Meanwhile, two days before this letter, his first number had been

launched with a sale that transcended his hopes and brought back

_Nickleby_ days. The _Dombey_ success "is BRILLIANT!" he wrote to me on

the 11th. "I had put before me thirty thousand as the limit of the most

extreme success, saying that if we should reach that, I should be more

than satisfied and more than happy; you will judge how happy I am! I

read the second number here last night to the most prodigious and

uproarious delight of the circle. I never saw or heard people laugh so.

You will allow me to observe that my reading of the Major has merit."

What a valley of the shadow he had just been passing, in his journey

through his Christmas book, has before been told; but always, and with

only too much eagerness, he sprang up under pressure. "A week of perfect

idleness," he wrote to me on the 26th, "has brought me round

again--idleness so rusting and devouring, so complete and unbroken, that

I am quite glad to write the heading of the first chapter of number

three to-day. I shall be slow at first, I fear, in consequence of that

change of the plan. But I allow myself nearly three weeks for the

number; designing, at present, to start for Paris on the 16th of

November. Full particulars in future bills. Just going to bed. I think I

can make a good effect, on the after story, of the feeling created by

the additional number before Paul's death." . . . Five more days confirmed

him in this hope. "I am at work at _Dombey_ with good speed, thank God.

All well here. Country stupendously beautiful. Mountains covered with

snow. Rich, crisp weather." There was one drawback. The second number

had gone out to him, and the illustrations he found to be so "dreadfully

bad" that they made him "curl his legs up." They made him also more than

usually anxious in regard to a special illustration on which he set much

store, for the part he had in hand.

The first chapter of it was sent me only four days later (nearly half

the entire part, so freely his fancy was now flowing and overflowing),

with intimation for the artist: "The best subject for Browne will be at

Mrs. Pipchin's; and if he liked to do a quiet odd thing, Paul, Mrs.

Pipchin, and the Cat, by the fire, would be very good for the story. I

earnestly hope he will think it worth a little extra care. The second

subject, in case he shouldn't take a second from that same chapter, I

will shortly describe as soon as I have it clearly (to-morrow or next

day), and send it to _you_ by post." The result was not satisfactory;

but as the artist more than redeemed it in the later course of the tale,

and the present disappointment was mainly the incentive to that better

success, the mention of the failure here will be excused for what it

illustrates of Dickens himself. "I am really _distressed_ by the

illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly

wide of the mark. Good Heaven! in the commonest and most literal

construction of the text, it is all wrong. She is described as an old

lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He

ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in the corner of the

fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say what pain and vexation it is

to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred

pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book. He never could

have got that idea of Mrs. Pipchin if he had attended to the text.

Indeed I think he does better without the text; for then the notion is

made easy to him in short description, and he can't help taking it in."

He felt the disappointment more keenly, because the conception of the

grim old boarding-house keeper had taken back his thoughts to the

miseries of his own child-life, and made her, as her prototype in verity

was, a part of the terrible reality.[138] I had forgotten, until I again

read this letter of the 4th of November 1846, that he thus early

proposed to tell me that story of his boyish sufferings which a question

from myself, of some months later date, so fully elicited. He was now

hastening on with the close of his third number, to be ready for

departure to Paris.

". . . I hope to finish the number by next Tuesday or Wednesday. It is

hard writing under these bird-of-passage circumstances, but I have no

reason to complain, God knows, having come to no knot yet. . . . I hope you

will like Mrs. Pipchin's establishment. It is from the life, and I was

there--I don't suppose I was eight years old; but I remember it all as

well, and certainly understood it as well, as I do now. We should be

devilish sharp in what we do to children. I thought of that passage in

my small life, at Geneva. _Shall I leave you my life in MS. when I die?

There are some things in it that would touch you very much, and that

might go on the same shelf with the first volume of Holcroft's._"

On the Monday week after that was written he left Lausanne for Paris,

and my first letter to him there was to say that he had overwritten his

number by three pages. "I have taken out about two pages and a half," he

wrote by return from the hotel Brighton, "and the rest I must ask you to

take out with the assurance that you will satisfy me in whatever you do.

The sale, prodigious indeed! I am very thankful." Next day he wrote as

to Walter. "I see it will be best as you advise, to give that idea up;

and indeed I don't feel it would be reasonable to carry it out now. I am

far from sure it could be wholesomely done, after the interest he has

acquired. But when I have disposed of Paul (poor boy!) I will consider

the subject farther." The subject was never resumed. He was at the

opening of his admirable fourth part, when, on the 6th of December, he

wrote from the Rue de Courcelles: "Here am I, writing letters, and

delivering opinions, politico-economical and otherwise, as if there were

no undone number, and no undone Dick! Well. Cosi va il mondo (God bless

me! Italian! I beg your pardon)--and one must keep one's spirits up, if

possible, even under _Dombey_ pressure. Paul, I shall slaughter at the

end of number five. His school ought to be pretty good, but I haven't

been able to dash at it freely, yet. However, I have avoided unnecessary

dialogue so far, to avoid overwriting; and all I _have_ written is

point."

And so, in "point," it went to the close; the rich humour of its picture

of Doctor Blimber and his pupils alternating with the quaint pathos of

its picture of little Paul; the first a good-natured exposure of the

forcing-system and its fruits, as useful as the sterner revelation in

_Nickleby_ of the atrocities of Mr. Squeers, and the last even less

attractive for the sweetness and sadness of its foreshadowing of a

child's death, than for those strange images of a vague, deep

thoughtfulness, of a shrewd unconscious intellect, of mysterious small

philosophies and questionings, by which the young old-fashioned little

creature has a glamour thrown over him as he is passing away. It was

wonderfully original, this treatment of the part that thus preceded the

close of Paul's little life; and of which the first conception, as I

have shown, was an afterthought. It quite took the death itself out of

the region of pathetic commonplaces, and gave to it the proper relation

to the sorrow of the little sister that survives it. It is a fairy

vision to a piece of actual suffering; a sorrow with heaven's hues upon

it, to a sorrow with all the bitterness of earth.

The number had been finished, he had made his visit to London, and was

again in the Rue de Courcelles, when on Christmas day he sent me its

hearty old wishes, and a letter of Jeffrey's on his new story of which

the first and second part had reached him. "Many merry Christmases, many

happy new years, unbroken friendship, great accumulation of cheerful

recollections, affection on earth, and Heaven at last! . . . Is it not a

strange example of the hazard of writing in parts, that a man like

Jeffrey should form his notion of Dombey and Miss Tox on three months'

knowledge? I have asked him the same question, and advised him to keep

his eye on both of them as time rolls on.[139] I do not at heart,

however, lay much real stress on his opinion, though one is naturally

proud of awakening such sincere interest in the breast of an old man who

has so long worn the blue and yellow. . . . He certainly did some service

in his old criticisms, especially to Crabbe. And though I don't think so

highly of Crabbe as I once did (feeling a dreary want of fancy in his

poems), I think he deserved the pains-taking and conscientious tracking

with which Jeffrey followed him". . . . Six days later he described himself

sitting down to the performance of one of his greatest achievements, his

number five, "most abominably dull and stupid. I have only written a

slip, but I hope to get to work in strong earnest to-morrow. It occurred

to me on special reflection, that the first chapter should be with Paul

and Florence, and that it should leave a pleasant impression of the

little fellow being happy, before the reader is called upon to see him

die. I mean to have a genteel breaking-up at Doctor Blimber's therefore,

for the Midsummer vacation; and to show him in a little quiet light (now

dawning through the chinks of my mind), which I hope will create an

agreeable impression." Then, two days later: ". . . I am working very

slowly. You will see in the first two or three lines of the enclosed

first subject, with what idea I am ploughing along. It is difficult; but

a new way of doing it, it strikes me, and likely to be pretty."

And then, after three days more, came something of a damper to his

spirits, as he thus toiled along. He saw public allusion made to a

review that had appeared in the _Times_ of his Christmas book, and it

momentarily touched what he too truly called his morbid susceptibility

to exasperation. "I see that the 'good old Times' are again at issue

with the inimitable B. Another touch of a blunt razor on B.'s nervous

system.--Friday morning. Inimitable very mouldy and dull. Hardly able to

work. Dreamed of _Timeses_ all night. Disposed to go to New Zealand and

start a magazine." But soon he sprang up, as usual, more erect for the

moment's pressure; and after not many days I heard that the number was

as good as done. His letter was very brief, and told me that he had

worked so hard the day before (Tuesday, the 12th of January), and so

incessantly, night as well as morning, that he had breakfasted and lain

in bed till midday. "I hope I have been very successful." There was but

one small chapter more to write, in which he and his little friend were

to part company for ever; and the greater part of the night of the day

on which it was written, Thursday the 14th, he was wandering desolate

and sad about the streets of Paris. I arrived there the following

morning on my visit; and as I alighted from the malle-poste, a little

before eight o'clock, found him waiting for me at the gate of the

post-office bureau.

I left him on the 2nd of February with his writing-table in readiness

for number six; but on the 4th, enclosing me subjects for illustration,

he told me he was "not under weigh yet. Can't begin." Then, on the 7th,

his birthday, he wrote to warn me he should be late. "Could not begin

before Thursday last, and find it very difficult indeed to fall into the

new vein of the story. I see no hope of finishing before the 16th at the

earliest, in which case the steam will have to be put on for this short

month. But it can't be helped. Perhaps I shall get a rush of

inspiration. . . . I will send the chapters as I write them, and you

must not wait, of course, for me to read the end in type. To transfer to

Florence, instantly, all the previous interest, is what I am aiming at.

For that, all sorts of other points must be thrown aside in this number.

. . . We are going to dine again at the Embassy to-day--with a very ill

will on my part. All well. I hope when I write next I shall report

myself in better cue. . . . I have had a tremendous outpouring from

Jeffrey about the last part, which he thinks the best thing past,

present, or to come."[140] Three more days and I had the MS. of the

completed chapter, nearly half the number (in which as printed it stands

second, the small middle chapter having been transposed to its place).

"I have taken the most prodigious pains with it; the difficulty,

immediately after Paul's death, being very great. May you like it! My

head aches over it now (I write at one o'clock in the morning), and I

am strange to it. . . . I think I shall manage Dombey's second wife

(introduced by the Major), and the beginning of that business in his

present state of mind, very naturally and well. . . . Paul's death has

amazed Paris. All sorts of people are open-mouthed with admiration. . . .

When I have done, I'll write you _such_ a letter! Don't cut me short

in your letters just now, because I'm working hard. . . . _I_'ll make

up. . . . Snow--snow--snow--a foot thick." The day after this, came the

brief chapter which was printed as the first; and then, on the 16th,

which he had fixed as his limit for completion, the close reached me;

but I had meanwhile sent him out so much of the proof as convinced him

that he had underwritten his number by at least two pages, and

determined him to come to London. The incident has been told which soon

after closed his residence abroad, and what remained of his story was

written in England.

I shall not farther dwell upon it in any detail. It extended over the

whole of the year; and the interest and passion of it, when to himself

both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold

of him, and more powerfully affected him, than had been the case in any

of his previous writings, I think, excepting only the close of the _Old

Curiosity Shop_. Jeffrey compared Florence to little Nell, but the

differences from the outset are very marked, and it is rather in what

disunites or separates them that we seem to find the purpose aimed at.

If the one, amid much strange and grotesque violence surrounding her,

expresses the innocent, unconsciousness of childhood to such rough ways

of the world, passing unscathed as Una to her home beyond it, the other

is this character in action and resistance, a brave young resolute heart

that will _not_ be crushed, and neither sinks nor yields, but from

earth's roughest trials works out her own redemption even here. Of Edith

from the first Jeffrey judged more rightly; and, when the story was

nearly half done, expressed his opinion about her, and about the book

itself, in language that pleased Dickens for the special reason that at

the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly

short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly,

claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of

all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that

it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while

it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the

former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive

tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of

tragedy, and bringing before us the appalling struggles of a proud,

scornful, and repentant spirit." Not that she was exactly this. Edith's

worst qualities are but the perversion of what should have been her

best. A false education in her, and a tyrant passion in her husband,

make them other than Nature meant; and both show how life may run its

evil course against the higher dispensations.

As the catastrophe came in view, a nice point in the management of her

character and destiny arose. I quote from a letter of the 19th of

November, when he was busy with his fourteenth part. "Of course she

hates Carker in the most deadly degree. I have not elaborated that, now,

because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day) I have relied on

it very much for the effect of her death. But I have no question that

what you suggest will be an improvement. The strongest place to put it

in, would be the close of the chapter immediately before this last one.

I want to make the two first chapters as light as I can, but I will try

to do it, solemnly, in that place." Then came the effect of this

fourteenth number on Jeffrey; raising the question of whether the end

might not come by other means than her death, and bringing with it a

more bitter humiliation for her destroyer. While engaged on the

fifteenth (21st December) Dickens thus wrote to me: "I am thoroughly

delighted that you like what I sent. I enclose designs. Shadow-plate,

poor. But I think Mr. Dombey admirable. One of the prettiest things in

the book ought to be at the end of the chapter I am writing now. But in

Florence's marriage, and in her subsequent return to her father, I see a

brilliant opportunity. . . . Note from Jeffrey this morning, who won't

believe (positively refuses) that Edith is Carker's mistress. What do

you think of a kind of inverted Maid's Tragedy, and a tremendous scene

of her undeceiving Carker, and giving him to know that she never meant

that?" So it was done; and when he sent me the chapter in which Edith

says adieu to Florence, I had nothing but praise and pleasure to

express. "I need not say," he wrote in reply, "I can't, how delighted

and overjoyed I am by what you say and feel of it. I propose to show

Dombey _twice_ more; and in the end, leave him exactly as you describe."

