OLIVER TWIST.
1838.
Interest in Characters at Close of
_Oliver_--Writing of the Last
Chapter--Cruikshank Illustrations--Etchings for
Last Volume--How executed--Slander respecting
them exposed--Falsehood ascribed to the
Artist--Reputation of the New Tale--Its
Workmanship--Social Evils passed away--Living
only in what destroyed them--Chief Design of
the Story--Its Principal Figures--Comedy and
Tragedy of Crime--Reply to Attacks--Le Sage,
Gay, and Fielding--Likeness to them--Again the
Shadow of _Barnaby_--Appeal to Mr. Bentley for
Delay--A Very Old Story--"Sic Vos non
Vobis"--_Barnaby_ given up by Mr.
Bentley--Resignation of _Miscellany_--Parent
parting from Child.
THE whole of his time not occupied by _Nickleby_ was now given to
_Oliver_, and as the story shaped itself to its close it took
extraordinary hold of him. I never knew him work so frequently after
dinner, or to such late hours (a practice he afterwards abhorred), as
during the final months of this task; which it was now his hope to
complete before October, though its close in the magazine would not be
due until the following March. "I worked pretty well last night," he
writes, referring to it in May, "very well indeed; but, although I did
eleven close slips before half-past twelve, I have four to write to
complete the chapter; and, as I foolishly left them till this morning,
have the steam to get up afresh." A month later he writes, "I got to
the sixteenth slip last night, and shall try hard to get to the
thirtieth before I go to bed."[17] Then, on a "Tuesday night," at the
opening of August, he wrote, "Hard at work still. Nancy is no more. I
showed what I have done to Kate last night, who was in an unspeakable
'_state_:' from which and my own impression I augur well. When I have
sent Sikes to the devil, I must have yours." "No, no," he wrote, in the
following month: "don't, don't let us ride till to-morrow, not having
yet disposed of the Jew, who is such an out-and-outer that I don't know
what to make of him." No small difficulty to an inventor, where the
creatures of his invention are found to be as real as himself; but this
also was mastered; and then there remained but the closing quiet chapter
to tell the fortunes of those who had figured in the tale. To this he
summoned me in the first week of September, replying to a request of
mine that he'd give me a call that day: "Come and give _me_ a call, and
let us have 'a bit o' talk' before we have a bit o' som'at else. My
missis is going out to dinner, and I ought to go, but I have got a bad
cold. So do you come, and sit here, and read, or work, or do something,
while I write the LAST chapter of _Oliver_, which will be arter a lamb
chop." How well I remember that evening! and our talk of what should be
the fate of Charley Bates, on behalf of whom (as indeed for the Dodger
too) Talfourd had pleaded as earnestly in mitigation of judgment as
ever at the bar for any client he had most respected.
The publication had been announced for October, but the third-volume
illustrations intercepted it a little. This part of the story, as we
have seen, had been written in anticipation of the magazine, and the
designs for it, having to be executed "in a lump," were necessarily done
somewhat hastily. The matter supplied in advance of the monthly portions
in the magazine formed the bulk of the last volume as published in the
book; and for this the plates had to be prepared by Cruikshank also in
advance of the magazine, to furnish them in time for the separate
publication: Sikes and his dog, Fagin in the cell, and Rose Maylie and
Oliver, being the three last. None of these Dickens had seen until he
saw them in the book on the eve of its publication; when he so strongly
objected to one of them that it had to be canceled. "I returned suddenly
to town yesterday afternoon," he wrote to the artist at the end of
October, "to look at the latter pages of _Oliver Twist_ before it was
delivered to the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in
the last volume for the first time. With reference to the last
one,--Rose Maylie and Oliver,--without entering into the question of
great haste, or any other cause, which may have led to its being what it
is, I am quite sure there can be little difference of opinion between us
with respect to the result. May I ask you whether you will object to
designing this plate afresh, and doing so _at once_, in order that as
few impressions as possible of the present one may go forth? I feel
confident you know me too well to feel hurt by this inquiry, and with
equal confidence in you I have lost no time in preferring it." This
letter, printed from a copy in Dickens's handwriting fortunately
committed to my keeping, entirely disposes of a wonderful story[18]
originally promulgated in America with a minute particularity of detail
that might have raised the reputation of Sir Benjamin Backbite himself.
