The porch 204
Negotiations for purchase 204
Becomes his home 205
Gadshill a century ago 206
Past owners and tenants 207
Sinking a well 209
Gradual additions 210
Gift from Mr. Fechter 211
Dickens's writing-table 211
The chalet 213
Much coveted acquisition 214
Last improvement 215
Visits of friends 216
Dickens's Dogs 218
A Fenian mastiff 218
Linda and Mrs. Bouncer 219
Favourite walks 220
The study and chair 222
CHAPTER IX. 1858-1859.
Pages 223-238.
FIRST PAID READINGS. AET. 46-47.
Various managements 223
One day's work 224
Impressions of Dublin 225
Irish audiences 226
Young Ireland and Old England 227
Railway ride to Belfast 229
Brought near his Fame 229
A knowing audience 231
Greeting in Manchester 231
Joined by his daughters 232
Strange life 233
Scotch audiences 234
When most successful in reading 235
At public meetings 236
Miss Marie Wilton as _Pippo_ 237
Ed. Landseer on Frith's portrait 238
CHAPTER X. 1859-1861.
Pages 239-254.
ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. AET. 47-49.
_Household Words_ discontinued 240
Earliest and latest publishers 240
Dickens and Mr. Bentley 241
In search of a title 242
A title found 243
Success of new periodical 244
Difference from the old 245
At Knebworth 246
Commercial Travellers' Schools 247
A Traveller for human interests 248
Personal references in writing 249
Birds and low company 250
Bethnal-green fowls 251
An incident of Doughty Street 252
Offers from America 253
CHAPTER XI. 1861-1863.
Pages 255-274.
SECOND SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 49-51.
Daughter Kate's marriage 255
Charles Alston Collins 257
Sale of Tavistock House 257
Brother Alfred's death 258
Metropolitan readings 258
Provincial circuit 259
New subjects for readings 260
Death of Mr. Arthur Smith 261
Death of Mr. Henry Austin 262
Readings at Brighton 263
At Canterbury and Dover 264
Alarming scene 265
Impromptu reading-hall 266
Scenes in Scotland 267
At Torquay 268
Death of C. C. Felton 269
Offers for Australia 270
Writing or Reading? 271
Home arguments 272
Religious Richardson's Show 273
Exiled ex-potentate 274
CHAPTER XII. 1855-1865.
Pages 275-297.
HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN. AET. 43-53.
Book of MS. memoranda 275
Originals of characters 277
Fancies put into books 277
Notions for _Little Dorrit_ 278
Suggestions for other books 279
Hints for last completed book 280
Fancies never used 281
Ideas not worked out 282
A touching fancy 284
Domestic subjects 284
Characters of women 285
Other female groups 286
Uncle Sam 288
Sketches of selfishness 288
Striking thoughts 290
Subjects not accomplished 290
Characters laid aside 291
Available names 293
Titles for books 293
Names for girls and boys 295
An undistinguished crowd 296
Mr. Brobity's snuff-box 297
CHAPTER XIII. 1864-1867.
Pages 298-324.
THIRD SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 52-55.
Death of Thackeray 298
Mother's death 300
Death of second son 300
Interest in Mr. Fechter 301
Notes on theatres 302
Sorrowful new year 303
C. W. Dilke's death 303
Staplehurst accident 305
Illness and suffering 305
Enters on new readings 306
Last meeting with Mrs. Carlyle 308
Mrs. Carlyle's death 309
Offer for more readings 309
Grave warnings 311
In Scotland 312
Exertion and its result 313
Self-deception 314
An old malady 314
Scene at Tynemouth 316
In Dublin with the Fenians 317
Yielding to temptation 318
Pressure from America 319
At bay at last 320
Warning unheeded 321
Discussion useless 322
The case in a nutshell 323
Decision to go 324
CHAPTER XIV. 1836-1870.
Pages 325-386.
DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. AET. 24-58.
See before you oversee 326
M. Taine's criticism 326
What is overlooked in it 327
A popularity explained 328
National excuses for Dickens 330
Comparison with Balzac 330
Anticipatory reply to M. Taine 332
A critic in the _Fortnightly Review_ 333
Blame and praise to be reconciled 333
A plea for objectors 334
"Hallucinative" imagination 335
Vain critical warnings 336
The critic and the criticised 336
An opinion on the Micawbers 338
Hallucinative phenomena 338
Scott writing _Bride of Lammermoor_ 339
Claim to be fairly judged 340
Dickens's leading quality 341
Dangers of Humour 342
His earlier books 343
Mastery of dialogue 344
Character-drawing 345
Realities of fiction 346
Fielding and Dickens 347
Touching of extremes 347
Why the creations of fiction live 349
Enjoyment of his own humour 350
Unpublished note of Lord Lytton 350
Exaggerations of humour 351
Temptations of all great humourists 352
A word for fanciful descriptions 353
_Tale of Two Cities_ 355
Difficulties and success 355
Specialty of treatment 356
Reply to objections 357
Care with which Dickens worked 358
An American critic 359
_Great Expectations_ 360
Pip and Magwitch 361
Another boy-child for hero 362
Unlikeness in likeness 363
Vivid descriptive writing 364
Masterly drawing of character 365
A day on the Thames 366
Homely and shrewd satire 367
Incident changed for Lytton 368
As originally written 369
Christmas Sketches 370
_Our Mutual Friend_ 370
Writing numbers in advance 373
Working slowly 374
Death of John Leech 375
A fatal anniversary 376
Effects on himself and his novel 376
A tale by Edmond About 378
First and Last 378
_Doctor Marigold_ 379
Minor stories 380
"Something from Above" 381
Purity of Dickens's writings 382
Substitute for an alleged deficiency 382
True province of humour 383
Horace Greeley and Longfellow 384
Letters from an American 385
Companions for solitude 386
CHAPTER XV. 1867.
Pages 387-406.
AMERICA REVISITED. NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1867. AET. 55.
Warmth of the greeting 388
Same cause as in 1842 388
Old and new friends 389
Changes since 1842 390
First Boston reading 391
Scene at New York sales 393
First New York reading 393
An action against Dickens 394
A fire at his hotel 395
Local and general politics 397
Railway arrangements 398
Police of New York 398
Mistletoe from England 399
As to newspapers 400
Nothing lasts long 401
Cities chosen for readings 401
Scene of a murder visited 402
A dinner at the murderer's 403
Illness and abstinence 404
Miseries of American travel 405
Startling prospect 406
CHAPTER XVI. 1868.
Pages 407-443.
AMERICA REVISITED. JANUARY TO APRIL, 1868. AET. 56.
Speculators and public 408
An Englishman's disadvantage 408
"Freedom and independence" 408
Mountain-sneezers and eye-openers 409
The work and the gain 410
A scene at Brooklyn 411
At Philadelphia 412
"Looking up the judge" 413
Improved social ways 414
Result of thirty-four readings 415
Shadow to the sunshine 416
Readings in a church 417
Change of plan 417
Baltimore women 418
Success in Philadelphia 419
Objections to coloured people 420
With Sumner at Washington 421
President Lincoln's dream 423
Interview with President Johnson 423
Washington audiences 424
A comical dog 425
Incident before a reading 426
The child and the doll 427
North-west tour 428
Political excitement 429
Struggle for tickets 430
American female beauty 432
Sherry to "slop round" with 432
Final impression of Niagara 433
Letter to Mr. Ouvry 434
"Getting along" through water 435
Again attacked by lameness 437
Illness and exertion 437
Seeing prevents believing 439
All but used up 439
Last Boston readings 440
New York farewells 441
The receipts throughout 441
Promise at public dinner 442
The Adieu 443
CHAPTER XVII. 1868-1870.
Pages 444-460.
LAST READINGS. AET. 56-58.
Health improved 444
What the readings did and undid 445
Expenses and gains in America 446
Noticeable changes in him 447
_Oliver Twist_ reading proposed 448
Objections to it 449
Death of Frederick Dickens 450
Macready at _Oliver Twist_ reading 451
Another attack of illness 452
A doctors' difference 454
At Emerson Tennent's funeral 454
The illness at Preston 455
Brought to London 456
Sir Thomas Watson consulted 456
His note of the case 457
Guarded sanction to other readings 458
Close of career as public reader 460
CHAPTER XVIII. 1869-1870.
Pages 461-477.
LAST BOOK. AET. 57-58.
The agreement for _Edwin Drood_ 461
First fancy for it 462
Story as planned in his mind 463
What to be its course and end 463
Merits of the fragment 464
Comparison of early and late MSS 466
Discovery of an unpublished scene 467
Last page of _Drood_ in fac-simile 468
Page of _Oliver Twist_ in fac-simile 469
Delightful specimen of Dickens 470
Unpublished scene for _Drood_ 470-476
CHAPTER XIX. 1836-1870.
Pages 478-526.
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. AET. 24-58.
Dickens not a bookish man 479
Books and their critics 479
Design of present book stated 480
Dickens made to tell his own story 480
Charge of personal obtrusiveness 481
Lord Russell on Dickens's letters 481
Shallower judgments 481
Absence of self-conceit in Dickens 482
Letter to youngest son 483
As to religion and prayer 485
Letter to a clergyman in 1856 485
Letter to a layman in 1870 486
Objection to posthumous honours 487
As to patronage of literature 488
Vanity of human wishes 488
As to writers and publishers 489
Editorship of his weekly serials 490
Work for his contributors 491
Editorial troubles and pleasures 493
Letter to an author 493
Help to younger novelists 495
Adelaide Procter's poetry 495
Effect of periodical writing 496
Proposed satirical papers 497
Political opinions 498
Not the man for Finsbury 499
The Liverpool dinner in 1869 500
Reply to Lord Houghton 501
Tribute to Lord Russell 501
People governing and governed 502
Alleged offers from her Majesty 503
Silly Rigmarole 504
The Queen sees him act (1857) 505
Desires to hear him read (1858) 506
Interview at the Palace (1870) 507
What passed at the interview 507
Dickens's grateful impression 508
A hope at the close of life 509
Games in Gadshill meadow 510
Home enjoyments 512
Habits of life everywhere 513
Family dependence on him 514
Carlyle's opinion of Dickens 514
Street walks and London haunts 515
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 517
The first attack of lameness 518
Effect upon his dogs 518
Why right things to be done 519
Silent heroisms 519
At social meetings 520
Delight in "assumption" 520
Humouring a joke 522
Unlucky hits 522
Ghost stories 524
Predominant feeling of his life 525
Sermon of the Master of Balliol 525
CHAPTER XX. 1869-1870.
Pages 527-545.
THE END. AET. 57-58.
