SCHOOL-DAYS AND START IN LIFE.
1824-1830.
Outcome of Boyish Trials--Disadvantage in Later
Years--Advantages--Next Move in
Life--Wellington House Academy--Revisited and
Described--Letter from a Schoolfellow--C. D.'s
Recollections of School--Schoolfellow's
Recollections of C. D.--Fac-simile of Schoolboy
Letter--Daniel Tobin--Another Schoolfellow's
Recollections--Writing Tales and getting up
Plays--Master Beverley
Scene-Painter--Street-acting--The Schoolfellows
after Forty Years--Smallness of the World--In
Attorneys' Offices--At Minor Theatres--The
Father on the Son's Education--Studying
Short-hand--In British Museum Reading
Room--Preparing for the Gallery--D. C. for C.
D.--A Real Dora in 1829--The same Dora in
1855--Dora changed into Flora--Ashes of Youth
and Hope.
IN what way these strange experiences of his boyhood affected him
afterwards, this narrative of his life must show; but there were
influences that made themselves felt even on his way to manhood.
What at once he brought out of the humiliation that had impressed him so
deeply, though scarcely as yet quite consciously, was a natural dread of
the hardships that might still be in store for him, sharpened by what he
had gone through; and this, though in its effect for the present
imperfectly understood, became by degrees a passionate resolve, even
while he was yielding to circumstances, _not to be_ what circumstances
were conspiring to make him. All that was involved in what he had
suffered and sunk into, could not have been known to him at the time;
but it was plain enough later, as we see; and in conversation with me
after the revelation was made, he used to find, at extreme points in his
life, the explanation of himself in those early trials. He had derived
great good from them, but not without alloy. The fixed and eager
determination, the restless and resistless energy, which opened to him
opportunities of escape from many mean environments, not by turning off
from any path of duty, but by resolutely rising to such excellence or
distinction as might be attainable in it, brought with it some
disadvantage among many noble advantages. Of this he was himself aware,
but not to the full extent. What it was that in society made him often
uneasy, shrinking, and over-sensitive, he knew; but all the danger he
ran in bearing down and overmastering the feeling, he did not know. A
too great confidence in himself, a sense that everything was possible to
the will that would make it so, laid occasionally upon him self-imposed
burdens greater than might be borne by any one with safety. In that
direction there was in him, at such times, something even hard and
aggressive; in his determinations a something that had almost the tone
of fierceness; something in his nature that made his resolves
insuperable, however hasty the opinions on which they had been formed.
So rare were these manifestations, however, and so little did they
prejudice a character as entirely open and generous as it was at all
times ardent and impetuous, that only very infrequently, towards the
close of the middle term of a friendship which lasted without the
interruption of a day for more than three-and-thirty years, were they
ever unfavorably presented to me. But there they were; and when I have
seen strangely present, at such chance intervals, a stern and even cold
isolation of self-reliance side by side with a susceptivity almost
feminine and the most eager craving for sympathy, it has seemed to me as
though his habitual impulses for everything kind and gentle had sunk,
for the time, under a sudden hard and inexorable sense of what fate had
dealt to him in those early years. On more than one occasion, indeed, I
had confirmation of this. "I must entreat you," he wrote to me in June,
1862, "to pause for an instant, and go back to what you know of my
childish days, and to ask yourself whether it is natural that something
of the character formed in me then, and lost under happier
circumstances, should have reappeared in the last five years. The
never-to-be-forgotten misery of that old time bred a certain shrinking
sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad ill-fed child, that I have found
come back in the never-to-be-forgotten misery of this later time."
One good there was, however, altogether without drawback, and which
claims simply to be mentioned before my narrative is resumed. The story
of his childish misery has itself sufficiently shown that he never
throughout it lost his precious gift of animal spirits, or his native
capacity for humorous enjoyment; and there were positive gains to him
from what he underwent, which were also rich and lasting. To what in the
outset of his difficulties and trials gave the decisive bent to his
genius, I have already made special reference; and we are to observe,
of what followed, that with the very poor and unprosperous, out of whose
sufferings and strugglings, and the virtues as well as vices born of
them, his not least splendid successes were wrought, his childish
experiences had made him actually one. They were not his clients whose
cause he pleaded with such pathos and humor, and on whose side he got
the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self.
