The first number appeared in December 1855, and on the 2nd there was

an exultant note. "_Little Dorrit_ has beaten even _Bleak House_ out of

the field. It is a most tremendous start, and I am overjoyed at it;" to

which he added, writing from Paris on the 6th of the month following,

"You know that they had sold 35,000 of number two on new year's day." He

was still in Paris on the day of the appearance of that portion of the

tale by which it will always be most vividly remembered, and thus wrote

on the 30th of January 1856: "I have a grim pleasure upon me to-night in

thinking that the Circumlocution Office sees the light, and in wondering

what effect it will make. But my head really stings with the visions of

the book, and I am going, as we French say, to disembarrass it by

plunging out into some of the strange places I glide into of nights in

these latitudes." The Circumlocution heroes led to the Society scenes,

the Hampton-court dowager-sketches, and Mr. Gowan; all parts of one

satire levelled against prevailing political and social vices. Aim had

been taken, in the course of it, at some living originals, disguised

sufficiently from recognition to enable him to make his thrust more

sure; but there was one exception self-revealed. "I had the general

idea," he wrote while engaged on the sixth number, "of the Society

business before the Sadleir affair, but I shaped Mr. Merdle himself out

of that precious rascality. Society, the Circumlocution Office, and Mr.

Gowan, are of course three parts of one idea and design. Mr. Merdle's

complaint, which you will find in the end to be fraud and forgery, came

into my mind as the last drop in the silver cream-jug on

Hampstead-heath. I shall beg, when you have read the present number, to

enquire whether you consider 'Bar' an instance, in reference to K F, of

a suggested likeness in not many touches!" The likeness no one could

mistake; and, though that particular Bar has since been moved into a

higher and happier sphere, Westminster-hall is in no danger of losing

"the insinuating Jury-droop, and persuasive double-eyeglass," by which

this keen observer could express a type of character in half a dozen

words.

Of the other portions of the book that had a strong personal interest

for him I have spoken on a former page, and I will now only add an

allusion of his own. "There are some things in Flora in number seven

that seem to me to be extraordinarily droll, with something serious at

the bottom of them after all. Ah, well! was there _not_ something very

serious in it once? I am glad to think of being in the country with the

long summer mornings as I approach number ten, where I have finally

resolved to make Dorrit rich. It should be a very fine point in the

story. . . . Nothing in Flora made me laugh so much as the confusion of

ideas between gout flying upwards, and its soaring with Mr. F---- to

another sphere." He had himself no inconsiderable enjoyment also of Mr.

F.'s aunt; and in the old rascal of a patriarch, the smooth-surfaced

Casby, and other surroundings of poor Flora, there was fun enough to

float an argosy of second-rates, assuming such to have formed the staple

of the tale. It would be far from fair to say they did. The defect in

the book was less the absence of excellent character or keen

observation, than the want of ease and coherence among the figures of

the story, and of a central interest in the plan of it. The agencies

that bring about its catastrophe, too, are less agreeable even than in

_Bleak House_; and, most unlike that well-constructed story, some of the

most deeply considered things that occur in it have really little to do

with the tale itself. The surface-painting of both Miss Wade and

Tattycoram, to take an instance, is anything but attractive, yet there

is under it a rare force of likeness in the unlikeness between the two

which has much subtlety of intention; and they must both have had, as

well as Mr. Gowan himself, a striking effect in the novel, if they had

been made to contribute in a more essential way to its interest or

development. The failure nevertheless had not been for want of care and

study, as well of his own design as of models by masters in his art. A

happier hint of apology, for example, could hardly be given for

Fielding's introduction of such an episode as the Man of the Hill

between the youth and manhood of Blifil and Tom Jones, than is suggested

by what Dickens wrote of the least interesting part of _Little Dorrit_.

In the mere form, Fielding of course was only following the lead of

Cervantes and Le Sage; but Dickens rightly judged his purpose also to

have been, to supply a kind of connection between the episode and the

story. "I don't see the practicability of making the History of a

Self-Tormentor, with which I took great pains, a written narrative. But

I do see the possibility" (he saw the other practicability before the

number was published) "of making it a chapter by itself, which might

enable me to dispense with the necessity of the turned commas. Do you

think that would be better? I have no doubt that a great part of

Fielding's reason for the introduced story, and Smollett's also, was,

that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the

idea it contains (which yet it may be on all accounts desirable to

present), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much

romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. In Miss

Wade I had an idea, which I thought a new one, of making the introduced

story so fit into surroundings impossible of separation from the main

story, as to make the blood of the book circulate through both. But I

can only suppose, from what you say, that I have not exactly succeeded

in this."

