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Title: Life of Charles Dickens


Author: Frank Marzials



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Great Writers.

Edited by

Eric S. Robertson, M.A.,

Professor of English Literature and Philosophy in the University of
the Punjab, Lahore.



[Illustration: Portrait of Dickens]



LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS

by

FRANK T. MARZIALS

London
Walter Scott
24 Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row

1887







NOTE.


That I should have to acknowledge a fairly heavy debt to Forster's
"Life of Charles Dickens," and "The Letters of Charles Dickens,"
edited by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter, is almost a
matter of course; for these are books from which every present and
future biographer of Dickens must perforce borrow in a more or less
degree. My work, too, has been much lightened by Mr. Kitton's
excellent "Dickensiana."




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.
                                                            PAGE

The lottery of education; Charles Dickens born February 7,
1812; his pathetic feeling towards his own childhood;
happy days at Chatham; family troubles; similarity between
little Charles and David Copperfield; John Dickens
taken to the Marshalsea; his character; Charles employed
in blacking business; over-sensitive in after years about
this episode in his career; isolation; is brought back into
family and prison circle; family in comparative comfort at
the Marshalsea; father released; Charles leaves the
blacking business; his mother; he is sent to Wellington
House Academy in 1824; character of that place of learning;
Dickens masters its humours thoroughly.                       11


CHAPTER II.

Dickens becomes a solicitor's clerk in 1827; then a reporter;
his experiences in that capacity; first story published in
_The Old Monthly Magazine_ for January, 1834; writes more
"Sketches"; power of minute observation thus early
shown; masters the writer's art; is paid for his contributions
to the _Chronicle_; marries Miss Hogarth on April 2,
1836; appearance at that date; power of physical endurance;
admirable influence of his peculiar education;
and its drawbacks                                             27


CHAPTER III.

Origin of "Pickwick"; Seymour's part therein; first number
published on April 1, 1836; early numbers not a success;
suddenly the book becomes the rage; English literature
just then in want of its novelist; Dickens' kingship
acknowledged; causes of the book's popularity; its admirable
humour, and other excellent qualities; Sam Weller;
Mr. Pickwick himself; book read by everybody                  40


CHAPTER IV.

Dickens works "double tides" from 1836 to 1839; appointed
editor of _Bentley's Miscellany_ at beginning of 1837, and
commences "Oliver Twist"; _Quarterly Review_ predicts
his speedy downfall; pecuniary position at this time;
moves from Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street; death of
his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth; his friendships; absence
of all jealousy in his character; habits of work; riding and
pedestrianizing; walking in London streets necessary to the
exercise of his art                                           49


CHAPTER V.

"Oliver Twist"; analysis of the book; doubtful probability of
Oliver's character; "Nicholas Nickleby"; its wealth of
character; _Master Humphrey's Clock_ projected and begun
in April, 1840; the public disappointed in its expectations
of a novel; "Old Curiosity Shop" commenced, and miscellaneous
portion of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ dropped;
Dickens' fondness for taking a child as his hero or
heroine; Little Nell; tears shed over her sorrows; general
admiration for the pathos of her story; is such admiration
altogether deserved? Paul Dombey more natural; Little
Nell's death too declamatory as a piece of writing; Dickens
nevertheless a master of pathos; "Barnaby Rudge"; a
historical novel dealing with times of the Gordon riots       57


CHAPTER VI.

Dickens starts for United States in January, 1842; had been
splendidly received a little before at Edinburgh; why he
went to the United States; is enthusiastically welcomed;
at first he is enchanted; then expresses the greatest disappointment;
explanation of the change; what the
Americans thought of _him_; "American Notes"; his
views modified on his second visit to America in 1867-8;
takes to fierce private theatricals for rest; delight of the
children on his return to England; an admirable father        71


CHAPTER VII.

Dickens again at work and play; publication of "Martin
Chuzzlewit" begun in January, 1843; plot not Dickens'
strong point; this not of any vital consequence; a novel
not really remembered by its story; Dickens' books often
have a higher unity than that of plot; selfishness the
central idea of "Martin Chuzzlewit"; a great book, and
yet not at the time successful; Dickens foresees money embarrassments;
publishes the admirable "Christmas Carol"
at Christmas, 1843; and determines to go for a space to
Italy                                                         84


CHAPTER VIII.

Journey through France; Genoa; the Italy of 1844; Dickens
charmed with its untidy picturesqueness; he is idle for a
few weeks; his palace at Genoa; he sets to work upon "The
Chimes"; gets passionately interested in the little book;
travels through Italy to read it to his friends in London;
reads it on December 2, 1844; is soon back again in Italy;
returns to London in the summer of 1845; on January 21,
1846, starts _The Daily News_; holds the post of editor three
weeks; "Pictures from Italy" first published in _Daily News_  93


CHAPTER IX.

Dickens as an amateur actor and stage-manager; he goes to
Lausanne in May, 1846, and begins "Dombey"; has
great difficulty in getting on without streets; the "Battle
of Life" written; "Dombey"; its pathos; pride the
subject of the book; reality of the characters; Dickens'
treatment of partial insanity; M. Taine's false criticism
thereon; Dickens in Paris in the winter of 1846-7; private
theatricals again; the "Haunted Man"; "David Copperfield"
begun in May, 1849; it marks the culminating point
in Dickens' career as a writer; _Household Words_ started
on March 30, 1850; character of that periodical and its
successor, _All the Year Round_; domestic sorrows cloud
the opening of the year 1851; Dickens moves in same year
from Devonshire Terrace to Tavistock House, and begins
"Bleak House"; story of the novel; its Chancery episodes;
Dickens is overworked and ill, and finds pleasant
quarters at Boulogne                                         102


CHAPTER X.

Dickens gives his first public (not paid) readings in December,
1853; was it _infra dig._ that he should read for money? he
begins his paid readings in April, 1858; reasons for their
success; care bestowed on them by the reader; their
dramatic character; Carlyle's opinion of them; how the
tones of Dickens' voice linger in the memory of one who
heard him                                                    121


CHAPTER XI.

"Hard Times" commenced in _Household Words_ for April 1,
1854; it is an attack on the "hard fact" school of philosophers;
what Macaulay and Mr. Ruskin thought of it;
the Russian war of 1854-5, and the cry for "Administrative
Reform"; Dickens in the thick of the movement;
"Little Dorrit" and the "Circumlocution Office"; character
of Mr. Dorrit admirably drawn; Dickens is in Paris
from December, 1855, to May, 1856; he buys Gad's Hill
Place; it becomes his hobby; unfortunate relations with
his wife; and separation in May 1858; lying rumours; how
these stung Dickens through his honourable pride in the
love which the public bore him; he publishes an indignant
protest in _Household Words_; and writes an unjustifiable
letter                                                       126


CHAPTER XII.

"The Tale of Two Cities," a story of the great French Revolution;
Phiz's connection with Dickens' works comes to
an end; his art and that of Cruikshank; both too essentially
caricaturists of an old school to be permanently the
illustrators of Dickens; other illustrators; "Great Expectations";
its story and characters; "Our Mutual Friend"
begun in May, 1864; a complicated narrative; Dickens'
extraordinary sympathy for Eugene Wrayburn; generally
his sympathies are so entirely right; which explains why
his books are not vulgar; he himself a man of great real
refinement                                                   139


CHAPTER XIII.

Dickens' health begins to fail; he is much shaken by an accident
in June, 1865; but bates no jot of his high courage,
and works on at his readings; sails for America on a
reading tour in November, 1867; is wretchedly ill, and yet
continues to read day after day; comes back to England,
and reads on; health failing more and more; reading has
to be abandoned for a time; begins to write his last and
unfinished book, "Edwin Drood"; except health all
seems well with him; on June 8, 1870, he works at his
book nearly all day; at dinner time is struck down; dies
on the following day, June the 9th; is buried in Westminster
Abbey among his peers; nor will his fame suffer
eclipse                                                      149


INDEX                                                        163




LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.




CHAPTER I.


Education is a kind of lottery in which there are good and evil
chances, and some men draw blanks and other men draw prizes. And in
saying this I do not use the word education in any restricted sense,
as applying exclusively to the course of study in school or college;
nor certainly, when I speak of prizes, am I thinking of scholarships,
exhibitions, fellowships. By education I mean the whole set of
circumstances which go to mould a man's character during the
apprentice years of his life; and I call that a prize when those
circumstances have been such as to develop the man's powers to the
utmost, and to fit him to do best that of which he is best capable.
Looked at in this way, Charles Dickens' education, however untoward
and unpromising it may often have seemed while in the process, must
really be pronounced a prize of value quite inestimable.

His father, John Dickens, held a clerkship in the Navy Pay Office, and
was employed in the Portsmouth Dockyard when little Charles first came
into the world, at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7, 1812. Wealth
can never have been one of the familiar friends of the household, nor
plenty have always sat at its board. Charles had one elder sister, and
six other brothers and sisters were afterwards added to the family;
and with eight children, and successive removals from Portsmouth to
London, and London to Chatham, and no more than the pay of a
Government clerk[1]--pay which not long afterwards dwindled to a
pension,--even a better domestic financier than the elder Dickens
might have found some difficulty in facing his liabilities. It was
unquestionably into a tottering house that the child was born, and
among its ruins that he was nurtured.

But through all these early years I can do nothing better than take
him for my guide, and walk as it were in his companionship. Perhaps no
novelist ever had a keener feeling of the pathos of childhood than
Dickens, or understood more fully how real and overwhelming are its
sorrows. No one, too, has entered more sympathetically into its ways.
And of the child and boy that he himself had once been, he was wont to
think very tenderly and very often. Again and again in his writings he
reverts to the scenes and incidents and emotions of his earlier days.
Sometimes he goes back to his young life directly, speaking as of
himself. More often he goes back to it indirectly, placing imaginary
children and boys in the position he had once occupied. Thus it is
almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using
such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of
autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's
tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic
aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life
should convey a false impression.

He was but two years old when his father left Portsea for London, and
but four when a second migration took the family to Chatham. Here we
catch our first glimpse of him, in his own word-painting, as a "very
queer small boy," a small boy who was sickly and delicate, and could
take but little part in the rougher sports of his school companions,
but read much, as sickly boys will--read the novels of the older
novelists in a "blessed little room," a kind of palace of enchantment,
where "'Roderick Random,' 'Peregrine Pickle,' 'Humphrey Clinker,' 'Tom
Jones,' 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Don Quixote, 'Gil Blas,' and
'Robinson Crusoe,' came out, a glorious host, to keep him company."
And the queer small boy had read Shakespeare's "Henry IV.," too, and
knew all about Falstaff's robbery of the travellers at Gad's Hill, on
the rising ground between Rochester and Gravesend, and all about mad
Prince Henry's pranks; and, what was more, he had determined that when
he came to be a man, and had made his way in the world, he should own
the house called Gad's Hill Place, with the old associations of its
site, and its pleasant outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying
levels by the Thames. Was that a child's dream? The man's tenacity and
steadfast strength of purpose turned it into fact. The house became
the home of his later life. It was there that he died.