Nor was it a small part of this manifest advantage that he should have
obtained his experience as a child and not as a man; that only the good
part, the flower and fruit of it, was plucked by him; and that nothing
of the evil part, none of the earth in which the seed was planted,
remained to soil him.
His next move in life can also be given in his own language: "There was
a school in the Hampstead Road kept by Mr. Jones, a Welshman, to which
my father dispatched me to ask for a card of terms. The boys were at
dinner, and Mr. Jones was carving for them with a pair of holland
sleeves on, when I acquitted myself of this commission. He came out, and
gave me what I wanted; and hoped I should become a pupil. I did. At
seven o'clock one morning, very soon afterwards, I went as day-scholar
to Mr. Jones's establishment, which was in Mornington Place, and had its
school-room sliced away by the Birmingham Railway, when that change came
about. The school-room, however, was not threatened by directors or
civil engineers then, and there was a board over the door, graced with
the words WELLINGTON HOUSE ACADEMY."
At Wellington House Academy he remained nearly two years, being a little
over fourteen years of age when he quitted it. In his minor writings as
well as in _Copperfield_ will be found general allusions to it, and
there is a paper among his pieces reprinted from _Household Words_ which
purports specifically to describe it. To the account therein given of
himself when he went to the school, as advanced enough, so safely had
his memory retained its poor fragments of early schooling, to be put
into _Virgil_, as getting sundry prizes, and as attaining to the eminent
position of its first boy, one of his two schoolfellows with whom I have
had communication makes objection; but both admit that the general
features of the place are reproduced with wonderful accuracy, and more
especially in those points for which the school appears to have been
much more notable than for anything connected with the scholarship of
its pupils.
In the reprinted piece Dickens describes it as remarkable for white
mice. He says that red-polls, linnets, and even canaries were kept by
the boys in desks, drawers, hat-boxes, and other strange refuges for
birds; but that white mice were the favorite stock, and that the boys
trained the mice much better than the master trained the boys. He
recalled in particular one white mouse who lived in the cover of a Latin
dictionary, ran up ladders, drew Roman chariots, shouldered muskets,
turned wheels, and even made a very creditable appearance on the stage
as the dog of Montargis, who might have achieved greater things but for
having had the misfortune to mistake his way in a triumphal procession
to the Capitol, when he fell into a deep inkstand and was dyed black and
drowned.
Nevertheless he mentions the school as one also of some celebrity in
its neighborhood, though nobody could have said why; and adds that among
the boys the master was supposed to know nothing, and one of the ushers
was supposed to know everything. "We are still inclined to think the
first-named supposition perfectly correct. We went to look at the place
only this last midsummer, and found that the railway had cut it up, root
and branch. A great trunk line had swallowed the playground, sliced away
the school-room, and pared off the corner of the house. Which, thus
curtailed of its proportions, presented itself in a green stage of
stucco, profile-wise towards the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without
a handle, standing on end."
One who knew him in those early days, Mr. Owen P. Thomas, thus writes to
me (February, 1871): "I had the honor of being Mr. Dickens's
schoolfellow for about two years (1824-1826), both being day-scholars,
at Mr. Jones's 'Classical and Commercial Academy,' as then inscribed in
front of the house, and which was situated at the corner of Granby
Street and the Hampstead Road. The house stands now in its original
state, but the school and large playground behind disappeared on the
formation of the London and Northwestern Railway, which at this point
runs in a slanting direction from Euston Square underneath the Hampstead
Road. We were all companions and playmates when out of school, as well
as fellow-students therein." (Mr. Thomas includes in this remark the
names of Henry Danson, now a physician in practice in London; of Daniel
Tobin, whom I remember to have been frequently assisted by his old
schoolfellow in later years; and of Richard Bray.) "You will find a
graphic sketch of the school by Mr. Dickens himself in _Household
Words_ of 11th October, 1851. The article is entitled Our School. The
names of course are feigned; but, allowing for slight coloring, the
persons and incidents described are all true to life, and easily
recognizable by any one who attended the school at the time. The Latin
master was Mr. Manville, or Mandeville, who for many years was well
known at the library of the British Museum. The academy, after the
railroad overthrew it, was removed to another house in the neighborhood,
but Mr. Jones and two at least of his assistant masters have long ago
departed this life."
