"I may be asked--'If you have been in any

respect disappointed in America, and are

assured beforehand that the expression of your

disappointment will give offence to any class,

why do you write at all?' My answer is, that I

went there expecting greater things than I

found, and resolved as far as in me lay to do

justice to the country, at the expense of any

(in my view) mistaken or prejudiced statements

that might have been made to its disparagement.

Coming home with a corrected and sobered

judgment, I consider myself no less bound to do

justice to what, according to my best means of

judgment, I found to be the truth."

Of the book for whose opening page this matter introductory was written,

it will be enough merely to add that it appeared on the 18th of October;

that before the close of the year four large editions had been sold;

and that in my opinion it thoroughly deserved the estimate formed of it

by one connected with America by the strongest social affections, and

otherwise in all respects an honourable, high-minded, upright judge.

"You have been very tender," wrote Lord Jeffrey, "to our sensitive

friends beyond sea, and my whole heart goes along with every word you

have written. I think that you have perfectly accomplished all that you

profess or undertake to do, and that the world has never yet seen a more

faithful, graphic, amusing, kind-hearted narrative."

* * * * *

I permit myself so far to anticipate a later page as to print here a

brief extract from one of the letters of the last American visit.

Without impairing the interest with which the narrative of that time

will be read in its proper place, I shall thus indicate the extent to

which present impressions were modified by the experience of twenty-six

years later. He is writing from Philadelphia on the fourteenth of

January, 1868.

"I see _great changes_ for the better, socially. Politically, no.

England governed by the Marylebone vestry and the penny papers, and

England as she would be after years of such governing; is what I make of

_that_. Socially, the change in manners is remarkable. There is much

greater politeness and forbearance in all ways. . . . On the other hand

there are still provincial oddities wonderfully quizzical; and the

newspapers are constantly expressing the popular amazement at 'Mr.

Dickens's extraordinary composure.' They seem to take it ill that I

don't stagger on to the platform overpowered by the spectacle before me,

and the national greatness. They are all so accustomed to do public

things with a flourish of trumpets, that the notion of my coming in to

read without somebody first flying up and delivering an 'Oration' about

me, and flying down again and leading me in, is so very unaccountable to

them, that sometimes they have no idea until I open my lips that it can

possibly be Charles Dickens."

FOOTNOTES:

[63] "Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is

very much harder for the poor to be virtuous than it is for the rich;

and the good that is in them, shines the brighter for it. In many a

noble mansion lives a man, the best of husbands and of fathers, whose

private worth in both capacities is justly lauded to the skies. But

bring him here, upon this crowded deck. Strip from his fair young wife

her silken dress and jewels, unbind her braided hair, stamp early

wrinkles on her brow, pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation,

array her faded form in coarsely patched attire, let there be nothing

but his love to set her forth or deck her out, and you shall put it to

the proof indeed. So change his station in the world that he shall see,

in those young things who climb about his knee, not records of his

wealth and name, but little wrestlers with him for his daily bread; so

many poachers on his scanty meal; so many units to divide his every sum

of comfort, and farther to reduce its small amount. In lieu of the

endearments of childhood in its sweetest aspect, heap upon him all its

pains and wants, its sicknesses and ills, its fretfulness, caprice, and

querulous endurance: let its prattle be, not of engaging infant fancies,

but of cold, and thirst, and hunger: and if his fatherly affection

outlive all this, and he be patient, watchful, tender; careful of his

children's lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then

send him back to parliament, and pulpit, and to quarter sessions, and

when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to

mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and

tell those holders-forth that they, by parallel with such a class,

should be high angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble siege to

heaven at last. . . . Which of us shall say what he would be, if such

realities, with small relief or change all through his days, were his!

Looking round upon these people: far from home, houseless, indigent,

wandering, weary with travel and hard living: and seeing how patiently

they nursed and tended their young children: how they consulted ever

their wants first, then half supplied their own; what gentle ministers

of hope and faith the women were; how the men profited by their example;

and how very, very seldom even a moment's petulance or harsh complaint

broke out among them: I felt a stronger love and honour of my kind come

glowing on my heart, and wished to God there had been many atheists in

the better part of human nature there, to read this simple lesson in the

book of life."

CHAPTER II.

FIRST YEAR OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.

1843.

A Sunset at Land's-end--Description of the

Cornish Tour--Letter from Maclise--Maclise to

J. F.--Names first given to _Chuzzlewit_--First

Number of _Chuzzlewit_--Prologue to a Play--A

Tragedy by Browning--Accompaniments of

Work--Miss Georgina Hogarth--American

Controversy--Cottage at Finchley--Origin of

Mrs. Gamp--Change of Editorship at

_Chronicle_--Macready bound for America--Works

of Charity and Mercy--Visit to

Broadstairs--Sea-side Life in Ordinary--Speech

at Opening of the Manchester

Athenaeum--Dickens's Interest in Ragged

Schools--His Sympathy with the Church of

England--Origin of his _Christmas Carol_--Third

Son born.

THE Cornish trip had come off, meanwhile, with such unexpected and

continued attraction for us that we were well into the third week of

absence before we turned our faces homeward. Railways helped us then not

much; but where the roads were inaccessible to post-horses, we walked.

Tintagel was visited, and no part of mountain or sea consecrated by the

legends of Arthur was left unexplored. We ascended to the cradle of the

highest tower of Mount St. Michael, and descended into several mines.

Land and sea yielded each its marvels to us; but of all the impressions

brought away, of which some afterwards took forms as lasting as they

could receive from the most delightful art, I doubt if any were the

source of such deep emotion to us all as a sunset we saw at Land's-end.

Stanfield knew the wonders of the Continent, the glories of Ireland

were native to Maclise, I was familiar from boyhood with border and

Scottish scenery, and Dickens was fresh from Niagara; but there was

something in the sinking of the sun behind the Atlantic that autumn

afternoon, as we viewed it together from the top of the rock projecting

farthest into the sea, which each in his turn declared to have no

parallel in memory.

But with the varied and overflowing gladness of those three memorable

weeks it would be unworthy now to associate only the saddened

recollection of the sole survivor. "Blessed star of morning!" wrote

Dickens to Felton while yet the glow of its enjoyment was upon him.

"Such a trip as we had into Cornwall just after Longfellow went away! . . .

Sometimes we travelled all night, sometimes all day, sometimes both. . . .

Heavens! If you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in

their immense varieties of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets!

If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the wild

attachment of the hostlers, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could

have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the

strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of

mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights where the unspeakable green

water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! If you

could have seen but one gleam of the bright fires by which we sat in the

big rooms of ancient inns at night, until long after the small hours had

come and gone. . . . I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey.

It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and

bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield

got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to

beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him.

Seriously, I do believe there never was such a trip. And they made such

sketches, those two men, in the most romantic of our halting-places,

that you would have sworn we had the Spirit of Beauty with us, as well

as the Spirit of Fun."[64]

The Logan Stone, by Stanfield, was one of them; and it laughingly

sketched both the charm of what was seen and the mirth of what was done,

for it perched me on the top of the stone. It is historical, however,

the ascent having been made; and of this and other examples of

steadiness at heights which deterred the rest, as well as of a subject

suggested for a painting of which Dickens became the unknown purchaser,

Maclise reminded me in some pleasant allusions many years later, which,

notwithstanding their tribute to my athletic achievements, the

good-natured reader must forgive my printing. They complete the little

picture of our trip. Something I had written to him of recent travel

among the mountain scenery of the wilder coasts of Donegal had touched

the chord of these old remembrances. "As to your clambering," he

replied, "don't I know what happened of old? Don't I still see the Logan

Stone, and you perched on the giddy top, while we, rocking it on its

pivot, shrank from all that lay concealed below! Should I ever have

blundered on the waterfall of St. Wighton, if you had not piloted the

way? And when we got to Land's-end, with the green sea far under us

lapping into solitary rocky nooks where the mermaids live, who but you

only had the courage to stretch over, to see those diamond jets of

brightness that I swore then, and believe still, were the flappings of

their tails! And don't I recall you again, sitting on the tip-top stone

of the cradle-turret over the highest battlement of the castle of St.

Michael's Mount, with not a ledge or coigne of vantage 'twixt you and

the fathomless ocean under you, distant three thousand feet? Last, do I

forget you clambering up the goat-path to King Arthur's castle of

Tintagel, when, in my vain wish to follow, I grovelled and clung to the

soil like a Caliban, and you, in the manner of a tricksy spirit and

stout Ariel, actually danced up and down before me!"

The waterfall I led him to was among the records of the famous holiday,

celebrated also by Thackeray in one of his pen-and-ink pleasantries,

which were sent by both painters to the next year's Academy; and so

eager was Dickens to possess this landscape by Maclise which included

the likeness of a member of his family, yet so anxious that our friend

should be spared the sacrifice which he knew would follow an avowal of

his wish, that he bought it under a feigned name before the Academy

opened, and steadily refused to take back the money which on discovery

of the artifice Maclise pressed upon him.[65] Our friend, who already

had munificently given him a charming drawing of his four eldest

children to accompany him and his wife to America, had his generous way

nevertheless; and as a voluntary offering four years later, painted Mrs.

Dickens on a canvas of the same size as the picture of her husband in

1839.

"Behold finally the title of the new book," was the first note I had

from Dickens (12th of November) after our return; "don't lose it, for I

have no copy." Title and even story had been undetermined while we

travelled, from the lingering wish he still had to begin it among those

Cornish scenes; but this intention had now been finally abandoned, and

the reader lost nothing by his substitution for the lighthouse or mine

in Cornwall, of the Wiltshire-village forge on the windy autumn evening

which opens the tale of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Into that name he finally

settled, but only after much deliberation, as a mention of his changes

will show. Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its

first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback, and Sweezlewag, to those of

Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig; nor was Chuzzlewit

chosen at last until after more hesitation and discussion. What he had

sent me in his letter as finally adopted, ran thus: "The Life and

Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewig, his family, friends, and enemies.

Comprising all his wills and his ways. With an historical record of what

he did and what he didn't. The whole forming a complete key to the house

of Chuzzlewig." All which latter portion of the title was of course

dropped as the work became modified, in its progress, by changes at

first not contemplated; but as early as the third number he sent me the

plan of "old Martin's plot to degrade and punish Pecksniff," and the

difficulties he encountered in departing from other portions of his

scheme were such as to render him, in his subsequent stories, more bent

upon constructive care at the outset, and adherence as far as might be

to any design he had formed.

The first number, which appeared in January 1843, had not been quite

finished when he wrote to me on the 8th of December: "The Chuzzlewit

copy makes so much more than I supposed, that the number is nearly done.

Thank God!" Beginning so hurriedly as at last he did, altering his

course at the opening and seeing little as yet of the main track of his

design, perhaps no story was ever begun by him with stronger heart or

confidence. Illness kept me to my rooms for some days, and he was so

eager to try the effect of Pecksniff and Pinch that he came down with

the ink hardly dry on the last slip to read the manuscript to me. Well

did Sydney Smith, in writing to say how very much the number had pleased

him, foresee the promise there was in those characters. "Pecksniff and

his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable--quite first-rate painting, such

as no one but yourself can execute!" And let me here at once remark that

the notion of taking Pecksniff for a type of character was really the

origin of the book; the design being to show, more or less by every

person introduced, the number and variety of humours and vices that have

their root in selfishness.

Another piece of his writing that claims mention at the close of 1842

was a prologue contributed to the _Patrician's Daughter_, Mr. Westland

Marston's first dramatic effort, which had attracted him by the beauty

of its composition less than by the courage with which its subject had

been chosen from the actual life of the time.

"Not light its import, and not poor its mien;

Yourselves the actors, and your homes the scene."

This was the date, too, of Mr. Browning's tragedy of the _Blot on the

'Scutcheon_, which I took upon myself, after reading it in the

manuscript, privately to impart to Dickens; and I was not mistaken in

the belief that it would profoundly touch him. "Browning's play," he

wrote (25th of November), "has thrown me into a perfect passion of

sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is

lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most

earnest feeling, and the most true and tender source of interest, is to

say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full

of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple and

beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in

any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so

young--I had no mother.' I know no love like it, no passion like it, no

moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it. And I swear

it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by

Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they

are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the

old servant _begin his tale upon the scene_; and be taken by the throat,

or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I

never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you

tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul

there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a

work.--Macready likes the altered prologue very much.". . . There will

come a more convenient time to speak of his general literary likings, or

special regard for contemporary books; but I will say now that nothing

interested him more than successes won honestly in his own field, and

that in his large and open nature there was no hiding-place for little

jealousies. An instance occurs to me which may be named at once, when,

many years after the present date, he called my attention very earnestly

to two tales then in course of publication in _Blackwood's Magazine_,

and afterwards collected under the title of _Scenes of Clerical Life_.