Last summer and autumn 527
Showing London to a visitor 528
His son Henry's scholarship 529
Twelve more readings 530
Medical attendance at them 531
Excitement incident to them 532
The Farewell 533
Last public appearances 535
At Royal Academy dinner 535
Eulogy of Daniel Maclise 536
Return of illness 537
Our last meeting 538
A noteworthy incident 538
Last letter received from him 539
Final days at Gadshill 539
Wednesday the 8th of June 540
Last piece of writing 540
The 8th and 9th of June 541
The general grief 542
The burial 544
Unbidden mourners 544
The grave 544
* * * * *
APPENDIX.
I. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS 547
II. THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS 561
III. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF
THE SECOND VOLUME OF THIS WORK 566
INDEX 571
THE LIFE
OF
CHARLES DICKENS.
CHAPTER I.
DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE.
1850-1853.
Interest of _Copperfield_--Scott, Smollett, and
Fielding--Too close to the Real--Earlier and
Later Methods--Dickens at Hatton-garden
(1837)--Originals of Boythorn and
Skimpole--Last Glimpse of Leigh Hunt
(1859)--Changes made in
Skimpole--Self-defence--Scott and his
Father--Dickens and his Father--Sayings of John
Dickens--Skimpole and Micawber--Dickens and
David--Self-portraiture not attempted--The
Autobiographic Form--Consistent Drawing--Design
of David's Character--Tone of the Novel--The
Peggottys--Miss Dartle--Mrs. Steerforth--Betsey
Trotwood--A Country Undertaker--The Two
Heroines--Contrast of Esther and David--Plot of
the Story--Incidents and Persons
interwoven--Defects of _Bleak House_--Success
in Character--Value of Critical
Judgments--Pathetic Touches--Dean Ramsay on
_Bleak House_ and Jo--Originals of Chancery
Abuses.
DICKENS never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of
_Copperfield_. The popularity it obtained at the outset increased to a
degree not approached by any previous book excepting _Pickwick_. "You
gratify me more than I can tell you," he wrote to Bulwer Lytton (July
1850), "by what you say about _Copperfield_, because I hope myself that
some heretofore deficient qualities are there." If the power was not
greater than in _Chuzzlewit_, the subject had more attractiveness; there
was more variety of incident, with a freer play of character; and there
was withal a suspicion, which though general and vague had sharpened
interest not a little, that underneath the fiction lay something of the
author's life. How much, was not known by the world until he had passed
away.
To be acquainted with English literature is to know, that, into its most
famous prose fiction, autobiography has entered largely in disguise, and
that the characters most familiar to us in the English novel had
originals in actual life. Smollett never wrote a story that was not in
some degree a recollection of his own adventures; and Fielding, who put
something of his wife into all his heroines, had been as fortunate in
finding, not Trulliber only, but Parson Adams himself, among his living
experiences. To come later down, there was hardly any one ever known to
Scott of whom his memory had not treasured up something to give minuter
reality to the people of his fancy; and we know exactly whom to look for
in Dandie Dinmont and Jonathan Oldbuck, in the office of Alan Fairford
and the sick room of Crystal Croftangry. We are to observe also that it
is never anything complete that is thus taken from life by a genuine
writer, but only leading traits, or such as may give greater finish;
that the fine artist will embody in his portraiture of one person his
experiences of fifty; and that this would have been Fielding's answer to
Trulliber if he had objected to the pigstye, and to Adams if he had
sought to make a case of scandal out of the affair in Mrs. Slipslop's
bedroom. Such questioning befell Dickens repeatedly in the course of his
writings, where he freely followed, as we have seen, the method thus
common to the masters in his art; but there was an instance of alleged
wrong in the course of _Copperfield_ where he felt his vindication to be
hardly complete, and what he did thereupon was characteristic.
"I have had the queerest adventure this morning," he wrote (28th of
December 1849) on the eve of his tenth number, "the receipt of the
enclosed from Miss Moucher! It is serio-comic, but there is no doubt one
is wrong in being tempted to such a use of power." Thinking a grotesque
little oddity among his acquaintance to be safe from recognition, he had
done what Smollett did sometimes, but never Fielding, and given way, in
the first outburst of fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the
temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of figure and face
amounting in effect to deformity. He was shocked at discovering the pain
he had given, and a copy is before me of the assurances by way of reply
which he at once sent to the complainant. That he was grieved and
surprised beyond measure. That he had not intended her altogether. That
all his characters, being made up out of many people, were composite,
and never individual. That the chair (for table) and other matters were
undoubtedly from her, but that other traits were not hers at all; and
that in Miss Moucher's "Ain't I volatile" his friends had quite
correctly recognized the favourite utterance of a different person. That
he felt nevertheless he had done wrong, and would now do anything to
repair it. That he had intended to employ the character in an unpleasant
way, but he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, change it all, so
that nothing but an agreeable impression should be left. The reader will
remember how this was managed, and that the thirty-second chapter went
far to undo what the twenty-second had done.
A much earlier instance is the only one known to me where a character in
one of his books intended to be odious was copied wholly from a living
original. The use of such material, never without danger, might have
been justifiable here if anywhere, and he had himself a satisfaction in
always admitting the identity of Mr. Fang in _Oliver Twist_ with Mr.
Laing of Hatton-garden. But the avowal of his purpose in that case, and
his mode of setting about it, mark strongly a difference of procedure
from that which, following great examples, he adopted in his later
books. An allusion to a common friend in one of his letters of the
present date--"A dreadful thought occurs to me! how brilliant in a
book!"--expresses both the continued strength of his temptations and the
dread he had brought himself to feel of immediately yielding to them;
but he had no such misgivings in the days of _Oliver Twist_. Wanting an
insolent and harsh police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original
ready to his hand in one of the London offices; and instead of pursuing
his later method of giving a personal appearance that should in some
sort render difficult the identification of mental peculiarities, he was
only eager to get in the whole man complete upon his page, figure and
face as well as manners and mind.
He wrote accordingly (from Doughty-street on the 3rd of June 1837) to
Mr. Haines,[164] a gentleman who then had general supervision over the
police reports for the daily papers. "In my next number of _Oliver
Twist_ I must have a magistrate; and, casting about for a magistrate
whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be
_shown up_, I have as a necessary consequence stumbled upon Mr. Laing of
Hatton-garden celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly well; but
as it would be necessary to describe his personal appearance also, I
ought to have seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as the case
may be) I have never done. In this dilemma it occurred to me that
perhaps I might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-garden
office for a few moments some morning. If you can further my object I
shall be really very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity was found;
the magistrate was brought up before the novelist; and shortly after, on
some fresh outbreak of intolerable temper, the home-secretary found it
an easy and popular step to remove Mr. Laing from the bench.
This was a comfort to everybody, saving only the principal person; but
the instance was highly exceptional, and it rarely indeed happens that
to the individual objection natural in every such case some
consideration should not be paid. In the book that followed
_Copperfield_, two characters appeared having resemblances in manner and
speech to two distinguished writers too vivid to be mistaken by their
personal friends. To Lawrence Boythorn, under whom Landor figured, no
objection was made; but Harold Skimpole, recognizable for Leigh Hunt,
led to much remark; the difference being, that ludicrous traits were
employed in the first to enrich without impairing an attractive person
in the tale, whereas to the last was assigned a part in the plot which
no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt.
Though a want of consideration was thus shown to the friend whom the
character would be likely to recall to many readers, it is nevertheless
very certain that the intention of Dickens was not at first, or at any
time, an unkind one. He erred from thoughtlessness only. What led him to
the subject at all, he has himself stated. Hunt's philosophy of moneyed
obligations, always, though loudly, half jocosely proclaimed, and his
ostentatious wilfulness in the humouring of that or any other theme on
which he cared for the time to expatiate,[165] had so often seemed to
Dickens to be whimsical and attractive that, wanting an "airy quality"
for the man he invented, this of Hunt occurred to him; and "partly for
that reason, and partly, he has since often grieved to think, for the
pleasure it afforded to find a delightful manner reproducing itself
under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often making the
character speak like his old friend." This apology was made[166] after
Hunt's death, and mentioned a revision of the first sketch, so as to
render it less like, at the suggestion of two other friends of Hunt. The
friends were Procter (Barry Cornwall) and myself; the feeling having
been mine from the first that the likeness was too like. Procter did not
immediately think so, but a little reflection brought him to that
opinion. "You will see from the enclosed," Dickens wrote (17th of March
1852), "that Procter is much of my mind. I will nevertheless go through
the character again in the course of the afternoon, and soften down
words here and there." But before the day closed Procter had again
written to him, and next morning this was the result. "I have again
gone over every part of it very carefully, and I think I have made it
much less like. I have also changed Leonard to Harold. I have no right
to give Hunt pain, and I am so bent upon not doing it that I wish you
would look at all the proof once more, and indicate any particular place
in which you feel it particularly like. Whereupon I will alter that
place."
Upon the whole the alterations were considerable, but the radical wrong
remained. The pleasant sparkling airy talk, which could not be mistaken,
identified with odious qualities a friend only known to the writer by
attractive ones; and for this there was no excuse. Perhaps the only
person acquainted with the original who failed to recognize the copy,
was the original himself (a common case); but good-natured friends in
time told Hunt everything, and painful explanations followed, where
nothing was possible to Dickens but what amounted to a friendly evasion
of the points really at issue. The time for redress had gone. I yet well
remember with what eager earnestness, on one of these occasions, he
strove to set Hunt up again in his own esteem. "Separate in your own
mind," he said to him, "what you see of yourself from what other people
tell you that they see. As it has given you so much pain, I take it at
its worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel I did wrong in
doing it. I should otherwise have taken it at its best, and ridden off
upon what I strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing in it
that _should_ have given you pain. Every one in writing must speak from
points of his experience, and so I of mine with you: but when I have
felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and the most blotted
parts of my MS. are those in which I have been striving hard to make the
impression I was writing from, _un_like you. The diary-writing I took
from Haydon, not from you. I now first learn from yourself that you ever
set anything to music, and I could not have copied _that_ from you. The
character is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty
thousand people besides, and I did not fancy you would ever recognize
it. Under similar disguises my own father and mother are in my books,
and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber." The distinction is
that the foibles of Mr. Micawber and of Mrs. Nickleby, however
laughable, make neither of them in speech or character less loveable;
and that this is not to be said of Skimpole's. The kindly or unkindly
impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a
friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the
practice to many, where near relatives are concerned.