One of the latter was the usher believed to know everything, who was
writing-master, mathematical master, English master, divided the little
boys with the Latin master, made out the bills, mended the pens, and
always called at parents' houses to inquire after sick boys, because he
had gentlemanly manners. This picture my correspondent recognized; as
well as those of the fat little dancing-master who taught them
hornpipes, of the Latin master who stuffed his ears with onions for his
deafness, of the gruff serving-man who nursed the boys in scarlet fever,
and of the principal himself, who was always ruling ciphering-books with
a bloated mahogany ruler, smiting the palms of offenders with the same
diabolical instrument, or viciously drawing a pair of pantaloons tight
with one of his large hands and caning the wearer with the other.
"My recollection of Dickens whilst at school," Mr. Thomas continues, "is
that of a healthy-looking boy, small but well built, with a more than
usual flow of spirits, inducing to harmless fun, seldom or never I
think to mischief, to which so many lads at that age are prone. I cannot
recall anything that then indicated he would hereafter become a literary
celebrity; but perhaps he was too young then. He usually held his head
more erect than lads ordinarily do, and there was a general smartness
about him. His weekday dress of jacket and trowsers, I can clearly
remember, was what is called pepper-and-salt; and, instead of the frill
that most boys of his age wore then, he had a turn-down collar, so that
he looked less youthful in consequence. He invented what we termed a
'lingo,' produced by the addition of a few letters of the same sound to
every word; and it was our ambition, walking and talking thus along the
street, to be considered foreigners. As an alternate amusement the
present writer well remembers extemporizing tales of some sort, and
reciting them offhand, with Dickens and Danson or Tobin walking on
either side of him. I inclose you a copy of a note I received from him
when he was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, perhaps one of
the earliest productions of his pen. The Leg referred to was the Legend
of something, a pamphlet romance I had lent him; the Clavis was of
course the Latin school-book so named."
There is some underlying whim or fun in the "Leg" allusions which Mr.
Thomas appears to have overlooked, and certainly fails to explain; but
the note, which is here given in fac-simile, may be left to speak for
itself; and in the signature the reader will be amused to see the first
faint beginning of a flourish afterwards famous.
"After a lapse of years," Mr. Thomas continues, "I recognized the
celebrated writer as the individual I had known so well as a boy, from
having preserved this note; and upon Mr. Dickens visiting Reading in
December, 1854, to give one of his earliest readings for the benefit of
the literary institute, of which he had become president on Mr. Justice
Talfourd's death, I took the opportunity of showing it to him, when he
was much diverted therewith. On the same occasion we conversed about
mutual schoolfellows, and among others Daniel Tobin was referred to,
whom I remembered to have been Dickens's _most_ intimate companion in
the school-days (1824 to 1826). His reply was that Tobin either was
then, or had previously been, assisting him in the capacity of
amanuensis; but there is a subsequent mystery about Tobin, in connection
with his friend and patron, which I have never been able to comprehend;
for I understood shortly afterwards that there was entire separation
between them, and it must have been an offense of some gravity to have
sundered an acquaintance formed in early youth, and which had endured,
greatly to Tobin's advantage, so long. He resided in our school-days in
one of the now old and grimy-looking stone-fronted houses in George
Street, Euston Road, a few doors from the Orange-tree tavern. It is the
opinion of the other schoolfellow with whom we were intimate, Doctor
Danson, that upon leaving school Mr. Dickens and Tobin entered the same
solicitor's office, and this he thinks was either in or near Lincoln's
Inn Fields."
[Illustration: Handwritten note: Punctuation and capitalization,
retained:
Tim/
I am quite ashamed I have not returned your Leg
but you shall have it by Harry to-morrow If you
would like to purchase my Clavis you shall have
it at a very ~reduced price~ Cheaper in
comparison than a Leg.
Yours &c
~C Dickens.~
PS. I suppose all this time you have had ~a
wooden~ leg. I have weighed yours every saturday
Night
(No date, but was written in latter part of 1825.)]
The offense of Tobin went no deeper than the having at last worn out
even Dickens's patience and kindness. His applications for relief were
so incessantly repeated, that to cut him and them adrift altogether was
the only way of escape from what had become an intolerable nuisance. To
Mr. Thomas's letter the reader will thank me for adding one not less
interesting with which Dr. Henry Danson has favored me. We have here,
with the same fun and animal spirits, a little of the proneness to
mischief which his other schoolfellow says he was free from; but the
mischief is all of the harmless kind, and might perhaps have been better
described as but part of an irrepressible vivacity:
"My impression is that I was a schoolfellow of Dickens for nearly two
years: he left before me, I think at about fifteen years of age. Mr.
