My visit was due at the opening of September, but a few days earlier

came the full revelation of which only a passing shadow had reached in

two or three previous letters. "Before I think of beginning my next

number, I perhaps cannot do better than give you an imperfect

description of the results of the climate of Bonchurch after a few

weeks' residence. The first salubrious effect of which the Patient

becomes conscious is an almost continual feeling of sickness,

accompanied with great prostration of strength, so that his legs tremble

under him, and his arms quiver when he wants to take hold of any object.

An extraordinary disposition to sleep (except at night, when his rest,

in the event of his having any, is broken by incessant dreams) is always

present at the same time; and, if he have anything to do requiring

thought and attention, this overpowers him to such a degree that he can

only do it in snatches: lying down on beds in the fitful intervals.

Extreme depression of mind, and a disposition to shed tears from morning

to night, developes itself at the same period. If the Patient happen to

have been a good walker, he finds ten miles an insupportable distance;

in the achievement of which his legs are so unsteady, that he goes from

side to side of the road, like a drunken man. If he happen to have ever

possessed any energy of any kind, he finds it quenched in a dull, stupid

languor. He has no purpose, power, or object in existence whatever. When

he brushes his hair in the morning, he is so weak that he is obliged to

sit upon a chair to do it. He is incapable of reading, at all times. And

his bilious system is so utterly overthrown, that a ball of boiling fat

appears to be always behind the top of the bridge of his nose, simmering

between his haggard eyes. If he should have caught a cold, he will find

it impossible to get rid of it, as his system is wholly incapable of

making any effort. His cough will be deep, monotonous, and constant.

'The faithful watch-dog's honest bark' will be nothing to it. He will

abandon all present idea of overcoming it, and will content himself with

keeping an eye upon his blood-vessels to preserve them whole and sound.

_Patient's name, Inimitable B._ . . . It's a mortal mistake!--That's the

plain fact. Of all the places I ever have been in, I have never been in

one so difficult to exist in, pleasantly. Naples is hot and dirty, New

York feverish, Washington bilious, Genoa exciting, Paris rainy--but

Bonchurch, smashing. I am quite convinced that I should die here, in a

year. It's not hot, it's not close, I don't know what it is, but the

prostration of it is _awful_. Nobody here has the least idea what I

think of it; but I find, from all sorts of hints from Kate, Georgina,

and the Leeches, that they are all affected more or less in the same

way, and find it very difficult to make head against. I make no sign,

and pretend not to know what is going on. But they are right. I believe

the Leeches will go soon, and small blame to 'em!--For me, when I leave

here at the end of this September, I must go down to some cold place; as

Ramsgate for example, for a week or two; or I seriously believe I shall

feel the effects of it for a long time. . . . What do you think of

_that_? . . . The longer I live, the more I doubt the doctors. I am

perfectly convinced, that, for people suffering under a wasting disease,

this Undercliff is madness altogether. The doctors, with the old

miserable folly of looking at one bit of a subject, take the patient's

lungs and the Undercliff's air, and settle solemnly that they are fit

for each other. But the whole influence of the place, never taken into

consideration, is to reduce and overpower vitality. I am quite confident

that I should go down under it, as if it were so much lead, slowly

crushing me. An American resident in Paris many years, who brought me a

letter from Olliffe, said, the day before yesterday, that he had always

had a passion for the sea never to be gratified enough, but that after

living here a month, he could not bear to look at it; he couldn't endure

the sound of it; he didn't know how it was, but it seemed associated

with the decay of his whole powers." These were grave imputations

against one of the prettiest places in England; but of the generally

depressing influence of that Undercliff on particular temperaments, I

had already enough experience to abate something of the surprise with

which I read the letter. What it too bluntly puts aside are the

sufferings other than his own, projected and sheltered by what only

aggravated his; but my visit gave me proof that he had really very

little overstated the effect upon himself. Making allowance, which

sometimes he failed to do, for special peculiarities, and for the

excitability never absent when he had in hand an undertaking such as

_Copperfield_, I observed a nervous tendency to misgivings and

apprehensions to the last degree unusual with him, which seemed to make

the commonest things difficult; and though he stayed out his time, and

brought away nothing that his happier associations with the place and

its residents did not long survive, he never returned to Bonchurch.

In the month that remained he completed his fifth number, and with the

proof there came the reply to some questions of which I hardly remember

more than that they referred to doubts of mine; one being as to the

propriety of the kind of delusion he had first given to poor Mr.

Dick,[155] which I thought a little too farcical for that really

touching delineation of character. "Your suggestion is perfectly wise

and sound," he wrote back (22nd of August). "I have acted on it. I have

also, instead of the bull and china-shop delusion, given Dick the idea,

that, when the head of king Charles the First was cut off, some of the

trouble was taken out of it, and put into his (Dick's)". When he next

wrote, there was news very welcome to me for the pleasure to himself it

involved. "Browne has sketched an uncommonly characteristic and capital

Mr. Micawber for the next number. I hope the present number is a good

one. I hear nothing but pleasant accounts of the general satisfaction."

The same letter told me of an intention to go to Broadstairs, put aside

by doubtful reports of its sanitary condition; but it will be seen

presently that there was another graver interruption. With his work well

off his hands, however, he had been getting on better where he was; and

they had all been very merry. "Yes," he said, writing after a couple of

days (23rd of September), "we have been sufficiently rollicking since I

finished the number; and have had great games at rounders every

afternoon, with all Bonchurch looking on; but I begin to long for a

little peace and solitude. And now for my less pleasing piece of news.

The sea has been running very high, and Leech, while bathing, was

knocked over by a bad blow from a great wave on the forehead. He is in

bed, and had twenty of his namesakes on his temples this morning. When I

heard of him just now, he was asleep--which he had not been all night."

He closed his letter hopefully, but next day (24th September) I had less

favourable report. "Leech has been very ill with congestion of the brain

ever since I wrote, and being still in excessive pain has had ice to his

head continuously, and been bled in the arm besides. Beard and I sat up

there, all night." On the 26th he wrote, "My plans are all unsettled by

Leech's illness; as of course I do not like to leave this place while I

can be of any service to him and his good little wife. But all visitors

are gone to-day, and Winterbourne once more left to the engaging family

of the inimitable B. Ever since I wrote to you Leech has been seriously

worse, and again very heavily bled. The night before last he was in such

an alarming state of restlessness, which nothing could relieve, that I

proposed to Mrs. Leech to try magnetism. Accordingly, in the middle of

the night I fell to; and after a very fatiguing bout of it, put him to

sleep for an hour and thirty-five minutes. A change came on in the

sleep, and he is decidedly better. I talked to the astounded little Mrs.

Leech across him, when he was asleep, as if he had been a truss of

hay. . . . What do you think of my setting up in the magnetic line with a

large brass plate? 'Terms, twenty-five guineas per nap.'" When he wrote

again on the 30th, he had completed his sixth number; and his friend was

so clearly on the way to recovery that he was next day to leave for

Broadstairs with his wife, her sister, and the two little girls. "I will

merely add that I entreat to be kindly remembered to Thackeray" (who had

a dangerous illness at this time); "that I think I have, without a

doubt, _got_ the Periodical notion; and that I am writing under the

depressing and discomforting influence of paying off the tribe of bills

that pour in upon an unfortunate family-young-man on the eve of a

residence like this. So no more at present from the disgusted, though

still inimitable, and always affectionate B."

He stayed at Broadstairs till he had finished his number seven, and what

else chiefly occupied him were thoughts about the Periodical of which

account will presently be given. "Such a night and day of rain," ran his

first letter, "I should think the oldest inhabitant never saw! and yet,

in the ould formiliar Broadstairs, I somehow or other don't mind it

much. The change has done Mamey a world of good, and I have begun to

sleep again. As for news, you might as well ask me for dolphins. Nobody

in Broadstairs--to speak of. Certainly nobody in Ballard's. We are in

the part, which is the house next door to the hotel itself, that we once

had for three years running, and just as quiet and snug now as it was

then. I don't think I shall return before the 20th or so, when the

number is done; but I _may_, in some inconstant freak, run up to you

before. Preliminary despatches and advices shall be forwarded in any

case to the fragrant neighbourhood of Clare-market and the

Portugal-street burying-ground." Such was his polite designation of my

whereabouts: for which nevertheless he had secret likings. "On the

Portsmouth railway, coming here, encountered Kenyon. On the ditto ditto

at Reigate, encountered young Dilke, and took him in tow to Canterbury.

On the ditto ditto at ditto (meaning Reigate), encountered Fox, M. P.

for Oldham, and his daughter. All within an hour. Young Dilke great

about the proposed Exposition under the direction of H. R. H. Prince

Albert, and evincing, very pleasantly to me, unbounded faith in our old

friend his father." There was one more letter, taking a rather gloomy

view of public affairs in connection with an inflated pastoral from

Doctor Wiseman "given out of the Flaminian Gate," and speaking dolefully

of some family matters; which was subscribed, each word forming a

separate line, "Yours Despondently, And Disgustedly, Wilkins Micawber."

His visit to the little watering-place in the following year was

signalised by his completion of the most famous of his novels, and his

letters otherwise were occupied by elaborate managerial preparation for

the private performances at Knebworth. But again the plague of itinerant

music flung him into such fevers of irritation, that he finally resolved

against any renewed attempt to carry on important work here; and the

summer of 1851, when he was only busy with miscellaneous writing, was

the last of his regular residences in the place. He then let his London

house for the brief remainder of its term; ran away at the end of May,

when some grave family sorrows had befallen him, from the crowds and

excitements of the Great Exhibition; and with intervals of absence,

chiefly at the Guild representations, stayed in his favourite Fort-house

by the sea until October, when he took possession of Tavistock-house.

From his letters may be added a few notices of this last holiday at

Broadstairs, which he had always afterwards a kindly word for; and to

which he said pleasant adieu in the sketch of "Our Watering-place,"

written shortly before he left.

"It is more delightful here" (1st of June) "than I can express. Corn

growing, larks singing, garden full of flowers, fresh air on the sea--O

it is wonderful! Why can't you come down next Saturday (bringing work)

and go back with me on Wednesday for the _Copperfield_ banquet?

Concerning which, of course, I say yes to Talfourd's kind proposal.

Lemon by all means. And--don't you think? Browne? Whosoever, besides,

pleases Talfourd will please me." Great was the success of that banquet.

The scene was the Star-and-Garter at Richmond; Thackeray and Alfred

Tennyson joined in the celebration; and the generous giver was in his

best vein. I have rarely seen Dickens happier than he was amid the

sunshine of that day. Jerrold and Thackeray returned to town with us;

and a little argument between them about money and its uses, led to an

avowal of Dickens about himself to which I may add the confirmation of

all our years of intercourse. "No man," he said, "attaches less

importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want

of it, than I do."

Vague mention of a "next book" escaped in a letter at the end of July,

on which I counselled longer abstinence. "Good advice," he replied, "but

difficult: I wish you'd come to us and preach another kind of

abstinence. Fancy the Preventive men finding a lot of brandy in barrels

on the rocks here, the day before yesterday! Nobody knows anything about

the barrels, of course. They were intended to have been landed with the

next tide, and to have been just covered at low water. But the water

being unusually low, the tops of the barrels became revealed to

Preventive telescopes, and descent was made upon the brandy. They are

always at it, hereabouts, I have no doubt. And of course B would not

have had any of it. O dear no! certainly not."

His reading was considerable and very various at these intervals of

labour, and in this particular summer took in all the minor tales as

well as the plays of Voltaire, several of the novels (old favourites

with him) of Paul de Kock, Ruskin's _Lamps of Architecture_, and a

surprising number of books of African and other travel for which he had

insatiable relish: but the notices of all this in his letters were few.

"By the bye, I observe, reading that wonderful book the _French

Revolution_ again, for the 500th time, that Carlyle, who knows

everything, don't know what Mumbo Jumbo is. It is not an Idol. It is a

secret preserved among the men of certain African tribes, and never

revealed by any of them, for the punishment of their women. Mumbo Jumbo

comes in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or

where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or

with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle

seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another

thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret

_among the men_."--"I finished the _Scarlet Letter_ yesterday. It falls

off sadly after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of the

story is very much over-done, and not truly done I think. Their

suddenness of meeting and agreeing to go away together, after all those

years, is very poor. Mr. Chillingworth ditto. The child out of nature

altogether. And Mr. Dimmisdale certainly never could have begotten her."