Whether all Sir Benjamin's laurels, however, should fall to the person
by whom the tale is told,[19] or whether any part belongs to the
authority alleged for it, is unfortunately not quite clear. There would
hardly have been a doubt, if the fable had been confined to the other
side of the Atlantic; but it has been reproduced and widely circulated
on this side also; and the distinguished artist whom it calumniates by
attributing the invention to him has been left undefended from its
slander. Dickens's letter spares me the necessity of characterizing, by
the only word which would have been applicable to it, a tale of such
incredible and monstrous absurdity as that one of the masterpieces of
its author's genius had been merely an illustration of etchings by Mr.
Cruikshank!
The completed _Oliver Twist_ found a circle of admirers, not so wide in
its range as those of others of his books, but of a character and mark
that made their honest liking for it, and steady advocacy of it,
important to his fame; and the book has held its ground in the first
class of his writings. It deserves that place. The admitted
exaggerations in _Pickwick_ are incident to its club's extravaganza of
adventure, of which they are part, and are easily separable from the
reality of its wit and humor, and its incomparable freshness; but no
such allowances were needed here. Make what deduction the too scrupulous
reader of _Oliver_ might please for "lowness" in the subject, the
precision and the unexaggerated force of the delineation were not to be
disputed. The art of copying from nature as it really exists in the
common walks had not been carried by any one to greater perfection, or
to better results in the way of combination. Such was his handling of
the piece of solid, existing, every-day life, which he made here the
groundwork of his wit and tenderness, that the book which did much to
help out of the world the social evils it portrayed will probably
preserve longest the picture of them as they then were. Thus far,
indeed, he had written nothing to which in a greater or less degree this
felicity did not belong. At the time of which I am speaking, the
debtors' prisons described in _Pickwick_, the parochial management
denounced in _Oliver_, and the Yorkshire schools exposed in _Nickleby_,
were all actual existences,--which now have no vivider existence than in
the forms he thus gave to them. With wiser purposes, he superseded the
old petrifying process of the magician in the Arabian tale, and struck
the prisons and parish abuses of his country, and its schools of neglect
and crime, into palpable life forever. A portion of the truth of the
past, of the character and very history of the moral abuses of his time,
will thus remain always in his writings; and it will be remembered that
with only the light arms of humor and laughter, and the gentle ones of
pathos and sadness, he carried cleansing and reform into those Augean
stables.
Not that such intentions are in any degree ever intruded by this least
didactic of writers. It is the fact that teaches, and not any
sermonizing drawn from it. _Oliver Twist_ is the history of a child born
in a workhouse and brought up by parish overseers, and there is nothing
introduced that is out of keeping with the design. It is a series of
pictures from the tragi-comedy of lower life, worked out by perfectly
natural agencies, from the dying mother and the starved wretches of the
first volume, through the scenes and gradations of crime, careless or
deliberate, which have a frightful consummation in the last volume, but
are never without the reliefs and self-assertions of humanity even in
scenes and among characters so debased. It is indeed the primary purpose
of the tale to show its little hero, jostled as he is in the miserable
crowd, preserved everywhere from the vice of its pollution by an
exquisite delicacy of natural sentiment which clings to him under every
disadvantage. There is not a more masterly touch in fiction, and it is
by such that this delightful fancy is consistently worked out to the
last, than Oliver's agony of childish grief on being brought away from
the branch-workhouse, the wretched home associated only with suffering
and starvation, and with no kind word or look, but containing still his
little companions in misery.
Of the figures the book has made familiar to every one it is not my
purpose to speak. To name one or two will be enough. Bumble and his
wife; Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger; the cowardly charity-boy,
Noah Claypole, whose _Such agony, please, sir_, puts the whole of a
school-life into one phrase; the so-called merry old Jew, supple and
black-hearted Fagin; and Bill Sikes, the bolder-faced bulky-legged
ruffian, with his white hat and white shaggy dog,--who does not know
them all, even to the least points of dress, look, and walk, and all the
small peculiarities that express great points of character? I have
omitted poor wretched Nancy; yet it is to be said of her, with such
honest truthfulness her strength and weakness are shown, in the virtue
that lies neighbored in her nature so closely by vice, that the people
meant to be entirely virtuous show poorly beside her. But, though Rose
and her lover are trivial enough beside Bill and his mistress, being
indeed the weak part of the story, it is the book's pre-eminent merit
that vice is nowhere made attractive in it. Crime is not more intensely
odious, all through, than it is also most wretched and most unhappy. Not
merely when its exposure comes, when the latent recesses of guilt are
laid bare, and all the agonies of remorse are witnessed; not in the
great scenes only, but in those lighter passages where no such aim might
seem to have guided the apparently careless hand, this is emphatically
so. Whether it be the comedy or the tragedy of crime, terror and
retribution dog closely at its heels. They are as plainly visible when
Fagin is first shown in his den, boiling the coffee in the saucepan and
stopping every now and then to listen when there is the least noise
below,--the villainous confidence of habit never extinguishing in him
the anxious watchings and listenings of crime,--as when we see him at
the last in the condemned cell, like a poisoned human rat in a hole.
