NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
1838-1839.
Doubts of Success dispelled--Realities of
English Life--Characters self-revealed--Miss
Bates and Mrs. Nickleby--Smike and Dotheboys--A
Favorite Type of Humanity--Sydney Smith and
Newman Noggs--Kindliness and Breadth of
Humor--Goldsmith and Smollett--Early and Later
Books--Biographical not
critical--Characteristics--Materials for the
Book--Birthday Letter--A Difficulty at
Starting--Never in Advance with
_Nickleby_--Always with Later Books--Enjoying a
Play--At the Adelphi--Writing Mrs. Nickleby's
Love-scene--Sydney Smith vanquished--Winding up
the Story--Parting from Creatures of his
Fancy--The Nickleby Dinner--Persons
present--The Maclise Portrait.
I WELL recollect the doubt there was, mixed with the eager expectation
which the announcement of his second serial story had awakened, whether
the event would justify all that interest, and if indeed it were
possible that the young writer could continue to walk steadily under the
burden of the popularity laid upon him. The first number dispersed this
cloud of a question in a burst of sunshine; and as much of the gayety of
nations as had been eclipsed by old Mr. Pickwick's voluntary exile to
Dulwich was restored by the cheerful confidence with which young Mr.
Nicholas Nickleby stepped into his shoes. Everything that had given
charm to the first book was here, with more attention to the important
requisite of a story, and more wealth as well as truth of character.
How this was poured forth in each successive number, it hardly needs
that I should tell. To recall it now, is to talk of what since has so
interwoven itself with common speech and thought as to have become
almost part of the daily life of us all. It was well said of him, soon
after his death, in mentioning how largely his compositions had
furnished one of the chief sources of intellectual enjoyment to this
generation, that his language had become part of the language of every
class and rank of his countrymen, and his characters were a portion of
our contemporaries. "It seems scarcely possible," continued this
otherwise not too indulgent commentator, "to believe that there never
were any such persons as Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Nickleby and Mrs. Gamp.
They are to us not only types of English life, but types actually
existing. They at once revealed the existence of such people, and made
them thoroughly comprehensible. They were not studies of persons, but
persons. And yet they were idealized in the sense that the reader did
not think that they were drawn from the life. They were alive; they were
themselves." The writer might have added that this is proper to all true
masters of fiction who work in the higher regions of their calling.
Nothing certainly could express better what the new book was at this
time making manifest to its thousands of readers; not simply an
astonishing variety in the creations of character, but what it was that
made these creations so real; not merely the writer's wealth of genius,
but the secret and form of his art. There never was any one who had
less need to talk about his characters, because never were characters so
surely revealed by themselves; and it was thus their reality made itself
felt at once. They talked so well that everybody took to repeating what
they said, as the writer just quoted has pointed out; and the sayings
being the constituent elements of the characters, these also of
themselves became part of the public. This, which must always be a
novelist's highest achievement, was the art carried to exquisite
perfection on a more limited stage by Miss Austen; and, under widely
different conditions both of art and work, it was pre-eminently that of
Dickens. I told him, on reading the first dialogue of Mrs. Nickleby and
Miss Knag, that he had been lately reading Miss Bates in _Emma_, but I
found that he had not at this time made the acquaintance of that fine
writer.
Who that recollects the numbers of _Nickleby_ as they appeared can have
forgotten how each number added to the general enjoyment? All that had
given _Pickwick_ its vast popularity, the overflowing mirth, hearty
exuberance of humor, and genial kindliness of satire, had here the
advantage of a better-laid design, more connected incidents, and greater
precision of character. Everybody seemed immediately to know the
Nickleby family as well as his own. Dotheboys, with all that rendered
it, like a piece by Hogarth, both ludicrous and terrible, became a
household word. Successive groups of Mantalinis, Kenwigses, Crummleses,
introduced each its little world of reality, lighted up everywhere with
truth and life, with capital observation, the quaintest drollery, and
quite boundless mirth and fun. The brothers Cheeryble brought with them
all the charities. With Smike came the first of those pathetic pictures
that filled the world with pity for what cruelty, ignorance, or neglect
may inflict upon the young. And Newman Noggs ushered in that class of
the creatures of his fancy in which he took himself perhaps the most
delight, and which the oftener he dealt with the more he seemed to know
how to vary and render attractive: gentlemen by nature, however shocking
bad their hats or ungenteel their dialects; philosophers of modest
endurance, and needy but most respectable coats; a sort of humble angels
of sympathy and self-denial, though without a particle of splendor or
even good looks about them, except what an eye as fine as their own
feelings might discern. "My friends," wrote Sydney Smith, describing to
Dickens the anxiety of some ladies of his acquaintance to meet him at
dinner, "have not the smallest objection to be put into a number, but on
the contrary would be proud of the distinction; and Lady Charlotte, in
particular, you may marry to Newman Noggs." Lady Charlotte was not a
more real person to Sydney than Newman Noggs; and all the world that
Dickens attracted to his books could draw from them the same advantage
as the man of wit and genius. It has been lately objected that humanity
is not seen in them in its highest or noblest types, and the assertion
may hereafter be worth considering; but what is very certain is, that
they have inculcated humanity in familiar and engaging forms to
thousands and tens of thousands of their readers, who can hardly have
failed each to make his little world around him somewhat the better for
their teaching. From first to last they were never for a moment alien
to either the sympathies or the understandings of any class; and there
were crowds of people at this time that could not have told you what
imagination meant, who were adding month by month to their limited
stores the boundless gains of imagination.