For what formerly was said of the Micawber resemblances, Dickens has
been sharply criticized; and in like manner it was thought objectionable
in Scott that for the closing scenes of Crystal Croftangry he should
have found the original of his fretful patient at the death-bed of his
own father. Lockhart, who tells us this, adds with a sad significance
that he himself lived to see the curtain fall at Abbotsford upon even
such another scene. But to no purpose will such objections still be
made. All great novelists will continue to use their experiences of
nature and fact, whencesoever derivable; and a remark made to Lockhart
by Scott himself suggests their vindication. "If a man will paint from
nature, he will be most likely to interest and amuse those who are daily
looking at it."
The Micawber offence otherwise was not grave. We have seen in what way
Dickens was moved or inspired by the rough lessons of his boyhood, and
the groundwork of the character was then undoubtedly laid; but the
rhetorical exuberance impressed itself upon him later, and from this, as
it expanded and developed in a thousand amusing ways, the full-length
figure took its great charm. Better illustration of it could not perhaps
be given than by passages from letters of Dickens, written long before
Micawber was thought of, in which this peculiarity of his father found
frequent and always agreeable expression. Several such have been given
in this work from time to time, and one or two more may here be added.
It is proper to preface them by saying that no one could know the elder
Dickens without secretly liking him the better for these flourishes of
speech, which adapted themselves so readily to his gloom as well as to
his cheerfulness, that it was difficult not to fancy they had helped him
considerably in both, and had rendered more tolerable to him, if also
more possible, the shade and sunshine of his chequered life. "If you
should have an opportunity _pendente lite_, as my father would
observe--indeed did on some memorable ancient occasions when he informed
me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at bay"--Dickens wrote in
December 1847. "I have a letter from my father" (May 1841) "lamenting
the fine weather, invoking congenial tempests, and informing me that it
will not be possible for him to stay more than another year in
Devonshire, as he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate Augustus's
French." "There has arrived," he writes from the Peschiere in September
1844, "a characteristic letter for Kate from my father. He dates it
Manchester, and says he has reason to believe that he will be in town
with the pheasants, on or about the first of October. He has been with
Fanny in the Isle of Man for nearly two months: finding there, as he
goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every description of
continental luxury at a cheap rate." Describing in the same year the
departure from Genoa of an English physician and acquaintance, he adds:
"We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice--or, as my father
would say, to be deprived, to a certain extent, of the concomitant
advantages, whatever they may be, resulting from his medical skill, such
as it is, and his professional attendance, in so far as it may be so
considered." Thus also it delighted Dickens to remember that it was of
one of his connections his father wrote a celebrated sentence; "And I
must express my tendency to believe that his longevity is (to say the
least of it) extremely problematical:" and that it was to another, who
had been insisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and nonconformist
superiorities, he addressed words which deserve to be no less
celebrated; "The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual
from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in
the least for the society of your relations." There was a laugh in the
enjoyment of all this, no doubt, but with it much personal fondness; and
the feeling of the creator of Micawber as he thus humoured and
remembered the foibles of his original, found its counterpart in that
of his readers for the creation itself, as its part was played out in
the story. Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked
his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities. "The
longer I live, the better man I think him," he exclaimed afterwards. The
fact and the fancy had united whatever was most grateful to him in both.
It is a tribute to the generally healthful and manly tone of the story
of _Copperfield_ that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities
of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of
Micawber over Skimpole is one of many indications of the inferiority of
_Bleak House_ to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it
difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no
principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the
advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is genuine humour
against personal satire. Between the worldly circumstances of the two,
there is nothing to choose; but as to everything else it is the
difference between shabbiness and greatness. Skimpole's sunny talk might
be expected to please as much as Micawber's gorgeous speech, the design
of both being to take the edge off poverty. But in the one we have no
relief from attendant meanness or distress, and we drop down from the
airiest fancies into sordidness and pain; whereas in the other nothing
pitiful or merely selfish ever touches us. At its lowest depth of what
is worst, we never doubt that something better must turn up; and of a
man who sells his bedstead that he may entertain his friend, we
altogether refuse to think nothing but badly. This is throughout the
free and cheery style of _Copperfield_. The masterpieces of Dickens's
humour are not in it; but he has nowhere given such variety of play to
his invention, and the book is unapproached among his writings for its
completeness of effect and uniform pleasantness of tone.
What has to be said hereafter of those writings generally, will properly
restrict what is said here, as in previous instances, mainly to personal
illustration. The _Copperfield_ disclosures formerly made will for ever
connect the book with the author's individual story; but too much has
been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with
his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as
parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to
warn the reader as to this. He can judge for himself how far the
childish experiences are likely to have given the turn to Dickens's
genius; whether their bitterness had so burnt into his nature, as, in
the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war
with injustice under every form displayed in his earliest books, to have
reproduced itself only; and to what extent mere compassion for his own
childhood may account for the strange fascination always exerted over
him by child-suffering and sorrow. But, many as are the resemblances in
Copperfield's adventures to portions of those of Dickens, and often as
reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail
to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest
mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious
novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose
that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life,
came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did. The language
of the fiction reflects only faintly the narrative of the actual fact;
and the man whose character it helped to form was expressed not less
faintly in the impulsive impressionable youth, incapable of resisting
the leading of others, and only disciplined into self-control by the
later griefs of his entrance into manhood. Here was but another proof
how thoroughly Dickens understood his calling, and that to weave fact
with fiction unskilfully would be only to make truth less true.
The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in
the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness
to Dickens, even where intentional resemblance might seem to be
prominent. Take autobiography as a design to show that any man's life
may be as a mirror of existence to all men, and the individual career
becomes altogether secondary to the variety of experiences received and
rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has
too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and
sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these
allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even
the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in
his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood,
and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him
are more within control.
Consider Copperfield thus in his proper place in the story, and sequence
as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish
adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother,
and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast
of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature
and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood;
the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these
are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its
achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as
such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not
many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy's
nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to
the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put
him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness
on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of
the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his
visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened
to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has
had room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing
how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but
David includes far less than this, and infinitely more.
That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves
naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a
part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of
Dickens's novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishable
people, and a prodigal wealth of detail; but unity of drift or purpose
is apparent always, and the tone is uniformly right. By the course of
the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet
endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable;
and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our
generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. It is easy thus to
account for the supreme popularity of _Copperfield_, without the
addition that it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not
discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself. Childhood and
youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences. Mr.
Micawber's presence must not prevent my saying that it does not take the
lead of the other novels in humorous creation; but in the use of humour
to bring out prominently the ludicrous in any object or incident without
excluding or weakening its most enchanting sentiment, it stands
decidedly first. It is the perfection of English mirth. We are apt to
resent the exhibition of too much goodness, but it is here so qualified
by oddity as to become not merely palatable but attractive; and even
pathos is heightened by what in other hands would only make it comical.
That there are also faults in the book is certain, but none that are
incompatible with the most masterly qualities; and a book becomes
everlasting by the fact, not that faults are not in it, but that genius
nevertheless is there.
Of its method, and its author's generally, in the delineation of
character, something will have to be said on a later page. The author's
own favourite people in it, I think, were the Peggotty group; and
perhaps he was not far wrong. It has been their fate, as with all the
leading figures of his invention, to pass their names into the
language, and become types; and he has nowhere given happier embodiment
to that purity of homely goodness, which, by the kindly and
all-reconciling influences of humour, may exalt into comeliness and even
grandeur the clumsiest forms of humanity. What has been indicated in the
style of the book as its greatest charm is here felt most strongly. The
ludicrous so helps the pathos, and the humour so uplifts and refines the
sentiment, that mere rude affection and simple manliness in these
Yarmouth boatmen, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and
heroic endurance, take forms half-chivalrous half-sublime. It is one of
the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the
serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at
the close of _Copperfield_, when the body of the seducer is flung dead
upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side
of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious of what he
had failed to reach as the other of what he has perished to save, is a
description that may compare with the most impressive in the language.
There are other people drawn into this catastrophe who are among the
failures of natural delineation in the book. But though Miss Dartle is
curiously unpleasant, there are some natural traits in her (which
Dickens's least life-like people are never without); and it was from one
of his lady friends, very familiar to him indeed, he copied her
peculiarity of never saying anything outright, but hinting it merely,
and making more of it that way. Of Mrs. Steerforth it may also be worth
remembering that Thackeray had something of a fondness for her. "I knew
how it would be when I began," says a pleasant letter all about himself
written immediately after she appeared in the story. "My letters to my
mother are like this, but then she likes 'em--like Mrs. Steerforth:
don't you like Mrs. Steerforth?"
Turning to another group there is another elderly lady to be liked
without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the
very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out
in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to
the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling
oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect
womanhood. Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and truth all
round, than Betsey Trotwood. It is one of her oddities to have a fool
for a companion; but this is one of them that has also most pertinence
and wisdom. By a line thrown out in _Wilhelm Meister_, that the true way
of treating the insane was, in all respects possible, to act to them as
if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to
the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs. Trotwood does for
Mr. Dick goes a step farther, by showing how often asylums might be
dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient
intellects manageable with patience in their own homes. Characters
hardly less distinguishable for truth as well as oddity are the kind old
nurse and her husband the carrier, whose vicissitudes alike of love and
of mortality are condensed into the three words since become part of
universal speech, _Barkis is willin'_. There is wholesome satire of much
utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier
scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the
humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up
in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the
vampire propensity of the town undertaker in _Chuzzlewit_, that he dares
not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly
misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to
Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters that are unlike than in
distinguishing those that are like; and to many examples of the art in
Dickens, such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley
Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr.
Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain
Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs,
Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the
nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr.
Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the
story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and,
amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for
baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the coffin is
heard.
Of the heroines who divide so equally between them the impulsive, easily
swayed, not disloyal but sorely distracted affections of the hero, the
spoilt foolishness and tenderness of the loving little child-wife, Dora,
is more attractive than the too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing
goodness of the angel-wife, Agnes. The scenes of the courtship and
housekeeping are matchless; and the glimpses of Doctors' Commons,
opening those views, by Mr. Spenlow, of man's vanity of expectation and
inconsistency of conduct in neglecting the sacred duty of making a will,
on which he largely moralizes the day before he dies intestate, form a
background highly appropriate to David's domesticities. This was among
the reproductions of personal experience in the book; but it was a
sadder knowledge that came with the conviction some years later, that
David's contrasts in his earliest married life between his happiness
enjoyed and his happiness once anticipated, the "vague unhappy loss or
want of something" of which he so frequently complains, reflected also a
personal experience which had not been supplied in fact so successfully
as in fiction. (A closing word may perhaps be allowed, to connect with
Devonshire-terrace the last book written there. On the page opposite is
engraved a drawing by Maclise of the house where so many of Dickens's
masterpieces were composed, done on the first anniversary of the day
when his daughter Kate was born.)
