THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP.
1840-1841.
Visit to Walter Landor--First Thought of Little
Nell--Hopeful of Master Humphrey--A Title for
the Child-Story--First Sale of _Master
Humphrey's Clock_--Its Original Plan
abandoned--Reasons for this--To be limited to
One Story--Disadvantages of Weekly
Publication--A Favorite Description--In Bevis
Marks for Sampson Brass--At Lawn House,
Broadstairs--Dedication of his First Volume to
Rogers--Chapters 43-45--Dick Swiveller and the
Marchioness--Masterpiece of Kindly Fun--Closing
of the Tale--Effect upon the
Writer--Making-believe very much--The End
approaching--The Realities of Fiction--Death of
Little Nell--My Share in the Close--A
Suggestion adopted by him--Success of the
Story--Useful Lessons--Its Mode of
Construction--Character and
Characteristics--The Art of it--A Recent
Tribute--Harte's "Dickens in Camp."
A DAY or two after the date of the last letter quoted, Dickens and his
wife, with Maclise and myself, visited Landor in Bath, and it was during
three happy days we passed together there that the fancy which was
shortly to take the form of Little Nell first occurred to its
author,[29]--but as yet with the intention only of making out of it a
tale of a few chapters. On the 1st of March we returned from Bath; and
on the 4th I had this letter: "If you can manage to give me a call in
the course of the day or evening, I wish you would. I am laboriously
turning over in my mind how I can best effect the improvement we spoke
of last night, which I will certainly make by hook or by crook, and
which I would like you to see _before_ it goes finally to the printer's.
I have determined not to put that witch-story into number 3, for I am by
no means satisfied of the effect of its contrast with Humphrey. I think
of lengthening Humphrey, finishing the description of the society, and
closing with the little child-story, which is SURE to be effective,
especially after the old man's quiet way." Then there came hard upon
this: "What do you think of the following double title for the beginning
of that little tale? 'PERSONAL ADVENTURES OF MASTER HUMPHREY: _The Old
Curiosity Shop_.' I have thought of _Master Humphrey's Tale_, _Master
Humphrey's Narrative_, _A Passage in Master Humphrey's Life_--but I
don't think any does as well as this. I have also thought of _The Old
Curiosity Dealer and the Child_ instead of _The Old Curiosity Shop_.
Perpend. Topping waits."----And thus was taking gradual form, with less
direct consciousness of design on his own part than I can remember in
any other instance of all his career, a story which was to add largely
to his popularity, more than any other of his works to make the bond
between himself and his readers one of personal attachment, and very
widely to increase the sense entertained of his powers as a pathetic as
well as humorous writer.
He had not written more than two or three chapters, when the capability
of the subject for more extended treatment than he had at first proposed
to give to it pressed itself upon him, and he resolved to throw
everything else aside, devoting himself to the one story only. There
were other strong reasons for this. Of the first number of the _Clock_
nearly seventy thousand were sold; but with the discovery that there was
no continuous tale the orders at once diminished, and a change must have
been made even if the material and means for it had not been ready.
There had been an interval of three numbers between the first and second
chapters, which the society of Mr. Pickwick and the two Wellers made
pleasant enough; but after the introduction of Dick Swiveller there were
three consecutive chapters; and in the continued progress of the tale
to its close there were only two more breaks, one between the fourth and
fifth chapters and one between the eighth and ninth, pardonable and
enjoyable now for the sake of Sam and his father. The reintroduction of
these old favorites, it will have been seen, formed part of his original
plan; of his abandonment of which his own description may be added, from
his preface to the collected edition: "The first chapter of this tale
appeared in the fourth number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, when I had
already been made uneasy by the desultory character of that work, and
when, I believe, my readers had thoroughly participated in the feeling.
The commencement of a story was a great satisfaction to me, and I had
reason to believe that my readers participated in this feeling too.
Hence, being pledged to some interruptions and some pursuit of the
original design, I set cheerfully about disentangling myself from those
impediments as fast as I could; and, this done, from that time until its
completion _The Old Curiosity Shop_ was written and published from week
to week, in weekly parts."