But death was a long way forward in those old Chatham days; nor, as
the time slipped by, and his father's pecuniary embarrassments began
to thicken, and make the forward ways of life more dark and difficult,
could the purchase of Gad's Hill Place have seemed much less remote.
There is one of Dickens' works which was his own special favourite,
the most cherished, as he tells us, among the offspring of his brain.
That work is "David Copperfield." Nor can there be much difficulty in
discovering why it occupied such an exceptional position in "his heart
of hearts;" for in its pages he had enshrined the deepest memories of
his own childhood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he had known what
it was to be a poor, neglected lad, set to rough, uncongenial work,
with no more than a mechanic's surroundings and outlook, and having to
fend for himself in the miry ways of the great city. Like David
Copperfield, he had formed a very early acquaintance with debts and
duns, and been initiated into the mysteries and sad expedients of
shabby poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been made free of the
interior of a debtor's prison. Poor lad, he was not much more than ten
or eleven years old when he left Chatham, with all the charms that
were ever after to live so brightly in his recollection,--the gay
military pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shifting sailor life,
the delightful walks in the surrounding country, the enchanted room,
tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school,
where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts,
giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left
for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for
companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all
around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With
what inimitable humour and pathos has he told the story of these
darkest days! Substitute John Dickens for Mr. Micawber, and Mrs.
Dickens for Mrs. Micawber, and make David Copperfield a son of Mr.
Micawber, a kind of elder Wilkins, and let little Charles Dickens be
that son--and then you will have a record, true in every essential
respect, of the child's life at this period. "Poor Mrs. Micawber! she
said she had tried to exert herself; and so, I have no doubt, she had.
The centre of the street door was perfectly covered with a great
brass-plate, on which was engraved 'Mrs. Micawber's Boarding
Establishment for Young Ladies;' but I never found that any young lady
had ever been to school there; or that any young lady ever came, or
proposed to come; or that the least preparation was ever made to
receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw or heard of were
creditors. _They_ used to come at all hours, and some of them were
quite ferocious." Even such a plate, bearing the inscription, _Mrs.
Dickens's Establishment_, ornamented the door of a house in Gower
Street North, where the family had hoped, by some desperate effort, to
retrieve its ruined fortunes. Even so did the pupils refuse the
educational advantages offered to them, though little Charles went
from door to door in the neighbourhood, carrying hither and thither
the most alluring circulars. Even thus was the place besieged by
assiduous and angry duns. And when, in the ordinary course of such sad
stories, Mr. Dickens is arrested for debt, and carried off to the
Marshalsea prison,[2] he moralizes over the event in precisely the
same strain as Mr. Micawber, using, indeed, the very same words, and
calls on his son, with many tears, "to take warning by the Marshalsea,
and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and spent
nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy;
but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched."

The son was taking note of other things besides these moral apothegms,
and reproduced, in after days, with a quite marvellous detail and
fidelity, all the incidents of his father's incarceration. Probably,
too, he was beginning, as children will, almost unconsciously, to form
some estimate of his father's character. And a very queer study in
human nature _that_ must have been, giving Dickens, when once he had
mastered it, a most exceptional insight into the ways of
impecuniosity. Charles Lamb, as we all remember, divided mankind into
two races, the mighty race of the borrowers, and the mean race of the
lenders; and expatiated, with a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon
the greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king among those who by
process of loan obtain possession of other people's money. Shift the
line of division a little, so that instead of separating borrowers and
lenders, it separates those who pay their debts from those who do not
pay them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed to something of
Bigod's kingship. He was of the great race of debtors, possessing
especially that _ideal_ quality of mind on which Lamb laid such
stress. Imagination played the very mischief with him. He had
evidently little grasp of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through
which all clear outlines would show blurred and unreal.
Sometimes--most often, perhaps--that haze would be irradiated with
sanguine visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes it would be
fitfully darkened with all the horrors of despair. But whether in
gloom or gleam, the realities of his position would be lost. He never,
certainly, contracted a debt which he did not mean honourably to pay.
But either he had never possessed the faculty of forming a just
estimate of future possibilities, or else, through the indulgence of
what may be called a vague habit of thought, he had lost the power of
seeing things as they are. Thus all his excellencies and good gifts
were neutralized at this time, so far as his family were concerned,
and went for practically nothing. He was, according to his son's
testimony, full of industry, most conscientious in the discharge of
any business, unwearying in loving patience and solicitude when those
bound to him by blood or friendship were ill or in trouble, "as
kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world." Yet as
debts accumulated, and accommodation bills shed their baleful shadow
on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he became altogether
immersed in mean money troubles, and suffered the son who was to shed
such lustre on his name to remain for a time without the means of
learning, and to sink first into a little household drudge, and then
into a mere warehouse boy.

So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, first blacked boots,
and minded the younger children, and ran messages, and effected the
family purchases--which can have been no pleasant task in the then
state of the family credit,--and made very close acquaintance with the
inside of the pawnbrokers' shops, and with the purchasers of
second-hand books, disposing, among other things, of the little store
of books he loved so well; and then, when his father was imprisoned,
ran more messages hither and thither, and shed many childish tears in
his father's company--the father doubtless regarding the tears as a
tribute to his eloquence, though, heaven knows, there were other
things to cry over besides his sonorous periods. After which a
connection, James Lamert by name, who had lived with the family before
they moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a
worm-eaten, rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market,
offered to employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week,
or thereabouts. The duties which commanded these high emoluments
consisted of the tying up and labelling of blacking pots. At first
Charles, in consideration probably of his relationship to the manager,
was allowed to do his tying, clipping, and pasting in the
counting-house. But soon this arrangement fell through, as it
naturally would, and he descended to the companionship of the other
lads, similarly employed, in the warehouse below. They were not bad
boys, and one of them, who bore the name of Bob Fagin, was very kind
to the poor little better-nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack
of illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side with much
tenderness. But, of course, they were rough and quite uncultured, and
the sensitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there was
something uncongenial and degrading in being compelled to associate
with them. Nor, though he had already sufficient strength of character
to learn to do his work well, did he ever regard the work itself as
anything but unsuitable, and almost discreditable. Indeed it may be
doubted whether the iron of that time did not unduly rankle and fester
as it entered into his soul, and whether the scar caused by the wound
was altogether quite honourable. He seems to have felt, in connection
with his early employment in a warehouse, a sense of shame such as
would be more fittingly associated with the commission of an unworthy
act. That he should not have habitually referred to the subject in
after life, may readily be understood. But why he should have kept
unbroken silence about it for long years, even with his wife, even
with so very close a friend as Forster, is less clear. And in the
terms used, when the revelation was finally made to Forster, there has
always, I confess, appeared to me to be a tone of exaggeration. "My
whole nature," he says, "was so penetrated with grief and humiliation,
... that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my
dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man, and
wander desolately back to that time of my life." And again: "From that
hour until this, at which I write, no word of that part of my
childhood, which I have now gladly brought to a close, has passed my
lips to any human being.... I have never, until I now impart it to
this paper, in any burst of confidence with any one, my own wife not
excepted, raised the curtain I then dropped, thank God." Great part,
perhaps the greatest part, of Dickens' success as a writer, came from
the sympathy and power with which he showed how the lower walks of
life no less than the higher are often fringed with beauty. I have
never been able to entirely divest myself of a slight feeling of the
incongruous in reading what he wrote about the warehouse episode in
his career.

At first, when he began his daily toil at the blacking business, some
poor dregs of family life were left to the child. His father was at
the Marshalsea. But his mother and brothers and sisters were, to use
his own words, "still encamped, with a young servant girl from Chatham
workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower Street
North." And there he lived with them, in much "hugger-mugger," merely
taking his humble midday meal in nomadic fashion, on his own account.
Soon, however, his position became even more forlorn. The paternal
creditors proved insatiable. The gipsy home in Gower Street had to be
broken up. Mrs. Dickens and the children went to live at the
Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed under the roof--it cannot be
called under the care--of a "reduced old lady," dwelling in Camden
Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she
anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind
of indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the
name of "Mrs. Pipchin," in "Dombey and Son." Here the boy seems to
have been left almost entirely to his own devices. He spent his
Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, his
lodgings at "Mrs. Pipchin's" were paid for. Otherwise, he "found
himself," in childish fashion, out of the six or seven weekly
shillings, breakfasting on two pennyworth of bread and milk, and
supping on a penny loaf and a bit of cheese, and dining hither and
thither, as his boy's appetite dictated--now, sensibly enough, on _ą
la mode_ beef or a saveloy; then, less sensibly, on pudding; and anon
not dining at all, the wherewithal having been expended on some
morning treat of cheap stale pastry. But are not all these things, the
lad's shifts and expedients, his sorrows and despair, his visits to
the public-house, where the kindly publican's wife stoops down to kiss
the pathetic little face--are they not all written in "David
Copperfield"? And if so be that I have a reader unacquainted with that
peerless book, can I do better than recommend him, or her, to study
therein the story of Dickens' life at this particular time?

At last the child's solitude and sorrows seem to have grown
unbearable. His fortitude broke down. One Sunday night he appealed to
his father, with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment,
which he seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his
forlornness and isolation. The father's kind, thoughtless heart was
touched. A back attic was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at
Lant Street, in the Borough--where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered,
afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy
moved into his new quarters with the same feeling of elation as if he
had been entering a palace.

The change naturally brought him more fully into the prison circle. He
used to breakfast there every morning, before going to the warehouse,
and would spend the larger portion of his spare time among the
inmates. Nor do Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who is to us
the family's most important member, appear to have been relatively at
all uncomfortable while under the shadow of the Marshalsea. There is
in "David Copperfield" a passage of inimitable humour, where Mr.
Micawber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprisonment for debt,
apostrophizes the King's Bench Prison as being the place "where, for
the first time in many revolving years, the overwhelming pressure of
pecuniary liabilities was not proclaimed from day to day, by
importunate voices declining to vacate the passage; where there was no
knocker on the door for any creditor to appeal to; where personal
service of process was not required, and detainers were lodged merely
at the gate." There is a similar passage in "Little Dorrit," where the
tipsy medical practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts Mr. Dorrit in
his affliction by saying: "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered
here; there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors,
and bring a man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a
man's at home, and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is.
Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It's
freedom, sir, it's freedom!" One smiles as one reads; and it adds a
pathos, I think, to the smile, to find that these are records of
actual experience. The Marshalsea prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of
peace, and to his household a place of plenty. Not only could he
pursue his career there untroubled by fears of arrest, but he
exercised among the other "gentlemen gaol-birds" a supremacy, a kind
of kingship, such as that to which Charles Lamb referred. They
recognized in him the superior spirit, ready of pen, and affluent of
speech, and with a certain grandeur in his conviviality. He it was
who drew up their memorial to George of England on an occasion no less
important than the royal birthday, when they, the monarch's
"unfortunate subjects,"--so they were described in the
memorial--besought the king's "gracious majesty," of his "well-known
munificence," to grant them a something towards the drinking of the
royal health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and penetrative genius did
little Charles, from his corner, watch the strange sad stream of
humanity that trickled through the room, and may be said to have
_smeared_ its approval of that petition!) And while Mr. Dickens was
enjoying his prison honours, he was also enjoying his Admiralty
pension,[3] which was not forfeited by his imprisonment; and his wife
and children were consequently enjoying a larger measure of the
necessaries of life than had been theirs for many a month. So all went
on merrily enough at the Marshalsea.

But even under the old law, imprisonment for debt did not always last
for ever. A legacy, and the Insolvent Debtors Act, enabled Mr. Dickens
to march out of durance, in some sort with the honours of war, after a
few months' incarceration--this would be early in 1824;--and he went
with his family, including Charles, to lodge with the "Mrs. Pipchin"
already mentioned. Charles meanwhile still toiled on in the blacking
warehouse, now removed to Chandos Street, Covent Garden; and had
reached such skill in the tying, pasting, and labelling of the
bottles, that small crowds used to collect at the window for the
purpose of watching his deft fingers. There was pride in this, no
doubt, but also humiliation; and release was at hand. His father and
Lamert quarrelled about something--about _what_, Dickens seems never
to have known--and he was sent home. Mrs. Dickens acted the part of
the peacemaker on the next day, probably feeling that amid the shadowy
expectations on which she and her husband had subsisted for so long,
even six or seven shillings a week was something tangible, and not to
be despised. Yet in spite of this, he did not return to the business.
His father decided that he should go to school. "I do not write
resentfully or angrily," said Dickens, in the confidential
communication made long afterwards to Forster, and to which reference
has already been made; "but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall
forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent
back."