_Bleak House_ followed _Copperfield_, which in some respects it copied
in the autobiographical form by means of extracts from the personal
relation of its heroine. But the distinction between the narrative of
David and the diary of Esther, like that between Micawber and Skimpole,
marks the superiority of the first to its successor. To represent a
storyteller as giving the most surprising vividness to manners, motives,
and characters of which we are to believe her, all the time, as
artlessly unconscious, as she is also entirely ignorant of the good
qualities in herself she is naively revealing in the story, was a
difficult enterprise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success,
and certainly not successful. Ingenuity is more apparent than freshness,
the invention is neither easy nor unstrained, and though the old
marvellous power over the real is again abundantly manifest, there is
some alloy of the artificial. Nor can this be said of Esther's relation
without some general application to the book of which it forms so large
a part. The novel is nevertheless, in the very important particular of
construction, perhaps the best thing done by Dickens.
[Illustration: DEVONSHIRE TERRACE.]
In his later writings he had been assiduously cultivating this essential
of his art, and here he brought it very nearly to perfection. Of the
tendency of composing a story piecemeal to induce greater concern for
the part than for the whole, he had been always conscious; but I
remember a remark also made by him to the effect that to read a story in
parts had no less a tendency to prevent the reader's noticing how
thoroughly a work so presented might be calculated for perusal as a
whole. Look back from the last to the first page of the present novel,
and not even in the highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will
it be found, that event leads more closely to event, or that the
separate incidents have been planned with a more studied consideration
of the bearing they are severally to have on the general result. Nothing
is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the
various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the
larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn. The heart of the
story is a Chancery suit. On this the plot hinges, and on incidents
connected with it, trivial or important, the passion and suffering turn
exclusively. Chance words, or the deeds of chance people, to appearance
irrelevant, are found everywhere influencing the course taken by a train
of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery,
to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are
unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every
conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts
of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery
court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of
the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very
certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little
law-stationer's servant help directly in the chain of small things that
lead indirectly to Lady Dedlock's death. One strong chain of interest
holds together Chesney Wold and its inmates, Bleak House and the
Jarndyce group, Chancery with its sorry and sordid neighbourhood. The
characters multiply as the tale advances, but in each the drift is the
same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and
myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under
the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop
Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." _Edax rerum_ the motto
of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge
slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story
are sensibly affected, and to which Chancery itself might have succumbed
if its devouring capacities had been less complete. But by the time
there is found among the lumber the will which puts all to rights in the
Jarndyce suit, it is found to be too late to put anything to rights. The
costs have swallowed up the estate, and there is an end of the matter.
What in one sense is a merit however may in others be a defect, and this
book has suffered by the very completeness with which its Chancery moral
is worked out. The didactic in Dickens's earlier novels derived its
strength from being merely incidental to interest of a higher and more
permanent kind, and not in a small degree from the playful sportiveness
and fancy that lighted up its graver illustrations. Here it is of
sterner stuff, too little relieved, and all-pervading. The fog so
marvellously painted in the opening chapter has hardly cleared away when
there arises, in _Jarndyce_ v. _Jarndyce_, as bad an atmosphere to
breathe in; and thenceforward to the end, clinging round the people of
the story as they come or go, in dreary mist or in heavy cloud, it is
rarely absent. Dickens has himself described his purpose to have been to
dwell on the romantic side of familiar things. But it is the romance of
discontent and misery, with a very restless dissatisfied moral, and is
too much brought about by agencies disagreeable and sordid. The Guppys,
Weevles, Snagsbys, Chadbands, Krooks, and Smallweeds, even the Kenges,
Vholeses, and Tulkinghorns, are much too real to be pleasant; and the
necessity becomes urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer
humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly
escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the
author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness
of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John
Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the
story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced
tender-souled Chancery victim, Gridley; the poor good-hearted youth
Richard, broken up in life and character by the suspense of the Chancery
suit on whose success he is to "begin the world," believing himself to
be saving money when he is stopped from squandering it, and thinking
that having saved it he is entitled to fling it away; trooper George,
with the Bagnets and their household, where the most ludicrous points
are more forcible for the pathetic touches underlying them; the Jellyby
interior, and its philanthropic strong-minded mistress, placid and
smiling amid a household muddle outmuddling Chancery itself; the model
of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young
people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for
everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the
inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and
especially the last, have been added by this book to the list of people
more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual
familiar acquaintance whom we see around us living and dying.
But how do we know them? There are plenty to tell us that it is by
vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative
insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of
character, by manifestation outwardly rather than by what lies behind.
Another opportunity will present itself for some remark on this kind of
criticism, which has always had a special pride in the subtlety of its
differences from what the world may have shown itself prone to admire.
"In my father's library," wrote Landor to Southey's daughter Edith,
"was the _Critical Review_ from its commencement; and it would have
taught me, if I could not even at a very early age teach myself better,
that Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith were really worth nothing." It is a
style that will never be without cultivators, and its frequent
application to Dickens will be shown hereafter. But in speaking of a
book in which some want of all the freshness of his genius first became
apparent, it would be wrong to omit to add that his method of handling a
character is as strongly impressed on the better portions of it as on
the best of his writings. It is difficult to say when a peculiarity
becomes too grotesque, or an extravagance too farcical, to be within the
limits of art, for it is the truth of these as of graver things that
they exist in the world in just the proportions and degree in which
genius can discover them. But no man had ever so surprising a faculty as
Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing; and of entering
into mental phases and processes so absolutely, in conditions of life
the most varied, as to reproduce them completely in dialogue without
need of an explanatory word. (He only departed from this method once,
with a result which will then be pointed out.) In speaking on a former
page of the impression of reality thus to a singular degree conveyed by
him, it was remarked that where characters so revealed themselves the
author's part in them was done; and in the book under notice there is
none, not excepting those least attractive which apparently present only
prominent or salient qualities, in which it will not be found that the
characteristic feature embodied, or the main idea personified, contains
as certainly also some human truth universally applicable. To expound
or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse
their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and
other tissues, was not at all Dickens's way. His genius was his fellow
feeling with his race; his mere personality was never the bound or limit
to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might colour them; he
never stopped to dissect or anatomize his own work; but no man could
better adjust the outward and visible oddities in a delineation to its
inner and unchangeable veracities. The rough estimates we form of
character, if we have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct:
but men touch and interfere with one another by the contact of their
extremes, and it may very often become necessarily the main business of
a novelist to display the salient points, the sharp angles, or the
prominences merely.
The pathetic parts of _Bleak House_ do not live largely in remembrance,
but the deaths of Richard and of Gridley, the wandering fancies of Miss
Flite, and the extremely touching way in which the gentleman-nature of
the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong
to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example,
taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has
made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been
reading _Bleak House_ aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very
shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and
successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is _there_ indeed;
the intimations of true heart-feeling, the glimmerings of higher
feeling, all are there; but everything still consistent and in harmony.
Wonderful is the genius that can show all this, yet keep it only and
really part of the character itself, low or common as it may be, and use
no morbid or fictitious colouring. To my mind, nothing in the field of
fiction is to be found in English literature surpassing the death of
Jo!" What occurs at and after the inquest is as worth remembering. Jo's
evidence is rejected because he cannot exactly say what will be done to
him after he is dead if he should tell a lie;[167] but he manages to say
afterwards very exactly what the deceased while he lived did to him.
That one cold winter night, when he was shivering in a doorway near his
crossing, a man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having
questioned him and found he had not a friend in the world, said,
"Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a
night's lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since, and asked
him if he slept of a night, and how he bore cold and hunger, or if he
ever wished to die; and would say in passing "I am as poor as you
to-day, Jo" when he had no money, but when he had any would always give
some. "He wos wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his
wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I
wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos werry good to me, he
wos!" The inquest over, the body is flung into a pestiferous churchyard
in the next street, houses overlooking it on every side, and a reeking
little tunnel of a court giving access to its iron gate. "With the
night, comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court, to the outside
of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands, and looks in within
the bars; stands looking in, for a little while. It then, with an old
broom it carries, softly sweeps the step, and makes the archway clean.
It does so, very busily, and trimly; looks in again, a little while; and
so departs." These are among the things in Dickens that cannot be
forgotten; and if _Bleak House_ had many more faults than have been
found in it, such salt and savour as this might freshen it for some
generations.
The first intention was to have made Jo more prominent in the story, and
its earliest title was taken from the tumbling tenements in Chancery,
"Tom-all-Alone's," where he finds his wretched habitation; but this was
abandoned. On the other hand, Dickens was encouraged and strengthened in
his design of assailing Chancery abuses and delays by receiving, a few
days after the appearance of his first number, a striking pamphlet on
the subject containing details so apposite that he took from them,
without change in any material point, the memorable case related in his
fifteenth chapter. Any one who examines the tract[168] will see how
exactly true is the reference to it made by Dickens in his preface. "The
case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual
occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end."
The suit, of which all particulars are given, affected a single farm, in
value not more than L1200, but all that its owner possessed in the
world, against which a bill had been filed for a L300 legacy left in the
will bequeathing the farm. In reality there was only one defendant, but
in the bill, by the rule of the Court, there were seventeen; and, after
two years had been occupied over the seventeen answers, everything had
to begin over again because an eighteenth had been accidentally omitted.
"What a mockery of justice this is," says Mr. Challinor, "the facts
speak for themselves, and I can personally vouch for their accuracy. The
costs already incurred in reference to this L300 legacy are not less
than from L800 to L900, and the parties are no forwarder. Already near
five years have passed by, and the plaintiff would be glad to give up
his chance of the legacy if he could escape from his liability to costs,
while the defendants who own the little farm left by the testator, have
scarce any other prospect before them than ruin."
FOOTNOTES:
[164] This letter is now in the possession of S. R. Goodman Esq. of
Brighton.