The end came; and, at the last moment when correction was possible, this

note arrived. "I suddenly remember that I have forgotten Diogenes. Will

you put him in the last little chapter? After the word 'favourite' in

reference to Miss Tox, you can add, 'except with Diogenes, who is

growing old and wilful.' Or, on the last page of all, after 'and with

them two children: boy and girl' (I quote from memory), you might say

'and an old dog is generally in their company,' or to that effect. Just

what you think best."

That was on Saturday the 25th of March, 1848, and may be my last

reference to _Dombey_ until the book, in its place with the rest, finds

critical allusion when I close. But as the confidences revealed in this

chapter have dealt wholly with the leading currents of interest, there

is yet room for a word on incidental persons in the story, of whom I

have seen other so-called confidences alleged which it will be only

right to state have really no authority. And first let me say what

unquestionable evidence these characters give of the unimpaired

freshness, richness, variety, and fitness of Dickens's invention at this

time. Glorious Captain Cuttle, laying his head to the wind and fighting

through everything; his friend Jack Bunsby,[141] with a head too

ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger;

good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his

whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his

shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the

forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the

plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the

starched Dombey household so nicely appointed as to seem born for only

that; simple thoughtful old Gills and his hearty young lad of a nephew;

Mr. Toodle and his children, with the charitable grinder's decline and

fall; Miss Tox, obsequious flatterer from nothing but good-nature;

spectacled and analytic, but not unkind Miss Blimber; and the good

droning dull benevolent Doctor himself, withering even the fruits of his

well-spread dinner-table with his _It is remarkable, Mr. Feeder, that

the Romans_--"at the mention of which terrible people, their implacable

enemies, every young gentleman fastened his gaze upon the Doctor, with

an assumption of the deepest interest." So vivid and life-like were all

these people, to the very youngest of the young gentlemen, that it

became natural eagerly to seek out for them actual prototypes; but I

think I can say with some confidence of them all, that, whatever single

traits may have been taken from persons known to him (a practice with

all writers, and very specially with Dickens), only two had living

originals. His own experience of Mrs. Pipchin has been related; I had

myself some knowledge of Miss Blimber; and the Little Wooden Midshipman

did actually (perhaps does still) occupy his post of observation in

Leadenhall-street. The names that have been connected, I doubt not in

perfect good faith, with Sol Gills, Perch the messenger, and Captain

Cuttle, have certainly not more foundation than the fancy a courteous

correspondent favours me with, that the redoubtable Captain must have

sat for his portrait to Charles Lamb's blustering, loud-talking,

hook-handed Mr. Mingay. As to the amiable and excellent city-merchant

whose name has been given to Mr. Dombey, he might with the same amount

of justice or probability be supposed to have originated _Coriolanus_ or

_Timon of Athens_.

FOOTNOTES:

[136] "He had already laid his hand upon the bell-rope to convey his

usual summons to Richards, when his eye fell upon a writing-desk,

belonging to his deceased wife, which had been taken, among other

things, from a cabinet in her chamber. It was not the first time that

his eye had lighted on it. He carried the key in his pocket; and he

brought it to his table and opened it now--having previously locked the

room door--with a well accustomed hand.

"From beneath a heap of torn and cancelled scraps of paper, he took one

letter that remained entire. Involuntarily holding his breath as he

opened this document, and 'bating in the stealthy action something of

his arrogant demeanour, he sat down, resting his head upon one hand, and

read it through.

"He read it slowly and attentively, and with a nice particularity to

every syllable. Otherwise than as his great deliberation seemed

unnatural, and perhaps the result of an effort equally great, he allowed

no sign of emotion to escape him. When he had read it through, he folded

and refolded it slowly several times, and tore it carefully into

fragments. Checking his hand in the act of throwing these away, he put

them in his pocket, as if unwilling to trust them even to the chances of

being reunited and deciphered; and instead of ringing, as usual, for

little Paul, he sat solitary all the evening in his cheerless room."

From the original MS. of _Dombey and Son_.

[137] "I will now explain that 'Oliver Twist,' the ----, the ----, etc."

(naming books by another writer), "were produced in an entirely

different manner from what would be considered as the usual course; _for

I, the Artist, suggested to the Authors of those works the original

idea, or subject_, for them to write out--furnishing, at the same time,

the principal characters and the scenes. And then, as the tale had to be

produced in monthly parts, the _Writer_, or _Author_, and the Artist,

had every month to arrange and settle what scenes, or subjects, and

characters were to be introduced, and the Author had to _weave_ in such

scenes as I wished to represent."--_The Artist and the Author_, by

George Cruikshank, p. 15. (Bell & Daldy: 1872.) The italics are Mr.

Cruikshank's own.

[138] I take, from his paper of notes for the number, the various names,

beginning with that of her real prototype, out of which the name

selected came to him at last. "Mrs. Roylance . . . House at the seaside.

Mrs. Wrychin. Mrs. Tipchin. Mrs. Alchin. Mrs. Somching. Mrs. Pipchin."

See Vol. I. p. 55.

[139] Some passages may be subjoined from the letter, as it does not

appear among those printed by Lord Cockburn. "EDINBURGH, _14th

December_, '46. My dear, dear Dickens!--and dearer every day, as you

every day give me more pleasure and do me more good! You do not wonder

at this style? for you know that I have been _in love with you_, ever

since Nelly! and I do not care now who knows it. . . . The Dombeys, my dear

D! how can I thank you enough for them! The truth, and the delicacy, and

the softness and depth of the pathos in that opening death-scene, could

only come from one hand; and the exquisite taste which spares all

details, and breaks off just when the effect is at its height, is wholly

yours. But it is Florence on whom my hopes chiefly repose; and in her I

see the promise of another Nelly! though reserved, I hope, for a happier

fate, and destined to let us see what a _grown-up_ female angel is like.

I expect great things, too, from Walter, who begins charmingly, and will

be still better I fancy than young Nickleby, to whom as yet he bears

most resemblance. I have good hopes too of Susan Nipper, who I think has

great capabilities, and whom I trust you do not mean to drop. Dombey is

rather too hateful, and strikes me as a mitigated Jonas, without his

brutal coarseness and ruffian ferocity. I am quite in the dark as to

what you mean to make of Paul, but shall watch his development with

interest. About Miss Tox, and her Major, and the Chicks, perhaps I do

not care enough. But you know I always grudge the exquisite painting you

waste on such portraits. I love the Captain, tho', and his hook, as much

as you can wish; and look forward to the future appearances of Carker

Junior, with expectations which I know will not be disappointed. . . ."

[140] "EDINBURGH, _31st January_, 1847. Oh, my dear, dear Dickens! what

a No. 5 you have now given us! I have so cried and sobbed over it last

night, and again this morning; and felt my heart purified by those

tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them; and I never

can bless and love you enough. Since the divine Nelly was found dead on

her humble couch, beneath the snow and the ivy, there has been nothing

like the actual dying of that sweet Paul, in the summer sunshine of that

lofty room. And the long vista that leads us so gently and sadly, and

yet so gracefully and winningly, to the plain consummation! Every trait

so true, and so touching--and yet lightened by the fearless innocence

which goes _playfully_ to the brink of the grave, and that pure

affection which bears the unstained spirit, on its soft and lambent

flash, at once to its source in eternity.". . . In the same letter he told

him of his having been reading the _Battle of Life_ again, charmed with

its sweet writing and generous sentiments.

[141] "_Isn't Bunsby good_?" I heard Lord Denman call out, with

unmistakable glee and enjoyment, over Talfourd's table--I think to Sir

Edward Ryan; one of the few survivors of that pleasant dinner party of

May 1847.

CHAPTER XVII.

SPLENDID STROLLING.

1847-1852.

Birth of Fifth Son--Theatrical Benefit for

Leigh Hunt--Troubles at Rehearsals--Leigh

Hunt's Account--Receipts and Expenses--Anecdote

of Macready--At Broadstairs--Appearance of Mrs.

Gamp--Fancy for a Jeu-d'esprit--Mrs. Gamp at

the Play--Mrs. Gamp with the

Strollers--Confidences with Mrs. Harris--Leigh

Hunt and Poole--Ticklish Society--Mrs. Gamp's

Cabman--George Cruikshank--Mr. Wilson the

Hair-dresser--In the Sweedlepipes

Line--Fatigues of a Powder Ball--C. D.'s

Moustache and Whiskers--John Leech--Mark

Lemon--Douglas Jerrold--Dudley Costello--Frank

Stone--Augustus Egg--J. F.--Cruikshank's

_Bottle_--Profits of _Dombey_--Design for

Edition of Old Novelists--Street-music at

Broadstairs--Margate Theatre--Public

Meetings--Book Friends--Friendly Reception in

Glasgow--Scott-monument--Purchase of

Shakespeare's House--Amateur

Theatricals--Origin of Guild of Literature and

Art--Travelling Theatre and Scenes--Success of

Comedy and Farce--Troubles of a Manager--Acting

under Difficulties--Scenery overturned--Dinner

at Manchester.

DEVONSHIRE TERRACE remaining still in possession of Sir James Duke, a

house was taken in Chester-place, Regent's-park, where, on the 18th of

April, his fifth son, to whom he gave the name of Sydney Smith

Haldimand, was born.[142] Exactly a month before, we had attended

together the funeral, at Highgate, of his publisher Mr. William Hall,

his old regard for whom had survived the recent temporary cloud, and

with whom he had the association as well of his first success, as of

much kindly intercourse not forgotten at this sad time. Of the summer

months that followed, the greater part was passed by him at Brighton or

Broadstairs; and the chief employment of his leisure, in the intervals

of _Dombey_, was the management of an enterprise originating in the

success of our private play, of which the design was to benefit a great

man of letters.

The purpose and the name had hardly been announced, when, with the

statesmanlike attention to literature and its followers for which Lord

John Russell has been eccentric among English politicians, a civil-list

pension of two hundred a year was granted to Leigh Hunt; but though this

modified our plan so far as to strike out of it performances meant to be

given in London, so much was still thought necessary as might clear off

past liabilities, and enable one of the most genuine of writers better

to enjoy the easier future that had at last been opened to him.

Reserving therefore anything realized beyond a certain sum for a

dramatic author of merit, Mr. John Poole, to whom help had become also

important, it was proposed to give, on Leigh Hunt's behalf, two

representations of Ben Jonson's comedy, one at Manchester and the other

at Liverpool, to be varied by different farces in each place; and with a

prologue of Talfourd's which Dickens was to deliver in Manchester, while

a similar address by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was to be spoken by me in

Liverpool. Among the artists and writers associated in the scheme were

Mr. Frank Stone, Mr. Augustus Egg, Mr. John Leech, and Mr. George

Cruikshank; Mr. Douglas Jerrold, Mr. Mark Lemon, Mr. Dudley Costello,

and Mr. George Henry Lewes; the general management and supreme control

being given to Dickens.

Leading men in both cities contributed largely to the design, and my

friend Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester has lately sent me some

letters not more characteristic of the energy of Dickens in regard to it

than of the eagerness of every one addressed to give what help they

could. Making personal mention of his fellow-sharers in the enterprise

he describes the troop, in one of those letters, as "the most easily

governable company of actors on earth;" and to this he had doubtless

brought them, but not very easily. One or two of his managerial troubles

at rehearsals remain on record in letters to myself, and may give

amusement still. Comedy and farces are referred to indiscriminately, but

the farces were the most recurring plague. "Good Heaven! I find that A.

hasn't twelve words, and I am in hourly expectation of rebellion!"--"You

were right about the green baize, that it would certainly muffle the

voices; and some of our actors, by Jove, haven't too much of that

commodity at the best."--"B. shocked me so much the other night by a

restless, stupid movement of his hands in his first scene with you, that

I took a turn of an hour with him yesterday morning, and I hope quieted

his nerves a little."--"I made a desperate effort to get C. to give up

his part. Yet in spite of all the trouble he gives me I am sorry for

him, he is so evidently hurt by his own sense of not doing well. He

clutched the part, however, tenaciously; and three weary times we

dragged through it last night."--"That infernal E. forgets

everything."--"I plainly see that F. when nervous, which he is sure to

be, loses his memory. Moreover his asides are inaudible, even at Miss

Kelly's; and as regularly as I stop him to say them again, he exclaims

(with a face of agony) that 'he'll speak loud on the night,' as if

anybody ever did without doing it always!"--"G. not born for it at all,

and too innately conceited, I much fear, to do anything well. I thought

him better last night, but I would as soon laugh at a kitchen

poker."--"Fancy H. ten days after the casting of that farce, wanting

F.'s part therein! Having himself an excellent old man in it already,

and a quite admirable part in the other farce." From which it will

appear that my friend's office was not a sinecure, and that he was not,

as few amateur-managers have ever been, without the experiences of Peter

Quince. Fewer still, I suspect, have fought through them with such

perfect success, for the company turned out at last would have done

credit to any enterprise. They deserved the term applied to them by

Maclise, who had invented it first for Macready, on his being driven to

"star" in the provinces when his managements in London closed. They were

"splendid strollers."[143]

On Monday the 26th July we played at Manchester, and on Wednesday the

28th at Liverpool; the comedy being followed on the first night by _A

Good Night's Rest_ and _Turning the Tables_, and on the second by

_Comfortable Lodgings, or Paris in 1750_; and the receipts being, on the

first night L440 12_s._, and on the second, L463 8_s._ 6_d._ But though

the married members of the company who took their wives defrayed that

part of the cost, and every one who acted paid three pounds ten to the

benefit-fund for his hotel charges, the expenses were necessarily so

great that the profit was reduced to four hundred guineas, and,

handsomely as this realised the design, expectations had been raised to

five hundred. There was just that shade of disappointment, therefore,

when, shortly after we came back and Dickens had returned to

Broadstairs, I was startled by a letter from him. On the 3rd of August

he had written: "All well. Children" (who had been going through

whooping cough) "immensely improved. Business arising out of the late

blaze of triumph, worse than ever." Then came what startled me, the very

next day. As if his business were not enough, it had occurred to him

that he might add the much longed-for hundred pounds to the benefit-fund

by a little jeu d'esprit in form of a history of the trip, to be

published with illustrations from the artists; and his notion was to

write it in the character of Mrs. Gamp. It was to be, in the phraseology

of that notorious woman, a new "Piljians Projiss;" and was to bear upon

the title page its description as an Account of a late Expedition into

the North, for an Amateur Theatrical Benefit, written by Mrs. Gamp (who

was an eye-witness), Inscribed to Mrs. Harris, Edited by Charles

Dickens, and published, with illustrations on wood by so and so, in aid

of the Benefit-fund. "What do you think of this idea for it? The

argument would be, that Mrs. Gamp, being on the eve of an excursion to

Margate as a relief from her professional fatigues, comes to the

knowledge of the intended excursion of our party; hears that several of

the ladies concerned are in an interesting situation; and decides to

accompany the party unbeknown, in a second-class carriage--'in case.'

