The Doctors Daughter

The Doctor's Daughter, by
"Vera"

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Title: The Doctor's Daughter
Author: "Vera"
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THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER.
BY "VERA." AUTHOR OF "HONOR EDGEWORTH"
"O Tempora! O Mores!"

PREFACE.
Charles Dickens observes with much truth, that "though seldom read,
prefaces are continually written." It may be asked and even wondered,
why? I cannot say that I know the exact reason, but it seems to me that
they may carry the same weight, in the literary world, that certain sotto
voce explanations, which oftentimes accompany the introduction of one
person to another, do in the social world.
If it is permitted, in bringing some quaint, old-fashioned little body,
before a gathering of your more fastidious friends, at once to reconcile

them to his or her strange, ungainly mien, and to justify yourself for
acknowledging an intimacy with so eccentric a creature, by following
up the prosy and unsuggestive: "Mr. B----, ladies and gentlemen," or
"Miss M----, ladies and gentlemen," with such a refreshing paraphrase
as, "brother-in-law of the celebrated Lord Marmaduke Pulsifer," or,
"confidential companion, to the wife of the late distinguished
Christopher Quill the American Poet"--why should not a like privilege
be extended the labour-worn author, when he ushers the crude and
unattractive offspring of his own undaunted energy into the arena of
literary life?
Mr. B----, without the whispered guarantee of his relative importance,
would never be noticed unless to be riled or ridiculed; and so with
many a meek and modest volume, whose key-note has never been
sounded, or if sounded has never been heard.
We would all be perfect in our attributes if we could! Who would write
vapid, savourless pages, if it were in his power to set them aglow with
rare erudition, and dazzling conceptions of ethical and other abstract
subjects? If I had been born a Dickens, lector benevole, I would have
willingly, eagerly, proudly, favoured you with a "Tale of Two Cities"
or a "David Copperfield;" of that you may be morally certain, however,
it is no mock self-disparagement (!) that moves me to humbly
acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have availed
myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the impossibility
of rivalling this protagonist among the dramatis personae of the great
Drama of English Fiction, and have done something of which he speaks
very tenderly and delicately somewhere in his prolific writings, one's
"best." He says, "one man's best is as good as another man's," not in its
results, (I know by experience), but in the abstract relationship which
exists between the nature of the two efforts, and I am grateful to him
for having thus provided against the possible discouragement of "small
authorship."
In the subjoining pages, I offer to the world, a pretenseless record of the
impressions, opinions, and convictions which have been, I may say,
thrust upon me by a contact, which is yet necessarily limited, with the

phases of every-day life.
That some of these reflections and conclusions should not meet with
universal sympathy or approval, is not at all to be wondered at, when
we consider how much more different, than alike, are any two human
lives and lots. I do not ask my readers to subscribe to those tenets and
opinions which may seem unreal and exaggerated to them, because of
their different experience; I can only justify them in myself, by
declaring them to be the outgrowth of my own personal speculations in
the market