The mothers of great men is a subject that has been handled often, and
eloquently. How many of those who have achieved distinction can trace
their inherited gifts to a mother's character, and their acquired
gifts to a mother's teaching and influence. Mrs. Dickens seems not to
have been a mother of this stamp. She scarcely, I fear, possessed
those admirable qualities of mind and heart which one can clearly
recognize as having borne fruit in the greatness and goodness of her
famous son. So far as I can discover, she exercised no influence upon
him at all. Her name hardly appears in his biographies. He never, that
I can recollect, mentions her in his correspondence; only refers to
her on the rarest occasions. And perhaps, on the whole, this is not to
be wondered at, if we accept the constant tradition that she had,
unknown to herself, sat to her son for the portrait of Mrs. Nickleby,
and suggested to him the main traits in the character of that
inconsequent and not very wise old lady. Mrs. Nickleby, I take it, was
not the kind of person calculated to form the mind of a boy of genius.
As well might one expect some very domestic bird to teach an eaglet
how to fly.

The school to which our callow eaglet was sent (in the spring or early
summer of 1824), belonged emphatically to the old school of schools.
It bore the goodly name of _Wellington House Academy_, and was
situated in Mornington Place, near the Hampstead Road. A certain Mr.
Jones held chief rule there; and as more than fifty years have now
elapsed since Dickens' connection with the establishment ceased, I
trust there may be nothing libellous in giving further currency to his
statement, or rather, perhaps, to his recorded impression,[4] that the
head master's one qualification for his office was dexterity in the
use of the cane;--especially as another "old boy" corroborates that
impression, and declares Mr. Jones to have been "a most ignorant
fellow, and a mere tyrant." Dickens, however, escaped with
comparatively little beating, because he was a day-boy, and sound
policy dictated that day-boys, who had facilities for carrying home
their complaints, should be treated with some leniency. So he had to
get his learning without tears, which was not at all considered the
orthodox method in the good old days; and, indeed, I doubt if he
finally took away from Wellington House Academy very much of the book
knowledge that would tell in a modern competitive examination. For
though in his own account of the school it is implied that he resumed
his interrupted studies with Virgil, and was, before he left, head
boy, and the possessor of many prizes, yet this is not corroborated by
the evidence of his surviving fellow pupils; nor can we, of course, in
the face of their direct counter evidence, treat statements made in a
fictitious or half-fictitious narrative as if made in what professed
to be a sober autobiography. Dickens, I repeat, seems to have acquired
a very scant amount of classic lore while under the instruction of Mr.
Jones, and not too much lore of any kind. But if he learned little, he
observed much. He thoroughly mastered the humours of the place, just
as he had mastered the humours of the Marshalsea. He had got to know
all about the masters, and all about the boys, and all about the white
mice--of which there were many in various stages of civilization. He
acquired, in short, a fund of school knowledge that seemed
inexhaustible, and on which he drew again and again, with the most
excellent results, in "David Copperfield," in "Dombey," in such
inimitable short papers as "Old Cheeseman." And while thus, half
unconsciously perhaps, assimilating the very life of the school, he
was himself a thorough schoolboy, bright, alert, intelligent; taking
part in all fun and frolic; amply indemnifying himself for his
enforced abstinence from childish games during the dreary warehouse
days; good at recitations and mimic plays; and already possessed of a
reputation among his peers as a writer of tales.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] £200 a year "without extras" from 1815 to 1820, and then £350. See
"Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens," by Robert Langton, a very
valuable monograph.

[2] Mr. Langton appears to doubt whether John Dickens was not
imprisoned in the King's Bench. But this seems scarcely a point on
which Dickens himself can have been mistaken.

[3] According to Mr. Langton's dates, he would still be drawing his
pay.

[4] See paper entitled "Our School."




CHAPTER II.


Dickens cannot have been very long at Wellington House Academy, for
before May, 1827, he had been at another school near Brunswick Square,
and had also obtained, and quitted, some employment in the office of a
solicitor in New Square, Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems clear,
therefore, that the whole of his school life might easily be computed
in months; and in May, 1827, it will be remembered, he was still but a
lad of fifteen. At that date he entered the office of a second
solicitor, in Gray's Inn this time, on a salary of thirteen shillings
and sixpence a week, afterwards increased to fifteen shillings. Here
he remained till November, 1828, again picking up a good deal of
information that cannot perhaps be regarded as strictly legal, but
such as he was afterwards able to turn to admirable account. He would
seem to have studied the profession exhaustively in all its branches,
from the topmost Tulkinghorns and Perkers, to the lowest pettifoggers
like Pell and Brass, and also to have given particular attention to
the parasites of the law--the Guppys and Chucksters; and altogether to
have stored his mind, as he had done at school, with a series of
invaluable notes and observations. All very well, no doubt, as we
look at the matter now. But then it must often have seemed to the
ambitious, energetic lad, that he was wasting his time. Was he to
remain for ever a lawyer's clerk who has not the means to be an
articled clerk, and who can never, therefore, aspire to become a
full-blown solicitor? Was he to spend the future obscurely in the
dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in whose career "something," as
Mr. Micawber would have said, had at last "turned up," was now a
reporter for the press. The son determined to be a reporter too.

He threw himself into this new career with characteristic energy. Of
course a reporter is not made in a day. It takes many months of
drudgery to obtain such skill in shorthand as shall enable the pen of
the ready-writer to keep up with the winged words of speech, and make
dots and lines that shall be readable. Dickens laboured hard to
acquire the art. In the intervals of his work he made it a kind of
holiday task to attend the Reading-room of the British Museum, and so
remedy the defects in the literary part of his education. But the best
powers of his mind were directed to "Gurney's system of shorthand."
And in time he had his reward. He earned and justified the reputation
of being one of the best reporters of his day.

I shall not quote the autobiographical passages in "David Copperfield"
which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in
everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my
pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter,
a description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches
of his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in
May, 1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper
Press Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under
circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here,
many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have
often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important
public speeches, in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a
mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely
compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark
lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country,
and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of
fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled
into the castle-yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend,
the spot on which I once took, as we used to call it, an election
speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight
maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and
under such pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues,
who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my
note-book, after the manner of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical
procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back
row of the old gallery in the old House of Commons; and I have worn my
feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of
Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep, kept
in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing. Returning
home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting
press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every
description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my
time, belated in miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or
fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted
horses, and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for
publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the
late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of
hearts I ever knew."

What shall I add to this? That the papers on which he was engaged as a
reporter, were _The True Sun_, _The Mirror of Parliament_, and _The
Morning Chronicle_; that long afterwards, little more than two years
before his death, when addressing the journalists of New York, he gave
public expression to his "grateful remembrance of a calling that was
once his own," and declared, "to the wholesome training of severe
newspaper work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my
first success;" that his income as a reporter appears latterly to have
been some five guineas a week, of course in addition to expenses and
general breakages and damages; that there is independent testimony to
his exceptional quickness in reporting and transcribing, and to his
intelligence in condensing; that to an observer so keen and apt, the
experiences of his business journeys in those more picturesque and
eventful ante-railway days must have been invaluable; and, finally,
that his connection with journalism lasted far into 1836, and so did
not cease till some months after "Pickwick" had begun to add to the
world's store of merriment and laughter.

But I have not really reached "Pickwick" yet, nor anything like it.
That master-work was not also a first work. With all Dickens' genius,
he had to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before
coming upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let
us go back for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay,
to the earliest streak upon the greyness of night, to his first
original published composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to
"Pickwick" too, has told us somewhat about that first paper of his;
how it was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and
trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court
in Fleet Street;" how it was accepted, and "appeared in all the glory
of print;" and how he was so filled with pleasure and pride on
purchasing a copy of the magazine in which it was published, that he
went into Westminster Hall to hide the tears of joy that would come
into his eyes. The paper thus joyfully wept over was originally
entitled "A Dinner at Poplar Walk," and now bears, among the "Sketches
by Boz," the name of "Mr. Minns and his Cousin"; the periodical in
which it was published was _The Old Monthly Magazine_, and the date of
publication was January 1, 1834.

"A Dinner at Poplar Walk" may be pronounced a very fairly told tale.
It is, no doubt, always easy to be wise after the event, in criticism
particularly easy, and when once a writer has achieved success, there
is but too little difficulty in showing that his earlier productions
were prophetic of his future greatness. At the risk, however, of
incurring a charge of this kind, I repeat that Dickens' first story is
well told, and that the editor of _The Old Monthly Magazine_ showed
due discernment in accepting it and encouraging his unknown
contributor to further efforts. Quite apart from the fact that the
author was only a young fellow of some two or three and twenty, both
this first story and the stories that followed it in _The Old Monthly
Magazine_, during 1834 and the early part of 1835, possessed qualities
of a very remarkable kind. So also did the humorous descriptive papers
shortly afterwards published in _The Evening Chronicle_, papers that,
with the stories, now compose the book known as "Sketches by Boz." Sir
Arthur Helps, speaking of Dickens, just after Dickens' death,[5] said,
"His powers of observation were almost unrivalled.... Indeed, I have
said to myself when I have been with him, he sees and observes nine
facts for any two that I see and observe." This particular faculty is,
I think, almost as clearly discernible in the "Sketches" as in the
author's later and greater works. London--its sins and sorrows, its
gaieties and amusements, its suburban gentilities, and central
squalor, the aspects of its streets, and the humours of the dingier
classes among its inhabitants,--all this had certainly never been so
seen and described before. The power of exact minute delineation
lavished upon the picture is admirable. Again, the dialogue in the
dramatic parts is natural, well-conducted, characteristic, and so used
as to help, not impede, the narrative. The speech, for instance, of
Mr. Bung, the broker's man, is a piece of very good Dickens. Of course
there is humour, and very excellent fooling some of it is; and
equally, of course, there is pathos, and some of that is not bad. Do I
mean at all that this earlier work stands on the same level of
excellence as the masterpieces of the writer? Clearly not. It were
absurd to expect the stripling, half-furtively coming forward, first
without a name at all, and then under the pseudonym of Boz,[6] to
write with the superb practised ease and mastery of the Charles
Dickens who penned "David Copperfield." By dint of doing blacksmith's
work, says the French proverb, one becomes a blacksmith. The artist,
like the handicraftsman, must learn his art. Much in the "Sketches"
betrays inexperience; or, perhaps, it would be more just to say,
comparative clumsiness of hand. The descriptions, graphic as they
undoubtedly are, lack for the most part the final imaginative touch;
the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual
charm to Dickens' word-painting. The humour is more obvious, less
delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be
considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married. The
pathos is often spoilt by over-emphasis and declamation. It lacks
simplicity.

For the "Sketches" published in _The Old Monthly Magazine_, Dickens
got nothing, beyond the pleasure of seeing himself in print. The
_Chronicle_ treated him somewhat more liberally, and, on his
application, increased his salary, giving him, in view of his original
contributions, seven guineas a week, instead of the five guineas which
he had been drawing as a reporter. Not a particularly brilliant
augmentation, perhaps, and one at which he must often have smiled in
after years, when his pen was dropping gold as well as ink. Still, the
addition to his income was substantial, and the son of John Dickens
must always, I imagine, have been in special need of money. Moreover
the circumstances of the next few months would render any increased
earnings doubly pleasant. For Dickens was shortly after this engaged
to be married to Miss Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of one of his
fellow-workers on the _Chronicle_. There had been, so Forster tells
us, a previous very shadowy love affair in his career,--an affair so
visionary indeed, and boyish, as scarcely to be worthy of mention in
this history, save for three facts: first, that his devotion,
dreamlike as it was, seems to have had love's highest practical effect
in inducing him to throw his whole strength into the study of
shorthand; secondly, that the lady of his love appears to have had
some resemblance to Dora, the child-wife of David Copperfield; and
thirdly, that he met her again long years afterwards, when time had
worked its changes, and the glamour of love had left his eyes, and
that to that meeting we owe the passages in "Little Dorrit" relating
to poor Flora. This, however, is a parenthesis. The engagement to Miss
Hogarth was neither shadowy nor unreal--an engagement only in
dreamland. Better for both, perhaps--who knows?--if it had been. Ah
me, if one could peer into the future, how many weddings there are at
which tears would be more appropriate than smiles and laughter! Would
Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth have foreborne to plight their
troth, one wonders, if they could have foreseen how slowly and surely
the coming years were to sunder their hearts and lives?--They were
married on the 2nd of April, 1836.