In Mr. Hawthorne's earlier books he had taken especial pleasure; his

_Mosses from an Old Manse_ having been the first book he placed in my

hands on his return from America, with reiterated injunctions to read

it. I will add a word or two of what he wrote of the clever story of

another popular writer, because it hits well the sort of ability that

has become so common, which escapes the highest point of cleverness, but

stops short only at the very verge of it. "The story extremely good

indeed; but all the strongest things of which it is capable, missed. It

shows just how far that kind of power can go. It is more like a note of

the idea than anything else. It seems to me as if it were written by

somebody who lived next door to the people, rather than inside of 'em."

I joined him for the August regatta and stayed a pleasant fortnight. His

paper on "Our Watering-place" appeared while I was there, and great was

the local excitement. His own restlessness with fancies for a new book

had now risen beyond bounds, and for the time he was eager to open it in

that prettiest quaintest bit of English landscape, Strood valley, which

reminded him always of a Swiss scene. I had not left him many days when

these lines followed me. "I very nearly packed up a portmanteau and went

away, the day before yesterday, into the mountains of Switzerland,

alone! Still the victim of an intolerable restlessness, I shouldn't be

at all surprised if I wrote to you one of these mornings from under Mont

Blanc. I sit down between whiles to think of a new story, and, as it

begins to grow, such a torment of a desire to be anywhere but where I

am; and to be going I don't know where, I don't know why; takes hold of

me, that it is like being _driven away_. If I had had a passport, I

sincerely believe I should have gone to Switzerland the night before

last. I should have remembered our engagement--say, at Paris, and have

come back for it; but should probably have left by the next express

train."

At the end of November, when he had settled himself in his new London

abode, the book was begun; and as generally happened with the more

important incidents of his life, but always accidentally, begun on a

Friday.

FOOTNOTES:

[153] My friend Mr. Shirley Brooks sends me a "characteristic" cutting

from an autograph catalogue in which these few lines are given from an

early letter in the Doughty-street days. "I always pay my taxes when

they won't call any longer, in order to get a bad name in the parish and

so escape all honours." It is a touch of character, certainly; but

though his motive in later life was the same, his method was not. He

attended to the tax-collector, but of any other parochial or political

application took no notice whatever.

[154] Even in the modest retirement of a note I fear that I shall offend

the dignity of history, and of biography, by printing the lines in which

this intention was announced to me. They were written "in character;"

and the character was that of the "waterman" at the Charing-cross

cabstand, first discovered by George Cattermole, whose imitations of him

were a delight to Dickens at this time, and adapted themselves in the

exuberance of his admiration to every conceivable variety of subject.

The painter of the Derby Day will have a fullness of satisfaction in

remembering this. "Sloppy" the hero in question, had a friend "Jack" in

whom he was supposed to typify his own early and hard experiences before

he became a convert to temperance; and Dickens used to point to "Jack"

as the justification of himself and Mrs. Gamp for their portentous

invention of Mrs. Harris. It is amazing nonsense to repeat; but to hear

Cattermole, in the gruff hoarse accents of what seemed to be the remains

of a deep bass voice wrapped up in wet straw, repeat the wild

proceedings of Jack, was not to be forgotten. "Yes sir, Jack went mad

sir, just afore he 'stablished hisself by Sir Robert Peel's-s-s, sir. He

was allis a callin' for a pint o' beer sir, and they brings him water

sir. Yes sir. And so sir, I sees him dodgin' about one day sir, yes sir,

and at last he gits a hopportunity sir and claps a pitch-plaster on the

mouth o' th' pump sir, and says he's done for his wust henemy sir. Yes

sir. And then they finds him a-sittin' on the top o' the corn-chest sir,

yes sir, a crammin' a old pistol with wisps o' hay and horse-beans sir,

and swearin' he's a goin' to blow hisself to hattoms, yes sir, but he

doesn't, no sir. For I sees him arterwards a lyin' on the straw a

manifacktrin' Bengal cheroots out o' corn-chaff sir and swearin' he'd

make 'em smoke sir, but they hulloxed him off round by the corner of

Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s sir, just afore I come here sir, yes sir. And so

you never see'd us together sir, no sir." This was the remarkable

dialect in which Dickens wrote from Broadstairs on the 13th of July.

"About Saturday sir?--Why sir, I'm a-going to _Folkestone_ a Saturday

sir!--not on accounts of the manifacktring of Bengal cheroots as there

is there but for the survayin' o' the coast sir. 'Cos you see sir, bein'

here sir, and not a finishin' my work sir till to-morrow sir, I couldn't

go afore! And if I wos to come home, and not go, and come back agin sir,

wy it would be nat'rally a hulloxing of myself sir. Yes sir. Wy sir, I

b'lieve that the gent as is a goin' to 'stablish hisself sir, in the

autumn, along with me round the corner sir (by Drummins's-s-s-s-s-s

bank) is a comin' down to Folkestone Saturday arternoon--Leech by name

sir--yes sir--another Jack sir--and if you wos to come down along with

him sir by the train as gits to Folkestone twenty minutes arter five,

you'd find me a smoking a Bengal cheroot (made of clover-chaff and

horse-beans sir) on the platform. You couldn't spend your arternoon

better sir. Dover, Sandgate, Herne Bay--they're all to be wisited sir,

most probable, till such times as a 'ouse is found sir. Yes sir. Then

decide to come sir, and say you will, and do it. I shall be here till

arter post time Saturday mornin' sir. Come on then!

"SLOPPY

"His x mark."

[155] It stood originally thus: "'Do you recollect the date,' said Mr.

Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down,

'when that bull got into the china warehouse and did so much mischief?'

I was very much surprised by the inquiry; but remembering a song about

such an occurrence that was once popular at Salem House, and thinking he

might want to quote it, replied that I believed it was on St. Patrick's

Day. 'Yes, I know,' said Mr. Dick--'in the morning; but what year?' I

could give no information on this point." Original MS. of _Copperfield_.

CHAPTER XIX.

HAUNTED MAN AND HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

1848-1850.

Friendly Plea for Mr. Macrone--Completion of

Christmas Tale--The "Ghost" Story and the

"Bargain"--The Tetterby Family--Moral of the

Story--_Copperfield_ Sales--Letter from

Russia--The Periodical taking Form--Hopes of

Success--Doubts respecting it--New Design

chosen--Names proposed--Appearance of First

Number--Earliest Contributors--His Opinion of

Mr. Sala--Child's Dream of a Star--A Fancy

derived from his Childhood.

IT has been seen that his fancy for his Christmas book of 1848 first

arose to him at Lausanne in the summer of 1846, and that, after writing

its opening pages in the autumn of the following year, he laid it aside

under the pressure of his _Dombey_. These lines were in the letter that

closed his 1848 Broadstairs holiday. "At last I am a mentally matooring

of the Christmas book--or, as poor Macrone[156] used to write, 'booke,'

'boke,' 'buke,' &c." It was the first labour to which he applied himself

at his return.

In London it soon came to maturity; was published duly as _The Haunted

Man, or the Ghost's Bargain_; sold largely, beginning with a

subscription of twenty thousand; and had a great success on the Adelphi

stage, to which it was rather cleverly adapted by Lemon. He had placed

on its title page originally four lines from Tennyson's "Departure,"

"And o'er the hills, and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim,

Beyond the night, across the day,

Thro' all the world IT follow'd him;"

but they were less applicable to the close than to the opening of the

tale, and were dropped before publication. The hero is a great chemist,

a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of studious philosophic habits,

haunted with recollections of the past "o'er which his melancholy sits

on brood," thinking his knowledge of the present a worthier substitute,

and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can

safely cast away. The recollections are of a great wrong done him in

early life, and of all the sorrow consequent upon it; and the ghost he

holds nightly conference with, is the darker presentiment of himself

embodied in those bitter recollections. This part is finely managed. Out

of heaped-up images of gloomy and wintry fancies, the supernatural takes

a shape which is not forced or violent; and the dialogue which is no

dialogue, but a kind of dreary dreamy echo, is a piece of ghostly

imagination better than Mrs. Radcliffe. The boon desired is granted and

the bargain struck. He is not only to lose his own recollection of grief

and wrong, but to destroy the like memory in all whom he approaches. By

this means the effect is shown in humble as well as higher minds, in the

worst poverty as in competence or ease, always with the same result. The

over-thinking sage loses his own affections and sympathy, sees them

crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom

he cannot change or influence, an outcast of the streets, a boy whom the

mere animal appetites have turned into a small fiend. Never having had

his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good; avarice, irreverence,

and vindictiveness, are his nature; sorrow has no place in his memory;

and from his brutish propensities the philosopher can take nothing away.

The juxtaposition of two people whom such opposite means have put in

the same moral position is a stroke of excellent art. There are plenty

of incredibilities and inconsistencies, just as in the pleasant _Cricket

on the Hearth_, which one does not care about, but enjoy rather than

otherwise; and, as in that charming little book, there were minor

characters as delightful as anything in Dickens. The Tetterby group, in

whose humble, homely, kindly, ungainly figures there is everything that

could suggest itself to a clear eye, a piercing wit, and a loving heart,

became enormous favourites. Tilly Slowboy and her little dot of a baby,

charging folks with it as if it were an offensive instrument, or handing

it about as if it were something to drink, were not more popular than

poor Johnny Tetterby staggering under his Moloch of an infant, the

Juggernaut that crushes all his enjoyments. The story itself consists of

nothing more than the effects of the Ghost's gift upon the various

groups of people introduced, and the way the end is arrived at is very

specially in Dickens's manner. What the highest exercise of the

intellect had missed is found in the simplest form of the affections.

The wife of the custodian of the college where the chemist is professor,

in whom are all the unselfish virtues that can beautify and endear the

humblest condition, is the instrument of the change. Such sorrow as she

had suffered had made her only zealous to relieve others' sufferings:

and the discontented wise man learns from her example that the world is,

after all, a much happier compromise than it seems to be, and life

easier than wisdom is apt to think it; that grief gives joy its relish,

purifying what it touches truly; and that "sweet are the uses of

adversity" when its clouds are not the shadow of dishonour. All this

can be shown but lightly within such space, it is true; and in the

machinery a good deal has to be taken for granted. But Dickens was quite

justified in turning aside from objections of that kind. "You must

suppose," he wrote to me (21st of November), "that the Ghost's saving

clause gives him those glimpses without which it would be impossible to

carry out the idea. Of course my point is that bad and good are

inextricably linked in remembrance, and that you could not choose the

enjoyment of recollecting only the good. To have all the best of it you

must remember the worst also. My intention in the other point you

mention is, that he should not know himself how he communicates the

gift, whether by look or touch; and that it should diffuse itself in its

own way in each case. I can make this clearer by a very few lines in the

second part. It is not only necessary to be so, for the variety of the

story, but I think it makes the thing wilder and stranger." Critical

niceties are indeed out of place, where wildness and strangeness in the

means matter less than that there should be clearness in the drift and

intention. Dickens leaves no doubt as to this. He thoroughly makes out

his fancy, that no man should so far question the mysterious

dispensations of evil in this world as to desire to lose the

recollection of such injustice or misery as he may suppose it to have

done to himself. There may have been sorrow, but there was the kindness

that assuaged it; there may have been wrong, but there was the charity

that forgave it; and with both are connected inseparably so many

thoughts that soften and exalt whatever else is in the sense of memory,

that what is good and pleasurable in life would cease to continue so if

these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that

you may forgive, but to forgive that you may forget. It is forgiveness

of wrong, for forgetfulness of the evil that was in it; such as poor old

Lear begged of Cordelia.

The design for his much-thought-of new Periodical was still "dim," as we

have seen, when the first cogitation of it at Bonchurch occupied him;

but the expediency of making it clearer came soon after with a visit

from Mr. Evans, who brought his half-year's accounts of sales, and some

small disappointment for him in those of _Copperfield_. "The accounts

are rather shy, after _Dombey_, and what you said comes true after all.