Shortly after the date of his letter he was in London on business

connected with the purchase of Gadshill Place, and he went over to the

Borough to see what traces were left of the prison of which his first

impression was taken in his boyhood, which had played so important a

part in this latest novel, and every brick and stone of which he had

been able to rebuild in his book by the mere vividness of his marvellous

memory. "Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gadshill,

to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part

of the original building--now 'Marshalsea Place.' Found the rooms that

have been in my mind's eye in the story. Found, nursing a very big boy,

a very small boy, who, seeing me standing on the Marshalsea pavement,

looking about, told me how it all used to be. God knows how he learned

it (for he was a world too young to know anything about it), but he was

right enough. . . . There is a room there--still standing, to my

amazement--that I think of taking! It is the room through which the

ever-memorable signers of Captain Porter's petition filed off in my

boyhood. The spikes are gone, and the wall is lowered, and anybody can

go out now who likes to go, and is not bedridden; and I said to the boy

'Who lives there?' and he said, 'Jack Pithick.' 'Who is Jack Pithick?' I

asked him. And he said, 'Joe Pithick's uncle.'"

Mention was made of this visit in the preface that appeared with the

last number; and all it is necessary to add of the completed book will

be, that, though in the humour and satire of its finer parts not

unworthy of him, and though it had the clear design, worthy of him in an

especial degree, of contrasting, both in private and in public life, and

in poverty equally as in wealth, duty done and duty not done, it made no

material addition to his reputation. His public, however, showed no

falling-off in its enormous numbers; and what is said in one of his

letters, noticeable for this touch of character, illustrates his anxiety

to avoid any set-off from the disquiet that critical discourtesies might

give. "I was ludicrously foiled here the other night in a resolution I

have kept for twenty years not to know of any attack upon myself, by

stumbling, before I could pick myself up, on a short extract in the

_Globe_ from _Blackwood's Magazine_, informing me that _Little Dorrit_

is 'Twaddle.' I was sufficiently put out by it to be angry with myself

for being such a fool, and then pleased with myself for having so long

been constant to a good resolution." There was a scene that made itself

part of history not four months after his death, which, if he could have

lived to hear of it, might have more than consoled him. It was the

meeting of Bismarck and Jules Favre under the walls of Paris. The

Prussian was waiting to open fire on the city; the Frenchman was engaged

in the arduous task of showing the wisdom of not doing it; and "we

learn," say the papers of the day, "that while the two eminent statesmen

were trying to find a basis of negotiation, Von Moltke was seated in a

corner reading _Little Dorrit_." Who will doubt that the chapter on HOW

NOT TO DO IT was then absorbing the old soldier's attention?

* * * * *

Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to

Christmas, and, in turning the school-room into a theatre, sawing and

hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. The priceless help of

Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at

Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by

Dickens, with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery

planned out with walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this

kind was to know how to take advice; and no suggestion came to him that

he was not ready to act upon, if it presented the remotest likelihood.

In one of his great difficulties of obtaining more space, for audience

as well as actors, he was told that Mr. Cooke of Astley's was a man of

much resource in that way; and to Mr. Cooke he applied, with the

following result. "One of the finest things" (18th of October 1856) "I

have ever seen in my life of that kind was the arrival of my friend Mr.

Cooke one morning this week, in an open phaeton drawn by two white

ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled), who came

in at the gate with a little jolt and a rattle, exactly as they come

into the Ring when they draw anything, and went round and round the

centre bed of the front court, apparently looking for the clown. A

multitude of boys who felt them to be no common ponies rushed up in a

breathless state--twined themselves like ivy about the railings--and

were only deterred from storming the enclosure by the glare of the

Inimitable's eye. Some of these boys had evidently followed from

Astley's. I grieve to add that my friend, being taken to the point of

difficulty, had no sort of suggestion in him; no gleam of an idea; and

might just as well have been the popular minister from the Tabernacle in

Tottenham Court Road. All he could say was--answering me, posed in the

garden, precisely as if I were the clown asking him a riddle at

night--that two of their stable tents would be home in November, and

that they were '20 foot square,' and I was heartily welcome to 'em.

Also, he said, 'You might have half a dozen of my trapezes, or my

middle-distance-tables, but they're all 6 foot and all too low sir.'