"Do read them," he wrote. "They are the best things I have seen since I

began my course."

Eighteen hundred and forty-three[66] opened with the most vigorous

prosecution of his _Chuzzlewit_ labour. "I hope the number will be very

good," he wrote to me of number two (8th of January). "I have been

hammering away, and at home all day. Ditto yesterday; except for two

hours in the afternoon, when I ploughed through snow half a foot deep,

round about the wilds of Willesden." For the present, however, I shall

glance only briefly from time to time at his progress with the earlier

portions of the story on which he was thus engaged until the midsummer

of 1844. Disappointments arose in connection with it, unexpected and

strange, which had important influence upon him: but, I reserve the

mention of these for awhile, that I may speak of the leading incidents

of 1843.

"I am in a difficulty," he wrote (12th of February), "and am coming down

to you some time to-day or to-night. I couldn't write a line yesterday;

not a word, though I really tried hard. In a kind of despair I started

off at half-past two with my pair of petticoats to Richmond; and dined

there!! Oh what a lovely day it was in those parts." His pair of

petticoats were Mrs. Dickens and her sister Georgina: the latter, since

his return from America, having become part of his household, of which

she remained a member until his death; and he had just reason to be

proud of the steadiness, depth, and devotion of her friendship. In a

note-book begun by him in January 1855, where, for the first time in his

life, he jotted down hints and fancies proposed to be made available in

future writings, I find a character sketched of which, if the whole was

not suggested by his sister-in-law, the most part was applicable to her.

"She--sacrificed to children, and sufficiently rewarded. From a child

herself, always 'the children' (of somebody else) to engross her. And so

it comes to pass that she is never married; never herself has a child;

is always devoted 'to the children' (of somebody else); and they love

her; and she has always youth dependent on her till her death--and dies

quite happily." Not many days after that holiday at Richmond, a slight

unstudied outline in pencil was made by Maclise of the three who formed

the party there, as we all sat together; and never did a touch so light

carry with it more truth of observation. The likenesses of all are

excellent; and I here preserve the drawing because nothing ever done of

Dickens himself has conveyed more vividly his look and bearing at this

yet youthful time. He is in his most pleasing aspect; flattered, if you

will; but nothing that is known to me gives a general impression so

life-like and true of the then frank, eager, handsome face.

It was a year of much illness with me, which had ever-helpful and active

sympathy from him. "Send me word how you are," he wrote, two days later.

"But not so much for that I now write, as to tell you, peremptorily,

that I insist on your wrapping yourself up and coming here in a

hackney-coach, with a big portmanteau, to-morrow. It surely is better to

be unwell with a Quick and Cheerful (and Co) in the neighbourhood, than

in the dreary vastness of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Here is the snuggest

tent-bedstead in the world, and there you are with the drawing-room for

your workshop, the Q and C for your pal, and 'every-think in a

concatenation accordingly.' I begin to have hopes of the regeneration of

mankind after the reception of Gregory last night, though I have none of

the _Chronicle_ for not denouncing the villain. Have you seen the note

touching my _Notes_ in the blue and yellow?"

The first of these closing allusions was to the editor of the infamous

_Satirist_ having been hissed from the Drury-lane stage, on which he had

presented himself in the character of Hamlet; and I remember with what

infinite pleasure I afterwards heard Chief Justice Tindal in court,

charging the jury in an action brought by this malefactor against a

publican of St. Giles's for having paid men to take part in the hissing

of him, avow the pride he felt in "living in the same parish with a man

of that humble station of life of the defendant's," who was capable of

paying money out of his own pocket to punish what he believed to be an

outrage to decency. The second allusion was to a statement of the

reviewer of the _American Notes_ in the _Edinburgh_ to the effect, that,

if he had been rightly informed, Dickens had gone to America as a kind

of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt

contradiction had been given in the _Times_. "I deny it," wrote Dickens,

"wholly. He is wrongly informed; and reports, without enquiry, a piece

of information which I could only characterize by using one of the

shortest and strongest words in the language."

The disputes that had arisen out of the American book, I may add,

stretched over great part of the year. It will quite suffice, however,

to say here that the ground taken by him in his letters written on the

spot, and printed in my former volume, which in all the more material

statements his book invited public judgment upon and which he was moved

to reopen in _Chuzzlewit_, was so kept by him against all comers, that

none of the counter-statements or arguments dislodged him from a square

inch of it. But the controversy is dead now; and he took occasion, on

his later visit to America, to write its epitaph.

Though I did not, to revert to his February letter, obey its cordial

bidding by immediately taking up quarters with him, I soon after joined

him at a cottage he rented in Finchley; and here, walking and talking in

the green lanes as the midsummer months were coming on, his introduction

of Mrs. Gamp, and the uses to which he should apply that remarkable

personage, first occurred to him. In his preface to the book he speaks

of her as a fair representation, at the time it was published, of the

hired attendant on the poor in sickness: but he might have added that

the rich were no better off, for Mrs. Gamp's original was in reality a

person hired by a most distinguished friend of his own, a lady, to take

charge of an invalid very dear to her; and the common habit of this

nurse in the sick room, among other Gampish peculiarities, was to rub

her nose along the top of the tall fender. Whether or not, on that first

mention of her, I had any doubts whether such a character could be made

a central figure in his story, I do not now remember; but if there were

any at the time, they did not outlive the contents of the packet which

introduced her to me in the flesh a few weeks after our return. "Tell

me," he wrote from Yorkshire, where he had been meanwhile passing

pleasant holiday with a friend, "what you think of Mrs. Gamp? You'll not

find it easy to get through the hundreds of misprints in her

conversation, but I want your opinion at once. I think you know already

something of mine. I mean to make a mark with her." The same letter

enclosed me a clever and pointed little parable in verse which he had

written for an annual edited by Lady Blessington.[67]

Another allusion in the February letter reminds me of the interest which

his old work for the _Chronicle_ gave him in everything affecting its

credit, and that this was the year when Mr. John Black ceased to be its

editor, in circumstances reviving strongly all Dickens's sympathies. "I

am deeply grieved" (3rd of May, 1843) "about Black. Sorry from my

heart's core. If I could find him out, I would go and comfort him this

moment." He did find him out; and he and a certain number of us did also

comfort this excellent man after a fashion extremely English, by giving

him a Greenwich dinner on the 20th of May; when Dickens had arranged and

ordered all to perfection, and the dinner succeeded in its purpose, as

in other ways, quite wonderfully. Among the entertainers were Sheil and

Thackeray, Fonblanque and Charles Buller, Southwood Smith and William

Johnson Fox, Macready and Maclise, as well as myself and Dickens.

There followed another similar celebration, in which one of these

entertainers was the guest and which owed hardly less to Dickens's

exertions, when, at the Star-and-garter at Richmond in the autumn, we

wished Macready good-speed on his way to America. Dickens took the chair

at that dinner; and with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself, was in the

following week to have accompanied the great actor to Liverpool to say

good-bye to him on board the Cunard ship, and bring his wife back to

London after their leave-taking; when a word from our excellent friend

Captain Marryat, startling to all of us except Dickens himself, struck

him out of our party. Marryat thought that Macready might suffer in the

States by any public mention of his having been attended on his way by

the author of the _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_, and our

friend at once agreed with him. "Your main and foremost reason," he

wrote to me, "for doubting Marryat's judgment, I can at once destroy. It

has occurred to me many times; I have mentioned the thing to Kate more

than once; and I had intended _not_ to go on board, charging Radley to

let nothing be said of my being in his house. I have been prevented from

giving any expression to my fears by a misgiving that I should seem to

attach, if I did so, too much importance to my own doings. But now that

I have Marryat at my back, I have not the least hesitation in saying

that I am certain he is right. I have very great apprehensions that the

_Nickleby_ dedication will damage Macready. Marryat is wrong in

supposing it is not printed in the American editions, for I have myself

seen it in the shop windows of several cities. If I were to go on board

with him, I have not the least doubt that the fact would be placarded

all over New York, before he had shaved himself in Boston. And that

there are thousands of men in America who would pick a quarrel with him

on the mere statement of his being my friend, I have no more doubt than

I have of my existence. You have only doubted Marryat because it is

impossible for _any man_ to know what they are in their own country, who

has not seen them there."

This letter was written from Broadstairs, whither he had gone in August,

after such help as he only could give, and never took such delight as in

giving, to a work of practical humanity. Earlier in the year he had

presided at a dinner for the Printers' Pension-fund, which Thomas Hood,

Douglas Jerrold, and myself attended with him; and upon the terrible

summer-evening accident at sea by which Mr. Elton the actor lost his

life, it was mainly by Dickens's unremitting exertions, seconded

admirably by Mr. Serle and warmly taken up by Mr. Elton's own profession

(the most generous in the world), that ample provision was made for the

many children. At the close of August I had news of him from his

favourite watering-place, too characteristic to be omitted. The day

before had been a day of "terrific heat," yet this had not deterred him

from doing what he was too often suddenly prone to do in the midst of

his hardest work. "I performed an insane match against time of eighteen

miles by the milestones in four hours and a half, under a burning sun

the whole way. I could get" (he is writing next morning) "no sleep at

night, and really began to be afraid I was going to have a fever. You

may judge in what kind of authorship-training I am to-day. I could as

soon eat the cliff as write about anything." A few days later, however,

all was well again; and another sketch from himself, to his American

friend, will show his sea-side life in ordinary. "In a bay-window in a

one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long

hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were

very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a

bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise,

splashing about in the ocean. After that he may be viewed in another

bay-window on the ground floor, eating a strong lunch; and after that,

walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading a

book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is disposed to be talked

to; and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a

berry, and they _do_ say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who sells

beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. Sometimes he goes up to

London (eighty miles or so away), and then I'm told there is a sound in

Lincoln's-inn-fields at night, as of men laughing, together with a

clinking of knives and forks and wine-glasses."[68]

He returned to town "for good" on Monday the 2nd of October, and from

the Wednesday to the Friday of that week was at Manchester, presiding at

the opening of its great Athenaeum, when Mr. Cobden and Mr. Disraeli also

"assisted." Here he spoke mainly on a matter always nearest his heart,

the education of the very poor. He protested against the danger of

calling a little learning dangerous; declared his preference for the

very least of the little over none at all; proposed to substitute for

the old a new doggerel,

Though house and lands be never got,

Learning can give what they can _not_;

told his listeners of the real and paramount danger we had lately taken

Longfellow to see in the nightly refuges of London, "thousands of

immortal creatures condemned without alternative or choice to tread, not

what our great poet calls the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,

but one of jagged flints and stones laid down by brutal ignorance;" and

contrasted this with the unspeakable consolation and blessings that a

little knowledge had shed on men of the lowest estate and most hopeless

means, "watching the stars with Ferguson the shepherd's boy, walking the

streets with Crabbe, a poor barber here in Lancashire with Arkwright, a

tallow-chandler's son with Franklin, shoemaking with Bloomfield in his

garret, following the plough with Burns, and, high above the noise of

loom and hammer, whispering courage in the ears of workers I could this

day name in Sheffield and in Manchester."

The same spirit impelled him to give eager welcome to the remarkable

institution of Ragged schools, which, begun by a shoemaker of

Southampton and a chimney-sweep of Windsor and carried on by a peer of

the realm, has had results of incalculable importance to society. The

year of which I am writing was its first, as this in which I write is

its last; and in the interval, out of three hundred thousand children to

whom it has given some sort of education, it is computed also to have

given to a third of that number the means of honest employment.[69] "I

sent Miss Coutts," he had written (24th of September), "a sledge hammer

account of the Ragged schools; and as I saw her name for two hundred

pounds in the clergy education subscription-list, took pains to show her

that religious mysteries and difficult creeds wouldn't do for such

pupils. I told her, too, that it was of immense importance they should

be _washed_. She writes back to know what the rent of some large airy

premises would be, and what the expense of erecting a regular bathing or

purifying place; touching which points I am in correspondence with the

authorities. I have no doubt she will do whatever I ask her in the

matter. She is a most excellent creature, I protest to God, and I have a

most perfect affection and respect for her."