There, she finds a gentleman from the Strand in a checked suit, who is

going down with the wigs"--the theatrical hair-dresser employed on these

occasions, Mr. Wilson, had eccentric points of character that were a

fund of infinite mirth to Dickens--"and to his politeness Mrs. Gamp is

indebted for much support and countenance during the excursion. She will

describe the whole thing in her own manner: sitting, in each place of

performance, in the orchestra, next the gentleman who plays the

kettle-drums. She gives her critical opinion of Ben Jonson as a literary

character, and refers to the different members of the party, in the

course of her description of the trip: having always an invincible

animosity towards Jerrold, for Caudle reasons. She addresses herself,

generally, to Mrs. Harris, to whom the book is dedicated,--but is

discursive. Amount of matter, half a sheet of _Dombey_: may be a page or

so more, but not less." Alas! it never arrived at even that small size,

but perished prematurely, as I feared it would, from failure of the

artists to furnish needful nourishment. Of course it could not live

alone. Without suitable illustration it must have lost its point and

pleasantry. "Mac will make a little garland of the ladies for the

title-page. Egg and Stone will themselves originate something fanciful,

and I will settle with Cruikshank and Leech. I have no doubt the little

thing will be droll and attractive." So it certainly would have been, if

the Thanes of art had not fallen from him; but on their desertion it had

to be abandoned after the first few pages were written. They were placed

at my disposal then; and, though the little jest has lost much of its

flavour now, I cannot find it in my heart to omit them here. There are

so many friends of Mrs. Gamp who will rejoice at this unexpected visit

from her!

"I. MRS. GAMP'S ACCOUNT OF HER CONNEXION WITH THIS AFFAIR.

"Which Mrs. Harris's own words to me, was these: 'Sairey Gamp,' she

says, 'why not go to Margate? Srimps,' says that dear creetur, 'is to

your liking, Sairey; why not go to Margate for a week, bring your

constitootion up with srimps, and come back to them loving arts as knows

and wallies of you, blooming? Sairey,' Mrs. Harris says, 'you are but

poorly. Don't denige it, Mrs. Gamp, for books is in your looks. You must

have rest. Your mind,' she says, 'is too strong for you; it gets you

down and treads upon you, Sairey. It is useless to disguige the

fact--the blade is a wearing out the sheets.' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to

her, 'I could not undertake to say, and I will not deceive you ma'am,

that I am the woman I could wish to be. The time of worrit as I had with

Mrs. Colliber, the baker's lady, which was so bad in her mind with her

first, that she would not so much as look at bottled stout, and kept to

gruel through the month, has agued me, Mrs. Harris. But ma'am,' I says

to her, 'talk not of Margate, for if I do go anywheres, it is elsewheres

and not there.' 'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, solemn, 'whence this

mystery? If I have ever deceived the hardest-working, soberest, and best

of women, which her name is well beknown is S. Gamp Midwife Kingsgate

Street High Holborn, mention it. If not,' says Mrs. Harris, with the

tears a standing in her eyes, 'reweal your intentions.' 'Yes, Mrs.

Harris,' I says, 'I will. Well I knows you Mrs. Harris; well you knows

me; well we both knows wot the characters of one another is. Mrs.

Harris then,' I says, 'I _have_ heerd as there _is_ a expedition going

down to Manjestir and Liverspool, a play-acting. If I goes anywheres for

change, it is along with that.' Mrs. Harris clasps her hands, and drops

into a chair, as if her time was come--which I know'd it couldn't be, by

rights, for six weeks odd. 'And have I lived to hear,' she says, 'of

Sairey Gamp, as always kept hersef respectable, in company with

play-actors!' 'Mrs. Harris,' I says to her, 'be not alarmed--not reg'lar

play-actors--hammertoors.' 'Thank Evans!' says Mrs. Harris, and bustiges

into a flood of tears.

"When the sweet creetur had compoged hersef (which a sip of brandy and

water warm, and sugared pleasant, with a little nutmeg did it), I

proceeds in these words. 'Mrs. Harris, I am told as these hammertoors

are litter'ry and artistickle.' 'Sairey,' says that best of wimmin, with

a shiver and a slight relasp, 'go on, it might be worse.' 'I likewise

hears,' I says to her, 'that they're agoin play-acting, for the benefit

of two litter'ry men; one as has had his wrongs a long time ago, and has

got his rights at last, and one as has made a many people merry in his

time, but is very dull and sick and lonely his own sef, indeed.'

'Sairey,' says Mrs. Harris, 'you're an Inglish woman, and that's no

business of you'rn.'

"'No, Mrs. Harris,' I says, 'that's very true; I hope I knows my dooty

and my country. But,' I says, 'I am informed as there is Ladies in this

party, and that half a dozen of 'em, if not more, is in various stages

of a interesting state. Mrs. Harris, you and me well knows what Ingeins

often does. If I accompanies this expedition, unbeknown and second

cladge, may I not combine my calling with change of air, and prove a

service to my feller creeturs?' 'Sairey,' was Mrs. Harris's reply, 'you

was born to be a blessing to your sex, and bring 'em through it. Good go

with you! But keep your distance till called in, Lord bless you Mrs.

Gamp; for people is known by the company they keeps, and litterary and

artistickle society might be the ruin of you before you was aware, with

your best customers, both sick and monthly, if they took a pride in

themselves.'

"II. MRS. GAMP IS DESCRIPTIVE.

"The number of the cab had a seven in it I think, and a ought I

know--and if this should meet his eye (which it was a black 'un, new

done, that he saw with; the other was tied up), I give him warning that

he'd better take that umbereller and patten to the Hackney-coach Office

before he repents it. He was a young man in a weskit with sleeves to it

and strings behind, and needn't flatter himsef with a suppogition of

escape, as I gave this description of him to the Police the moment I

found he had drove off with my property; and if he thinks there an't

laws enough he's much mistook--I tell him that:

"I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that

morning with my bundle on my arm and one patten in my hand, you might

have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a

lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about

like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman

with a large shirt-collar and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr.

Sweedlepipes's hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I

wouldn't have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round

a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing,

'Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are _you_ up to!' I didn't know him from a man

(except by his clothes); but I says faintly, 'If you're a Christian man,

show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me

put in a carriage, or I shall drop!' Which he kindly did, in a cheerful

kind of a way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see,

making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under

the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent,

that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried

as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along

with a individgle--the politest as ever I see--in a shepherd's plaid

suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a

trembling through nervousness worse than a aspian leaf.

"'I'm wery appy, ma'am,' he says--the politest vice as ever I

heerd!--'to go down with a lady belonging to our party.'

"'Our party, sir!' I says.

"'Yes, m'am,' he says, 'I'm Mr. Wilson. I'm going down with the wigs.'

"Mrs. Harris, wen he said he was agoing down with the wigs, such was my

state of confugion and worrit that I thought he must be connected with

the Government in some ways or another, but directly moment he explains

himsef, for he says:

"'There's not a theatre in London worth mentioning that I don't attend

punctually. There's five-and-twenty wigs in these boxes, ma'am,' he

says, a pinting towards a heap of luggage, 'as was worn at the Queen's

Fancy Ball. There's a black wig, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by

Garrick; there's a red one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kean;

there's a brown one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was worn by Kemble; there's a

yellow one, ma'am,' he says, 'as was made for Cooke; there's a grey one,

ma'am,' he says, 'as I measured Mr. Young for, mysef; and there's a

white one, ma'am, that Mr. Macready went mad in. There's a flaxen one as

was got up express for Jenny Lind the night she came out at the Italian

Opera. It was very much applauded was that wig, ma'am, through the

evening. It had a great reception. The audience broke out, the moment

they see it.'

"'Are you in Mr. Sweedlepipes's line, sir?' I says.

"'Which is that, ma'am?' he says--the softest and genteelest vice I ever

heerd, I do declare, Mrs. Harris!

"'Hair-dressing,' I says.

"'Yes, ma'am,' he replies, 'I have that honour. Do you see this, ma'am?'

he says, holding up his right hand.

"'I never see such a trembling,' I says to him. And I never did!

"'All along of Her Majesty's Costume Ball, ma'am,' he says. 'The

excitement did it. Two hundred and fifty-seven ladies of the first rank

and fashion had their heads got up on that occasion by this hand, and my

t'other one. I was at it eight-and-forty hours on my feet, ma'am,

without rest. It was a Powder ball, ma'am. We have a Powder piece at

Liverpool. Have I not the pleasure,' he says, looking at me curious,

'of addressing Mrs. Gamp?'

"'Gamp I am, sir,' I replies. 'Both by name and natur.'

"'Would you like to see your beeograffer's moustache and wiskers,

ma'am?' he says. 'I've got 'em in this box.'

"'Drat my beeograffer, sir,' I says, 'he has given me no region to wish

to know anythink about him.'

"'Oh, Missus Gamp, I ask your parden'--I never see such a polite man,

Mrs. Harris! 'P'raps,' he says, 'if you're not of the party, you don't

know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!'

"'No, Sir,' I says, 'I don't, indeed.'

"'Why, ma'am,' he says, a wisperin', 'that was George, ma'am.'

"'What George, sir? I don't know no George,' says I.

"'The great George, ma'am,' says he. 'The Crookshanks.'

"If you'll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turns my head, and see the wery

man a making picturs of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! while

another of 'em--a tall, slim, melancolly gent, with dark hair and a bage

vice--looks over his shoulder, with his head o' one side as if he

understood the subject, and cooly says, '_I_'ve draw'd her several

times--in Punch,' he says too! The owdacious wretch!

"'Which I never touches, Mr. Wilson,' I remarks out loud--I couldn't

have helped it, Mrs. Harris, if you had took my life for it!--'which I

never touches, Mr. Wilson, on account of the lemon!'

"'Hush!' says Mr. Wilson. 'There he is!'

"I only see a fat gentleman with curly black hair and a merry face, a

standing on the platform rubbing his two hands over one another, as if

he was washing of 'em, and shaking his head and shoulders wery much; and

I was a wondering wot Mr. Wilson meant, wen he says, 'There's Dougladge,

Mrs. Gamp!' he says. 'There's him as wrote the life of Mrs. Caudle!'

"Mrs. Harris, wen I see that little willain bodily before me, it give me

such a turn that I was all in a tremble. If I hadn't lost my umbereller

in the cab, I must have done him a injury with it! Oh the bragian little

traitor! right among the ladies, Mrs. Harris; looking his wickedest and

deceitfullest of eyes while he was a talking to 'em; laughing at his own

jokes as loud as you please; holding his hat in one hand to cool

his-sef, and tossing back his iron-grey mop of a head of hair with the

other, as if it was so much shavings--there, Mrs. Harris, I see him,

getting encouragement from the pretty delooded creeturs, which never

know'd that sweet saint, Mrs. C, as I did, and being treated with as

much confidence as if he'd never wiolated none of the domestic ties, and

never showed up nothing! Oh the aggrawation of that Dougladge! Mrs.

Harris, if I hadn't apologiged to Mr. Wilson, and put a little bottle to

my lips which was in my pocket for the journey, and which it is very

rare indeed I have about me, I could not have abared the sight of

him--there, Mrs. Harris! I could not!--I must have tore him, or have

give way and fainted.

