Addresser

The girls were listening with the polite though precarious attention which Brown Borough girls always bring to bear on the first three hundred words of any address, especially if the addresser be a man.

When letters were in their infancy, and when knowledge and the arts were groping their way through seemingly impervious mists, some splendid name was necessary to give an author celebrity—hence the custom of DEDICATIONS; hence those floods of adulation, which poured from the press, and outraged the feelings of the addresser and the addressed.

All adults had to be addressed as Mister, Missus, Miss, Auntie, Cousin, Unk, Uncle, Buhbah, Sister, Brother and a thousand other appellations indicating familial relationship and the lowliness of the addressor.

[…] if they had not been lifted in the air by the enormous accident of a man of genius, the Dickenses, I fancy, would have appeared in poorer and poorer places, as inventory clerks, as caretakers, as addressers of envelopes, until they melted into the masses of the poor.