One of the last things he did at the close of the year, in the like

spirit, was to offer to describe the Ragged schools for the _Edinburgh

Review_. "I have told Napier," he wrote to me, "I will give a

description of them in a paper on education, if the _Review_ is not

afraid to take ground against the church catechism and other mere

formularies and subtleties, in reference to the education of the young

and ignorant. I fear it is extremely improbable it will consent to

commit itself so far." His fears were well-founded; but the statements

then made by him give me opportunity to add that it was his impatience

of differences on this point with clergymen of the Established Church

that had led him, for the past year or two, to take sittings in the

Little Portland-street Unitarian chapel; for whose officiating minister,

Mr. Edward Tagart, he had a friendly regard which continued long after

he had ceased to be a member of his congregation. That he did so quit

it, after two or three years, I can distinctly state; and of the

frequent agitation of his mind and thoughts in connection with this

all-important theme, there will be other occasions to speak. But upon

essential points he had never any sympathy so strong as with the leading

doctrine and discipline of the Church of England; to these, as time went

on, he found himself able to accommodate all minor differences; and the

unswerving faith in Christianity itself, apart from sects and schisms,

which had never failed him at any period of his life, found expression

at its close in the language of his will. Twelve months before his

death, these words were written. "I direct that my name be inscribed in

plain English letters on my tomb . . . I conjure my friends on no account

to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial

whatever. I rest my claim to the remembrance of my country on my

published works, and to the remembrance of my friends upon their

experience of me in addition thereto. I commit my soul to the mercy of

God, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; and I exhort my dear

children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New

Testament in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow

construction of its letter here or there."

Active as he had been in the now ending year, and great as were its

varieties of employment; his genius in its highest mood, his energy

unwearied in good work, and his capacity for enjoyment without limit; he

was able to signalize its closing months by an achievement supremely

fortunate, which but for disappointments the year had also brought might

never have been thought of. He had not begun until a week after his

return from Manchester, where the fancy first occurred to him, and

before the end of November he had finished, his memorable _Christmas

Carol_. It was the work of such odd moments of leisure as were left him

out of the time taken up by two numbers of his _Chuzzlewit_; and though

begun with but the special design of adding something to the

_Chuzzlewit_ balance, I can testify to the accuracy of his own account

of what befell him in its composition, with what a strange mastery it

seized him for itself, how he wept over it, and laughed, and wept again,

and excited himself to an extraordinary degree, and how he walked

thinking of it fifteen and twenty miles about the black streets of

London, many and many a night after all sober folks had gone to bed. And

when it was done, as he told our friend Mr. Felton in America, he let

himself loose like a madman. "Forster is out again," he added, by way of

illustrating our practical comments on his celebration of the jovial

old season, "and if he don't go in again after the manner in which we

have been keeping Christmas, he must be very strong indeed. Such

dinings, such dancings, such conjurings, such blind-man's-buffings, such

theatre-goings, such kissings-out of old years and kissings-in of new

ones, never took place in these parts before."

Yet had it been to him, this closing year, a time also of much anxiety

and strange disappointments of which I am now to speak; and before, with

that view, we go back for a while to its earlier months, one step into

the new year may be taken for what marked it with interest and

importance to him. Eighteen hundred and forty-four was but fifteen days

old when a third son (his fifth child, which received the name of its

godfather Francis Jeffrey) was born; and here is an answer sent by him,

two days later, to an invitation from Maclise, Stanfield, and myself to

dine with us at Richmond. "DEVONSHIRE LODGE, _Seventeenth of January_,

1844. FELLOW COUNTRYMEN! The appeal with which you have honoured me,

awakens within my breast emotions that are more easily to be imagined

than described. Heaven bless you. I shall indeed be proud, my friends,

to respond to such a requisition. I had withdrawn from Public Life--I

fondly thought forever--to pass the evening of my days in hydropathical

pursuits, and the contemplation of virtue. For which latter purpose, I

had bought a looking-glass.--But, my friends, private feeling must ever

yield to a stern sense of public duty. The Man is lost in the Invited

Guest, and I comply. Nurses, wet and dry; apothecaries; mothers-in-law;

babbies; with all the sweet (and chaste) delights of private life;

these, my countrymen, are hard to leave. But you have called me forth,

and I will come. Fellow countrymen, your friend and faithful servant,

CHARLES DICKENS."

FOOTNOTES:

[64] Printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ shortly after his death, and

since collected, by Mr. James T. Fields of Boston, with several of later

date addressed to himself, and much correspondence having reference to

other writers, into a pleasing volume entitled _Yesterdays with

Authors_.

[65] This is mentioned in Mr. O. Driscoll's agreeable little Memoir, but

supposed to refer to Maclise's portrait of Dickens.

[66] In one of the letters to his American friend Mr. Felton there is a

glimpse of Christmas sports which had escaped my memory, and for which a

corner may be found here, inasmuch as these gambols were characteristic

of him at the pleasant old season, and were frequently renewed in future

years. "The best of it is" (31 Dec. 1842) "that Forster and I have

purchased between us the entire stock-in-trade of a conjuror, the

practice and display whereof is entrusted to me. . . . In those tricks

which require a confederate I am assisted (by reason of his

imperturbable good humour) by Stanfield, who always does his part

exactly the wrong way, to the unspeakable delight of all beholders. We

come out on a small scale to-night, at Forster's, where we see the old

year out and the new one in." _Atlantic Monthly_, July 1871.

[67] "I have heard, as you have, from Lady Blessington, for whose behoof

I have this morning penned the lines I send you herewith. But I have

only done so to excuse myself, for I have not the least idea of their

suiting her; and I hope she will send them back to you for the _Ex._" C.

D. to J. F. July 1843. The lines are quite worth preserving.

A WORD IN SEASON.

They have a superstition in the East,

That Allah, written on a piece of paper,

Is better unction than can come of priest,

Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper:

Holding, that any scrap which bears that name

In any characters its front impress'd on,

Shall help the finder thro' the purging flame,

And give his toasted feet a place to rest on.

Accordingly, they make a mighty fuss

With every wretched tract and fierce oration,

And hoard the leaves--for they are not, like us

A highly civilized and thinking nation:

And, always stooping in the miry ways

To look for matter of this earthly leaven,

They seldom, in their dust-exploring days,

Have any leisure to look up to Heaven.

So have I known a country on the earth

Where darkness sat upon the living waters,

And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth

Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters:

And yet, where they who should have oped the door

Of charity and light, for all men's finding

Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor,

And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding.

The gentlest man among those pious Turks

God's living image ruthlessly defaces;

Their best High-Churchman, with no faith in works,

Bowstrings the Virtues in the market-places.

The Christian Pariah, whom both sects curse

(They curse all other men, and curse each other),

Walks thro' the world, not very much the worse,

Does all the good he can, and loves his brother.

[68] C. D. to Professor Felton (1st Sept. 1843), in _Atlantic Monthly_

for July 1871.

[69] "After a period of 27 years, from a single school of five small

infants, the work has grown into a cluster of some 300 schools, an

aggregate of nearly 30,000 children, and a body of 3000 voluntary

teachers, most of them the sons and daughters of toil. . . . Of more than

300,000 children which, on the most moderate calculation, we have a

right to conclude have passed through these schools since their

commencement, I venture to affirm that more than 100,000 of both sexes

have been placed out in various ways, in emigration, in the marine, in

trades, and in domestic service. For many consecutive years I have

contributed prizes to thousands of the scholars; and let no one omit to

call to mind what these children were, whence they came, and whither

they were going without this merciful intervention. They would have been

added to the perilous swarm of the wild, the lawless, the wretched, and

the ignorant, instead of being, as by God's blessing they are, decent

and comfortable, earning an honest livelihood, and adorning the

community to which they belong." _Letter of Lord Shaftesbury in the

Times of the 13th of November, 1871._

CHAPTER III.

CHUZZLEWIT DISAPPOINTMENTS AND CHRISTMAS CAROL.

1843-1844.

Sale of _Chuzzlewit_--Publishers and

Authors--Unlucky Clause in _Chuzzlewit_

Agreement--Resolve to have other Publishers--A

Plan for seeing Foreign Cities--Confidence in

Himself--Preparation of _Carol_--Turning-point

of his Career--Work and its

Interruptions--Superiority of _Martin

Chuzzlewit_ to former Books--News from

America--A Favourite Scene of

Thackeray's--Grand Purpose of the Satire of

_Chuzzlewit_--Publication of _Christmas

Carol_--Unrealized Hopes--Agreement with

Bradbury and Evans.

CHUZZLEWIT had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in

regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the

public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its

predecessors. The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been

the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two

stories; for into everything in this world mere habit enters more

largely than we are apt to suppose. Nor had the temporary withdrawal to

America been favourable to an immediate resumption by his readers of

their old and intimate relations. This also is to be added, that the

excitement by which a popular reputation is kept up to the highest

selling mark, will always be subject to lulls too capricious for

explanation. But whatever the causes, here was the undeniable fact of a

grave depreciation of sale in his writings, unaccompanied by any falling

off either in themselves or in the writer's reputation. It was very

temporary; but it was present, and to be dealt with accordingly. The

forty and fifty thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the

sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprize in

which the _Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared, had fallen

to little over twenty thousand. They rose somewhat on Martin's ominous

announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he'd _go to

America_; but though it was believed that this resolve, which Dickens

adopted as suddenly as his hero, might increase the number of his

readers, that reason influenced him less than the challenge to make good

his _Notes_ which every mail had been bringing him from unsparing

assailants beyond the Atlantic. The substantial effect of the American

episode upon the sale was yet by no means great. A couple of thousand

additional purchasers were added, but the highest number at any time

reached before the story closed was twenty-three thousand. Its sale,

since, has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_.

We were now, however, to have a truth brought home to us which few that

have had real or varied experience in such matters can have failed to be

impressed by--that publishers are bitter bad judges of an author, and

are seldom safe persons to consult in regard to the fate or fortunes

that may probably await him. Describing the agreement for this book in

September 1841, I spoke of a provision against the improbable event of

its profits proving inadequate to certain necessary repayments. In this

unlikely case, which was to be ascertained by the proceeds of the first

five numbers, the publishers were to have power to appropriate fifty

pounds a month out of the two hundred pounds payable for authorship in

the expenses of each number; but though this had been introduced with my

knowledge, I knew also too much of the antecedent relations of the

parties to regard it as other than a mere form to satisfy the attorneys

in the case. The fifth number, which landed Martin and Mark in America,

and the sixth, which described their first experiences, were published;

and on the eve of the seventh, in which Mrs. Gamp was to make her first

appearance, I heard with infinite pain that from Mr. Hall, the younger

partner of the firm which had enriched itself by _Pickwick_ and

_Nickleby_, and a very kind well-disposed man, there had dropped an

inconsiderate hint to the writer of those books that it might be

desirable to put the clause in force. It had escaped him without his

thinking of all that it involved; certainly the senior partner, whatever

amount of as thoughtless sanction he had at the moment given to it,

always much regretted it, and made endeavours to exhibit his regret; but

the mischief was done, and for the time was irreparable.

"I am so irritated," Dickens wrote to me on the 28th of June, "so rubbed

in the tenderest part of my eyelids with bay-salt, by what I told you

yesterday, that a wrong kind of fire is burning in my head, and I don't

think I _can_ write. Nevertheless, I am trying. In case I should

succeed, and should not come down to you this morning, shall you be at

the club or elsewhere after dinner? I am bent on paying the money. And

before going into the matter with anybody I should like you to propound

from me the one preliminary question to Bradbury and Evans. It is more

than a year and a half since Clowes wrote to urge me to give him a

hearing, in case I should ever think of altering my plans. A printer is

better than a bookseller, and it is quite as much the interest of one

(if not more) to join me. But whoever it is, or whatever, I am bent upon

paying Chapman and Hall _down_. And when I have done that, Mr. Hall

shall have a piece of my mind."

What he meant by the proposed repayment will be understood by what

formerly was said of his arrangements with these gentlemen on the

repurchase of his early copyrights. Feeling no surprise at this

announcement, I yet prevailed with him to suspend proceedings until his

return from Broadstairs in October; and what then I had to say led to

memorable resolves. The communication he had desired me to make to his

printers had taken them too much by surprise to enable them to form a

clear judgment respecting it; and they replied by suggestions which were

in effect a confession of that want of confidence in themselves. They

enlarged upon the great results that would follow a reissue of his

writings in a cheap form; they strongly urged such an undertaking; and

they offered to invest to any desired amount in the establishment of a

magazine or other periodical to be edited by him. The possible dangers,

in short, incident to their assuming the position of publishers as well

as printers of new works from his pen, seemed at first to be so much

greater than on closer examination they were found to be, that at the

outset they shrank from encountering them. And hence the remarkable

letter I shall now quote (1st of November, 1843).

