"Eyes too like the lobster's"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on Jenny Hartley's new one-volume selection of Dickens' letters:

He is often killingly funny, more so even than in the novels, as in his description of taking his son and friends out on a picnic from Eton; “What I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk – the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence – must ever remain untold . . . . They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like the lobster’s to be comfortable, but only temporarily”.