REPORTERS' GALLERY AND NEWSPAPER LITERATURE.
1831-1835.
Reporting for _True Sun_--First seen by
me--Reporting for _Mirror_ and
_Chronicle_--First Published Piece--Discipline
and Experiences of Reporting--Life as a
Reporter--John Black--Mr. Thomas Beard--A
Letter to his Editor--Incident of Reporting
Days--The same more correctly told--Origin of
"Boz"--Captain Holland--Mr. George
Hogarth--Sketches in _Evening Chronicle_--C.
D.'s First Hearty Appreciator.
DICKENS was nineteen years old when at last he entered the gallery. His
father, with whom he still lived in Bentinck Street, had already, as we
have seen, joined the gallery as a reporter for one of the morning
papers, and was now in the more comfortable circumstances derived from
the addition to his official pension which this praiseworthy labor
insured; but his own engagement on the _Chronicle_ dates somewhat later.
His first parliamentary service was given to the _True Sun_, a journal
which had then on its editorial staff some dear friends of mine, through
whom I became myself a contributor to it, and afterwards, in common with
all concerned, whether in its writing, reporting, printing, or
publishing, a sharer in its difficulties. The most formidable of these
arrived one day in a general strike of the reporters; and I well
remember noticing at this dread time, on the staircase of the
magnificent mansion we were lodged in, a young man of my own age, whose
keen animation of look would have arrested attention anywhere, and whose
name, upon inquiry, I then for the first time heard. It was coupled with
the fact, which gave it interest even then, that "young Dickens" had
been spokesman for the recalcitrant reporters, and conducted their case
triumphantly. He was afterwards during two sessions engaged for the
_Mirror of Parliament_, which one of his uncles by the mother's side
originated and conducted; and finally, in his twenty-third year, he
became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_.
A step far more momentous to him (though then he did not know it) he had
taken shortly before. In the December number for 1833 of what then was
called the _Old Monthly Magazine_, his first published piece of writing
had seen the light. He has described himself dropping this paper (Mr.
Minns and his Cousin, as he afterwards entitled it, but which appeared
in the magazine as A Dinner at Poplar Walk) stealthily one evening at
twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark
office up a dark court in Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation
when it appeared in all the glory of print: "On which occasion I walked
down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because
my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the
street, and were not fit to be seen there." He had purchased the
magazine at a shop in the Strand; and exactly two years afterwards, in
the younger member of a publishing firm who had called, at the chambers
in Furnival's Inn to which he had moved soon after entering the
gallery, with the proposal that originated _Pickwick_, he recognized the
person he had bought that magazine from, and whom before or since he had
never seen.
This interval of two years more than comprised what remained of his
career in the gallery and the engagements connected with it; but that
this occupation was of the utmost importance in its influence on his
life, in the discipline of his powers as well as of his character, there
can be no doubt whatever. "To the wholesome training of severe newspaper
work, when I was a very young man, I constantly refer my first
successes," he said to the New York editors when he last took leave of
them. It opened to him a wide and varied range of experience, which his
wonderful observation, exact as it was humorous, made entirely his own.
He saw the last of the old coaching-days, and of the old inns that were
a part of them; but it will be long before the readers of his living
page see the last of the life of either. "There never was," he once
wrote to me (in 1845), "anybody connected with newspapers who, in the
same space of time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I.
And what gentlemen they were to serve, in such things, at the old
_Morning Chronicle_! Great or small it did not matter. I have had to
charge for half a dozen break-downs in half a dozen times as many miles.
I have had to charge for the damage of a great-coat from the drippings
of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the smallest hours of the
night in a swift-flying carriage-and-pair. I have had to charge for all
sorts of breakages fifty times in a journey without question, such being
the ordinary results of the pace which we went at. I have charged for
broken hats, broken luggage, broken chaises, broken harness--everything
but a broken head, which is the only thing they would have grumbled to
pay for."
