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Dickens

by Sir Adolphus William Ward · English · Gutenberg #36714 · 437,364 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Dickens

Author: Sir Adolphus William Ward


        
Release date: July 12, 2011 [eBook #36714]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICKENS ***




Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive.)









English Men of Letters

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY




  DICKENS


  BY ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD


  NEW YORK
  HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
  FRANKLIN SQUARE




ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.

  JOHNSON               Leslie Stephen.
  GIBBON                 J. C. Morison.
  SCOTT                   R. H. Hutton.
  SHELLEY                J. A. Symonds.
  HUME                    T. H. Huxley.
  GOLDSMITH              William Black.
  DEFOE                  William Minto.
  BURNS                   J. C. Shairp.
  SPENSER                 R. W. Church.
  THACKERAY           Anthony Trollope.
  BURKE                    John Morley.
  MILTON                 Mark Pattison.
  HAWTHORNE            Henry James, Jr.
  SOUTHEY                    E. Dowden.
  CHAUCER                   A. W. Ward.
  BUNYAN                  J. A. Froude.
  COWPER                 Goldwin Smith.
  POPE                  Leslie Stephen.
  BYRON                    John Nichol.
  LOCKE                  Thomas Fowler.
  WORDSWORTH                  F. Myers.
  DRYDEN                 G. Saintsbury.
  LANDOR                 Sidney Colvin.
  DE QUINCEY              David Masson.
  LAMB                   Alfred Ainger.
  BENTLEY                   R. C. Jebb.
  DICKENS                   A. W. Ward.
  GRAY                     E. W. Gosse.
  SWIFT                 Leslie Stephen.
  STERNE                  H. D. Traill.
  MACAULAY           J. Cotter Morison.
  FIELDING               Austin Dobson.
  SHERIDAN               Mrs. Oliphant.
  ADDISON              W. J. Courthope.
  BACON                   R. W. Church.
  COLERIDGE               H. D. Traill.
  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY      J. A. Symonds.
  KEATS                  Sidney Colvin.

12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.

_Other volumes in preparation._

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

_Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part
of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price._




PREFACE.


At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend John Forster,
but not to be found in the English editions of the _Life_, the writer adds
to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words: "I
desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the
control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic."
Dickens was a man of few close friendships--"his breast," he said, "would
not hold many people"--but, of these friendships, that with Forster was
one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. To Dickens, at
least, his future biographer must have been the embodiment of two
qualities rarely combined in equal measure--discretion and candour. In
literary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was given, and
nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of Dickens passed through
his faithful helpmate's hands. Nor were there many important decisions
formed by Dickens concerning himself in the course of his manhood to which
Forster was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once counselled in
vain.

On Mr. Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_, together with the three
volumes of _Letters_ collected by Dickens's eldest daughter and his
sister-in-law--his "dearest and best friend"--it is superfluous to state
that the biographical portion of the following essay is mainly based. It
may be superfluous, but it cannot be considered impertinent, if I add that
the shortcomings of the _Life_ have, in my opinion, been more frequently
proclaimed than defined; and that its merits are those of its author as
well as of its subject.

My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me in connexion
with the production of this little volume by Miss Hogarth, Mr. Charles
Dickens, Professor Henry Morley, Mr. Alexander Ireland, Mr. John Evans,
Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Britton. Mr. Evans has kindly enabled me to correct
some inaccuracies in Mr. Forster's account of Dickens's early Chatham days
on unimpeachable first-hand evidence. I also beg Captain and Mrs. Budden
to accept my thanks for allowing me to see Gad's Hill Place.

I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Librarian of the
Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in
affording me much useful aid and information. With the kind permission of
Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of
Dickens's life, in the period 1838-'41, from a hitherto unpublished
source--a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of _The Law and
Commercial Daily Remembrancer_ for those years. These volumes formed no
part of the Forster bequest, but were added to it, under certain
conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief; and
sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another
with no other note than "Work."

Mr. R. H. Shepherd's _Bibliography of Dickens_ has been of considerable
service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as
a charming reminiscence of the connexion between _Charles Dickens and
Rochester_, Mr. Robert Langton's sketches illustrating a paper recently
printed under that title?

Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor
T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to me on
this, any more than on former occasions.

A. W. W.




CONTENTS.


                                      PAGE

  PREFACE                                v

  CHAPTER I.
    BEFORE "PICKWICK"                    1

  CHAPTER II.
    FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS             20

  CHAPTER III.
    STRANGE LANDS                       49

  CHAPTER IV.
    "DAVID COPPERFIELD"                 85

  CHAPTER V.
    CHANGES                            108

  CHAPTER VI.
    LAST YEARS                         146

  CHAPTER VII.
    THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME       192




DICKENS.




CHAPTER I.

BEFORE "PICKWICK."

[1812-1836.]


Charles Dickens, the eldest son, and the second of the eight children, of
John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on
Friday, February 7, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huffham.
His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and employed in
the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was recalled to London when his eldest son was
only two years of age; and two years afterwards was transferred to
Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 1821. Thus Chatham,
and the more venerable city of Rochester adjoining, with their
neighbourhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodland and
marshes, became, in the words of Dickens's biographer, the birthplace of
his fancy. He looked upon himself as, to all intents and purposes, a
Kentish man born and bred, and his heart was always in this particular
corner of the incomparable county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred
Jingle's spasmodic eloquence had, in the very first number of _Pickwick_,
epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, already the scene of
one of the _Sketches_, Dickens returned to the local associations of his
early childhood. It was at Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on
his solitary tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night's sleep "near a
cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps;" and in many a
Christmas narrative or uncommercial etching the familiar features of town
and country, of road and river, were reproduced, before in _Great
Expectations_ they suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his
later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his faithful fancy
once more haunted the well-known precincts. During the last thirteen years
of his life he was again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where,
with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so often made
holiday; where, when hope was young, he had spent his honey-moon; and
whither, after his last restless wanderings, he was to return, to seek
such repose as he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the
daily life of the "very queer small boy" of that early time is only quite
incidentally to be associated with the grand gentleman's house on Gad's
Hill, where his father, little thinking that his son was to act over again
the story of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he might some
day come to live, if he were to be very persevering, and to work hard. The
family abode was in Ordnance (not St. Mary's) Place, at Chatham, amidst
surroundings classified in Mr. Pickwick's notes as "appearing to be
soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and dock-yard men." But
though the half-mean, half-picturesque aspect of the Chatham streets may
already at an early age have had its fascination for Dickens, yet his
childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of observation. Having
learned reading from his mother, he was sent with his elder sister, Fanny,
to a day-school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles,
the eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, whose family had
formed an intimate acquaintance with their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The
younger Giles children were pupils at the school of their elder brother
with Charles and Fanny Dickens, and thus naturally their constant
playmates. In later life Dickens preserved a grateful remembrance, at
times refreshed by pleasant communications between the families, of the
training he had received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as
generous man, who, recognising his pupil's abilities, seems to have
resolved that they should not lie fallow for want of early cultivation.
Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for supposing that this
period of his life was anything but happy. For his sister Fanny he always
preserved a tender regard; and a touching little paper, written by him
after her death in womanhood, relates how the two children used to watch
the stars together, and make friends with one in particular, as belonging
to themselves. But obviously he did not lack playmates of his own sex; and
it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes made him disinclined to take
much part in the rougher sports of his school-fellows, that he found
plenty of time for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came to
pass that already as a child he followed his own likings in the two
directions from which they were never very materially to swerve. He once
said of himself that he had been "a writer when a mere baby, an actor
always."

Of these two passions he could always, as a child and as a man, be "happy
with either," and occasionally with both at the same time. In his tender
years he was taken by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to
see the legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits behind the
scenes at private theatricals; while his own juvenile powers as a teller
of stories and singer of comic songs (he was possessed, says one who
remembers him, of a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs
and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fellows. He also
wrote a--not strictly original--tragedy, which is missing among his
_Reprinted Pieces_. There is nothing unique in these childish doings, nor
in the circumstance that he was an eager reader of works of fiction; but
it is noteworthy that chief among the books to which he applied himself,
in a small neglected bookroom in his father's house, were those to which
his allegiance remained true through much of his career as an author.
Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination for his mind from
his earliest childhood, besides the "Arabian Nights" and kindred tales,
and the English Essayists, he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes
and Le Sage, in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald's
collection of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as he was no
great reader in the days of his authorship, and had to go through hard
times of his own before, it was well that the literature of his childhood
was good of its kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay.
Dickens afterwards made it an article of his social creed that the
imagination of the young needs nourishment as much as their bodies require
food and clothing; and he had reason for gratefully remembering that at
all events the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect.

But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his
family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began.
Misfortune pursued the elder Dickens to town, his salary having been
decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at
economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street,
Camden Town; and here, what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he
was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he
was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son's education to take
care of itself. John Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as
a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him,
and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years; nor would it
be fair, because of a similarity in their experiences, and in the grandeur
of their habitual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the
immortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details of manner and
incident, can the character of the elder Dickens be thought to have
suggested that of the pitiful "Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison,
almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the
unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London.

Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles,
whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive
sketches of odd personages among his acquaintance, had become familiar
with the inside of a pawnbroker's shop, and had sold the paternal
"library" piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller,
with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber's representative. But
neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens's abortive efforts at setting up
an educational establishment had been of avail. Her husband's creditors
_would not_ give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and
more especially for the little eldest son, now ten years old, in which,
as he afterwards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, "but for the
mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of
him, a little robber or a little vagabond."

Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiography, communicated
to him by Dickens five-and-twenty years after the period to which it
refers, and subsequently incorporated with but few changes in the
_Personal History of David Copperfield_. Who can forget the thrill with
which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of the solitary
child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, was an
episode in the life of Charles Dickens himself? Between fact and fiction
there was but a difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby's wine warehouse
down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren's blacking warehouse at Hungerford
Stairs, in which a place had been found for the boy by a relative, a
partner in the concern; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels
were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and the miserable pay,
the uncongenial companionship during worktime, and the speculative devices
of the dinner-hour were the same in each case. At this time, after his
family had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to the little
waif at night was a lodging in Little College Street, Camden Town,
presenting even fewer attractions than Mr. Micawber's residence in Windsor
Terrace, and kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs.
Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. On his urgent
remonstrance--"the first I had ever made about my lot"--concerning the
distance from his family at which he was left through the week, a back
attic was found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, "where Bob Sawyer
lodged many years afterwards;" and he now breakfasted and supped with his
parents in their apartment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon
by a faithful "orfling," who had accompanied the family and its fortunes
from Chatham, and who is said by Forster to have her part in the character
of the Marchioness. Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his
discharge, and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodgings, a
quarrel occurred between the elder Dickens and his cousin, and the boy was
in consequence taken away from the business.

He had not been ill-treated there; nor indeed is it ill-treatment which
leads to David Copperfield's running away in the story. Nevertheless, it
is not strange that Dickens should have looked back with a bitterness very
unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish solitude and
degradation. He never "forgot" his mother's having wished him to remain in
the warehouse; the subject of his employment there was never afterwards
mentioned in the family; he could not bring himself to go near old
Hungerford Market so long as it remained standing; and to no human being,
not even to his wife, did he speak of this passage in his life until he
narrated it in the fragment of autobiography which he confided to his
trusty friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain; for no man is
expected to dilate upon the days "when he lived among the beggars in St.
Mary Axe," and it is only the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or
falsely, in the sordid memories of the time before they became rich or
powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his childhood might have ceased
to be resented by one whom the world on the whole treated so kindly, at
least they left his heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender
to the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion "eaten his bread
with tears" when a puny child.

A happy accident having released the David Copperfield of actual life from
his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at
that time was the lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. "The
world has done much better since in that way, and will do far better yet,"
he writes at the close of his description of _Our School_, the "Wellington
House Academy," situate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest
gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms
his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this
worthy and his usher, "considered to know everything as opposed to the
chief who was considered to know nothing," furnished some of the features
in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly
doubted by an old school-fellow whether the statement "We were First Boy"
is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, when he
entered the school, was "put into Virgil," he was not put there to much
purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the
resumption of the old amusements which were to grow into the occupations
of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the
express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the
manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot.

After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for
Charles Dickens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who
had probably lost his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber's
phrase, "hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking employment as a
parliamentary reporter, and must have rejoiced when a Gray's Inn solicitor
of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son,
took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His
office associates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the
blacking warehouse; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the
vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession
as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequented, in company
with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor theatres, and even occasionally to
have acted there; and assuredly it must have been personal knowledge which
suggested the curiously savage description of _Private Theatres_ in the
_Sketches by Boz_, the all but solitary _unkindly_ reference to theatrical
amusements in his works. But whatever his experiences of this kind may
have been, he passed unscathed through them; and during the year and a
half of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the technicalities
of the law to be able to assail its enormities without falling into
rudimentary errors about it, and sufficient knowledge of lawyers and
lawyers' men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters.

Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the
son into the line of life from which he was easily to pass into the career
where success and fame awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained
employment as a parliamentary reporter for the _Morning Herald_, his son,
who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, resolved to
essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years
of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life,
two of his most marked characteristics--strength of will, and a
determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it thoroughly. The art of
short-hand, which he now resolutely set himself to master, was in those
days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first
efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he had
conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But Dickens, whose education
no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a
reporter of the highest class he needed something besides the knowledge of
short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set
himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British
Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of
Dickens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what
is not less true than obvious; but he had this one quality of the true
lover of reading, that he never professed a familiarity with that of which
he knew little or nothing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even
when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors' Commons. With this
occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years.
Once more David Copperfield, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth,
will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his
soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the
rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story,
but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of
opinion that he had loved particularly wisely; but how well he had loved
is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing
came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit
the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that
Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora; for
it was as such that, not very chivalrously, he could bring himself to
describe her, for the second time, in _Little Dorrit_.

Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a newspaper, he had, and
not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It
was the profession to which--uncommercially--he was attached during so
great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a
stage of his own, he seemed to be but following an irresistible
fascination. His best friend described him to me as "a born actor;" and
who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only--those
whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is behind
them? His love of acting was stronger than himself; and I doubt whether he
ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it.
"Assumption," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, "has charms for me--I
hardly know for how many wild reasons--so delightful that I feel a loss
of, oh! I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being
some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre and
everything which savoured of histrionics with an intensity not even to be
imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same passion. He had
that "belief in a play" which he so pleasantly described as one of the
characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson
Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and
acting which makes a little separate world of the "quality." One of the
staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English
tragedian of his age, Macready; one of the delights of his last years was
his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No
performer, however, was so obscure or so feeble as to be outside the pale
of his sympathy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all manner of
entertainers and entertainments--from Mr. Vincent Crummles and the more or
less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary's horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley's
wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickleson
the giant; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously
applauding a young lady "who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers,
leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon
which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, 'Behold the
abazid power of woobad!'" He was unable to sit through a forlorn
performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a
sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house
when he entered, and which "had warmed up in the course of the evening to
twelve shillings;" and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by
appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as
Pantaloon: "Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir--no one knows it
better, sir--there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own
circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy,
sir!--a boy!" Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the
streets he first sees in the United States remind him irresistibly of the
set-scene in a London pantomime; and at Verona his interest is divided
between _Romeo and Juliet_ and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the
amphitheatre.

What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the
present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he
achieved as an amateur actor and manager, and in his more than
half-dramatic readings. But, the influence of early associations and
personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom
he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the
genius of Frederic Lemaitre, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. "Sound
melodrama and farce" were the dramatic species which he affected, and in
which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might
have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more
in the other; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his
thoroughness, which extended itself to every detail of performance or
make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was
preserved for literature. But he had carefully prepared himself for his
intended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a
preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of
the illness of the applicant.

Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last--in the year
1831--obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter, and after some
earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the
famous Whig _Morning Chronicle_, then in its best days under the
editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had
an opportunity of putting forth the energy that was in him. He shrunk from
none of the difficulties which in those days attended the exercise of his
craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his
death he "held a brief for his brothers" at the dinner of the Newspaper
Press Fund: "I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand
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.... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back
row of the old gallery of 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 restuffing. 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 on miry by-roads,
towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless
carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, 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." Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of
throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and of half
achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When
at the close of the parliamentary session of the year 1836 his labours as
a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gallery.
During this period his naturally keen powers of observation must have been
sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which
constitutes, perhaps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice
of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dickens's experience
as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed,
in which there was a good deal of infidelity; or, at all events, his
determined contempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the
mouth of "Thisman" or of "Thatman," and his rooted dislike of the
"cheap-jacks" and "national dustmen" whom he discerned among our orators
and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of
Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words.
Moreover, the period of Dickens's most active labours as a reporter was
one that succeeded a time of great political excitement; and when men wish
thankfully to rest after deeds, words are in season.

Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the
significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, Dickens
had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a
writer as a "baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer's clerk, and the time
had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In
December, 1833, the _Monthly Magazine_ published a paper which he had
dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes "dimmed with joy and pride" the
young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called _A Dinner
at Poplar Walk_, was afterwards reprinted in the _Sketches by Boz_ under
the title of _Mr. Minns and his Cousin_, and is laughable enough. His
success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to
the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February,
1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a
nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens
used this signature not only as the author of the _Sketches_ and a few
other minor productions, but also as "editor" of the _Pickwick Papers_, it
is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and
in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on
a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman
complaining to his wife: "Boz keeps himself very close."

But the _Monthly Magazine_, though warmly welcoming its young
contributor's lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was
therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the
conductor of the _Evening Chronicle_, a paper in connexion with the great
morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had
gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal
favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors
of the _Morning Chronicle_ that Dickens should be duly remunerated for
this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of,
as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's
Inn--one of those old legal inns which he loved so well--he might already
in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By
the beginning of 1836 the _Sketches by Boz_ printed in the _Evening
Chronicle_ were already numerous enough, and their success was
sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their
republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank,
and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the
copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last
day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the
_Pickwick Papers_, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days
afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the
friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures.
Mr. George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of two masters of
English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet
in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens's
apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and
he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of
popularity. As for the _Sketches by Boz_, their author soon repurchased
the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to
him for it.

In their collected form these _Sketches_ modestly described themselves as
"illustrative of every-day life and every-day people." Herein they only
prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was
never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to
term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little
difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse,
the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few
of the most peculiar features of Dickens's humour are already here,
together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true
that in these early _Sketches_ the latter is at times strained, but its
power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief
narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the
humour--more especially that of the _Tales_--is not of the most refined
sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The
style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the
bane of "light" journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it,
very pardonable under the circumstances, but generally absent from
Dickens's later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but
rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which _Pickwick_
and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's favourite passions and
favourite aversions alike reflect themselves here in small. In the
description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the
manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its
full freshness upon it--however he may pretend at Astley's that his
"histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly
delights him. But of course the gift which these _Sketches_ pre-eminently
revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight
of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous
in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river,
a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the
old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades
and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How
inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of "the last cab-driver, and the
first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," was
not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets.

Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and
in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces
are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the
_Sketches_ may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love
to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due
to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have
followed the days of coaching; "Honest Tom" no more paces the lobby in a
black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D'Orsay hat; the Hickses
of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house
dinner-tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young
men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to "Satan" Montgomery. But the
_Sketches by Boz_ have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be
remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner
begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet,
however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to
which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to
mount.




CHAPTER II.

FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS.

[1836-1841.]


Even in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his
life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the world, had his share of
troubles--troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart,
and vexations manifold in the way of business. But in the history of his
early career as an author the word failure has no place.

Not that the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_, published as they
were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm; for the public
needed two or three months to make up its mind that "Boz" was equal to an
effort considerably in advance of his _Sketches_. But when the popularity
of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity
until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold
man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished
at the present day. Against the productions of _Pickwick_, and of other
works of amusement of which it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought
himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby; and twenty
years later young men at the university talked nothing but _Pickwick_, and
quoted nothing but _Pickwick_, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the
world at large an examination paper in _Pickwick_, over which pretentious
half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to "describe the common
Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory definition of "a red-faced
Nixon." No changes in manners and customs have interfered with the hold of
the work upon nearly all classes of readers at home; and no translation
has been dull enough to prevent its being relished even in countries where
all English manners and customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally
absurd.

So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more than thrice
fortunate book, that the wildest legends have grown up as to the history
of its origin. The facts, however, as stated by Dickens himself, are few
and plain. Attracted by the success of the _Sketches_, Messrs. Chapman &
Hall proposed to him that he should write "something" in monthly numbers
to serve as a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by the comic
draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour; and either the publishers or the artist
suggested as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a "Nimrod Club" of
unlucky sportsmen. The proposition was at Dickens's suggestion so modified
that the plates were "to arise naturally out of the text," the range of
the latter being left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial
machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle's misfortunes by
flood and field hold their place by the side of the philanthropical
meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An
original was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the hero of
the book, and a felicitous name for him soon suggested itself. Only a
single number of the serial had appeared when Mr. Seymour's own hand put
an end to his life. It is well known that among the applicants for the
vacant office of illustrator of the _Pickwick Papers_ was Thackeray--the
senior of Dickens by a few months--whose style as a draughtsman would have
been singularly unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr.
Pickwick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some of Dickens's
books, Mr. Hablot Browne ("Phiz") was chosen as illustrator. Some happy
hits--such as the figure of Mr. Micawber--apart, the illustrations of
Dickens by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, are
apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author's fidelity to nature, and on
the other, to intensify his unreality. _Oliver Twist_, like the
_Sketches_, was illustrated by George Cruikshank, a pencil humourist of no
common calibre, but as a rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of
his heart. Dickens himself was never so well satisfied with any
illustrator as with George Cattermole (_alias_ "Kittenmoles"), a
connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hablot Browne in
_Master Humphrey's Clock_; in his latest works he resorted to the aid of
younger artists, whose reputation has since justified his confidence. The
most congenial of the pictorial interpreters of Dickens, in his brightest
and freshest humour, was his valued friend John Leech, whose services,
together occasionally with those of Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as
well as of his faithful Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his
Christmas books.

The _Pickwick Papers_, of which the issue was completed by the end of
1837, brought in to Dickens a large sum of money, and after a time a
handsome annual income. On the whole this has remained the most general
favourite of all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that
_Pickwick_ defies criticism, but also because the circumstances under
which the book was begun and carried on make it preposterous to judge it
by canons applicable to its author's subsequent fictions. As the serial
proceeded, the interest which was to be divided between the inserted
tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, was absorbed by
the latter. The rise in the style of the book can almost be measured by
the change in the treatment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself.
In a later preface, Dickens endeavoured to illustrate this change by the
analogy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it was only as the
author proceeded that he recognised the capabilities of the character, and
his own power of making it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as
laughable. Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves
himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. Nupkins, there
follows a little bit of the idyl between Sam and the pretty housemaid,
written with a delicacy that could hardly have been suspected in the
chronicler of the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus
Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative will be found
exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos of which Dickens was
afterwards so repeatedly to prove himself master, more especially, of
course, in those prison scenes for which some of our older novelists may
have furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of humour is not
wanting which is content to miss its effect with the less attentive
reader; as in this passage concerning the ruined cobbler's confidences to
Sam in the Fleet:

    "The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on
    Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of
    his pipe, _sighed_, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head,
    and went to sleep too."

Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and more of irony into
a single word.

But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details such as this in view
of the broad and universally acknowledged comic effects of this
masterpiece of English humour. Its many genuinely comic characters are as
broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and
as true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison's art. The
author's humour is certainly not one which eschews simple in favour of
subtle means, or which is averse from occasional desipience in the form of
the wildest farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden-party--or rather "public
breakfast"--at The Den, Eatanswill; Mr. Pickwick's nocturnal descent,
through three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of
Miss Tomkins's establishment for young ladies; the _supplice d'un homme_
of Mr. Pott; Mr. Weller junior's love-letter, with notes and comments by
Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior's own letter of affliction
written by somebody else; the footmen's "swarry" at Bath, and Mr. Bob
Sawyer's bachelors' party in the Borough--all these and many other scenes
and passages have in them that jovial element of exaggeration which nobody
mistakes and nobody resents. Whose duty is it to check the volubility of
Mr. Alfred Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness, _quot libras_, of the Fat
Boy? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the contagious high
spirits of the author lies one of the chief charms of the book. Not,
however, that the effect produced is obtained without the assistance of a
very vigilant art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character
which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many brilliant additions
which the author made to his original group of personages. If there is
nothing so humorous in the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it
anything more pathetic than the relation between him and his master. As
for Sam Weller's style of speech, scant justice was done to it by Mr.
Pickwick when he observed to Job Trotter, "My man is in the right,
although his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and
occasionally incomprehensible." The fashion of Sam's gnomic philosophy is
at least as old as Theocritus;[1] but the special impress which he has
given to it is his own, rudely foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the
apophthegms of his father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms in _Oliver Twist_ and
_Nicholas Nickleby_ show how enduring a hold the whimsical fancy had taken
of its creator. For the rest, the freshness of the book continues the same
to the end; and farcical as are some of the closing scenes--those, for
instance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the movements of the elder
Mr. Weller--there is even here no straining after effect. An exception
might perhaps be found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is
coarsely contrived; but the fun of the character is in itself neither
illegitimate nor unwholesome. It will be observed below that it is the
constant harping on the same string, the repeated picturing of
professional preachers of religion as gross and greasy scoundrels, which
in the end becomes offensive in Dickens.

On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bidden farewell to his
labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words which he uttered at the table of
the ever-hospitable Mr. Wardle at the Adelphi.

    "'I shall never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice--'I shall
    never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing
    with different varieties and shades of human character; frivolous as
    my pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my
    previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of
    wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have
    dawned upon me--I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the
    improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I
    trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be
    other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the
    decline of life. God bless you all.'"

Of course Mr. Pickwick "filled and drained a bumper" to the sentiment.
Indeed, it "snoweth" in this book "of meat and drink." Wine, ale, and
brandy abound there, and viands to which ample justice is invariably
done--even under Mr. Tupman's heart-rending circumstances at the (now,
alas! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something of this is due to the times in
which the work was composed, and to the class of readers for which we may
suppose it in the first instance to have been intended; but Dickens,
though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia of good cheer, besides
cherishing the associations which are inseparable from it. At the same
time, there is a little too much of it in the _Pickwick Papers_, however
well its presence may consort with the geniality which pervades them. It
is difficult to turn any page of the book without chancing on one of those
supremely felicitous phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all
times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit of the
whole--that spirit of true humour which calls forth at once merriment,
good-will, and charity.

In the year 1836, which the commencement of the _Pickwick Papers_ has made
memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the
full tide of authorship. In February, 1837, the second number of
_Bentley's Miscellany_, a new monthly magazine which he had undertaken to
edit, contained the opening chapters of his story of _Oliver Twist_.
Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two
of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of
Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to _The Strange
Gentleman_, a "comic burletta," or farce, in two acts, founded upon the
tale in the _Sketches_ called _The Great Winglebury Duel_. It ran for
seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author's opinion, was "the best
thing Harley did." But the adaptation has no special feature
distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the effective bustle of
the opening. _The Village Coquettes_, an operetta represented at the St.
James's Theatre, with music by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort.
In this piece Harley took one part, that of "a very small farmer with a
very large circle of intimate friends," and John Parry made his _debut_ on
the London stage in another. To quote any of the songs in this operetta
would be very unfair to Dickens.[2] He was not at all depressed by the
unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against
which he had to set the round declaration of Braham, that there had been
"no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since _The
Duenna_." As time went on, however, he became anything but proud of his
juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their
revival. His third and last attempt of this kind, a farce called _The
Lamplighter_, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted,
having been withdrawn by Macready's wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it
into a story printed among the _Picnic Papers_, a collection generously
edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher
towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship
for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy
worthy of so distinguished an actor; and, according to his wont, he had
even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to
forget--_No Thoroughfare_. But the genius of the age, an influence which
is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from
dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see
mentioned among his literary works the _Life of Grimaldi_, which he merely
edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten memorials of forgotten
greatness.

To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which
their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short
pamphlet entitled _Sunday under Three Heads_, is not without a certain
biographical interest. This little book was written with immediate
reference to a bill "for the better observance of the Sabbath," which the
House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority; and its
special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sunday
amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunkenness distinguishing
what Dickens called a London _Sunday as it is_. His own love of fresh air
and brightness intensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears
to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London,
"gloomy, close, and stale," which he afterwards drew in _Little Dorrit_,
he almost seems to hold Sabbatarianism and the weather responsible for one
another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it "not
comfortable," so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may perhaps have
come to recognise the difficulty of arranging an English _Sunday as it
might be made_. On the other hand, he may have remembered his youthful
fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church,
when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the
counterpart of _Sunday as Sabbath bills would have it_: describing how
"the usual preparations are making for the band in the open air in the
afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are
at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to
the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions
invariably close." The _Sketches of Young Gentlemen_, published in the
same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier _Sketches by
Boz_, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a
fortnight, and noted in his diary that "one hundred and twenty-five pounds
for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well." The _Sketches of
Young Couples_, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a
facetious introduction, suggested by her Majesty's own announcement of her
approaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these
pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a
mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent
itself.

It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to
keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a
bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production of
_Pickwick_, he began his first long continuous story, the _Adventures of
Oliver Twist_. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will
remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with
his later MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits.
But here and there the writing shows traces of excitement; for the
author's heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later
habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of
authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength.
_Oliver Twist_ was certainly written _with a purpose_, and with one that
was afterwards avowed. The author intended to put before his readers--"so
long as their speech did not offend the ear"--a picture of "dregs of
life," hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their
loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fiction, Fielding in particular,
as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had
not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens,
however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already
relished _Paul Clifford_, and which was not to be debarred from exciting
itself over _Jack Sheppard_, begun before _Oliver Twist_ had been
completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens's purpose was an honest
and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the
most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the
cloud. To that unfailing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of
both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the
redeeming features in his company of criminals; not only the devotion and
the heroism of Nancy, but the irresistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger,
and the good-humour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to "plead as
earnestly in mitigation of judgment" against him as ever he had done "at
the bar for any client he most respected." Other parts of the story were
less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police-magistrate, appears to have
been a rather hasty portrait of a living original; and the whole picture
of Bumble and Bumbledom was certainly a caricature of the working of the
new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with
that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of
truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy's story, and adds to
the effect of a marvellously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy's interview
with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes--the flight of Sikes, his
death at Jacob's Island, and the end of the Jew--the action has an
intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this
genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from
some of the "low" domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author's comic
humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types:
Bumble and his partner; Noah Claypole, complete in himself, but full of
promise for Uriah Heep; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of
his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story of _Oliver
Twist_ also contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that
is weak and (the author of _Endymion_ is to be thanked for the word)
"gushy." Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver
discreetly "glides" away from the lovers, are barely endurable. But,
whatever its shortcomings, _Oliver Twist_ remains an almost unique example
of a young author's brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty
and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their
power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them; and some
of its characters will live by the side of Dickens's happiest and most
finished creations. Even had a sapient critic been right who declared,
during the progress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have
worked out "the particular vein of humour which had hitherto yielded so
much attractive metal," it would have been worked out to some purpose.
After making his readers merry with _Pickwick_, he had thrilled them with
_Oliver Twist_; and by the one book as by the other he had made them think
better of mankind.

But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his hand content with a
single task. In April, 1838, several months before the completion of
_Oliver Twist_, the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_ appeared; and
while engaged upon the composition of these books he contributed to
_Bentley's Miscellany_, of which he retained the editorship till the early
part of 1839, several smaller articles. Of these, the _Mudfog Papers_ have
been recently thought worth reprinting; but even supposing the satire
against the Association for the Advancement of Everything to have not yet
altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day before yesterday refuses to
be revived. _Nicholas Nickleby_, published in twenty numbers, was the
labour of many months, but was produced under so great a press of work
that during the whole time of publication Dickens was never a single
number in advance. Yet, though not one of the most perfect of his books,
it is indisputably one of the most thoroughly original, and signally
illustrates the absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between
the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel of the
present. Dickens was never so strong as when he produced from the real;
and in this instance--starting, no doubt, with a healthy prejudice--so
carefully had he inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of
which Dotheboys Hall was to be held up as the infamous type, that there
seems to be no difficulty in identifying the site of the very school
itself; while the Portsmouth Theatre is to the full as accurate a study
as the Yorkshire school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers
Cheeryble were real personages well known in Manchester,[3] where even the
original of Tim Linkinwater still survives in local remembrance. On the
other hand, with how conscious a strength has the author's imaginative
power used and transmuted his materials: in the Squeers family creating a
group of inimitable grotesqueness; in their humblest victim Smike giving
one of his earliest pictures of those outcasts whom he drew again and
again with such infinite tenderness; and in Mr. Vincent Crummles and his
company, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but a kindly one,
for all times! In a third series of episodes in this book, it is
universally agreed that the author has no less conspicuously failed.
Dickens's first attempt to picture the manners and customs of the
aristocracy certainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people.
Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed--who is allowed to redeem his character
in the end--is not without touches resembling nature.