I am not sorry I cannot bring myself to care much for what opinions

people may form; and I have a strong belief, that, if any of my books

are read years hence, _Dombey_ will be remembered as among the best of

them: but passing influences are important for the time, and as

_Chuzzlewit_ with its small sale sent me up, _Dombey's_ large sale has

tumbled me down. Not very much, however, in real truth. These accounts

only include the first three numbers, have of course been burdened with

all the heavy expenses of number one, and ought not in reason to be

complained of. But it is clear to me that the Periodical must be set

agoing in the spring; and I have already been busy, at odd half-hours,

in shadowing forth a name and an idea. Evans says they have but one

opinion repeated to them of _Copperfield_, and they feel very confident

about it. A steady twenty-five thousand, which it is now on the verge

of, will do very well. The back numbers are always going off. Read the

enclosed."

It was a letter from a Russian man of letters, dated from St. Petersburg

and signed "Trinarch Ivansvitch Wredenskii," sending him a translation

of _Dombey_ into Russian; and informing him that his works, which before

had only been translated in the journals, and with certain omissions,

had now been translated in their entire form by his correspondent,

though even he had found an omission to be necessary in his version of

_Pickwick_. He adds, with an exquisite courtesy to our national tongue

which is yet not forgetful of the claims of his own nationality, that

his difficulties (in the Sam Weller direction and others) had arisen

from the "impossibility of portraying faithfully the beauties of the

original in the Russian language, which, though the richest in Europe in

its expressiveness, is far from being elaborate enough for literature

like other civilized languages." He had however, he assured Dickens,

been unremitting in his efforts to live with his thoughts; and the

exalted opinion he had formed of them was attended by only one wish,

that such a writer "could but have expanded under a Russian sky!" Still,

his fate was an enviable one. "For the last eleven years your name has

enjoyed a wide celebrity in Russia, and from the banks of the Neva to

the remotest parts of Siberia you are read with avidity. Your _Dombey_

continues to inspire with enthusiasm the whole of the literary Russia."

Much did we delight in the good Wredenskii; and for a long time, on

anything going "contrairy" in the public or private direction with him,

he would tell me he had ordered his portmanteau to be packed for the

more sympathizing and congenial climate of "the remotest parts of

Siberia."

The week before he left Bonchurch I again had news of the old and often

recurring fancy. "The old notion of the Periodical, which has been

agitating itself in my mind for so long, I really think is at last

gradually growing into form." That was on the 24th of September; and on

the 7th of October, from Broadstairs, I had something of the form it had

been taking. "I do great injustice to my floating ideas (pretty speedily

and comfortably settling down into orderly arrangement) by saying

anything about the Periodical now: but my notion is a weekly journal,

price either three-halfpence or two-pence, matter in part original and

in part selected, and always having, if possible, a little good

poetry. . . . Upon the selected matter, I have particular notions. One is,

that it should always be _a subject_. For example, a history of Piracy;

in connexion with which there is a vast deal of extraordinary, romantic,

and almost unknown matter. A history of Knight-errantry, and the wild

old notion of the Sangreal. A history of Savages, showing the singular

respects in which all savages are like each other; and those in which

civilised men, under circumstances of difficulty, soonest become like

savages. A history of remarkable characters, good and bad, _in_ history;

to assist the reader's judgment in his observation of men, and in his

estimates of the truth of many characters in fiction. All these things,

and fifty others that I have already thought of, would be compilations;

through the whole of which the general intellect and purpose of the

paper should run, and in which there would be scarcely less interest

than in the original matter. The original matter to be essays, reviews,

letters, theatrical criticisms, &c, &c, as amusing as possible, but all

distinctly and boldly going to what in one's own view ought to be the

spirit of the people and the time. . . . Now to bind all this together, and

to get a character established as it were which any of the writers may

maintain without difficulty, I want to suppose a certain SHADOW, which

may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight,

candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be

supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the

least difficulty. Which may be in the Theatre, the Palace, the House of

Commons, the Prisons, the Unions, the Churches, on the Railroad, on the

Sea, abroad and at home: a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent,

intangible creature. I don't think it would do to call the paper THE

SHADOW: but I want something tacked to that title, to express the notion

of its being a cheerful, useful, and always welcome Shadow. I want to

open the first number with this Shadow's account of himself and his

family. I want to have all the correspondence addressed to him. I want

him to issue his warnings from time to time, that he is going to fall on

such and such a subject; or to expose such and such a piece of humbug;

or that he may be expected shortly in such and such a place. I want the

compiled part of the paper to express the idea of this Shadow's having

been in libraries, and among the books referred to. I want him to loom

as a fanciful thing all over London; and to get up a general notion of

'What will the Shadow say about this, I wonder? What will the Shadow

say about that? Is the Shadow here?' and so forth. Do you understand? . . .

I have an enormous difficulty in expressing what I mean, in this stage

of the business; but I think the importance of the idea is, that once

stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it

presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of

previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into

one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature

which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't

anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to

believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort

of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common-sense and

humanity. I want to express in the title, and in the grasp of the idea

to express also, that it is the Thing at everybody's elbow, and in

everybody's footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in the street, in the

house, from infancy to old age, everyone's inseparable companion. . . . Now

do you make anything out of this? which I let off as if I were a bladder

full of it, and you had punctured me. I have not breathed the idea to

any one; but I have a lively hope that it _is_ an idea, and that out of

it the whole scheme may be hammered."

Excellent the idea doubtless, and so described in his letter that hardly

anything more characteristic survives him. But I could not make anything

out of it that had a quite feasible look. The ordinary ground of

miscellaneous reading, selection, and compilation out of which it was to

spring, seemed to me no proper soil for the imaginative produce it was

meant to bear. As his fancies grew and gathered round it, they had given

it too much of the range and scope of his own exhaustless land of

invention and marvel; and the very means proposed for letting in the

help of others would only more heavily have weighted himself. Not to

trouble the reader now with objections given him in detail, my judgment

was clear against his plan; less for any doubt of the effect if its

parts could be brought to combine, than for my belief that it was not in

that view practicable; and though he did not immediately accept my

reasons, he acquiesced in them ultimately. "I do not lay much stress on

your grave doubts about Periodical, but more anon." The more anon

resolved itself into conversations out of which the shape given to the

project was that which it finally took.

It was to be a weekly miscellany of general literature; and its stated

objects were to be, to contribute to the entertainment and instruction

of all classes of readers, and to help in the discussion of the more

important social questions of the time. It was to comprise short stories

by others as well as himself; matters of passing interest in the

liveliest form that could be given to them; subjects suggested by books

that might most be attracting attention; and poetry in every number if

possible, but in any case something of romantic fancy. This was to be a

cardinal point. There was to be no mere utilitarian spirit; with all

familiar things, but especially those repellent on the surface,

something was to be connected that should be fanciful or kindly; and the

hardest workers were to be taught that their lot is not necessarily

excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination. This was all

finally settled by the close of 1849, when a general announcement of the

intended adventure was made. There remained only a title and an

assistant editor; and I am happy now to remember that for the latter

important duty Mr. Wills was chosen at my suggestion. He discharged his

duties with admirable patience and ability for twenty years, and

Dickens's later life had no more intimate friend.

The title took some time and occupied many letters. One of the first

thought-of has now the curious interest of having foreshadowed, by the

motto proposed to accompany it, the title of the series of _All the Year

Round_ which he was led to substitute for the older series in 1859. "THE

ROBIN. With this motto from Goldsmith. '_The redbreast, celebrated for

its affection to mankind, continues with us, the year round._'" That

however was rejected. Then came: "MANKIND. This I think very good." It

followed the other nevertheless. After it came: "And here a strange

idea, but with decided advantages. 'CHARLES DICKENS. A weekly journal

designed for the instruction and entertainment of all classes of

readers. CONDUCTED BY HIMSELF.'" Still, there was something wanting in

that also. Next day arrived: "I really think if there _be_ anything

wanting in the other name, that this is very pretty, and just supplies

it. THE HOUSEHOLD VOICE. I have thought of many others, as--THE

HOUSEHOLD GUEST. THE HOUSEHOLD FACE. THE COMRADE. THE MICROSCOPE. THE

HIGHWAY OF LIFE. THE LEVER. THE ROLLING YEARS. THE HOLLY TREE (with two

lines from Southey for a motto). EVERYTHING, But I rather think the

VOICE is it." It was near indeed; but the following day came, "HOUSEHOLD

WORDS. This is a very pretty name:" and the choice was made.

The first number appeared on Saturday the 30th of March 1850, and

contained among other things the beginning of a story by a very original

writer, Mrs. Gaskell, for whose powers he had a high admiration, and

with whom he had friendly intercourse during many years. Other

opportunities will arise for mention of those with whom this new labour

brought him into personal communication, but I may at once say that of

all the writers, before unknown, whom his journal helped to make

familiar to a wide world of readers, he had the strongest personal

interest in Mr. Sala, and placed at once in the highest rank his

capabilities of help in such an enterprise.[157] An illustrative trait

of what I have named as its cardinal point to him will fitly close my

account of its establishment. Its first number, still unpublished, had

not seemed to him quite to fulfil his promise, "tenderly to cherish the

light of fancy inherent in all breasts;" and, as soon as he received

the proof of the second, I heard from him. "Looking over the suggested

contents of number two at breakfast this morning" (Brighton: 14th of

March 1850) "I felt an uneasy sense of there being a want of something

tender, which would apply to some universal household knowledge. Coming

down in the railroad the other night (always a wonderfully suggestive

place to me when I am alone) I was looking at the stars, and revolving a

little idea about them. Putting now these two things together, I wrote

the enclosed little paper, straightway; and should like you to read it

before you send it to the printers (it will not take you five minutes),

and let me have a proof by return." This was the child's "dream of a

star," which opened his second number; and, not appearing among his

reprinted pieces, may justify a word or two of description. It is of a

brother and sister, constant child-companions, who used to make friends

of a star, watching it together until they knew when and where it would

rise, and always bidding it good-night; so that when the sister dies the

lonely brother still connects her with the star, which he then sees

opening as a world of light, and its rays making a shining pathway from

earth to heaven; and he also sees angels waiting to receive travellers

up that sparkling road, his little sister among them; and he thinks ever

after that he belongs less to the earth than to the star where his

sister is; and he grows up to youth and through manhood and old age,

consoled still under the successive domestic bereavements that fall to

his earthly lot by renewal of that vision of his childhood; until at

last, lying on his own bed of death, he feels that he is moving as a

child to his child-sister, and he thanks his heavenly father that the

star had so often opened before to receive the dear ones who awaited

him.

His sister Fanny and himself, he told me long before this paper was

written, used to wander at night about a churchyard near their house,

looking up at the stars; and her early death, of which I am now to

speak, had vividly reawakened all the childish associations which made

her memory dear to him.

FOOTNOTES:

[156] The mention of this name may remind me to state that I have

received, in reference to the account in my first volume of Dickens's

repurchase of his _Sketches_ from Mr. Macrone, a letter from the

solicitor and friend of that gentleman so expressed that I could have

greatly wished to revise my narrative into nearer agreement with its

writer's wish. But farther enquiry, and an examination of the books of

Messrs. Chapman and Hall, have confirmed the statement given. Mr.

Hansard is in error in supposing that "unsold impressions" of the books

were included in the transaction (the necessary requirement being simply

that the small remainders on hand should be transferred with a view to

being "wasted"): I know myself that it could not have included any

supposed right of Mr. Macrone to have a novel written for him, because

upon that whole matter, and his continued unauthorised advertisements of

the tale, I decided myself the reference against him: and Mr. Hansard

may be assured that the L2000 was paid for the copyright alone. For the

same copyright, a year before, Dickens had received L250, both the first

and second series being included in the payment; and he had already had

about the same sum as his half share of the profits of sales. I quote

the close of Mr. Hansard's letter. "Macrone no doubt was an adventurer,

but he was sanguine to the highest degree. He was a dreamer of dreams,

putting no restraint on his exultant hopes by the reflection that he was

not dealing justly towards others. But reproach has fallen upon him from

wrong quarters. He died in poverty, and his creditors received nothing

from his estate. But that was because he had paid away all he had, and

all he had derived from trust and credit, _to authors_." This may have

been so, but Dickens was not among the authors so benefited. The

_Sketches_ repurchased for the high price I have named never afterwards

really justified such an outlay.