Something to the same effect he said publicly twenty years later, on the
occasion of his presiding, in May, 1865, at the second annual dinner of
the Newspaper Press Fund, when he condensed within the compass of his
speech a summary of the whole of his reporting life. "I am not here," he
said, "advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have
little or no knowledge. I hold a brief to-night for my brothers. I went
into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter
when I was a boy, and I left it--I can hardly believe the inexorable
truth--nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a reporter
under circumstances of which many of my brethren here can form no
adequate conception. 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. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled
into the castle-yard there, to identify, for the amusement of a friend,
the spot on which I once 'took,' as we used to call it, an
election-speech of Lord John Russell at the Devon contest, in the midst
of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of
the county, and under such a pelting rain that I remember two
good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a
pocket-handkerchief over my note-book, after the manner of a state
canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing
on them on the old back row of the old gallery 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 exciting 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. These trivial things I mention as an assurance to you that
I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure
that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has
never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I
took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully
believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long
disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or
where not, hearing a dull speech (the phenomenon does occur), I
sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the
speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I
even find my hand going on the table-cloth, taking an imaginary note of
it all." The latter I have known him do frequently. It was indeed a
quite ordinary habit with him.
Mr. James Grant, a writer who was himself in the gallery with Dickens,
and who states that among its eighty or ninety reporters he occupied the
very highest rank, not merely for accuracy in reporting but for
marvelous quickness in transcribing, has lately also told us that while
there he was exceedingly reserved in his manners, and that, though
showing the usual courtesies to all he was concerned with in his duties,
the only personal intimacy he formed was with Mr. Thomas Beard, then too
reporting for the _Morning Chronicle_. I have already mentioned the
friendly and familiar relations maintained with this gentleman to the
close of his life; and in confirmation of Mr. Grant's statement I can
further say that the only other associate of these early reporting days
to whom I ever heard him refer with special regard was the late Mr.
Vincent Dowling, many years editor of _Bell's Life_, with whom he did
not continue much personal intercourse, but of whose character as well
as talents he had formed a very high opinion. Nor is there anything to
add to the notice of these days which the reader's fancy may not easily
supply. A letter has been kept as written by him while engaged on one of
his "expresses;" but it is less for its saying anything new, than for
its confirming with a pleasant vividness what has been said already,
that its contents will justify mention here.
He writes, on a "Tuesday morning" in May, 1835, from the Bush Inn,
Bristol; the occasion that has taken him to the west, connected with a
reporting party, being Lord John Russell's Devonshire contest above
named, and his associate-chief being Mr. Beard, intrusted with command
for the _Chronicle_ in this particular express. He expects to forward
"the conclusion of Russell's dinner" by Cooper's company's coach leaving
the Bush at half-past six next morning; and by the first Ball's coach on
Thursday morning he will forward the report of the Bath dinner,
indorsing the parcel for immediate delivery, with extra rewards for the
porter. Beard is to go over to Bath next morning. He is himself to come
back by the mail from Marlborough; he has no doubt, if Lord John makes a
speech of any ordinary dimensions, it can be done by the time
Marlborough is reached; "and taking into consideration the immense
importance of having the addition of saddle-horses from thence, it is,
beyond all doubt, worth an effort. . . . I need not say," he continues,
"that it will be sharp work and will require two of us; for we shall
both be up the whole of the previous night, and shall have to sit up all
night again to get it off in time." He adds that as soon as they have
had a little sleep they will return to town as quickly as they can; but
they have, if the express succeeds, to stop at sundry places along the
road to pay money and notify satisfaction. And so, for himself and
Beard, he is his editor's very sincerely.
Another anecdote of these reporting days, with its sequel, may be added
from his own alleged relation, in which, however, mistakes occur that it
seems strange he should have made. The story, as told, is that the late
Lord Derby, when Mr. Stanley, had on some important occasion made a
speech which all the reporters found it necessary greatly to abridge;
that its essential points had nevertheless been so well given in the
_Chronicle_ that Mr. Stanley, having need of it for himself in greater
detail, had sent a request to the reporter to meet him in Carlton House
Terrace and take down the entire speech; that Dickens attended and did
the work accordingly, much to Mr. Stanley's satisfaction; and that, on
his dining with Mr. Gladstone in recent years, and finding the aspect of
the dining-room strangely familiar, he discovered afterwards on inquiry
that it was there he had taken the speech. The story, as it actually
occurred, is connected with the brief life of the _Mirror of
Parliament_. It was not at any special desire of Mr. Stanley's, but for
that new record of the debates, which had been started by one of the
uncles of Dickens and professed to excel _Hansard_ in giving verbatim
reports, that the famous speech against O'Connell was taken as
described. The young reporter went to the room in Carlton Terrace
because the work of his uncle Barrow's publication required to be done
there; and if, in later years, the great author was in the same room as
the guest of the prime minister, it must have been but a month or two
before he died, when for the first time he visited and breakfasted with
Mr. Gladstone.