"Don't be startled by the novelty and extent of my project. Both

startled _me_ at first; but I am well assured of its wisdom and

necessity. I am afraid of a magazine--just now. I don't think the time a

good one, or the chances favourable. I am afraid of putting myself

before the town as writing tooth and nail for bread, headlong, after the

close of a book taking so much out of one as _Chuzzlewit_. I am afraid I

could not do it, with justice to myself. I know that whatever we may say

at first, a new magazine, or a new anything, would require so much

propping, that I should be _forced_ (as in the _Clock_) to put myself

into it, in my old shape. I am afraid of Bradbury and Evans's desire to

force on the cheap issue of my books, or any of them, prematurely. I am

sure if it took place yet awhile, it would damage me and damage the

property, _enormously_. It is very natural in them to want it; but,

since they do want it, I have no faith in their regarding me in any

other respect than they would regard any other man in a speculation. I

see that this is really your opinion as well; and I don't see what I

gain, in such a case, by leaving Chapman and Hall. If I had made money,

I should unquestionably fade away from the public eye for a year, and

enlarge my stock of description and observation by seeing countries new

to me; which it is most necessary to me that I should see, and which

with an increasing family I can scarcely hope to see at all, unless I

see them now. Already for some time I have had this hope and intention

before me; and though not having made money yet, I find or fancy that I

can put myself in the position to accomplish it. And this is the course

I have before me. At the close of _Chuzzlewit_ (by which time the debt

will have been materially reduced) I purpose drawing from Chapman and

Hall my share of the subscription--bills, or money, will do equally

well. I design to tell them that it is not likely I shall do anything

for a year; that, in the meantime, I make no arrangement whatever with

any one; and our business matters rest _in statu quo_. The same to

Bradbury and Evans. I shall let the house if I can; if not, leave it to

be let. I shall take all the family, and two servants--three at most--to

some place which I know beforehand to be CHEAP and in a delightful

climate, in Normandy or Brittany, to which I shall go over, first, and

where I shall rent some house for six or eight months. During that time,

I shall walk through Switzerland, cross the Alps, travel through France

and Italy; take Kate perhaps to Rome and Venice, but not elsewhere; and

in short see everything that is to be seen. I shall write my

descriptions to you from time to time, exactly as I did in America; and

you will be able to judge whether or not a new and attractive book may

not be made on such ground. At the same time I shall be able to turn

over the story I have in my mind, and which I have a strong notion might

be published with great advantage, _first in Paris_--but that's another

matter to be talked over. And of course I have not yet settled, either,

whether any book about the travel, or this, should be the first. 'All

very well,' you say, 'if you had money enough.' Well, but if I can see

my way to what would be necessary without binding myself in any form to

anything; without paying interest, or giving any security but one of my

Eagle five thousand pounds; you would give up that objection. And I

stand committed to no bookseller, printer, money-lender, banker, or

patron whatever; and decidedly strengthen my position with my readers,

instead of weakening it, drop by drop, as I otherwise must. Is it not

so? and is not the way before me, plainly this? I infer that in reality

you do yourself think, that what I first thought of is _not_ the way? I

have told you my scheme very badly, as I said I would. I see its great

points, against many prepossessions the other way--as, leaving England,

home, friends, everything I am fond of--but it seems to me, at a

critical time, _the_ step to set me right. A blessing on Mr. Mariotti my

Italian master, and his pupil!--If you have any breath left, tell

Topping how you are."

I had certainly not much after reading this letter, written amid all the

distractions of his work, with both the _Carol_ and _Chuzzlewit_ in

hand; but such insufficient breath as was left to me I spent against the

project, and in favour of far more consideration than he had given to

it, before anything should be settled. "I expected you," he wrote next

day (the 2nd of November), "to be startled. If I was startled myself,

when I first got this project of foreign travel into my head, MONTHS

AGO, how much more must you be, on whom it comes fresh: numbering only

hours! Still, I am very resolute upon it--very. I am convinced that my

expenses abroad would not be more than half of my expenses here; the

influence of change and nature upon me, enormous. You know, as well as

I, that I think _Chuzzlewit_ in a hundred points immeasurably the best

of my stories. That I feel my power now, more than I ever did. That I

have a greater confidence in myself than I ever had. That I _know_, if I

have health, I could sustain my place in the minds of thinking men,

though fifty writers started up to-morrow. But how many readers do _not_

think! How many take it upon trust from knaves and idiots, that one

writes too fast, or runs a thing to death! How coldly did this very book

go on for months, until it forced itself up in people's opinion, without

forcing itself up in sale! If I wrote for forty thousand Forsters, or

for forty thousand people who know I write because I can't help it, I

should have no need to leave the scene. But this very book warns me that

if I _can_ leave it for a time, I had better do so, and must do so.

Apart from that again, I feel that longer rest after this story would do

me good. You say two or three months, because you have been used to see

me for eight years never leaving off. But it is not rest enough. It is

impossible to go on working the brain to that extent for ever. The very

spirit of the thing, in doing it, leaves a horrible despondency behind,

when it is done; which must be prejudicial to the mind, so soon renewed,

and so seldom let alone. What would poor Scott have given to have gone

abroad, of his own free will, a young man, instead of creeping there, a

driveller, in his miserable decay! I said myself in my note to

you--anticipating what you put to me--that it was a question _what_ I

should come out with, first. The travel-book, if to be done at all,

would cost me very little trouble; and surely would go very far to pay

charges, whenever published. We have spoken of the baby, and of leaving

it here with Catherine's mother. Moving the children into France could

not, in any ordinary course of things, do them anything but good. And

the question is, what it would do to that by which they live: not what

it would do to them.--I had forgotten that point in the B. and E.

negociation; but they certainly suggested instant publication of the

reprints, or at all events of some of them; by which of course I know,

and as you point out, I could provide of myself what is wanted. I take

that as putting the thing distinctly as a matter of trade, and feeling

it so. And, as a matter of trade with them or anybody else, as a matter

of trade between me and the public, should I not be better off a year

hence, with the reputation of having seen so much in the meantime? The

reason which induces you to look upon this scheme with dislike--separation

for so long a time--surely has equal weight with me. I see very little

pleasure in it, beyond the natural desire to have been in those great

scenes; I anticipate no enjoyment at the time. I have come to look upon

it as a matter of policy and duty. I have a thousand other reasons, but

shall very soon myself be with you."

There were difficulties, still to be strongly urged, against taking any

present step to a final resolve; and he gave way a little. But the

pressure was soon renewed. "I have been," he wrote (10th of November),

"all day in _Chuzzlewit_ agonies--conceiving only. I hope to bring forth

to-morrow. Will you come here at six? I want to say a word or two about

the cover of the _Carol_ and the advertising, and to consult you on a

nice point in the tale. It will come wonderfully I think. Mac will call

here soon after, and we can then all three go to Bulwer's together. And

do, my dear fellow, do for God's sake turn over about Chapman and Hall,

and look upon my project as a _settled thing_. If you object to see

them, I must write to them." My reluctance as to the question affecting

his old publishers was connected with the little story, which, amid all

his perturbations and troubles and "_Chuzzlewit_ agonies," he was

steadily carrying to its close; and which remains a splendid proof of

how thoroughly he was borne out in the assertion just before made, of

the sense of his power felt by him, and his confidence that it had never

been greater than when his readers were thus falling off from him. He

had entrusted the _Carol_ for publication on his own account, under the

usual terms of commission, to the firm he had been so long associated

with; and at such a moment to tell them, short of absolute necessity,

his intention to quit them altogether, I thought a needless putting in

peril of the little book's chances. He yielded to this argument; but the

issue, as will be found, was less fortunate than I hoped.

Let disappointments or annoyances, however, beset him as they might,

once heartily in his work and all was forgotten. His temperament of

course coloured everything, cheerful or sad, and his present outlook was

disturbed by imaginary fears; but it was very certain that his labours

and successes thus far had enriched others more than himself, and while

he knew that his mode of living had been scrupulously governed by what

he believed to be his means, the first suspicion that these might be

inadequate made a change necessary to so upright a nature. It was the

turning-point of his career; and the issue, though not immediately,

ultimately justified him. Much of his present restlessness I was too

ready myself to ascribe to that love of change in him which was always

arising from his passionate desire to vary and extend his observation;

but even as to this the result showed him right in believing that he

should obtain decided intellectual advantage from the mere effects of

such farther travel. Here indeed he spoke from experience, for already

he had returned from America with wider views than when he started, and

with a larger maturity of mind. The money difficulties on which he dwelt

were also, it is now to be admitted, unquestionable. Beyond his own

domestic expenses necessarily increasing, there were many,

never-satisfied, constantly-recurring claims from family quarters, not

the more easily avoidable because unreasonable and unjust; and it was

after describing to me one such with great bitterness, a few days

following the letter last quoted, that he thus replied on the following

day (19th of November) to the comment I had made upon it. "I was most

horribly put out for a little while; for I had got up early to go at it,

and was full of interest in what I had to do. But having eased my mind

by that note to you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, I

went at it again, and soon got so interested that I blazed away till 9

last night; only stopping ten minutes for dinner! I suppose I wrote

eight printed pages of _Chuzzlewit_ yesterday. The consequence is that I

_could_ finish to-day, but am taking it easy, and making myself laugh

very much." The very next day, unhappily, there came to himself a

repetition of precisely similar trouble in exaggerated form, and to me a

fresh reminder of what was gradually settling into a fixed resolve. "I

am quite serious and sober when I say, that I have very grave thoughts

of keeping my whole menagerie in Italy, three years."

* * * * *

Of the book which awoke such varied feelings and was the occasion of

such vicissitudes of fortune, some notice is now due; and this,

following still as yet my former rule, will be not so much critical as

biographical. He had left for Italy before the completed tale was

published, and its reception for a time was exactly what his just-quoted

letter prefigures. It had forced itself up in public opinion without

forcing itself up in sale. It was felt generally to be an advance upon

his previous stories, and his own opinion is not to be questioned that

it was in a hundred points immeasurably the best of them thus far; less

upon the surface, and going deeper into springs of character. Nor would

it be difficult to say, in a single word, where the excellence lay that

gave it this superiority. It had brought his highest faculty into play:

over and above other qualities it had given scope to his imagination;

and it first expressed the distinction in this respect between his

earlier and his later books. Apart wholly from this, too, his letters

will have confirmed a remark already made upon the degree to which his

mental power had been altogether deepened and enlarged by the effect of

his visit to America.

In construction and conduct of story _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is defective,

character and description constituting the chief part of its strength.

But what it lost as a story by the American episode it gained in the

other direction; young Martin, by happy use of a bitter experience,

casting off his slough of selfishness in the poisonous swamp of Eden.

Dickens often confessed, however, the difficulty it had been to him to

have to deal with this gap in the main course of his narrative; and I

will give an instance from a letter he wrote to me when engaged upon the

number in which Jonas brings his wife to her miserable home. "I write in

haste" (28th of July 1843), "for I have been at work all day; and, it

being against the grain with me to go back to America when my interest

is strong in the other parts of the tale, have got on but slowly. I have

a great notion to work out with Sydney's favourite,[70] and long to be

at him again." But obstructions of this kind with Dickens measured only

and always the degree of readiness and resource with which he rose to

meet them, and never had his handling of character been so masterly as

in _Chuzzlewit_. The persons delineated in former books had been more

agreeable, but never so interpenetrated with meanings brought out with a

grasp so large, easy, and firm. As well in this as in the passionate

vividness of its descriptions, the imaginative power makes itself felt.

The windy autumn night, with the mad desperation of the hunted leaves

and the roaring mirth of the blazing village forge; the market-day at

Salisbury; the winter walk, and the coach journey to London by night;

the ship voyage over the Atlantic; the stormy midnight travel before the

murder, the stealthy enterprise and cowardly return of the murderer;

these are all instances of first-rate description, original in the

design, imaginative in all the detail, and very complete in the

execution. But the higher power to which I direct attention is even

better discerned in the persons and dialogue. With nothing absent or

abated in its sharp impressions of reality, there are more of the subtle

requisites which satisfy reflection and thought. We have in this book

for the most part, not only observation but the outcome of it, the

knowledge as well as the fact. While we witness as vividly the life

immediately passing, we are more conscious of the permanent life above

and beyond it. Nothing nearly so effective therefore had yet been

achieved by him. He had scrutinised as truly and satirised as keenly;

but had never shown the imaginative insight with which he now sent his

humour and his art into the core of the vices of the time.