One other kindliest product of humor in _Nickleby_, not to be passed
over in even thus briefly recalling a few first impressions of it, was
the good little miniature-painter Miss La Creevy, living by herself,
overflowing with affections she has nobody to bestow on, but always
cheerful by dint of industry and good-heartedness. When she is
disappointed in the character of a woman she has been to see, she eases
her mind by saying a very cutting thing at her expense _in a soliloquy_:
and thereby illustrates one of the advantages of having lived alone so
long, that she made always a confidante of herself; was as sarcastic as
she could be, by herself, on people who offended her; pleased herself,
and did no harm. Here was one of those touches, made afterwards familiar
to the readers of Dickens by innumerable similar fancies, which added
affection to their admiration for the writer, and enabled them to
anticipate the feeling with which posterity would regard him as indeed
the worthy companion of the Goldsmiths and Fieldings. There was a piece
of writing, too, within not many pages of it, of which Leigh Hunt
exclaimed on reading it that it surpassed the best things of the kind in
Smollett that he was able to call to mind. This was the letter of Miss
Squeers to Ralph Nickleby, giving him her version of the chastisement
inflicted by Nicholas on the schoolmaster: "My pa requests me to write
to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever
recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen. We are in
a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both
blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. . . . Me and my
brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered
very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received
some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are
visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so
is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse
mistakes". . . .
Thus rapidly may be indicated some elements that contributed to the
sudden and astonishingly wide popularity of these books. I purposely
reserve from my present notices of them, which are biographical rather
than critical, any statement of the reasons for which I think them
inferior in imagination and fancy to some of the later works; but there
was continued and steady growth in them on the side of humor,
observation, and character, while freshness and raciness of style
continued to be an important help. There are faults of occasional
exaggeration in the writing, but none that do not spring from animal
spirits and good humor, or a pardonable excess, here and there, on the
side of earnestness; and it has the rare virtue, whether gay or grave,
of being always thoroughly intelligible and for the most part thoroughly
natural, of suiting itself without effort to every change of mood, as
quick, warm, and comprehensive as the sympathies it is taxed to express.
The tone also is excellent. We are never repelled by egotism or
conceit, and misplaced ridicule never disgusts us. When good is going
on, we are sure to see all the beauty of it; and when there is evil, we
are in no danger of mistaking it for good. No one can paint more
picturesquely by an apposite epithet, or illustrate more happily by a
choice allusion. Whatever he knows or feels, too, is always at his
fingers' ends, and is present through whatever he is doing. What Rebecca
says to Ivanhoe of the black knight's mode of fighting would not be
wholly inapplicable to Dickens's manner of writing: "There is more than
mere strength, there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the
champion were given to every blow he deals." This, when a man deals his
blows with a pen, is the sort of handling that freshens with new life
the oldest facts, and breathes into thoughts the most familiar an
emotion not felt before. There seemed to be not much to add to our
knowledge of London until his books came upon us, but each in this
respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In _Nickleby_ the old city
reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing
over what is good and cheerful in it, or the veil is uplifted from its
darker scenes, it is at all times our privilege to see and feel it as it
absolutely is. Its interior hidden life becomes familiar as its
commonest outward forms, and we discover that we hardly knew anything of
the places we supposed that we knew the best.
Of such notices as his letters give of his progress with _Nickleby_,
which occupied him from February, 1838, to October, 1839, something may
now be said. Soon after the agreement for it was signed, before the
Christmas of 1837 was over, he went down into Yorkshire with Mr. Hablot
Browne to look up the Cheap Schools in that county to which public
attention had been painfully drawn by a law-case in the previous year;
which had before been notorious for cruelties committed in them, whereof
he had heard as early as in his childish days;[21] and which he was bent
upon destroying if he could. I soon heard the result of his journey; and
the substance of that letter, returned to him for the purpose, is in his
preface to the story written for the collected edition. He came back
confirmed in his design, and in February set to work upon his first
chapter. On his birthday he wrote to me, "I _have_ begun! I wrote four
slips last night, so you see the beginning is made. And what is more, I
can go on: so I hope the book is in training at last." "The first
chapter of _Nicholas_ is done," he wrote two days later. "It took time,
but I think answers the purpose as well as it could." Then, after a
dozen days more, "I wrote twenty slips of _Nicholas_ yesterday, left
only four to do this morning (up at 8 o'clock too!), and have ordered my
horse at one." I joined him as he expected, and we read together at
dinner that day the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_.