[157] Mr. Sala's first paper appeared in September 1851, and in the same

month of the following year I had an allusion in a letter from Dickens

which I shall hope to have Mr. Sala's forgiveness for printing. "That

was very good indeed of Sala's" (some essay he had written). "He was

twenty guineas in advance, by the bye, and I told Wills delicately to

make him a present of it. I find him a very conscientious fellow. When

he gets money ahead, he is not like the imbecile youth who so often do

the like in Wellington-street" (the office of _Household Words_) "and

walk off, but only works more industriously. I think he improves with

everything he does. He looks sharply at the alterations in his articles,

I observe; and takes the hint next time."

CHAPTER XX.

LAST YEARS IN DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.

1848-1851.

Sentiment about Places--Personal

Revelations--At his Sister's Sick-bed--Sister's

Death--Book to be written in First

Person--Visiting the Scene of a Tragedy--First

sees Yarmouth--Birth of Sixth Son--Title of

_Copperfield_ chosen--Difficulties of

Opening--Memorable Dinner--Rogers and

Benedict--Wit of Fonblanque--Procter and

Macready--The Sheridans--Dinner to Halevy and

Scribe--Expedition with Lord Mulgrave--The Duke

at Vauxhall--Carlyle and Thackeray--Marryat's

Delight with Children--Monckton Milnes and Lord

Lytton--Lords Dudley, Stuart, and

Nugent--Kemble, Harness, and Dyce--Mrs. Siddons

and John Kemble--Mazzini and Edinburgh

Friends--Artist Acquaintance--Friends from

America--M. Van de Weyer--Doubtful

Compliment--A Hint for London Citizens--Letter

against Public Executions--An American Observer

in England--Marvels of English Manners--Letter

from Rockingham--Private Theatricals--A Family

Scene--Death of Francis Jeffrey--Progress of

_Copperfield_--A Run to Paris--Third Daughter

born--At Great Malvern--Macready's

Farewell--The Home at Shepherd's-bush--Death of

John Dickens--Tribute by his

Son--Theatrical-fund Dinner--Plea for Small

Actors--Death of his Little

Daughter--Advocating Sanitary Reform--Lord

Shaftesbury--Realities of his Books to Dickens.

EXCEPTING always the haunts and associations of his childhood, Dickens

had no particular sentiment of locality, and any special regard for

houses he had lived in was not a thing noticeable in him. But he cared

most for Devonshire-terrace, perhaps for the bit of ground attached to

it; and it was with regret he suddenly discovered, at the close of

1847, that he should have to resign it "next lady-day three years. I had

thought the lease two years more." To that brief remaining time belong

some incidents of which I have still to give account; and I connect them

with the house in which he lived during the progress of what is

generally thought his greatest book, and of what I think were his

happiest years.

We had never had such intimate confidences as in the interval since his

return from Paris; but these have been used in my narrative of the

childhood and boyish experiences, and what remain are incidental only.

Of the fragment of autobiography there also given, the origin has been

told; but the intention of leaving such a record had been in his mind,

we now see, at an earlier date; and it was the very depth of our

interest in the opening of his fragment that led to the larger design in

which it became absorbed. "I hardly know why I write this," was his own

comment on one of his personal revelations, "but the more than

friendship which has grown between us seems to force it on me in my

present mood. We shall speak of it all, you and I, Heaven grant, wisely

and wonderingly many and many a time in after years. In the meanwhile I

am more at rest for having opened all my heart and mind to you. . . . This

day eleven years, poor dear Mary died."[158]

That was written on the seventh of May 1848, but another sadness

impending at the time was taking his thoughts still farther back; to

when he trotted about with his little elder sister in the small garden

to the house at Portsea. The faint hope for her which Elliotson had

given him in Paris had since completely broken down; and I was to hear,

in less than two months after the letter just quoted, how nearly the end

was come. "A change took place in poor Fanny," he wrote on the 5th of

July, "about the middle of the day yesterday, which took me out there

last night. Her cough suddenly ceased almost, and, strange to say, she

immediately became aware of her hopeless state; to which she resigned

herself, after an hour's unrest and struggle, with extraordinary

sweetness and constancy. The irritability passed, and all hope faded

away; though only two nights before, she had been planning for 'after

Christmas.' She is greatly changed. I had a long interview with her

to-day, alone; and when she had expressed some wishes about the funeral,

and her being buried in unconsecrated ground" (Mr. Burnett's family were

dissenters), "I asked her whether she had any care or anxiety in the

world. She said No, none. It was hard to die at such a time of life, but

she had no alarm whatever in the prospect of the change; felt sure we

should meet again in a better world; and although they had said she

might rally for a time, did not really wish it. She said she was quite

calm and happy, relied upon the mediation of Christ, and had no terror

at all. She had worked very hard, even when ill; but believed that was

in her nature, and neither regretted nor complained of it. Burnett had

been always very good to her; they had never quarrelled; she was sorry

to think of his going back to such a lonely home; and was distressed

about her children, but not painfully so. She showed me how thin and

worn she was; spoke about an invention she had heard of that she would

like to have tried, for the deformed child's back; called to my

remembrance all our sister Letitia's patience and steadiness; and,

though she shed tears sometimes, clearly impressed upon me that her mind

was made up, and at rest. I asked her very often, if she could ever

recall anything that she could leave to my doing, to put it down, or

mention it to somebody if I was not there; and she said she would, but

she firmly believed that there was nothing--nothing. Her husband being

young, she said, and her children infants, she could not help thinking

sometimes, that it would be very long in the course of nature before

they were reunited; but she knew that was a mere human fancy, and could

have no reality after she was dead. Such an affecting exhibition of

strength and tenderness, in all that early decay, is quite

indescribable. I need not tell you how it moved me. I cannot look round

upon the dear children here, without some misgiving that this sad

disease will not perish out of our blood with her; but I am sure I have

no selfishness in the thought, and God knows how small the world looks

to one who comes out of such a sick-room on a bright summer day. I don't

know why I write this before going to bed. I only know that in the very

pity and grief of my heart, I feel as if it were doing something." After

not many weeks she died, and the little child who was her last anxiety

did not long survive her.

In all the latter part of the year Dickens's thoughts were turning much

to the form his next book should assume. A suggestion that he should

write it in the first person, by way of change, had been thrown out by

me, which he took at once very gravely; and this, with other things,

though as yet not dreaming of any public use of his own personal and

private recollections, conspired to bring about that resolve. The

determination once taken, with what a singular truthfulness he contrived

to blend the fact with the fiction may be shown by a small occurrence of

this time. It has been inferred, from the vividness of the

boy-impressions of Yarmouth in David's earliest experiences, that the

place must have been familiar to his own boyhood: but the truth was that

at the close of 1848 he first saw that celebrated sea-port. One of its

earlier months had been signalised by an adventure in which Leech,

Lemon, and myself took part with him, when, obtaining horses from

Salisbury, we passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part

of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "hut" at

Winterslow, birthplace of some of his finest essays; altogether with so

brilliant a success that now (13th of November) he proposed to "repeat

the Salisbury Plain idea in a new direction in mid-winter, to wit,

Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight, with dark winter cliffs and

roaring oceans." But mid-winter brought with it too much dreariness of

its own, to render these stormy accompaniments to it very palatable; and

on the last day of the year he bethought him "it would be better to make

an outburst to some old cathedral city we don't know, and what do you

say to Norwich and Stanfield-hall?" Thither accordingly the three

friends went, illness at the last disabling me; and of the result I

heard (12th of January, 1849) that Stanfield-hall, the scene of a recent

frightful tragedy, had nothing attractive unless the term might be

applied to "a murderous look that seemed to invite such a crime. We

arrived," continued Dickens, "between the Hall and Potass farm, as the

search was going on for the pistol in a manner so consummately stupid,

that there was nothing on earth to prevent any of Rush's labourers from

accepting five pounds from Rush junior to find the weapon and give it to

him. Norwich, a disappointment" (one pleasant face "transformeth a

city," but he was unable yet to connect it with our delightful friend

Elwin); "all save its place of execution, which we found fit for a

gigantic scoundrel's exit. But the success of the trip, for me, was to

come. Yarmouth, sir, where we went afterwards, is the strangest place in

the wide world: one hundred and forty-six miles of hill-less marsh

between it and London. More when we meet. I shall certainly try my hand

at it." He made it the home of his "little Em'ly."

Everything now was taking that direction with him; and soon, to give his

own account of it, his mind was upon names "running like a high sea."

Four days after the date of the last-quoted letter ("all over happily,

thank God, by four o'clock this morning") there came the birth of his

eighth child and sixth son; whom at first he meant to call by Oliver

Goldsmith's name, but settled afterwards into that of Henry Fielding;

and to whom that early friend Ainsworth who had first made us known to

each other, welcome and pleasant companion always, was asked to be

godfather. Telling me of the change in the name of the little fellow,

which he had made in a kind of homage to the style of work he was now so

bent on beginning, he added, "What should you think of this for a notion

of a character? 'Yes, that is very true: but now, _What's his motive?_'

I fancy I could make something like it into a kind of amusing and more

innocent Pecksniff. 'Well now, yes--no doubt that was a fine thing to

do! But now, stop a moment, let us see--_What's his motive?_'" Here

again was but one of the many outward signs of fancy and fertility that

accompanied the outset of all his more important books; though, as in

their cases also, other moods of the mind incident to such beginnings

were less favourable. "Deepest despondency, as usual, in commencing,

besets me;" is the opening of the letter in which he speaks of what of

course was always one of his first anxieties, the selection of a name.

In this particular instance he had been undergoing doubts and misgivings

to more than the usual degree. It was not until the 23rd of February he

got to anything like the shape of a feasible title. "I should like to

know how the enclosed (one of those I have been thinking of) strikes

you, on a first acquaintance with it. It is odd, I think, and new; but

it may have A's difficulty of being 'too comic, my boy.' I suppose I

should have to add, though, by way of motto, 'And in short it led to the

very Mag's Diversions. _Old Saying._' Or would it be better, there being

equal authority for either, 'And in short they all played Mag's

Diversions. _Old Saying?_'

_Mag's Diversions._

Being the personal history of

MR. THOMAS MAG THE YOUNGER,

Of Blunderstone House."

This was hardly satisfactory, I thought; and it soon became apparent

that he thought so too, although within the next three days I had it in

three other forms. "_Mag's Diversions_, being the Personal History,

Adventures, Experience and Observation of Mr. David Mag the Younger, of

Blunderstone House." The second omitted Adventures, and called his hero

Mr. David Mag the Younger, of Copperfield House. The third made nearer

approach to what the destinies were leading him to, and transformed Mr.

David Mag into Mr. David Copperfield the Younger and his great-aunt

Margaret; retaining still as his leading title, _Mag's Diversions_. It

is singular that it should never have occurred to him, while the name

was thus strangely as by accident bringing itself together, that the

initials were but his own reversed; but he was much startled when I

pointed this out, and protested it was just in keeping with the fates

and chances which were always befalling him. "Why else," he said,

"should I so obstinately have kept to that name when once it turned up?"

It was quite true that he did so, as I had curious proof following close

upon the heels of that third proposal. "I wish," he wrote on the 26th of

February, "you would look over carefully the titles now enclosed, and

tell me to which you most incline. You will see that they give up _Mag_

altogether, and refer exclusively to one name--that which I last sent

you. I doubt whether I could, on the whole, get a better name.

"1. _The Copperfield Disclosures._ Being the

personal history, experience, and observation,

of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of

Blunderstone House.

"2. _The Copperfield Records._ Being the

personal history, experience, and observation,

of Mr. David Copperfield the Younger, of

Copperfield Cottage.

"3. _The Last Living Speech and Confession of

David Copperfield Junior_, of Blunderstone

Lodge, who was never executed at the Old

Bailey. Being his personal history found among

his papers.