[165] Here are two passages taken from Hunt's writing in the _Tatler_ (a
charming little paper which it was one of the first ventures of the
young firm of Chapman and Hall to attempt to establish for Hunt in
1830), to which accident had unluckily attracted Dickens's
notice:--"Supposing us to be in want of patronage, and in possession of
talent enough to make it an honour to notice us, we would much rather
have some great and comparatively private friend, rich enough to assist
us, and amiable enough to render obligation delightful, than become the
public property of any man, or of any government. . . . If a divinity had
given us our choice we should have said--make us La Fontaine, who goes
and lives twenty years with some rich friend, as innocent of any harm in
it as a child, and who writes what he thinks charming verses, sitting
all day under a tree." Such sayings will not bear to be deliberately
read and thought over, but any kind of extravagance or oddity came from
Hunt's lips with a curious fascination. There was surely never a man of
so sunny a nature, who could draw so much pleasure from common things,
or to whom books were a world so real, so exhaustless, so delightful. I
was only seventeen when I derived from him the tastes which have been
the solace of all subsequent years, and I well remember the last time I
saw him at Hammersmith, not long before his death in 1859, when, with
his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous
eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded
black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was
buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer
and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged
sensuous and voluptuous qualities.
[166] In a paper in _All the Year Round_.
[167] "O! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very
hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy!--But stop a minute. Caution. This boy
must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that
he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of
sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it
long enough for _him. He_ don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No.
_He_ can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to
school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to
tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom, or about the
lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's
dead if he tells a lie to the gentleman here, but believes it'll be
something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell
the truth. 'This won't do, gentlemen,' says the coroner, with a
melancholy shake of the head. . . . '_Can't exactly say_ won't do, you
know. . . . It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.' Boy put aside; to
the great edification of the audience;--especially of Little Swills, the
Comic Vocalist."
[168] By W. Challinor Esq. of Leek in Staffordshire, by whom it has been
obligingly sent to me, with a copy of Dickens's letter acknowledging the
receipt of it from the author on the 11th of March 1852. On the first of
that month the first number of _Bleak House_ had appeared, but two
numbers of it were then already written.
CHAPTER II.
HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES.
1853-1854-1855.
_Bleak House_ Sale--Proposed
Titles--Restless--Tavistock House--Last Child
born--Death of Friends--Liking for
Boulogne--Banquet at
Birmingham--Self-changes--Overdoing
it--Projected Trip to Italy--First Public
Readings--Argument against Paid
Readings--Children's Theatricals--Small
Actors--Henry Fielding Dickens--Dickens and the
Czar--Titles for a New Story--"Hard Times"
chosen--Difficulties of Weekly Publication--Mr.
Ruskin on _Hard Times_--Exaggerated Rebuke of
Exaggeration--Manufacturing Town on
Strike--Dinner to Thackeray--Peter
Cunningham--Incident of a November Night.
_DAVID COPPERFIELD_ had been written, in Devonshire-terrace for the most
part, between the opening of 1849 and October 1850, its publication
covering that time; and its sale, which has since taken the lead of all
his books but _Pickwick_, never then exceeding twenty-five thousand. But
though it remained thus steady for the time, the popularity of the book
added largely to the sale of its successor. _Bleak House_ was begun in
his new abode of Tavistock House at the end of November 1851; was
carried on, amid the excitements of the Guild performances, through the
following year; was finished at Boulogne in the August of 1853; and was
dedicated to "his friends and companions in the Guild of Literature and
Art."
[Illustration: TAVISTOCK HOUSE.]
In March 1852 the first number appeared,[169] and its sale was
mentioned in the same letter from Tavistock House (7th of March)
which told of his troubles in the story at its outset, and of other
anxieties incident to the common lot and inseparable equally from its
joys and sorrows, through which his life was passing at the time. "My
Highgate journey yesterday was a sad one. Sad to think how all journeys
tend that way. I went up to the cemetery to look for a piece of ground.
In no hope of a Government bill,[170] and in a foolish dislike to leaving
the little child shut up in a vault there, I think of pitching a tent
under the sky. . . . Nothing has taken place here: but I believe, every
hour, that it must next hour. Wild ideas are upon me of going to
Paris--Rouen--Switzerland--somewhere--and writing the remaining two-thirds
of the next No. aloft in some queer inn room. I have been hanging over
it, and have got restless. Want a change I think. Stupid. We were at
30,000 when I last heard. . . . I am sorry to say that after all kinds
of evasions, I am obliged to dine at Lansdowne House to-morrow. But
maybe the affair will come off to-night and give me an excuse! I enclose
proofs of No. 2. Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him
singularly unlike the great original. Look it over, and say what occurs
to you. . . . Don't you think Mrs. Gaskell charming? With one
ill-considered thing that looks like a want of natural perception, I
think it masterly." His last allusion is to the story by a delightful
writer then appearing in _Household Words_; and of the others it only
needs to say that the family affair which might have excused his absence
at the Lansdowne dinner did not come off until four days later. On the
13th of March his last child was born; and the boy, his seventh son,
bears his godfather's distinguished name, Edward Bulwer Lytton.
The inability to "grind sparks out of his dull blade," as he
characterized his present labour at _Bleak House_, still fretting him,
he struck out a scheme for Paris. "I could not get to Switzerland very
well at this time of year. The Jura would be covered with snow. And if I
went to Geneva I don't know where I might _not_ go to." It ended at last
in a flight to Dover; but he found time before he left, amid many
occupations and some anxieties, for a good-natured journey to Walworth
to see a youth rehearse who was supposed to have talents for the stage,
and he was able to gladden Mr. Toole's friends by thinking favourably of
his chances of success. "I remember what I once myself wanted in that
way," he said, "and I should like to serve him."
At one of the last dinners in Tavistock House before his departure, Mr.
Watson of Rockingham was present; and he was hardly settled in
Camden-crescent, Dover, when he had news of the death of that excellent
friend. "Poor dear Watson! It was this day two weeks when you rode with
us and he dined with us. We all remarked after he had gone how happy he
seemed to have got over his election troubles, and how cheerful he was.
He was full of Christmas plans for Rockingham, and was very anxious that
we should get up a little French piece I had been telling him the plot
of. He went abroad next day to join Mrs. Watson and the children at
Homburg, and then go to Lausanne, where they had taken a house for a
month. He was seized at Homburg with violent internal inflammation, and
died--without much pain--in four days. . . . I was so fond of him that I am
sorry you didn't know him better. I believe he was as thoroughly good
and true a man as ever lived; and I am sure I can have felt no greater
affection for him than he felt for me. When I think of that bright
house, and his fine simple honest heart, both so open to me, the blank
and loss are like a dream." Other deaths followed. "Poor d'Orsay!" he
wrote after only seven days (8th of August). "It is a tremendous
consideration that friends should fall around us in such awful numbers
as we attain middle life. What a field of battle it is!" Nor had another
month quite passed before he lost, in Mrs. Macready, a very dear family
friend. "Ah me! ah me!" he wrote. "This tremendous sickle certainly does
cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one's own small blade has
ripened. But _this_ is all a Dream, may be, and death will wake us."
Able at last to settle to his work, he stayed in Dover three months; and
early in October, sending home his family caravan, crossed to Boulogne
to try it as a resort for seaside holiday. "I never saw a better
instance of our countrymen than this place. Because it is accessible it
is genteel to say it is of no character, quite English, nothing
continental about it, and so forth. It is as quaint, picturesque, good a
place as I know; the boatmen and fishing-people quite a race apart, and
some of their villages as good as the fishing-villages on the
Mediterranean. The Haute Ville, with a walk all round it on the
ramparts, charming. The country walks, delightful. It is the best
mixture of town and country (with sea air into the bargain) I ever saw;
everything cheap, everything good; and please God I shall be writing on
those said ramparts next July!"
Before the year closed, the time to which his publishing arrangements
with Messrs. Bradbury and Evans were limited had expired, but at his
suggestion the fourth share in such books as he might write, which they
had now received for eight years, was continued to them on the
understanding that the publishers' percentage should no longer be
charged in the partnership accounts, and with a power reserved to
himself to withdraw when he pleased. In the new year his first adventure
was an ovation in Birmingham, where a silver-gilt salver and a diamond
ring were presented to him, as well for eloquent service specially
rendered to the Institution, as in general testimony of "varied literary
acquirements, genial philosophy, and high moral teaching." A great
banquet followed on Twelfth Night, made memorable by an offer[171] to
give a couple of readings from his books at the following Christmas, in
aid of the new Midland Institute. It might seem to have been drawn from
him as a grateful return for the enthusiastic greeting of his
entertainers, but it was in his mind before he left London. It was his
first formal undertaking to read in public.
His eldest son had now left Eton, and, the boy's wishes pointing at the
time to a mercantile career, he was sent to Leipzig for completion of
his education.[172] At this date it seemed to me that the overstrain of
attempting too much, brought upon him by the necessities of his weekly
periodical, became first apparent in Dickens. Not unfrequently a
complaint strange upon his lips fell from him. "Hypochondriacal
whisperings tell me that I am rather overworked. The spring does not
seem to fly back again directly, as it always did when I put my own work
aside, and had nothing else to do. Yet I have everything to keep me
going with a brave heart, Heaven knows!" Courage and hopefulness he
might well derive from the increasing sale of _Bleak House_, which had
risen to nearly forty thousand; but he could no longer bear easily what
he carried so lightly of old, and enjoyments with work were too much for
him. "What with _Bleak House_, and _Household Words_, and _Child's
History_" (he dictated from week to week the papers which formed that
little book, and cannot be said to have quite hit the mark with it),
"and Miss Coutts's Home, and the invitations to feasts and festivals, I
really feel as if my head would split like a fired shell if I remained
here." He tried Brighton first, but did not find it answer, and
returned.[173] A few days of unalloyed enjoyment were afterwards given
to the visit of his excellent American friend Felton; and on the 13th of
June he was again in Boulogne, thanking heaven for escape from a
breakdown. "If I had substituted anybody's knowledge of myself for my
own, and lingered in London, I never could have got through."
What befell him in Boulogne will be given, with the incidents of his
second and third summer visits to the place, on a later page. He
completed, by the third week of August, his novel of _Bleak House_; and
it was resolved to celebrate the event by a two months' trip to Italy,
in company with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr. Augustus Egg. The start was
to be made from Boulogne in the middle of October, when he would send
his family home; and he described the intervening weeks as a fearful
"reaction and prostration of laziness" only broken by the _Child's
History_. At the end of September he wrote: "I finished the little
_History_ yesterday, and am trying to think of something for the
Christmas number. After which I shall knock off; having had quite enough
to do, small as it would have seemed to me at any other time, since I
finished _Bleak House_." He added, a week before his departure: "I get
letters from Genoa and Lausanne as if I were going to stay in each place
at least a month. If I were to measure my deserts by people's
remembrance of me, I should be a prodigy of intolerability. Have
recovered my Italian, which I had all but forgotten, and am one entire
and perfect chrysolite of idleness."