He had very early himself become greatly taken with it. "I am very glad
indeed," he wrote to me after the first half-dozen chapters, "that you
think so well of the _Curiosity Shop_, and especially that what may be
got out of Dick strikes you. I _mean_ to make much of him. I feel the
story extremely myself, which I take to be a good sign; and am already
warmly interested in it. I shall run it on now for four whole numbers
together, to give it a fair chance." Every step lightened the road as it
became more and more real with each character that appeared in it, and
I still recall the glee with which he told me what he intended to do not
only with Dick Swiveller, but with Septimus Brass, changed afterwards to
Sampson. Undoubtedly, however, Dick was his favorite. "Dick's behavior
in the matter of Miss Wackles will, I hope, give you satisfaction," is
the remark of another of his letters. "I cannot yet discover that his
aunt has any belief in him, or is in the least degree likely to send him
a remittance, so that he will probably continue to be the sport of
destiny." His difficulties were the quickly recurring times of
publication, the confined space in each number that yet had to
contribute its individual effect, and (from the suddenness with which he
had begun) the impossibility of getting in advance. "I was obliged to
cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter.
I hadn't room to turn:" to this or a similar effect his complaints are
frequent, and of the vexations named it was by far the worst. But he
steadily bore up against all, and made a triumph of the little story.
To help his work he went twice to Broadstairs, in June and in September.
From this he wrote to me (17th June), "It's now four o'clock, and I have
been at work since half-past eight. I have really dried myself up into a
condition which would almost justify me in pitching off the cliff, head
first--but I must get richer before I indulge in a crowning luxury.
Number 15, which I began to-day, I anticipate great things from. There
is a description of getting gradually out of town, and passing through
neighborhoods of distinct and various characters, with which, if I had
read it as anybody else's writing, I think I should have been very much
struck. The child and the old man are on their journey of course, and
the subject is a very pretty one." Between these two Broadstairs visits
he wrote to me, "I intended calling on you this morning on my way back
from Bevis Marks, whither I went to look at a house for Sampson Brass.
But I got mingled up in a kind of social paste with the Jews of
Houndsditch, and roamed about among them till I came out in Moorfields,
quite unexpectedly. So I got into a cab, and came home again, very
tired, by way of the City Road." At the opening of September he was
again at Broadstairs. The residence he most desired there, Fort House,
stood prominently at the top of a breezy hill on the road to Kingsgate,
with a corn-field between it and the sea, and this in many subsequent
years he always occupied; but he was fain to be content, as yet, with
Lawn House, a smaller villa between the hill and the corn-field, from
which he now wrote of his attentions to Mr. Sampson Brass's sister: "I
have been at work of course" (2d September), "and have just finished a
number. I have effected a reform by virtue of which we breakfast at a
quarter-before eight, so that I get to work at half-past, and am
commonly free by one o'clock or so, which is a great happiness. Dick is
now Sampson's clerk, and I have touched Miss Brass in Number 25,
lightly, but effectively I hope."
At this point it became necessary to close the first volume of the
_Clock_, which was issued accordingly with a dedication to Rogers, and a
preface to which allusion will be made hereafter. "I have opened the
second volume," he wrote to me on the 9th of September, "with Kit; and
I saw this morning looking out at the sea, as if a veil had been lifted
up, an affecting thing that I can do with him by-and-by. Nous verrons."
"I am glad you like that Kit number," he wrote twelve days later; "I
thought you would. I have altered that about the opera-going. Of course
I had no intention to delude the many-headed into a false belief
concerning opera-nights, but merely to specify a class of senators. I
needn't have done it, however, for God knows they're pretty well all
alike." This referred to an objection made by me to something he had
written of "opera-going senators on Wednesday nights;" and, of another
change made in compliance with some other objection of mine, he wrote on
the 4th of October, "You will receive the proof herewith. I have altered
it. You must let it stand now. I really think the dead mankind a million
fathoms deep, the best thing in the sentence. I have a notion of the
dreadful silence down there, and of the stars shining down upon their
drowned eyes,--the fruit, let me tell you, of a solitary walk by
starlight on the cliffs. As to the child-image, I have made a note of it
for alteration. In number thirty there will be some cutting needed, I
think. I have, however, something in my eye near the beginning which I
can easily take out. You will recognize a description of the road we
traveled between Birmingham and Wolverhampton; but I had conceived it so
well in my mind that the execution doesn't please me quite as well as I
expected. I shall be curious to know whether you think there's anything
in the notion of the man and his furnace-fire. It would have been a good
thing to have opened a new story with, I have been thinking since."