Since then, I have arranged to do it in my own way, and with my own

carpenter. You will be surprised by the look of the place. It is no more

like the school-room than it is like the sign of the Salutation Inn at

Ambleside in Westmoreland. The sounds in the house remind me, as to the

present time, of Chatham Dockyard--as to a remote epoch, of the building

of Noah's ark. Joiners are never out of the house, and the carpenter

appears to be unsettled (or settled) for life."

Of course time did not mend matters, and as Christmas approached the

house was in a state of siege. "All day long, a labourer heats size over

the fire in a great crucible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell

it. Seventy paint-pots (which came in a van) adorn the stage; and

thereon may be beheld, Stanny, and three Dansons (from the Surrey

Zoological Gardens), all painting at once!! Meanwhile, Telbin, in a

secluded bower in Brewer-street, Golden-square, plies _his_ part of the

little undertaking." How worthily it turned out in the end, the

excellence of the performances and the delight of the audiences, became

known to all London; and the pressure for admittance at last took the

form of a tragi-comedy, composed of ludicrous makeshifts and gloomy

disappointments, with which even Dickens's resources could not deal. "My

audience is now 93," he wrote one day in despair, "and at least 10 will

neither hear nor see." There was nothing for it but to increase the

number of nights; and it was not until the 20th of January he described

"the workmen smashing the last atoms of the theatre."

His book was finished soon after at Gadshill Place, to be presently

described, which he had purchased the previous year, and taken

possession of in February; subscribing himself, in the letter announcing

the fact, as "the Kentish Freeholder on his native heath, his name

Protection."[209] The new abode occupied him in various ways in the

early part of the summer; and Hans Andersen the Dane had just arrived

upon a visit to him there, when Douglas Jerrold's unexpected death

befell. It was a shock to every one, and an especial grief to Dickens.

Jerrold's wit, and the bright shrewd intellect that had so many

triumphs, need no celebration from me; but the keenest of satirists was

one of the kindliest of men, and Dickens had a fondness for Jerrold as

genuine as his admiration for him. "I chance to know a good deal about

the poor fellow's illness, for I was with him on the last day he was

out. It was ten days ago, when we dined at a dinner given by Russell at

Greenwich. He was complaining much when we met, said he had been sick

three days, and attributed it to the inhaling of white paint from his

study window. I did not think much of it at the moment, as we were very

social; but while we walked through Leicester-square he suddenly fell

into a white, hot, sick perspiration, and had to lean against the

railings. Then, at my urgent request, he was to let me put him in a cab

and send him home; but he rallied a little after that, and, on our

meeting Russell, determined to come with us. We three went down by

steamboat that we might see the great ship, and then got an open fly and

rode about Blackheath: poor Jerrold mightily enjoying the air, and

constantly saying that it set him up. He was rather quiet at dinner--sat

next Delane--but was very humorous and good, and in spirits, though he

took hardly anything. We parted with references to coming down here"

(Gadshill) "and I never saw him again. Next morning he was taken very

ill when he tried to get up. On the Wednesday and Thursday he was very

bad, but rallied on the Friday, and was quite confident of getting well.

On the Sunday he was very ill again, and on the Monday forenoon died;

'at peace with all the world' he said, and asking to be remembered to

friends. He had become indistinct and insensible, until for but a few

minutes at the end. I knew nothing about it, except that he had been ill

and was better, until, going up by railway yesterday morning, I heard a

man in the carriage, unfolding his newspaper, say to another 'Douglas

Jerrold is dead.' I immediately went up there, and then to Whitefriars

. . . I propose that there shall be a night at a theatre when the actors

(with old Cooke) shall play the _Rent Day_ and _Black-ey'd Susan_;

another night elsewhere, with a lecture from Thackeray; a day reading by

me; a night reading by me; a lecture by Russell; and a subscription

performance of the _Frozen Deep_, as at Tavistock House. I don't mean to

do it beggingly; but merely to announce the whole series, the day after

the funeral, 'In memory of the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold,' or some such

phrase. I have got hold of Arthur Smith as the best man of business I

know, and go to work with him to-morrow morning--inquiries being made in

the meantime as to the likeliest places to be had for these various

purposes. My confident hope is that we shall get close upon two thousand

pounds."

The friendly enterprise was carried to the close with a vigour,

promptitude, and success, that well corresponded with this opening. In

addition to the performances named, there were others in the country

also organized by Dickens, in which he took active personal part; and

the result did not fall short of his expectations. The sum was invested

ultimately for our friend's unmarried daughter, who still receives the

income from myself, the last surviving trustee.