From this trip, of which the incidents have an interest independent of
my ordinary narrative, Dickens was home again in the middle of December
1853, and kept his promise to his Birmingham friends by reading in their
Town Hall his _Christmas Carol_ on the 27th,[174] and his _Cricket on
the Hearth_ on the 29th. The enthusiasm was great, and he consented to
read his _Carol_ a second time, on Friday the 30th, if seats were
reserved for working men at prices within their means. The result was an
addition of between four and five hundred pounds to the funds for
establishment of the new Institute; and a prettily worked flower-basket
in silver, presented to Mrs. Dickens, commemorated these first public
readings "to nearly six thousand people," and the design they had
generously helped. Other applications then followed to such extent that
limits to compliance had to be put; and a letter of the 16th of May 1854
is one of many that express both the difficulty in which he found
himself, and his much desired expedient for solving it. "The objection
you suggest to paid public lecturing does not strike me at all. It is
worth consideration, but I do not think there is anything in it. On the
contrary, if the lecturing would have any motive power at all (like my
poor father this, in the sound!) I believe it would tend the other way.
In the Colchester matter I had already received a letter from a
Colchester magnate; to whom I had honestly replied that I stood pledged
to Christmas readings at Bradford[175] and at Reading, and could in no
kind of reason do more in the public way." The promise to the people of
Reading was for Talfourd's sake; the other was given after the
Birmingham nights, when an institute in Bradford asked similar help, and
offered a fee of fifty pounds. At first this was entertained; but was
abandoned, with some reluctance, upon the argument that to become
publicly a reader must alter without improving his position publicly as
a writer, and that it was a change to be justified only when the higher
calling should have failed of the old success. Thus yielding for the
time, he nevertheless soon found the question rising again with the same
importunity; his own position to it being always that of a man assenting
against his will that it should rest in abeyance. But nothing farther
was resolved on yet. The readings mentioned came off as promised, in aid
of public objects;[176] and besides others two years later for the
family of a friend, he had given the like liberal help to institutes in
Folkestone, Chatham, and again in Birmingham, Peterborough, Sheffield,
Coventry, and Edinburgh, before the question settled itself finally in
the announcement for paid public readings issued by him in 1858.
Carrying memory back to his home in the first half of 1854, there are
few things that rise more pleasantly in connection with it than the
children's theatricals. These began with the first Twelfth Night at
Tavistock House, and were renewed until the principal actors ceased to
be children. The best of the performances were _Tom Thumb_ and
_Fortunio_, in '54 and '55; Dickens now joining first in the revel, and
Mr. Mark Lemon bringing into it his own clever children and a very
mountain of child-pleasing fun in himself. Dickens had become very
intimate with him, and his merry genial ways had given him unbounded
popularity with the "young 'uns," who had no such favourite as "Uncle
Mark." In Fielding's burlesque he was the giantess Glumdalca, and
Dickens was the ghost of Gaffer Thumb; the names by which they
respectively appeared being the Infant Phenomenon and the Modern
Garrick. But the younger actors carried off the palm. There was a Lord
Grizzle, at whose ballad of Miss Villikins, introduced by desire,
Thackeray rolled off his seat in a burst of laughter that became
absurdly contagious. Yet even this, with hardly less fun from the
Noodles, Doodles, and King Arthurs, was not so good as the pretty,
fantastic, comic grace of Dollalolla, Huncamunca, and Tom. The girls
wore steadily the grave airs irresistible when put on by little
children; and an actor not out of his fourth year, who went through the
comic songs and the tragic exploits without a wrong note or a victim
unslain, represented the small helmeted hero. He was in the bills as Mr.
H----, but bore in fact the name of the illustrious author whose
conception he embodied; and who certainly would have hugged him for
Tom's opening song, delivered in the arms of Huncamunca, if he could
have forgiven the later master in his own craft for having composed it
afresh to the air of a ditty then wildly popular at the "Coal
Hole."[177] The encores were frequent, and for the most part the little
fellow responded to them; but the misplaced enthusiasm that took similar
form at the heroic intensity with which he stabbed Dollalolla, he
rebuked by going gravely on to the close. His Fortunio, the next Twelfth
Night, was not so great; yet when, as a prelude to getting the better of
the Dragon, he adulterated his drink (Mr. Lemon played the Dragon) with
sherry, the sly relish with which he watched the demoralization, by this
means, of his formidable adversary into a helpless imbecility, was
perfect. Here Dickens played the testy old Baron, and took advantage of
the excitement against the Czar raging in 1855 to denounce him (in a
song) as no other than own cousin to the very Bear that Fortunio had
gone forth to subdue. He depicted him, in his desolation of autocracy,
as the Robinson Crusoe of absolute state, who had at his court many a
show-day and many a high-day, but hadn't in all his dominions a
Friday.[178] The bill, which attributed these interpolations to "the
Dramatic Poet of the Establishment," deserves also mention for the fun
of the six large-lettered announcements which stood at the head of it,
and could not have been bettered by Mr. Crummles himself. "Re-engagement
of that irresistible comedian" (the performer of Lord Grizzle) "Mr.
Ainger!" "Reappearance of Mr. H. who created so powerful an impression
last year!" "Return of Mr. Charles Dickens Junior from his German
engagements!" "Engagement of Miss Kate, who declined the munificent
offers of the Management last season!" "Mr. Passe, Mr. Mudperiod, Mr.
Measly Servile, and Mr. Wilkini Collini!" "First appearance on any stage
of Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter (who has been kept out of bed at a vast
expense)." The last performer mentioned[179] was yet at some distance
from the third year of his age. Dickens was Mr. Passe.
Gravities were mixed with these gaieties. "I wish you would look" (20th
of January 1854) "at the enclosed titles for the _H. W._ story, between
this and two o'clock or so, when I will call. It is my usual day, you
observe, on which I have jotted them down--Friday! It seems to me that
there are three very good ones among them. I should like to know whether
you hit upon the same." On the paper enclosed was written: 1. According
to Cocker. 2. Prove it. 3. Stubborn Things. 4. Mr. Gradgrind's Facts. 5.
The Grindstone. 6. Hard Times. 7. Two and Two are Four. 8. Something
Tangible. 9. Our Hard-headed Friend. 10. Rust and Dust. 11. Simple
Arithmetic. 12. A Matter of Calculation. 13. A Mere Question of Figures.
14. The Gradgrind Philosophy.[180] The three selected by me were 2, 6,
and 11; the three that were his own favourites were 6, 13, and 14; and
as 6 had been chosen by both, that title was taken.
It was the first story written by him for _Household Words_; and in the
course of it the old troubles of the _Clock_ came back, with the
difference that the greater brevity of the weekly portions made it
easier to write them up to time, but much more difficult to get
sufficient interest into each. "The difficulty of the space," he wrote
after a few weeks' trial, "is CRUSHING. Nobody can have an idea of it
who has not had an experience of patient fiction-writing with some
elbow-room always, and open places in perspective. In this form, with
any kind of regard to the current number, there is absolutely no such
thing." He went on, however; and, of the two designs he started with,
accomplished one very perfectly and the other at least partially. He
more than doubled the circulation of his journal; and he wrote a story
which, though not among his best, contains things as characteristic as
any he has written. I may not go as far as Mr. Ruskin in giving it a
high place; but to anything falling from that writer, however one may
differ from it, great respect is due, and every word here said of
Dickens's intention is in the most strict sense just.[181] "The
essential value and truth of Dickens's writings," he says, "have been
unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons, merely because he
presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because
Dickens's caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing
for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true.
I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration
to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a
subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in
_Hard Times_, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The
usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest
he has written) is with many persons seriously diminished, because Mr.
Bounderby is a dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of
a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead
of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose
the use of Dickens's wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a
circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose
in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially _Hard
Times_, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons
interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial,
and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the
evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will
appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right
one, grossly and sharply told."[182] The best points in it, out of the
circle of stage fire (an expression of wider application to this part
of Dickens's life than its inventor supposed it to be), were the
sketches of the riding-circus people and the Bounderby household; but it
is a wise hint of Mr. Ruskin's that there may be, in the drift of a
story, truths of sufficient importance to set against defects of
workmanship; and here they challenged wide attention. You cannot train
any one properly, unless you cultivate the fancy, and allow fair scope
to the affections. You cannot govern men on a principle of averages; and
to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market is not the _summum
bonum_ of life. You cannot treat the working man fairly unless, in
dealing with his wrongs and his delusions, you take equally into account
the simplicity and tenacity of his nature, arising partly from limited
knowledge, but more from honesty and singleness of intention. Fiction
cannot prove a case, but it can express forcibly a righteous sentiment;
and this is here done unsparingly upon matters of universal concern.
The book was finished at Boulogne in the middle of July,[183] and is
inscribed to Carlyle.
An American admirer accounted for the vivacity of the circus-scenes by
declaring that Dickens had "arranged with the master of Astley's Circus
to spend many hours behind the scenes with the riders and among the
horses;" a thing just as likely as that he went into training as a
stroller to qualify for Mr. Crummles in _Nickleby_. Such successes
belonged to the experiences of his youth; he had nothing to add to what
his marvellous observation had made familiar from almost childish days;
and the glimpses we get of them in the _Sketches by Boz_ are in these
points as perfect as anything his later experience could supply. There
was one thing nevertheless which the choice of his subject made him
anxious to verify while _Hard Times_ was in hand; and this was a strike
in a manufacturing town. He went to Preston to see one at the end of
January, and was somewhat disappointed. "I am afraid I shall not be able
to get much here. Except the crowds at the street-corners reading the
placards pro and con; and the cold absence of smoke from the
mill-chimneys; there is very little in the streets to make the town
remarkable. I am told that the people 'sit at home and mope.' The
delegates with the money from the neighbouring places come in to-day to
report the amounts they bring; and to-morrow the people are paid. When I
have seen both these ceremonies, I shall return. It is a nasty place (I
thought it was a model town); and I am in the Bull Hotel, before which
some time ago the people assembled supposing the masters to be here, and
on demanding to have them out were remonstrated with by the landlady in
person. I saw the account in an Italian paper, in which it was stated
that 'the populace then environed the Palazzo Bull, until the padrona of
the Palazzo heroically appeared at one of the upper windows and
addressed them!' One can hardly conceive anything less likely to be
represented to an Italian mind by this description, than the old,
grubby, smoky, mean, intensely formal red brick house with a narrow
gateway and a dingy yard, to which it applies. At the theatre last night
I saw _Hamlet_, and should have done better to 'sit at home and mope'
like the idle workmen. In the last scene, Laertes on being asked how it
was with him replied (verbatim) 'Why, like a woodcock--on account of my
treachery.'" (29th Jan.)