Sending me the second chapter of his eighth number on the 15th of

August, he gave me the latest tidings from America. "I gather from a

letter I have had this morning that Martin has made them all stark

staring raving mad across the water. I wish you would consider this.

Don't you think the time has come when I ought to state that such public

entertainments as I received in the States were either accepted before I

went out, or in the first week after my arrival there; and that as soon

as I began to have any acquaintance with the country, I set my face

against any public recognition whatever but that which was forced upon

me to the destruction of my peace and comfort--and made no secret of my

real sentiments." We did not agree as to this, and the notion was

abandoned; though his correspondent had not overstated the violence of

the outbreak in the States when those chapters exploded upon them. But

though an angry they are a good humoured and a very placable people;

and, as time moved on a little, the laughter on that side of the

Atlantic became quite as great as our amusement on this side, at the

astonishing fun and comicality of these scenes. With a little reflection

the Americans had doubtless begun to find out that the advantage was not

all with us, nor the laughter wholly against them.

They had no Pecksniff at any rate. Bred in a more poisonous swamp than

their Eden, of greatly older standing and much harder to be drained,

Pecksniff was all our own. The confession is not encouraging to national

pride, but this character is so far English, that though our countrymen

as a rule are by no means Pecksniffs, the ruling weakness is to

countenance and encourage the race. When people call the character

exaggerated, and protest that the lines are too broad to deceive any

one, they only refuse, naturally enough, to sanction in a book what half

their lives is passed in tolerating if not in worshipping. Dickens,

illustrating his never-failing experience of being obliged to subdue in

his books what he knew to be real for fear it should be deemed

impossible, had already made the remark in his preface to _Nickleby_,

that the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true,

is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary. They agree to be

deceived in a reality, and reward themselves by refusing to be deceived

in a fiction. That a great many people who might have sat for Pecksniff,

should condemn him for a grotesque impossibility, as Dickens averred to

be the case, was no more than might be expected. A greater danger he has

exposed more usefully in showing the greater numbers, who, desiring

secretly to be thought better than they are, support eagerly pretensions

that keep their own in countenance, and, without being Pecksniffs,

render Pecksniffs possible. All impostures would have something too

suspicious or forbidding in their look if we were not prepared to meet

them half way.

There is one thing favourable to us however, even in this view, which a

French critic has lately suggested. Informing us that there are no

Pecksniffs to be found in France, Mr. Taine explains this by the fact

that his countrymen have ceased to affect virtue, and pretend only to

vice; that a charlatan setting up morality would have no sort of

following; that religion and the domestic virtues have gone so utterly

to rags as not to be worth putting on for a deceitful garment; and that,

no principles being left to parade, the only chance for the French

modern Tartuffe is to confess and exaggerate weaknesses. We seem to have

something of an advantage here. We require at least that the respectable

homage of vice to virtue should not be omitted. "Charity, my dear," says

our English Tartuffe, upon being bluntly called what he really is, "when

I take my chamber-candlestick to-night, remind me to be more than

usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done

me an injustice." No amount of self-indulgence weakens or lowers his

pious and reflective tone. "Those are her daughters," he remarks, making

maudlin overtures to Mrs. Todgers in memory of his deceased wife. "Mercy

and Charity, Charity and Mercy, not unholy names I hope. She was

beautiful. She had a small property." When his condition has fallen into

something so much worse than maudlin that his friends have to put him to

bed, they have not had time to descend the staircase when he is seen to

be "fluttering" on the top landing, desiring to collect their sentiments

on the nature of human life. "Let us be moral. Let us contemplate

existence." He turns his old pupil out of doors in the attitude of

blessing him, and when he has discharged that social duty retires to

shed his personal tribute of a few tears in the back garden. No

conceivable position, action, or utterance finds him without the vice in

which his being is entirely steeped and saturated. Of such consummate

consistency is its practice with him, that in his own house with his

daughters he continues it to keep his hand in; and from the mere habit

of keeping up appearances, even to himself, falls into the trap of

Jonas. Thackeray used to say that there was nothing finer in rascaldom

than this ruin of Pecksniff by his son-in-law at the very moment when

the oily hypocrite believes himself to be achieving his masterpiece of

dissembling over the more vulgar avowed ruffian. "'Jonas!' cried Mr.

Pecksniff much affected, 'I am not a diplomatical character; my heart is

in my hand. By far the greater part of the inconsiderable savings I have

accumulated in the course of--I hope--a not dishonourable or useless

career, is already given, devised, or bequeathed (correct me, my dear

Jonas, if I am technically wrong), with expressions of confidence which

I will not repeat; and in securities which it is unnecessary to mention;

to a person whom I cannot, whom I will not, whom I need not, name.' Here

he gave the hand of his son-in-law a fervent squeeze, as if he would

have added, 'God bless you: be very careful of it when you get it!'"

Certainly Dickens thus far had done nothing of which, as in this novel,

the details were filled in with such minute and incomparable skill;

where the wealth of comic circumstance was lavished in such overflowing

abundance on single types of character; or where generally, as

throughout the story, the intensity of his observation of individual

humours and vices had taken so many varieties of imaginative form.

Everything in _Chuzzlewit_ indeed had grown under treatment, as will be

commonly the case in the handling of a man of genius, who never knows

where any given conception may lead him, out of the wealth of resource

in development and incident which it has itself created. "As to the

way," he wrote to me of its two most prominent figures, as soon as all

their capabilities were revealed to him, "As to the way in which these

characters have opened out, that is, to me, one of the most surprising

processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows,

what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its

being true, as I am of the law of gravitation--if such a thing be

possible, more so." The remark displays exactly what in all his

important characters was the very process of creation with him.

Nor was it in the treatment only of his present fiction, but also in

its subject or design, that he had gone higher than in preceding

efforts. Broadly what he aimed at, he would have expressed on the

title-page if I had not dissuaded him, by printing there as its motto a

verse altered from that prologue of his own composition to which I have

formerly referred: "Your homes the scene. Yourselves, the actors, here!"

Debtors' prisons, parish Bumbledoms, Yorkshire schools, were vile

enough, but something much more pestiferous was now the aim of his

satire; and he had not before so decisively shown vigour, daring, or

discernment of what lay within reach of his art, as in taking such a

person as Pecksniff for the central figure in a tale of existing life.

Setting him up as the glass through which to view the groups around him,

we are not the less moved to a hearty detestation of the social vices

they exhibit, and pre-eminently of selfishness in all its forms, because

we see more plainly than ever that there is but one vice which is quite

irremediable. The elder Chuzzlewits are bad enough, but they bring their

self-inflicted punishments; the Jonases and Tigg Montagues are

execrable, but the law has its halter and its penal servitude; the

Moulds and Gamps have plague-bearing breaths, from which sanitary wisdom

may clear us; but from the sleek, smiling, crawling abomination of a

Pecksniff, there is no help but self-help. Every man's hand should be

against him, for his is against every man; and, as Mr. Taine very wisely

warns us, the virtues have most need to be careful that they do not make

themselves panders to his vice. It is an amiable weakness to put the

best face on the worst things, but there is none more dangerous. There

is nothing so common as the mistake of Tom Pinch, and nothing so rare

as his excuses.

The art with which that delightful character is placed at Mr.

Pecksniff's elbow at the beginning of the story, and the help he gives

to set fairly afloat the falsehood he innocently believes, contribute to

an excellent management of this part of the design; and the same

prodigal wealth of invention and circumstance which gives its higher

imaginative stamp to the book, appears as vividly in its lesser as in

its leading figures. There are wonderful touches of this suggestive kind

in the household of Mould the undertaker; and in the vivid picture

presented to us by one of Mrs. Gamp's recollections, we are transported

to the youthful games of his children. "The sweet creeturs! playing at

berryins down in the shop, and follerin' the order-book to its long home

in the iron safe!" The American scenes themselves are not more full of

life and fun and freshness, and do not contribute more to the general

hilarity, than the cockney group at Todgers's; which is itself a little

world of the qualities and humours that make up the interest of human

life, whether it be high or low, vulgar or fine, filled in with a

master's hand. Here, in a mere byestroke as it were, are the very finest

things of the earlier books superadded to the new and higher achievement

that distinguished the later productions. No part indeed of the

execution of this remarkable novel is inferior. Young Bailey and

Sweedlepipes are in the front rank of his humorous creations; and poor

Mrs. Todgers, worn but not depraved by the cares of gravy and

solicitudes of her establishment, with calculation shining out of one

eye but affection and goodheartedness still beaming in the other, is in

her way quite as perfect a picture as even the portentous Mrs. Gamp with

her grim grotesqueness, her filthy habits and foul enjoyments, her thick

and damp but most amazing utterances, her moist clammy functions, her

pattens, her bonnet, her bundle, and her umbrella. But such prodigious

claims must have a special mention.

This world-famous personage has passed into and become one with the

language, which her own parts of speech have certainly not exalted or

refined. To none even of Dickens's characters has there been such a run

of popularity; and she will remain among the everlasting triumphs of

fiction, a superb masterpiece of English humour. What Mr. Mould says of

her in his enthusiasm, that she's the sort of woman one would bury for

nothing, and do it neatly too, every one feels to be an appropriate

tribute; and this, by a most happy inspiration, is exactly what the

genius to whom she owes her existence did, when he called her into life,

to the foul original she was taken from. That which enduringly stamped

upon his page its most mirth-moving figure, had stamped out of English

life for ever one of its disgraces. The mortal Mrs. Gamp was handsomely

put into her grave, and only the immortal Mrs. Gamp survived. Age will

not wither this one, nor custom stale her variety. In the latter point

she has an advantage over even Mr. Pecksniff. She has a friend, an alter

ego, whose kind of service to her is expressed by her first utterance in

the story; and with this, which introduces her, we may leave her most

fitly. "'Mrs. Harris,' I says, at the very last case as ever I acted in,

which it was but a young person, 'Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'leave the

bottle on the chimley-piece, and don't ask me to take none, but let me

put my lips to it when I am so dispoged.' 'Mrs. Gamp,' she says in

answer, 'if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteen pence a

day for working people, and three and six for gentlefolks--night

watching,' said Mrs. Gamp with emphasis, 'being a extra charge--you are

that inwallable person.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'don't name the

charge, for if I could afford to lay all my fellow-creeturs out for

nothink, I would gladly do it, sich is the love I bears 'em.'" To this

there is nothing to be added, except that in the person of that

astonishing friend every phase of fun and comedy in the character is

repeated, under fresh conditions of increased appreciation and

enjoyment. By the exuberance of comic invention which gives his

distinction to Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp profits quite as much; the same

wealth of laughable incident which surrounds that worthy man is upon her

heaped to overflowing; but over and above this, by the additional

invention of Mrs. Harris, it is all reproduced, acted over with renewed

spirit, and doubled and quadrupled in her favour. This on the whole is

the happiest stroke of humorous art in all the writings of Dickens.

* * * * *

But this is a chapter of disappointments, and I have now to state, that

as _Martin Chuzzlewit's_ success was to seem to him at first only

distant and problematical, so even the prodigious immediate success of

the _Christmas Carol_ itself was not to be an unmitigated pleasure.

Never had a little book an outset so full of brilliancy of promise.

Published but a few days before Christmas, it was hailed on every side

with enthusiastic greeting. The first edition of six thousand copies was

sold the first day, and on the third of January 1844 he wrote to me that

"two thousand of the three printed for second and third editions are

already taken by the trade." But a very few weeks were to pass before

the darker side of the picture came. "Such a night as I have passed!" he

wrote to me on Saturday morning the 10th of February. "I really believed

I should never get up again, until I had passed through all the horrors

of a fever. I found the _Carol_ accounts awaiting me, and they were the

cause of it. The first six thousand copies show a profit of L230! And

the last four will yield as much more. I had set my heart and soul upon

a Thousand, clear. What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great

success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!

My year's bills, unpaid, are so terrific, that all the energy and

determination I can possibly exert will be required to clear me before I

go abroad; which, if next June come and find me alive, I shall do. Good

Heaven, if I had only taken heart a year ago! Do come soon, as I am very

anxious to talk with you. We can send round to Mac after you arrive, and

tell him to join us at Hampstead or elsewhere. I was so utterly knocked

down last night, that I came up to the contemplation of all these things

quite bold this morning. If I can let the house for this season, I will

be off to some seaside place as soon as a tenant offers. I am not

afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past

all mortal hope of redemption."