    "'I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint
    smile, 'such an interest in the drama.'

    "'Ye-es. It's very interasting,' replied Lord Frederick.

    "'I'm always ill after Shakspeare,' said Mrs. Wititterly. 'I scarcely
    exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy,
    my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.'

    "'Ye-es,' replied Lord Frederick. 'He was a clayver man.'"

But Sir Mulberry Hawk is a kind of scoundrel not frequently met with in
polite society; his henchmen Pluck and Pyke have the air of "followers of
Don John," and the enjoyments of the "trainers of young noblemen and
gentlemen" at Hampton races, together with the riotous debauch which
precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct from the transpontine stage.
The fact is that Dickens was here content to draw his vile seducers and
wicked orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a thousand times
before, and will draw them a thousand times again. Much of the hero's talk
is of the same conventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be more
genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which finds its outlet in the
most unexpected channels, but nowhere so resistlessly as in the
invertebrate talk of Mrs. Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary
prototype in a character of Miss Austen's; but even if Mrs. Nickleby was
founded on Miss Bates, in _Emma_, she left her original far behind. Miss
Bates, indeed, is verbose, roundabout, and parenthetic; but the widow
never deviates into coherence.

_Nicholas Nickleby_ shows the comic genius of its author in full activity,
and should be read with something of the buoyancy of spirit in which it
was written, and not with a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a
scamp as Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens's "monstrous failures." At the same
time this book displays the desire of the author to mould his manner on
the old models. The very title has a savour of Smollett about it; the
style has more than one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of
Goldsmith; and the general method of the narrative resembles that of our
old novelists and their Spanish and French predecessors. Partly for this
reason, and partly, no doubt, because of the rapidity with which the story
was written, its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dickens's
earlier works. Coincidences are repeatedly employed to help on the
action; and the _denoument_, which, besides turning Mr. Squeers into a
thief, reveals Ralph Nickleby as the father of Smike, is oppressively
complete. As to the practical aim of the novel, the author's word must be
taken for the fact that "Mr. Squeers and his school were faint and feeble
pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they
should be deemed impossible." The exposure, no doubt, did good in its way,
though perhaps Mr. Squeers, in a more or less modified form, has proved a
tougher adversary to overcome than Mrs. Gamp.

During these years Dickens was chiefly resident in the modest locality of
Doughty Street, whither he had moved his household from the "three rooms,"
"three storeys high," in Furnival's Inn, early in 1837. It was not till
the end of 1839 that he took up his abode, further west, in a house which
he came to like best among all his London habitations, in Devonshire
Terrace, Regent's Park. His town life was, however, varied by long
rustications at Twickenham and at Petersham, and by sojourns at the
sea-side, of which he was a most consistent votary. He is found in various
years of his life at Brighton, Dover, and Bonchurch--where he liked his
neighbours better than he liked the climate; and in later years, when he
had grown accustomed to the Continent, he repeatedly domesticated himself
at Boulogne. But already in 1837 he had discovered the little sea-side
village, as it then was, which for many years afterwards became his
favourite holiday retreat, and of which he would be the _genius loci_,
even if he had not by a special description immortalised _Our English
Watering-place_. Broadstairs--whose afternoon tranquillity even to this
day is undisturbed except by the Ethiopians on their tramp from Margate to
Ramsgate--and its constant visitor, are thus described in a letter
written to an American friend in 1843: "This is a little fishing-place;
intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon--in the centre of a tiny
semicircular bay--our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the
windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the
Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if
they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big
light-house called the North Foreland on a hill beyond the village, a
severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and
stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where
all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible
fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high-water. Old
gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two
reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other
old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a
bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with
rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought
he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz."

Not a few houses at Broadstairs may boast of having been at one time or
another inhabited by him and his. Of the long-desired Fort House, however,
which local perverseness triumphantly points out as the original of _Bleak
House_ (no part even of _Bleak House_ was written there, though part of
_David Copperfield_ was), he could not obtain possession till 1850. As
like Bleak House as it is like Chesney Wold, it stands at the very highest
end of the place, looking straight out to sea, over the little harbour and
its two colliers, with a pleasant stretch of cornfields leading along the
cliff towards the light-house which Dickens promised Lord Carlisle should
serve him as a night-light. But in 1837 Dickens was content with narrower
quarters. The "long small procession of sons" and daughters had as yet
only begun with the birth of his eldest boy. His life was simple and full
of work, and occasional sea-side or country quarters, and now and then a
brief holiday tour, afforded the necessary refreshment of change. In 1837
he made his first short trip abroad, and in the following year,
accompanied by Mr. Hablot Browne, he spent a week of enjoyment in
Warwickshire, noting in his _Remembrancer_: "Stratford; Shakspeare; the
birthplace; visitors, scribblers, old woman (query whether she knows what
Shakspeare did), etc." Meanwhile, among his truest home enjoyments were
his friendships. They were few in number, mostly with men for whom, after
he had once taken them into his heart, he preserved a life-long regard.
Chief of all these were John Forster and Daniel Maclise, the high-minded
painter, to whom we owe a charming portrait of his friend in this youthful
period of his life. Losing them, he afterwards wrote when absent from
England, was "like losing my arms and legs, and dull and tame I am without
you." Besides these, he was at this time on very friendly terms with
William Harrison Ainsworth, who succeeded him in the editorship of the
_Miscellany_, and concerning whom he exclaimed in his _Remembrancer_:
"Ainsworth has a fine heart." At the close of 1838, Dickens, Ainsworth,
and Forster constituted themselves a club called the Trio, and afterwards
the Cerberus. Another name frequent in the _Remembrancer_ entries is that
of Talfourd, a generous friend, in whom, as Dickens finely said after his
death, "the success of other men made as little change as his own." All
these, together with Stanfield, the Landseers, Douglas Jerrold, Macready,
and others less known to fame, were among the friends and associates of
Dickens's prime. The letters, too, remaining from this part of Dickens's
life, have all the same tone of unaffected frankness. With some of his
intimate friends he had his established epistolary jokes. Stanfield, the
great marine painter, he pertinaciously treated as a "very salt"
correspondent, communications to whom, as to a "block-reeving,
main-brace-splicing, lead-heaving, ship-conning, stun'sail-bending,
deck-swabbing son of a sea-cook," needed garnishing with the obscurest
technicalities and strangest oaths of his element. (It is touching to turn
from these friendly buffooneries to a letter written by Dickens many years
afterward--in 1867--and mentioning a visit to "poor dear Stanfield," when
"it was clear that the shadow of the end had fallen on him.... It happened
well that I had seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea effect,
of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it under his
pillow.") Macready, after his retirement from the stage, is bantered on
the score of his juvenility with a pertinacity of fun recalling similar
whimsicalities of Charles Lamb's; or the jest is changed, and the great
London actor in his rural retreat is depicted in the character of a
country gentleman strange to the wicked ways of the town. As in the case
of many delightful letter-writers, the charm of Dickens as a correspondent
vanishes so soon as he becomes self-conscious. Even in his letters to Lady
Blessington and Mrs. Watson, a striving after effect is at times
perceptible; the homage rendered to Lord John Russell is not offered with
a light hand; on the contrary, when writing to Douglas Jerrold, Dickens is
occasionally so intent upon proving himself a sound Radical that his
vehemence all but passes into a shriek.

In these early years, at all events, Dickens was happy in the society of
his chosen friends. His favourite amusements were a country walk or ride
with Forster, or a dinner at Jack Straw's Castle with him and Maclise. He
was likewise happy at home. Here, however, in the very innermost circle of
his affections, he had to suffer the first great personal grief of his
life. His younger sister-in-law, Miss Mary Hogarth, had accompanied him
and his wife into their new abode in Doughty Street, and here, in May,
1837, she died, at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to
have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens
like that for the loss of this dearly-loved girl, "young, beautiful, and
good." "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her
death, "that, waking or sleeping, I have never lost the recollection of
our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall." "If," ran part
of his first entry in the Diary which he began on the first day of the
following year, "she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable
companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than any
one I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but
a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one
day, through his mercy, rejoin her." It was not till, in after years, it
became necessary to abandon the project, that he ceased to cherish the
intention of being buried by her side, and through life the memory of her
haunted him with strange vividness. At the Niagara Falls, when the
spectacle of Nature in her glory had produced in him, as he describes it,
a wondrously tranquil and happy peace of mind, he longed for the presence
of his dearest friends, and "I was going to add, what would I give if the
dear girl, whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to come so far along
with us; but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet
face faded from my earthly sight." "After she died," he wrote to her
mother in May, 1843, "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and
always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that
I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one
shape or other. And so it did." Once he dreamt of her, when travelling in
Yorkshire; and then, after an interval of many months, as he lay asleep
one night at Genoa, it seemed to him as if her spirit visited him and
spoke to him in words which he afterwards precisely remembered, when he
had awaked, with the tears running down his face. He never forgot her, and
in the year before he died he wrote to his friend: "She is so much in my
thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful and have greatly
prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part
of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my
heart is!" In a word, she was the object of the one great imaginative
passion of his life. Many have denied that there is any likeness to nature
in the fictitious figure in which, according to the wont of imaginative
workers, he was irresistibly impelled to embody the sentiment with which
she inspired him; but the sentiment itself became part of his nature, and
part of his history. When in writing the _Old Curiosity Shop_ he
approached the death of Little Nell, he shrunk from the task: "Dear Mary
died yesterday, when I think of this sad story."

The _Old Curiosity Shop_ has long been freed from the encumbrances which
originally surrounded it, and there is little except biographical interest
in the half-forgotten history of _Master Humphrey's Clock_. Early in the
year 1840, his success and confidence in his powers induced him to
undertake an illustrated weekly journal, in which he depended solely on
his own name, and, in the first instance, on his own efforts, as a writer.
Such was his trust in his versatility that he did not think it necessary
even to open with a continuous story. Perhaps the popularity of the
_Pickwick Papers_ encouraged him to adopt the time-honoured device of
wrapping up several tales in one. In any case, his framework was in the
present instance too elaborate to take hold of the public mind, while the
characters introduced into it possessed little or nothing of the freshness
of their models in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. In order to
re-enforce Master Humphrey, the deaf gentleman, and the other original
members of his benevolent conclave, he hereupon resorted to a natural, but
none the less unhappy, expedient. Mr. Pickwick was revived, together with
Sam Weller and his parent; and a Weller of the third generation was
brought on the stage in the person of a precocious four-year-old,
"standing with his little legs very wide apart as if the top-boots were
familiar to them, and actually winking upon the house-keeper with his
infant eye, in imitation of his grandfather." A laugh may have been raised
at the time by this attempt, from which, however, every true Pickwickian
must have turned sadly away. Nor was there much in the other contents of
these early numbers to make up for the disappointment. As, therefore,
neither "Master Humphrey's Clock" nor "Mr. Weller's Watch" seemed to
promise any lasting success, it was prudently determined that the story of
the _Old Curiosity Shop_, of which the first portion had appeared in the
fourth number of the periodical, should run on continuously; and when this
had been finished, a very short "link" sufficed to introduce another
story, _Barnaby Rudge_, with the close of which _Master Humphrey's Clock_
likewise stopped.

In the _Old Curiosity Shop_, though it abounds in both grotesquely
terrible and boisterously laughable effects, the key-note is that of an
idyllic pathos. The sense of this takes hold of the reader at the very
outset, as he lingers over the picture, with which the first chapter
concludes, of little Nell asleep through the solitary night in the
curiosity-dealer's warehouse. It retains possession of him as he
accompanies the innocent heroine through her wanderings, pausing with her
in the church-yard where all is quiet save the cawing of the satirical
rooks, or in the school-master's cottage by the open window, through which
is borne upon the evening air the distant hum of the boys at play upon the
green, while the poor school-master holds in his hand the small cold one
of the little scholar that has fallen asleep. Nor is it absent to the last
when Nell herself lies at rest in her little bed. "Her little bird--a poor
slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed--was stirring
nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute
and motionless forever." The hand which drew Little Nell afterwards formed
other figures not less affecting, but none so essentially poetic. Like
many such characters, this requires, for its full appreciation, a certain
tension of the mind; and those who will not, or cannot, pass in some
measure out of themselves, will be likely to tire of the conception, or to
declare its execution artificial. Curiously enough, not only was Little
Nell a favourite of Landor, a poet and critic utterly averse from
meretricious art, but she also deeply moved the sympathy of Lord Jeffrey,
who at least knew his own mind, and spoke it in both praise and blame. As
already stated, Dickens only with difficulty brought himself to carry his
story to its actual issue, though it is hard to believe that he could ever
have intended a different close from that which he gave to it. His whole
heart was in the story, nor could he have consoled himself by means of an
ordinary happy ending.

Dickens's comic humour never flowed in a pleasanter vein than in the _Old
Curiosity Shop_, and nowhere has it a more exquisite element of pathos in
it. The shock-headed, red-cheeked Kit is one of the earliest of those
ungainly figures who speedily find their way into our affections--the odd
family to which Mr. Toots, Tom Pinch, Tommy Traddles, and Joe Gargery
alike belong. But the triumph of this serio-comic form of art in the _Old
Curiosity Shop_ is to be found in the later experiences of Dick Swiveller,
who seems at first merely a more engaging sample of the Bob Sawyer
species, but who ends by endearing himself to the most thoughtless
laugher. Dick Swiveller and his protegee have gained a lasting place among
the favourite characters of English fiction, and the privations of the
Marchioness have possibly had a result which would have been that most
coveted by Dickens--that of helping towards the better treatment of a
class whose lot is among the dust and ashes, too often very bitter ashes,
of many households. Besides these, the story contains a variety of
incidental characters of a class which Dickens never grew weary of drawing
from the life. Messrs. Codlin, Short, and Company, and the rest of the
itinerant showmen, seem to have come straight from the most real of
country fairs; and if ever a _troupe_ of comedians deserved pity on their
wanderings through a callous world, it was the most diverting and the most
dismal of all the mountebanks that gathered round the stew of tripe in
the kitchen of The Jolly Sandboys--Jerry's performing dogs.

    "'Your people don't usually travel in character, do they?' said Short,
    pointing to the dresses of the dogs. 'It must come expensive if they
    do.'

    "'No,' replied Jerry--'no, it's not the custom with us. But we've been
    playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new
    wardrobe at the races, so I didn't think it worth while to stop to
    undress. Down, Pedro!'"

In addition to these public servants we have a purveyor of diversion--or
instruction--of an altogether different stamp. "Does the caravan look as
if _it_ know'd em?" indignantly demands the proprietress of Jarley's
wax-work, when asked whether she is acquainted with the men of the Punch
show. She too is drawn, or moulded, in the author's most exuberant style
of fun, together with _her_ company, in which "all the gentlemen were very
pigeon-breasted and very blue about the beards, and all the ladies were
miraculous figures; and all the ladies and all the gentlemen were looking
intensely nowhere, and staring with extraordinary earnestness at nothing."

In contrast with these genial products of observation and humour stand the
grotesquely hideous personages who play important parts in the machinery
of the story, the vicious dwarf Quilp and the monstrous virago Sally
Brass. The former is among the most successful attempts of Dickens in a
direction which was full of danger for him, as it is for all writers; the
malevolent little demon is so blended with his surroundings--the
description of which forms one of the author's most telling pictures of
the lonely foulnesses of the river-side--that his life seems natural in
its way, and his death a most appropriate ending to it. Sally Brass,
"whose accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly legal kind,"
is less of a caricature, and not without a humorously redeeming point of
feminine weakness; yet the end of her and her brother is described at the
close of the book with almost tragic earnestness. On the whole, though the
poetic sympathy of Dickens when he wrote this book was absorbed in the
character of his heroine, yet his genius rarely asserted itself after a
more diversified fashion.