The home incidents of the summer and autumn of 1855 may be mentioned
briefly. It was a year of much unsettled discontent with him, and upon
return from a short trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins, he flung
himself rather hotly into agitation with the administrative
reformers,[184] and spoke at one of the great meetings in Drury-lane
Theatre. In the following month (April) he took occasion, even from the
chair of the General Theatrical Fund, to give renewed expression to
political dissatisfactions.[185] In the summer he threw open to many
friends his Tavistock House Theatre, having secured for its "lessee and
manager Mr. Crummles;" for its poet Mr. Wilkie Collins, in an "entirely
new and original domestic melodrama;" and for its scene-painter "Mr.
Stanfield, R.A."[186] _The Lighthouse_, by Mr. Wilkie Collins, was then
produced, its actors being Mr. Crummles the manager (Dickens in other
words), the Author of the play, Mr. Lemon and Mr. Egg, and the manager's
sister-in-law and eldest daughter. It was followed by the Guild farce of
_Mr. Nightingale's Diary_, in which besides the performers named, and
Dickens in his old personation part, the manager's youngest daughter and
Mr. Frank Stone assisted. The success was wonderful; and in the three
delighted audiences who crowded to what the bills described as "the
smallest theatre in the world," were not a few of the notabilities of
London. Mr. Carlyle compared Dickens's wild picturesqueness in the old
lighthouse keeper to the famous figure in Nicholas Poussin's
bacchanalian dance in the National Gallery; and at one of the joyous
suppers that followed on each night of the play, Lord Campbell told the
company that he had much rather have written _Pickwick_ than be Chief
Justice of England and a peer of parliament.[187]
Then came the beginning of _Nobody's Fault_, as _Little Dorrit_
continued to be called by him up to the eve of its publication; a flight
to Folkestone to help his sluggish fancy; and his return to London in
October to preside at a dinner to Thackeray on his going to lecture in
America. It was a muster of more than sixty admiring entertainers, and
Dickens's speech gave happy expression to the spirit that animated all,
telling Thackeray not alone how much his friendship was prized by those
present, and how proud they were of his genius, but offering him in the
name of the tens of thousands absent who had never touched his hand or
seen his face, life-long thanks for the treasures of mirth, wit, and
wisdom within the yellow-covered numbers of _Pendennis_ and _Vanity
Fair_. Peter Cunningham, one of the sons of Allan, was secretary to the
banquet; and for many pleasures given to the subject of this memoir, who
had a hearty regard for him, should have a few words to his memory.
His presence was always welcome to Dickens, and indeed to all who knew
him, for his relish of social life was great, and something of his keen
enjoyment could not but be shared by his company. His geniality would
have carried with it a pleasurable glow even if it had stood alone, and
it was invigorated by very considerable acquirements. He had some
knowledge of the works of eminent authors and artists; and he had an
eager interest in their lives and haunts, which he had made the subject
of minute and novel enquiry. This store of knowledge gave substance to
his talk, yet never interrupted his buoyancy and pleasantry, because
only introduced when called for, and not made matter of parade or
display. But the happy combination of qualities that rendered him a
favourite companion, and won him many friends, proved in the end
injurious to himself. He had done much while young in certain lines of
investigation which he had made almost his own, and there was every
promise that, in the department of biographical and literary research,
he would have produced much weightier works with advancing years. This
however was not to be. The fascinations of good fellowship encroached
more and more upon literary pursuits, until he nearly abandoned his
former favourite studies, and sacrificed all the deeper purposes of his
life to the present temptation of a festive hour. Then his health gave
way, and he became lost to friends as well as to literature. But the
impression of the bright and amiable intercourse of his better time
survived, and his old associates never ceased to think of Peter
Cunningham with regret and kindness.
Dickens went to Paris early in October, and at its close was brought
again to London by the sudden death of a friend, much deplored by
himself, and still more so by a distinguished lady who had his loyal
service at all times. An incident before his return to France is worth
brief relation. He had sallied out for one of his night walks, full of
thoughts of his story, one wintery rainy evening (the 8th of November),
and "pulled himself up," outside the door of Whitechapel Workhouse, at a
strange sight which arrested him there. Against the dreary enclosure of
the house were leaning, in the midst of the downpouring rain and storm,
what seemed to be seven heaps of rags: "dumb, wet, silent horrors" he
described them, "sphinxes set up against that dead wall, and no one
likely to be at the pains of solving them until the General Overthrow."
He sent in his card to the Master. Against him there was no ground of
complaint; he gave prompt personal attention; but the casual ward was
full, and there was no help. The rag-heaps were all girls, and Dickens
gave each a shilling. One girl, "twenty or so," had been without food a
day and night. "Look at me," she said, as she clutched the shilling, and
without thanks shuffled off. So with the rest. There was not a single
"thank you." A crowd meanwhile, only less poor than these objects of
misery, had gathered round the scene; but though they saw the seven
shillings given away they asked for no relief to themselves, they
recognized in their sad wild way the other greater wretchedness, and
made room in silence for Dickens to walk on.
Not more tolerant of the way in which laws meant to be most humane are
too often administered in England, he left in a day or two to resume his
_Little Dorrit_ in Paris. But before his life there is described, some
sketches from his holiday trip to Italy with Mr. Wilkie Collins and Mr.
Augustus Egg, and from his three summer visits to Boulogne, claim to
themselves two intervening chapters.
FOOTNOTES:
[169] I subjoin the dozen titles successively proposed for _Bleak
House_. 1. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House;" 2. "Tom-all-Alone's. The
Solitary House that was always shut up;" 3. "Bleak House Academy;" 4.
"The East Wind;" 5. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined [House, Building,
Factory, Mill] that got into Chancery and never got out;" 6.
"Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the Grass grew;" 7.
"Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House that was always shut up and never
Lighted;" 8. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined Mill, that got into Chancery
and never got out;" 9. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Solitary House where the
Wind howled;" 10. "Tom-all-Alone's. The Ruined House that got into
Chancery and never got out;" 11. "Bleak House and the East Wind. How
they both got into Chancery and never got out;" 12. "Bleak House."
[170] He was greatly interested in the movement for closing town and
city graves (see the close of the 11th chapter of _Bleak House_), and
providing places of burial under State supervision.
[171] The promise was formally conveyed next morning in a letter to one
who took the lead then and since in all good work for Birmingham, Mr.
Arthur Ryland. The reading would, he said in this letter (7th of Jan.
1853), "take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half way
through. There would be some novelty in the thing, as I have never done
it in public, though I have in private, and (if I may say so) with a
great effect on the hearers."
[172] Baron Tauchnitz, describing to me his long and uninterrupted
friendly intercourse with Dickens, has this remark: "I give also a
passage from one of his letters written at the time when he sent his son
Charles, through my mediation, to Leipzig. He says in it what he desires
for his son. 'I want him to have all interest in, and to acquire a
knowledge of, the life around him, and to be treated like a gentleman
though pampered in nothing. By punctuality in all things, great or
small, I set great store.'"
[173] From one of his letters while there I take a passage of
observation full of character. "Great excitement here about a wretched
woman who has murdered her child. Apropos of which I observed a curious
thing last night. The newspaper offices (local journals) had placards
like this outside:
CHILD MURDER IN BRIGHTON.
INQUEST.
COMMITTAL OF THE MURDERESS.
I saw so many common people stand profoundly staring at these lines for
half-an-hour together--and even go back to stare again--that I feel
quite certain they had not the power of thinking about the thing at all
connectedly or continuously, without having something about it before
their sense of sight. Having got that, they were considering the case,
wondering how the devil they had come into that power. I saw one man in
a smock frock lose the said power the moment he turned away, and bring
his hob-nails back again."
[174] The reading occupied nearly three hours: double the time devoted
to it in the later years.
[175] "After correspondence with all parts of England, and every kind of
refusal and evasion on my part, I am now obliged to decide this
question--whether I shall read two nights at Bradford for a hundred
pounds. If I do, I may take as many hundred pounds as I choose." 27th of
Jan. 1854.
[176] On the 28th of Dec. 1854 he wrote from Bradford: "The hall is
enormous, and they expect to seat 3700 people to-night! Notwithstanding
which, it seems to me a tolerably easy place--except that the width of
the platform is so very great to the eye at first." From Folkestone, on
his way to Paris, he wrote in the autumn of 1855: "16th of Sept. I am
going to read for them here, on the 5th of next month, and have answered
in the last fortnight thirty applications to do the like all over
England, Ireland, and Scotland. Fancy my having to come from Paris in
December, to do this, at Peterborough, Birmingham, and Sheffield--old
promises." Again: 23rd of Sept. "I am going to read here, next Friday
week. There are (as there are everywhere) a Literary Institution and a
Working Men's Institution, which have not the slightest sympathy or
connexion. The stalls are five shillings, but I have made them fix the
working men's admission at threepence, and I hope it may bring them
together. The event comes off in a carpenter's shop, as the biggest
place that can be got." In 1857, at Paxton's request, he read his
_Carol_ at Coventry for the Institute.
[177] My name it is Tom Thumb,
Small my size,
Small my size,
My name it is Tom Thumb,
Small my size.
Yet though I am so small,
I have killed the giants tall;
And now I'm paid for all,
Small my size,
Small my size,
And now I'm paid for all,
Small my size.
[178] This finds mention, I observe, in a pleasant description of "Mr.
Dickens's Amateur Theatricals," which appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_
two years ago, by one who had been a member of the Juvenile Company. I
quote a passage, recommending the whole paper as very agreeably written,
with some shrewd criticism. "Mr. Planche had in one portion of the
extravaganza put into the mouth of one of the characters for the moment
a few lines of burlesque upon Macbeth, and we remember Mr. Dickens's
unsuccessful attempts to teach the performer how to imitate Macready,
whom he (the performer) had never seen! And after the performance, when
we were restored to our evening-party costumes, and the school-room was
cleared for dancing, still a stray 'property' or two had escaped the
vigilant eye of the property-man, for Douglas Jerrold had picked up the
horse's head (Fortunio's faithful steed _Comrade_), and was holding it
up before the greatest living animal painter, who had been one of the
audience, with 'Looks as if it knew _you_, Edwin!'"
[179] He went with the rest to Boulogne in the summer, and an anecdote
transmitted in one of his father's letters will show that he maintained
the reputation as a comedian which his early debut had awakened.
"ORIGINAL ANECDOTE OF THE PLORNISHGHENTER. This distinguished wit, being
at Boulogne with his family, made a close acquaintance with his
landlord, whose name was M. Beaucourt--the only French word with which
he was at that time acquainted. It happened that one day he was left
unusually long in a bathing-machine when the tide was making,
accompanied by his two young brothers and little English nurse, without
being drawn to land. The little nurse, being frightened, cried 'M'soo!