In the middle of October he returned to town, and by the end of the
month he had so far advanced that the close of the story began to be not
far distant. "Tell me what you think," he had written just before his
return, "of 36 and 37? The way is clear for Kit now, and for a great
effect at the last with the Marchioness." The last allusion I could not
in the least understand, until I found, in the numbers just sent me,
those exquisite chapters of the tale, the 57th and 58th, in which Dick
Swiveller realizes his threat to Miss Wackles, discovers the small
creature that his destiny is expressly saving up for him, dubs her
Marchioness, and teaches her the delights of hot purl and cribbage. This
is comedy of the purest kind; its great charm being the good-hearted
fellow's kindness to the poor desolate child hiding itself under cover
of what seems only mirth and fun. Altogether, and because of rather than
in spite of his weakness, Dick is a captivating person. His gayety and
good humor survive such accumulations of "staggerers," he makes such
discoveries of the "rosy" in the very smallest of drinks, and becomes
himself by his solacements of verse such a "perpetual grand Apollo,"
that his failings are all forgiven, and hearts resolutely shut against
victims of destiny in general open themselves freely to Dick Swiveller.
At the opening of November, there seems to have been a wish on Maclise's
part to try his hand at an illustration for the story; but I do not
remember that it bore other fruit than a very pleasant day at Jack
Straw's Castle, where Dickens read one of the later numbers to us.
"Maclise and myself (alone in the carriage)," he wrote, "will be with
you at two exactly. We propose driving out to Hampstead and walking
there, if it don't rain in buckets'-full. I sha'n't send Bradburys' the
MS. of next number till to-morrow, for it contains the shadow of the
number after that, and I want to read it to Mac, as, if he likes the
subject, it will furnish him with one, I think. You can't imagine
(gravely I write and speak) how exhausted I am to-day with yesterday's
labors. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All
night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am
unrefreshed and miserable. I don't know what to do with myself. . . . I
think the close of the story will be great." Connected with the same
design on Maclise's part there was another reading, this time at my
house, and of the number shadowed forth by what had been read at
Hampstead. "I will bring the MS.," he writes on the 12th of November,
"and, for Mac's information if needful, the number before it. I have
only this moment put the finishing touch to it. The difficulty has been
tremendous--the anguish unspeakable. I didn't say six. Therefore dine at
half-past five like a Christian. I shall bring Mac at that hour."
He had sent me, shortly before, the chapters in which the Marchioness
nurses Dick in his fever, and puts his favorite philosophy to the hard
test of asking him whether he has ever put pieces of orange-peel into
cold water and made believe it was wine. "If you make believe very much,
it's quite nice; but if you don't, you know, it hasn't much flavor:" so
it stood originally, and to the latter word in the little creature's
mouth I seem to have objected. Replying (on the 16th of December) he
writes, "'If you make believe very much, it's quite nice; but if you
don't, you know, it seems as if it would bear a little more seasoning,
certainly.' I think that's better. Flavor is a common word in cookery,
and among cooks, and so I used it. The part you cut out in the other
number, which was sent me this morning, I had put in with a view to
Quilp's last appearance on any stage, which is casting its shadow upon
my mind; but it will come well enough without such a preparation, so I
made no change. I mean to shirk Sir Robert Inglis, and work to-night. I
have been solemnly revolving the general story all this morning. The
forty-fifth number will certainly close. Perhaps this forty-first, which
I am now at work on, had better contain the announcement of _Barnaby_? I
am glad you like Dick and the Marchioness in that sixty-fourth chapter.
I thought you would."
Fast shortening as the life of little Nell was now, the dying year might
have seen it pass away; but I never knew him wind up any tale with such
a sorrowful reluctance as this. He caught at any excuse to hold his hand
from it, and stretched to the utmost limit the time left to complete it
in. Christmas interposed its delays too, so that Twelfth-night had come
and gone when I wrote to him in the belief that he was nearly done.
"Done!" he wrote back to me on Friday, the 7th; "Done!!! Why, bless you,
I shall not be done till Wednesday night. I only began yesterday, and
this part of the story is not to be galloped over, I can tell you. I
think it will come famously--but I am the wretchedest of the wretched.