This date again leads me to a time subsequent to the publication of
the first number of "Pickwick," which had appeared a day or two
before;--and again I refrain from dealing with that great book. For
before I do so, I wish to pause a brief space to consider what manner
of man Charles Dickens was when he suddenly broke on the world in his
full popularity; and also what were the influences, for good and evil,
which his early career had exercised upon his character and intellect.

What manner of man he was? In outward aspect all accounts agree that
he was singularly, noticeably prepossessing--bright, animated, eager,
with energy and talent written in every line of his face. Such he was
when Forster saw him, on the occasion of their first meeting, when
Dickens was acting as spokesman for the insurgent reporters engaged on
the _Mirror_. So Carlyle, who met him at dinner shortly after this,
and was no flatterer, sketches him for us with a pen of unwonted
kindliness. "He is a fine little fellow--Boz, I think. Clear, blue,
intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large protrusive
rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme _mobility_, which he
shuttles about--eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all--in a very singular
manner while speaking. Surmount this with a loose coil of
common-coloured hair, and set it on a small compact figure, very
small, and dressed _ą la_ D'Orsay rather than well--this is Pickwick.
For the rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who seems to
guess pretty well what he is and what others are."[7] Is not this a
graphic little picture, and characteristic even to the touch about
D'Orsay, the dandy French Count? For Dickens, like the young men of
the time--Disraeli, Bulwer, and the rest--was a great fop. We, of
these degenerate days, shall never see again that antique magnificence
in coloured velvet waistcoats.

But to return. Dickens, it need scarcely be said, had by this
[time][8] long out-lived the sickliness of his earlier years. The
hardships and trials of his childhood and boyhood had served but to
brace his young manhood, knitting the frame and strengthening the
nerves. Light and small, as Carlyle describes him, he was wiry and
very active, and could bear without injury an amount of intellectual
work and bodily fatigue that would have killed many men of seemingly
stronger build. And as what might have seemed unfortunate in his youth
had helped perchance to develop his physical powers, so had it
assisted to strengthen his character and foster his genius. I go back
here to the point from which I started. No doubt a weaker man would
have been crushed by such a youth. He would have been indolently
content to remain a warehouse drudge, would have listlessly fallen
into his father's ways about money, would have had no ambition beyond
his desk and salary as a lawyer's clerk, would have never cared to
piece together and supplement the scattered scraps of his education,
would have rested on his oars when he had once shot into the waters of
ordinary journalism. With Dickens it was not so. The alchemy of a fine
nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons
of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy,
self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the
battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the
muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method,
order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is
worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his
favourite maxims--it was the rule of his life.

And for what was to be his life work, what better preparation could
there have been than that which he received? I am far from
recommending warehouses, squalid solitary lodgings, pawnshops,
debtors' prisons,--if such could now be found,--ill-conducted private
schools,--which probably could be found,--attorneys' offices, and the
hand-to-mouth of journalism, as constituting generally the highest
ideal of a liberal education. I am equally far from asserting that the
majority of men do not require more training of a purely scholastic
kind than fell to Dickens' lot. But Dickens was not a bookish man. His
genius did not lie in that direction. To have forced him unduly into
the world of books would have made him, doubtless, an average scholar,
but might have weakened his hold on life. Such a risk was certainly
not worth the running. Fate arranged it otherwise. What he was above
all was a student of the world of men, a passionately keen observer of
the ways of humanity. Men were to be his books, his special branch of
knowledge; and in order to graduate and take high honours in that
school, I repeat, he could have had no better training. Not only had
he passed through a range of most unwonted experiences, experiences
calculated to quicken to the uttermost his superb faculties of
observation and insight; but he had been placed in sympathetic
communication with a strange assortment of characters, lying quite out
of the usual ken of the literary classes. Knowledge and sympathy, the
seeing eye and the feeling heart--were these nothing to have
acquired?

That so abnormal an education can have been entirely without
drawbacks, it is no part of my purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may
say, to sink or swim amid the waves of life, where those waves ran
turbid and brackish, Dickens had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But
that some little signs should not remain of the straining and effort
with which he had won the land, was scarcely to be expected. He
himself, in his more confidential communications with Forster, seems
to avow a consciousness that this was so; and Forster, though he
speaks guardedly, lovingly, appears to be of opinion that a certain
self-assertiveness and fierce intolerance of advice or control[9]
occasionally discernible in his friend, might justly be attributed to
the harsh influence of early struggles and privations. But what then?
That system of education has yet to be devised which shall mould this
poor human clay of ours into flawless shapes of use and beauty. A man
may be considered fortunate indeed, when his training has left in him
only what the French call the "defects of his virtues," that is, the
exaggeration of his good qualities till they turn into faults. Without
his immense strength of purpose and iron will, Dickens might never
have emerged from obscurity, and the world would have been very
distinctly the poorer. One cannot be very sorry that he possessed
these gifts in excess.

And now, at last, having slightly sketched the history of his earlier
years, and endeavoured to show, however perfectly, what influences had
gone to the formation of his character, I proceed to consider the book
that lifted him to fame and fortune. The years of apprenticeship are
over, and the master-workman brings forth his finished work in its
flower of perfection. Let us study "Pickwick."


FOOTNOTES:

[5] _Macmillan's Magazine_, July, 1870.

[6] It was the pet name of one of his brothers; that was why he took
it.

[7] Froude's "Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London."

[8] Transcriber's Note: The word "time" appears to be missing from the
original text.

[9] "I have heard Dickens described by those who knew him," says Mr.
Edmund Yates, in his "Recollections," "as aggressive, imperious, and
intolerant, and I can comprehend the accusation.... He was imperious
in the sense that his life was conducted on the _sic volo sic jubeo_
principle, and that everything gave way before him. The society in
which he mixed, the hours which he kept, the opinions which he held,
his likes and dislikes, his ideas of what should or should not be,
were all settled by himself, not merely for himself, but for all those
brought into connection with him, and it was never imagined they could
be called in question.... He had immense powers of will."




CHAPTER III.


Dickens has told us, in his preface to the later editions, much of how
"Pickwick" came to be projected and published. It was in this wise:
Seymour, a caricaturist of very considerable merit, though not, as we
should now consider, in the first rank of the great caricaturists, had
proposed to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting on their
career as publishers, a "series of Cockney sporting plates." Messrs.
Chapman and Hall entertained the idea favourably, but opined that the
plates would require illustrative letter-press; and casting about for
some suitable author, bethought themselves of Dickens, whose tales and
sketches had been exciting some little sensation in the world of
journalism; and who had, indeed, already written for the firm a story,
the "Tuggs at Ramsgate," which may be read among the "Sketches."
Accordingly Mr. Hall called on Dickens for the purpose of proposing
the scheme. This would be in 1835, towards the latter end of the year;
and Dickens, who had apparently left the paternal roof for some little
time, was living bachelorwise, in Furnival's Inn. What was his
astonishment, when Mr. Hall came in, to find he was the same person
who had sold him the copy of the magazine containing his first
story--that memorable copy at which he had looked, in Westminster
Hall, through eyes bedimmed with joyful tears. Such coincidences
always had for Dickens a peculiar, almost a superstitious, interest.
The circumstance seemed of happy augury to both the "high contracting
parties." Publisher and author were for the nonce on the best of
terms. The latter, no doubt, saw his opening; was more than ready to
undertake the work, and had no quarrel with the remuneration offered.
But even then he was not the man to play second fiddle to anybody.
Before they parted, he had quite succeeded in turning the tables on
Seymour. The original proposal had been that the artist should produce
four caricatures on sporting subjects every month, and that the
letter-press should be in illustration of the caricatures. Dickens got
Mr. Hall to agree to reverse that position. _He_, Dickens, was to have
the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate _him_. How
far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if
Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the
proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour
died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so
ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in
deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his
disastrous sporting proclivities, made part of the first conception of
the book; and it is also very significant of the book's origin, that
the design on the green wrapper in which the monthly parts made their
appearance, should have had a purely sporting character, and exhibited
Mr. Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. Winkle shooting at
what looks like a cock-sparrow, the whole surrounded by a chaste
arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. To Seymour, too, we owe the
portrait of Mr. Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent old
gentleman's face and figure upon all our memories. But to return to
Dickens' interview with Mr. Hall. They seem to have parted in mutual
satisfaction. At least it is certain Dickens was satisfied, for in a
letter written, apparently on the same day, to "my dearest Kate," he
thus sums up the proposals of the publishers: "They have made me an
offer of fourteen pounds a month to write and edit a new publication
they contemplate, entirely by myself, to be published monthly, and
each number to contain four wood-cuts.... The work will be no joke,
but the emolument is too tempting to resist."[10]

So, little thinking how soon he would begin to regard the "emolument"
as ludicrously inadequate, he set to work on "Pickwick." The first
part was published on the 31st of March or 1st of April, 1836.

That part seems scarcely to have created any sensation. Mr James
Grant, the novelist, says indeed, that the first five parts were "a
dead failure," and that the publishers were even debating whether the
enterprise had not better be abandoned altogether, when suddenly Sam
Weller appeared upon the scene, and turned their gloom into laughter.
Be that as it may, certain it is that before many months had passed,
Messrs. Chapman and Hall must have been thoroughly confirmed in a
policy of perseverance. "The first order for Part I.," that is, the
first order for binding, "was," says the bookbinder who executed the
work, "for four hundred copies only." The order for Part XV. had
risen to forty thousand. All contemporary accounts agree that the
success was sudden, immense. The author, like Lord Byron, some
twenty-five years before, "awoke and found himself famous." Young as
he was, not having yet numbered more than twenty-four summers, he at
one stride reached the topmost height of popularity. Everybody read
his book. Everybody laughed over it. Everybody talked about it.
Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but very surely, that a new and
vital force had arisen in English literature.

And English literature just then was in one of its times of slackness,
rather than full flow. The great tide of the beginning of the century
had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had scarcely begun to do more
than ripple and flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and Shelley and
Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; Southey's life was on the decline;
Wordsworth had long executed his best work; while of the coming men,
Carlyle, though in the plenitude of his power, having published
"Sartor Resartus," had not yet published his "French Revolution,"[11]
or delivered his lectures on the "Heroes," and was not yet in the
plenitude of his fame and influence; and Macaulay, then in India, was
known only as the essayist and politician; and Lord Tennyson and the
Brownings were more or less names of the future. Looking especially at
fiction, the time may be said to have been waiting for its
master-novelist. Five years had gone by since the good and great Sir
Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep,
as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved
so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one
shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer,
more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of
"Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" and Disraeli
had written "Vivian Grey," and his earlier books; while Thackeray,
Charlotte Brontė, Kingsley, George Eliot were all, of course, to come
later. No, there was a vacant throne among the novelists. Here was the
hour--and here, too, was the man. In virtue of natural kingship he
took up his sceptre unquestioned.