The ultimate result was that his publishers were changed, and the

immediate result that his departure for Italy became a settled thing;

but a word may be said on these Carol accounts before mention is made of

his new publishing arrangements.[71] Want of judgment had been shown in

not adjusting the expenses of production with a more equable regard to

the selling price, but even as it was, before the close of the year, he

had received L726 from a sale of fifteen thousand copies; and the

difference between this and the amount realised by the same proportion

of the sale of the successor to the _Carol_, undoubtedly justified him

in the discontent now expressed. Of that second tale, as well as of the

third and fourth, more than double the numbers of the _Carol_ were at

once sold, and of course there was no complaint of any want of success:

but the truth really was, as to all the Christmas stories issued in this

form, that the price charged, while too large for the public addressed

by them, was too little to remunerate their outlay; and when in later

years he put forth similar fancies for Christmas, charging for them

fewer pence than the shillings required for these, he counted his

purchasers, with fairly corresponding gains to himself, not by tens but

by hundreds of thousands.[72]

It was necessary now that negotiations should be resumed with his

printers, but before any step was taken Messrs. Chapman and Hall were

informed of his intention not to open fresh publishing relations with

them after _Chuzzlewit_ should have closed. Then followed deliberations

and discussions, many and grave, which settled themselves at last into

the form of an agreement with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans executed on the

first of June 1844; by which, upon advance made to him of L2800, he

assigned to them a fourth share in whatever he might write during the

next ensuing eight years, to which the agreement was to be strictly

limited. There were the usual protecting clauses, but no interest was to

be paid, and no obligations were imposed as to what works should be

written, if any, or the form of them; the only farther stipulation

having reference to the event of a periodical being undertaken whereof

Dickens might be only partially editor or author, in which case his

proprietorship of copyright and profits was to be two thirds instead of

three fourths. There was an understanding, at the time this agreement

was signed, that a successor to the _Carol_ would be ready for the

Christmas of 1844; but no other promise was asked or made in regard to

any other book, nor had he himself decided what form to give to his

experiences of Italy, if he should even finally determine to publish

them at all.

Between this agreement and his journey six weeks elapsed, and there were

one or two characteristic incidents before his departure: but mention

must first be interposed of the success quite without alloy that also

attended the little book, and carried off in excitement and delight

every trace of doubt or misgiving.

"Blessings on your kind heart!" wrote Jeffrey to the author of the

_Carol_. "You should be happy yourself, for you may be sure you have

done more good by this little publication, fostered more kindly

feelings, and prompted more positive acts of beneficence, than can be

traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom since

Christmas 1842." "Who can listen," exclaimed Thackeray, "to objections

regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to

every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness." Such praise

expressed what men of genius felt and said; but the small volume had

other tributes, less usual and not less genuine. There poured upon its

author daily, all through that Christmas time, letters from complete

strangers to him which I remember reading with a wonder of pleasure; not

literary at all, but of the simplest domestic kind; of which the general

burden was to tell him, amid many confidences about their homes, how the

_Carol_ had come to be read aloud there, and was to be kept upon a

little shelf by itself, and was to do them all no end of good. Anything

more to be said of it will not add much to this.

There was indeed nobody that had not some interest in the message of the

_Christmas Carol_. It told the selfish man to rid himself of

selfishness; the just man to make himself generous; and the good-natured

man to enlarge the sphere of his good nature. Its cheery voice of faith

and hope, ringing from one end of the island to the other, carried

pleasant warning alike to all, that if the duties of Christmas were

wanting no good could come of its outward observances; that it must

shine upon the cold hearth and warm it, and into the sorrowful heart and

comfort it; that it must be kindness, benevolence, charity, mercy, and

forbearance, or its plum pudding would turn to bile, and its roast beef

be indigestible.[73] Nor could any man have said it with the same

appropriateness as Dickens. What was marked in him to the last was

manifest now. He had identified himself with Christmas fancies. Its life

and spirits, its humour in riotous abundance, of right belonged to him.

Its imaginations as well as kindly thoughts were his; and its privilege

to light up with some sort of comfort the squalidest places, he had made

his own. Christmas Day was not more social or welcome: New Year's Day

not more new: Twelfth Night not more full of characters. The duty of

diffusing enjoyment had never been taught by a more abundant, mirthful,

thoughtful, ever-seasonable writer.

Something also is to be said of the spirit of the book, and of the

others that followed it, which will not anticipate special allusions to

be made hereafter. No one was more intensely fond than Dickens of old

nursery tales, and he had a secret delight in feeling that he was here

only giving them a higher form. The social and manly virtues he desired

to teach, were to him not less the charm of the ghost, the goblin, and

the fairy fancies of his childhood; however rudely set forth in those

earlier days. What now were to be conquered were the more formidable

dragons and giants which had their places at our own hearths, and the

weapons to be used were of a finer than the "ice-brook's temper." With

brave and strong restraints, what is evil in ourselves was to be

subdued; with warm and gentle sympathies, what is bad or unreclaimed in

others was to be redeemed; the Beauty was to embrace the Beast, as in

the divinest of all those fables; the star was to rise out of the ashes,

as in our much-loved Cinderella; and we were to play the Valentine with

our wilder brothers, and bring them back with brotherly care to

civilization and happiness. Nor is it to be doubted, I think, that, in

that largest sense of benefit, great public and private service was

done; positive, earnest, practical good; by the extraordinary

popularity, and nearly universal acceptance, which attended these little

holiday volumes. They carried to countless firesides, with new enjoyment

of the season, better apprehension of its claims and obligations; they

mingled grave with glad thoughts, much to the advantage of both; what

seemed almost too remote to meddle with they brought within reach of the

charities, and what was near they touched with a dearer tenderness; they

comforted the generous, rebuked the sordid, cured folly by kindly

ridicule and comic humour, and, saying to their readers _Thus you have

done, but it were better Thus_, may for some have realised the

philosopher's famous experience, and by a single fortunate thought

revised the whole manner of a life. Criticism here is a second-rate

thing, and the reader may be spared such discoveries as it might have

made in regard to the _Christmas Carol_.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Chuffey. Sydney Smith had written to Dickens on the appearance of

his fourth number (early in April): "Chuffey is admirable. . . . I never

read a finer piece of writing: it is deeply pathetic and affecting."

[71] It may interest the reader, and be something of a curiosity of

literature, if I give the expenses of the first edition of 6000, and of

the 7000 more which constituted the five following editions, with the

profit of the remaining 2000 which completed the sale of fifteen

thousand:

CHRISTMAS CAROL.

1st Edition, 6000 No.

1843. L _s._ _d._

Dec. Printing 74 2 9

Paper 89 2 0

Drawings and Engravings 49 18 0

Two Steel Plates 1 4 0

Printing Plates 15 17 6

Paper for do 7 12 0

Colouring Plates 120 0 0

Binding 180 0 0

Incidents and Advertising 168 7 8

Commission 99 4 6

--------------

L805 8 5

==============

* * * * *

2nd to the 7th Edition, making 7000 Copies.

1844. L _s._ _d._

Jan. Printing 58 18 0

Paper 103 19 0

Printing Plates 17 10 0

Paper 8 17 4

Colouring Plates 140 0 0

Binding 199 18 2

Incidents and Advertising 83 5 8

Commission 107 18 10

-------------

L720 7 0

=============

* * * * *

Two thousand more, represented by the last item in the subjoined

balance, were sold before the close of the year, leaving a remainder of

70 copies.

1843. L _s._ _d._

Dec. Balance of a/c to Mr. Dickens's credit 186 16 7

1844.

Jan. to April. Do. Do. 349 12 0

May to Dec. Do. Do. 189 11 5

-------------

Amount of Profit on the Work L726 0 0

=============

[72] In November 1865 he wrote to me that the sale of his Christmas

fancy for that year (_Dr. Marigold's Prescriptions_) had gone up, in the

first week, to 250,000.

[73] A characteristic letter of this date, which will explain itself,

has been kindly sent to me by the gentleman it was written to, Mr. James

Verry Staples, of Bristol:--"Third of April, 1844. I have been very much

gratified by the receipt of your interesting letter, and I assure you

that it would have given me heartfelt satisfaction to have been in your

place when you read my little _Carol_ to the Poor in your neighbourhood.

I have great faith in the poor; to the best of my ability I always

endeavour to present them in a favourable light to the rich; and I shall

never cease, I hope, until I die, to advocate their being made as happy

and as wise as the circumstances of their condition, in its utmost

improvement, will admit of their becoming. I mention this to assure you

of two things. Firstly, that I try to deserve their attention; and

secondly, that any such marks of their approval and confidence as you

relate to me are most acceptable to my feelings, and go at once to my

heart."

CHAPTER IV.

YEAR OF DEPARTURE FOR ITALY.

1844.

Gore-house--Liverpool and Birmingham

Institutes--A Troublesome Cheque--Wrongs from

Piracy--Proceedings in Chancery--Result of

Chancery Experience--Reliefs to Work--M. Henri

Taine on Dickens--Writing in the

_Chronicle_--Preparations for Departure--In

Temporary Quarters--The Farewell

Dinner-party--"The Evenings of a

Working-man"--Greenwich Dinner.

AND now, before accompanying Dickens on his Italian travel, one or two

parting incidents will receive illustration from his letters. A

thoughtful little poem written during the past summer for Lady

Blessington has been quoted on a previous page: and it may remind me to

say here what warmth of regard he had for her, and for all the inmates

of Gore-house; how uninterruptedly joyous and pleasurable were his

associations with them; and what valued help they now gave in his

preparations for Italy. The poem, as we have seen, was written during a

visit made in Yorkshire to the house of Mr. Smithson, already named as

the partner of his early companion, Mr. Mitton; and this visit he

repeated in sadder circumstances during the present year, when (April

1844) he attended Mr. Smithson's funeral. With members or connections of

the family of this friend, his intercourse long continued.

In the previous February, on the 26th and 28th respectively, he had

taken the chair at two great meetings, in Liverpool of the Mechanics'

Institution, and in Birmingham of the Polytechnic Institution, to which

reference is made by him in a letter of the 21st. I quote the allusion

because it shows thus early the sensitive regard to his position as a

man of letters, and his scrupulous consideration for the feelings as

well as interest of the class, which he manifested in many various and

often greatly self-sacrificing ways all through his life. "Advise me on

the following point. And as I must write to-night, having already lost a

post, advise me by bearer. This Liverpool Institution, which is wealthy

and has a high grammar-school the masters of which receive in salaries

upwards of L2000 a year (indeed its extent horrifies me; I am struggling

through its papers this morning), writes me yesterday by its secretary a

business letter about the order of the proceedings on Monday; and it

begins thus. 'I beg to send you prefixed, with the best respects of our

committee, a bank order for twenty pounds in payment of the expenses

contingent on your visit to Liverpool.'--And there, sure enough, it is.

Now my impulse was, _and is_, decidedly to return it. Twenty pounds is

not of moment to me; and any sacrifice of independence is worth it

twenty times' twenty times told. But haggling in my mind is a doubt

whether that would be proper, and not boastful (in an inexplicable way);

and whether as an author, I have a right to put myself on a basis which

the professors of literature in other forms _connected with the

Institution_ cannot afford to occupy. Don't you see? But of course you

do. The case stands thus. The Manchester Institution, being in debt,

appeals to me as it were _in forma pauperis_, and makes no such

provision as I have named. The Birmingham Institution, just struggling

into life with great difficulty, applies to me on the same grounds. But

the Leeds people (thriving) write to me, making the expenses a distinct

matter of business; and the Liverpool, as a point of delicacy, say

nothing about it to the last minute, and then send the money. Now, what

in the name of goodness ought I to do?--I am as much puzzled with the

cheque as Colonel Jack was with his gold. If it would have settled the

matter to put it in the fire yesterday, I should certainly have done it.

Your opinion is requested. I think I shall have grounds for a very good

speech at Brummagem; but I am not sure about Liverpool: having

misgivings of over-gentility." My opinion was clearly for sending the

money back, which accordingly was done.

Both speeches, duly delivered to enthusiastic listeners at the places

named, were good, and both, with suitable variations, had the same

theme: telling his popular audience in Birmingham that the principle of

their institute, education comprehensive and unsectarian, was the only

safe one, for that without danger no society could go on punishing men

for preferring vice to virtue without giving them the means of knowing

what virtue was; and reminding his genteeler audience in Liverpool, that

if happily they had been themselves well taught, so much the more should

they seek to extend the benefit to all, since, whatever the precedence

due to rank, wealth, or intellect, there was yet a nobility beyond them,

expressed unaffectedly by the poet's verse and in the power of education

to confer.

Howe'er it be, it seems to me,

'Tis only noble to be good:

True hearts are more than coronets,

And simple faith than Norman blood.