A word may be added upon the attacks directed against the subject of the
book, to which Dickens made reply in one of his later editions,
declaring his belief that he had tried to do a service to society, and
had certainly done no disservice, in depicting a knot of such associates
in crime in all their deformity and squalid wretchedness, skulking
uneasily through a miserable life to a painful and shameful death. It
is, indeed, never the subject that can be objectionable, if the
treatment is not so, as we may see by much popular writing since, where
subjects unimpeachably high are brought low by degrading sensualism.
When the object of a writer is to exhibit the vulgarity of vice, and not
its pretensions to heroism or cravings for sympathy, he may measure his
subject with the highest. We meet with a succession of swindlers and
thieves in _Gil Blas_; we shake hands with highwaymen and housebreakers
all round in the _Beggars' Opera_; we pack cards with La Ruse or pick
pockets with Jonathan in Fielding's _Mr. Wild the Great_; we follow
cruelty and vice from its least beginning to its grossest ends in the
prints of Hogarth; but our morals stand none the looser for any of them.
As the spirit of the Frenchman was pure enjoyment, the strength of the
Englishmen lay in wisdom and satire. The low was set forth to pull down
the false pretensions of the high. And though for the most part they
differ in manner and design from Dickens in this tale, desiring less to
discover the soul of goodness in things evil than to brand the stamp of
evil on things apt to pass for good, their objects and results are
substantially the same. Familiar with the lowest kind of abasement of
life, the knowledge is used, by both him and them, to teach what
constitutes its essential elevation; and by the very coarseness and
vulgarity of the materials employed we measure the gentlemanliness and
beauty of the work that is done. The quack in morality will always call
such writing immoral, and the impostors will continue to complain of its
treatment of imposture, but for the rest of the world it will still
teach the invaluable lesson of what men ought to be from what they are.
We cannot learn it more than enough. We cannot too often be told that as
the pride and grandeur of mere external circumstance is the falsest of
earthly things, so the truth of virtue in the heart is the most lovely
and lasting; and from the pages of _Oliver Twist_ this teaching is once
again to be taken by all who will look for it there.
And now, while _Oliver_ was running a great career of popularity and
success, the shadow of the tale of _Barnaby Rudge_, which he was to
write on similar terms, and to begin in the _Miscellany_ when the other
should have ended, began to darken everything around him. We had much
discussion respecting it, and I had no small difficulty in restraining
him from throwing up the agreement altogether; but the real hardship of
his position, and the considerate construction to be placed on every
effort made by him to escape from obligations incurred in ignorance of
the sacrifices implied by them, will be best understood from his own
frank and honest statement. On the 21st of January, 1839, inclosing me
the copy of a letter which he proposed to send to Mr. Bentley the
following morning, he thus wrote: "From what I have already said to you,
you will have been led to expect that I entertained some such
intention. I know you will not endeavor to dissuade me from sending it.
Go it MUST. It is no fiction to say that at present I _cannot_ write
this tale. The immense profits which _Oliver_ has realized to its
publisher and is still realizing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it
brought to me (not equal to what is every day paid for a novel that
sells fifteen hundred copies at most); the recollection of this, and the
consciousness that I have still the slavery and drudgery of another work
on the same journeyman-terms; the consciousness that my books are
enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that I, with
such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and
wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the
best part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who
are nearest and dearest to me I can realize little more than a genteel
subsistence: all this puts me out of heart and spirits. And I
cannot--cannot and will not--under such circumstances that keep me down
with an iron hand, distress myself by beginning this tale until I have
had time to breathe, and until the intervention of the summer, and some
cheerful days in the country, shall have restored me to a more genial
and composed state of feeling. There--for six months _Barnaby Rudge_
stands over. And but for you, it should stand over altogether. For I do
most solemnly declare that morally, before God and man, I hold myself
released from such hard bargains as these, after I have done so much for
those who drove them. This net that has been wound about me so chafes
me, so exasperates and irritates my mind, that to break it at whatever
cost--_that_ I should care nothing for--is my constant impulse. But I
have not yielded to it. I merely declare that I must have a postponement
very common in all literary agreements; and for the time I have
mentioned--six months from the conclusion of _Oliver_ in the
_Miscellany_--I wash my hands of any fresh accumulation of labor, and
resolve to proceed as cheerfully as I can with that which already
presses upon me."[20]
To describe what followed upon this is not necessary. It will suffice to
state the results. Upon the appearance in the _Miscellany_, in the early
months of 1839, of the last portion of _Oliver Twist_, its author,
having been relieved altogether from his engagement to the magazine,
handed over, in a familiar epistle from a parent to his child, the
editorship to Mr. Ainsworth; and the still subsisting agreement to write
_Barnaby Rudge_ was, upon the overture of Mr. Bentley himself in June of
the following year, 1840, also put an end to, on payment by Dickens, for
the copyright of _Oliver Twist_ and such printed stock as remained of
the edition then on hand, of two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds.