Jones's school, called the Wellington Academy, was in the Hampstead
Road, at the northeast corner of Granby Street. The school-house was
afterwards removed for the London and Northwestern Railway. It was
considered at the time a very superior sort of school,--one of the best,
indeed, in that part of London; but it was most shamefully mismanaged,
and the boys made but very little progress. The proprietor, Mr. Jones,
was a Welshman; a most ignorant fellow, and a mere tyrant; whose chief
employment was to scourge the boys. Dickens has given a very lively
account of this place in his paper entitled Our School, but it is very
mythical in many respects, and more especially in the compliment he pays
in it to himself. I do not remember that Dickens distinguished himself
in any way, or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not
learn Greek or Latin there; and you will remember there is no allusion
to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed
lad, full of animation and animal spirits, and probably was connected
with every mischievous prank in the school. I do not think he came in
for any of Mr. Jones's scourging propensity: in fact, together with
myself, he was only a day-pupil, and with these there was a wholesome
fear of tales being carried home to the parents. His personal appearance
at that time is vividly brought home to me in the portrait of him taken
a few years later by Mr. Lawrence. He resided with his friends in a very
small house in a street leading out of Seymour Street, north of Mr.
Judkin's chapel.
"Depend on it, he was quite a self-made man, and his wonderful knowledge
and command of the English language must have been acquired by long and
patient study after leaving his last school.
"I have no recollection of the boy you name. His chief associates were,
I think, Tobin, Mr. Thomas, Bray, and myself. The first-named was his
chief ally, and his acquaintance with him appears to have continued many
years afterwards. At about that time Penny and Saturday Magazines were
published weekly, and were greedily read by us. We kept bees, white
mice, and other living things clandestinely in our desks; and the
mechanical arts were a good deal cultivated, in the shape of
coach-building, and making pumps and boats, the motive power of which
was the white mice.
"I think at that time Dickens took to writing small tales, and we had a
sort of club for lending and circulating them. Dickens was also very
strong in using a sort of lingo, which made us quite unintelligible to
bystanders. We were very strong, too, in theatricals. We mounted small
theatres, and got up very gorgeous scenery to illustrate the _Miller and
his Men_ and _Cherry and Fair Star_. I remember the present Mr.
Beverley, the scene-painter, assisted us in this. Dickens was always a
leader at these plays, which were occasionally presented with much
solemnity before an audience of boys and in the presence of the ushers.
My brother, assisted by Dickens, got up the _Miller and his Men_, in a
very gorgeous form. Master Beverley constructed the mill for us in such
a way that it could tumble to pieces with the assistance of crackers. At
one representation the fireworks in the last scene, ending with the
destruction of the mill, were so very real that the police interfered
and knocked violently at the doors. Dickens's after-taste for
theatricals might have had its origin in these small affairs.
"I quite remember Dickens on one occasion heading us in Drummond Street
in pretending to be poor boys, and asking the passers-by for
charity,--especially old ladies, one of whom told us she 'had no money
for beggar-boys.' On these adventures, when the old ladies were quite
staggered by the impudence of the demand, Dickens would explode with
laughter and take to his heels.
"I met him one Sunday morning shortly after he left the school, and we
very piously attended the morning service at Seymour Street Chapel. I am
sorry to say Master Dickens did not attend in the slightest degree to
the service, but incited me to laughter by declaring his dinner was
ready and the potatoes would be spoiled, and in fact behaved in such a
manner that it was lucky for us we were not ejected from the chapel.
"I heard of him some time after from Tobin, whom I met carrying a
foaming pot of London particular in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I then
understood that Dickens was in the same or some neighboring office.