"While the bell was a ringing, and the luggage of the hammertoors in

great confugion--all a litter'ry indeed--was handled up, Mr. Wilson

demeens his-sef politer than ever. 'That,' he says, 'Mrs. Gamp,' a

pinting to a officer-looking gentleman, that a lady with a little basket

was a taking care on, 'is another of our party. He's a author

too--continivally going up the walley of the Muses, Mrs. Gamp. There,'

he says, alluding to a fine looking, portly gentleman, with a face like

a amiable full moon, and a short mild gent, with a pleasant smile, 'is

two more of our artists, Mrs G, well beknowed at the Royal Academy, as

sure as stones is stones, and eggs is eggs. This resolute gent,' he

says, 'a coming along here as is aperrently going to take the railways

by storm--him with the tight legs, and his weskit very much buttoned,

and his mouth very much shut, and his coat a flying open, and his heels

a giving it to the platform, is a cricket and beeograffer, and our

principal tragegian.' 'But who,' says I, when the bell had left off, and

the train had begun to move, 'who, Mr. Wilson, is the wild gent in the

prespiration, that's been a tearing up and down all this time with a

great box of papers under his arm, a talking to everybody wery

indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful?' 'Why?' says Mr. Wilson,

with a smile. 'Because, sir,' I says, 'he's being left behind.' 'Good

God!' cries Mr. Wilson, turning pale and putting out his head, 'it's

_your_ beeograffer--the Manager--and he has got the money, Mrs. Gamp!'

Hous'ever, some one chucked him into the train and we went off. At the

first shreek of the whistle, Mrs. Harris, I turned white, for I had took

notice of some of them dear creeturs as was the cause of my being in

company, and I know'd the danger that--but Mr. Wilson, which is a

married man, puts his hand on mine, and says, 'Mrs. Gamp, calm yourself;

it's only the Ingein.'"

Of those of the party with whom these humorous liberties were taken

there are only two now living to complain of their friendly

caricaturist, and Mr. Cruikshank will perhaps join me in a frank

forgiveness not the less heartily for the kind words about himself that

reached me from Broadstairs not many days after Mrs. Gamp. "At

Canterbury yesterday" (2nd of September) "I bought George Cruikshank's

_Bottle_. I think it very powerful indeed: the two last plates most

admirable, except that the boy and girl in the very last are too young,

and the girl more like a circus-phenomenon than that no-phenomenon she

is intended to represent. I question, however, whether anybody else

living could have done it so well. There is a woman in the last plate

but one, garrulous about the murder, with a child in her arms, that is

as good as Hogarth. Also, the man who is stooping down, looking at the

body. The philosophy of the thing, as a great lesson, I think all wrong;

because to be striking, and original too, the drinking should have begun

in sorrow, or poverty, or ignorance--the three things in which, in its

awful aspect, it _does_ begin. The design would then have been a

double-handed sword--but too 'radical' for good old George, I suppose."

The same letter made mention of other matters of interest. His accounts

for the first half-year of _Dombey_ were so much in excess of what had

been expected from the new publishing arrangements, that from this date

all embarrassments connected with money were brought to a close. His

future profits varied of course with his varying sales, but there was

always enough, and savings were now to begin. "The profits of the

half-year are brilliant. Deducting the hundred pounds a month paid six

times, I have still to receive two thousand two hundred and twenty

pounds, which I think is tidy. Don't you? . . . Stone is still here, and I

lamed his foot by walking him seventeen miles the day before yesterday;

but otherwise he flourisheth. . . . Why don't you bring down a

carpet-bag-full of books, and take possession of the drawing-room all

the morning? My opinion is that Goldsmith would die more easy by the

seaside. Charley and Walley have been taken to school this morning in

high spirits, and at London Bridge will be folded in the arms of

Blimber. The Government is about to issue a Sanitary commission, and

Lord John, I am right well pleased to say, has appointed Henry Austin

secretary." Mr. Austin, who afterwards held the same office under the

Sanitary act, had married his youngest sister Letitia; and of his two

youngest brothers I may add that Alfred, also a civil-engineer, became

one of the sanitary inspectors, and that Augustus was now placed in a

city employment by Mr. Thomas Chapman, which after a little time he

surrendered, and then found his way to America.

The next Broadstairs letter (5th of September) resumed the subject of

Goldsmith, whose life I was then bringing nearly to completion.

"Supposing your _Goldsmith_ made a general sensation, what should you

think of doing a cheap edition of his works? I have an idea that we

might do some things of that sort with considerable effect. There is

really no edition of the great British novelists in a handy nice form,

and would it not be a likely move to do it with some attractive feature

that could not be given to it by the Teggs and such people? Supposing

one wrote an essay on Fielding for instance, and another on Smollett,

and another on Sterne, recalling how one read them as a child (no one

read them younger than I, I think;) and how one gradually grew up into a

different knowledge of them, and so forth--would it not be interesting

to many people? I should like to know if you descry anything in this. It

is one of the dim notions fluctuating within me.[144]. . . The profits,

brave indeed, are four hundred pounds more than the utmost I

expected. . . . The same yearnings have been mine, in reference to the

Praslin business. It is pretty clear to me, for one thing, that the

Duchess was one of the most uncomfortable women in the world, and that

it would have been hard work for anybody to have got on with her. It is

strange to see a bloody reflection of our friends Eugene Sue and Dumas

in the whole melodrama. Don't you think so . . . remembering what we often

said of the canker at the root of all that Paris life? I dreamed of you,

in a wild manner, all last night. . . . A sea fog here, which prevents

one's seeing the low-water mark. A circus on the cliff to the right, and

of course I have a box to-night! Deep slowness in the inimitable's

brain. A shipwreck on the Goodwin sands last Sunday, which WALLY, with

a hawk's eye, SAW GO DOWN: for which assertion, subsequently confirmed

and proved, he was horribly maltreated at the time."

Devonshire-terrace meanwhile had been left by his tenant; and coming up

joyfully himself to take possession, he brought for completion in his

old home an important chapter of _Dombey_. On the way he lost his

portmanteau, but "Thank God! the MS. of the chapter wasn't in it.

Whenever I travel, and have anything of that valuable article, I always

carry it in my pocket."[145] He had begun at this time to find

difficulties in writing at Broadstairs, of which he told me on his

return. "Vagrant music is getting to that height here, and is so

impossible to be escaped from, that I fear Broadstairs and I must part

company in time to come. Unless it pours of rain, I cannot write

half-an-hour without the most excruciating organs, fiddles, bells, or

glee-singers. There is a violin of the most torturing kind under the

window now (time, ten in the morning) and an Italian box of music on the

steps--both in full blast." He closed with a mention of improvements in

the Margate theatre since his memorable last visit. In the past two

years it had been managed by a son of the great comedian, Dowton, with

whose name it is pleasant to connect this note. "We went to the

manager's benefit on Wednesday" (10th of September): "_As You Like It_

really very well done, and a most excellent house. Mr. Dowton delivered

a sensible and modest kind of speech on the occasion, setting forth his

conviction that a means of instruction and entertainment possessing such

a literature as the stage in England, could not pass away; and, that

what inspired great minds, and delighted great men, two thousand years

ago, and did the same in Shakespeare's day, must have within itself a

principle of life superior to the whim and fashion of the hour. And with

that, and with cheers, he retired. He really seems a most respectable

man, and he has cleared out this dust-hole of a theatre into something

like decency."

He was to be in London at the end of the month: but I had from him

meanwhile his preface[146] for his first completed book in the popular

edition (_Pickwick_ being now issued in that form, with an illustration

by Leslie); and sending me shortly after (12th of Sept.) the first few

slips of the story of the _Haunted Man_ proposed for his next Christmas

book, he told me he must finish it in less than a month if it was to be

done at all, _Dombey_ having now become very importunate. This prepared

me for his letter of a week's later date. "Have been at work all day,

and am seedy in consequence. _Dombey_ takes so much time, and requires

to be so carefully done, that I really begin to have serious doubts

whether it is wise to go on with the Christmas book. Your kind help is

invoked. What do you think? Would there be any distinctly bad effect in

holding this idea over for another twelvemonth? saying nothing whatever

till November; and then announcing in the _Dombey_ that its occupation

of my entire time prevents the continuance of the Christmas series until

next year, when it is proposed to be renewed. There might not be

anything in that but a possibility of an extra lift for the little book

when it did come--eh? On the other hand, I am very loath to lose the

money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I

ought to fill. In short I am (forgive the expression) BLOWED if I know

what to do. I am a literary Kitely--and you ought to sympathize and

help. If I had no _Dombey_, I could write and finish the story with the

bloom on--but there's the rub. . . . Which unfamiliar quotation reminds me

of a Shakspearian (put an e before the s; I like it much better)

speculation of mine. What do you say to 'take arms against a sea of

troubles' having been originally written 'make arms,' which is the

action of swimming. It would get rid of a horrible grievance in the

figure, and make it plain and apt. I think of setting up a claim to live

in The House at Stratford, rent-free, on the strength of this

suggestion. You are not to suppose that I am anything but disconcerted

to-day, in the agitation of my soul concerning Christmas; but I have

been brooding, like Dombey himself, over _Dombey_ these two days, until

I really can't afford to be depressed." To his Shakespearian suggestion

I replied that it would hardly give him the claim he thought of setting

up, for that swimming through your troubles would not be "opposing"

them. And upon the other point I had no doubt of the wisdom of delay.

The result was that the Christmas story was laid aside until the

following year.

The year's closing incidents were his chairmanship at a meeting of the

Leeds Mechanics' Society on the 1st of December, and his opening of the

Glasgow Athenaeum on the 28th; where, to immense assemblages in

both,[147] he contrasted the obstinacy and cruelty of the Power of

ignorance with the docility and gentleness of the Power of knowledge;

pointed the use of popular institutes in supplementing what is learnt

first in life, by the later education for its employments and equipment

for its domesticities and virtues, which the grown person needs from day

to day as much as the child its reading and writing; and he closed at

Glasgow with allusion to a bazaar set on foot by the ladies of the city,

under patronage of the Queen, for adding books to its Athenaeum library.

"We never tire of the friendships we form with books," he said, "and

here they will possess the added charm of association with their

donors. Some neighbouring Glasgow widow will be mistaken for that

remoter one whom Sir Roger de Coverley could not forget; Sophia's muff

will be seen and loved, by another than Tom Jones, going down the

High-street some winter day; and the grateful students of a library thus

filled will be apt, as to the fair ones who have helped to people it, to

couple them in their thoughts with Principles of the Population and

Additions to the History of Europe, by an author of older date than

Sheriff Alison." At which no one laughed so loudly as the Sheriff

himself, who had cordially received Dickens as his guest, and stood with

him on the platform.

On the last day but one of the old year he wrote to me from Edinburgh.

"We came over this afternoon, leaving Glasgow at one o'clock. Alison

lives in style in a handsome country house out of Glasgow, and is a

capital fellow, with an agreeable wife, nice little daughter, cheerful

niece, all things pleasant in his household. I went over the prison and

lunatic asylum with him yesterday;[148] at the Lord Provost's had

gorgeous state-lunch with the Town Council; and was entertained at a

great dinner-party at night. Unbounded hospitality and enthoozymoozy the

order of the day, and I have never been more heartily received anywhere,

or enjoyed myself more completely. The great chemist, Gregory, who spoke

at the meeting, returned with us to Edinburgh to-day, and gave me many

new lights on the road regarding the extraordinary pains Macaulay seems

for years to have taken to make himself disagreeable and disliked here.

No one else, on that side, would have had the remotest chance of being

unseated at the last election; and, though Gregory voted for him, I

thought he seemed quite as well pleased as anybody else that he didn't

come in. . . . I am sorry to report the Scott Monument a failure. It is

like the spire of a Gothic church taken off and stuck in the ground." On

the first day of 1848, still in Edinburgh, he wrote again: "Jeffrey, who

is obliged to hold a kind of morning court in his own study during the

holidays, came up yesterday in great consternation, to tell me that a

person had just been to make and sign a declaration of bankruptcy; and

that on looking at the signature he saw it was James Sheridan Knowles.

He immediately sent after, and spoke with him; and of what passed I am

eager to talk with you." The talk will bring back the main subject of

this chapter, from which another kind of strolling has led me away; for

its results were other amateur performances, of which the object was to

benefit Knowles.

This was the year when a committee had been formed for the purchase and

preservation of Shakespeare's house at Stratford, and the performances

in question took the form of contributions to the endowment of a

curatorship to be held by the author of _Virginius_ and the _Hunchback_.

The endowment was abandoned upon the town and council of Stratford

finally (and very properly) taking charge of the house; but the sum

realised was not withdrawn from the object really desired, and one of

the finest of dramatists profited yet more largely by it than Leigh Hunt

did by the former enterprise. It may be proper to remark also, that,

like Leigh Hunt, Knowles received soon after, through Lord John Russell,

the same liberal pension; and that smaller claims to which attention had

been similarly drawn were not forgotten, Mr. Poole, after much kind help

from the Bounty Fund, being in 1850 placed on the Civil List for half

the amount by the same minister and friend of letters.