Still, it may not be superfluous to inquire into the why and wherefore
of his success. All effects have a cause. What was the cause of this
special phenomenon? In the first place, the admirable freshness of the
book won its way into every heart. There is a fervour of youth and
healthy good spirits about the whole thing. In a former generation,
Byron had uttered his wail of despair over a worthless world. We, in
our own time, have got back to the dreary point of considering whether
life be worth living. Here was a writer who had no such misgivings.
For him life was pleasant, useful, full of delight--to be not only
tolerated, but enjoyed. He liked its sights, its play of character,
its adventures--affected no superiority to its amusements and
convivialities--thoroughly laid himself out to please and to be
pleased. And his characters were in the same mood. Their fund of
animal spirits seemed inexhaustible. For life's jollities they were
never unprepared. No doubt there were "mighty mean moments" in their
existence, as there have been in the existence of most of us. It
cannot have been pleasant to Mr. Winkle to have his eye blackened by
the obstreperous cabman. Mr. Tracy Tupman probably felt a passing pang
when jilted by the maiden aunt in favour of the audacious Jingle. No
man would elect to occupy the position of defendant in an action for
breach of promise, or prefer to sojourn in a debtors' prison. But how
jauntily do Mr. Pickwick and his friends shake off such discomforts!
How buoyantly do they override the billows that beset their course!
And what excellent digestions they have, and how slightly do they seem
to suffer the next day from any little excesses in the matter of milk
punch!

Then besides the good spirits and good temper, there is Dickens' royal
gift of humour. As some actors have only to show their face and utter
a word or two, in order to convulse an audience with merriment, so
here does almost every sentence hold good and honest laughter. Not,
perhaps, objects the superfine and too dainty critic, humour of the
most delicate sort--not humour that for its rare and exquisite quality
can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne,
or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of that
special character. But very good humour nevertheless, the thoroughly
popular humour of broad comedy and obvious farce--the humour that
finds its account where absurd characters are placed in ridiculous
situations, that delights in the oddities of the whimsical and
eccentric, that irradiates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. How
thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be at the same time merry and
wise, says the old adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was both.
With all his boisterous merriment, his volleys of inextinguishable
laughter, he never makes game of what is at all worthy of respect.
Here, as in his later books, right is right, and wrong wrong, and he
is never tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of season, and make
right look ridiculous. And if the humour of "Pickwick" be wholesome,
it is also most genial and kindly. We have here no acrid cynic
sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing
pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does
Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering
memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of
unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost. In
brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and
even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly and
helpfully.

So much the first readers of "Pickwick" might note as the book
unfolded itself to them, part by part; and they might also note one or
two things besides. They might note--they could scarcely fail to do
so--that though there was a touch of caricature in nearly all the
characters, yet those characters were, one and all, wonderfully real,
and very much alive. It was no world of shadows to which the author
introduced them. Mr. Pickwick had a very distinct existence, and so
had his three friends, and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and Mr.
Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the swarm of minor characters. While
as to Sam Weller, if it be really true that he averted impending ruin
from the book, and turned defeat into victory, one can only say that
it was like him. When did he ever "stint stroke" in "foughten field"?
By what array of adverse circumstances was he ever taken at a
disadvantage? To have created a character of this vitality, of this
individual force, would be a feather in the cap of any novelist who
ever lived. Something I think of Dickens' own blood passed into this
special progeniture of his. It has been irreverently said that
Falstaff might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just as Hamlet might
represent him in his more sober moments. So I have always had a kind
of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded as Dickens himself seen in
a certain aspect--a sort of Dickens, shall I say?--in an humbler
sphere of life, and who had never devoted himself to literature. There
is in both the same energy, pluck, essential goodness of heart,
fertility of resource, abundance of animal spirits, and also an
imagination of a peculiar kind, in which wit enters as a main
ingredient. And having noted how highly vitalized were the characters
in "Pickwick," I think the first readers might also fairly be expected
to note,--and, in fact, it is clear from Dickens' preface that they
did note--how greatly the book increased in scope and power as it
proceeded. The beginning was conceived almost in a spirit of farce.
The incidents and adventures had scarcely any other object than to
create amusement. Mr. Pickwick himself appeared on the scene with
fantastic honours and the badge of absurdity, as "the man who had
traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the
scientific world with the Theory of Tittlebats." But in all this there
is a gradual change. Mr. Pickwick is presented to us latterly as an
exceedingly sound-headed as well as sound-hearted old gentleman, whom
we should never think of associating with the sources of Hampstead
Ponds or any other folly. While in such scenes as those at the Fleet
Prison, the author is clearly endeavouring to do much more than raise
a laugh. He is sounding the deeper, more tragic chords in human
feeling.

Ah, if we add to all this--to the freshness, the "go," the good
spirits, the keen observation, the graphic painting, the humour, the
vitality of the characters, the gradual development of power--if we
add to all this that something which is in all, and greater than all,
viz., genius, and genius of a highly popular kind, then we shall have
no difficulty in understanding why everybody read "Pickwick," and how
it came to pass that its publishers made some £20,000 by a work that
they had once thought of abandoning as worthless.[12]



FOOTNOTES:

[10] See the Letters published by Chapman and Hall.

[11] It was finished in January, 1837, and not published till six
months afterwards.

[12] They acknowledged to Dickens that they had made £14,000 by the
sale of the monthly parts alone.




CHAPTER IV.


Dickens was not at all the man to rest on his oars while "Pickwick"
was giving such a magnificent impetus to the boat that contained his
fortunes. The amount of work which he accomplished in the years 1836,
1837, 1838, and 1839 is, if we consider its quality, amazing.
"Pickwick," as we have seen, was begun with the first of these years,
and its publication continued till the November of 1837. Independently
of his work on "Pickwick," he was, in the year 1836, engaged in the
arduous profession of a reporter till the close of the parliamentary
session, and also wrote a pamphlet on Sabbatarianism, a farce in two
acts, "The Strange Gentleman," for the St. James's Theatre, and a
comic opera, "The Village Coquettes," which was set to music by
Hullah. With the very commencement of 1837--"Pickwick," it will be
remembered, going on all the while--he entered upon the duties of
editor of _Bentley's Miscellany_, and in the second number began the
publication of "Oliver Twist," which was continued into the early
months of 1839, when his connection with the magazine ceased. In the
April of 1838, and simultaneously, of course, with "Oliver Twist,"
appeared the first part of "Nicholas Nickleby"--the last part
appearing in the October of the following year. Three novels of more
than full size and of first-rate importance, in less than four years,
besides a good deal of other miscellaneous work--certainly that was
"good going." The pace was decidedly fast. Small wonder that _The
Quarterly Review_, even so early as October, 1837, was tempted to
croak about "Mr. Dickens" as writing "too often and too fast, and
putting forth in their crude, unfinished, undigested state, thoughts,
feelings, observations, and plans which it required time and study to
mature," and to warn him that as he had "risen like a rocket," so he
was in danger of "coming down like the stick." Small wonder, I say,
and yet to us now, how unjust the accusation appears, and how false
the prophecy. Rapidly as those books were executed, Dickens, like the
real artist that he was, had put into them his best work. There was no
scamping. The critics of the time judged superficially, not making
allowance for the ample fund of observations he had amassed, for the
genuine fecundity of his genius, and for the admirable industry of an
extremely industrious man. "The World's Workers"--there exists under
that general designation a series of short biographies, for which Miss
Dickens has written a sketch of her father's life. To no one could the
description more fittingly apply. Throughout his life he worked
desperately hard. He possessed, in a high degree, the "infinite
faculty for taking pains," which is so great an adjunct to genius,
though it is not, as the good Sir Joshua Reynolds held, genius itself.
Thus what he had done rapidly was done well; and, for the rest, the
writer, who had yet to give the world "Martin Chuzzlewit," "The
Christmas Carol," "David Copperfield," and "Dombey," was not "coming
down like a stick." There were many more stars, and of very brilliant
colours, to be showered out by that rocket; and the stick has not even
yet fallen to the ground.[13]

Naturally, with the success of "Pickwick," came a great change in
Dickens' pecuniary position. He had, as we have seen, been glad
enough, before he began the book, to close with the offer of £14 for
each monthly part. That sum was afterwards increased to £15, and the
two first payments seem to have been made in advance for the purpose
of helping him to defray the expenses of his marriage. But as the sale
leapt up, the publishers themselves felt that such a rate of
remuneration was altogether insufficient, and sent him, first and
last, a goodly number of supplementary cheques, for sums amounting in
the aggregate, as _they_ computed, to £3,000, and as Forster computes
to about £2,500. This Dickens, who, to use his own words, "never
undervalued his own work," considered a very inadequate percentage on
their gains--forgetting a little, perhaps, that the risks had been
wholly theirs, and that he had been more than content with the
original bargain. Similarly he was soon utterly dissatisfied with his
arrangements with Bentley about the editorship of the _Miscellany_ and
"Oliver Twist,"--arrangements which had been entered into in August,
1836, while "Pickwick" was in progress; and he utterly refused to let
that publisher have "Gabriel Varden, The Locksmith of London"
("Barnaby Rudge") on the terms originally agreed upon. With Macrone
also, who had made some £4,000 by the "Sketches," and given him about
£400, he was no better pleased, especially when that enterprising
gentleman threatened a re-issue in monthly parts, and so compelled him
to re-purchase the copyright for £2,000. But however much he might
consider himself ill-treated by the publishing fraternity, he was, of
course, rapidly getting far richer than he had been, and so able to
enlarge his mode of life. He had begun, modestly enough, by taking his
wife to live with him in his bachelor's quarters in Furnival's
Inn,--much as Tommy Traddles, in "David Copperfield," took _his_ wife
to live in chambers at Gray's Inn; and there, in Furnival's Inn, his
first child, a boy, was born on the 6th of January, 1837. But in the
March of that year he moved to a more commodious dwelling, at 48,
Doughty Street, where he remained till the end of 1839, when still
increasing means enabled him to move to a still better house at 1,
Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. But the house in Doughty Street
must have been endeared to him by many memories. It was there, on the
7th of May, 1837, that he lost, at the early age of seventeen, and
quite suddenly, a sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, to whom he was greatly
attached. The blow fell so heavily at the time as to incapacitate him
from all work, and delayed the publication of one of the numbers of
"Pickwick." Nor was the sorrow only sharp and transient. He speaks of
her in the preface to the first edition of that book. Her spirit
seemed to be hovering near as he stood looking at Niagara. He felt her
hallowing influence when in danger of growing too much elated by his
first reception in America. She came back to him in dreams in Italy.
Her image remained in his heart, unchanged by time, as he declared, to
the very end. She represented to his mind all that was pure and lovely
in opening womanhood, and lives, in the world created by his art, as
the Little Nell of "The Old Curiosity Shop." It was in Doughty Street,
too, that he began to gather round him the circle of friends whose
names seem almost like a muster-roll of the famous men and women in
the first thirty years of Queen Victoria's reign. I shall not
enumerate them. The list of writers, artists, actors, would be too
long. But this at least it would be unjust not to note, that among his
friends were included nearly all those who by any stretch of fancy
could be regarded as his rivals in the fields of humour and fiction.
With Washington Irving, Hood, Douglas Jerrold, Lord Lytton, Harrison
Ainsworth, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, and, save for a passing
foolish quarrel, with Thackeray, the novelist who really was his peer,
he maintained the kindliest and most cordial relations. Nor when
George Eliot published her first books, "The Scenes of Clerical Life"
and "Adam Bede," did any one acknowledge their excellence more freely.
Petty jealousies found no place in the nature of this great writer.