"4. _The Copperfield Survey of the World as it

Rolled._ Being the personal history,

experience, and observation, of David

Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone

Rookery.

"5. _The Last Will and Testament of Mr. David

Copperfield._ Being his personal history left

as a legacy.

"6. _Copperfield, Complete._ Being the whole

personal history and experience of Mr. David

Copperfield of Blunderstone House, which he

never meant to be published on any account.

Or, the opening words of No. 6 might be _Copperfield's Entire_; and _The

Copperfield Confessions_ might open Nos. 1 and 2. Now, WHAT SAY YOU?"

What I said is to be inferred from what he wrote back on the 28th. "The

_Survey_ has been my favourite from the first. Kate picked it out from

the rest, without my saying anything about it. Georgy too. You hit upon

it, on the first glance. Therefore I have no doubt that it is

indisputably the best title; and I will stick to it." There was a change

nevertheless. His completion of the second chapter defined to himself,

more clearly than before, the character of the book; and the propriety

of rejecting everything not strictly personal from the name given to it.

The words proposed, therefore, became ultimately these only: "The

Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David

Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant

to be published on any account." And the letter which told me that with

this name it was finally to be launched on the first of May, told me

also (19th April) the difficulties that still beset him at the opening.

"My hand is out in the matter of _Copperfield_. To-day and yesterday I

have done nothing. Though I know what I want to do, I am lumbering on

like a stage-waggon. I can't even dine at the Temple to-day, I feel it

so important to stick at it this evening, and make some head. I am quite

aground; quite a literary Benedict, as he appeared when his heels

wouldn't stay upon the carpet; and the long Copperfieldian perspective

looks snowy and thick, this fine morning."[159] The allusion was to a

dinner at his house the night before; when not only Rogers had to be

borne out, having fallen sick at the table, but, as we rose soon after

to quit the dining-room, Mr. Jules Benedict had quite suddenly followed

the poet's lead, and fallen prostrate on the carpet in the midst of us.

Amid the general consternation there seemed a want of proper attendance

on the sick: the distinguished musician faring in this respect hardly so

well as the famous bard, by whose protracted sufferings in the library,

whither he had been removed, the sanitary help available on the

establishment was still absorbed; and as Dickens had been eloquent

during dinner on the atrocities of a pauper-farming case at Tooting

which was then exciting a fury of indignation, Fonblanque now declared

him to be no better himself than a second Drouet, reducing his guests to

a lamentable state by the food he had given them, and aggravating their

sad condition by absence of all proper nursing. The joke was well kept

up by Quin and Edwin Landseer, Lord Strangford joining in with a tragic

sympathy for his friend the poet; and the banquet so dolefully

interrupted ended in uproarious mirth. For nothing really serious had

happened. Benedict went laughing away with his wife, and I helped Rogers

on with his overshoes for his usual night-walk home. "Do you know how

many waistcoats I wear?" asked the poet of me, as I was doing him this

service. I professed my inability to guess. "Five!" he said: "and here

they are!" Upon which he opened them, in the manner of the gravedigger

in _Hamlet_, and showed me every one.

That dinner was in the April of 1849, and among others present were Mrs.

Procter and Mrs. Macready, dear and familiar names always in his house.

No swifter or surer perception than Dickens's for what was solid and

beautiful in character; he rated it higher than intellectual effort; and

the same lofty place, first in his affection and respect, would have

been Macready's and Procter's, if the one had not been the greatest of

actors, and the other a poet as genuine as old Fletcher or Beaumont.

There were present at this dinner also the American minister and Mrs.

Bancroft (it was the year of that visit of Macready to America, which

ended in the disastrous Forrest riots); and it had among its guests Lady

Graham, the wife of Sir James Graham, than whom not even the wit and

beauty of her nieces, Mrs. Norton and Lady Dufferin, better represented

the brilliant family of the Sheridans; so many of whose members, and

these three above all, Dickens prized among his friends. The table that

day will be "full" if I add the celebrated singer Miss Catherine Hayes,

and her homely good-natured Irish mother, who startled us all very much

by complimenting Mrs. Dickens on her having had for her father so clever

a painter as Mr. Hogarth.

Others familiar to Devonshire-terrace in these years will be indicated

if I name an earlier dinner (3rd of January), for the "christening" of

the _Haunted Man_, when, besides Lemons, Evanses, Leeches, Bradburys,

and Stanfields, there were present Tenniel, Topham, Stone, Robert Bell,

and Thomas Beard. Next month (24th of March) I met at his table, Lord

and Lady Lovelace; Milner Gibson, Mowbray Morris, Horace Twiss, and

their wives; Lady Molesworth and her daughter (Mrs. Ford); John

Hardwick, Charles Babbage, and Dr. Locock. That distinguished physician

had attended the poor girl, Miss Abercrombie, whose death by strychnine

led to the exposure of Wainewright's murders; and the opinion he had

formed of her chances of recovery, the external indications of that

poison being then but imperfectly known, was first shaken, he told me,

by the gloomy and despairing cries of the old family nurse, that her

mother and her uncle had died exactly so! These, it was afterwards

proved, had been among the murderer's former victims. The Lovelaces

were frequent guests after the return from Italy, Sir George Crawford,

so friendly in Genoa, having married Lord Lovelace's sister; and few had

a greater warmth of admiration for Dickens than Lord Byron's "Ada," on

whom Paul Dombey's death laid a strange fascination. They were again at

a dinner got up in the following year for Scribe and the composer

Halevy, who had come over to bring out the _Tempest_ at Her

Majesty's-theatre, then managed by Mr. Lumley, who with M. Van de Weyer,

Mrs. Gore and her daughter, the Hogarths, and I think the fine French

comedian, Samson, were also among those present. Earlier that year there

were gathered at his dinner-table the John Delanes, Isambard Brunels,

Thomas Longmans (friends since the earliest Broadstairs days, and

special favourites always), Lord Mulgrave, and Lord Carlisle, with all

of whom his intercourse was intimate and frequent, and became especially

so with Delane in later years. Lord Carlisle amused us that night, I

remember, by repeating what the good old Brougham had said to him of

"those _Punch_ people," expressing what was really his fixed belief.

"They never get my face, and are obliged" (which, like Pope, he always

pronounced obleeged), "to put up with my plaid trousers!" Of Lord

Mulgrave, pleasantly associated with the first American experiences, let

me add that he now went with us to several outlying places of amusement

of which he wished to acquire some knowledge, and which Dickens knew

better than any man; small theatres, saloons, and gardens in city or

borough, to which the Eagle and Britannia were as palaces; and I think

he was of the party one famous night in the summer of 1849 (29th of

June), when with Talfourd, Edwin Landseer, and Stanfield, we went to the

_Battle of Waterloo_ at Vauxhall, and were astounded to see pass in

immediately before us, in a bright white overcoat, the great Duke

himself, Lady Douro on his arm, the little Ladies Ramsay by his side,

and everybody cheering and clearing the way before him. That the old

hero enjoyed it all, there could be no doubt, and he made no secret of

his delight in "Young Hernandez;" but the "Battle" was undeniably

tedious, and it was impossible not to sympathize with the repeatedly and

very audibly expressed wish of Talfourd, that "the Prussians would come

up!"

The preceding month was that of the start of _David Copperfield_, and to

one more dinner (on the 12th) I may especially refer for those who were

present at it. Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle came, Thackeray and Rogers, Mrs.

Gaskell and Kenyon, Jerrold and Hablot Browne, with Mr. and Mrs. Tagart;

and it was a delight to see the enjoyment of Dickens at Carlyle's

laughing reply to questions about his health, that he was, in the

language of Mr. Peggotty's housekeeper, a lorn lone creature and

everything went contrairy with him. Things were not likely to go better,

I thought, as I saw the great writer,--kindest as well as wisest of men,

but not very patient under sentimental philosophies,--seated next the

good Mr. Tagart, who soon was heard launching at him various

metaphysical questions in regard to heaven and such like; and the relief

was great when Thackeray introduced, with quaint whimsicality, a story

which he and I had heard Macready relate in talking to us about his

boyish days, of a country actor who had supported himself for six months

on his judicious treatment of the "tag" to the _Castle Spectre_. In the

original it stands that you are to do away with suspicion, banish vile

mistrust, and, almost in the words we had just heard from the minister

to the philosopher, "Believe there is a Heaven nor Doubt that Heaven is

just!" in place of which Macready's friend, observing that the drop fell

for the most part quite coldly, substituted one night the more telling

appeal, "And give us your Applause, for _that_ is ALWAYS JUST!" which

brought down the house with rapture.

This chapter would far outrun its limits if I spoke of other as pleasant

gatherings under Dickens's roof during the years which I am now more

particularly describing; when, besides the dinners, the musical

enjoyments and dancings, as his children became able to take part in

them, were incessant. "Remember that for my Biography!" he said to me

gravely on twelfth-day in 1849, after telling me what he had done the

night before; and as gravely I now redeem my laughing promise that I

would. Little Mary and her sister Kate had taken much pains to teach

their father the polka, that he might dance it with them at their

brother's birthday festivity (held this year on the 7th, as the 6th was

a Sunday); and in the middle of the previous night as he lay in bed, the

fear had fallen on him suddenly that the step was forgotten, and then

and there, in that wintry dark cold night, he got out of bed to practise

it. Anything _more_ characteristic could certainly not be told; unless I

could have shown him dancing it afterwards, and far excelling the

youngest performer in untiring vigour and vivacity. There was no one who

approached him on these occasions excepting only our attached friend

Captain Marryat, who had a frantic delight in dancing, especially with

children, of whom and whose enjoyments he was as fond as it became so

thoroughly good hearted a man to be. His name would have stood first

among those I have been recalling, as he was among the first in

Dickens's liking; but in the autumn of 1848 he had unexpectedly passed

away. Other names however still reproach me for omission as my memory

goes back. With Marryat's on the earliest page of this volume stands

that of Monckton Milnes, familiar with Dickens over all the time it

covers, and still more prominent in Tavistock-house days when with Lady

Houghton he brought fresh claims to my friend's admiration and regard.

Of Bulwer Lytton's frequent presence in all his houses, and of Dickens's

admiration for him as one of the supreme masters in his art, so

unswerving and so often publicly declared, it would be needless again to

speak. Nor shall I dwell upon his interchange of hospitalities with

distinguished men in the two great professions so closely allied to

literature and its followers; Denmans, Pollocks, Campbells, and Chittys;

Watsons, Southwood Smiths, Lococks, and Elliotsons. To Alfred Tennyson,

through all the friendly and familiar days I am describing, he gave full

allegiance and honoured welcome. Tom Taylor was often with him; and

there was a charm for him I should find it difficult to exaggerate in

Lord Dudley Stuart's gentle yet noble character, his refined

intelligence and generous public life, expressed so perfectly in his

chivalrous face. Incomplete indeed would be the list if I did not add to

it the frank and hearty Lord Nugent, who had so much of his grandfather,

Goldsmith's friend, in his lettered tastes and jovial enjoyments. Nor

should I forget occasional days with dear old Charles Kemble and one or

other of his daughters; with Alexander Dyce; and with Harness and his

sister, or his niece and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Archdale; made

especially pleasant by talk about great days of the stage. It was

something to hear Kemble on his sister's Mrs. Beverley; or to see

Harness and Dyce exultant in recollecting her Volumnia. The enchantment

of the Mrs. Beverley, her brother would delightfully illustrate by

imitation of her manner of restraining Beverley's intemperance to their

only friend, "You are too busy, sir!" when she quietly came down the

stage from a table at which she had seemed to be occupying herself, laid

her hand softly on her husband's arm, and in a gentle half-whisper "No,

not too busy; mistaken perhaps; but----" not only stayed his temper but

reminded him of obligations forgotten in the heat of it. Up to where the

tragic terror began, our friend told us, there was nothing but this

composed domestic sweetness, expressed even in the simplicity and neat

arrangement of her dress, her cap with the strait band, and her hair

gathered up underneath; but all changing when the passion _did_ begin;

one single disordered lock escaping at the first outbreak, and, in the

final madness, all of it streaming dishevelled down her beautiful face.