He underwent some suffering, which he might have spared himself, at his

return. "I saw the _Carol_ last night," he wrote to me of a dramatic

performance of the little story at the Adelphi. "Better than usual, and

Wright seems to enjoy Bob Cratchit, but _heart-breaking_ to me. Oh

Heaven! if any forecast of _this_ was ever in my mind! Yet O. Smith was

drearily better than I expected. It is a great comfort to have that kind

of meat under done; and his face is quite perfect." Of what he suffered

from these adaptations of his books, multiplied remorselessly at every

theatre, I have forborne to speak, but it was the subject of complaint

with him incessantly; and more or less satisfied as he was with

individual performances, such as Mr. Yates's Quilp or Mantalini and Mrs.

Keeley's Smike or Dot, there was only one, that of Barnaby Rudge by the

Miss Fortescue who became afterwards Lady Gardner, on which I ever heard

him dwell with a thorough liking. It is true that to the dramatizations

of his next and other following Christmas stories he gave help himself;

but, even then, all such efforts to assist special representations were

mere attempts to render more tolerable what he had no power to prevent,

and, with a few rare exceptions, they were never very successful.

Another and graver wrong was the piracy of his writings, every one of

which had been reproduced with merely such colourable changes of title,

incidents, and names of characters, as were believed to be sufficient to

evade the law and adapt them to "penny" purchasers. So shamelessly had

this been going on ever since the days of _Pickwick_, in so many

outrageous ways[74] and with all but impunity, that a course repeatedly

urged by Talfourd and myself was at last taken in the present year with

the _Christmas Carol_ and the _Chuzzlewit_ pirates. Upon a case of such

peculiar flagrancy, however, that the vice-chancellor would not even

hear Dickens's counsel; and what it cost our dear friend Talfourd to

suppress his speech exceeded by very much the labour and pains with

which he had prepared it. "The pirates," wrote Dickens to me, after

leaving the court on the 18th of January, "are beaten flat. They are

bruised, bloody, battered, smashed, squelched, and utterly undone.

Knight Bruce would not hear Talfourd, but instantly gave judgment. He

had interrupted Anderdon constantly by asking him to produce a passage

which was not an expanded or contracted idea from my book. And at every

successive passage he cried out, 'That is Mr. Dickens's case. Find

another!' He said that there was not a shadow of doubt upon the matter.

That there was no authority which would bear a construction in their

favour; the piracy going beyond all previous instances. They might

mention it again in a week, he said, if they liked, and might have an

issue if they pleased; but they would probably consider it unnecessary

after that strong expression of his opinion. Of course I will stand by

what we have agreed as to the only terms of compromise with the

printers. I am determined that I will have an apology for their

affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I

will stick to my friend the author." Two days later he wrote: "The

farther affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals

_are_ rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men

must be who hold on by the heels of literature. Oh! the agony of

Talfourd at Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had sat up till three in

the morning, he says, preparing his speech; and would have done all

kinds of things with the affidavits. It certainly was a splendid

subject. We have heard nothing from the vagabonds yet. I once thought of

printing the affidavits without a word of comment, and sewing them up

with _Chuzzlewit_. Talfourd is strongly disinclined to compromise with

the printers on any terms. In which case it would be referred to the

master to ascertain what profits had been made by the piracy, and to

order the same to be paid to me. But wear and tear of law is my

consideration." The undertaking to which he had at last to submit was,

that upon ample public apology, and payment of all costs, the offenders

should be let go; but the real result was that, after infinite vexation

and trouble, he had himself to pay all the costs incurred on his own

behalf; and, a couple of years later, upon repetition of the wrong he

had suffered in so gross a form that proceedings were again advised by

Talfourd and others, he wrote to me from Switzerland the condition of

mind to which his experience had brought him. "My feeling about the ----

is the feeling common, I suppose, to three fourths of the reflecting

part of the community in our happiest of all possible countries; and

that is, that it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse

to the much greater wrong of the law. I shall not easily forget the

expense, and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the _Carol_ case,

wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated

as if I were the robber instead of the robbed. Upon the whole, I

certainly would much rather NOT proceed. What do you think of sending in

a grave protest against what has been done in this case, on account of

the immense amount of piracy to which I am daily exposed, and because I

have been already met in the court of chancery with the legal doctrine

that silence under such wrongs barred my remedy: to which Talfourd's

written opinion might be appended as proof that we stopped under no

discouragement. It is useless to affect that I don't know I have a

morbid susceptibility of exasperation, to which the meanness and badness

of the law in such a matter would be stinging in the last degree. And I

know of nothing that _could_ come, even of a successful action, which

would be worth the mental trouble and disturbance it would cost."[75]

A few notes of besetting temptations during his busiest days at

_Chuzzlewit_, one taken from each of the first four months of the year

when he was working at its masterly closing scenes, will amusingly

exhibit, side by side, his powers of resistance and capacities of

enjoyment. "I had written you a line" (16th of January), "pleading Jonas

and Mrs. Gamp, but this frosty day tempts me sorely. I am distractingly

late; but I look at the sky, think of Hampstead, and feel hideously

tempted. Don't come with Mae, and fetch me. I couldn't resist if you

did." In the next (18th of February), he is not the tempted, but the

tempter. "Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead

to dinner. I leave Betsey Prig as you know, so don't you make a scruple

about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up, to give you

time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw's at

four. . . . In the very improbable (surely impossible?) case of your not

coming, we will call on you at a quarter before eight, to go to the

ragged school." The next (5th of March) shows him in yielding mood, and

pitying himself for his infirmity of compliance. "Sir, I

will--he--he--he--he--he--he--I will NOT eat with you, either at your

own house or the club. But the morning looks bright, and a walk to

Hampstead would suit me marvellously. If you should present yourself at

my gate (bringing the R. A.'s along with you) I shall not be sapparized.

So no more at this writing from Poor MR. DICKENS." But again the tables

are turned, and he is tempter in the last; written on that Shakespeare

day (23rd of April) which we kept always as a festival, and signed in

character expressive of his then present unfitness for any of the

practical affairs of life, including the very pressing business which at

the moment ought to have occupied him, namely, attention to the long

deferred nuptials of Miss Charity Pecksniff. "November blasts! Why it's

the warmest, most genial, most intensely bland, delicious, growing,

springy, songster-of-the-grovy, bursting-forth-of-the-buddy, day as

ever was. At half-past four I shall expect you. Ever, MODDLE."

Moddle, the sentimental noodle hooked by Miss Pecksniff who flies on his

proposed wedding-day from the frightful prospect before him, the reader

of course knows; and has perhaps admired for his last supreme outbreak

of common sense. It was a rather favourite bit of humour with Dickens;

and I find it pleasant to think that he never saw the description given

of it by a trained and skilful French critic, who has been able to pass

under his review the whole of English literature without any apparent

sense or understanding of one of its most important as well as richest

elements. A man without the perception of humour taking English prose

literature in hand, can of course set about it only in one way.

Accordingly, in Mr. Taine's decisive judgments of our last great

humourist, which proceed upon a principle of psychological analysis

which it is only fair to say he applies impartially to everybody,

_Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, and _The Old Curiosity Shop_ are not in any

manner even named or alluded to; Mrs. Gamp is only once mentioned as

always talking of Mrs. Harris; and Mr. Micawber also only once as using

always the same emphatic phrases; the largest extracts are taken from

the two books in all the Dickens series that are weakest on the humorous

side, _Hard Times_ and the _Chimes_; _Nickleby_, with its many

laughter-moving figures, is dismissed in a line and a half; Mr. Toots,

Captain Cuttle, Susan Nipper, Toodles, and the rest have no place in

what is said of _Dombey_; and, to close with what has caused and must

excuse my digression, Mr. Augustus Moddle is introduced as a gloomy

maniac who makes us laugh and makes us shudder, and as drawn so truly

for a madman that though at first sight agreeable, he is in reality

horrible![76]

A month before the letter subscribed by Dickens in the character, so

happily unknown to himself, of this gloomy maniac, he had written to me

from amidst his famous chapter in which the tables are turned on

Pecksniff; but here I quote the letter chiefly for noticeable words at

its close. "I heard from Macready by the Hibernia. I have been slaving

away regularly, but the weather is against rapid progress. I altered the

verbal error, and substituted for the action you didn't like some words

expressive of the hurry of the scene. Macready sums up slavery in New

Orleans in the way of a gentle doubting on the subject, by a 'but' and a

dash. I believe it is in New Orleans that the man is lying under

sentence of death, who, not having the fear of God before his eyes, did

not deliver up a captive slave to the torture? The largest gun in that

country has not burst yet--_but it will_. Heaven help us, too, from

explosions nearer home! I declare I never go into what is called

'society' that I am not aweary of it, despise it, hate it, and reject

it. The more I see of its extraordinary conceit, and its stupendous

ignorance of what is passing out of doors, the more certain I am that it

is approaching the period when, being incapable of reforming itself, it

will have to submit to be reformed by others off the face of the earth."

Thus we see that the old radical leanings were again rather strong in

him at present, and I may add that he had found occasional recent vent

for them by writing in the _Morning Chronicle_.

Some articles thus contributed by him having set people talking, the

proprietors of the paper rather eagerly mooted the question what payment

he would ask for contributing regularly; and ten guineas an article was

named. Very sensibly, however, the editor who had succeeded his old

friend Black pointed out to him, that though even that sum would not be

refused in the heat of the successful articles just contributed, yet (I

quote his own account in a letter of the 7th of March 1844) so much

would hardly be paid continuously; and thereupon an understanding, was

come to, that he would write as a volunteer and leave his payment to be

adjusted to the results. "Then said the editor--and this I particularly

want you to turn over in your mind, at leisure--supposing me to go

abroad, could I contemplate such a thing as the writing of a letter a

week under any signature I chose, with such scraps of descriptions and

impressions as suggested themselves to my mind? If so, would I do it

for the _Chronicle_? And if so again, what would I do it for? He thought

for such contributions Easthope would pay anything. I told him that the

idea had never occurred to me; but that I was afraid he did not know

what the value of such contributions would be. He repeated what he had

said before; and I promised to consider whether I could reconcile it to

myself to write such letters at all. The pros and cons need to be very

carefully weighed. I will not tell you to which side I incline, but if

we should disagree, or waver on the same points, we will call Bradbury

and Evans to the council. I think it more than probable that we shall be

of exactly the same mind, but I want you to be in possession of the

facts and therefore send you this rigmarole." The rigmarole is not

unimportant; because, though we did not differ on the wisdom of saying

No to the _Chronicle_, the "council" spoken of was nevertheless held,

and in it lay the germ of another newspaper enterprise he permitted

himself to engage in twelve months later, to which he would have done

more wisely to have also answered No.

The preparation for departure was now actively going forward, and

especially his enquiries for two important adjuncts thereto, a courier

and a carriage. As to the latter it occurred to him that he might

perhaps get for little money "some good old shabby devil of a coach--one

of those vast phantoms that hide themselves in a corner of the

Pantechnicon;" and exactly such a one he found there; sitting himself

inside it, a perfect Sentimental Traveller, while the managing man told

him its history. "As for comfort--let me see--it is about the size of

your library; with night-lamps and day-lamps and pockets and imperials

and leathern cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances. Joking

apart, it is a wonderful machine. And when you see it (if you _do_ see

it) you will roar at it first, and will then proclaim it to be

'perfectly brilliant, my dear fellow.'" It was marked sixty pounds; he

got it for five-and-forty; and my own emotions respecting it he had

described by anticipation quite correctly. In finding a courier he was

even more fortunate; and these successes were followed by a third

apparently very promising, but in the result less satisfactory. His

house was let to not very careful people.

The tenant having offered herself for Devonshire-terrace unexpectedly,

during the last week or two of his stay in England he went into

temporary quarters in Osnaburgh-terrace; and here a domestic difficulty

befell of which the mention may be amusing, when I have disposed of an

incident that preceded it too characteristic for omission. The Mendicity

Society's officers had caught a notorious begging-letter writer, had

identified him as an old offender against Dickens of which proofs were

found on his person, and had put matters in train for his proper

punishment; when the wretched creature's wife made such appeal before

the case was heard at the police-court, that Dickens broke down in his

character of prosecutor, and at the last moment, finding what was said

of the man's distress at the time to be true, relented. "When the

Mendicity officers themselves told me the man was in distress, I desired

them to suppress what they knew about him, and slipped out of the bundle

(in the police office) his first letter, which was the greatest lie of

all. For he looked wretched, and his wife had been waiting about the

street to see me, all the morning. It was an exceedingly bad case

however, and the imposition, all through, very great indeed. Insomuch

that I could not _say_ anything in his favour, even when I saw him. Yet

I was not sorry that the creature found the loophole for escape. The

officers had taken him illegally without any warrant; and really they

messed it all through, quite facetiously."