So passed the greater part of the summer,[210] and when the country

performances were over at the end of August I had this intimation. "I

have arranged with Collins that he and I will start next Monday on a

ten or twelve days' expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns

and coast-corners) a little tour in search of an article and in

avoidance of railroads. I must get a good name for it, and I propose it

in five articles, one for the beginning of every number in the October

part." Next day: "Our decision is for a foray upon the fells of

Cumberland; I having discovered in the books some promising moors and

bleak places thereabout." Into the lake-country they went accordingly;

and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, contributed to _Household

Words_, was a narrative of the trip. But his letters had descriptive

touches, and some whimsical personal experiences, not in the published

account.

Looking over the _Beauties of England and Wales_ before he left London,

his ambition was fired by mention of Carrick Fell, "a gloomy old

mountain 1500 feet high," which he secretly resolved to go up. "We came

straight to it yesterday" (9th of September). "Nobody goes up. Guides

have forgotten it. Master of a little inn, excellent north-countryman,

volunteered. Went up, in a tremendous rain. C. D. beat Mr. Porter (name

of landlord) in half a mile. Mr. P. done up in no time. Three

nevertheless went on. Mr. P. again leading; C. D. and C." (Mr. Wilkie

Collins) "following. Rain terrific, black mists, darkness of night. Mr.

P. agitated. C. D. confident. C. (a long way down in perspective)

submissive. All wet through. No poles. Not so much as a walking-stick in

the party. Reach the summit, at about one in the day. Dead darkness as

of night. Mr. P. (excellent fellow to the last) uneasy. C. D. produces

compass from pocket. Mr. P. reassured. Farm-house where dog-cart was

left, N.N.W. Mr. P. complimentary. Descent commenced. C. D. with

compass triumphant, until compass, with the heat and wet of C. D.'s

pocket, breaks. Mr. P. (who never had a compass), inconsolable,

confesses he has not been on Carrick Fell for twenty years, and he don't

know the way down. Darker and darker. Nobody discernible, two yards off,

by the other two. Mr. P. makes suggestions, but no way. It becomes clear

to C. D. and to C. that Mr. P. is going round and round the mountain,

and never coming down. Mr. P. sits on angular granite, and says he is

'just fairly doon.' C. D. revives Mr. P. with laughter, the only

restorative in the company. Mr. P. again complimentary. Descent tried

once more. Mr. P. worse and worse. Council of war. Proposals from C. D.

to go 'slap down.' Seconded by C. Mr. P. objects, on account of

precipice called The Black Arches, and terror of the country-side. More

wandering. Mr. P. terror-stricken, but game. Watercourse, thundering and

roaring, reached. C. D. suggests that it must run to the river, and had

best be followed, subject to all gymnastic hazards. Mr. P. opposes, but

gives in. Watercourse followed accordingly. Leaps, splashes, and

tumbles, for two hours. C. lost. C. D. whoops. Cries for assistance from

behind. C. D. returns. C. with horribly sprained ankle, lying in

rivulet!"

All the danger was over when Dickens sent his description; but great had

been the trouble in binding up the sufferer's ankle and getting him

painfully on, shoving, shouldering, carrying alternately, till terra

firma was reached. "We got down at last in the wildest place,

preposterously out of the course; and, propping up C. against stones,

sent Mr. P. to the other side of Cumberland for dog-cart, so got back to

his inn, and changed. Shoe or stocking on the bad foot, out of the

question. Foot tumbled up in a flannel waistcoat. C. D. carrying C.

melo-dramatically (Wardour to the life!)[211] everywhere; into and out

of carriages; up and down stairs; to bed; every step. And so to Wigton,

got doctor, and here we are!! A pretty business, we flatter ourselves!"

Wigton, Dickens described as a place of little houses all in

half-mourning, yellow stone or white stone and black, with the wonderful

peculiarity that though it had no population, no business, and no

streets to speak of, it had five linendrapers within range of their

single window, one linendraper's next door, and five more linendrapers

round the corner. "I ordered a night light in my bed-room. A queer

little old woman brought me one of the common Child's night lights, and,

seeming to think that I looked at it with interest, said, 'It's joost a

vara keeyourious thing, sir, and joost new coom oop. It'll burn awt

hoors a' end, and no gootther, nor no waste, nor ony sike a thing, if

you can creedit what I say, seein' the airticle.'" In these primitive

quarters there befell a difficulty about letters, which Dickens solved

in a fashion especially his own. "The day after Carrick there was a mess

about our letters, through our not going to a place called Mayport. So,

while the landlord was planning how to get them (they were only twelve

miles off), I walked off, to his great astonishment, and brought them

over." The night after leaving Wigton they were at the Ship-hotel in

Allonby.