Kemble made no secret of his belief that his sister had the higher

genius of the two; but he spoke with rapture of "John's" Macbeth and

parts of his Othello; comparing his "Farewell the tranquil mind" to the

running down of a clock, an image which he did not know that Hazlitt had

applied to the delivery of "To-morrow and to-morrow," in the other

tragedy. In all this Harness seemed to agree; and I thought a

distinction was not ill put by him, on the night of which I speak, in

his remark that the nature in Kemble's acting only supplemented his

magnificent art, whereas, though the artist was not less supreme in his

sister, it was on nature she most relied, bringing up the other power

only to the aid of it. "It was in another sense like your writing," said

Harness to Dickens, "the commonest natural feelings made great, even

when not rendered more refined, by art." Her Constance would have been

fishwify, he declared, if its wonderful truth had not overborne every

other feeling; and her Volumnia escaped being vulgar only by being so

excessively grand. But it was just what was so called "vulgarity" that

made its passionate appeal to the vulgar in a better meaning of the

word. When she first entered, Harness said, swaying and surging from

side to side with every movement of the Roman crowd itself, as it went

out and returned in confusion, she so absorbed her son into herself as

she looked at him, so swelled and amplified in her pride and glory for

him, that "the people in the pit blubbered all round," and he could no

more help it than the rest.

There are yet some other names that should have place in these rambling

recollections, though I by no means affect to remember all. One Sunday

evening Mazzini made memorable by taking us to see the school he had

established in Clerkenwell for the Italian organ-boys. This was after

dining with Dickens, who had been brought into personal intercourse with

the great Italian by having given money to a begging impostor who made

unauthorized use of his name. Edinburgh friends made him regular visits

in the spring time: not Jeffrey and his family alone, but sheriff Gordon

and his, with whom he was not less intimate, Lord Murray and his wife,

Sir William Allan and his niece, Lord Robertson with his wonderful

Scotch mimicries, and Peter Fraser with his enchanting Scotch songs; our

excellent friend Liston the surgeon, until his fatal illness came in

December 1848, being seldom absent from those assembled to bid such

visitors welcome. Allan's name may remind me of other artists often at

his house, Eastlakes, Leslies, Friths, and Wards, besides those who have

had frequent mention, and among whom I should have included Charles as

well as Edwin Landseer, and William Boxall. Nor should I drop from this

section of his friends, than whom none were more attractive to him, such

celebrated names in the sister arts as those of Miss Helen Faucit, an

actress worthily associated with the brightest days of our friend

Macready's managements, Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. John Parry, Mr. Phelps, Mr.

Webster, Mr. Harley, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, Mr. Whitworth, and Miss Dolby.

Mr. George Henry Lewes he had an old and great regard for; among other

men of letters should not be forgotten the cordial Thomas Ingoldsby, and

many-sided true-hearted Charles Knight; Mr. R. H. Horne and his wife

were frequent visitors both in London and at seaside holidays; and I

have met at his table Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall. There were the Duff

Gordons too, the Lyells, and, very old friends of us both, the Emerson

Tennents; there was the good George Raymond, Mr. Frank Beard and his

wife; the Porter Smiths, valued for Macready's sake as well as their

own; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Black, near connections by marriage of George

Cattermole, with whom there was intimate intercourse both before and

during the residence in Italy; Mr. Thompson, brother of Mrs. Smithson

formerly named, and his wife, whose sister Frederick Dickens married;

Mr. Mitton, his own early companion; and Mrs. Torrens, who had played

with the amateurs in Canada. These are all in my memory so connected

with Devonshire-terrace, as friends or familiar acquaintance, that they

claim this word before leaving it; and visitors from America, I may

remark, had always a grateful reception. Of the Bancrofts mention has

been made, and with them should be coupled the Abbot Lawrences,

Prescott, Hillard, George Curtis, and Felton's brother. Felton himself

did not visit England until the Tavistock-house time. In 1847 there was

a delightful day with the Coldens and the Wilkses, relatives by marriage

of Jeffrey; in the following year, I think at my rooms because of some

accident that closed Devonshire-terrace that day (25th of April),

Dickens, Carlyle, and myself foregathered with the admirable Emerson;

and M. Van de Weyer will probably remember a dinner where he took joyous

part with Dickens in running down a phrase which the learned in books,

Mr. Cogswell, on a mission here for the Astor library, had startled us

by denouncing as an uncouth Scotch barbarism--_open up_. You found it

constantly in Hume, he said, but hardly anywhere else; and he defied us

to find it more than once through the whole of the volumes of Gibbon.

Upon this, after brief wonder and doubt, we all thought it best to take

part in a general assault upon _open up_, by invention of phrases on the

same plan that should show it in exaggerated burlesque, and support Mr.

Cogswell's indictment. Then came a struggle who should carry the

absurdity farthest; and the victory remained with M. Van de Weyer until

Dickens surpassed even him, and "opened up" depths of almost frenzied

absurdity that would have delighted the heart of Leigh Hunt. It will

introduce the last and not least honoured name into my list of his

acquaintance and friends, if I mention his amusing little interruption

one day to Professor Owen's description of a telescope of huge

dimensions built by an enterprising clergyman who had taken to the study

of the stars; and who was eager, said Owen, to see farther into

heaven--he was going to say, than Lord Rosse; if Dickens had not drily

interposed, "than his professional studies had enabled him to

penetrate."

Some incidents that belong specially to the three years that closed his

residence in the home thus associated with not the least interesting

part of his career, will farther show what now were his occupations and

ways of life. In the summer of 1849 he came up from Broadstairs to

attend a Mansion-house dinner, which the lord mayor of that day had been

moved by a laudable ambition to give to "literature and art," which he

supposed would be adequately represented by the Royal Academy, the

contributors to _Punch_, Dickens, and one or two newspaper men. On the

whole the result was not cheering; the worthy chief magistrate, no

doubt quite undesignedly, expressing too much surprise at the

unaccustomed faces around him to be altogether complimentary. In general

(this was the tone) we are in the habit of having princes, dukes,

ministers, and what not for our guests, but what a delight, all the

greater for being unusual, to see gentlemen like you! In other words,

what could possibly be pleasanter than for people satiated with

greatness to get for a while by way of change into the butler's pantry?

This in substance was Dickens's account to me next day, and his reason

for having been very careful in his acknowledgment of the toast of "the

Novelists." He was nettled not a little therefore by a jesting allusion

to himself in the _Daily News_ in connection with the proceedings, and

asked me to forward a remonstrance. Having a strong dislike to all such

displays of sensitiveness, I suppressed the letter; but it is perhaps

worth printing now. Its date is Broadstairs, Wednesday 11th of July

1849. "I have no other interest in, or concern with, a most facetious

article on last Saturday's dinner at the Mansion-house, which appeared

in your paper of yesterday, and found its way here to-day, than that it

misrepresents me in what I said on the occasion. If you should not think

it at all damaging to the wit of that satire to state what I did say, I

shall be much obliged to you. It was this. . . . That I considered the

compliment of a recognition of Literature by the citizens of London the

more acceptable to us because it was unusual in that hall, and likely to

be an advantage and benefit to them in proportion as it became in future

less unusual. That, on behalf of the novelists, I accepted the tribute

as an appropriate one; inasmuch as we had sometimes reason to hope that

our imaginary worlds afforded an occasional refuge to men busily engaged

in the toils of life, from which they came forth none the worse to a

renewal of its strivings; and certainly that the chief magistrate of the

greatest city in the world might be fitly regarded as the representative

of that class of our readers."

Of an incident towards the close of the year, though it had important

practical results, brief mention will here suffice. We saw the Mannings

executed on the walls of Horsemonger-lane gaol; and with the letter

which Dickens wrote next day to the _Times_ descriptive of what we had

witnessed on that memorable morning, there began an active agitation

against public executions which never ceased until the salutary change

was effected which has worked so well. Shortly after this he visited

Rockingham-castle, the seat of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, his Lausanne

friends; and I must preface by a word or two the amusing letter in which

he told me of this visit. It was written in character, and the character

was that of an American visitor to England.

"I knew him, Horatio;" and a very kindly honest man he was, who had come

to England authorised to make enquiry into our general agricultural

condition, and who discharged his mission by publishing some reports

extremely creditable to his good sense and ability, expressed in a plain

nervous English that reminded one of the rural writings of Cobbett. But

in an evil hour he published also a series of private letters to friends

written from the various residences his introductions had opened to him;

and these were filled with revelations as to the internal economy of

English noblemen's country houses, of a highly startling description. As

for example, how, on arrival at a house your "name is announced, and

your portmanteau immediately taken into your chamber, which the servant

shows you, with every convenience." How "you are asked by the servant at

breakfast what you will have, or you get up and help yourself." How at

dinner you don't dash at the dishes, or contend for the "fixings," but

wait till "his portion is handed by servants to every one." How all the

wines, fruit, glasses, candlesticks, lamps, and plate are "taken care

of" by butlers, who have under-butlers for their "adjuncts;" how ladies

never wear "white satin shoes or white gloves more than once;" how

dinner napkins are "never left upon the table, but either thrown into

your chair or on the floor under the table;" how no end of pains are

taken to "empty slops;" and above all what a national propensity there

is to brush a man's clothes and polish his boots, whensoever and

wheresoever the clothes and boots can be seized without the man.[160]

This was what Dickens good-humouredly laughs at.

"Rockingham Castle: Friday, thirtieth of November, 1849. Picture to

yourself, my dear F, a large old castle, approached by an ancient keep,

portcullis, &c, &c, filled with company, waited on by six-and-twenty

servants; the slops (and wine-glasses) continually being emptied; and my

clothes (with myself in them) always being carried off to all sorts of

places; and you will have a faint idea of the mansion in which I am at

present staying. I should have written to you yesterday, but for having

had a very busy day. Among the guests is a Miss B, sister of the

Honourable Miss B (of Salem, Mass.), whom we once met at the house of

our distinguished literary countryman Colonel Landor. This lady is

renowned as an amateur actress, so last night we got up in the great

hall some scenes from the _School for Scandal_; the scene with the

lunatic on the wall, from the _Nicholas Nickleby_ of Major-General the

Hon. C. Dickens (Richmond, Va.); some conjuring; and then finished off

with country-dances; of which we had two admirably good ones, quite new

to me, though really old. Getting the words, and making the

preparations, occupied (as you may believe) the whole day; and it was

three o'clock before I got to bed. It was an excellent entertainment,

and we were all uncommonly merry. . . . I had a very polite letter from our

enterprising countryman Major Bentley[161] (of Lexington, Ky.), which I

shall show you when I come home. We leave here this afternoon, and I

shall expect you according to appointment, at a quarter past ten A.M.

to-morrow. Of all the country-houses and estates I have yet seen in

England, I think this is by far the best. Everything undertaken

eventuates in a most magnificent hospitality; and you will be pleased to

hear that our celebrated fellow citizen General Boxall (Pittsburg,

Penn.) is engaged in handing down to posterity the face of the owner of

the mansion and of his youthful son and daughter. At a future time it

will be my duty to report on the turnips, mangel-wurzel, ploughs, and

live stock; and for the present I will only say that I regard it as a

fortunate circumstance for the neighbouring community that this

patrimony should have fallen to my spirited and enlightened host. Every

one has profited by it, and the labouring people in especial are

thoroughly well cared-for and looked after. To see all the household,

headed by an enormously fat housekeeper, occupying the back benches last

night, laughing and applauding without any restraint; and to see a

blushing sleek-headed footman produce, for the watch-trick, a silver

watch of the most portentous dimensions, amidst the rapturous delight of

his brethren and sisterhood; was a very pleasant spectacle, even to a

conscientious republican like yourself or me, who cannot but contemplate

the parent country with feelings of pride in our own land, which (as was

well observed by the Honorable Elias Deeze, of Hertford, Conn.) is truly

the land of the free. Best remembrances from Columbia's daughters. Ever

thine, my dear F,--C.H." Dickens, during the too brief time this

excellent friend was spared to him, often repeated his visits to

Rockingham, always a surpassing enjoyment; and in the winter of 1851 he

accomplished there, with help of the country carpenter, "a very elegant

little theatre," of which he constituted himself manager, and had among

his actors a brother of the lady referred to in his letter, "a very good

comic actor, but loose in words;" poor Augustus Stafford "more than

passable;" and "a son of Vernon Smith's, really a capital low comedian."