Of _Barnaby Rudge_, though in my opinion an excellent book after its kind,
I may speak more briefly. With the exception of _A Tale of Two Cities_, it
was Dickens's only attempt in the historical novel. In the earlier work
the relation between the foreground and background of the story is
skilfully contrived, and the colouring of the whole, without any elaborate
attempt at accurate fidelity, has a generally true and harmonious effect.
With the help of her portrait by a painter (Mr. Frith) for whose pictures
Dickens had a great liking, Dolly Varden has justly taken hold of the
popular fancy as a charming type of a pretty girl of a century ago. And
some of the local descriptions in the early part of the book are hardly
less pleasing: the Temple in summer, as it was before the charm of
Fountain Court was destroyed by its guardians; and the picturesque
comforts of the Maypole Inn, described beforehand, by way of contrast to
the desecration of its central sanctuary. The intrigue of the story is
fairly interesting in itself, and the gentlemanly villain who plays a
principal part in it, though, as usual, over-elaborated, is drawn with
more skill than Dickens usually displays in such characters. After the
main interest of the book has passed to the historical action of the
George Gordon riots, the story still retains its coherence, and, a few
minor improbabilities apart, is successfully conducted to its close. No
historical novel can altogether avoid the banalities of the species; and
though Dickens, like all the world, had his laugh at the late Mr. G. P. R.
James, he is constrained to introduce the historical hero of the tale,
with his confidential adviser, and his attendant, in the familiar guise of
three horsemen. As for Lord George Gordon himself, and the riots of which
the responsibility remains inseparable from his unhappy memory, the
representation of them in the novel sufficiently accords both with poetic
probability and with historical fact. The poor lord's evil genius, indeed,
Gashford--who has no historical original--tries the reader's sense of
verisimilitude rather hard; such converts are uncommon except among
approvers. The Protestant hangman, on the other hand, has some slight
historical warranty; but the leading part which he is made to play in the
riots, and his resolution to go any lengths "in support of the great
Protestant principle of hanging," overshoot the mark. It cannot be said
that there is any substantial exaggeration in the description of the
riots; thus, the burning of the great distiller's house in Holborn is a
well-authenticated fact; and there is abundant vigour in the narrative.
Repetition is unavoidable in treating such a theme, but in _Barnaby Rudge_
it is not rendered less endurable by mannerism, nor puffed out with
rhetoric.

One very famous character in this story was, as personages in historical
novels often are, made up out of two originals.[4] This was Grip the
Raven, who, after seeing the idiot hero of the tale safe through his
adventures, resumed his addresses on the subject of the kettle to the
horses in the stable; and who, "as he was a mere infant when Barnaby was
gray, has very probably gone on talking to the present time." In a later
preface to _Barnaby Rudge_, Dickens, with infinite humour, related his
experiences of the two originals in question, and how he had been
ravenless since the mournful death before the kitchen fire of the second
of the pair, the _Grip_ of actual life. This occurred in the house at
Devonshire Terrace, into which the family had moved two years before (in
1839).

As Dickens's fame advanced his circle of acquaintances was necessarily
widened; and in 1841 he was invited to visit Edinburgh, and to receive
there the first great tribute of public recognition which had been paid to
him. He was entertained with great enthusiasm at a public banquet, voted
the freedom of the city, and so overwhelmed with hospitalities that,
notwithstanding his frank pleasure in these honours, he was glad to make
his escape at last, and refreshed himself with a tour in the Highlands.
These excitements may have intensified in him a desire which had for some
time been active in his mind, and which in any case would have been kept
alive by an incessant series of invitations. He had signed an agreement
with his publishers for a new book before this desire took the shape of an
actual resolution. There is no great difficulty in understanding why
Dickens made up his mind to go to America, and thus to interrupt for the
moment a course of life and work which was fast leading him on to great
heights of fame and fortune. The question of international copyright alone
would hardly have induced him to cross the seas. Probably he felt
instinctively that to see men and cities was part of the training as well
as of the recreation which his genius required. Dickens was by nature one
of those artists who when at work always long to be in sympathy with their
public, and to know it to be in sympathy with them. And hitherto he had
not met more than part of his public of readers face to face.




CHAPTER III.

STRANGE LANDS.

[1842-1847.]


A journey across the Atlantic in midwinter is no child's-play even at the
present day, when, bad though their passage may have been, few people
would venture to confess doubts, as Dickens did, concerning the safety of
such a voyage by steam in heavy weather. The travellers--for Dickens was
accompanied by his wife--had an exceptionally rough crossing, the horrors
of which he has described in his _American Notes_. His powers of
observation were alive in the midst of the lethargy of sea-sickness, and
when he could not watch others he found enough amusement in watching
himself. At last, on January 28, 1842, they found themselves in Boston
harbour. Their stay in the United States lasted about four months, during
which time they saw Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Richmond, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Then they passed by
Niagara into Canada, and after a pleasant visit to Montreal, diversified
by private theatricals with the officers there, were safe at home again in
July.

Dickens had met with an enthusiastic welcome in every part of the States
where he had not gone out of the way of it; in New York, in particular,
he had been feted, with a fervour unique even in the history of American
enthusiasms, under the resounding title of "the Guest of the Nation."
Still, even this imposed no moral obligation upon him to take the advice
tendered to him in America, and to avoid writing about that country--"we
are so very suspicious." On the other hand, whatever might be his
indignation at the obstinate unwillingness of the American public to be
moved a hair's-breadth by his championship of the cause of international
copyright,[5] this failure could not, in a mind so reasonable as his, have
outweighed the remembrance of the kindness shown to him and to his fame.
But the truth seems to be that he had, if not at first, at least very
speedily, taken a dislike to American ways which proved too strong for him
to the last. In strange lands, most of all in a country which, like the
United States, is not in the least ashamed to be what it is, travellers
are necessarily at the outset struck by details; and Dickens's habit of
minute observation was certain not to let him lose many of them. He was
neither long enough in the country to study very closely, nor was it in
his way to ponder very deeply, the problems involved in the existence of
many of the institutions with which he found fault. Thus, he was indignant
at the sight of slavery, and even ventured to "tell a piece of his mind"
on the subject to a judge in the South; but when, twenty years later, the
great struggle came, at the root of which this question lay, his
sympathies were with the cause of disunion and slavery in its conflict
with the "mad and villanous" North. In short, his knowledge of America
and its affairs was gained in such a way and under such circumstances as
to entitle him, if he chose, to speak to the vast public which he
commanded as an author of men and manners as observed by him; but he had
no right to judge the destinies and denounce the character of a great
people on evidence gathered in the course of a holiday tour.

Nor, indeed, did the _American Notes_, published by him after his return
home, furnish any serious cause of offence. In an introductory chapter,
which was judiciously suppressed, he had taken credit for the book as not
having "a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composition."
Indeed, the contents were rather disappointing from their meagreness. The
author showed good taste in eschewing all reference to his personal
reception, and good judgment in leaving the copyright question
undiscussed. But though his descriptions were as vivid as usual--whether
of the small steamboat, "of about half a pony power," on the Connecticut
river, or of the dismal scenery on the Mississippi, "great father of
rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!"--and
though some of the figure-sketches were touched off with the happiest of
hands, yet the public, even in 1842, was desirous to learn something more
about America than this. It is true that Dickens had, with his usual
conscientiousness, examined and described various interesting public
institutions in the States--prisons, asylums, and the like; but the book
was not a very full one; it was hardly anything but a sketch-book, with
more humour, but with infinitely less poetic spirit, than the
_Sketch-book_ of the illustrious American author whose friendship had been
one of the chief personal gains of Dickens's journey.

The _American Notes_, for which the letters to Forster had furnished ample
materials, were published in the year of Dickens's return, after he had
refreshed himself with a merry Cornish trip in the company of his old
friend, and his two other intimates, "Stanny" and "Mac." But he had not
come home, as he had not gone out, to be idle. On the first day of the
following year, 1843, appeared the first number of the story which was to
furnish the real _casus discriminis_ between Dickens and the enemies, as
well no doubt as a very large proportion of the friends, whom he had left
behind him across the water. The American scenes in _Martin Chuzzlewit_
did not, it is true, begin till the fifth number of the story; nor is it
probable from the accounts of the sale, which was much smaller than
Dickens had expected, that these particular episodes at first produced any
strong feeling in the English public. But the merits of the book gradually
obtained for it a popularity at home which has been surpassed by that of
but one or two other of Dickens's works; and in proportion to this
popularity was the effect exercised by its American chapters. What that
effect has been, it would be hypocrisy to question.

Dickens, it is very clear, had been unable to resist the temptation of at
once drawing upon the vast addition to his literary capital as a
humourist. That the satire of many of the American scenes in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ is, as satire, not less true than telling, it needs but a
small acquaintance with American journalism and oratory even at the
present day to perceive; and the heartrending history of Eden, as a type
of some of the settlements "vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope,"
at least had the warrant of something more than hearsay and a look in
passing. Nor, as has already been observed, would it have been in
accordance either with human nature, or with the fitness of things, had
Dickens allowed his welcome in America to become to him (as he termed it
in the suppressed Preface to the _Notes_) "an iron muzzle disguised
beneath a flower or two." But the frankness, to say the least, of the
mirror into which he now invited his late hosts to gaze was not likely to
produce grateful compliments to its presenter, nor was the effect softened
by the despatch with which this _souvenir_ of the "guest of the nation"
was pressed upon its attention. No doubt it would have been easy to
reflect that only the evil, not the good, sides of social life in America
were held up to derision and contempt, and that an honourable American
journalist had no more reason to resent the portraiture of Mr. Jefferson
Brick than a virtuous English paterfamilias had to quarrel with that of
Mr. Pecksniff. Unfortunately, offence is usually taken where offence is
meant; and there can be little doubt as to the _animus_ with which Dickens
had written. Only two months after landing at Boston Dickens had declared
to Macready, that "however much he liked the ingredients of this great
dish, he could not but say that the dish itself went against the grain
with him, and that he didn't like it." It was not, and could not be,
pleasant for Americans to find the "_New York Sewer_, in its twelfth
thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their
names printed," introduced as the first expression of "the bubbling
passions of their country;" or to be certified, apropos of a conversation
among American "gentlemen" after dinner, that dollars, and dollars only,
at the risk of honesty and honour, filled their souls. "No satirist,"
Martin Chuzzlewit is told by a candid and open-minded American, "could, I
believe, breathe this air." But satire in such passages as these borders
too closely on angry invective; and neither the irresistible force nor the
earnest pathos of the details which follow can clear away the suspicion
that at the bottom lay a desire to depreciate. Nor was the general effect
of the American episodes in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ materially modified by
their conclusion, to which, with the best of intentions, the author could
not bring himself to give a genuinely complimentary turn. The Americans
did not like all this, and could not be expected to like it. The tone of
the whole satire was too savage, and its tenor was too hopelessly
one-sided, for it to pass unresented; while much in it was too near the
truth to glance off harmless. It is well known that in time Dickens came
himself to understand this. Before quitting America, in 1868, he declared
his intention to publish in every future edition of his _American Notes_
and _Martin Chuzzlewit_ his testimony to the magnanimous cordiality of his
second reception in the States, and to the amazing changes for the better
which he had seen everywhere around him during his second sojourn in the
country. But it is not likely that the postscript, all the more since it
was added under circumstances so honourable to both sides, has undone, or
will undo, the effect of the text. Very possibly the Americans may, in the
eyes of the English people as well as in their own, cease to be chargeable
with the faults and foibles satirised by Dickens; but the satire itself
will live, and will continue to excite laughter and loathing, together
with the other satire of the powerful book to which it belongs.

For in none of his books is that power, which at times filled their author
himself with astonishment, more strikingly and abundantly revealed than in
_The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit_. Never was his inventive
force more flexible and more at his command; yet none of his books cost
him more hard work. The very names of hero and novel were only the final
fortunate choice out of a legion of notions; though "Pecksniff" as well as
"Charity" and "Mercy" ("not unholy names, I hope," said Mr. Pecksniff to
Mrs. Todgers) were first inspirations. The MS. text too is full of the
outward signs of care. But the author had his reward in the general
impression of finish which is conveyed by this book as compared with its
predecessors; so that _Martin Chuzzlewit_ may be described as already one
of the masterpieces of Dickens's maturity as a writer. Oddly enough, the
one part of the book which moves rather heavily is the opening chapter, an
effort in the mock-heroic, probably suggested by the author's eighteenth
century readings.

A more original work, however, than _Martin Chuzzlewit_ was never
composed, or one which more freshly displays the most characteristic
qualities of its author's genius. Though the actual construction of the
story is anything but faultless--for what could be more slender than the
thread by which the American interlude is attached to the main action, or
more wildly improbable than the hazardous stratagem of old Martin upon
which that action turns?--yet it is so contrived as to fulfil the author's
avowed intention of exhibiting under various forms the evil and the folly
of selfishness. This vice is capable of both serious and comic treatment,
and commended itself in each aspect to Dickens as being essentially
antagonistic to his moral and artistic ideals of human life. A true comedy
of humours thus unfolded itself with the progress of his book, and one for
which the types had not been fetched from afar: "Your homes the scene;
yourselves the actors here," had been the motto which he had at first
intended to put upon his title-page. Thus, while in "the old-established
firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son" selfishness is cultivated as a growth
excellent in itself, and the son's sentiment, "Do other men, for they
would do you," is applauded by his admiring father, in young Martin the
vice rather resembles a weed strong and rank, yet not so strong but that
it gives way at last before a manly endeavour to uproot it. The character
of the hero, though very far from heroic, is worked out with that reliance
upon the fellow-feeling of candid readers which in our great novelists of
the eighteenth century has obtained sympathy for much less engaging
personages. More especially is the young man's loss of self-respect in the
season of his solitary wretchedness depicted with admirable feeling. It
would not, I think, be fanciful to assert that in this story Dickens has
with equal skill distinguished between two species of unselfishness. Mark
Tapley's is the actively unselfish nature, and though his reiteration of
his guiding motive is wearisome and occasionally absurd, yet the power of
coming out jolly under unpropitious circumstances is a genuinely English
ideal of manly virtue. Tom Pinch's character, on the other hand, is
unselfish from innate sweetness; and never has the art of Dickens drawn a
type which, while closely approaching the border-line of the grotesque, is
yet so charmingly true to nature.

Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in this book, but all the
others pale before the immortal presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced
to an original in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own
legs has been most properly vindicated against any supposition of likeness
to the different type, the subject of Leigh Hunt's _Monthly Nurse_--a
paper, by-the-way, distinguished by shrewdness as well as feeling.
Imagination has never taken bolder flights than those requisite for the
development of Mrs. Gamp's mental processes:

    "'And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I
    wonder? Goodness me!' cried Mrs. Gamp.

    "'What boat did you want?' asked Ruth.

    "'The Ankworks package,' Mrs. Gamp replied. 'I will not deceive you,
    my sweet. Why should I?'

    "'That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,' said Ruth.

    "'And I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do!' cried Mrs. Gamp,
    appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous
    aspiration."

A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed in order to fix in
distinct forms the peculiarities of her diction, nay, to sustain the
unique rhythm of her speech:

    "'I says to Mrs. Harris,' Mrs. Gamp continued, 'only t' other day, the
    last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian's Projiss of a
    mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, "Years and
    our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all"--"Say not the words,
    Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not
    the case."'"

Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to be such that she has
been the death of her sisterhood in a great part (to say the least) of our
hospital wards and sick-rooms; and as for her oddities of tongue, they
are, with the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type of
all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, laundresses, and
single gentlemen's house-keepers. Compared with her, even her friend and
patron, Mr. Mould, and her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the
book the low company at Todgers's and the fine company at Mr. Tigg
Montague's sink into insignificance. The aged Chuffey is a grotesque study
of a very different kind, of which the pathos never loses itself in
exaggeration. As for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of
grotesque as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers's, he
is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest comic type, while
at the same time one of the truest, among the innumerable reproductions in
English imaginative literature of our favourite national vice--hypocrisy.
His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood: "Mr. Pinch," he
cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine and captain's biscuits, "if you
spare the bottle, we shall quarrel!" His understanding with his daughters
is the very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when
ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty "that in all he
does he has his purpose straight and full before him." And he is a man who
understands the times as well as the land in which he lives; for, as M.
Taine has admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been full of
religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a humanitarian
philosopher. Comic art has never more successfully fulfilled its highest
task after its truest fashion than in this picture of the rise and fall of
a creature who never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be
loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to attest the
exuberance of its author's genius. The kindly poetic spirit of the
Christmas books breathes in sweet Ruth Pinch; and the tragic power of the
closing chapters of _Oliver Twist_ is recalled by the picture of Jonas
before and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely descriptive
passages, though in none of his previous stories had Dickens so completely
mastered the secret of describing scenery and weather in their relation to
his action or his characters.

_Martin Chuzzlewit_ ran its course of twenty monthly numbers; but already
a week or two before the appearance of the first of these, Dickens had
bestowed upon the public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful
_Christmas Books_. Among all his productions perhaps none connected him so
closely, and as it were personally, with his readers. Nor could it well
have been otherwise; since nowhere was he so directly intent upon
promoting kindliness of feeling among men--more especially good-will,
founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness was, from his point
of view, twin-sister to charity; and sulkiness, like selfishness,
belonged, as an appropriate ort, to the dust-heap of "Tom Tiddler's
Ground." What more fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these
with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holiday in which
remains a vestige of religious and poetic feeling? Beyond all doubt there
is much that is tedious in the _cultus_ of Father Christmas, and there was
yet more in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet come to
look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as part of their democratic
inheritance. But that Dickens should constitute himself its chief minister
and interpreter was nothing but fit. Already one of the _Sketches_ had
commended a Christmas-dinner at which a seat is not denied even to "poor
Aunt Margaret;" and Mr. Pickwick had never been more himself than in the
Christmas game of Blind-man's-buff at Dingley Dell, in which "the poor
relations caught the people who they thought would like it," and, when the
game flagged, "got caught themselves." But he now sought to reach the
heart of the subject; and the freshness of his fancy enabled him
delightfully to vary his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man
harm to be reminded in as well as out of season.

Dickens's Christmas books were published in the Christmas seasons of
1843-1846, and of 1848. If the palm is to be granted to any one among
them above its fellows, few readers would hesitate, I think, to declare
themselves in favour of _The Cricket on the Hearth_, as tender and
delicate a domestic idyl as any literature can boast. But the informing
spirit proper of these productions, the desire to stir up a feeling of
benevolence, more especially towards the poor and lowly, nowhere shows
itself more conspicuously than in the earliest, _A Christmas Carol in
Prose_, and nowhere more combatively than in the second in date, the
"Goblin Story" of _The Chimes_. Of the former its author declared that he
"wept and laughed and wept again" over it, "and excited himself in a most
extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking thereof he walked
about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night,
when all the sober folks had gone to bed." Simple in its romantic design
like one of Andersen's little tales, the _Christmas Carol_ has never lost
its hold upon a public in whom it has called forth Christmas thoughts
which do not all centre on "holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys,
geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies,
puddings, fruit, and punch;" and the Cratchit household, with Tiny Tim,
who did not die, are living realities even to those who have not seen Mr.
Toole--an actor after Dickens's own heart--as the father of the family,
shivering in his half-yard of comforter.

In _The Chimes_, composed in self-absorbed solitude at Genoa, he imagined
that "he had written a tremendous book, and knocked the _Carol_ out of the
field." Though the little work failed to make "the great uproar" he had
confidently anticipated, its purpose was certainly unmistakable; but the
effect of hard exaggerations such as Mr. Filer and Alderman Cute, and of a
burlesque absurdity like Sir Joseph Bowley, was too dreary to be
counteracted by the more pleasing passages of the tale. In his novel _Hard
Times_ Dickens afterwards reproduced some of the ideas, and repeated some
of the artistic mistakes, to be found in _The Chimes_, though the design
of the later work was necessarily of a more mixed kind. The Christmas book
has the tone of a _doctrinaire_ protest against _doctrinaires_, and, as
Forster has pointed out, is manifestly written under the influence of
Carlyle. But its main doctrine was one which Dickens lost no opportunity
of proclaiming, and which here breaks forth in the form of an indignant
appeal by Richard Fern, the outlaw in spite of himself: "Gentlefolks, be
not hard upon the poor!" No feeling was more deeply rooted in Dickens's
heart than this; nor could he forbear expressing it by invective and
satire as well as by humorous and pathetic pictures of his clients, among
whom Trotty Veck too takes a representative place.

_The Cricket on the Hearth_, as a true work of art, is not troubled about
its moral, easily though half-a-dozen plain morals might be drawn from it;
a purer and more lightsome creation of the fancy has never been woven out
of homespun materials. Of the same imaginative type, though not executed
with a fineness so surpassing, is _The Battle of Life_, the treatment of a
fancy in which Dickens appears to have taken great pleasure. Indeed, he
declared that he was "thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so
short a story." As it stands, it is a pretty idyl of resignation, very
poetical in tone as well as in conception, though here and there,
notwithstanding the complaint just quoted, rather lengthy. It has been
conjectured, with much probability, that the success which had attended
dramatic versions of Dickens's previous Christmas books caused "those
admirable comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley," to be in his mind "when he drew
the charming characters of Britain and Clemency Newcome." At all events
the pair serve as good old bits of English pottery to relieve the delicate
Sevres sentiment of Grace and Marion. In the last of Dickens's Christmas
books, _The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain_, he returns once more to
a machinery resembling those of the earliest. But the fancy on which the
action turns is here more forced, and the truth which it illustrates is
after all only a half-truth, unless taken as part of the greater truth,
that the moral conditions of man's life are more easily marred than
mended. Once more the strength of the book lies in its humorous side. The
picture of the good Milly's humble proteges, the Tetterby family, is to
remind us that happiness consists precisely in that which the poor and the
rich may alike obtain, but which it is so difficult for the poor, amidst
their shifts and shabbiness, to keep fresh and green. Even without the
evil influence of an enchanted chemist, it is hard enough for the Mrs.
Tetterbys of real life always to be ministering angels to their families;
for the hand of every little Tetterby not occasionally to be against the
other little Tetterbys, and even for a devoted Johnny's temper never to
rise against Moloch. All the more is that to be cherished in the poor
which makes them love one another.

More than one of these Christmas books, both the humour and the sentiment
of which are so peculiarly English, was written on foreign soil. Dickens's
general conceptions of life, not less than his literary individuality, had
been formed before he became a traveller and sojourner in foreign lands.
In Italy, as elsewhere, a man will, in a sense, find only what he takes
there. At all events the changed life brought with it for Dickens, though
not at once, a refreshment and a brief repose which invigorated him for
some of the truest efforts of his genius. His resolution to spend some
time on the Continent had not been taken rashly, although it was at least
hastened by business disappointments. He seems at this time, as was
virtually inevitable, to have seen a good deal of society in London, and
more especially to have become a welcome guest of Lady Blessington and
Count d'Orsay at Gore House. Moreover, his services were beginning to be
occasionally claimed as a public speaker; and altogether he must have
found more of his time than he wished slipping through his hands. Lastly,
he very naturally desired to see what was to be seen, and to enjoy what
was to be enjoyed, by one gifted with a sleepless observation and animated
by a genuine love of nature and art. The letters, public and private,
which he wrote from Italy, are not among the most interesting productions
of his pen; even his humour seems now and then ill at ease in them, and
his descriptive power narrow in its range. His eyes were occasionally
veiled, as are those of most travellers in quest of "first impressions."
Thus I cannot but think his picture of Naples inadequate, and that of its
population unjust. Again, although he may have told the truth in asserting
that the Eternal City, at first sight, "looked like--I am half afraid to
write the word--like LONDON," and although his general description of Rome
has been pronounced correct by competent judgment, yet it is impossible to
ignore in it the undertone of Bow Bells. On the other hand, not even in
his newspaper letters can he be said to fall into affectation; his
impressions are never given pretentiously, and are accordingly seldom
altogether worthless; while his criticisms of works of art, when offered,
are candid and shrewd, besides being invariably his own.

Thus, there was never anything truer in its way than the account which he
gave to Maclise of his first impressions a few days after his arrival at
Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, where he found himself settled with his family
in July, 1844. He re-christened his abode, the Villa Bagnerello ("it
sounds romantic, but Signor Banderello is a butcher hard by"), "the Pink
Jail." Here, with abundance of space and time, and with a view from his
writing-table of "the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the
vineyards, the blistering hot fort, with a sentry on the drawbridge
standing in a bit of shadow no broader than his own musket, and the sky,"
he began his _villeggiatura_, and resolving not to know, or to be known
where it could be helped, looked round him at his leisure. This looking
round very naturally took up some time; for the circuit of Dickens's daily
observation was unusually wide. Soon he was seeking winter-quarters in
Genoa it self, and by October was established in the Palazzo Peschiere,
situate on a height within the walls of the city, and overlooking the
whole of it, with the harbour and the sea beyond. "There is not in Italy,
they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence." Even here, however,
among fountains and frescoes, it was some time before he could set
steadily to work at his Christmas story. At last the bells of Genoa chimed
a title for it into his restless ears; and, though longing with a nostalgy
that was specially strong upon him at periods of mental excitement for his
nightly walks in the London streets, he settled down to his task. I have
already described the spirit in which he executed it. No sooner was the
writing done than the other half of his double artist-nature was seized
with another craving. The rage which possesses authors to read their
writings aloud to sympathizing ears, if such can be found, is a well-worn
theme of satire; but in Dickens the actor was almost as strong as the
author, and he could not withstand the desire to interpret in person what
he had written, and to watch its effect with his own eyes and ears. In the
first days of November, therefore, he set off from Genoa, and made his way
home by Bologna, Venice, Milan, and the Simplon Pass. Of this journey his
_Pictures from Italy_ contains the record, including a chapter about
Venice, pitched in an unusually poetic key. But not all the memories of
all the Doges could have stayed the execution of his set purpose. On the
30th of November he reached London, and on the 2d of December he was
reading the _Chimes_, from the proofs, to the group of friends
immortalised in Maclise's inimitable sketch. Three days afterwards the
reading was repeated to a slightly different audience; and, indeed, it
would seem, from an enthusiastic postscript to a letter addressed to his
wife, that he had read at least part of the book to Macready on the night
before that of the first conclave. The distance was no doubt wide between
the intimacy of these friendly readings and the stormy seas of public
audiences; but, however unconsciously, the first step had been taken. It
may be worth noticing, in connexion with this, that the scheme of a
private dramatic performance, which was to occupy much of Dickens's
"leisure" in the year following, was proposed for the first time on the
occasion of the first reading of the _Chimes_. Before Christmas he was
back again in his "Italian bowers." If the strain of his effort in writing
the _Chimes_ had been severe, the holiday which followed was long. In the
later winter and early spring of 1845 he and the ladies of his family saw
Rome and Naples, and in June their Italian life came to an end, and they
were in London before the close of the month. Projects of work remained in
abeyance until the absorbing fancy of a private play had been realised
with an earnestness such as only Dickens could carry into his amusements,
and into this particular amusement above all others. The play was _Every
Man in his Humour_; the theatre, the little house in Dean Street, of whose
chequered fortunes no theatrical history has succeeded in exhausting the
memories; and the manager was, of course, "Bobadil," as Dickens now took
to signing himself. His joking remark to Macready, that he "thought of
changing his present mode of life, and was open to an engagement," was
after all not so very wide of the mark. According to the inevitable rule
in such things, he and his friends--among whom Mark Lemon, Douglas
Jerrold, and Forster were conspicuous--were "induced" to repeat their
performance at a larger house for a public charity, and later in the year
they played _The Elder Brother_ for Miss Fanny Kelly's benefit. Leigh
Hunt, whose opinion, however, could hardly fail to be influenced by the
circumstances under which Ben Jonson's comedy was afterwards performed by
the amateurs, and who was no longer the youthful Draco of the _News_,
afterwards spoke very highly of Dickens's Bobadil. It had "a spirit in it
of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has
shown." His acting in the farce which followed Leigh Hunt thought
"throughout admirable; quite rich and filled up."

Christmas, 1845, had passed, and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ had graced
the festival, when an altogether new chapter in Dickens's life seemed
about to open for him. The experience through which he now passed was one
on which his biographer, for reasons easy to guess, has touched very
slightly, while his _Letters_ throw no additional light on it at all. Most
people, I imagine, would decline to pronounce upon the qualifications
requisite in an editor of a great political journal. Yet, literary power
of a kind which acts upon the multitude rapidly and powerfully, habits of
order so confirmed as to have almost become second nature, and an interest
in the affairs of the nation fed by an ardent enthusiasm for its
welfare--these would seem to go some way towards making up the list. Of
all these qualifications Dickens at various times gave proof, and they
sufficed in later years to make him the successful conductor of a weekly
journal which aimed at the enlightenment hardly less than at the
entertainment of no inconsiderable portion of the British public. But, in
the first place, political journalism proper is a craft of which very few
men have been known to become masters by intuition, and Dickens had as yet
had no real experience of it. His zealous efforts as a reporter can hardly
be taken into account here. He had for a short time edited a miscellany of
amusement, and had failed to carry beyond a beginning the not very
carefully considered scheme of another. Recently, he had resumed the old
notion of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ in a different shape; but nothing had
come of his projected cheap weekly paper for the present, while its title,
"_The Cricket_," was reserved for a different use. Since his reporting
days he had, however, now and then appeared among the lighter combatants
of political literature. In 1841 he had thrown a few squibs in the
_Examiner_ at Sir Robert Peel and the Tories; and from about the same date
he had, besides occasionally contributing to the literary and theatrical
columns of the same weekly journal, now and then discussed in it subjects
of educational or other general interest.[6] Finally, it is stated by
Forster that in 1844, when the greatest political struggle of the last
generation was approaching its climax, Dickens contributed some articles
to the _Morning Chronicle_ which attracted attention and led to
negotiations with the editor that arrived at no positive result. If these
contributions treated any political questions whatever, they were, with
the exception of the few _Examiner_ papers, and of the letters to the
_Daily News_ to be mentioned in this chapter, the only articles of this
kind which, to my knowledge, he ever wrote.

For, from first to last, whether in the days when Oliver Twist suffered
under the maladministration of the Poor-law, or in those when Arthur
Clennam failed to make an impression upon the Circumlocution Office,
politics were with Dickens a sentiment rather than a study or a pursuit.
With his habits of application and method, it might have taken but a very
short time for him to train himself as a politician; but this short time
never actually occurred. There is, however, no reason to suppose that
when, in 1841, a feeler was put out by some more or less influential
persons at Reading, with regard to his willingness to be nominated for the
representation of that borough, he had any reason for declining the
proposal besides that which he stated in his replies. He could not afford
the requisite expense; and he was determined not to forfeit his
independence through accepting Government--by which I hope he means Whig
party--aid for meeting the cost of the contest. Still, in 1845, though
slack of faith in the "people who govern us," he had not yet become the
irreclaimable political sceptic of later days; and without being in any
way bound to the Whigs, he had that general confidence in Lord John
Russell which was all they could expect from their irregular followers. As
yet, however, he had shown no sign of any special aptitude or inclination
for political work, though if he addressed himself to questions affecting
the health and happiness of the humbler classes, he was certain to bring
to them the enthusiasm of a genuine sympathy. And a question of this kind
was uppermost in Englishmen's minds in this year 1845, when at last the
time was drawing near for the complete abolition of the tax upon the
staple article of the poor man's daily food.

The establishment of a new London morning paper, on the scale to which
those already in existence had attained, was a serious matter in itself;
but it seems to have been undertaken in no spirit of diffidence by the
projectors and first proprietors of the _Daily News_. With the early
history of the experiment I cannot here concern myself; it is, however, an
open secret that the rate of expenditure of the new journal was at first
on a most liberal, not to say lavish, scale, and that the losses of the
proprietors were for many years very large indeed. Established on those
principles of Radicalism which, on the whole, it has in both good and evil
times consistently maintained, the _Daily News_ was to rise superior to
the opportunism, if not to the advertisements, of the _Times_, and to
outstrip the cautious steps of the Whig _Morning Chronicle_. Special
attention was to be given to those industrial enterprises with which the
world teemed in that speculative age, and no doubt also to those social
questions affecting the welfare and elevation of the masses and the
relations between employers and employed, which were attracting more and
more of the public attention. But in the first instance the actual
political situation would oblige the new journal to direct the greater
part of its energies to one particular question, which had, in truth,
already been threshed out by the organs of public opinion, and as to which
the time for action had at last arrived. No Liberal journal projected in
1845, and started early in 1846, could fail to concentrate its activity
for a time upon the question of the Corn-laws, to which the session of
1846 was to give the death-blow.