Dickens threw himself into the new scheme with all his old energy;[149]

and prefatory mention may be made of our difficulty in selection of a

suitable play to alternate with our old Ben Jonson. The _Alchemist_ had

been such a favourite with some of us, that, before finally laying it

aside, we went through two or three rehearsals, in which I recollect

thinking Dickens's Sir Epicure Mammon as good as anything he had done;

and now the same trouble, with the same result, arising from a vain

desire to please everybody, was taken successively with Beaumont and

Fletcher's _Beggar's Bush_, and Goldsmith's _Good Natured Man_, with

Jerrold's characteristic drama of the _Rent Day_, and Bulwer's masterly

comedy of _Money_. Choice was at last made of Shakespeare's _Merry

Wives_, in which Lemon played Falstaff, I took again the jealous husband

as in Jonson's play, and Dickens was Justice Shallow; to which was added

a farce, _Love, Law, and Physick_, in which Dickens took the part he had

acted long ago, before his days of authorship; and, besides the

professional actresses engaged, we had for our Dame Quickly the lady to

whom the world owes incomparably the best _Concordance_ to Shakespeare

that has ever been published, Mrs. Cowden Clarke. The success was

undoubtedly very great. At Manchester, Liverpool, and Edinburgh there

were single representations; but Birmingham and Glasgow had each two

nights, and two were given at the Haymarket, on one of which the Queen

and Prince were present. The gross receipts from the nine performances,

before the necessary large deductions for London and local charges, were

two thousand five hundred and fifty-one pounds and eightpence.[150] The

first representation was in London on the 15th of April, the last in

Glasgow on the 20th of July, and everywhere Dickens was the leading

figure. In the enjoyment as in the labour he was first. His animal

spirits, unresting and supreme, were the attraction of rehearsal at

morning, and of the stage at night. At the quiet early dinner, and the

more jovial unrestrained supper, where all engaged were assembled daily,

his was the brightest face, the lightest step, the pleasantest word.

There seemed to be no rest needed for that wonderful vitality.

My allusion to the last of these splendid strollings in aid of what we

believed to be the interests of men of letters, shall be as brief as I

can make it. Two winters after the present, at the close of November

1850, in the great hall of Lord Lytton's old family mansion in

Knebworth-park, there were three private performances by the original

actors in Ben Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_. All the circumstances

and surroundings were very brilliant; some of the gentlemen of the

county played both in the comedy and farces; our generous host was

profuse of all noble encouragement; and amid the general pleasure and

excitement hopes rose high. Recent experience had shown what the public

interest in this kind of amusement might place within reach of its

providers; and there came to be discussed the possibility of making

permanent such help as had been afforded to fellow writers, by means of

an endowment that should not be mere charity, but should combine indeed

something of both pension-list and college-lectureship, without the

drawbacks of either. It was not enough considered that schemes for

self-help, to be successful, require from those they are meant to

benefit, not only a general assent to their desirability, but zealous

and active co-operation. Without discussing now, however, what will have

to be stated hereafter, it suffices to say that the enterprise was set

on foot, and the "Guild of Literature and Art" originated at Knebworth.

A five-act comedy was to be written by Sir Edward Lytton, and, when a

certain sum of money had been obtained by public representations of it,

the details of the scheme were to be drawn up, and appeal made to those

whom it addressed more especially. In a very few months everything was

ready, except a farce which Dickens was to have written to follow the

comedy, and which unexpected cares of management and preparation were

held to absolve him from. There were other reasons. "I have written the

first scene," he told me (23rd March, 1851), "and it has droll points in

it, more farcical points than you commonly find in farces,[151] really

better. Yet I am constantly striving, for my reputation's sake, to get

into it a meaning that is impossible in a farce; constantly thinking of

it, therefore, against the grain; and constantly impressed with a

conviction that I could never act in it myself with that wild

abandonment which can alone carry a farce off. Wherefore I have

confessed to Bulwer Lytton and asked for absolution." There was

substituted a new farce of Lemon's, to which, however, Dickens soon

contributed so many jokes and so much Gampish and other fun of his own,

that it came to be in effect a joint piece of authorship; and Gabblewig,

which the manager took to himself, was one of those personation parts

requiring five or six changes of face, voice, and gait in the course of

it, from which, as we have seen, he derived all the early theatrical

ambition that the elder Mathews had awakened in him. "You have no idea,"

he continued, "of the immensity of the work as the time advances, for

the Duke even throws the whole of the audience on us, or he would get

(he says) into all manner of scrapes." The Duke of Devonshire had

offered his house in Piccadilly for the first representations, and in

his princely way discharged all the expenses attending them. A moveable

theatre was built and set up in the great drawing-room, and the library

was turned into a green-room.

_Not so Bad as We Seem_ was played for the first time at

Devonshire-house on the 27th of May, 1851, before the Queen and Prince

and as large an audience as places could be found for; _Mr.

Nightingale's Diary_ being the name given to the farce. The success

abundantly realised the expectations formed; and, after many

representations at the Hanover-square Rooms in London, strolling began

in the country, and was continued at intervals for considerable portions

of this and the following year. From much of it, illness and occupation

disabled me, and substitutes had to be found; but to this I owe the

opportunity now of closing with a characteristic picture of the course

of the play, and of Dickens amid the incidents and accidents to which

his theatrical career exposed him. The company carried with them, it

should be said, the theatre constructed for Devonshire-house, as well as

the admirable scenes which Stanfield, David Roberts, Thomas Grieve,

Telbin, Absolon, and Louis Haghe had painted as their generous

free-offerings to the comedy; of which the representations were thus

rendered irrespective of theatres or their managers, and took place in

the large halls or concert-rooms of the various towns and cities.

"The enclosure forgotten in my last" (Dickens writes from Sunderland on

the 29th of August 1852), "was a little printed announcement which I

have had distributed at the doors wherever we go, knocking _Two o' Clock

in the Morning_ bang out of the bills. Funny as it used to be, it is

become impossible to get anything out of it after the scream of _Mr.

Nightingale's Diary_. The comedy is so far improved by the reductions

which your absence and other causes have imposed on us, that it acts now

only two hours and twenty-five minutes, all waits included, and goes

'like wildfire,' as Mr. Tonson[152] says. We have had prodigious houses,

though smaller rooms (as to their actual size) than I had hoped for. The

Duke was at Derby, and no end of minor radiances. Into the room at

Newcastle (where Lord Carlisle was by the bye) they squeezed six

hundred people, at twelve and sixpence, into a space reasonably capable

of holding three hundred. Last night, in a hall built like a theatre,

with pit, boxes, and gallery, we had about twelve hundred--I dare say

more. They began with a round of applause when Coote's white waistcoat

appeared in the orchestra, and wound up the farce with three deafening

cheers. I never saw such good fellows. Stanny is their fellow-townsman;

was born here; and they applauded his scene as if it were himself. But

what I suffered from a dreadful anxiety that hung over me all the time,

I can never describe. When we got here at noon, it appeared that the

hall was a perfectly new one, and had only had the slates put upon the

roof by torchlight over night. Farther, that the proprietors of some

opposition rooms had declared the building to be unsafe, and that there

was a panic in the town about it; people having had their money back,

and being undecided whether to come or not, and all kinds of such

horrors. I didn't know what to do. The horrible responsibility of

risking an accident of that awful nature seemed to rest wholly upon me;

for I had only to say we wouldn't act, and there would be no chance of

danger. I was afraid to take Sloman into council lest the panic should

infect our men. I asked W. what he thought, and he consolingly observed

that his digestion was so bad that death had no terrors for him! I went

and looked at the place; at the rafters, walls, pillars, and so forth;

and fretted myself into a belief that they really were slight! To crown

all, there was an arched iron roof without any brackets or pillars, on a

new principle! The only comfort I had was in stumbling at length on the

builder, and finding him a plain practical north-countryman with a foot

rule in his pocket. I took him aside, and asked him should we, or could

we, prop up any weak part of the place: especially the dressing-rooms,

which were under our stage, the weight of which must be heavy on a new

floor, and dripping wet walls. He told me there wasn't a stronger

building in the world; and that, to allay the apprehension, they had

opened it, on Thursday night, to thousands of the working people, and

induced them to sing, and beat with their feet, and make every possible

trial of the vibration. Accordingly there was nothing for it but to go

on. I was in such dread, however, lest a false alarm should spring up

among the audience and occasion a rush, that I kept Catherine and

Georgina out of the front. When the curtain went up and I saw the great

sea of faces rolling up to the roof, I looked here and looked there, and

thought I saw the gallery out of the perpendicular, and fancied the

lights in the ceiling were not straight. Rounds of applause were perfect

agony to me, I was so afraid of their effect upon the building. I was

ready all night to rush on in case of an alarm--a false alarm was my

main dread--and implore the people for God's sake to sit still. I had

our great farce-bell rung to startle Sir Geoffrey instead of throwing

down a piece of wood, which might have raised a sudden-apprehension. I

had a palpitation of the heart, if any of our people stumbled up or down

a stair. I am sure I never acted better, but the anxiety of my mind was

so intense, and the relief at last so great, that I am half-dead to-day,

and have not yet been able to eat or drink anything or to stir out of

my room. I shall never forget it. As to the short time we had for

getting the theatre up; as to the upsetting, by a runaway pair of

horses, of one of the vans at the Newcastle railway station, _with all

the scenery in it, every atom of which was turned over_; as to the

fatigue of our carpenters, who have now been up four nights, and who

were lying dead asleep in the entrances last night; I say nothing, after

the other gigantic nightmare, except that Sloman's splendid knowledge of

his business, and the good temper and cheerfulness of all the workmen,

are capital. I mean to give them a supper at Liverpool, and address them

in a neat and appropriate speech. We dine at two to-day (it is now one)

and go to Sheffield at four, arriving there at about ten. I had been as

fresh as a daisy; walked from Nottingham to Derby, and from Newcastle

here; but seem to have had my nerves crumpled up last night, and have an

excruciating headache. That's all at present. I shall never be able to

bear the smell of new deal and fresh mortar again as long as I live."

Manchester and Liverpool closed the trip with enormous success at both

places; and Sir Edward Lytton was present at a public dinner which was

given in the former city, Dickens's brief word about it being written as

he was setting foot in the train that was to bring him to London.

"Bulwer spoke brilliantly at the Manchester dinner, and his earnestness

and determination about the Guild was most impressive. It carried

everything before it. They are now getting up annual subscriptions, and

will give us a revenue to begin with. I swear I believe that people to

be the greatest in the world. At Liverpool I had a Round Robin on the

stage after the play was over, a place being left for your signature,

and as I am going to have it framed, I'll tell Green to send it to

Lincoln's-inn-fields. You have no idea how good Tenniel, Topham, and

Collins have been in what they had to do."

These names, distinguished in art and letters, represent additions to

the company who had joined the enterprise; and the last of them, Mr.

Wilkie Collins, became, for all the rest of the life of Dickens, one of

his dearest and most valued friends.

FOOTNOTES:

[142] He entered the Royal Navy, and survived his father only a year and

eleven months. He was a Lieutenant, at the time of his death from a

sharp attack of bronchitis; being then on board the P. and O. steamer

"Malta," invalided from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was

buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest

in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little

over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any

other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet

most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in

a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September

1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted,"

Dickens then wrote to me, "the Ocean Spectre, and made a very pretty

little picture of him." It was a strange chance that led his father to

invent this playful name for one whom the ocean did indeed take to

itself at last.

[143] I think it right to place on record here Leigh Hunt's own allusion

to the incident (_Autobiography_, p. 432), though it will be thought to

have too favourable a tone, and I could have wished that other names had

also found mention in it. But I have already (p. 211) stated quite

unaffectedly my own opinion of the very modest pretensions of the whole

affair, and these kind words of Hunt may stand _valeant quantum_.

"Simultaneous with the latest movement about the pension was one on the

part of my admirable friend Dickens and other distinguished men,

Forsters and Jerrolds, who, combining kindly purpose with an amateur

inclination for the stage, had condescended to show to the public what

excellent actors they could have been, had they so pleased,--what

excellent actors, indeed, some of them were. . . . They proposed . . . a

benefit for myself, . . . and the piece performed on the occasion was Ben

Jonson's _Every Man in his Humour_. . . . If anything had been needed to

show how men of letters include actors, on the common principle of the

greater including the less, these gentlemen would have furnished it. Mr.

Dickens's Bobadil had a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond

anything the existing stage has shown . . . and Mr. Forster delivered the

verses of Ben Jonson with a musical flow and a sense of their grace and

beauty unknown, I believe, to the recitation of actors at present. At

least I have never heard anything like it since Edmund Kean's.". . . To

this may be added some lines from Lord Lytton's prologue spoken at

Liverpool, of which I have not been able to find a copy, if indeed it

was printed at the time; but the verses come so suddenly and completely

back to me, as I am writing after twenty-five years, that in a small way

they recall a more interesting effort of memory told me once by

Macready. On a Christmas night at Drury Lane there came a necessity to

put up the _Gamester_, which he had not played since he was a youth in

his father's theatre thirty years before. He went to rehearsal shrinking

from the long and heavy study he should have to undergo, when, with the

utterance of the opening sentence, the entire words of the part came

back, including even a letter which Beverly has to read, and which it is

the property-man's business to supply. My lines come back as

unexpectedly; but with pleasanter music than any in Mr. Moore's dreary

tragedy, as a few will show.

"Mild amid foes, within a prison free,

He comes . . . our grey-hair'd bard of Rimini!

Comes with the pomp of memories in his train,

Pathos and wit, sweet pleasure and sweet pain!

Comes with familiar smile and cordial tone,

Our hearths' wise cheerer!--Let us cheer his own!

Song links her children with a golden thread,

To aid the living bard strides forth the dead.

Hark the frank music of the elder age--

Ben Jonson's giant tread sounds ringing up the stage!

Hail! the large shapes our fathers loved! again

Wellbred's light ease, and Kitely's jealous pain.

Cob shall have sense, and Stephen be polite,

Brainworm shall preach, and Bobadil shall fight--

Each, here, a merit not his own shall find,

And _Every Man_ the _Humour_ to be kind."

[144] Another, which for many reasons we may regret went also into the

limbo of unrealized designs, is sketched in the subjoined (7th of

January, 1848). "Mac and I think of going to Ireland for six weeks in

the spring, and seeing whether anything is to be done there, in the way

of a book? I fancy it might turn out well." The Mac of course is

Maclise.