"Many years elapsed after this before I became aware, from accidentally
reading Our School, that the brilliant and now famous Dickens was my old
schoolfellow. I didn't like to intrude myself upon him; and it was not
until three or four years ago, when he presided at the University
College dinner at Willis's rooms, and made a most brilliant and
effective speech, that I sent him a congratulatory note reminding him of
our former fellowship. To this he sent me a kind note in reply, and
which I value very much. I send you copies of these."[5]
From Dickens himself I never heard much allusion to the school thus
described; but I knew that, besides being the subject dealt with in
_Household Words_, it had supplied some of the lighter traits of Salem
House for _Copperfield_; and that to the fact of one of its tutors being
afterwards engaged to teach a boy of Macready's, our common friend,
Dickens used to point for one of the illustrations of his favorite
theory as to the smallness of the world, and how things and persons
apparently the most unlikely to meet were continually knocking up
against each other. The employment as his amanuensis of his schoolfellow
Tobin dates as early as his Doctors'-Commons days, but both my
correspondents are mistaken in the impression they appear to have
received that Tobin had been previously his fellow-clerk in the same
attorney's office. I had thought him more likely to have been
accompanied there by another of his boyish acquaintances who became
afterwards a solicitor, Mr. Mitton, not recollected by either of my
correspondents in connection with the school, but whom I frequently met
with him in later years, and for whom he had the regard arising out of
such early associations. In this, however, I have since discovered my
own mistake: the truth being that it was this gentleman's connection,
not with the Wellington Academy, but with a school kept by Mr. Dawson in
Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, where the brothers of Dickens were
subsequently placed, which led to their early knowledge of each other. I
fancy that they were together also, for a short time, at Mr. Molloy's in
New Square, Lincoln's Inn; but, whether or not this was so, Dickens
certainly had not quitted school many months before his father had made
sufficient interest with an attorney of Gray's Inn, Mr. Edward
Blackmore, to obtain him regular employment in his office. In this
capacity of clerk, our only trustworthy glimpse of him we owe to the
last-named gentleman, who has described briefly, and I do not doubt
authentically, the services so rendered by him to the law. It cannot be
said that they were noteworthy, though it might be difficult to find a
more distinguished person who has borne the title, unless we make
exception for the very father of literature himself, whom Chaucer, with
amusing illustration of the way in which words change their meanings,
calls "that conceited clerke Homere."
"I was well acquainted," writes Mr. Edward Blackmore of Alresford, "with
his parents, and, being then in practice in Gray's Inn, they asked me if
I could find employment for him. He was a bright, clever-looking youth,
and I took him as a clerk. He came to me in May, 1827, and left in
November, 1828; and I have now an account-book which he used to keep of
petty disbursements in the office, in which he charged himself with the
modest salary first of thirteen shillings and sixpence, and afterwards
of fifteen shillings, a week. Several incidents took place in the office
of which he must have been a keen observer, as I recognized some of them
in his _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_; and I am much mistaken if some of his
characters had not their originals in persons I well remember. His taste
for theatricals was much promoted by a fellow-clerk named Potter, since
dead, with whom he chiefly associated. They took every opportunity, then
unknown to me, of going together to a minor theatre, where (I afterwards
heard) they not unfrequently engaged in parts. After he left me I saw
him at times in the lord chancellor's court, taking notes of cases as a
reporter. I then lost sight of him until his _Pickwick_ made its
appearance." This letter indicates the position he held at Mr.
Blackmore's; and we have but to turn to the passage in _Pickwick_ which
describes the several grades of attorney's clerk, to understand it more
clearly. He was very far below the articled clerk, who has paid a
premium and is attorney in perspective. He was not so high as the
salaried clerk, with nearly the whole of his weekly thirty shillings
spent on his personal pleasures. He was not even on the level with his
middle-aged copying-clerk, always needy and uniformly shabby. He was
simply among, however his own nature may have lifted him above, the
"office-lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for
boys at day-schools, club as they go home at night for saveloys and
porter, and think there's nothing like life." Thus far, not more or
less, had he now reached. He was one of the office-lads, and probably in
his first surtout.
But, even thus, the process of education went on, defying what seemed to
interrupt it; and in the amount of his present equipment for his needs
of life, what he brought from the Wellington House Academy can have
borne but the smallest proportion to his acquirement at Mr. Blackmore's.