M'soo!' The two young brothers being frightened, cried 'Ici! Ici!'. Our
wit, at once perceiving that his English was of no use to him under the
foreign circumstances, immediately fell to bawling 'Beau-court!' which
he continued to shout at the utmost pitch of his voice and with great
gravity, until rescued.--_New Boulogne Jest Book_, page 578."
[180] To show the pains he took in such matters I will give other titles
also thought of for this tale. 1. Fact; 2. Hard-headed Gradgrind; 3.
Hard Heads and Soft Hearts; 4. Heads and Tales; 5. Black and White.
[181] It is well to remember, too, what he wrote about the story to
Charles Knight. It had no design, he said, to damage the really useful
truths of Political Economy, but was wholly directed against "those who
see figures and averages, and nothing else; who would take the average
of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a
soldier in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur;
and who would comfort the labourer in travelling twelve miles a day to
and from his work, by telling him that the average distance of one
inhabited place from another, on the whole area of England, is not more
than four miles."
[182] It is curious that with as strong a view in the opposite
direction, and with an equally mistaken exaltation, above the writer's
ordinary level, of a book which on the whole was undoubtedly below it,
Mr. Taine speaks of _Hard Times_ as that one of Dickens's romances which
is a summary of all the rest: exalting instinct above reason, and the
intuitions of the heart above practical knowledge; attacking all
education based on statistic figures and facts; heaping sorrow and
ridicule on the practical mercantile people; fighting against the pride,
hardness, and selfishness of the merchant and noble; cursing the
manufacturing towns for imprisoning bodies in smoke and mud, and souls
in falsehood and factitiousness;--while it contrasts, with that satire
of social oppression, lofty eulogy of the oppressed; and searches out
poor workmen, jugglers, foundlings, and circus people, for types of good
sense, sweetness of disposition, generosity, delicacy, and courage, to
perpetual confusion of the pretended knowledge, pretended happiness,
pretended virtue, of the rich and powerful who trample upon them! This
is a fair specimen of the exaggerations with which exaggeration is
rebuked, in Mr. Taine's and much similar criticism.
[183] Here is a note at the close. "Tavistock House. Look at that!
Boulogne, of course. Friday, 14th of July, 1854. I am three parts mad,
and the fourth delirious, with perpetual rushing at _Hard Times_. I have
done what I hope is a good thing with Stephen, taking his story as a
whole; and hope to be over in town with the end of the book on Wednesday
night. . . . I have been looking forward through so many weeks and sides of
paper to this Stephen business, that now--as usual--it being over, I
feel as if nothing in the world, in the way of intense and violent
rushing hither and thither, could quite restore my balance."
[184] "I have hope of Mr. Morley--whom one cannot see without knowing to
be a straightforward, earnest man. Travers, too, I think a man of the
Anti-corn-law-league order. I also think Higgins will materially help
them. Generally I quite agree with you that they hardly know what to be
at; but it is an immensely difficult subject to start, and they must
have every allowance. At any rate, it is not by leaving them alone and
giving them no help, that they can be urged on to success." 29th of
March 1855.
[185] "The Government hit took immensely, but I'm afraid to look at the
report, these things are so ill done. It came into my head as I was
walking about at Hampstead yesterday. . . . On coming away I told B. we
must have a toastmaster in future less given to constant drinking while
the speeches are going on. B. replied 'Yes sir, you are quite right sir,
he has no head whatever sir, look at him now sir'--Toastmaster was
weakly contemplating the coats and hats--'do you not find it difficult
to keep your hands off him sir, he ought to have his head knocked
against the wall sir,--and he should sir, I assure you sir, if he was
not in too debased a condition to be aware of it sir.'" April 3rd 1855.
[186] For the scene of the Eddystone Lighthouse at this little play,
afterwards placed in a frame in the hall at Gadshill, a thousand guineas
was given at the Dickens sale. It occupied the great painter only one or
two mornings, and Dickens will tell how it originated. Walking on
Hampstead Heath to think over his Theatrical Fund speech, he met Mr.
Lemon, and they went together to Stanfield. "He has been very ill, and
he told us that large pictures are too much for him, and he must confine
himself to small ones. But I would not have this, I declared he must
paint bigger ones than ever, and what would he think of beginning upon
an act-drop for a proposed vast theatre at Tavistock House? He laughed
and caught at this, we cheered him up very much, and he said he was
quite a man again." April 1855.
[187] Sitting at Nisi Prius not long before, the Chief Justice, with the
same eccentric liking for literature, had committed what was called at
the time a breach of judicial decorum. (Such indecorums were less
uncommon in the great days of the Bench.) "The name," he said, "of the
illustrious Charles Dickens has been called on the jury, but he has not
answered. If his great Chancery suit had been still going on, I
certainly would have excused him, but, as that is over, he might have
done us the honour of attending here, that he might have seen how we
went on at common law."
CHAPTER III.
SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED.
1853.
Swiss People--Narrow
Escape--Berne--Lausanne--An Old
Friend--Genoa--Peschiere revisited--On the Way
to Naples--Scene on Board Steamship--A Jaunt to
Pisa--A Greek War-ship--At Naples--At
Rome--Time's Changes--At the Opera--A
"Scattering" Party--Performance of
Puppets--Malaria--Desolation--At Bolsena--At
Venice--Habits of Gondoliers--Uses of
Travel--Tintoretto--At Turin--Liking for the
Sardinians--Austrian Police--Police
Arrangements--Dickens and the Austrian--An Old
Dislike.
THE first news of the three travellers was from Chamounix, on the 20th
of October; and in it there was little made of the fatigue, and much of
the enjoyment, of their Swiss travel. Great attention and cleanliness at
the inns, very small windows and very bleak passages, doors opening to
wintery blasts, overhanging eaves and external galleries, plenty of
milk, honey, cows, and goats, much singing towards sunset on mountain
sides, mountains almost too solemn to look at--that was the picture of
it, with the country everywhere in one of its finest aspects, as winter
began to close in. They had started from Geneva the previous morning at
four, and in their day's travel Dickens had again noticed what he spoke
of formerly, the ill-favoured look of the people in the valleys owing
to their hard and stern climate. "All the women were like used-up men,
and all the men like a sort of fagged dogs. But the good, genuine,
grateful Swiss recognition of the commonest kind word--not too often
thrown to them by our countrymen--made them quite radiant. I walked the
greater part of the way, which was like going up the Monument." On the
day the letter was written they had been up to the Mer de Glace, finding
it not so beautiful in colour as in summer, but grander in its
desolation; the green ice, like the greater part of the ascent, being
covered with snow. "We were alarmingly near to a very dismal accident.
We were a train of four mules and two guides, going along an immense
height like a chimney-piece, with sheer precipice below, when there came
rolling from above, with fearful velocity, a block of stone about the
size of one of the fountains in Trafalgar-square, which Egg, the last of
the party, had preceded by not a yard, when it swept over the ledge,
breaking away a tree, and rolled and tumbled down into the valley. It
had been loosened by the heavy rains, or by some wood-cutters afterwards
reported to be above." The only place new to Dickens was Berne: "a
surprisingly picturesque old Swiss town, with a view of the Alps from
the outside of it singularly beautiful in the morning light." Everything
else was familiar to him: though at that winter season, when the inns
were shutting up, and all who could afford it were off to Geneva, most
things in the valley struck him with a new aspect. From such of his old
friends as he found at Lausanne, where a day or two's rest was taken, he
had the gladdest of greetings; "and the wonderful manner in which they
turned out in the wettest morning ever beheld for a Godspeed down the
Lake was really quite pathetic."
He had found time to see again the deaf, dumb, and blind youth at Mr.
Haldimand's Institution who had aroused so deep an interest in him seven
years before, but, in his brief present visit, the old associations
would not reawaken. "Tremendous efforts were made by Hertzel to impress
him with an idea of me, and the associations belonging to me; but it
seemed in my eyes quite a failure, and I much doubt if he had the least
perception of his old acquaintance. According to his custom, he went on
muttering strange eager sounds like Town and Down and Mown, but nothing
more. I left ten francs to be spent in cigars for my old friend. If I
had taken one with me, I think I could, more successfully than his
master, have established my identity." The child similarly afflicted,
the little girl whom he saw at the same old time, had been after some
trial discharged as an idiot.
Before October closed, the travellers had reached Genoa, having been
thirty-one consecutive hours on the road from Milan. They arrived in
somewhat damaged condition, and took up their lodging in the top rooms
of the Croce di Malta, "overlooking the port and sea pleasantly and
airily enough, but it was no joke to get so high, and the apartment is
rather vast and faded." The warmth of personal greeting that here
awaited Dickens was given no less to the friends who accompanied him,
and though the reader may not share in such private confidences as would
show the sensation created by his reappearance, and the jovial hours
that were passed among old associates, he will perhaps be interested to
know how far the intervening years had changed the aspect of things and
places made pleasantly familiar to us in his former letters. He wrote to
his sister-in-law that the old walks were pretty much the same as ever
except that there had been building behind the Peschiere up the San
Bartolomeo hill, and the whole town towards San Pietro d'Arena had been
quite changed. The Bisagno looked just the same, stony just then, having
very little water in it; the vicoli were fragrant with the same old
flavour of "very rotten cheese kept in very hot blankets;" and
everywhere he saw the mezzaro as of yore. The Jesuits' College in the
Strada Nuova was become, under the changed government, the Hotel de
Ville, and a splendid caffe with a terrace-garden had arisen between it
and Palaviccini's old palace. "Pal himself has gone to the dogs."
Another new and handsome caffe had been built in the Piazza Carlo
Felice, between the old one of the Bei Arti and the Strada Carlo Felice;
and the Teatro Diurno had now stone galleries and seats, like an ancient
amphitheatre. "The beastly gate and guardhouse in the Albaro road are
still in their dear old beastly state; and the whole of that road is
just as it was. The man without legs is still in the Strada Nuova; but
the beggars in general are all cleared off, and our old one-arm'd
Belisario made a sudden evaporation a year or two ago. I am going to the
Peschiere to-day." To myself he described his former favourite abode as
converted into a girls' college; all the paintings of gods and goddesses
canvassed over, and the gardens gone to ruin; "but O! what a wonderful
place!" He observed an extraordinary increase everywhere else, since he
was last in the splendid city, of "life, growth, and enterprise;" and he
declared his old conviction to be confirmed that for picturesque beauty
and character there was nothing in Italy, Venice excepted, "near
brilliant old Genoa."