[145] "Here we are" (23rd of August) "in the noble old premises; and

very nice they look, all things considered. . . . Trifles happen to me

which occur to nobody else. My portmanteau 'fell off' a cab last night

somewhere between London-bridge and here. It contained on a moderate

calculation L70 worth of clothes. I have no shirt to put on, and am

obliged to send out to a barber to come and shave me."

[146] "Do you see anything to object to in it? I have never had so much

difficulty, I think, in setting about any slight thing; for I really

didn't know that I had a word to say, and nothing seems to live 'twixt

what I _have_ said and silence. The advantage of it is, that the latter

part opens an idea for future prefaces all through the series, and may

serve perhaps to make a feature of them." (7th of September, 1847.)

[147] From his notes on these matters I may quote. "The Leeds appears to

be a very important institution, and I am glad to see that George

Stephenson will be there, besides the local lights, inclusive of all the

Baineses. They talk at Glasgow of 6,000 people." (26th of November.)

"You have got Southey's _Holly Tree_. I have not. Put it in your pocket

to-day. It occurs to me (up to the eyes in a mass of Glasgow Athenaeum

papers) that I could quote it with good effect in the North." (24th of

December.) "A most brilliant demonstration last night, and I think I

never did better. Newspaper reports bad." (29th of December.)

[148] "Tremendous distress at Glasgow, and a truly damnable jail,

exhibiting the separate system in a most absurd and hideous form.

Governor practical and intelligent; very anxious for the associated

silent system; and much comforted by my fault-finding." (30th of

December.)

[149] It would amuse the reader, but occupy too much space, to add to my

former illustrations of his managerial troubles; but from an elaborate

paper of rules for rehearsals, which I have found in his handwriting, I

quote the opening and the close. "Remembering the very imperfect

condition of all our plays at present, the general expectation in

reference to them, the kind of audience before which they will be

presented, and the near approach of the nights of performance, I hope

everybody concerned will abide by the following regulations, and will

aid in strictly carrying them out." Elaborate are the regulations set

forth, but I take only the three last. "Silence, on the stage and in the

theatre, to be faithfully observed; the lobbies &c. being always

available for conversation. No book to be referred to on the stage; but

those who are imperfect to take their words from the prompter. Everyone

to act, as nearly as possible, as on the night of performance; everyone

to speak out, so as to be audible through the house. And every mistake

of exit, entrance, or situation, to be corrected _three times_

successively." He closes thus. "All who were concerned in the first

getting up of _Every Man in his Humour_, and remember how carefully the

stage was always kept then, and who have been engaged in the late

rehearsals of the _Merry Wives_, and have experienced the difficulty of

getting on, or off: of being heard, or of hearing anybody else: will, I

am sure, acknowledge the indispensable necessity of these regulations."

[150] I give the sums taken at the several theatres. Haymarket, L319

14_s._; Manchester, L266 12_s._ 6_d._; Liverpool, L467 6_s._ 6_d._;

Birmingham, L327 10_s._, and L262 18_s._ 6_d._; Edinburgh, L325 1_s._

6_d._; Glasgow, L471 7_s._ 8_d._, and (at half the prices of the first

night) L210 10_s._

[151] "Those Rabbits have more nature in them than you commonly find in

Rabbits"--the self-commendatory remark of an aspiring animal-painter

showing his piece to the most distinguished master in that line--was

here in my friend's mind.

[152] Mr. Tonson was a small part in the comedy entrusted with much

appropriateness to Mr. Charles Knight, whose _Autobiography_ has this

allusion to the first performance, which, as Mr. Pepys says, is "pretty

to observe." "The actors and the audience were so close together that as

Mr. Jacob Tonson sat in Wills's Coffee-house he could have touched with

his clouded cane the Duke of Wellington." (iii. 116.)

CHAPTER XVIII.

SEASIDE HOLIDAYS.

1848-1851.

Louis Philippe dethroned--French Missive from

C. D.--At Broadstairs--A Chinese Junk--What it

was like--Perplexing Questions--A Type of

Finality--A Contrast--Dickens's View of

Temperance Agitation--Cruikshank's _Bottle_:

and _Drunkard's Children_--Realities of

Cruikshank's Pencil--Dickens on Hogarth--Exit

of Gin-lane--Wisdom of the Great

Painter--Originality of Leech--Superiority of

his Method--Excuses for the Rising

Generation--What Leech will be remembered

for--Pony-chaise Accident--Fortunate

Escape--Strenuous Idleness--Hint for Mr.

Taine--At Brighton--A Name for his New Book--At

Broadstairs--Summoned as Special Juror--A Male

Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Harris--At Bonchurch--Rev.

James White--First Impressions of the

Undercliff--Talfourd made a Judge--Touching

Letter from Jeffrey--The Comedian

Regnier--Progress in Writing--A Startling

Revelation--Effects of Bonchurch Climate--Mr.

Browne's Sketch for Micawber--Accident to

Leech--Its Consequences--At Broadstairs--A

_Copperfield_ Banquet--Thoughts of a New Book.

THE portion of Dickens's life over which his adventures of strolling

extended was in other respects not without interest; and this chapter

will deal with some of his seaside holidays before I pass to the

publication in 1848 of the story of _The Haunted Man_, and to the

establishment in 1850 of the Periodical which had been in his thoughts

for half a dozen years before, and has had foreshadowings nearly as

frequent in my pages.

Among the incidents of 1848 before the holiday season came, were the

dethronement of Louis Philippe, and birth of the second French

republic: on which I ventured to predict that a Gore-house friend of

ours, and _his_ friend, would in three days be on the scene of action.

The three days passed, and I had this letter. "Mardi, Fevrier 29, 1848.

MON CHER. Vous etes homme de la plus grande penetration! Ah, mon Dieu,

que vous etes absolument magnifique! Vous prevoyez presque toutes les

choses qui vont arriver; et aux choses qui viennent d'arriver vous etes

merveilleusement au-fait. Ah, cher enfant, quelle idee sublime vous vous

aviez a la tete quand vous prevites si clairement que M. le Comte Alfred

d'Orsay se rendrait au pays de sa naissance! Quel magicien! Mais--c'est

tout egal, mais--il n'est pas parti. Il reste a Gore-house, ou,

avant-hier, il y avait un grand diner a tout le monde. Mais quel homme,

quel ange, neanmoins! MON AMI, je trouve que j'aime tant la Republique,

qu'il me faut renoncer ma langue et ecrire seulement le langage de la

Republique de France--langage des Dieux et des Anges--langage, en un

mot, des Francais! Hier au soir je rencontrai a l'Athenaeum Monsieur Mack

Leese, qui me dit que MM. les Commissionnaires des Beaux Arts lui

avaient ecrit, par leur secretaire, un billet de remerciements a propos

de son tableau dans la Chambre des Deputes, et qu'ils lui avaient prie

de faire l'autre tableau en fresque, dont on y a besoin. Ce qu'il a

promis. Voici des nouvelles pour les champs de Lincoln's Inn! Vive la

gloire de France! Vive la Republique! Vive le Peuple! Plus de Royaute!

Plus des Bourbons! Plus de Guizot! Mort aux traitres! Faisons couler le

sang pour la liberte, la justice, la cause populaire! Jusqu'a cinq

heures et demie, adieu, mon brave! Recevez l'assurance de ma

consideration distinguee, et croyez-moi, CONCITOYEN! votre tout devoue,

CITOYEN CHARLES DICKENS." I proved to be not quite so wrong,

nevertheless, as my friend supposed.

Somewhat earlier than usual this summer, on the close of the

Shakespeare-house performances, he tried Broadstairs once more, having

no important writing in hand: but in the brief interval before leaving

he saw a thing of celebrity in those days, the Chinese Junk; and I had

all the details in so good a description that I could not resist the

temptation of using some parts of it at the time. "Drive down to the

Blackwall railway," he wrote to me, "and for a matter of eighteen-pence

you are at the Chinese Empire in no time. In half a score of minutes,

the tiles and chimney-pots, backs of squalid houses, frowsy pieces of

waste ground, narrow courts and streets, swamps, ditches, masts of

ships, gardens of dockweed, and unwholesome little bowers of scarlet

beans, whirl away in a flying dream, and nothing is left but China. How

the flowery region ever came into this latitude and longitude is the

first thing one asks; and it is not certainly the least of the marvel.

As Aladdin's palace was transported hither and thither by the rubbing of

a lamp, so the crew of Chinamen aboard the Keying devoutly believed that

their good ship would turn up, quite safe, at the desired port, if they

only tied red rags enough upon the mast, rudder, and cable. Somehow they

did not succeed. Perhaps they ran short of rag; at any rate they hadn't

enough on board to keep them above water; and to the bottom they would

undoubtedly have gone but for the skill and coolness of a dozen English

sailors, who brought them over the ocean in safety. Well, if there be

any one thing in the world that this extraordinary craft is not at all

like, that thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long, so

grotesque; so low in the middle, so high at each end, like a China

pen-tray; with no rigging, with nowhere to go to aloft; with mats for

sails, great warped cigars for masts, gaudy dragons and sea-monsters

disporting themselves from stem to stern, and _on_ the stern a gigantic

cock of impossible aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce

his equal,--it would look more at home at the top of a public building,

or at the top of a mountain, or in an avenue of trees, or down in a

mine, than afloat on the water. As for the Chinese lounging on the deck,

the most extravagant imagination would never dare to suppose them to be

mariners. Imagine a ship's crew, without a profile among them, in gauze

pinafores and plaited hair; wearing stiff clogs a quarter of a foot

thick in the sole; and lying at night in little scented boxes, like

backgammon men or chess-pieces, or mother-of-pearl counters! But by

Jove! even this is nothing to your surprise when you go down into the

cabin. There you get into a torture of perplexity. As, what became of

all those lanterns hanging to the roof when the Junk was out at sea?

Whether they dangled there, banging and beating against each other, like

so many jesters' baubles? Whether the idol Chin Tee, of the eighteen

arms, enshrined in a celestial Punch's Show, in the place of honour,

ever tumbled out in heavy weather? Whether the incense and the

joss-stick still burnt before her, with a faint perfume and a little

thread of smoke, while the mighty waves were roaring all around? Whether

that preposterous tissue-paper umbrella in the corner was always spread,

as being a convenient maritime instrument for walking about the decks

with in a storm? Whether all the cool and shiny little chairs and tables

were continually sliding about and bruising each other, and if not why

not? Whether anybody on the voyage ever read those two books printed in

characters like bird-cages and fly-traps? Whether the Mandarin

passenger, He Sing, who had never been ten miles from home in his life

before, lying sick on a bamboo couch in a private china closet of his

own (where he is now perpetually writing autographs for inquisitive

barbarians), ever began to doubt the potency of the Goddess of the Sea,

whose counterfeit presentment, like a flowery monthly nurse, occupies

the sailors' joss-house in the second gallery? Whether it is possible

that the said Mandarin, or the artist of the ship, Sam Sing, Esquire,

R.A. of Canton, _can_ ever go ashore without a walking-staff of

cinnamon, agreeably to the usage of their likenesses in British

tea-shops? Above all, whether the hoarse old ocean could ever have been

seriously in earnest with this floating toy-shop; or had merely played

with it in lightness of spirit--roughly, but meaning no harm--as the

bull did with another kind of china-shop on St. Patrick's day in the

morning."

The reply made on this brought back comment and sequel not less amusing.

"Yes, there can be no question that this is Finality in perfection; and

it is a great advantage to have the doctrine so beautifully worked out,

and shut up in a corner of a dock near a fashionable white-bait house

for the edification of man. Thousands of years have passed away since

the first junk was built on this model, and the last junk ever launched

was no better for that waste and desert of time. The mimic eye painted

on their prows to assist them in finding their way, has opened as wide

and seen as far as any actual organ of sight in all the interval through

the whole immense extent of that strange country. It has been set in the

flowery head to as little purpose for thousands of years. With all their

patient and ingenious but never advancing art, and with all their rich

and diligent agricultural cultivation, not a new twist or curve has been

given to a ball of ivory, and not a blade of experience has been grown.

There is a genuine finality in that; and when one comes from behind the

wooden screen that encloses the curious sight, to look again upon the

river and the mighty signs on its banks of life, enterprise, and

progress, the question that comes nearest is beyond doubt a home one.

Whether _we_ ever by any chance, in storms, trust to red flags; or burn

joss-sticks before idols; or grope our way by the help of conventional

eyes that have no sight in them; or sacrifice substantial facts for

absurd forms? The ignorant crew of the Keying refused to enter on the

ships' books, until 'a considerable amount of silvered-paper, tin-foil,

and joss-stick' had been laid in by the owners for the purposes of their

worship. And I wonder whether _our_ seamen, let alone our bishops and

deacons, ever stand out upon points of silvered-paper and tin-foil and

joss-sticks. To be sure Christianity is not Chin-Teeism, and that I

suppose is why we never lose sight of the end in contemptible and

insignificant quarrels about the means. There is enough matter for

reflection aboard the Keying at any rate to last one's voyage home to

England again."

