a substantial share of the 'Little Exhibition' portions of 'The Great Exhibition and the Little One.' His hand seems most evident in the following passages: from 'As it is impossible' (p. 357) to 'Amen' (p. 358); the paragraph beginning 'Compare these' (p. 358); the paragraph beginning 'In the Little Exhibition' (p. 359); from 'In China, there are' (p. 360) to the conclusion.
Dickens seems also to have emended other passages.
Three years earlier (24 June 1848), in the Examiner, Dickens propounded the superiority of the West to the East in a paper entitled 'The Chinese Junk,' a paper which described the exotic Chinese craft which had just come round the world to be put on display in London, and a paper which incorporated many of the instances and images developed below. In 1848 there was no Great Exhibition to use as a condensed antithesis of the 'Little Exhibition' (Dickens' name for the Chinese Gallery in Hyde Park Place and the Chinese junk at Temple Stairs), but in both essays the 'Stoppage' of the East is contrasted with the 'Progress' of the West (the terms are Dickens', see p. 360) - a view of East and West that Dickens, along with most of his contemporaries, regarded as self-evident.
Harry Stone; © Bloomington and Indiana University Press, 1968. DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.