Yet to seek to identify, without help from himself, any passages in his
books with those boyish law-experiences, would be idle and hopeless
enough. In the earliest of his writings, and down to the very latest, he
worked exhaustively the field which is opened by an attorney's office to
a student of life and manners; but we have not now to deal with his
numerous varieties of the _genus_ clerk drawn thus for the amusement of
others, but with the acquisitions which at present he was storing up for
himself from the opportunities such offices opened to him. Nor would it
be possible to have better illustrative comment on all these years than
is furnished by his father's reply to a friend it was now hoped to
interest on his behalf, which more than once I have heard him
whimsically, but good-humoredly, imitate. "Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was
your son educated?" "Why, indeed, sir--ha! ha!--he may be said to have
educated himself!" Of the two kinds of education which Gibbon says that
all men who rise above the common level receive,--the first, that of his
teachers, and the second, more personal and more important, _his
own_,--he had the advantage only of the last. It nevertheless sufficed
for him.
Very nearly another eighteen months were now to be spent mainly in
practical preparation for what he was, at this time, led finally to
choose as an employment from which a fair income was certain with such
talents as he possessed; his father already having taken to it, in these
latter years, in aid of the family resources. In his father's house,
which was at Hampstead through the first portion of the Mornington
Street school time, then in the house out of Seymour Street mentioned by
Dr. Danson, and afterwards, upon the elder Dickens going into the
gallery, in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, Charles had continued to
live; and, influenced doubtless by the example before him, he took
sudden determination to qualify himself thoroughly for what his father
was lately become, a newspaper parliamentary reporter. He set
resolutely, therefore, to the study of short-hand; and, for the
additional help of such general information about books as a
fairly-educated youth might be expected to have, as well as to satisfy
some higher personal cravings, he became an assiduous attendant in the
British Museum reading-room. He would frequently refer to these days as
decidedly the usefulest to himself he had ever passed; and, judging from
the results, they must have been so. No man who knew him in later years,
and talked to him familiarly of books and things, would have suspected
his education in boyhood, almost entirely self-acquired as it was, to
have been so rambling or hap-hazard as I have here described it. The
secret consisted in this, that, whatever for the time he had to do, he
lifted himself, there and then, to the level of, and at no time
disregarded the rules that guided the hero of his novel. "Whatever I
have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well.
What I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely.
Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self,
and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now
to have been my golden rules."
Of the difficulties that beset his short-hand studies, as well as of
what first turned his mind to them, he has told also something in
_Copperfield_. He had heard that many men distinguished in various
pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in parliament, and he
was not deterred by a friend's warning that the mere mechanical
accomplishment for excellence in it might take a few years to master
thoroughly; "a perfect and entire command of the mystery of short-hand
writing and reading being about equal in difficulty to the mastery of
six languages." Undaunted, he plunged into it, self-teaching in this as
in graver things, and, having bought Mr. Gurney's half-guinea book,
worked steadily his way through its distractions. "The changes that were
rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such
another position something else entirely different; the wonderful
vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences
that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a
curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but
reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way, blindly,
through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, there then
appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters; the
most despotic characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance,
that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, and that
a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed
these wretches in my mind, I found that they had driven everything else
out of it; then, beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking
them up, I dropped the other fragments of the system: in short, it was
almost heart-breaking."
What it was that made it not quite heart-breaking to the hero of the
fiction, its readers know; and something of the same kind was now to
enter into the actual experience of its writer. First let me say,
however, that after subduing to his wants in marvelously quick time this
unruly and unaccommodating servant of stenography, what he most desired
was still not open to him. "There never _was_ such a short-hand writer,"
has been often said to me by Mr. Beard, the friend he first made in that
line when he entered the gallery, and with whom to the close of his life
he maintained the friendliest intercourse. But there was no opening for
him in the gallery yet. He had to pass nearly two years as a reporter
for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, practicing in this and the
other law courts, before he became a sharer in parliamentary toils and
triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the
same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at
apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only
thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he
succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other,
supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out
to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial,
happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had no belief in any
but the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden reappearance of the
real one in his life, nearly six years after _Copperfield_ was written,
convinced me there had been a more actual foundation for those chapters
of his book than I was ready to suppose. Still, I would hardly admit it,