Other letters of the summer from Broadstairs will complete what he wrote

from the same place last year on Mr. Cruikshank's efforts in the cause

of temperance, and will enable me to say, what I know he wished to be

remembered in his story, that there was no subject on which through his

whole life he felt more strongly than this. No man advocated temperance,

even as far as possible its legislative enforcement, with greater

earnestness; but he made important reservations. Not thinking

drunkenness to be a vice inborn, or incident to the poor more than to

other people, he never would agree that the existence of a gin-shop was

the alpha and omega of it. Believing it to be, _the_ "national horror,"

he also believed that many operative causes had to do with having made

it so; and his objection to the temperance agitation was that these were

left out of account altogether. He thought the gin-shop not fairly to be

rendered the exclusive object of attack, until, in connection with the

classes who mostly made it their resort, the temptations that led to it,

physical and moral, should have been more bravely dealt with. Among the

former he counted foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and

workshop-customs, scarcity of light, air, and water, in short the

absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter,

the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome

relaxation, the craving for _some_ stimulus and excitement, not less

needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive

of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training,

generally applied. This was consistently Dickens's "platform" throughout

the years he was known to me; and holding it to be within the reach as

well as the scope of legislation, which even our political magnates have

been discovering lately, he thought intemperance to be but the one

result that, out of all those arising from the absence of legislation,

was the most wretched. For him, drunkenness had a teeming and

reproachful history anterior to the drunken stage; and he thought it the

first duty of the moralist bent upon annihilating the gin-shop, to

"strike deep and spare not" at those previous remediable evils.

Certainly this was not the way of Mr. Cruikshank, any more than it is

that of the many excellent people who take part in temperance

agitations. His former tale of the _Bottle_, as told by his admirable

pencil, was that of a decent working man, father of a boy and a girl,

living in comfort and good esteem until near the middle age, when,

happening unluckily to have a goose for dinner one day in the bosom of

his thriving family, he jocularly sends out for a bottle of gin,

persuades his wife, until then a picture of neatness and good

housewifery, to take a little drop after the stuffing, and the whole

family from that moment drink themselves to destruction. The sequel, of

which Dickens now wrote to me, traced the lives of the boy and girl

after the wretched deaths of their drunken parents, through gin-shop,

beer-shop, and dancing-rooms, up to their trial for robbery, when the

boy is convicted, dying aboard the hulks; and the girl, desolate and

mad after her acquittal, flings herself from London-bridge into the

night-darkened river.

"I think," said Dickens, "the power of that closing scene quite

extraordinary. It haunts the remembrance like an awful reality. It is

full of passion and terror, and I doubt very much whether any hand but

his could so have rendered it. There are other fine things too. The

death-bed scene on board the hulks; the convict who is composing the

face, and the other who is drawing the screen round the bed's head; seem

to me masterpieces worthy of the greatest painter. The reality of the

place, and the fidelity with which every minute object illustrative of

it is presented, are surprising. I think myself no bad judge of this

feature, and it is remarkable throughout. In the trial scene at the Old

Bailey, the eye may wander round the Court, and observe everything that

is a part of the place. The very light and atmosphere are faithfully

reproduced. So, in the gin-shop and the beer-shop. An inferior hand

would indicate a fragment of the fact, and slur it over; but here every

shred is honestly made out. The man behind the bar in the gin-shop, is

as real as the convicts at the hulks, or the barristers round the table

in the Old Bailey. I found it quite curious, as I closed the book, to

recall the number of faces I had seen of individual identity, and to

think what a chance they have of living, as the Spanish friar said to

Wilkie, when the living have passed away. But it only makes more

exasperating to me the obstinate one-sidedness of the thing. When a man

shows so forcibly the side of the medal on which the people in their

faults and crimes are stamped, he is the more bound to help us to a

glance at that other side on which the faults and vices of the

governments placed over the people are not less gravely impressed."

This led to some remark on Hogarth's method in such matters, and I am

glad to be able to preserve this fine criticism of that great

Englishman, by a writer who closely resembled him in genius; as another

generation will be probably more apt than our own to discover. "Hogarth

avoided the Drunkard's Progress, I conceive, precisely because the

causes of drunkenness among the poor were so numerous and widely spread,

and lurked so sorrowfully deep and far down in all human misery,

neglect, and despair, that even _his_ pencil could not bring them fairly

and justly into the light. It was never his plan to be content with only

showing the effect. In the death of the miser-father, his shoe new-soled

with the binding of his bible, before the young Rake begins his career;

in the worldly father, listless daughter, impoverished young lord, and

crafty lawyer, of the first plate of Marriage-a-la mode; in the

detestable advances through the stages of Cruelty; and in the progress

downward of Thomas Idle; you see the effects indeed, but also the

causes. He was never disposed to spare the kind of drunkenness that was

of more 'respectable' engenderment, as one sees in his midnight modern

conversation, the election plates, and crowds of stupid aldermen and

other guzzlers. But after one immortal journey down Gin-lane, he turned

away in pity and sorrow--perhaps in hope of better things, one day, from

better laws and schools and poor men's homes--and went back no more. The

scene of Gin-lane, you know, is that just cleared away for the

extension of Oxford-street, which we were looking at the other day; and

I think it a remarkable trait of Hogarth's picture, that while it

exhibits drunkenness in the most appalling forms, it also forces on

attention a most neglected wretched neighbourhood, and an unwholesome,

indecent, abject condition of life that might be put as frontispiece to

our sanitary report of a hundred years later date. I have always myself

thought the purpose of this fine piece to be not adequately stated even

by CHARLES LAMB. 'The very houses seem absolutely reeling' it is true;

but beside that wonderful picture of what follows intoxication, we have

indication quite as powerful of what leads to it among the neglected

classes. There is no evidence that any of the actors in the dreary scene

have ever been much better than we see them there. The best are pawning

the commonest necessaries, and tools of their trades; and the worst are

homeless vagrants who give us no clue to their having been otherwise in

bygone days. All are living and dying miserably. Nobody is interfering

for prevention or for cure, in the generation going out before us, or

the generation coming in. The beadle is the only sober man in the

composition except the pawnbroker, and he is mightily indifferent to the

orphan-child crying beside its parent's coffin. The little charity-girls

are not so well taught or looked after, but that they can take to

dram-drinking already. The church indeed is very prominent and handsome;

but as, quite passive in the picture, it coldly surveys these things in

progress under shadow of its tower, I cannot but bethink me that it was

not until this year of grace 1848 that a Bishop of London first came out

respecting something wrong in poor men's social accommodations, and I

am confirmed in my suspicion that Hogarth had many meanings which have

not grown obsolete in a century."

Another art-criticism by Dickens should be added. Upon a separate

publication by Leech of some drawings on stone called the Rising

Generation, from designs done for Mr. Punch's gallery, he wrote at my

request a little essay of which a few sentences will find appropriate

place with his letter on the other great caricaturist of his time. I use

that word, as he did, only for want of a better. Dickens was of opinion

that, in this particular line of illustration, while he conceded all his

fame to the elder and stronger contemporary, Mr. Leech was the very

first Englishman who had made Beauty a part of his art; and he held,

that, by striking out this course, and setting the successful example of

introducing always into his most whimsical pieces some beautiful faces

or agreeable forms, he had done more than any other man of his

generation to refine a branch of art to which the facilities of

steam-printing and wood-engraving were giving almost unrivalled

diffusion and popularity. His opinion of Leech in a word was that he

turned caricature into character; and would leave behind him not a

little of the history of his time and its follies, sketched with

inimitable grace.

"If we turn back to a collection of the works of Rowlandson or Gilray,

we shall find, in spite of the great humour displayed in many of them,

that they are rendered wearisome and unpleasant by a vast amount of

personal ugliness. Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent

what is satirized as being necessarily ugly, which is but the resource

of an angry child or a jealous woman, it serves no purpose but to

produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason why the farmer's

daughter in the old caricature who is squalling at the harpsichord (to

the intense delight, by the bye, of her worthy father, whom it is her

duty to please) should be squab and hideous. The satire on the manner of

her education, if there be any in the thing at all, would be just as

good, if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would have made her so. The average

of farmers' daughters in England are not impossible lumps of fat. One is

quite as likely to find a pretty girl in a farm-house, as to find an

ugly one; and we think, with Mr. Leech, that the business of this Style

of art is with the pretty one. She is not only a pleasanter object, but

we have more interest in her. We care more about what does become her,

and does not become her. Mr. Leech represented the other day certain

delicate creatures with bewitching countenances encased in several

varieties of that amazing garment, the ladies' paletot. Formerly those

fair creatures would have been made as ugly and ungainly as possible,

and then the point would have been lost. The spectator, with a laugh at

the absurdity of the whole group, would not have cared how such uncouth

creatures disguised themselves, or how ridiculous they became. . . . But to

represent female beauty as Mr. Leech represents it, an artist must have,

a most delicate perception of it; and the gift of being able to realise

it to us with two or three slight, sure touches of his pencil. This

power Mr. Leech possesses, in an extraordinary degree. . . . For this

reason, we enter our protest against those of the Rising Generation who

are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a

pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in

the right than the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock

of hair from his pretty cousin, to take back to school. Madness is in

her apron, and Virgil dog's-eared and defaced is in her ringlets. Doubts

may suggest themselves of the perfect disinterestedness of the other

young gentleman contemplating the fair girl at the piano--doubts

engendered by his worldly allusion to 'tin'; though even that may have

arisen in his modest consciousness of his own inability to support an

establishment--but that he should be 'deucedly inclined to go and cut

that fellow out,' appears to us one of the most natural emotions of the

human breast. The young gentleman with the dishevelled hair and clasped

hands who loves the transcendant beauty with the bouquet, and can't be

happy without her, is to us a withering and desolate spectacle. Who

_could_ be happy without her? . . . The growing youths are not less happily

observed and agreeably depicted than the grown women. The languid little

creature who 'hasn't danced since he was quite a boy,' is perfect; and

the eagerness of the small dancer whom he declines to receive for a

partner at the hands of the glorious old lady of the house (the little

feet quite ready for the first position, the whole heart projected into

the quadrille, and the glance peeping timidly at the desired one out of

a flutter of hope and doubt) is quite delightful to look at. The

intellectual juvenile who awakens the tremendous wrath of a Norma of

private life by considering woman an inferior animal, is lecturing at

the present moment, we understand, on the Concrete in connexion with the

Will. The legs of the young philosopher who considers Shakespeare an

over-rated man, were seen by us dangling over the side of an omnibus

last Tuesday. We have no acquaintance with the scowling young gentleman

who is clear that 'if his Governor don't like the way he goes on in, why

he must have chambers and so much a week;' but if he is not by this time

in Van Diemen's land, he will certainly go to it through Newgate. We

should exceedingly dislike to have personal property in a strong box, to

live in the suburb of Camberwell, and to be in the relation of

bachelor-uncle to that youth. . . . In all his designs, whatever Mr. Leech

desires to do, he does. His drawing seems to us charming; and the

expression indicated, though by the simplest means, is exactly the

natural expression, and is recognised as such immediately. Some forms of

our existing life will never have a better chronicler. His wit is

good-natured, and always the wit of a gentleman. He has a becoming sense

of responsibility and self-restraint; he delights in agreeable things;

he imparts some pleasant air of his own to things not pleasant in

themselves; he is suggestive and full of matter; and he is always

improving. Into the tone as well as into the execution of what he does,

he has brought a certain elegance which is altogether new, without

involving any compromise of what is true. Popular art in England has not

had so rich an acquisition." Dickens's closing allusion was to a remark

made by Mr. Ford in a review of _Oliver Twist_ formerly referred to. "It

is eight or ten years since a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, making

mention of MR. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, commented on the absurdity of

excluding such a man from the Royal Academy, because his works were not

produced in certain materials, and did not occupy a certain space in its

annual shows. Will no Associates be found upon its books one of these

days, the labours of whose oil and brushes will have sunk into the

profoundest obscurity, when many pencil-marks of MR. CRUIKSHANK and of

MR. LEECH will be still fresh in half the houses in the land?"

Of what otherwise occupied him at Broadstairs in 1848 there is not much

to mention until the close of his holiday. He used to say that he never

went for more than a couple of days from his own home without something

befalling him that never happened to anyone else, and his Broadstairs

adventure of the present summer verged closer on tragedy than comedy.

Returning there one day in August after bringing up his boys to school,

it had been arranged that his wife should meet him at Margate; but he

had walked impatiently far beyond the place for meeting when at last he

caught sight of her, not in the small chaise but in a large carriage and

pair followed by an excited crowd, and with the youth that should have

been driving the little pony bruised and bandaged on the box behind the

two prancing horses. "You may faintly imagine my amazement at

encountering this carriage, and the strange people, and Kate, and the

crowd, and the bandaged one, and all the rest of it." And then in a line

or two I had the story. "At the top of a steep hill on the road, with a

ditch on each side, the pony bolted, upon which what does John do but

jump out! He says he was thrown out, but it cannot be. The reins

immediately became entangled in the wheels, and away went the pony down

the hill madly, with Kate inside rending the Isle of Thanet with her

screams. The accident might have been a fearful one, if the pony had

not, thank Heaven, on getting to the bottom, pitched over the side;

breaking the shaft and cutting her hind legs, but in the most

extraordinary manner smashing her own way apart. She tumbled down, a

bundle of legs with her head tucked underneath, and left the chaise

standing on the bank! A Captain Devaynes and his wife were passing in

their carriage at the moment, saw the accident with no power of

preventing it, got Kate out, laid her on the grass, and behaved with

infinite kindness. All's well that ends well, and I think she's really

none the worse for the fright. John is in bed a good deal bruised, but

without any broken bone, and likely soon to come right; though for the

present plastered all over, and, like Squeers, a brown-paper parcel

chock-full of nothing but groans. The women generally have no sympathy

for him whatever; and the nurse says, with indignation, how could he go

and leave an unprotected female in the shay!"