He will himself also best relate the small domestic difficulty into

which he fell in his temporary dwelling, upon his unexpectedly

discovering it to be unequal to the strain of a dinner party for which

invitations had gone out just before the sudden "let" of

Devonshire-terrace. The letter is characteristic in other ways, or I

should hardly have gone so far into domesticities here; and it enables

me to add that with the last on its list of guests, Mr. Chapman the

chairman of Lloyd's, he held much friendly intercourse, and that few

things more absurd or unfounded have been invented, even of Dickens,

than that he found any part of the original of Mr. Dombey in the nature,

the appearance, or the manners of this estimable gentleman. "Advise,

advise," he wrote (9 Osnaburgh-terrace, 28th of May 1844), "advise with

a distracted man. Investigation below stairs renders it, as my father

would say, 'manifest to any person of ordinary intelligence, if the term

may be considered allowable,' that the Saturday's dinner cannot come off

here with safety. It would be a toss-up, and might come down heads, but

it would put us into an agony with that kind of people. . . . Now, I feel a

difficulty in dropping it altogether, and really fear that this might

have an indefinably suspicious and odd appearance. Then said I at

breakfast this morning, I'll send down to the Clarendon. Then says Kate,

have it at Richmond. Then I say, that might be inconvenient to the

people. Then she says, how could it be if we dine late enough? Then I am

very much offended without exactly knowing why; and come up here, in a

state of hopeless mystification. . . . What do you think? Ellis would be

quite as dear as anybody else; and unless the weather changes, the place

is objectionable. I must make up my mind to do one thing or other, for

we shall meet Lord Denman at dinner to-day. Could it be dropped

decently? That, I think very doubtful. Could it be done for a couple of

guineas apiece at the Clarendon? . . . In a matter of more importance I

could make up my mind. But in a matter of this kind I bother and

bewilder myself, and come to no conclusion whatever. Advise! Advise! . . .

List of the Invited. There's Lord Normanby. And there's Lord Denman.

There's Easthope, wife, and sister. There's Sydney Smith. There's you

and Mac. There's Babbage. There's a Lady Osborne and her daughter.

There's Southwood Smith. And there's Quin. And there are Thomas Chapman

and his wife. So many of these people have never dined with us, that the

fix is particularly tight. Advise! Advise!" My advice was for throwing

over the party altogether, but additional help was obtained and the

dinner went off very pleasantly. It was the last time we saw Sydney

Smith.

Of one other characteristic occurrence he wrote before he left; and the

very legible epigraph round the seal of his letter, "It is particularly

requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not

trouble himself to seal it again," expresses both its date and its

writer's opinion of a notorious transaction of the time. "I wish" (28th

of June) "you would read this, and give it me again when we meet at

Stanfield's to-day. Newby has written to me to say that he hopes to be

able to give Overs more money than was agreed on." The enclosure was the

proof-sheet of a preface written by him to a small collection of stories

by a poor carpenter dying of consumption, who hoped by their

publication, under protection of such a name, to leave behind him some

small provision for his ailing wife and little children.[77] The book

was dedicated to the kind physician, Doctor Elliotson, whose name was

for nearly thirty years a synonym with us all for unwearied,

self-sacrificing, beneficent service to every one in need.

The last incident before Dickens's departure was a farewell dinner to

him at Greenwich, which took also the form of a celebration for the

completion of _Chuzzlewit_, or, as the Ballantynes used to call it in

Scott's case, a christening dinner; when Lord Normanby took the chair,

and I remember sitting next the great painter Turner, who had come with

Stanfield, and had enveloped his throat, that sultry summer day, in a

huge red belcher-handkerchief which nothing would induce him to remove.

He was not otherwise demonstrative, but enjoyed himself in a quiet

silent way, less perhaps at the speeches than at the changing lights on

the river. Carlyle did not come; telling me in his reply to the

invitation that he truly loved Dickens, having discerned in the inner

man of him a real music of the genuine kind, but that he'd rather

testify to this in some other form than that of dining out in the

dogdays.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] In a letter on the subject of copyright published by Thomas Hood

after Dickens's return from America, he described what had passed

between himself and one of these pirates who had issued a Master

Humphrey's Clock edited by Bos. "Sir," said the man to Hood, "if you had

observed the name, it was _Bos_, not _Boz_; s, sir, not z; and, besides,

it would have been no piracy, sir, even with the z, because _Master

Humphrey's Clock_, you see, sir, was not published as by Boz, but by

Charles Dickens!"

[75] The reader may be amused if I add in a note what he said of the

pirates in those earlier days when grave matters touched him less

gravely. On the eve of the first number of _Nickleby_ he had issued a

proclamation. "Whereas we are the only true and lawful Boz. And whereas

it hath been reported to us, who are commencing a new work, that some

dishonest dullards resident in the by-streets and cellars of this town

impose upon the unwary and credulous, by producing cheap and wretched

imitations of our delectable works. And whereas we derive but small

comfort under this injury from the knowledge that the dishonest dullards

aforesaid cannot, by reason of their mental smallness, follow near our

heels, but are constrained to creep along by dirty and little-frequented

ways, at a most respectful and humble distance behind. And whereas, in

like manner, as some other vermin are not worth the killing for the sake

of their carcases, so these kennel pirates are not worth the powder and

shot of the law, inasmuch as whatever damages they may commit they are

in no condition to pay any. This is to give notice, that we have at

length devised a mode of execution for them, so summary and terrible,

that if any gang or gangs thereof presume to hoist but one shred of the

colours of the good ship _Nickleby_, we will hang them on gibbets so

lofty and enduring that their remains shall be a monument of our just

vengeance to all succeeding ages; and it shall not lie in the power of

any lord high admiral, on earth, to cause them to be taken down again."

The last paragraph of the proclamation informed the potentates of

Paternoster-row, that from the then ensuing day of the thirtieth of

March, until farther notice, "we shall hold our Levees, as heretofore,

on the last evening but one of every month, between the hours of seven

and nine, at our Board of Trade, number one hundred and eighty-six in

the Strand, London; where we again request the attendance (in vast

crowds) of their accredited agents and ambassadors. Gentlemen to wear

knots upon their shoulders; and patent cabs to draw up with their doors

towards the grand entrance, for the convenience of loading."

[76] This might seem not very credible if I did not give the passage

literally, and I therefore quote it from the careful translation of

_Taine's History of English Literature_ by Mr. Van Laun, one of the

masters of the Edinburgh Academy, where I will venture to hope that

other authorities on English Literature are at the same time admitted.

"Jonas" (also in _Chuzzlewit_) "is on the verge of madness. There are

other characters quite mad. Dickens has drawn three or four portraits of

madmen, very agreeable at first sight, but so true that they are in

reality horrible. It needed an imagination like his, irregular,

excessive, capable of fixed ideas, to exhibit the derangements of

reason. Two especially there are, which make us laugh, and which make us

shudder. Augustus, the gloomy maniac, who is on the point of marrying

Miss Pecksniff; and poor Mr. Dick, half an idiot, half a monomaniac, who

lives with Miss Trotwood. . . . The play of these shattered reasons is like

the creaking of a dislocated door; it makes one sick to hear it." (Vol.

ii. p. 346.) The original was published before Dickens's death, but he

certainly never saw it.

[77] He wrote from Marseilles (17th Dec. 1844). "When poor Overs was

dying he suddenly asked for a pen and ink and some paper, and made up a

little parcel for me which it was his last conscious act to direct. She

(his wife) told me this and gave it me. I opened it last night. It was a

copy of his little book in which he had written my name, 'With his

devotion.' I thought it simple and affecting of the poor fellow." From a

later letter a few lines may be added. "Mrs. Overs tells me" (Monte

Vacchi, 30th March, 1845) "that Miss Coutts has sent her, at different

times, sixteen pounds, has sent a doctor to her children, and has got

one of the girls into the Orphan School. When I wrote her a word in the

poor woman's behalf, she wrote me back to the effect that it was a

kindness to herself to have done so, 'for what is the use of my means

but to try and do some good with them?'"

CHAPTER V.

IDLENESS AT ALBARO: VILLA BAGNERELLO.

1844.

Arrival at Marseilles--A Character--Villa at

Genoa--Sirocco--Sunsets and Scenery--Address to

Maclise--French and Italian Skies--The

Mediterranean--The Cicala--French Consul of

Genoa--Learning Italian--Trades-people--Genoa

the Superb--Theatres--Italian Plays--Religious

Houses--Sunday Promenade--Winter Residence

chosen--Dinner at French Consul's--Reception at

M. di Negri's--A Tumble--English Visitors and

News--Visit of his Brother--Sea-bathing.

THE travelling party arrived at Marseilles on the evening of Sunday the

14th of July. Not being able to get vetturino horses in Paris, they had

come on, post; paying for nine horses but bringing only four, and

thereby saving a shilling a mile out of what the four would have cost in

England. So great thus far, however, had been the cost of travel, that

"what with distance, caravan, sight-seeing, and everything," two hundred

pounds would be nearly swallowed up before they were at their

destination. The success otherwise had been complete. The children had

not cried in their worst troubles, the carriage had gone lightly over

abominable roads, and the courier had proved himself a perfect gem.

"Surrounded by strange and perfectly novel circumstances," Dickens wrote

to me from Marseilles, "I feel as if I had a new head on side by side

with my old one."

To what shrewd and kindly observation the old one had helped him at

every stage of his journey, his published book of travel tells, and of

all that there will be nothing here; but a couple of experiences at his

outset, of which he told me afterwards, have enough character in them to

be worth mention.

Shortly before there had been some public interest about the captain of

a Boulogne steamer apprehended on a suspicion of having stolen specie,

but reinstated by his owners after a public apology to him on their

behalf; and Dickens had hardly set foot on the boat that was to carry

them across, when he was attracted by the look of its captain, and

discovered him after a few minutes' talk to be that very man. "Such an

honest, simple, good fellow, I never saw," said Dickens, as he imitated

for me the homely speech in which his confidences were related. The

Boulogne people, he said, had given him a piece of plate, "but Lord

bless us! it took a deal more than that to get him round again in his

own mind; and for weeks and weeks he was uncommon low to be sure.

Newgate, you see! What a place for a sea-faring man as had held up his

head afore the best on 'em, and had more friends, I mean to say, and I

do tell you the daylight truth, than any man on this station--ah! or any

other, I don't care where!"

His first experience in a foreign tongue he made immediately on landing,

when he had gone to the bank for money, and after delivering with most

laborious distinctness a rather long address in French to the clerk

behind the counter, was disconcerted by that functionary's cool enquiry

in the native-born Lombard-street manner, "How would you like to take

it, sir?" He took it, as everybody must, in five-franc pieces, and a

most inconvenient coinage he found it; for he required so much that he

had to carry it in a couple of small sacks, and was always "turning hot

about suddenly" taking it into his head that he had lost them.

The evening of Tuesday the 16th of July saw him in a villa at Albaro,

the suburb of Genoa in which, upon the advice of our Gore-house friends,

he had resolved to pass the summer months before taking up his quarters

in the city. His wish was to have had Lord Byron's house there, but it

had fallen into neglect and become the refuge of a third-rate wine-shop.

The matter had then been left to Angus Fletcher who just now lived near

Genoa, and he had taken at a rent absurdly above its value[78] an

unpicturesque and uninteresting dwelling, which at once impressed its

new tenant with its likeness to a pink jail. "It is," he said to me,

"the most perfectly lonely, rusty, stagnant old staggerer of a domain

that you can possibly imagine. What would I give if you could only look

round the courtyard! _I_ look down into it, whenever I am near that side

of the house, for the stable is so full of 'vermin and swarmers' (pardon

the quotation from my inimitable friend) that I always expect to see the

carriage going out bodily, with legions of industrious fleas harnessed

to and drawing it off, on their own account. We have a couple of Italian

work-people in our establishment; and to hear one or other of them

talking away to our servants with the utmost violence and volubility in

Genoese, and our servants answering with great fluency in English (very

loud: as if the others were only deaf, not Italian), is one of the most

ridiculous things possible. The effect is greatly enhanced by the

Genoese manner, which is exceedingly animated and pantomimic; so that

two friends of the lower class conversing pleasantly in the street,

always seem on the eve of stabbing each other forthwith. And a stranger

is immensely astonished at their not doing it."