It is curious enough, on opening the first number of the _Daily News_,
dated January 21, 1846, to find one's self transplanted into the midst of
one of the most memorable episodes of our more recent political history.
The very advertisements of subscriptions to the Anti-Corn-law League, with
the good old Manchester names figuring conspicuously among them, have a
historic interest; and the report of a disputation on free-trade at
Norwich, in which all the hits are made by Mr. Cobden, another report of a
great London meeting on the same subject, and some verses concerning the
people's want of its bread, probably written by Mr. Charles Mackay, occupy
an entire page of the paper. Railway news and accounts of railway meetings
fill about the same space; while the foreign news is extremely meagre.
There remain the leading articles, four in number--of which three are on
the burning question of the day--and the first of a series of _Travelling
Letters Written on the Road, by Charles Dickens_ (the Avignon chapter in
the _Pictures from Italy_.)[7] The hand of the editor is traceable only
in this _feuilleton_ and in the opening article of the new paper. On
internal evidence I conclude that this article, which has little to
distinguish it from similar manifestoes, unless it be a moderation of tone
that would not have suited Captain Shandon, was not written by Dickens
alone or unassisted. But his hand is traceable in the concluding
paragraphs, which contain the following wordy but spirited assertion of a
cause that Dickens lost no opportunity of advocating:

    "We seek, so far as in us lies, to elevate the character of the Public
    Press in England. We believe it would attain a much higher position,
    and that those who wield its powers would be infinitely more respected
    as a class, and an important one, if it were purged of a disposition
    to sordid attacks _upon itself_, which only prevails in England and
    America. We discern nothing in the editorial plural that justifies a
    gentleman, or body of gentlemen, in discarding a gentleman's
    forbearance and responsibility, and venting ungenerous spleen against
    a rival, by a perversion of a great power--a power, however, which is
    only great so long as it is good and honest. The stamp on newspapers
    is not like the stamp on universal medicine-bottles, which licenses
    anything, however false and monstrous; and we are sure this misuse of
    it, in any notorious case, not only offends and repels right-minded
    men in that particular instance, but naturally, though unjustly,
    involves the whole Press, as a pursuit or profession, in the feeling
    so awakened, and places the character of all who are associated with
    it at a great disadvantage.

    "Entering on this adventure of a new daily journal in a spirit of
    honourable competition and hope of public usefulness, we seek, in our
    new station, at once to preserve our own self-respect, and to be
    respected, for ourselves and for it, by our readers. Therefore, we
    beg them to receive, in this our first number, the assurance that no
    recognition or interchange of trade abuse, by us, shall be the
    destruction of either sentiment; and that we intend proceeding on our
    way, and theirs, without stooping to any such flowers by the
    roadside."

I am unable to say how many days it was after the appearance of this first
number that Dickens, or the proprietors of the journal, or, as seems most
likely, both sides simultaneously, began to consider the expediency of
ending the connexion between them. He was "revolving plans for quitting
the paper" on January 30, and resigned his editorship on February 9
following. In the interval, with the exception of two or three more of the
_Travelling Letters_, very few signs of his hand appear in the journal.
The number of January 24, however, contains an editorial contribution, in
the shape of "a new song, but an old story," concerning _The British
Lion_, his accomplishment of eating Corn-law Leagues, his principal
keeper, _Wan Humbug_, and so forth. This it would be cruel to unearth. A
more important indication of a line of writing that his example may have
helped to domesticate in the _Daily News_ appears in the number of
February 4, which contains a long letter, with his signature, urging the
claims of Ragged Schools, and giving a graphic account of his visit to one
in Saffron Hill. After he had placed his resignation in the hands of the
proprietors, and was merely holding on at his post till the time of his
actual withdrawal, he was naturally not anxious to increase the number of
his contributions. The _Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers_--which appeared
on February 14--is, of course, an echo of the popular cry of the day; but
the subtler pathos of Dickens never found its way into his verse. The most
important, and so far as I know, the last, of his contributions to the
_Daily News_, consisted of a series of three letters (March 9, 13, and
16) on capital punishment. It was a question which much occupied him at
various times of his life, and on which it cannot be shown that he really
changed his opinions. The letters in the _Daily News_, based in part on
the arguments of one of the ablest men of his day, the "unlucky" Mr.
Wakefield, are an interesting contribution to the subject; and the first
of them, with its Hogarthian sketch of the temptation and fall of Thomas
Hocker, Sunday-school teacher and murderer, would be worth reprinting as
an example of Dickens's masterly use of the argument _ex concreto_.

The few traditions which linger in the _Daily News_ office concerning
Dickens as editor of the paper, agree with the conjecture that his labours
on its behalf were limited, or very nearly so, to the few pieces
enumerated above. Of course there must have been some inevitable business;
but of this much may have been taken off his hands by his sub-editor, Mr.
W. H. Wills, who afterwards became his _alter ego_ at the office of his
own weekly journal and his intimate personal friend. In the days of the
first infancy of the _Daily News_, Mr. Britton, the present publisher of
that journal, was attached to the editor as his personal office attendant;
and he remembers very vividly what little there can have been to remember
about Dickens's performance of his functions. His habit, following a
famous precedent, was to make up for coming late--usually about half-past
ten P.M.--by going away early--usually not long after midnight. There were
frequently sounds of merriment, if not of modest revelry, audible from the
little room at the office in Lombard Street, where the editor sat in
conclave with Douglas Jerrold and one or two other intimates. Mr. Britton
is not sure that the work did not sometimes begin _after the editor had
left_; but at all events he cannot recollect that Dickens ever wrote
anything at the office--that he ever, for instance, wrote about a debate
that had taken place in Parliament on the same night. And he sums up his
reminiscences by declaring his conviction that Dickens was "not a
newspaper man, at least not when in 'the chair.'" And so Dickens seems on
this occasion to have concluded; for when, not long after quitting the
paper, he republished with additions the _Travelling Letters_ which during
his conduct of it had been its principal ornaments, he spoke of "a brief
mistake he had made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between
himself and his readers, and departing for a moment from his old
pursuits." He had been virtually out of "the chair" almost as soon as he
had taken it. His successor, but only for a few months, was his friend
Forster.

Never has captive released made a more eager or a better use of his
recovered freedom. Before the summer had fairly set in Dickens had let his
house, and was travelling with his family up the Rhine towards
Switzerland. This was, I think, Dickens's only passage through Germany,
which in language and literature remained a _terra incognita_ to him,
while in various ways so well known to his friendly rivals, Lord Lytton
and Thackeray. He was on the track of poor Thomas Hood's old journeyings,
whose facetious recollections of Rhineland he had some years before
reviewed in a spirit of admiration rather for the author than for the
book, funny as it is. His point of destination was Lausanne, where he had
resolved to establish his household for the summer, and where by the
middle of June they were most agreeably settled in a little villa or
cottage which did not belie its name of Rosemont, and from which they
looked upon the lake and the mighty Alpine chain beyond. If Rome had
reminded Dickens of London, the green woods near Lausanne recalled to him
his Kentish glades; but he had the fullest sense and the truest enjoyment
of the grandeurs of Alpine scenery, and lost no opportunity of becoming
acquainted with them. Thus his letters contain an admirable description
(not untinged with satire) of a trip to the Great St. Bernard and its
convent, many years afterwards reproduced in one of the few enjoyable
chapters of the Second Part of _Little Dorrit_. More interesting, however,
because more characteristic, is the freshness and candour with which in
Switzerland, where by most English visitors the native inhabitants are
"taken for granted," he set himself to observe, and, so far as he could,
to appreciate, the people among whom he was a temporary resident. His
solutions of some of the political difficulties, which were mostly
connected with religious differences, at that time rife in Switzerland,
are palpably one-sided. But the generosity of spirit which reveals itself
in his kindly recognition of the fine qualities of the people around him
is akin to what was best and noblest in Dickens.

He had, at the same time, been peculiarly fortunate in finding at Lausanne
a circle of pleasant acquaintances, to whom he dedicated the Christmas
book which he wrote among the roses and the foliage of his lake-side
cottage. Of course _The Battle of Life_ was read aloud by its author to so
kindly an audience. The day of parting, however, soon came; on the 16th of
November _paterfamilias_ had his "several tons of luggage, other tons of
servants, and other tons of children," in travelling order, and soon had
safely stowed them away at Paris "in the most preposterous house in the
world. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes, does not,
exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes;
the dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The
dining-room"--which in another letter he describes as "mere midsummer
madness"--"is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a
grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the
branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room, but
it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a
telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery." Here, with the
exception of two brief visits to England, paid before his final departure,
he spent three months, familiarising himself for the first time of his
life with the second of his "Two Cities."

Dickens came to know the French language well enough to use it with ease,
if not with elegance; and he lost no opportunity, it need hardly be said,
of resorting to the best of schools for the purpose. Macready, previously
addressed from "Altorf," had made him acquainted with Regnier, of the
Theatre Francais, who in his turn had introduced him to the greenroom of
the house of Moliere. Other theatres were diligently visited by him and
Forster, when the latter arrived on a visit; and celebrities were polite
and hospitable to their distinguished English _confrere_. With these,
however, Dickens was not cosmopolitan enough to consort except in passing;
the love of literary society _because_ it is literary society was at no
time one of his predilections or foibles. The streets of Paris were to him
more than its _salons_, more even than its theatres. They are so to a
larger number of Englishmen than that which cares to confess it, but
Dickens would have been the last to disown the impeachment. They were the
proper sphere for his powers of humorous observation, as he afterwards
showed in more than one descriptive paper as true to life as any of his
London _Sketches_. And, moreover, he _needed_ the streets for the work
which he had in hand. _Dombey and Son_ had been begun at Rosemont, and the
first of its twenty monthly numbers had been published in October, 1846.
No reader of the book is likely to forget how, after writing the chapter
which relates the death of little Paul, Dickens during the greater part of
the night wandered restlessly with a heavy heart about the Paris streets.
Sooner, however, than he had intended, his residence abroad had to come to
a close; and early in 1847 he and his family were again in London.

_Dombey and Son_ has, perhaps, been more criticised than any other amongst
the stories of its author; and yet it certainly is not the one which has
been least admired, or least loved. Dickens himself, in the brief preface
which he afterwards prefixed to the story, assumed a half-defiant air
which sits ill upon the most successful author, but which occasionally he
was tempted to assume. Before condescending to defend the character of Mr.
Dombey as in accordance with both probability and experience, he "made so
bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of correctly observing
the characters of men is a rare one." Yet, though the drawing of this
character is only one of the points which have been objected against the
story, not only did the book at the time of publication far surpass its
predecessor in popularity, but it has, I believe, always preserved to
itself a special congregation of enthusiastic admirers. Manifestly, this
novel is one of its author's most ambitious endeavours. In it, more
distinctly even than in _Chuzzlewit_, he has chosen for his theme one of
the chief vices of human nature, and has striven to show what pride
cannot achieve, what it cannot conquer, what it cannot withstand. This
central idea gives to the story, throughout a most varied succession of
scenes, a unity of action to be found in few of Dickens's earlier works.
On the other hand, _Dombey and Son_ shares with these earlier productions,
and with its successor, _David Copperfield_, the freshness of invention
and spontaneous flow of both humour and pathos which at times are wanting
in the more powerfully conceived and more carefully constructed romances
of Dickens's later years. If there be any force at all in the common
remark that the most interesting part of the book ends together with the
life of little Paul, the censure falls upon the whole design of the
author. Little Paul, in something besides the ordinary meaning of the
words, was born to die; and though, like the writer, most readers may have
dreaded the hour which was to put an end to that frail life, yet in this
case there could be no question--such as was possible in the story of
Little Nell--of any other issue. Indeed, deep as is the pathos of the
closing scene, its beauty is even surpassed by those which precede it. In
death itself there is release for a child as for a man, and for those
sitting by the pillow of the patient; but it is the gradual approach of
death which seems hardest of all for the watchers to bear; it is the
sinking of hope which seems even sadder than its extinction. What old
fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a palpitating heart, that was so
visibly expressed in him, so plainly seen by so many people? Every heart
is softened and every eye dimmed as the innocent child passes on his way
to his grave. The hand of God's angel is on him; he is no longer
altogether of this world. The imagination which could picture and present
this mysterious haze of feeling, through which the narrative moves, half
like a reality, half like a dream, is that of a true poet, and of a great
one.

What even the loss of his son could not effect in Mr. Dombey is to be
accomplished in the progress of the story by a yet stronger agency than
sorrow. His pride is to be humbled to the dust, where he is to be sought
and raised up by the love of his despised and ill-used daughter. Upon the
relations between this pair, accordingly, it was necessary for the author
to expend the greatest care, and upon the treatment of those relations the
criticism to which the character of Mr. Dombey has been so largely
subjected must substantially turn. The unfavourable judgments passed upon
it have, in my opinion, not been altogether unjust. The problem obviously
was to show how the father's cold indifference towards the daughter
gradually becomes jealousy, as he finds that upon her is concentrated,
first, the love of his innocent little son, and then that of his haughty
second wife; and how hereupon this jealousy deepens into hate. But, unless
we are to suppose that Mr. Dombey hated his daughter from the first, the
disfavour shown by him on her account to young Walter Gay remains without
adequate explanation. His dislike of Florence is not manifestly founded
upon his jealousy of what Mrs. Chick calls her brother's "infatuation" for
her; and the main motives at work in the unhappy man are either not very
skilfully kept asunder, or not very intelligibly intermixed. Nor are the
later stages of the relations between father and daughter altogether
satisfactorily conceived. The momentary yielding of Mr. Dombey, after his
"coming home" with his new wife, is natural and touching; but his threat
to visit his daughter with the consequences of her step-mother's conduct
is sheer brutality. The passage in which Mr. Dombey's ultimatum to Mrs.
Dombey is conveyed by him in her presence through a third person is so
artificial as to fall not very far short of absurdity. The closing scene
which leads to the flight of Florence is undeniably powerful; but it is
the development of the relations between the pair in which the art of the
author is in my judgment occasionally at fault.

As to the general effect of the latter part of the story--or rather of its
main plot--which again has been condemned as melodramatic and unnatural, a
distinction should be drawn between its incidents and its characters.
Neither Edith Dombey nor Mr. Carker is a character of real life. The pride
of the former comes very near to bad breeding, and her lapses into
sentiment seem artificial lapses. How differently Thackeray would have
managed the "high words" between her and her frivolous mother! how
differently, for that matter, he _has_ managed a not altogether dissimilar
scene in the _Newcomes_ between Ethel Newcome and old Lady Kew! As for Mr.
Carker, with his white teeth and glistening gums, who calls his unhappy
brother "Spaniel," and contemplates a life of sensual ease in Sicily, he
has the semi-reality of the stage. Possibly the French stage had helped to
suggest the _scene de la piece_ between the fugitives at Dijon--an
effective situation, but one which many a novelist might have worked out
not less skilfully than Dickens. His own master-hand, however, re-asserts
itself in the wondrously powerful narrative of Carker's flight and death.
Here again he excites terror--as in the same book he had evoked pity--by
foreshadowing, without prematurely revealing, the end. We know what the
morning is to bring which rises in awful tranquillity over the victim of
his own sins; and, as in Turner's wild but powerful picture, the engine
made by the hand of man for peaceful purposes seems a living agent of
wrath.[8]

No other of Dickens's books is more abundantly stocked than this with
genuinely comic characters; but nearly all of them, in accordance with the
pathetic tone which is struck at the outset, and which never dies out till
the story has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. Lord
Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment that Dickens should
devote so much pains to characters like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably
the habit remained with him from his earliest times of authorship, when he
had not always distinguished very accurately between the humorous and the
_bizarre_. But Polly and the Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her
"select infantine boarding-house," and the whole of Doctor Blimber's
establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, and up again, in
the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., are among the most admirable
of all the great humourist's creations. Against this ample provision for
her poor little brother's nursing and training Florence has to set but her
one Susan Nipper; but she is a host in herself, an absolutely original
character among the thousands of _soubrettes_ that are known to comedy and
fiction, and one of the best tonic mixtures ever composed out of much
humour and not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling flavour
of its own; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only upon whom she acts, as
their type acted upon her, "like early gooseberries." Of course she has a
favourite figure of speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would
probably class among the figures "working by surplusage:"

    "'Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth,
    Mrs. Richards, but that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole
    set.'"

Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of "labelling" his
characters, as it has been called, by particular tricks or terms of
speech; and there is a certain excess in this direction already in _Dombey
and Son_, where not only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but
Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished forth. But the
invention is still so fresh and the play of humour so varied, that this
mannerism cannot be said as yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic
charm of a peculiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint
home over which he mounts guard during the absence of its owner. The
nautical colouring and concomitant fun apart--for only Smollett could have
drawn Jack Bunsby's fellow, though the character in his hands would have
been differently accentuated--Dickens has never approached more nearly to
the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in this singularly attractive part of
his book. Elsewhere the story passes into that sphere of society in
describing which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. But
though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot be denied, human
nature in the pigments and figments of her hideous old mother; and, to
outward appearance at all events, the counterparts of her apoplectic
admirer, Major Bagstock, still pace those pavements and promenades which
it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is likewise very far from
impossible, and is besides extremely delightful--and a good fellow too at
bottom, so that the sting of the satire is here taken away. On the other
hand, the meeting between the _sacs et parchemins_ at Mr. Dombey's house
is quite out of focus.

The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant and unpleasant parts
and passages. But enough has been said to recall the exuberant creative
force, and the marvellous strength of pathos and humour which _Dombey and
Son_ proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his powers as a
writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his public readings many years
afterwards, when he was reciting the adventures of Little Dombey, he
narrates that "a very good fellow," whom he noticed in the stalls, could
not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often as he thought
that Toots was coming on. And just as Toots had become a reality to this
good fellow, so Toots and Toots's little friend, and divers other
personages in this story, have become realities to half the world that
reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What higher praise could be
given to this wonderful book? Of all the works of its author none has more
powerfully and more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its
readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to us from the
aspect of our own streets and our own homes, he too wielded a wizard's
wand.

After the success of _Dombey_ it might have seemed that nothing further
was wanting to crown the prosperity of Dickens's literary career. While
the publication of this story was in progress he had concluded
arrangements for the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition,
which began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated "to the English
people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will
live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die."
He who could thus proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all
dispute, the people's chosen favourite among its men of letters. That
position he was not to lose so long as he lived; but even at this time the
height had not been reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of
those who love his writings) he was in his next work to attain.




CHAPTER IV.

"DAVID COPPERFIELD."

[1847-1851.]


The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close
of 1851, were most assuredly the season in which the genius of Dickens
produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work
upon _Dombey and Son_; towards its end he was already engaged upon the
earliest portions of _Bleak House_. And it was during the interval that he
produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind,
as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his
literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions
of our English school--_David Copperfield_. To this period also belong, it
is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last
of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly
periodical, _Household Words_, began to run its course. There was much
play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his
good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised:

    "'Play!' said Thomas Idle. 'Here is a man goes systematically tearing
    himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of
    training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the
    champion's belt, and he calls it "Play." Play!' exclaimed Thomas
    Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air; 'you can't
    play. You don't know what it is. You make work of everything!'"

"A man," added the same easy philosopher, "who can do nothing by halves
appears to me to be a fearful man." And as at all times in Dickens's life,
so most emphatically in these years when his physical powers seemed ready
to meet every demand, and the elasticity of his mind seemed equal to every
effort, he did nothing by halves. Within this short space of time not only
did he write his best book, and conduct a weekly journal of solid merit
through its most trying stage, but he also established his reputation as
one of the best "unpolitical" speakers in the country; and as an amateur
actor and manager successfully weathered what may be called three
theatrical seasons, to the labours and glories of which it would be
difficult to find a parallel even in the records of that most exacting of
all social amusements. One likes to think of him in these years of
vigorous manhood, no longer the fair youth with the flowing locks of
Maclise's charming portrait, but not yet, I suppose, altogether the
commanding and rather stern presence of later years. Mr. Frith's portrait
was not painted till 1859, by which time the face occasionally had a more
set expression, and the entire personality a more weather-beaten
appearance, than this well-known picture suggests. But even eight years
before this date, when Dickens was acting in Lord Lytton's comedy the part
of a young man of _mode_, Mr. Sala's well-known comparison of his outward
man to "some prosperous sea-captain home from a sea-voyage," was thought
applicable to him by another shrewd observer, Mr. R. H. Horne, who says
that, fashionable "make-up" notwithstanding, "he presented a figure that
would have made a good portrait of a Dutch privateer after having taken a
capital prize." And in 1856 Ary Scheffer, to whom when sitting for his
portrait he had excused himself for being a difficult subject, "received
the apology as strictly his due, and said, with a vexed air, 'At this
moment, _mon cher_ Dickens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral
than anything else;' for which I apologised again." In 1853, in the
sympathetic neighbourhood of Boulogne, he was "growing a mustache," and,
by 1856, a beard of the _Henri Quatre_ type had been added; but even
before that time we may well believe that he was, as Mr. Sala says, "one
of the few men whose individuality was not effaced by the mournful
conventionality of evening-dress." Even in morning-dress he unconsciously
contrived, born actor as he was, to have something unusual about him; and,
if report speaks the truth, even at the sea-side, when most prodigal of
ease, he was careful to dress the character.

The five years of which more especially I am speaking brought him
repeatedly face to face with the public, and within hearing of the
applause that was becoming more and more of a necessity to him. They were
thus unmistakably amongst the very happiest years of his life. The shadow
that was to fall upon his home can hardly yet have been visible even in
the dim distance. For this the young voices were too many and too fresh
around him behind the garden-wall in Devonshire Terrace, and amongst the
autumnal corn on the cliffs at Broadstairs. "They are all in great force,"
he writes to his wife, in September, 1850, and "much excited with the
expectation of receiving you on Friday;" and I only wish I had space to
quote the special report sent on this occasion to the absent mother
concerning her precocious three-year-old. What sorrowful experiences he in
these years underwent were such as few men escape amongst the chances of
life. In 1848 he lost the sister who had been the companion of his
earliest days, and three years later his father, whom he had learned to
respect as well as love. Not long afterwards his little Dora, the youngest
of his flock, was suddenly taken from him. Meanwhile, his old friends
clung to him. Indeed, I never heard that he lost the affection of any one
who had been attached to him; and though the circle of his real intimates
was never greatly widened, yet he was on friendly or even familiar terms
with many whose names belong to the history of their times. Amongst these
were the late Lord Lytton--then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton--whose splendid
abilities were still devoted mainly to literary labours, and between whom
and Dickens there were more points of contrast than might at first sight
appear. Of Thackeray, too, he seems to have been coming to know more; and
with Leech, more especially during a summer sojourn of both their families
at Bonchurch, in 1849, he grew intimate. Mr. Monckton Milnes--then, and
since as Lord Houghton, _semper amicus, semper hospes_ both to successful
merit and to honest endeavour--Lord Carlisle, and others who adorned the
great world under more than one of its aspects, were, of course, welcome
friends and acquaintances; and even Carlyle occasionally found his way to
the house of his staunch admirer, though he might declare that he was, in
the language of Mr. Peggotty's house-keeper, "a lorn lone creature, and
everything went contrairy with him."

It is not very easy to describe the personal habits of a man who is found
seeing the spring in at Brighton and the autumn out at Broadstairs, and in
the interval "strolling" through the chief towns of the kingdom at the
head of a large company of ladies and gentlemen, according to the
description which he put into Mrs. Gamp's mouth, "with a great box of
papers under his arm, a-talking to everybody wery indistinct, and exciting
of himself dreadful." But since under ordinary circumstances he made, even
in outward matters and arrangements of detail, a home for himself wherever
he was, and as a rule cared little for the society of companions whose
ideas and ways of life were foreign to his own, certain habits had become
second nature to him, and to others he adhered with sophistical tenacity.
He was an early riser, if for no other reason, because every man in whose
work imagination plays its part must sometimes be alone; and Dickens has
told us that there was to him something incomparably solemn in the still
solitude of the morning. But it was only exceptionally, and when
hard-pressed by the necessities of his literary labours, that he wrote
before breakfast; in general he was contented with the ordinary working
hours of the morning, not often writing after luncheon, and, except in
early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, when engaged on a work of
fiction, he considered three of his not very large MS. pages a good, and
four an excellent, day's work; and, while very careful in making his
corrections clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a morning's
labour had ultimately produced. On the other hand, he was frequently slow
in beginning a story, being, as he himself says, affected by something
like despondency at such times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it,
"going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about
and about his sugar before he touches it." A temperate liver, he was at
the same time a zealous devotee of bodily exercise. He had not as yet
given up riding, and is found, in 1848, spending the whole of a March day,
with Forster, Leech, and Mark Lemon, in riding over every part of
Salisbury Plain. But walking exercise was at once his forte and his
fanaticism. He is said to have constructed for himself a theory that, to
every portion of the day given to intellectual labour should correspond an
equal number of hours spent in walking; and frequently, no doubt, he gave
up his morning's chapter before he had begun it, "entirely persuading
himself that he was under a moral obligation" to do his twenty miles on
the road. By day he found in the London thoroughfares stimulative variety,
and at a later date he states it to be "one of his fancies that even his
idlest walk must have its appointed destination;" and by night, in seasons
of intellectual excitement, he found in these same streets the refreshment
of isolation among crowds. But the walks he loved best were long stretches
on the cliffs or across the downs by the sea, where, following the track
of his "breathers," one half expects to meet him coming along against the
wind at four and a half miles an hour, the very embodiment of energy and
brimful of life.

And besides this energy he carried with him, wheresoever he pitched his
tent, what was the second cause of his extraordinary success in so much of
the business of life as it fell to him to perform. He hated disorder as
Sir Artegal hated injustice; and if there was anything against which he
took up his parable with burning indignation, it was slovenliness, and
half-done work, and "shoddiness" of all kinds. His love of order made him
always the most regular of men. "Everything with him," Miss Hogarth told
me, "went as by clock-work; his movements, his absences from home, and the
times of his return were all fixed beforehand, and it was seldom that he
failed to adhere to what he had fixed." Like most men endowed with a
superfluity of energy, he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not
live in a room or in a house till he had put every piece of furniture into
its proper place, nor could he begin to work till all his writing-gear was
at hand, with no item missing or misplaced. Yet he did not, like so many,
combine with these habits and tendencies a saving disposition. "No man,"
he said of himself, "attaches less importance to the possession of money,
or less disparagement to the want of it, than I do." His circumstances,
though easy, were never such as to warrant a display to which, perhaps,
certain qualities of his character might have inclined him; even at a much
later date he described himself--rather oddly, perhaps--as "a man of
moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive public position."
But, so far as I can gather, he never had a reasonable want which he could
not and did not satisfy, though at the same time he cared for very few of
the pursuits or amusements that are apt to drain much larger resources
than his. He never had to think twice about country or sea-side quarters;
wherever it might suit his purpose or fancy to choose them, at one of his
south-coast haunts or, for his wife's health, at Malvern, thither he went;
and when the whim seized him for a trip _en garcon_ to any part of England
or to Paris, he had only to bid the infallible Anne pack his trunk. He was
a provident as well as an affectionate father; but the cost of educating
his numerous family seems to have caused him no serious anxiety. In 1849
he sent his eldest son to Eton. And while he had sworn a kind of
_vendetta_ against begging-letter writers, and afterwards used to parry
the attacks of his pertinacious enemies by means of carefully-prepared
written forms, his hand seems to have been at all times open for charity.

Some of these personal characteristics of Dickens were to be brought out
with remarkable vividness during the period of his life which forms the
special subject of the present chapter. Never was he more thoroughly
himself than as a theatrical manager and actor, surrounded by congenial
associates. He starred it to his heart's content at the country seat of
his kind Lausanne friends, Mr. and Mrs. Watson. But the first occasion on
which he became publicly known in both the above-mentioned capacities was
the reproduction of the amateur performance of _Every Man in his Humour_.
This time the audiences were to be in Manchester and Liverpool, where it
was hoped that a golden harvest might be reaped for Leigh Hunt, who was at
that time in sore straits. As it chanced, a civil-list pension was just
about this time--1847--conferred upon the most unaffectedly graceful of
all modern writers of English verse. It was accordingly resolved to divert
part of the proceeds of the undertaking in favour of a worthy playwright,
the author of _Paul Pry_. The comedy was acted with brilliant success at
Manchester, on July 26, and at Liverpool two days later; and then the
"managerial miseries," which Dickens had enjoyed with his whole heart and
soul, were over for the nonce. Already, however, in the following year,
1848, an excellent reason was found for their recommencement; and nine
performances of Ben Jonson's play, this time alternated with _The Merry
Wives of Windsor_, were given by Dickens's "company of amateurs"--the
expression is his own--at the Haymarket, and in the theatres of five of
the largest towns in the kingdom, for the benefit of Sheridan Knowles.
Nothing could have been more honourable than Dickens's readiness to serve
the interests of an actor with whom, but for his own generous temper, he
would only a few months before have been involved in a wordy quarrel. In
_The Merry Wives_, the manager acted Justice Shallow to Mark Lemon's
Falstaff. Dame Quickly was played by Mrs. Cowden Clarke, who speedily
became a favourite correspondent of Dickens. But the climax of these
excitements arrived in the year of wonders, 1851, when, with a flourish of
trumpets resounding through the world of fashion as well as of letters,
the comedy _Not so Bad as We Seem_, written for the occasion by Bulwer
Lytton, was performed under Dickens's management at Devonshire House, in
the presence of the Queen, for the benefit of the Guild of Literature and
Art. The object was a noble one, though the ultimate result of the scheme
has been an almost pitiable failure; and nothing was spared, by the host
or the actors, to make the effect worthy of it. While some of the most
popular men of letters took parts in the clever and effective play, its
scenery was painted by some of the most eminent among the English artists.
Dickens was fired by the ardour of the enterprise, and, proceeding on his
principle that the performance could not possibly "be a success if the
smallest pepper-corn of arrangement were omitted," covered himself and his
associates with glory. From Devonshire House play and theatre were
transferred to the Hanover Square Rooms, where the farce of _Mr.
Nightingale's Diary_ was included in the performance, of which some vivid
reminiscences have been published by one of the few survivors of that
noble company, Mr. R. H. Horne. Other accounts corroborate his
recollections of the farce, which was the triumph of "gag," and would have
been reckoned a masterpiece in the old _commedia dell' arte_. The
characters played by Dickens included Sam Weller turned waiter; a voluble
barrister by the name of Mr. Gabblewig; a hypochondriac suffering from a
prescription of mustard and milk; the Gampish mother of a charity-boy
(Mr. Egg); and her brother, a stone-deaf old sexton, who appeared to be
"at least ninety years of age." The last-named assumption seems to have
been singularly effective:

    "After repeated shoutings ('It's of no use whispering to me, young
    man') of the word 'buried'--'_Brewed!_ Oh yes, sir, I have brewed many
    a good gallon of ale in my time. The last batch I brewed, sir, was
    finer than all the rest--the best ale ever brewed in the county. It
    used to be called in our parts here "Samson with his hair on!" in
    allusion'--here his excitement shook the tremulous frame into coughing
    and wheezing--'in allusion to its great strength.' He looked from face
    to face to see if his feat was duly appreciated, and his venerable
    jest understood by those around; and then, softly repeating, with a
    glimmering smile, 'in allusion to its great strength,' he turned
    about, and made his exit, like one moving towards his own grave while
    he thinks he is following the funeral of another."

From London the company travelled into the country, where their series of
performances was not closed till late in the succeeding year, 1852.
Dickens was from first to last the manager, and the ruling spirit of the
undertaking. Amongst his latest recruits Mr. Wilkie Collins is specially
mentioned by Forster. The acquaintance which thus began soon ripened into
a close and lasting friendship, and became, with the exception of that
with Forster himself, the most important of all Dickens's personal
intimacies for the history of his career as an author.