It was also while living at Doughty Street that he seems, in great
measure, to have formed those habits of work and relaxation which
every artist fashions so as to suit his own special needs and
idiosyncrasies. His favourite time for work was the morning, between
the hours of breakfast and lunch; and though, at this particular
period, the enormous pressure of his engagements compelled him to work
"double tides," and often far into the night, yet he was essentially a
day-worker, not a night-worker. Like the great German poet Goethe, he
preferred to exercise his art in the fresh morning hours, when the
dewdrops, as it were, lay bright upon his imagination and fancy. And
for relaxation and sedative, when he had thoroughly worn himself out
with mental toil, he would have recourse to the hardest bodily
exercise. At first riding seems to have contented him--fifteen miles
out and fifteen miles in, with a halt at some road-side inn for
refreshment. But soon walking took the place of riding, and he became
an indefatigable pedestrian. He would think nothing of a walk of
twenty or thirty miles, and that not merely in the vigorous heyday of
youth, but afterwards, to the very last. He was always on those alert,
quick feet of his, perambulating London from end to end, and in every
direction; perambulating the suburbs, perambulating the "greater
London" that lies within a radius of twenty miles, round the central
core of metropolitan houses. In short, he was everywhere, in all
weathers, at all hours. Nor was London, smaller and greater, his only
walking field. He would walk wherever he was--walked through and
through Genoa, and all about Genoa, when he lived there; knew every
inch of the Kent country round Broadstairs and round Gad's Hill--was,
as I have said, always, always, always on his feet. But if he would
pedestrianize everywhere, London remained the walking ground of his
heart. As Dr. Johnson held that nothing equalled a stroll down Fleet
Street, so did Dickens, sitting in full view of Genoa's perfect bay,
and with the blue Mediterranean sparkling at his feet, turn in thought
for inspiration to his old haunts. "Never," he writes to Forster, when
about to begin "The Chimes," "never did I stagger so upon a threshold
before. I seem as if I had plucked myself out of my proper soil when I
left Devonshire Terrace, and could take root no more until I return to
it.... Did I tell you how many fountains we have here? No matter. If
they played nectar, they wouldn't please me half so well as the West
Middlesex Waterworks at Devonshire Terrace.... Put me down on Waterloo
Bridge at eight o'clock in the evening, with leave to roam about as
long as I like, and I would come home, as you know, panting to go on.
I am sadly strange as it is, and can't settle." "Eight o'clock in the
evening,"--that points to another of his peculiarities. As he liked
best to walk in London, so he liked best to walk at night. The
darkness of the great city had a strange fascination for him. He never
grew tired of it, would find pleasure and refreshment, when most weary
and jaded, in losing himself in it, in abandoning himself to its
mysteries. Looked at with this knowledge, the opening of the "Old
Curiosity Shop" becomes a passage of autobiography. And how all these
wanderings must have served him in his art! Remember what a keen
observer he was, perhaps one of the keenest that ever lived, and then
think what food for observation he would thus be constantly
collecting. To the eye that knows how to see, there is no stage where
so many scenes from the drama of life are being always enacted as the
streets of London. Dickens frequented that theatre very assiduously,
and of his power of sight there can be no question.


FOOTNOTES:

[13] I think critics, and perhaps I myself, have been a little hard on
this Quarterly Reviewer. He did not, after all, say that Dickens would
come down like a stick, only that he might do so if he wrote too fast
and furiously.




CHAPTER V.


"Pickwick" had been a novel without any plot. The story, if story it
can be called, bore every trace of its hasty origin. Scene succeeded
scene, and incident incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three friends
were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all
kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many
people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading
the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal.
But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent
plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based
on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a
young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great
temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him
birth. He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly
ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he
escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of
thieves. His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to
see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common
father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when he has escaped from
their clutches. Now I would rather not say whether I consider it quite
likely that a boy of this birth and nurture would fly at a boy much
bigger than himself in vindication of the fair fame of a mother whom
he had never known, or would freely risk his life to warn a sleeping
household that they were being robbed, or would, on all occasions,
exhibit the most excellent manners and morals, and a delicacy of
feeling that is quite dainty. But this is the essence of the book. To
show purity and goodness of disposition as self-sufficient in
themselves to resist all adverse influences, is Dickens' main object.
Take Oliver's sweet uncontaminated character away, and the story
crumbles to pieces. With mere improbabilities of plot, I have no
quarrel. Of course it is not likely that the boy, on the occasion of
his first escape from the thieves, should be rescued by his father's
oldest friend, and, on the second occasion, come across his aunt. But
such coincidences must be accepted in any story; they violate no truth
of character. I am afraid I can't say as much of Master Oliver's
graces and virtues.

With this reservation, however, how much there is in the book to which
unstinted admiration can be given! As "Pickwick" first fully exhibited
the humorous side of Dickens' genius, so "Oliver Twist" first fully
exhibited its tragic side;--the pathetic side was to come somewhat
later. The scenes at the workhouse; at the thieves' dens in London;
the burglary; the murder of poor Nancy; the escape and death of the
horror-haunted Sikes,--all are painted with a master's hand. And the
book, like its predecessor, and like those that were to follow,
contains characters that have passed into common knowledge as
types,--characters of the keenest individuality, and that yet seem in
themselves to sum up a whole class. Such are Bill Sikes, whose
ruffianism has an almost epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the
Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of youth in the way they
should _not_ go; and Master Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, is
Mr. Bumble, greatest and most unhappy of beadles.

Comedy had predominated in "Pickwick," tragedy in "Oliver Twist." The
more complete fusion of the two was effected in "Nicholas Nickleby."
But as the mighty actor Garrick, in the well-known picture by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, is drawn towards the more mirthful of the two
sisters, so, here again, I think that comedy decidedly bears away the
palm,--though tragedy is not beaten altogether without a struggle
either. Here is the story as it unfolds itself. The two heroes are
Ralph Nickleby and his nephew Nicholas. They stand forth, almost from
the beginning, as antagonists, in battle array the one against the
other; and the story is, in the main, a history of the campaigns
between them--cunning and greed being mustered on the one side, and
young, generous courage on the other. At first Nicholas believes in
his uncle, who promises to befriend Nicholas's mother and sister, and
obtains for Nicholas himself a situation as usher in a Yorkshire
school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the
sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having
first beaten Mr. Squeers,--leaves it followed by a poor shattered
creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his
sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the
latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender.
Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and
ultimately marries, a young lady who had been immeshed in one of them;
and Ralph, at last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on finding that
Smike, through whom he had been endeavouring all through to injure
Nicholas, and who is now dead, was his own son. Such are the book's
dry bones, its skeleton, which one is almost ashamed to expose thus
nakedly. For the beauty of these novels lies not at all in the plot;
it is in the incidents, situations, characters. And with beauty of
this kind how richly dowered is "Nicholas Nickleby"! Take the
characters alone. What lavish profusion of humour in the theatrical
group that clusters round Mr. Vincent Crummles, the country manager;
and in the Squeers family too; and in the little shop-world of Mrs.
Mantalini, the fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheeryble Brothers, the
golden-hearted old merchants who take Nicholas into their
counting-house. Then for single characters commend me to Mrs.
Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is
positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the
honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie
Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The high-life
personages are far less successful. Dickens had small gift that way,
and seldom succeeded in his society pictures. Nor, if the truth must
be told, do I greatly care for the description of the duel between Sir
Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, though it was evidently very much
admired at the time, and is quoted, as a favourable specimen of
Dickens' style, in Charles Knight's "Half-hours with the Best
Authors." The writing is a little too _tall_. It lacks simplicity, as
is sometimes the case with Dickens, when he wants to be particularly
impressive.

And this leads me, by a kind of natural sequence, to what I have to
say about his next book, "The Old Curiosity Shop;" for here, again,
though in a very much more marked degree, I fear I shall have to run
counter to a popular opinion.

But first a word as to the circumstances under which the book was
published. Casting about, after the conclusion of "Nicholas Nickleby,"
for further literary ventures, Dickens came to the conclusion that the
public must be getting tired of his stories in monthly parts. It
occurred to him that a weekly periodical, somewhat after the manner of
Addison's _Spectator_ or Goldsmith's _Bee_, and containing essays,
stories, and miscellaneous papers,--to be written mainly, but not
entirely, by himself,--would be just the thing to revive interest, and
give his popularity a spur. Accordingly an arrangement was entered
into with Messrs. Chapman and Hall, by which they covenanted to give
him £50 for each weekly number of such a periodical, and half
profits;--and the first number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ made its
appearance in the April of 1840. Unfortunately Dickens had reckoned
altogether without his host. The public were not to be cajoled. What
they expected from their favourite was novels, not essays, short
stories, or sketches, however admirable. The orders for the first
number had amounted to seventy thousand; but they fell off as soon as
it was discovered that Master Humphrey, sitting by his clock, had no
intention of beguiling the world with a continuous narrative,--that
the title, in short, did not stand for the title of a novel. Either
the times were not ripe for the _Household Words_, which, ten years
afterwards, proved to be such a great and permanent success, or
Dickens had laid his plans badly. Vainly did he put forth all his
powers, vainly did he bring back upon the stage those old popular
favourites, Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Tony Weller. All was of no
avail. Clearly, in order to avoid defeat, a change of front had become
necessary. The novel of "The Old Curiosity Shop" was accordingly
commenced in the fourth number of the _Clock_, and very soon acted the
cuckoo's part of thrusting Master Humphrey and all that belonged to
him out of the nest. He disappeared pretty well from the periodical,
and when the novel was republished, the whole machinery of the _Clock_
had gone;--and with it I may add, some very characteristic and
admirable writing. Dickens himself confessed that he "winced a
little," when the "opening paper, ... in which Master Humphrey
described himself and his manner of life," "became the property of the
trunkmaker and the butterman;" and most Dickens lovers will agree with
me in rejoicing that the omitted parts have now at last been tardily
rescued from unmerited neglect, and finds [Transcriber's Note: sic] a
place in the recently issued "Charles Dickens" edition of the works.

There is no hero in "The Old Curiosity Shop,"--unless Mr. Richard
Swiveller, "perpetual grand-master of the Glorious Apollos," be the
questionable hero; and the heroine is Little Nell, a child. Of
Dickens' singular feeling for the pathos and humour of childhood, I
have already spoken. Many novelists, perhaps one might even say, most
novelists, have no freedom of utterance when they come to speak about
children, do not know what to do with a child if it chances to stray
into their pages. But how different with Dickens! He is never more
thoroughly at home than with the little folk. Perhaps his best speech,
and they all are good, is the one uttered at the dinner given on
behalf of the Children's Hospital. Certainly there is no figure in
"Dombey and Son" on which more loving care has been lavished than the
figure of little Paul, and when the lad dies one quite feels that the
light has gone out of the book. "David Copperfield" shorn of David's
childhood and youth would be a far less admirable performance. The
hero of "Oliver Twist" is a boy. Pip is a boy through a fair portion
of "Great Expectations." The heroine of "The Old Curiosity Shop" is,
as I have just said, a girl. And of all these children, the one who
seems, from the first, to have stood highest in popular favour, and
won most hearts, is Little Nell. Ay me, what tears have been shed over
her weary wanderings with that absurd old gambling grandfather of
hers; how many persons have sorrowed over her untimely end as if she
had been a daughter or a sister. High and low, literate and
illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her spell. Hood, he who sang
the "Song of the Shirt," paid her the tribute of his admiration, and
Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and editor of _The Edinburgh
Review_, the tribute of his tears. Landor volleyed forth his
thunderous praises over her grave, likening her to Juliet and
Desdemona. Nay, Dickens himself sadly bewailed her fate, described
himself as being the "wretchedest of the wretched" when it drew near,
and shut himself from all society as if he had suffered a real
bereavement. While as to the feeling which she has excited in the
breasts of the illiterate, we may take Mr. Bret Harte's account of the
haggard golddiggers by the roaring Californian camp fire, who throw
down their cards to listen to her story, and, for the nonce, are
softened and humanized.[14]--Such is the sympathy she has created. And
for the description of her death and burial, as a superb piece of
pathetic writing, there has been a perfect chorus of praise broken
here and there no doubt by a discordant voice, but still of the
loudest and most heartfelt. Did not Horne, a poet better known to the
last generation than to this, point out that though printed as prose,
these passages were, perhaps as "the result of harmonious accident,"
essentially poetry, and "written in blank verse of irregular metres
and rhythms, which Southey and Shelley and some other poets have
occasionally adopted"? Did he not print part of the passages in this
form, substituting only, as a concession to the conventionalities of
verse, the word "grandames" for "grandmothers"; and did he not declare
of one of the extracts so printed that it was "worthy of the best
passages in Wordsworth"?