and, that the matter could possibly affect him then, persisted in a
stout refusal to believe. His reply (1855) throws a little light on this
juvenile part of his career, and I therefore venture to preserve it:
"I don't quite apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength of
the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of my own feeling,
and will only think what the desperate intensity of my nature is, and
that this began when I was Charley's age; that it excluded every other
idea from my mind for four years, at a time of life when four years are
equal to four times four; and that I went at it with a determination to
overcome all the difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that
newspaper life, and floated me away over a hundred men's heads; then you
are wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that. I have positively stood
amazed at myself ever since!--And so I suffered, and so worked, and so
beat and hammered away at the maddest romances that ever got into any
boy's head and stayed there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now,
loosens my hold upon myself. Without for a moment sincerely believing
that it would have been better if we had never got separated, I cannot
see the occasion of so much emotion as I should see any one else. No
one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain the recollection
gave me in _Copperfield_. And, just as I can never open that book as I
open any other book, I cannot see the face (even at four-and-forty), or
hear the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes of all that
youth and hope in the wildest manner." More and more plainly seen,
however, in the light of four-and-forty, the romance glided visibly
away, its work being fairly done; and at the close of the month
following that in which this letter was written, during which he had
very quietly made a formal call with his wife at his youthful Dora's
house, and contemplated with a calm equanimity, in the hall, her stuffed
favorite Jip, he began the fiction in which there was a Flora to set
against its predecessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. The
fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it
was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed
him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was
nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was
conscious of anything.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The reader will probably think them worth subjoining. Dr. Danson
wrote: "_April, 1864._ DEAR SIR, On the recent occasion of the U. C. H.
dinner, you would probably have been amused and somewhat surprised to
learn that one of those whom you addressed had often accompanied you
over that 'field of forty footsteps' to which you so aptly and amusingly
alluded. It is now some years since I was accidentally reading a paper
written by yourself in the _Household Words_, when I was first impressed
with the idea that the writer described scenes and persons with which I
was once familiar, and that he must necessarily be the veritable Charles
Dickens of 'our school,'--the school of Jones! I did not then, however,
like to intrude myself upon you, for I could hardly hope that you would
retain any recollection of myself; indeed, it was only barely possible
you should do so, however vividly _I_ might recall you in many scenes of
fun and frolic of my school-days. I happened to be present at the dinner
of Tuesday last (being interested as an old student in the school of the
hospital), and was seated very near you; I was tempted during the
evening to introduce myself to you, but feared lest an explanation such
as this in a public room might attract attention and be disagreeable to
yourself. A man who has attained a position and celebrity such as yours
will probably have many early associates and acquaintances claiming his
notice. I beg of you to believe that such is not my object, but that
having so recently met you I feel myself unable to repress the desire to
assure you that no one in the room could appreciate the fame and rank
you have so fairly won, or could wish you more sincerely long life and
happiness to enjoy them, than, Dear Sir, your old schoolfellow, HENRY
DANSON." To this Dickens replied: "GADSHILL PLACE, _Thursday, 5th May,
1864_. DEAR SIR, I should have assured you before now that the receipt
of your letter gave me great pleasure, had I not been too much occupied
to have leisure for correspondence. I perfectly recollect your name as
that of an old schoolfellow, and distinctly remember your appearance and
dress as a boy, and believe you had a brother who was unfortunately
drowned in the Serpentine. If you had made yourself personally known to
me at the dinner, I should have been well pleased; though in that case I
should have lost your modest and manly letter. Faithfully yours, CHARLES
DICKENS."
[6] I take other fanciful allusions to the lady from two of his
occasional writings. The first from his visit to the city churches
(written during the Dombey time, when he had to select a church for the
marriage of Florence): "Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old
women asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window,
and the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and the
lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that I mind
when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a city church on
account of a shower (by this special coincidence that it was in Huggin
Lane), and when I said to my Angelica, 'Let the blessed event, Angelica,
occur at no altar but this!' and when my Angelica consented that it
should occur at no other--which it certainly never did, for it never
occurred anywhere. And O, Angelica, what has become of you, this present
Sunday morning when I can't attend to the sermon? and, more difficult
question than that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your
side?" The second, from his pleasant paper on birthdays: "I gave a party
on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to name Her, more
particularly; She was older than I, and had pervaded every chink and
crevice of my mind for three or four years. I had held volumes of
Imaginary Conversations with her mother on the subject of our union, and
I had written letters more in number than Horace Walpole's, to that
discreet woman, soliciting her daughter's hand in marriage. I had never
had the remotest intention of sending any of those letters; but to write
them, and after a few days tear them up, had been a sublime occupation."