Speech-making was not in quite the same sense, or to quite the same
degree, as amateur acting and managing, a voluntary labour on Dickens's
part. Not that he was one of those to whom the task of occasionally
addressing a public audience is a pain or even a burden. Indeed, he was a
born orator; for he possessed both that strong and elastic imaginative
power which enables a man to place himself at once in sympathy with his
audience, and that gift of speech, pointed, playful, and where necessary
impetuous, which pleads well in any assembly for any cause. He had
moreover the personal qualifications of a handsome manly presence, a
sympathetic eye, and a fine flexible voice, which, as his own hints on
public speaking show, he managed with care and intelligence. He had, he
says, "fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas." But though a
speaker in whom ease bred force, and force ease, he was the reverse of a
mere builder of phrases and weaver of periods. "Mere holding forth," he
declared, "I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure." His innate hatred of
talk for mere talk's sake had doubtless been intensified by his early
reporting experiences, and by what had become his stereotyped notion of
our parliamentary system. At the Administration Reform meeting in 1855 he
stated that he had never before attended a public meeting. On the other
hand, he had been for already several years in great request for meetings
of a different kind, concerned with the establishment or advancement of
educational or charitable institutions in London and other great towns of
the country. His addresses from the chair were often of remarkable
excellence; and this not merely because crowded halls and increased
subscription-lists were their concomitants, and because the happiness of
his humour--never out of season, and even on such occasions often
singularly prompt--sent every one home in good spirits. In these now
forgotten speeches on behalf of Athenaeums and Mechanics' Institutes, or of
actors' and artists' and newsmen's charities, their occasional advocate
never appears occasional. Instead of seeming to have just mastered his
brief while the audience was taking its seats, or to have become for the
first time deeply interested in his subject in the interval between his
soup and his speech, the cause which Dickens pleads never has in him
either an imperfectly informed or a half-indifferent representative.
Amongst many charming illustrations of a vein of oratory in which he has
been equalled by very few if by any public men of his own or the
succeeding generation, I will instance only one address, though it belongs
to a considerably later date than the time of _David Copperfield_.
Nothing, however, that Dickens has ever written--not even _David
Copperfield_ itself--breathes a tenderer sympathy for the weakness of
unprotected childhood than the beautiful little speech delivered by him on
February 9, 1858, on behalf of the London Hospital for Sick Children.
Beginning with some touches of humour concerning the spoilt children of
the rich, the orator goes on to speak of the "spoilt children" of the
poor, illustrating with concrete directness both the humorous and the
pathetic side of his subject, and after a skilfully introduced sketch of
the capabilities and wants of the "infant institution" for which he
pleads, ending with an appeal, founded on a fancy of Charles Lamb, to the
support of the "dream-children" belonging to each of his hearers: "the
dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might
have had, the child you certainly have been." This is true eloquence, of a
kind which aims at something besides opening purse-strings. In 1851 he had
spoken in the same vein of mixed humour and pathos on behalf of his
clients, the poor actors, when, unknown to him, a little child of his own
was lying dead at home. But in these years of his life, as indeed at all
times, his voice was at the service of such causes as had his sympathy; it
was heard at Birmingham, at Leeds, at Glasgow; distance was of little
moment to his energetic nature; and as to trouble, how could he do
anything by halves?

There was yet a third kind of activity, distinct from that of literary
work pure and simple, in which Dickens in these years for the first time
systematically engaged. It has been seen how he had long cherished the
notion of a periodical conducted by himself, and marked by a unity of
design which should make it in a more than ordinary sense his own paper.
With a genius like his, which attached itself to the concrete, very much
depended at the outset upon the choice of a title. _The Cricket_ could not
serve again, and for some time the notion of an omnipresent _Shadow_, with
something, if possible, tacked to it "expressing the notion of its being
cheerful, useful, and always welcome," seemed to promise excellently. For
a rather less ambitious design, however, a rather less ambitious title was
sought, and at last fortunately found, in the phrase, rendered proverbial
by Shakspeare, "_Household Words_." "We hope," he wrote a few weeks before
the first number appeared, on March 30, 1850, "to do some solid good, and
we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as we can." But _Household Words_,
which in form and in cost was to be a paper for the multitude, was to be
something more than agreeable and useful and cheap. It was to help in
casting out the many devils that had taken up their abode in popular
periodical literature, the "bastards of the Mountain," and the foul fiends
who dealt in infamous scurrility, and to do this with the aid of a charm
more potent than the most lucid argument and the most abundant facts. "In
the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor," says
the _Preliminary Word_ in the first number, "we would tenderly cherish
that light of fancy which is inherent in the human breast." To this
purpose it was the editor's constant and deliberate endeavour to bind his
paper. "KEEP 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS' IMAGINATIVE!" is the "solemn and continual
Conductorial Injunction" which three years after the foundation of the
journal he impresses, with the artful aid of capitals, upon his faithful
coadjutor, Mr. W. H. Wills. In his own contributions he was not forgetful
of this maxim, and the most important of them, the serial story, _Hard
Times_, was written with the express intention of pointing it as a moral.

There are, I suppose, in addition to the many mysterious functions
performed by the editor of a literary journal, two of the very highest
significance; in the first place, the choice of his contributors, and
then, if the expression may be used, the management of them. In both
respects but one opinion seems to exist of Dickens's admirable qualities
as an editor. Out of the many contributors to _Household Words_, and its
kindred successor, _All the Year Round_--some of whom are happily still
among living writers--it would be invidious to select for mention a few in
proof of the editor's discrimination. But it will not be forgotten that
the first number of the earlier journal contained the beginning of a tale
by Mrs. Gaskell, whose name will long remain a household word in England,
both North and South. And a periodical could hardly be deemed one-sided
which included among its contributors scholars and writers of the
distinction belonging to the names of Forster and Mr. Henry Morley,
together with humorous observers of men and things such as Mr. Sala and
Albert Smith. On the other hand, _Household Words_ had what every literary
journal ought to have, an individuality of its own; and this individuality
was, of course, that of its editor. The mannerisms of Dickens's style
afterwards came to be imitated by some among his contributors; but the
general unity perceptible in the journal was the natural and legitimate
result of the fact that it stood under the independent control of a
vigorous editor, assisted by a sub-editor--Mr. W. H. Wills--of rare
trustworthiness. Dickens had a keen eye for selecting subjects from a
definite field, a ready skill for shaping, if necessary, the articles
accepted by him, and a genius for providing them with expressive and
attractive titles. Fiction and poetry apart, these articles have mostly a
social character or bearing, although they often deviate into the pleasant
paths of literature or art; and usually, but by no means always, the
scenes or associations with which they connect themselves are of England,
English.

Nothing could surpass the unflagging courtesy shown by Dickens towards his
contributors, great or small, old or new, and his patient interest in
their endeavours, while he conducted _Household Words_, and afterwards
_All the Year Round_. Of this there is evidence enough to make the records
of the office in Wellington Street a pleasant page in the history of
journalism. He valued a good workman when he found him, and was far too
reasonable and generous to put his own stamp upon all the good metal that
passed through his hands. Even in his Christmas Numbers he left the utmost
possible freedom to his associates. Where he altered or modified it was as
one who had come to know the pulse of the public; and he was not less
considerate with novices, than he was frank and explicit with experts, in
the writer's art. The articles in his journal being anonymous, he was not
tempted to use names as baits for the public, though many who wrote for
him were men or women of high literary reputation. And he kept his doors
open. While some editors deem it their duty to ward off would-be
contributors, as some ministers of state think it theirs to get rid of
deputations, Dickens sought to ignore instead of jealously guarding the
boundaries of professional literature. Nothing in this way ever gave him
greater delight than to have welcomed and published several poems sent to
him under a feigned name, but which he afterwards discovered to be the
first-fruits of the charming poetical talent of Miss Adelaide Procter, the
daughter of his old friend "Barry Cornwall."

In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, like the
Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with one or more of his
familiars, he spared no labour and thought no toil too great. At times, of
course, he, like all periodical writers who cannot be merry every
Wednesday or caustic every Saturday, felt the pressure of the screw. "As
to two comic articles," he exclaims on one occasion, "or two any sort of
articles, out of me, that's the intensest extreme of no-goism." But, as a
rule, no great writer ever ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His
"Uncommercial Travels," as he at a later date happily christened them,
familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects of London his long walks
had still left unexplored; and he was as conscientious in hunting up the
details of a complicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an
obscure pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and "commissioners"
assisted him in his labours; but he was no _roi faineant_ on the editorial
sofa which he so complacently describes. Whether he was taking _A Walk in
a Workhouse_, or knocking at the door of another with the supernumerary
waifs in Whitechapel, or _On_ (night) _Duty with Inspector Field_ among
the worst of the London slums, he was always ready to see with his own
eyes; after which the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable
of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more properly
journalistic, but he is most delightful when he takes his ease in his
_English_ or his _French Watering-place_, or carries his readers with him
on _A Flight to Paris_, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless
succession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of all is he
when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins--this, however, not until the
autumn of 1857--he starts on _The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, the
earlier chapters of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most
humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget himself to enforce
the claim of his journal to strengthen the imaginary side of literature.
In an assumed character he allows a veteran poet to carry him _By Rail to
Parnassus_, and even good-humouredly banters an old friend, George
Cruikshank, for having committed _Frauds on the Fairies_ by re-editing
legendary lore with the view of inculcating the principle of total
abstinence.

Such, then, were some of the channels in which the intense mental and
physical energy of Dickens found a congenial outlet in these busy years.
Yet in the very midst of this multifarious activity the mysterious and
controlling power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the
composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already said, holds, and
will always continue to hold, a place of its own among its works. "Of all
my books," he declares, "I like this the best. It will be easily believed
that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can
ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond
parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child--and his name is
DAVID COPPERFIELD!" He parted from the story with a pang, and when in
after life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to master the
emotions which it recalled; perhaps even he hardly knew what the effort
of its production had cost him.

The first number of _David Copperfield_ was published in May, 1849--the
last in November, 1850. To judge from the difficulty which Dickens found
in choosing a title for his story--of which difficulty plentiful evidence
remains in MS. at South Kensington--he must have been fain to delay longer
even than usual on the threshold. In the end the name of the hero evolved
itself out of a series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to
Copperboy, Copperstone--"Copperfull" being reserved as a _lectio varians_
for Mrs. Crupp--and _Copperfield_. Then at last the pen could fall
seriously to work, and, proceeding slowly at first--for the first page of
the MS. contains a great number of alterations--dip itself now into black,
now into blue ink, and in a small writing, already contrasting with the
bolder hand of earlier days, produce page upon page of an incomparable
book. No doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to _David
Copperfield_, and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less
conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in
the story. Until the publication of Forster's _Life_ no reader of
_Copperfield_ could be aware of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay
bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had
hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could
not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the
memory of Dickens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those
experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully
playful humor, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose
original, by a strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of
life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical
immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the
author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely
little idyl of the loves of Doady and Dora--with Jip, as Dora's father
might have said, intervening--there were, besides the reminiscences of an
innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man's unconfessed though not
altogether unrepressed disappointment--the sense that "there was always
something wanting." But in order to be affected by a personal or
autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary
to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very
existence. _Amelia_ would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the
experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the
peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking the existence of an
autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its
presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be _there_. But it had far
better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused
this particular stream of metal with the mass filling his mould that the
result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with
_David Copperfield_, which of all Dickens's fictions is on the whole the
most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in
the author's breast are, as effects, harmonised with local associations
old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic
truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by Dickens for the first
time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the
elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the
construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that
harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his
materials.

As to the construction of _David Copperfield_, however, I frankly confess
that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not
merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy's old
favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes
may here and there occur. The boy's flight from London, and the direction
which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of
obscurity, as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations
between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy thing
writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has
much that is beautiful in it. Thus, there is real art in the way in which
the scene of Barkis's death--written with admirable moderation--prepares
for the "greater loss" at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire
treatment of his hero's double love story Dickens has, to my mind, avoided
that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in
_Esmond_ and in _Adam Bede_. The best constructed part of _David
Copperfield_ is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her
kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences
of David, of which--except in its very beginnings--it forms no integral
part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming
catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its
actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with
the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of
_David Copperfield_ might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the
whole literature of modern fiction.

Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its earliest stages are
full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpass the history
of the picnic--where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast
an imaginary rival, "Red Whisker," made the salad--how could they eat
it?--and "voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he
constructed, _being an ingenious beast_, in the hollow trunk of a tree."
Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of
all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and
suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative
of the young house-keeping David's real trouble is most skilfully mingled
with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyl almost
imperceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a
rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing
scenes was touched by a pity towards the fictitious creatures of his own
imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here
irresistible.

The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other books indulged itself
so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it
in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no
character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little
Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dickens had copied from a
living original; but receiving a remonstrance from the latter, he
good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character,
and thereby spoiled what there was in it--not much, in my opinion--to
spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of eccentric personages--mad people,
in a word--for which Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though
there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring
out the latent tenderness in another. David's Aunt is a figure which none
but a true humourist such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she
must have sprung from the author's brain armed _cap-a-pie_ as she appeared
in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was
not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is
still pointed out where the "one great outrage of her life" was daily
renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to
rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities
of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old
boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the
experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the
"salt" division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of
shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy
and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr.
Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type
of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so
long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only
temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always
capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and a
merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine character was never conceived
than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the
conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and
her mind made up _not_ to desert Mr. Micawber. Delightful too in his way,
though of a class more common in Dickens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial
picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray's Inn, with the dearest
girl in the world and her five sisters, including the beauty, on a visit,
may have been suggested by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days.
In contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, villanous
hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and elaborate workmanship,
almost cruelly done without being overdone. It was in his figures of
hypocrites that Dickens's satirical power most diversely displayed itself;
and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the
prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, the valet
Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself could not have surpassed.

Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour,
with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mood
of manhood pervading it from first to last. The _reality_ of _David
Copperfield_ is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the
reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and
familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful _art_. Nothing will
ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that,
while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its
author put into it his life's blood.




CHAPTER V.

CHANGES.

[1852-1858.]


I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles
Dickens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit
was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his
activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary
successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of
which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he
was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and
cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken
possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country
residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a
stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man's house is
truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little
before, come to such a pass that he wrote to his faithful friend: "I am
become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and
die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way
Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed."
Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him--the boy
whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which
no eccentric humours and fantastic _sobriquets_ could conceal. In May,
1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though
self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet
that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds
of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself.

In the earlier of these years Dickens's movements were still very much of
the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period
described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances
in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in
Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his
working hours in this and the following year--the spring of which was
partly spent at Brighton--he was engaged upon his new story, _Bleak
House_, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853.
"To let you into a secret," he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary
Boyle, from Dover, "I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever
shall like, anything quite so well as _Copperfield_. But I foresee, I
think, some very good things in _Bleak House_." There is no reason to
believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its
publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its
predecessor. According to the author's own testimony it "took
extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months" of its
issue, and "retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear
old _Copperfield_ by a round ten thousand or more." To this day the book
has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by
which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On
the other hand, _Bleak House_ was probably the first of Dickens's works
which furnished a suitable text to a class of censors whose precious balms
have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of
amusing being graciously conceded to the "man of genius," his book was
charged with "absolute want of construction," and with being a
heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a
number of "odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit." Of the
characters themselves it was asserted that, though in the main excessively
funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from
nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as
types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and
while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised,
it was regretted that Dickens should never have succeeded in drawing "a
man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy." He
belonged, unfortunately, "in literature to the same class as his
illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the
illustrator in range and power." In other words, he was essentially a
caricaturist.

As applied to _Bleak House_, with which I am at present alone concerned,
this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as
constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to _Bleak
House_ may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as
compared, not with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, but with its immediate
predecessor, _David Copperfield_, this novel exhibits a decided advance in
that respect. In truth, Dickens in _Bleak House_ for the first time
emancipated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his
great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less
consciously adopted--the novel of adventure, of which the person of the
hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element.
It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon
him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about this time
praising for his unlikeness to the "conceited idiots who suppose that
volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes," was alr

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