If it "argues an insensibility" to stand somewhat unmoved among all
these tears and admiration, I am afraid I must be rather
pebble-hearted. To tell the whole damaging truth, I am, and always
have been, only slightly affected by the story of Little Nell; have
never felt any particular inclination to shed a tear over it, and
consider the closing chapters as failing of their due effect, on me at
least, because they are pitched in a key that is altogether too high
and unnatural. Of course one makes a confession of this kind with
diffidence. It is no light thing to stem the current of a popular
opinion. But one can only go with the stream when one thinks the
stream is flowing in a right channel. And here I think the stream is
meandering out of its course. For me, Little Nell is scarcely more
than a figure in cloudland. Possibly part of the reason why I do not
feel as much sympathy with her as I ought, is because I do not seem to
know her very well. With Paul Dombey I am intimately acquainted. I
should recognize the child anywhere, should be on the best of terms
with him in five minutes. Few things would give me greater pleasure
than an hour's saunter by the side of his little invalid's carriage
along the Parade at Brighton. How we should laugh, to be sure, if we
happened to come across Mr. Toots, and smile, too, if we met Feeder,
B.A., and give a furtive glance of recognition at Glubb, the discarded
charioteer. Then the classic Cornelia Blimber would pass, on her
constitutional, and we should quail a little--at least I am certain
_I_ should--as she bent upon us her scholastic spectacles; and a
glimpse of Dr. Blimber would chill us even more; till--ah! what's
this? Why does a flush of happiness mantle over my little friend's
pale face? Why does he utter a faint cry of pleasure? Yes, there she
is--he has caught sight of Floy running forward to meet him.--So am
I led, almost instinctively, whenever the figure of Paul flashes into
my mind, to think of him as a child I have actually known. But
Nell--she has no such reality of existence. She has been etherealized,
vapourized, rhapsodized about, till the flesh and blood have gone out
of her. I recognize her attributes, unselfishness, sweetness of
disposition, gentleness. But these don't constitute a human being.
They don't make up a recognizable individuality. If I met her in the
street, I am afraid I should not know her; and if I did, I am sure we
should both find it difficult to keep up a conversation.

Do the passages describing her death and burial really possess the
rhythm of poetry? That would seem to me, I confess, to be as ill a
compliment as to say of a piece of poetry that it was really prose.
The music of prose and of poetry are essentially different. They do
not affect the ear in the same way. The one is akin to song, the other
to speech. Give to prose the recurring cadences, the measure, and the
rhythmic march of verse, and it becomes bad prose without becoming
good poetry.[15] So, in fairness to Dickens, one is bound, as far as
one can, to forget Horne's misapplied praise. But even thus, and
looking upon it as prose alone, can we say that the account of Nell's
funeral is, in the high artistic sense, a piece of good work. Here is
an extract: "And now the bell--the bell she had so often heard, by
night and day, and listened to with solemn pleasure almost as a
living voice--rang its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so
beautiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming
youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth--on crutches, in the pride
of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn
of life--to gather round her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes were
dim and senses failing--grandmothers, who might have died ten years
ago, and still been old,--the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied,
the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that
earthly grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that which
still could crawl and creep above it?" Such is the tone throughout,
and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone
in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard?
All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me--shall I say it?--as much out of
place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister
of state--with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by
a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over
the grave. The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not
much less incongruous and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject,
above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most
effective.

There are some, indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos
altogether. Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little
unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more
obvious kind. But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and
overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious
as to defeat their own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what I
have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the
force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to
acknowledge that Dickens occasionally lays himself open to it. But go
one inch beyond this I cannot. Of course we may, if we like, take up a
position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in
art. We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for
existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only
treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall. We may hold
that neither sorrow nor suffering call for any meed of sympathy. Such
is mainly the attitude which the French novelist adopts towards the
world of his creation.[16] But once admit that feeling is legitimate;
once allow that tears are due to those who have been crushed and left
bleeding by this great world of ours as it crashes blundering on its
way; once grant that the writer's art can properly embrace what
Shakespeare calls "the pity of it," the sorrows inwoven in all our
human relationships; once acknowledge all this, and then I affirm,
most confidently, that Dickens, working at his best, was one of the
greatest masters of pathos who ever lived. I can myself see scarce a
strained discordant note in the account of the short life and early
death of Paul Dombey, and none in the description of the death of Paul
Dombey's mother, or in the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of
David Copperfield's childhood and boyhood. I consider the passage in
"American Notes" describing the traits of gentle kindliness among the
emigrants as being nobly, pathetically eloquent. Did space allow, I
could support my position by quotations and example to any extent. And
my conclusion is that, though he failed with Little Nell, yet he
succeeded elsewhere, and superbly.

The number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, containing the conclusion of
"The Old Curiosity Shop," appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and
"Barnaby Rudge" began its course in the ensuing week. The first had
been essentially a tale of modern life. All the characters that made a
kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of
Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when
the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the
past some six and forty years ago. Quilp, the dwarf,--and a far finer
specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in every respect, than that poor
stage villain Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister Sally, a
goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and plain of body, who so barely
escapes from the plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to prove
him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing of notaries' clerks; Mrs.
Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be
naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate
Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little
misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a
marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the
idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery
rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the
"Glorious Apollers,"--all these, making allowance perhaps for some
idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time. But in "Barnaby
Rudge," Dickens threw himself back into the last century. The book is
a historical novel, one of the two which he wrote, the other being the
"Tale of Two Cities," and its scenes are many of them laid among the
No Popery Riots of 1780.

A ghastly time, a time of aimless, brutal incendiarism and mad
turbulence on the part of the mob; a time of weakness and ineptitude
on the part of the Government; a time of wickedness, folly, and
misrule. Dickens describes it admirably. His picture of the riots
themselves seems painted in pigments of blood and fire; and yet,
through all the hurry and confusion, he retains the clearness of
arrangement and lucidity which characterize the pictures of such
subjects when executed by the great masters of the art--as Carlyle,
for example. His portrait of the poor, crazy-brained creature, Lord
George Gordon, who sowed the wind which the country was to reap in
whirlwind, is excellent. Nor is what may be called the private part of
the story unskilfully woven with the historical part. The plot, though
not good, rises perhaps above the average of Dickens' plots; for even
we, his admirers, are scarcely bound to maintain that plot was his
strong point. Beyond this, I think I may say that the book is, on the
whole, the least characteristic of his books. It is the one which
those who are most out of sympathy with his peculiar vein of humour
and pathos will probably think the best, and the one which the true
Dickens lovers will generally regard as bearing the greatest
resemblance to an ordinary novel.


FOOTNOTES:

[14] "Dickens in Camp."

[15] Dickens himself knew that he had a tendency to fall into blank
verse in moments of excitement, and tried to guard against it.

[16] M. Daudet, in many respects a follower of Dickens, is a fine and
notable exception.




CHAPTER VI.


The last number of "Barnaby Rudge" appeared in November, 1841, and, on
the 4th of the following January Dickens sailed with his wife for a
six months' tour in the United States. What induced him to undertake
this journey, more formidable then, of course, than now?

Mainly, I think, that restless desire to see the world which is strong
in a great many men, and was specially strong in Dickens. Ride as he
might, and walk as he might, his abounding energies remained
unsatisfied. In 1837 there had been trips to Belgium, Broadstairs,
Brighton; in 1838 to Yorkshire, Broadstairs, North Wales, and a fairly
long stay at Twickenham; in 1839 a similar stay at Petersham--where,
as at Twickenham, frolic, gaiety and athletics had prevailed,--and
trips to Broadstairs and Devonshire; in 1840 trips again to Bath,
Birmingham, Shakespeare's country, Broadstairs, Devonshire; in 1841
more trips, and a very notable visit to Edinburgh, with which Little
Nell had a great deal to do. For Lord Jeffrey was enamoured of that
young lady, declaring to whomsoever would hear that there had been
"nothing so good ... since Cordelia;" and inoculating the citizens of
the northern capital with his enthusiasm, he had induced them to offer
to Dickens a right royal banquet, and the freedom of their city.
Accordingly to Edinburgh he repaired, and the dinner took place on the
26th of June, with three hundred of the chief notabilities for
entertainers, and a reception such as kings might have envied. Jeffrey
himself was ill and unable to take the chair, but Wilson, the leonine
"Christopher North," editor of _Blackwood_, and author of those
"Noctes Ambrosianę" which were read so eagerly as they came out, and
which some of us find so difficult to read now--Wilson presided most
worthily. Of speechifying there was of course much, and compliments
abounded. But the banquet itself, the whole reception at Edinburgh was
the most magnificent of compliments. Never, I imagine, can such
efforts have been made to turn any young man's brain, as were made,
during this and the following year, to turn the head of Dickens, who
was still, be it remembered, under thirty. Nevertheless he came
unscathed through the ordeal. A kind of manly genuineness bore him
through. Amid all the adulation and excitement, the public and private
hospitalities, the semi-regal state appearance at the theatre, he
could write, and write truly, to his friend Forster: "The moral of
this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most
heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't
hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for
battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and
Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit
my household gods, please heaven. I wish the day were here."

Yes, except during the few years when he and his wife lived unhappily
together, he was greatly attached to his home, with its friendships
and simple pleasures; but yet, as I have said, a desire to see more of
the world, and to garner new experiences, was strong upon him. The two
conflicting influences often warred in his life, so that it almost
seemed sometimes as if he were being driven by relentless furies.
Those furies pointed now with stern fingers towards America, though
"how" he was "to get on" "for seven or eight months without" his
friends, he could not upon his "soul conceive;" though he dreaded "to
think of breaking up all" his "old happy habits for so long a time;"
though "Kate," remembering doubtless her four little children, wept
whenever the subject was "spoken of." Something made him feel that the
going was "a matter of imperative necessity." Washington Irving
beckoned from across the Atlantic, speaking, as Jeffrey had spoken
from Edinburgh, of Little Nell and her far-extended influence. There
was a great reception foreshadowed, and a new world to be seen, and a
book to be written about it. While as to the strongest of the home
ties--the children that brought the tears into Mrs. Dickens'
eyes,--the separation, after all, would not be eternal, and the good
Macready, tragic actor and true friend, would take charge of the
little folk while their parents were away. So Dickens, who had some
time before "begun counting the days between this and coming home
again," set sail, as I have said, for America on the 4th of January,
1842.

And a very rough experience he, and Mrs. Dickens, and Mrs. Dickens'
maid seem to have had during that January passage from Liverpool to
Halifax and Boston. Most of the time it blew horribly, and they were
direfully ill. Then a storm supervened, which swept away the
paddle-boxes and stove in the life-boats, and they seem to have been
in real peril. Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But dangers and
discomforts must have been forgotten, at any rate to begin with, in
the glories of the reception that awaited the "inimitable,"--as
Dickens whimsically called himself in those days,--when he landed in
the New World. If he had been received with princely honours in
Edinburgh, he was treated now as an emperor in some triumphant
progress. Halifax sounded the first note of welcome, gave, as it were,
the preliminary trumpet flourish. From that town he writes: "I wish
you could have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable in the streets.
I wish you could have seen judges, law-officers, bishops, and
law-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could have seen the
inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the Speaker's throne, and
sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, the
observed of all observers, listening with exemplary gravity to the
queerest speaking possible, and breaking, in spite of himself, into a
smile as he thought of this commencement to the thousand and one
stories in reserve for home." At Boston the enthusiasm had swelled to
even greater proportions. "How can I give you," he writes, "the
faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and
out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out;
of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses,
letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners,
assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to
which I have had an invitation with every known name in America
appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have
come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the
rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories,
villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have
written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate,
and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind." All was
indeed going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not rightly say that the
world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth
had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power?
What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a
reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? Is it matter for surprise
if he found the women "very beautiful," the "general breeding neither
stiff nor forward," "the good nature universal"; if he expatiated, not
without a backward look at unprogressive Old England, on the
comparative comfort among the working classes, and the absence of
beggars in the streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns
sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather. Before many
weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very
different spirit. On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect
ovation of balls and dinners, he writes "with reluctance,
disappointment, and sorrow," that "there is no country on the face of
the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in
reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in"
the United States. On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready,
who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent: "It
is of no use, I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to
see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a
liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniment of Court
circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth
and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it
appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast,
excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children,
it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and
England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and
miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison....
Freedom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry
and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew.... In the
respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by
tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably."