In the following number there was a difficulty which it was marvelous
should not oftener have occurred to him in this form of publication. "I
could not write a line till three o'clock," he says, describing the
close of that number, "and have yet five slips to finish, and don't know
what to put in them, for I have reached the point I meant to leave off
with." He found easy remedy for such a miscalculation at his outset, and
it was nearly his last as well as first misadventure of the kind: his
difficulty in _Pickwick_, as he once told me, having always been, not
the running short, but the running over: not the whip, but the drag,
that was wanted. Sufflaminandus erat, as Ben Jonson said of Shakspeare.
And in future works, with such marvelous nicety could he do always what
he had planned, strictly within the space available, that only another
similar instance is remembered by me. The third number introduced the
school; and "I remain dissatisfied until you have seen and read number
three," was his way of announcing to me his own satisfaction with that
first handling of Dotheboys Hall. Nor had it the least part in my
admiration of his powers at this time that he never wrote without the
printer at his heels; that, always in his later works two or three
numbers in advance, he was never a single number in advance with this
story; that the more urgent the call upon him the more readily he rose
to it; and that his astonishing animal spirits never failed him. As late
in the November month of 1838 as the 20th, he thus wrote to me: "I have
just begun my second chapter; cannot go out to-night; must get on; think
there _will_ be a _Nickleby_ at the end of this month now (I doubted it
before); and want to make a start towards it if I possibly can." That
was on Tuesday; and on Friday morning in the same week, explaining to me
the failure of something that had been promised the previous day, he
tells me, "I was writing incessantly until it was time to dress; and
have not yet got the subject of my last chapter, which _must be_
finished to-night."
But this was not all. Between that Tuesday and Friday an indecent
assault had been committed on his book by a theatrical adapter named
Stirling, who seized upon it without leave while yet only a third of it
was written; hacked, cut, and garbled its dialogue to the shape of one
or two farcical actors; invented for it a plot and an ending of his own,
and produced it at the Adelphi; where the outraged author, hard pressed
as he was with an unfinished number, had seen it in the interval between
the two letters I have quoted. He would not have run such a risk in
later years, but he threw off lightly at present even such offenses to
his art; and though I was with him at a representation of his _Oliver
Twist_ the following month at the Surrey theatre, when in the middle of
the first scene he laid himself down upon the floor in a corner of the
box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell, he had been able
to sit through _Nickleby_ and to see a kind of merit in some of the
actors. Mr. Yates had a sufficiently humorous meaning in his wildest
extravagance, and Mr. O. Smith could put into his queer angular oddities
enough of a hard dry pathos, to conjure up shadows at least of Mantalini
and Newman Noggs; of Ralph Nickleby there was indeed nothing visible
save a wig, a spencer, and a pair of boots; but there was a quaint actor
named Wilkinson who proved equal to the drollery though not to the
fierce brutality of Squeers; and even Dickens, in the letter that amazed
me by telling me of his visit to the theatre, was able to praise "the
skillful management and dressing of the boys, the capital manner and
speech of Fanny Squeers, the dramatic representation of her card-party
in Squeers's parlor, the careful making-up of all the people, and the
exceedingly good tableaux formed from Browne's sketches. . . . Mrs.
Keeley's first appearance beside the fire (see wollum), and all the rest
of Smike, was excellent; bating sundry choice sentiments and rubbish
regarding the little robins in the fields which have been put in the
boy's mouth by Mr. Stirling the adapter." His toleration could hardly be
extended to the robins, and their author he very properly punished by
introducing and denouncing him at Mr. Crummles's farewell supper.
The story was well in hand at the next letter to be quoted, for I limit
myself to those only with allusions that are characteristic or
illustrative. "I must be alone in my glory to-day," he wrote, "and see
what I can do. I perpetrated a great amount of work yesterday, and have
every day indeed since Monday, but I must buckle-to again and endeavor
to get the steam up. If this were to go on long, I should 'bust' the
boiler. I think Mrs. Nickleby's love-scene will come out rather unique."