What was further incident to this transaction will be told hereafter;
and a few words may meanwhile be taken, not without significance in
regard to it, from the parent's familiar epistle. It describes the child
as aged two years and two months (so long had he watched over it); gives
sundry pieces of advice concerning its circulation, and the importance
thereto of light and pleasant articles of food; and concludes, after
some general moralizing on the shiftings and changes of this world
having taken so wonderful a turn that mail-coach guards were become no
longer judges of horse-flesh, "I reap no gain or profit by parting from
you, nor will any conveyance of your property be required, for in this
respect you have always been literally Bentley's Miscellany and never
mine."
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Here is another of the same month: "All day I have been at work on
_Oliver_, and hope to finish the chapter by bedtime. I wish you'd let me
know what Sir Francis Burdett has been saying about him at some
Birmingham meeting. B. has just sent me the _Courier_ containing some
reference to his speech; but the speech I haven't seen."
[18] Reproduced as below, in large type, and without a word of
contradiction or even doubt, in a biography of Mr. Dickens put forth by
Mr. Hotten: "Dr. Shelton McKenzie, in the American _Round Table_,
relates this anecdote of _Oliver Twist_: In London I was intimate with
the brothers Cruikshank, Robert and George, but more particularly with
the latter. Having called upon him one day at his house (it was then in
Myddelton Terrace, Pentonville), I had to wait while he was finishing an
etching, for which a printer's boy was waiting. To while away the time,
I gladly complied with his suggestion that I should look over a
portfolio crowded with etchings, proofs, and drawings, which lay upon
the sofa. Among these, carelessly tied together in a wrap of brown
paper, was a series of some twenty-five or thirty drawings, very
carefully finished, through most of which were carried the well-known
portraits of Fagin, Bill Sikes and his dog, Nancy, the Artful Dodger,
and Master Charles Bates--all well known to the readers of _Oliver
Twist_. There was no mistake about it; and when Cruikshank turned round,
his work finished, I said as much. He told me that it had long been in
his mind to show the life of a London thief by a series of drawings
engraved by himself, in which, without a single line of letter-press,
the story would be strikingly and clearly told. 'Dickens,' he continued,
'dropped in here one day, just as you have done, and, while waiting
until I could speak with him, took up that identical portfolio, and
ferreted out that bundle of drawings. When he came to that one which
represents Fagin in the condemned cell, he studied it for half an hour,
and told me that he was tempted to change the whole plot of his story;
not to carry Oliver Twist through adventures in the country, but to take
him up into the thieves' den in London, show what their life was, and
bring Oliver through it without sin or shame. I consented to let him
write up to as many of the designs as he thought would suit his purpose;
and that was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created. My
drawings suggested them, rather than his strong individuality suggested
my drawings.'"
[19] This question has been partly solved, since my last edition, by Mr.
Cruikshank's announcement in the _Times_, that, though Dr. Mackenzie had
"confused some circumstances with respect to Mr. Dickens looking over
some drawings and sketches," the substance of his information as to who
it was that originated _Oliver Twist_, and all its characters, had been
derived from Mr. Cruikshank himself. The worst part of the foregoing
fable, therefore, has not Dr. Mackenzie for its author; and Mr.
Cruikshank is to be congratulated on the prudence of his rigid silence
respecting it as long as Mr. Dickens lived.
[20] Upon receiving this letter I gently reminded him that I had made
objection at the time to the arrangement on the failure of which he
empowered me to bring about the settlement it was now proposed to
supersede. I cannot give his reply, as it would be unbecoming to repeat
the warmth of its expression to myself, but I preserve its first few
lines to guard against any possible future misstatement: "If you suppose
that anything in my letter could by the utmost latitude of construction
imply the smallest dissatisfaction on my part, for God's sake dismiss
such a thought from your mind. I have never had a momentary approach to
doubt or discontent where you have been mediating for me. . . . I could say
more, but you would think me foolish and rhapsodical; and such feeling
as I have for you is better kept within one's own breast than vented in
imperfect and inexpressive words."