Extracts like these could be multiplied to any extent, and the
question arises, why did such a change come over the spirit of
Dickens? Washington Irving, at the great New York dinner, had called
him "the guest of the nation." Why was the guest so quickly
dissatisfied with his host, and quarrelling with the character of his
entertainment? Sheer physical fatigue, I think, had a good deal to do
with it. Even at Boston, before he had begun to travel over the
unending railways, water-courses, and chaotic coach-roads of the great
Republic, that key-note had been sounded. "We are already," he had
written, "weary at times, past all expression." Few men can wander
with impunity out of their own professional sphere, and undertake
duties for which they have neither the training nor acquired tastes.
Dickens was a writer, not a king; and here he was expected to hold a
king's state, and live in a king's publicity, but without the formal
etiquette that hedge a king from intruders, and make his position
tolerable. He was hemmed in by curious eyes, mobbed in the streets,
stared at in his own private rooms, interviewed by the hour, shaken by
the hand till his arm must often have been ready to drop off, waylaid
at every turn with formal addresses. If he went to church the people
crowded into the adjacent pews, and the preacher preached at him. If
he got into a public conveyance, every one inside insisted on an
introduction, and the people outside--say before the train
started--would pull down the windows and comment freely on his nose
and eyes and personal appearance generally, some even touching him as
if to see if he were real. He was safe from intrusion nowhere--no, not
when he was washing and his wife in bed. Such attentions must have
been exhausting to a degree that can scarcely be imagined. But there
was more than mere physical weariness in his growing distaste for the
United States. Perfectly outspoken at all times, and eager for the
strife of tongues in any cause which he had at heart, it horrified him
to find that he was expected not to express himself freely on such
subjects as International Copyright, and that even in private, or
semi-private intercourse, slavery was a topic to be avoided. Then I
fear, too, that as he left cultured Boston behind, he was brought into
close and habitual contact with natives whom he did not appreciate.
Rightly or wrongly, he took a strong dislike for Brother Jonathan as
Brother Jonathan existed, in the rough, five and forty years ago. He
was angered by that young gentleman's brag, offended by the rough
familiarity of his manners, indignant at his determination by all
means to acquire dollars, incensed by his utter want of care for
literature and art, sickened by his tobacco-chewing and
expectorations. So when Dickens gets to "Niagara Falls, upon the
_English_ side," he puts ten dashes under the word English; and,
meeting two English officers, contrasts them in thought with the men
whom he has just left, and seems, by note of exclamation and italics,
to call upon the world to witness, "what _gentlemen_, what noblemen of
nature they seemed!"

And Brother Jonathan, how did _he_ regard his young guest? Well,
Jonathan, great as he was, and greater as he was destined to be, did
not possess the gift of prophecy, and could not of course foresee the
scathing satire of "American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." But
still, amid all his enthusiasm, I think there must have been a feeling
of uneasiness and disappointment. Part, as there is no doubt, of the
fervour with which he greeted Dickens, was due to his regarding
Dickens as the representative of democratic feeling in aristocratic
England, as the advocate of the poor and down-trodden against the
wealthy and the strong; "and"--thus argued Jonathan--"because we are
a democracy, therefore Dickens will admire and love us, and see how
immeasurably superior we are to the retrograde Britishers of his
native land." But unfortunately Dickens showed no signs of being
impressed in that particular way. On the contrary, as we have seen,
such comparison as he made in his own mind was infinitely to the
disadvantage of the United States. "We must be cracked up," says
Hannibal Chollop, in "Martin Chuzzlewit," speaking of his fellow
countrymen. And Dickens, even while fźted and honoured, would not
"crack up" the Americans. He lectured them almost with truculence on
their sins in the matter of copyright; he could scarcely be restrained
from testifying against slavery; he was not the man to say he liked
manners and customs which he loathed. Jonathan must have been very
doubtfully satisfied with his guest.

It is no part of my purpose to follow Dickens lingeringly, and step by
step, from the day when he landed at Halifax, to the 7th of June, when
he re-embarked at New York for England. From Boston he went to New
York, where the great dinner was given with Washington Irving in the
chair, and thence to Philadelphia and Washington,--which was still the
empty "city of magnificent distances," that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares
it has now ceased to be;--and thence again westward, and by Niagara
and Canada back to New York. And if any persons want to know what he
thought about these and other places, and the railway travelling, and
the coach travelling, and the steamboat travelling, and the prisons
and other public institutions--aye, and many other things besides,
they cannot do better than read the "American Notes for general
circulation," which he wrote and published within the year after his
return. Nor need such persons be deterred by the fact that Macaulay
thought meanly of the book; for Macaulay, with all his great gifts,
did not, as he himself knew full well, excel in purely literary
criticism. So when he pronounces, that "what is meant to be easy and
sprightly is vulgar and flippant," and "what is meant to be fine is a
great deal too fine for me, as the description of the Falls of
Niagara," one can venture to differ without too great a pang. The
book, though not assuredly one of Dickens' best, contains admirable
passages which none but he could have written, and the description of
Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the subject being
remembered, as a piece of impassioned prose. Whether satire so bitter
and unfriendly as that in which he indulged, both here and in "Martin
Chuzzlewit," was justifiable from what may be called an international
point of view, is another question. Publicists do not always remember
that a cut which would smart for a moment, and then be forgotten, if
aimed at a countryman, rankles and festers if administered to a
foreigner. And if this be true as regards the English publicist's
comment on the foreigner who does not understand our language, it is,
of course, true with tenfold force as regards the foreigner whose
language is our own. _He_ understands only too well the jibe and the
sneer, and the tone of superiority, more offensive perhaps than
either. Looked at in this way, it can, I think, but be accounted a
misfortune that the most popular of English writers penned two books
containing so much calculated to wound American feeling, as the
"Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." Nor are signs entirely wanting that,
as the years went by, the mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some
such suspicion. A quarter of a century later, he visited the United
States a second time; and speaking at a public dinner given in his
honour by the journalists of New York, he took occasion to comment on
the enormous strides which the country had made in the interval, and
then said, "Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in
five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had
nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was
here first." And he added that, in all future editions of the two
books just named, he would cause to be recorded, that, "wherever he
had been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, he had been
received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper,
hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the
privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature of his avocation there"
(as a public reader), "and the state of his health."

And now, with three observations, I will conclude what I have to say
about the visit to America in 1842. The first is that the "Notes" are
entirely void of all vulgarity of reference to the private life of the
notable Americans whom Dickens had met. He seems to have known, more
or less intimately, the chief writers of the time--Washington Irving,
Channing, Dana, Bryant, Longfellow, Bancroft; but his intercourse with
them he held sacred, and he made no literary capital out of it.
Secondly, it is pleasant to note that there was, so far, no great
"incompatibility of temper" between him and his wife. He speaks of
her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as a "most admirable
traveller," and expatiates on the good temper and equanimity with
which she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most trying journey.
And the third point to which I will call attention is the thoroughly
characteristic form of rest to which he had recourse in the midst of
all his toil and travel. Most men would have sought relaxation in
being quiet. He found it in vigorously getting up private theatricals
with the officers of the Coldstream Guards, at Montreal. Besides
acting in all the three pieces played, he also accepted the part of
stage manager; and "I am not," he says, "placarded as stage manager
for nothing. Everybody was told that they would have to submit to the
most iron despotism, and didn't I come Macready over them? Oh no, by
no means; certainly not. The pains I have taken with them, and the
perspiration I have expended, during the last ten days, exceed in
amount anything you can imagine." What bright vitality, and what a
singular charm of exuberant animal spirits!

And who was glad one evening--which would be about the last evening in
June, or the first of July--when a hackney coach rattled up to the
door of the house in Devonshire Terrace, and four little folk, two
girls and two boys, were hurried down, and kissed through the bars of
the gate, because their father was too eager to wait till it was
opened? Who were glad but the little folk aforementioned--I say
nothing of the joy of father and mother; for children as they were, a
sense of sorrowful loss had been theirs while their parents were away,
and greater strictness seems to have reigned in the good Macready's
household than in their own joyous home. It is Miss Dickens herself
who tells us this, and in whose memory has lingered that pretty scene
of the kiss through the bars in the summer gloaming. And she has much
to tell us too of her father's tenderness and care,--of his sympathy
with the children's terrors, so that, for instance, he would sit
beside the cot of one of the little girls who had been startled, and
hold her hand in his till she fell asleep; of his having them on his
knees, and singing to them the merriest of comic songs; of his
interest in all their small concerns; of the many pet names with which
he invested them.[17] Then, as they grew older, there were Twelfth
Night parties and magic lanterns. "Never such magic lanterns as those
shown by him," she says. "Never such conjuring as his." There was
dancing, too, and the little ones taught him his steps, which he
practised with much assiduity, once even jumping out of bed in terror,
lest he had forgotten the polka, and indulging in a solitary midnight
rehearsal. Then, as the children grew older still, there were private
theatricals. "He never," she says again, "was too busy to interest
himself in his children's occupations, lessons, amusements, and
general welfare." Clearly not one of those brilliant men, a numerous
race, who when away from their homes, in general society, sparkle and
scintillate, flash out their wit, and irradiate all with their humour,
but who, when at home, are dull as rusted steel. Among the many
tributes to his greatness, that of his own child has a place at once
touching and beautiful.


FOOTNOTES:

[17] Miss Dickens evidently bears proudly still her pet name of
"Mamie," and signs it to her book.




CHAPTER VII.


With the return from America began the old life of hard work and hard
play. There was much industrious writing of "American Notes," at
Broadstairs and elsewhere; and there were many dinners of welcome
home, and strolls, doubtless, with Forster and Maclise, and other
intimates, to old haunts, as Jack Straw's Castle on Hampstead Heath,
and similar houses of public entertainment. And then in the autumn
there was "such a trip ... into Cornwall," with Forster, and the
painters Stanfield and Maclise for travelling companions. How they
enjoyed themselves to be sure, and with what bubbling, bursting
merriment. "I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey,"
writes Dickens, "... I was choking and gasping ... all the way. And
Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often
obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could
recover him." Immediately on their return, refreshed and invigorated
by this wholesome hilarity and enjoyment, he threw himself into the
composition of his next book, and the first number of "Martin
Chuzzlewit" appeared in January, 1843.

"Martin Chuzzlewit" is unquestionably one of Dickens' great works. He
himself held it to be "in a hundred points" and "immeasurably"
superior to anything he had before written, and that verdict may, I
think, be accepted freely. The plot, as plot is usually understood,
can scarcely indeed be commended. But then plot was never his strong
point. Later in life, and acting, as I have always surmised, under the
influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, he endeavoured to
construct ingenious stories that turned on mysterious disappearances,
and the substitution of one person for another, and murders real or
suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens had no real
gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He
did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and
marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by
seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax.
Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move
forward at all, he was compelled to make h