It will be one more added to the many examples I have given of his

untiring energy both in work and play, if I mention the fact that this

theatre was opened at Rockingham for their first representation on

Wednesday the 15th of January; that after the performance there was a

country dance which lasted far into the morning; and that on the next

evening, after a railway journey of more than 120 miles, he dined in

London with the prime minister, Lord John Russell.

A little earlier in that winter we had together taken his eldest son to

Eton, and a little later he had a great sorrow. "Poor dear Jeffrey!" he

wrote to me on the 29th January, 1850. "I bought a _Times_ at the

station yesterday morning, and was so stunned by the announcement, that

I felt it in that wounded part of me, almost directly; and the bad

symptoms (modified) returned within a few hours. I had a letter from him

in extraordinary good spirits within this week or two--he was better, he

said, than he had been for a long time--and I sent him proof-sheets of

the number only last Wednesday. I say nothing of his wonderful abilities

and great career, but he was a most affectionate and devoted friend to

me; and though no man could wish to live and die more happily, so old in

years and yet so young in faculties and sympathies, I am very very

deeply grieved for his loss." He was justly entitled to feel pride in

being able so to word his tribute of sorrowing affection. Jeffrey had

completed with consummate success, if ever man did, the work appointed

him in this world; and few, after a life of such activities, have left a

memory so unstained and pure. But other and sharper sorrows awaited

Dickens.

The chief occupation of the past and present year, _David Copperfield_,

will have a chapter to itself, and in this may be touched but lightly.

Once fairly in it, the story bore him irresistibly along; certainly with

less trouble to himself in the composition, beyond that ardent sympathy

with the creatures of the fancy which always made so absolutely real to

him their sufferings or sorrows; and he was probably never less harassed

by interruptions or breaks in his invention. His principal hesitation

occurred in connection with the child-wife Dora, who had become a great

favourite as he went on; and it was shortly after her fate had been

decided, in the early autumn of 1850,[162] but before she breathed her

last, that a third daughter was born to him, to whom he gave his dying

little heroine's name. On these and other points, without forestalling

what waits to be said of the composition of this fine story, a few

illustrative words from his letters will properly find a place here.

"_Copperfield_ half done," he wrote of the second number on the 6th of

June. "I feel, thank God, quite confident in the story. I have a move in

it ready for this month; another for next; and another for the next." "I

think it is necessary" (15th of November) "to decide against the special

pleader. Your reasons quite suffice. I am not sure but that the banking

house might do. I will consider it in a walk." "Banking business

impracticable" (17th of November) "on account of the confinement: which

would stop the story, I foresee. I have taken, for the present at all

events, the proctor. I am wonderfully in harness, and nothing galls or

frets." "_Copperfield_ done" (20th of November) "after two days' very

hard work indeed; and I think a smashing number. His first dissipation I

hope will be found worthy of attention, as a piece of grotesque truth."

"I feel a great hope" (23rd of January, 1850) "that I shall be

remembered by little Em'ly, a good many years to come." "I begin to have

my doubts of being able to join you" (20th of February), "for

_Copperfield_ runs high, and must be done to-morrow. But I'll do it if

possible, and strain every nerve. Some beautiful comic love, I hope, in

the number." "Still undecided about Dora" (7th of May), "but MUST decide

to-day."[163] "I have been" (Tuesday, 20th of August) "very hard at work

these three days, and have still Dora to kill. But with good luck, I may

do it to-morrow. Obliged to go to Shepherd's-bush to-day, and can

consequently do little this morning. Am eschewing all sorts of things

that present themselves to my fancy--coming in such crowds!" "Work in a

very decent state of advancement" (13th of August) "domesticity

notwithstanding. I hope I shall have a splendid number. I feel the story

to its minutest point." "Mrs. Micawber is still" (15th of August), "I

regret to say, in statu quo. Ever yours, WILKINS MICAWBER." The little

girl was born the next day, the 16th, and received the name of Dora

Annie. The most part of what remained of the year was passed away from

home.

The year following did not open with favourable omen, both the child and

its mother having severe illness. The former rallied however, and

"little Dora is getting on bravely, thank God!" was his bulletin of the

early part of February. Soon after, it was resolved to make trial of

Great Malvern for Mrs. Dickens; and lodgings were taken there in March,

Dickens and her sister accompanying her, and the children being left in

London. "It is a most beautiful place," he wrote to me (15th of March).

"O Heaven, to meet the Cold Waterers (as I did this morning when I went

out for a shower-bath) dashing down the hills, with severe expressions

on their countenances, like men doing matches and not exactly winning!

Then, a young lady in a grey polka going _up_ the hills, regardless of

legs; and meeting a young gentleman (a bad case, I should say) with a

light black silk cap on under his hat, and the pimples of I don't know

how many douches under that. Likewise an old man who ran over a

milk-child, rather than stop!--with no neckcloth, on principle; and with

his mouth wide open, to catch the morning air." This was the month, as

we have seen, when the performances for the Guild were in active

preparation, and it was also the date of the farewell dinner to our

friend Macready on his quitting the stage. Dickens and myself came up

for it from Malvern, to which he returned the next day; and from the

spirited speech in which he gave the health of the chairman at the

dinner, I will add a few words for the sake of the truth expressed in

them. "There is a popular prejudice, a kind of superstition, that

authors are not a particularly united body, and I am afraid that this

may contain half a grain or so of the veracious. But of our chairman I

have never in my life made public mention without adding what I can

never repress, that in the path we both tread I have uniformly found him

to be, from the first, the most generous of men; quick to encourage,

slow to disparage, and ever anxious to assert the order of which he is

so great an ornament. That we men of letters are, or have been,

invariably or inseparably attached to each other, it may not be possible

to say, formerly or now; but there cannot now be, and there cannot ever

have been, among the followers of literature, a man so entirely without

the grudging little jealousies that too often disparage its brightness,

as Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton." That was as richly merited as it is

happily said.

Dickens had to return to London after the middle of March for business

connected with a charitable Home established at Shepherd's-bush by Miss

Coutts, in the benevolent hope of rescuing fallen women by testing their

fitness for emigration, of which future mention will be made, and which

largely and regularly occupied his time for several years. On this

occasion his stay was prolonged by the illness of his father. His

health had been failing latterly, and graver symptoms were now spoken

of. "I saw my poor father twice yesterday," he wrote to me on the 27th,

"the second time between ten and eleven at night. In the morning I

thought him not so well. At night, as well as any one in such a

situation could be." Next day he was so much better that his son went

back to Malvern, and even gave us grounds for hope that we might yet

have his presence in Hertfordshire to advise on some questions connected

with the comedy which Sir Edward Lytton had written for the Guild. But

the end came suddenly. I returned from Knebworth to London, supposing

that some accident had detained him at Malvern; and at my house this

letter waited me. "Devonshire-terrace, Monday, thirty-first of March

1851. . . . My poor father died this morning at five and twenty minutes to

six. They had sent for me to Malvern, but I passed John on the railway;

for I came up with the intention of hurrying down to Bulwer Lytton's

to-day before you should have left. I arrived at eleven last night, and

was in Keppel-street at a quarter past eleven. But he did not know me,

nor any one. He began to sink at about noon yesterday, and never rallied

afterwards. I remained there until he died--O so quietly. . . . I hardly

know what to do. I am going up to Highgate to get the ground. Perhaps

you may like to go, and I should like it if you do. I will not leave

here before two o'clock. I think I must go down to Malvern again, at

night, to know what is to be done about the children's mourning; and as

you are returning to Bulwer's I should like to have gone that way, if

_Bradshaw_ gave me any hope of doing it. I wish most particularly to

see you, I needn't say. I must not let myself be distracted by

anything--and God knows I have left a sad sight!--from the scheme on

which so much depends. Most part of the alterations proposed I think

good." Mr. John Dickens was laid in Highgate Cemetery on the 5th of

April; and the stone placed over him by the son who has made his name a

famous one in England, bore tribute to his "zealous, useful, cheerful

spirit." What more is to be said of him will be most becomingly said in

speaking of _David Copperfield_. While the book was in course of being

written, all that had been best in him came more and more vividly back

to its author's memory; as time wore on, nothing else was remembered;

and five years before his own death, after using in one of his letters

to me a phrase rather out of the common with him, this was added: "I

find this looks like my poor father, whom I regard as a better man the

longer I live."

He was at this time under promise to take the chair at the General

Theatrical Fund on the 14th of April. Great efforts were made to relieve

him from the promise; but such special importance was attached to his

being present, and the Fund so sorely then required help, that, no

change of day being found possible for the actors who desired to attend,

he yielded to the pressure put upon him; of which the result was to

throw upon me a sad responsibility. The reader will understand why, even

at this distance of time; my allusion to it is brief.

The train from Malvern brought him up only five minutes short of the

hour appointed for the dinner, and we first met that day at the London

Tavern. I never heard him to greater advantage than in the speech that

followed. His liking for this Fund was the fact of its not confining its

benefits to any special or exclusive body of actors, but opening them

generously to all; and he gave a description of the kind of actor, going

down to the infinitesimally small, not omitted from such kind help,

which had a half-pathetic humour in it that makes it charming still. "In

our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include

every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or

the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He

may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric.

He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still

unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred

years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the

white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be

to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing, and to shake

hands with everybody between all the verses. Or he may be the baron who

gives the fete, and who sits uneasily on the sofa under a canopy with

the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the

fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it

may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to

drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of

the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the

gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is

precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who

resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit to a bower

or a palace. Or again, if an actor, he may be the armed head of the

witch's cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom I

have observed in country places, that he is much less like the notion

formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or Donalbain of

the previous scenes. This society, in short, says, 'Be you what you may,

be you actor or actress, be your path in your profession never so high

or never so low, never so haughty or never so humble, we offer you the

means of doing good to yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.'"

Half an hour before he rose to speak I had been called out of the room.

It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was

suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was

just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions

came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be

formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit

his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him.

But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors

having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death

itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. "Yet

how often is it with all of us," he proceeded to say, and I remember to

this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself

alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: "how often is

it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to

our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life,

if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities." In

the disclosure that followed when he left the chair, Mr. Lemon, who was

present, assisted me; and I left this good friend with him next day,

when I went myself to Malvern and brought back Mrs. Dickens and her

sister. The little child lies in a grave at Highgate near that of Mr.

and Mrs. John Dickens; and on the stone which covers her is now written

also her father's name, and those of two of her brothers.

One more public discussion he took part in, before quitting London for

the rest of the summer; and what he said (it was a meeting, with Lord

Carlisle in the chair, in aid of Sanitary reform) very pregnantly

illustrates what was remarked by me on a former page. He declared his

belief that neither education nor religion could do anything really

useful in social improvement until the way had been paved for their

ministrations by cleanliness and decency. He spoke warmly of the

services of Lord Ashley in connection with ragged schools, but he put

the case of a miserable child tempted into one of those schools out of

the noisome places in which his life was passed, and he asked what a few

hours' teaching could effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole

existence. "But give him, and his, a glimpse of heaven through a little

of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten

the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag, and which makes them

the callous things they are; take the body of the dead relative from the

room where the living live with it, and where such loathsome familiarity

deprives death itself of awe; and then, but not before, they will be

brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the

wretched, and who had compassion for all human sorrow." He closed by

proposing Lord Ashley's health as having preferred the higher ambition

of labouring for the poor to that of pursuing the career open to him in

the service of the State; and as having also had "the courage on all

occasions to face the cant which is the worst and commonest of all, the

cant about the cant of philanthropy." Lord Shaftesbury first dined with

him in the following year at Tavistock-house.