The mention of his career in the gallery may close with the incident. I
will only add that his observation while there had not led him to form
any high opinion of the House of Commons or its heroes, and that of the
Pickwickian sense which so often takes the place of common sense in our
legislature he omitted no opportunity of declaring his contempt at
every part of his life.
The other occupation had meanwhile not been lost sight of, and for this
we are to go back a little. Since the first sketch appeared in the
_Monthly Magazine_, nine others have enlivened the pages of later
numbers of the same magazine, the last in February, 1835, and that which
appeared in the preceding August having first had the signature of Boz.
This was the nickname of a pet child, his youngest brother Augustus,
whom in honor of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ he had dubbed Moses, which
being facetiously pronounced through the nose became Boses, and being
shortened became Boz. "Boz was a very familiar household word to me,
long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it." Thus had he
fully invented his Sketches by Boz before they were even so called, or
any one was ready to give much attention to them; and the next invention
needful to himself was some kind of payment in return for them. The
magazine was owned as well as conducted at this time by a Mr. Holland,
who had come back from Bolivar's South American campaigns with the rank
of captain, and had hoped to make it a popular mouthpiece for his ardent
liberalism. But this hope, as well as his own health, quite failed; and
he had sorrowfully to decline receiving any more of the sketches when
they had to cease as voluntary offerings. I do not think that either he
or the magazine lived many weeks after an evening I passed with him in
Doughty Street in 1837, when he spoke in a very touching way of the
failure of this and other enterprises of his life, and of the help that
Dickens had been to him.
Nothing thus being forthcoming from the _Monthly_, it was of course but
natural the sketches too should cease to be forthcoming; and, even
before the above-named February number appeared, a new opening had been
found for them. An evening offshoot to the _Morning Chronicle_ had been
lately in hand; and to a countryman of Black's engaged in the
preparations for it, Mr. George Hogarth, Dickens was communicating from
his rooms in Furnival's Inn, on the evening of Tuesday, the 20th of
January, 1835, certain hopes and fancies he had formed. This was the
beginning of his knowledge of an accomplished and kindly man, with whose
family his relations were soon to become so intimate as to have an
influence on all his future career. Mr. Hogarth had asked him, as a
favor to himself, to write an original sketch for the first number of
the enterprise, and in writing back to say with what readiness he should
comply, and how anxiously he should desire to do his best for the person
who had made the request, he mentioned what had arisen in his mind. It
had occurred to him that he might not be unreasonably or improperly
trespassing farther on Mr. Hogarth if, trusting to his kindness to refer
the application to the proper quarter, he begged to ask whether it was
probable, if he commenced a regular series of articles under some
attractive title for the _Evening Chronicle_, its conductors would think
he had any claim to _some_ additional remuneration (of course, of no
great amount) for doing so. In short, he wished to put it to the
proprietors--first, whether a continuation of some chapters of light
papers in the style of his street-sketches would be considered of use to
the new journal; and secondly, if so, whether they would not think it
fair and reasonable that, taking his share of the ordinary reporting
business of the _Chronicle_ besides, he should receive something for the
papers beyond his ordinary salary as a reporter. The request was thought
fair, he began the sketches, and his salary was raised from five to
seven guineas a week.
They went on, with undiminished spirit and freshness, throughout the
year; and, much as they were talked of outside as well as in the world
of newspapers, nothing in connection with them delighted the writer half
so much as the hearty praise of his own editor. Mr. Black is one of the
men who has passed without recognition out of a world his labors largely
benefited, but with those who knew him no man was so popular, as well
for his broad kindly humor as for his honest great-hearted enjoyment of
whatever was excellent in others. Dickens to the last remembered that it
was most of all the cordial help of this good old mirth-loving man which
had started him joyfully on his career of letters. "It was John Black
that flung the slipper after me," he would often say. "Dear old Black!
my first hearty out-and-out appreciator," is an expression in one of his
letters written to me in the year he died.