Holiday incidents there were many, but none that need detain us. This

was really a summer idleness: for it was the interval between two of his

important undertakings, there was no periodical yet to make demands on

him, and only the task of finishing his _Haunted Man_ for Christmas lay

ahead. But he did even his nothings in a strenuous way, and on occasion

could make gallant fight against the elements themselves. He reported

himself, to my horror, thrice wet through on a single day, "dressed

four times," and finding all sorts of great things, brought out by the

rains, among the rocks on the sea-beach. He also sketched now and then

morsels of character for me, of which I will preserve one. "F is

philosophical, from sunrise to bedtime: chiefly in the French line,

about French women going mad, and in that state coming to their

husbands, and saying, 'Mon ami, je vous ai trompe. Voici les lettres de

mon amant!' Whereupon the husbands take the letters and think them waste

paper, and become extra-philosophical at finding that they really _were_

the lover's effusions: though what there is of philosophy in it all, or

anything but unwholesomeness, it is not easy to see." (A remark that it

might not be out of place to offer to Mr. Taine's notice.) "Likewise

about dark shades coming over our wedded Emmeline's face at parties; and

about F handing her to her carriage, and saying, 'May I come in, for a

lift homeward?' and she bending over him out of window, and saying in a

low voice, I DARE NOT! And then of the carriage driving away like

lightning, leaving F more philosophical than ever on the pavement." Not

till the close of September I heard of work intruding itself, in a

letter twitting me for a broken promise in not joining him: "We are

reasonably jolly, but rurally so; going to bed o' nights at ten, and

bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with

those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the

great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him,

Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and

pensiveness are coming. I have NOT

'--seen Fancy write

With a pencil of light

On the blotter so solid, commanding the sea!'

but I shouldn't wonder if she were to do it, one of these days. Dim

visions of divers things are floating around me; and I must go to work,

head foremost, when I get home. I am glad, after all, that I have not

been at it here; for I am all the better for my idleness, no doubt. . . .

Roche was very ill last night, and looks like one with his face turned

to the other world, this morning. When _are_ you coming? Oh what days

and nights there have been here, this week past!" My consent to a

suggestion in his next letter, that I should meet him on his way back,

and join him in a walking-excursion home, got me full absolution for

broken promises; and the way we took will remind friends of his later

life, when he was lord of Gadshill, of an object of interest which he

delighted in taking them to see. "You will come down booked for

Maidstone (I will meet you at Paddock-wood), and we will go thither in

company over a most beautiful little line of railroad. The eight miles

walk from Maidstone to Rochester, and the visit to the Druidical altar

on the wayside, are charming. This could be accomplished on the Tuesday;

and Wednesday we might look about us at Chatham, coming home by Cobham

on Thursday. . . ."

His first seaside holiday in 1849 was at Brighton, where he passed some

weeks in February; and not, I am bound to add, without the usual

_un_usual adventure to signalize his visit. He had not been a week in

his lodgings, where Leech and his wife joined him, when both his

landlord and the daughter of his landlord went raving mad, and the

lodgers were driven away to the Bedford hotel. "If you could have heard

the cursing and crying of the two; could have seen the physician and

nurse quoited out into the passage by the madman at the hazard of their

lives; could have seen Leech and me flying to the doctor's rescue; could

have seen our wives pulling us back; could have seen the M.D. faint with

fear; could have seen three other M.D.'s come to his aid; with an

atmosphere of Mrs. Gamps, strait-waistcoats, struggling friends and

servants, surrounding the whole; you would have said it was quite worthy

of me, and quite in keeping with my usual proceedings." The letter ended

with a word on what then his thoughts were full of, but for which no

name had yet been found. "A sea-fog to-day, but yesterday inexpressibly

delicious. My mind running, like a high sea, on names--not satisfied

yet, though." When he next wrote from the seaside, in the beginning of

July, he had found the name; had started his book; and was "rushing to

Broadstairs" to write the fourth number of _David Copperfield_.

In this came the childish experiences which had left so deep an

impression upon him, and over which he had some difficulty in throwing

the needful disguises. "Fourteen miles to-day in the country," he had

written to me on the 21st of June, "revolving number four!" Still he did

not quite see his way. Three days later he wrote: "On leaving you last

night, I found myself summoned on a special jury in the Queen's Bench

to-day. I have taken no notice of the document,[153] and hourly expect

to be dragged forth to a dungeon for contempt of court. I think I should

rather like it. It might help me with a new notion or two in my

difficulties. Meanwhile I shall take a stroll to-night in the green

fields from 7 to 10, if you feel inclined to join." His troubles ended

when he got to Broadstairs, from which he wrote on the tenth of July to

tell me that agreeably to the plan we had discussed he had introduced a

great part of his MS. into the number. "I really think I have done it

ingeniously, and with a very complicated interweaving of truth and

fiction. Vous verrez. I am getting on like a house afire in point of

health, and ditto ditto in point of number."

In the middle of July the number was nearly done, and he was still

doubtful where to pass his longer summer holiday. Leech wished to join

him in it, and both desired a change from Broadstairs. At first he

thought of Folkestone,[154] but disappointment there led to a sudden

change. "I propose" (15th of July) "returning to town to-morrow by the

boat from Ramsgate, and going off to Weymouth or the Isle of Wight, or

both, early the next morning." A few days after, his choice was made.

He had taken a house at Bonchurch, attracted there by the friend who had

made it a place of interest for him during the last few years, the

Reverend James White, with whose name and its associations my mind

connects inseparably many of Dickens's happiest hours. To pay him

fitting tribute would not be easy, if here it were called for. In the

kindly shrewd Scotch face, a keen sensitiveness to pleasure and pain was

the first thing that struck any common observer. Cheerfulness and gloom

coursed over it so rapidly that no one could question the tale they

told. But the relish of his life had outlived its more than usual share

of sorrows; and quaint sly humour, love of jest and merriment, capital

knowledge of books, and sagacious quips at men, made his companionship

delightful. Like his life, his genius was made up of alternations of

mirth and melancholy. He would be immersed, at one time, in those

darkest Scottish annals from which he drew his tragedies; and

overflowing, at another, into Sir Frizzle Pumpkin's exuberant farce. The

tragic histories may probably perish with the actor's perishable art;

but three little abstracts of history written at a later time in prose,

with a sunny clearness of narration and a glow of picturesque interest

to my knowledge unequalled in books of such small pretension, will find,

I hope, a lasting place in literature. They are filled with felicities

of phrase, with breadth of understanding and judgment, with manful

honesty, quiet sagacity, and a constant cheerful piety, valuable for all

and priceless for the young. Another word I permit myself to add. With

Dickens, White was popular supremely for his eager good fellowship; and

few men brought him more of what he always liked to receive. But he

brought nothing so good as his wife. "He is excellent, but she is

better," is the pithy remark of his first Bonchurch letter; and the true

affection and respect that followed is happily still borne her by his

daughters.

Of course there is something strange to be recorded of the Bonchurch

holiday, but it does not come till nearer the ending; and, with more

attention to Mrs. Malaprop's advice to begin with a little aversion,

might probably not have come at all. He began with an excess of liking.

Of the Undercliff he was full of admiration. "From the top of the

highest downs," he wrote in his second letter (28th of July) "there are

views which are only to be equalled on the Genoese shore of the

Mediterranean; the variety of walks is extraordinary; things are cheap,

and everybody is civil. The waterfall acts wonderfully, and the sea

bathing is delicious. Best of all, the place is certainly cold rather

than hot, in the summer time. The evenings have been even chilly. White

very jovial, and emulous of the inimitable in respect of gin-punch. He

had made some for our arrival. Ha! ha! not bad for a beginner. . . . I

have been, and am, trying to work this morning; but I can't make

anything of it, and am going out to think. I am invited by a

distinguished friend to dine with you on the first of August, but I have

pleaded distance and the being resident in a cave on the sea shore; my

food, beans; my drink, the water from the rock. . . . I must pluck up heart

of grace to write to Jeffrey, of whom I had but poor accounts from

Gordon just before leaving. Talfourd delightful, and amuses me mightily.

I am really quite enraptured at his success, and think of his happiness

with uncommon pleasure." Our friend was now on the bench; which he

adorned with qualities that are justly the pride of that profession, and

with accomplishments that have become more rare in its highest places

than they were in former times. His elevation only made those virtues

better known. Talfourd assumed nothing with the ermine but the privilege

of more frequent intercourse with the tastes and friends he loved, and

he continued to be the most joyous and least affected of companions.

Such small oddities or foibles as he had made him secretly only dearer

to Dickens, who had no friend he was more attached to; and the many

happy nights made happier by the voice so affluent in generous words,

and the face so bright with ardent sensibility, come back to me

sorrowfully now. "Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue."

The poet's line has a double application and sadness.

He wrote again on the first of August. "I have just begun to get into

work. We are expecting the Queen to come by very soon, in grand array,

and are going to let off ever so many guns. I had a letter from Jeffrey

yesterday morning, just as I was going to write to him. He has evidently

been very ill, and I begin to have fears for his recovery. It is a very

pathetic letter, as to his state of mind; but only in a tranquil

contemplation of death, which I think very noble." His next letter, four

days later, described himself as continuing still at work; but also

taking part in dinners at Blackgang, and picnics of "tremendous success"

on Shanklin Down. "Two charity sermons for the school are preached

to-day, and I go to the afternoon one. The examination of said school

t'other day was very funny. All the boys made Buckstone's bow in the

_Rough Diamond_, and some in a very wonderful manner recited pieces of

poetry, about a clock, and may we be like the clock, which is always a

going and a doing of its duty, and always tells the truth (supposing it

to be a slap-up chronometer I presume, for the American clock in the

school was lying frightfully at that moment); and after being bothered

to death by the multiplication table, they were refreshed with a public

tea in Lady Jane Swinburne's garden." (There was a reference in one of

his letters, but I have lost it, to a golden-haired lad of the

Swinburnes whom his own boys used to play with, since become more widely

known.) "The rain came in with the first tea-pot, and has been active

ever since. On Friday we had a grand, and what is better, a very good

dinner at 'parson' Fielden's, with some choice port. On Tuesday we are

going on another picnic; with the materials for a fire, at my express

stipulation; and a great iron pot to boil potatoes in. These things, and

the eatables, go to the ground in a cart. Last night we had some very

good merriment at White's, where pleasant Julian Young and his wife

(who are staying about five miles off) showed some droll new games"--and

roused the ambition in my friend to give a "mighty conjuring performance

for all the children in Bonchurch," for which I sent him the materials

and which went off in a tumult of wild delight. To the familiar names in

this letter I will add one more, grieving freshly even now to connect it

with suffering. "A letter from Poole has reached me since I began this

letter, with tidings in it that you will be very sorry to hear. Poor

Regnier has lost his only child; the pretty daughter who dined with us

that nice day at your house, when we all pleased the poor mother by

admiring her so much. She died of a sudden attack of malignant typhus.

Poole was at the funeral, and writes that he never saw, or could have

imagined, such intensity of grief as Regnier's at the grave. How one

loves him for it. But is it not always true, in comedy and in tragedy,

that the more real the man the more genuine the actor?"

After a few more days I heard of progress with his writing in spite of

all festivities. "I have made it a rule that the inimitable is

invisible, until two every day. I shall have half the number done,

please God, to-morrow. I have not worked quickly here yet, but I don't

know what I _may_ do. Divers cogitations have occupied my mind at

intervals, respecting the dim design." The design was the weekly

periodical so often in his thoughts, of which more will appear in my

next chapter. His letter closed with intimations of discomfort in his

health; of an obstinate cough; and of a determination he had formed to

mount daily to the top of the downs. "It makes a great difference in

the climate to get a blow there and come down again." Then I heard of

the doctor "stethoscoping" him, of his hope that all was right in that

quarter, and of rubbings "a la St. John Long" being ordered for his

chest. But the mirth still went on. "There has been a Doctor Lankester

at Sandown, a very good merry fellow, who has made one at the picnics,

and whom I went over and dined with, along with Danby (I remember your

liking for Danby, and don't wonder at it), Leech, and White." A letter

towards the close of August resumed yet more of his ordinary tone. "We

had games and forfeits last night at White's. Davy Roberts's pretty

little daughter is there for a week, with her husband, Bicknell's son.

There was a dinner first to say good-bye to Danby, who goes to other

clergyman's-duty, and we were very merry. Mrs. White unchanging; White

comically various in his moods. Talfourd comes down next Tuesday, and we

think of going over to Ryde on Monday, visiting the play, sleeping there

(I don't mean at the play), and bringing the Judge back. Browne is

coming down when he has done his month's work. Should you like to go to

Alum Bay while you are here? It would involve a night out, but I think

would be very pleasant; and if you think so too, I will arrange it sub

rosa, so that we may not be, like Bobadil, 'oppressed by numbers.' I

mean to take a fly over from Shanklin to meet you at Ryde; so that we

can walk back from Shanklin over the landslip, where the scenery is

wonderfully beautiful. Stone and Egg are coming next month, and we hope

to see Jerrold before we go." Such notices from his letters may be

thought hardly worth preserving; but a wonderful vitality in every

circumstance, as long as life under any conditions remained to the

writer, is the picture they contribute to; nor would it be complete

without the addition, that fond as he was, in the intervals of his work,

of this abundance and variety of enjoyments, to no man were so essential

also those quieter hours of thought, and talk, not obtainable when

"oppressed by numbers."