The steam doubtless rose dangerously high when such happy inspiration
came. It was but a few numbers earlier than this, while that eccentric
lady was imparting her confidences to Miss Knag, that Sydney Smith
confessed himself vanquished by a humor against which his own had long
striven to hold out. "_Nickleby_ is _very good_," he wrote to Sir George
Phillips after the sixth number. "I stood out against Mr. Dickens as
long as I could, but he has conquered me."[22]
The close of the story was written at Broadstairs, from which (he had
taken a house "two doors from the Albion Hotel, where we had that merry
night two years ago") he wrote to me on the 9th September, 1839, "I am
hard at it, but these windings-up wind slowly, and I shall think I have
done great things if I have entirely finished by the 20th. Chapman &
Hall came down yesterday with Browne's sketches, and dined here. They
imparted their intentions as to a Nicklebeian fete which will make you
laugh heartily--so I reserve them till you come. It has been blowing
great guns for the last three days, and last night (I wish you could
have seen it!) there was such a sea! I staggered down to the pier, and,
creeping under the lee of a large boat which was high and dry, watched
it breaking for nearly an hour. Of course I came back wet through." On
the afternoon of Wednesday, the 18th, he wrote again: "I shall not
finish entirely before Friday, sending Hicks the last twenty pages of
manuscript by the night-coach. I have had pretty stiff work, as you may
suppose, and I have taken great pains. The discovery is made, Ralph is
dead, the loves have come all right, Tim Linkinwater has proposed, and I
have now only to break up Dotheboys and the book together. I am very
anxious that you should see this conclusion before it leaves my hands,
and I plainly see therefore that I must come to town myself on Saturday
if I would not endanger the appearance of the number. So I have written
to Hicks to send proofs to your chambers as soon as he can that evening;
and, if you don't object, I will dine with you any time after five, and
we will devote the night to a careful reading. I have not written to
Macready, for they have not yet sent me the title-page of dedication,
which is merely 'To W. C. Macready, Esq., the following pages are
inscribed, as a slight token of admiration and regard, by his friend the
Author.' Meanwhile will you let him know that I have fixed the Nickleby
dinner for Saturday, the 5th of October? Place, the Albion in Aldersgate
Street. Time, six for half-past exactly. . . . I shall be more glad than I
can tell you to see you again, and I look forward to Saturday, and the
evenings that are to follow it, with most joyful anticipation. I have
had a good notion for _Barnaby_, of which more anon."
The shadow from the old quarter, we see, the unwritten _Barnaby_ tale,
intrudes itself still; though hardly, as of old, making other pleasanter
anticipations less joyful. Such, indeed, at this time was his buoyancy
of spirit that it cost him little, compared with the suffering it gave
him at all subsequent similar times, to separate from the people who for
twenty months had been a part of himself. The increased success they had
achieved left no present room but for gladness and well-won pride; and
so, to welcome them into the immortal family of the English novel, and
open cheerily to their author "fresh woods and pastures new," we had the
dinner celebration. But there is small need now to speak of what has
left, to one of the few survivors, only the sadness of remembering that
all who made the happiness of it are passed away. There was Talfourd,
facile and fluent of kindliest speech, with whom we were in constant and
cordial intercourse, and to whom, grateful for his copyright exertions
in the House of Commons, he had dedicated _Pickwick_; there was Maclise,
dear and familiar friend to us both, whose lately-painted portrait of
Dickens hung in the room;[23] and there was the painter of the Rent-day,
who made a speech as good as his pictures, rich in color and quaint with
homely allusion, all about the reality of Dickens's genius, and how
there had been nothing like him issuing his novels part by part since
Richardson issued his novels volume by volume, and how in both cases
people talked about the characters as if they were next-door neighbors
or friends; and as many letters were written to the author of _Nickleby_
to implore him not to kill poor Smike, as had been sent by young ladies
to the author of _Clarissa_ to "save Lovelace's soul alive." These and
others are gone. Of those who survive, only three arise to my
memory,--Macready, who spoke his sense of the honor done him by the
dedication in English as good as his delivery of it, Mr. Edward Chapman,
and Mr. Thomas Beard.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] "I cannot call to mind now how I came to hear about Yorkshire
schools when I was a not very robust child, sitting in by-places near
Rochester castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes, and
Sancho Panza; but I know that my first impressions of them were picked
up at that time."
[22] Moore, in his _Diary_ (April, 1837), describes Sydney crying down
Dickens at a dinner in the Row, "and evidently without having given him
a fair trial."
[23] This portrait was given to Dickens by his publishers, for whom it
was painted with a view to an engraving for _Nickleby_, which, however,
was poorly executed, and of a size too small to do the original any kind
of justice. To the courtesy of its present possessor, the Rev. Sir
Edward Repps Joddrell, and to the careful art of Mr. Robert Graves,
A.R.A., I owe the illustration at the opening of this volume, in which
the head is for the first time worthily expressed. In some sort to help
also the reader's fancy to a complete impression, Maclise having caught
as happily the figure as the face, a skillful outline of the painting
has been executed for the present page by Mr. Jeens. "As a likeness,"
said Mr. Thackeray of the work, and no higher praise could be given to
it, "it is perfectly amazing. A looking-glass could not render a better
fac-simile. We have here the real identical man Dickens, the inward as
well as the outward of him."