Rather Small Jim

        by Charles Dickens

Part 1 - in which Jim discovers that he is rather small

Whether, or not, I began my life rather smaller than those around me, these pages must reveal. Or whether, or not, the position of smallest boy was held at that time, or will be held at any other time, by anybody, or any person, or any non-person, or a squirrel, we are, or were, yet to discover.

To begin my discovery with the beginning of my discovery, or rather, to begin on a Friday, just after lunch. It was remarked that I was rather small, and I began to cry. In consideration of the precise, and most poignant, moment of the discovery, it was declared by a more than usually, or less than unusually, scrawny woman, who was, or may have been, selling haddock in the fish-market.

It was speculated, first, that I was destined to have trouble finding fitted breeches; and secondly, that I would be able to see under young young ladies' skirts; both these gifts attaching, as they believed, or appeared to believe, to all infants, of either gender, who are towards the short end of being a midget.

I need say nothing here about the details of the remarks, or the details of those details, because nothing can show better than these pages whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result of the discovery of my being rather small. On the third part of the question, I will only remark, and then only quietly, and with a sideways glance at that woman to whom I have not yet referred, that my grandfather was a dwarf.

I shall also comment that I have, notwithstanding my own opinions, an enormous personality, but I have not grown into it yet. However I do not at all complain of being rather smaller than those boys who think of themselves as being of an age similar to mine, and if anybody else should be in the present amusement of it, that being my being rather small, then he is heartily welcome to it.

Part 2 - in which Jim recalls his early childhood

After my rather smallness had been, or was, discovered, my mother and I moved, or relocated, to Calais, in France, or "shite'ole", as they say in Bradford. The doctors there labelled me a 'Pig of India', being, as I was, rather small and brownish, and being, as they were, French.

My nanny, Miss Trotwood, or 'Miss Pantaloon' as my poor mother always called her (for my mother was mad and seldom called any woman by her real name), had been married to a husband forty years younger than herself, who was very lovely, except in the sense that he was strongly suspected of having the clap.

Miss Pantaloon, upon hearing the rumour, had made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw herself out of a two pair of stairs' window, especially as, according to a wild legend in the family, he was once seen blowing a baboon, but I think it must have been a balloon.

My father had once been a favourite of Miss Pantaloon, I believe, but she was mortally peeved by his marriage, on the grounds that my mother was "a prat".

The doctor would often visit to check my height. He sidled in and out of a room, bobbing up and down. I think perhaps he had been at the whisky. He walked softly and on tip-toes, as if he were a ghost. But he was not a ghost. He was a man.

Sometimes he would say a word, like "yes", or "no", or "maybe". It is nothing to say that he hadn't a stick to throw at a mad dog. He couldn't have thrown a stick at a mad dog. It would have bitten him.

Part 3 - coming soon