Allonby his letters presented as a small untidy outlandish place; rough

stone houses in half mourning, a few coarse yellow-stone lodging houses

with black roofs (bills in all the windows), five bathing-machines, five

girls in straw hats, five men in straw hats (wishing they had not come);

very much what Broadstairs would have been if it had been born Irish,

and had not inherited a cliff. "But this is a capital little homely inn,

looking out upon the sea; with the coast of Scotland, mountainous and

romantic, over against the windows; and though I can just stand upright

in my bedroom, we are really well lodged. It is a clean nice place in a

rough wild country, and we have a very obliging and comfortable

landlady." He had found indeed, in the latter, an acquaintance of old

date. "The landlady at the little inn at Allonby, lived at Greta-Bridge

in Yorkshire when I went down there before _Nickleby_; and was smuggled

into the room to see me, after I was secretly found out. She is an

immensely fat woman now. 'But I could tuck my arm round her waist then,

Mr. Dickens,' the landlord said when she told me the story as I was

going to bed the night before last. 'And can't you do it now?' I said.

'You insensible dog! Look at me! Here's a picture!' Accordingly I got

round as much of her as I could; and this gallant action was the most

successful I have ever performed, on the whole."

On their way home the friends were at Doncaster, and this was Dickens's

first experience of the St. Leger and its saturnalia. His companion had

by this time so far recovered as to be able, doubled-up, to walk with a

thick stick; in which condition, "being exactly like the gouty admiral

in a comedy I have given him that name." The impressions received from

the race-week were not favourable. It was noise and turmoil all day

long, and a gathering of vagabonds from all parts of the racing earth.

Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from an innocent horse

had its representative in the streets; and as Dickens, like Gulliver

looking down upon his fellow-men after coming from the horse-country,

looked down into Doncaster High-street from his inn-window, he seemed to

see everywhere a then notorious personage who had just poisoned his

betting-companion. "Everywhere I see the late Mr. Palmer with his

betting-book in his hand. Mr. Palmer sits next me at the theatre; Mr.

Palmer goes before me down the street; Mr. Palmer follows me into the

chemist's shop where I go to buy rose water after breakfast, and says to

the chemist 'Give us soom sal volatile or soom damned thing o' that

soort, in wather--my head's bad!' And I look at the back of his bad head

repeated in long, long lines on the race course, and in the betting

stand and outside the betting rooms in the town, and I vow to God that I

can see nothing in it but cruelty, covetousness, calculation,

insensibility, and low wickedness."

Even a half-appalling kind of luck was not absent from my friend's

experiences at the race course, when, what he called a "wonderful,

paralysing, coincidence" befell him. He bought the card; facetiously

wrote down three names for the winners of the three chief races (never

in his life having heard or thought of any of the horses, except that

the winner of the Derby, who proved to be nowhere, had been mentioned to

him); "and, if you can believe it without your hair standing on end,

those three races were won, one after another, by those three horses!!!"

That was the St. Leger-day, of which he also thought it noticeable,

that, though the losses were enormous, nobody had won, for there was

nothing but grinding of teeth and blaspheming of ill-luck. Nor had

matters mended on the Cup-day, after which celebration "a groaning

phantom" lay in the doorway of his bed-room and howled all night. The

landlord came up in the morning to apologise, "and said it was a

gentleman who had lost L1500 or L2000; and he had drunk a deal

afterwards; and then they put him to bed, and then he--took the 'orrors,

and got up, and yelled till morning."[212] Dickens might well believe,

as he declared at the end of his letter, that if a boy with any good in

him, but with a dawning propensity to sporting and betting, were but

brought to the Doncaster races soon enough, it would cure him.

FOOTNOTES:

[207] The framework for this sketch was a graphic description, also done

by Dickens, of the celebrated Charity at Rochester founded in the

sixteenth century by Richard Watts, "for six poor travellers, who, not

being Rogues or Proctors, may receive gratis for one night, lodging,

entertainment, and fourpence each." A quaint monument to Watts is the

most prominent object on the wall of the south-west transept of the

cathedral, and underneath it is now placed a brass thus inscribed:

"CHARLES DICKENS. Born at Portsmouth, seventh of February 1812. Died at

Gadshill Place by Rochester, ninth of June 1870. Buried in Westminster

Abbey. To connect his memory with the scenes in which his earliest and

his latest years were passed, and with the associations of Rochester

Cathedral and its neighbourhood which extended over all his life, this

Tablet, with the sanction of the Dean and Chapter, is placed by his

Executors."