It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can
do to keep moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal
more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland; a great deal more
than the Single Gentleman. I sha'n't recover it for a long time. Nobody
will miss her like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that
I really cannot express my sorrow. Old wounds bleed afresh when I only
think of the way of doing it: what the actual doing it will be, God
knows. I can't preach to myself the schoolmaster's consolation, though I
try. Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story. I don't
know what to say about dining to-morrow--perhaps you'll send up
to-morrow morning for news? That'll be the best way. I have refused
several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere
till I had done. I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying
to get into, and having to fetch it all back again." He had finished,
all but the last chapter, on the Wednesday named; that was the 12th of
January; and on the following night he read to me the two chapters of
Nell's death, the seventy-first and seventy-second, with the result
described in a letter to me of the following Monday, the 17th January,
1841:
"I can't help letting you know how much your yesterday's letter pleased
me. I felt sure you liked the chapters when we read them on Thursday
night, but it was a great delight to have my impression so strongly and
heartily confirmed. You know how little value I should set on what I had
done, if all the world cried out that it was good, and those whose good
opinion and approbation I value most were silent. The assurance that
this little closing of the scene touches and is felt by you so strongly,
is better to me than a thousand most sweet voices out of doors. When I
first began, _on your valued suggestion_, to keep my thoughts upon this
ending of the tale, I resolved to try and do something which might be
read by people about whom Death had been, with a softened feeling, and
with consolation. . . . After you left last night, I took my desk
up-stairs, and, writing until four o'clock this morning, finished the
old story. It makes me very melancholy to think that all these people
are lost to me forever, and I feel as if I never could become attached
to any new set of characters." The words printed in italics, as
underlined by himself, give me my share in the story which had gone so
closely to his heart. I was responsible for its tragic ending. He had
not thought of killing her, when, about half-way through, I asked him to
consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own
conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of
sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy
endings so that the gentle pure little figure and form should never
change to the fancy. All that I meant he seized at once, and never
turned aside from it again.
The published book was an extraordinary success, and, in America more
especially, very greatly increased the writer's fame. The pathetic vein
it had opened was perhaps mainly the cause of this, but opinion at home
continued still to turn on the old characteristics,--the freshness of
humor of which the pathos was but another form and product, the grasp of
reality with which character had again been seized, the discernment of
good under its least attractive forms and of evil in its most
captivating disguises, the cordial wisdom and sound heart, the enjoyment
and fun, luxuriant yet under proper control. No falling-off was found in
these; and I doubt if any of his people have been more widely liked than
Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. The characters generally, indeed,
work out their share in the purpose of the tale; the extravagances of
some of them help to intensify its meaning; and the sayings and doings
of the worst and the best alike have their point and applicability. Many
an oversuspicious person will find advantage in remembering what a too
liberal application of Foxey's principle of suspecting everybody brought
Mr. Sampson Brass to; and many an overhasty judgment of poor human
nature will unconsciously be checked, when it is remembered that Mr.
Christopher Nubbles _did_ come back to work out that shilling.
But the main idea and chief figure of the piece constitute its interest
for most people, and give it rank upon the whole with the most
attractive productions of English fiction. I am not acquainted with any
story in the language more adapted to strengthen in the heart what most
needs help and encouragement, to sustain kindly and innocent impulses,
and to awaken everywhere the sleeping germs of good. It includes
necessarily much pain, much uninterrupted sadness; and yet the
brightness and sunshine quite overtop the gloom. The humor is so
benevolent; the view of errors that have no depravity of heart in them
is so indulgent; the quiet courage under calamity, the purity that
nothing impure can soil, are so full of tender teaching. Its effect as a
mere piece of art, too, considering the circumstances in which I have
shown it to be written, I think very noteworthy. It began with a plan
for but a short half-dozen chapters; it grew into a full-proportioned
story under the warmth of the feeling it had inspired its writer with;
its very incidents created a necessity at first not seen; and it was
carried to a close only contemplated after a full half of it had been
written. Yet, from the opening of the tale to that undesigned
ending,--from the image of little Nell asleep amid the quaint grotesque
figures of the old curiosity warehouse to that other final sleep she
takes among the grim forms and carvings of the old church aisle,--the
main purpose seems to be always present. The characters and incidents
that at first appear most foreign to it are found to have had with it a
close relation. The hideous lumber and rottenness that surround the
child in her grandfather's home take shape again in Quilp and his filthy
gang. In the first still picture of Nell's innocence in the midst of
strange and alien forms, we have the forecast of her after-wanderings,
her patient miseries, her sad maturity of experience before its time.