Shortly after the Sanitary meeting came the first Guild performances;

and then Dickens left Devonshire-terrace, never to return to it. What

occupied him in the interval before he took possession of his new abode,

has before been told; but two letters were overlooked in describing his

progress in the labour of the previous year, and brief extracts from

them will naturally lead me to the subject of my next chapter. "I have

been" (15th of September) "tremendously at work these two days; eight

hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half to-day, with the

Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me

over--utterly defeated me!" "I am" (21st of October) "within three pages

of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between

sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what

_Copperfield_ makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I

should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself

into the Shadowy World."

=END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.=

FOOTNOTES:

[158] I take the opportunity of saying that there was an omission of

three words in the epitaph quoted on a former page (vol. i. p. 120). The

headstone at the grave in Kensal-green bears this inscription: "Young,

beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at

the early age of seventeen."

[159] From letters of nearly the same date here is another

characteristic word: "Pen and ink before me! Am I not at work on

_Copperfield_! Nothing else would have kept me here until half-past two

on such a day. . . . Indian news bad indeed. Sad things come of bloody war.

If it were not for Elihu, I should be a peace and arbitration man."

[160] Here is really an only average specimen of the letters as

published: "I forgot to say, if you leave your chamber twenty times a

day, after using your basin, you would find it clean, and the pitcher

replenished on your return, and that you cannot take your clothes off,

but they are taken away, brushed, folded, pressed, and placed in the

bureau; and at the dressing-hour, before dinner, you find your candles

lighted, your clothes laid out, your shoes cleaned, and everything

arranged for use; . . . the dress-clothes brushed and folded in the nicest

manner, and cold water, and hot water, and clean napkins in the greatest

abundance. . . . Imagine an elegant chamber, fresh water in basins, in

goblets, in tubs, and sheets of the finest linen!"

[161] From this time to his death there was always friendly intercourse

with his old publisher Mr. Bentley.

[162] It may be proper to record the fact that he had made a short run

to Paris, with Maclise, at the end of June, of which sufficient farther

note will have been taken if I print the subjoined passages from a

letter to me dated 24th June, 1850, Hotel Windsor, Rue de Rivoli. "There

being no room in the Hotel Brighton, we are lodged (in a very good

apartment) here. The heat is absolutely frightful. I never felt anything

like it in Italy. Sleep is next to impossible, except in the day, when

the room is dark, and the patient exhausted. We purpose leaving here on

Saturday morning and going to Rouen, whence we shall proceed either to

Havre or Dieppe, and so arrange our proceedings as to be home, please

God, on Tuesday evening. We are going to some of the little theatres

to-night, and on Wednesday to the Francais, for Rachel's last

performance before she goes to London. There does not seem to be

anything remarkable in progress, in the theatrical way. Nor do I observe

that out of doors the place is much changed, except in respect of the

carriages which are certainly less numerous. I also think the Sunday is

even much more a day of business than it used to be. As we are going

into the country with Regnier to-morrow, I write this after letter-time

and before going out to dine at the Trois Freres, that it may come to

you by to-morrow's post. The twelve hours' journey here is

astounding--marvellously done, except in respect of the means of

refreshment, which are absolutely none. Mac is very well (extremely

loose as to his waistcoat, and otherwise careless in regard of buttons)

and sends his love. De Fresne proposes a dinner with all the

notabilities of Paris present, but I WON'T stand it! I really have

undergone so much fatigue from work, that I am resolved not even to see

him, but to please myself. I find, my child (as Horace Walpole would

say), that I have written you nothing here, but you will take the will

for the deed."

[163] The rest of the letter may be allowed to fill the corner of a

note. The allusions to Rogers and Landor are by way of reply to an

invitation I had sent him. "I am extremely sorry to hear about Fox.

Shall call to enquire, as I come by to the Temple. And will call on you

(taking the chance of finding you) on my way to that Seat of Boredom. I

wrote my paper for _H. W._ yesterday, and have begun _Copperfield_ this

morning. Still undecided about Dora, but MUST decide to-day. La

difficulte d'ecrire l'Anglais m'est extremement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu!

si l'on pourrait toujours ecrire cette belle langue de France! Monsieur

Rogere! Ah! qu'il est homme d'esprit, homme de genie, homme des lettres!

Monsieur Landore! Ah qu'il parle Francais--pas parfaitement comme un

ange--un peu (peut-etre) comme un diable! Mais il est bon

garcon--serieusement, il est un de la vraie noblesse de la nature. Votre

tout devoue, CHARLES. A Monsieur Monsieur Fos-tere."

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Pages 47-48, word split over two pages was mistyped. Word "yester-

terday" changed to "yesterday" (Ditto yesterday; except)

Footnote 116, "inim table" changed to "inimitable" (facetiousness of the

inimitable)

Page 310, "Nove ber" changed to "November" (21st of November)

Page 311, "hem" changed to "them" (perfect joy in them)

Footnote 139, "Edi burgh" changed to "Edinburgh" (Lord Cockburn.

"EDINBURGH)

Footnote 143, "l ght" changed to "light" (Wellbred's light ease)

To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations,

capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained.

For example:

Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was

retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of

A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained.

*****

Transcriber's Note:

For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by _underscores_, bold text is

surrounded by =equal signs= and underlined text is surrounded by

~tildes~. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by [)e] in the

text.

THE LIFE

OF

[Illustration: Signature: Charles Dickens]

THE LIFE

OF

CHARLES DICKENS

BY

JOHN FORSTER.

VOL. III.

1852-1870.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

Autograph of Charles Dickens _Fly-leaf_

Charles Dickens, aet. 56. From the last photograph

taken in America, in 1868. Engraved by J. C.

Armytage _Frontispiece_

Devonshire Terrace. From a drawing by Daniel

Maclise, R.A. 41

Tavistock House 53

Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _David

Copperfield_ 157

Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of _Little

Dorrit_ 158

The Porch at Gadshill 204

The Chalet 213

House and conservatory, from the meadow 216

The study at Gadshill 222

Facsimile from the last page of _Edwin Drood_, written

on the 8th of June, 1870 468

Facsimile of a page of _Oliver Twist_, written in 1837 469

The Grave. From an original water-colour drawing,

executed for this Work, by S. L. Fildes. Engraved by

J. Saddler _to face_ p. 544

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. 1850-1853.

Pages 21-50.

DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE. AET. 38-41.

PAGE

Interest of _Copperfield_ 21

Real people in novels 22

Scott, Smollett, and Fielding 22

Complaint and atonement 23

Earlier and later methods 24

Boythorn and Skimpole 26

Yielding to temptation 27

Changes made in Skimpole 28

Relatives put into books 29

Scott and his father 29

Dickens and his father 30

No harm done 32

Micawber and Skimpole 32

Dickens and David 33

Dangers of autobiography 34

Design of David's character 35

Why books continue 36

The storm and shipwreck 37

Goethe on the insane 38

The two heroines 39

Risks not worth running 40

Devonshire Terrace 41

_Bleak House_ 43

Defects of the novel 44

Set-offs and successes 45

Value of critical judgments 46

The contact of extremes 47

Dean Ramsay on Jo 48

Town graves 49

One last friend 49

Truth of Gridley's case 50

CHAPTER II. 1853-1855.

Pages 51-75.

HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES. AET. 41-43.

Titles proposed for _Bleak House_ 52

Restlessness 52

Tavistock House 53

Last child born 54

A young stage aspirant 54

Deaths of friends 55

At Boulogne 55

Publishing agreements 56

At Birmingham 56

Self-changes 57

Employments in Boulogne 59

First reading in public 60

Argument against paid readings 61

Children's theatricals 62

Mr. H. in _Tom Thumb_ 62

Dickens in Fortunio 63

Titles for a new story 65

Difficulties of weekly parts 66

Mr. Ruskin on _Hard Times_ 67

Truths enforced 68

Early experiences 69

Strike at Preston 69

Speaking at Drury Lane 70

Stanfield scenes 71

Tavistock House theatricals 71

Peter Cunningham 73

Incident of a November night 74

Degrees in misery 75

CHAPTER III. 1853.

Pages 76-95.

SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED. AET. 41.

Swiss people 76

Narrow escape 77

Lausanne and Genoa 78

The Peschiere and its owner 79

On the way to Naples 80

A night on board ship 81

A Greek potentate 82

Going out to dinner 83

The old idle Frenchman 84

Changes and old friends 85

A "scattering" party 86

The puppets at Rome 87

Malaria and desolation 88

Plague-smitten places 89

Again in Venice 90

A painter among paintings 91

Liking for the Sardinians 92

Neapolitans in exile 93

Travelling police arrangements 94

Dickens and the Austrian 95

CHAPTER IV. 1853, 1854, and 1856.

Pages 96-120.

THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE. AET. 41, 42, 44.

Visits to France 96

First summer residence (1853) 97

Villa des Moulineaux 98

Doll's house and offices 99

Bon garcon of a landlord 100

Making the most of it 101

Among Putney market-gardeners 102

Shakespearian performance 103

Pictures at the pig-market 104

English friends 105

Change of villa (1854) 105

The Northern Camp 106

Visit of Prince Albert 107

Emperor, Prince, and Dickens 108

"Like boxing" 109

The Empress at a review 110

A French conjuror 110

Conjuring by Dickens 111

Making demons of cards 112

Conjuror's compliment and vision 114

Old residence resumed (1856) 115

Last of the Camp 116

A household war 117

State of siege 118

Death of Gilbert A'Becket 119

Leaving for England 119

CHAPTER V. 1855, 1856.

Pages 121-153.

RESIDENCE IN PARIS. AET. 43-44.

Actors and dramas 122

Frederic Lemaitre 122

Last scene in _Gambler's Life_ 123

Apartment in Champs Elysees 124

French Translation of Dickens 125

Ary Scheffer and Daniel Manin 126

English friends 126

Acting at the Francais 127

Dumas' _Orestes_ 129

_Paradise Lost_ at the Ambigu 130

Profane nonsense 131

French _As You Like It_ 132

Story of a French drama 133

A delightful "Tag" 134

Auber and Queen Victoria 134

Scribe and his wife 136

At Regnier's 137

Viardot in _Orphee_ 138

Meets Georges Sand 138

Banquet at Girardin's 139

Second banquet 141

Bourse and its victims 142

Entry of troops from Crimea 143

Zouaves and their dog 144

Streets on New Year's Day 145

English and French art 146

Emperor and Edwin Landseer 147

Sitting to Ary Scheffer 148

Scheffer as to the likeness 149

A duchess murdered 150

Truth is stranger than fiction 151

Singular scenes described 152

What became of the actors 153

CHAPTER VI. 1855-1857.

Pages 154-176.

LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR. AET. 43-45.

Watts's Rochester charity 155

Tablet to Dickens in Cathedral 155

_Nobody's Fault_ 155

How the _Dorrit_ story grew 156

Number-Plan of _Copperfield_ 157

Number-Plan of _Dorrit_ 158

Circumlocution Office 159

Flora and Mr. F---- 160

Weak and strong points 161

A scene of boy-trials 162

Reception of the novel 163

Christmas theatricals 164

Theatre-making 165

Rush for places 166

Douglas Jerrold's death 168

Exertions and result 168

Seeing the serpents fed 169

Lazy Tour projected 170

Up Carrick Fell 170

Accident to Mr. Wilkie Collins 171

At Wigton and Allonby 172

The Yorkshire landlady 173

Doncaster in race week 174

A performance of _Money_ 175

CHAPTER VII. 1857-1858.

Pages 177-201.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME. AET. 45-46.

Disappointments and distastes 177

What we seem and are 178

Compensations of Art 179

Misgivings 180

A defect and a merit 181

Reply to a remonstrance 182

Dangerous comfort 183

One happiness missed 184

Homily on life 185

Confidences 186

Rejoinder to a reply 187

What the world cannot give 189

An old project revived 189

Shakespeare on acting 191

Hospital for sick children 192

Charities of the very poor 192

Unsolved mysteries 194

Appeal for sick children 195

Reading for Child's Hospital 195

Proposal for Paid readings 196

Question of the Plunge 198

Mr. Arthur Smith 199

Separation from Mrs. Dickens 200

What alone concerned the public 201

CHAPTER VIII. 1856-1870.

Pages 202-222.

GADSHILL PLACE. AET. 44-58.