Without the show-people and their blended fictions and realities, their
wax-works, dwarfs, giants, and performing dogs, the picture would have
wanted some part of its significance. Nor could the genius of Hogarth
himself have given it higher expression than in the scenes by the
cottage door, the furnace-fire, and the burial-place of the old church,
over whose tombs and gravestones hang the puppets of Mr. Punch's show
while the exhibitors are mending and repairing them. And when, at last,
Nell sits within the quiet old church where all her wanderings end, and
gazes on those silent monumental groups of warriors,--helmets, swords,
and gauntlets wasting away around them,--the associations among which
her life had opened seem to have come crowding on the scene again, to be
present at its close,--but stripped of their strangeness; deepened into
solemn shapes by the suffering she has undergone; gently fusing every
feeling of a life past into hopeful and familiar anticipation of a life
to come; and already imperceptibly lifting her, without grief or pain,
from the earth she loves, yet whose grosser paths her light steps only
touched to show the track through them to heaven. This is genuine art,
and such as all cannot fail to recognize who read the book in a right
sympathy with the conception that pervades it. Nor, great as the
discomfort was of reading it in brief weekly snatches, can I be wholly
certain that the discomfort of so writing it involved nothing but
disadvantage. With so much in every portion to do, and so little space
to do it in, the opportunities to a writer for mere self-indulgence were
necessarily rare.
Of the innumerable tributes the story has received, and to none other by
Dickens have more or more various been paid, there is one, the very
last, which has much affected me. Not many months before my friend's
death, he had sent me two _Overland Monthlies_ containing two sketches
by a young American writer far away in California, "The Luck of Roaring
Camp," and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in which he had found such
subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in late years
discovered; the manner resembling himself, but the matter fresh to a
degree that had surprised him; the painting in all respects masterly,
and the wild rude thing painted a quite wonderful reality. I have
rarely known him more honestly moved. A few months passed;
telegraph-wires flashed over the world that he had passed away on the
9th of June; and the young writer of whom he had then written to me, all
unconscious of that praise, put his tribute of gratefulness and sorrow
into the form of a poem called _Dickens in Camp_.[30] It embodies the
same kind of incident which had so affected the master himself, in the
papers to which I have referred; it shows the gentler influences which,
in even those Californian wilds, can restore outlawed "roaring camps" to
silence and humanity; and there is hardly any form of posthumous tribute
which I can imagine likely to have better satisfied his desire of fame
than one which should thus connect, with the special favorite among all
his heroines, the restraints and authority exerted by his genius over
the rudest and least civilized of competitors in that far fierce race
for wealth.
"Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow:
"The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;
"Till one arose, and from his pack's scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew;
"And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the fire-light fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of 'Little Nell:'
"Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy,--for the reader
Was youngest of them all,--
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall;
"The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp with 'Nell' on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way.
"And so in mountain solitudes--o'ertaken
As by some spell divine--
Their cares dropped from them like the needles shaken
From out the gusty pine.
"Lost is that camp, and wasted all its fire;
And he who wrought that spell?--
Ah, towering pine and stately Kentish spire,
Ye have one tale to tell!
"Lost is that camp! but let its fragrant story
Blend with the breath that thrills
With hop-vines' incense all the pensive glory
That fills the Kentish hills.
"And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,--
This spray of Western pine!
"July, 1870."
FOOTNOTES:
[29] I have mentioned the fact in my _Life of Landor_; and to the
passage I here add the comment made by Dickens when he read it: "It was
at a celebration of his birthday in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35,
St. James's Square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in
the _Curiosity Shop_ first dawned on the genius of its creator. No
character in prose fiction was a greater favorite with Landor. He
thought that, upon her, Juliet might for a moment have turned her eyes
from Romeo, and that Desdemona might have taken her hair-breadth escapes
to heart, so interesting and pathetic did she seem to him; and when,
some years later, the circumstance I have named was recalled to him, he
broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of
which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed
the fact, and added that he had never in his life regretted anything so
much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed
respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35, St.
James's Square, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to
the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace
of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become conscious of our sense of
his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter." Dickens
had himself proposed to tell this story as a contribution to my
biography of our common friend, but his departure for America prevented
him. "I see," he wrote to me, as soon as the published book reached him,
"you have told, with what our friend would have called _won_-derful
accuracy, the little St. James's Square story, which a certain faithless
wretch was to have related."
[30] _Poems._ By Bret Harte (Boston: Osgood & Co., 1871), pp. 32-35.