[208] So curious a contrast, taking _Copperfield_ for the purpose, I

have thought worth giving in fac-simile; and can assure the reader that

the examples taken express very fairly the general character of the

Notes to the two books respectively.

[209] In the same letter was an illustration of the ruling passion in

death, which, even in so undignified a subject, might have interested

Pope. "You remember little Wieland who did grotesque demons so well. Did

you ever hear how he died? He lay very still in bed with the life fading

out of him--suddenly sprung out of it, threw what is professionally

called a flip-flap, and fell dead on the floor."

[210] One of its incidents made such an impression on him that it will

be worth while to preserve his description of it. "I have been (by mere

accident) seeing the serpents fed to-day, with the live birds, rabbits,

and guinea pigs--a sight so very horrible that I cannot get rid of the

impression, and am, at this present, imagining serpents coming up the

legs of the table, with their infernal flat heads, and their tongues

like the Devil's tail (evidently taken from that model, in the magic

lanterns and other such popular representations), elongated for dinner.

I saw one small serpent, whose father was asleep, go up to a guinea pig

(white and yellow, and with a gentle eye--every hair upon him erect with

horror); corkscrew himself on the tip of his tail; open a mouth which

couldn't have swallowed the guinea pig's nose; dilate a throat which

wouldn't have made him a stocking; and show him what his father meant to

do with him when he came out of that ill-looking Hookah into which he

had resolved himself. The guinea pig backed against the side of the

cage--said 'I know it, I know it!'--and his eye glared and his coat

turned wiry, as he made the remark. Five small sparrows crouching

together in a little trench at the back of the cage, peeped over the

brim of it, all the time; and when they saw the guinea pig give it up,

and the young serpent go away looking at him over about two yards and a

quarter of shoulder, struggled which should get into the innermost angle

and be seized last. Everyone of them then hid his eyes in another's

breast, and then they all shook together like dry leaves--as I daresay

they may be doing now, for old Hookah was as dull as laudanum. . . . Please

to imagine two small serpents, one beginning on the tail of a white

mouse, and one on the head, and each pulling his own way, and the mouse

very much alive all the time, with the middle of him madly writhing."

[211] There was a situation in the _Frozen Deep_ where Richard Wardour,

played by Dickens, had thus to carry about Frank Aldersley in the person

of Wilkie Collins.

[212] The mention of a performance of Lord Lytton's _Money_ at the

theatre will supply the farce to this tragedy. "I have rarely seen

anything finer than Lord Glossmore, a chorus-singer in bluchers, drab

trowsers, and a brown sack; and Dudley Smooth, in somebody else's wig,

hindside before. Stout also, in anything he could lay hold of. The

waiter at the club had an immense moustache, white trowsers, and a

striped jacket; and he brought everybody who came in, a vinegar-cruet.

The man who read the will began thus: 'I so-and-so, being of unsound

mind but firm in body . . . ' In spite of all this, however, the real

character, humour, wit, and good writing of the comedy, made themselves

apparent; and the applause was loud and repeated, and really seemed

genuine. Its capital things were not lost altogether. It was succeeded

by a Jockey Dance by five ladies, who put their whips in their mouths

and worked imaginary winners up to the float--an immense success."

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME.

1857-1858.

Disappointments and Distastes--Compensations of

Art--Misgivings--Restlessness and

Impatience--Reply to a Remonstrance--Visions of

Places to write Books in--Fruitless

Aspirations--What lay behind--Sorrowful

Convictions--No Desire for Immunity from

Blame--Counteracting Influences weakened--Old

Project revived--Disadvantages of Public

Reading--Speech for Children's

Hospital--Unsolved Mysteries--Hospital

described--Appeal for Sick Children--Reasons

for and against Paid Readings--A Proposal from

Mr. Beale--Question of the Plunge--Mr. Arthur

Smith--Change in Home--Unwise Printed

Statement--A "Violated Letter."

AN unsettled feeling greatly in excess of what was usual with Dickens,

more or less observable since his first residence at Boulogne, became at

this time almost habitual, and the satisfactions which home should have

supplied, and which indeed were essential requirements of his nature, he

had failed to find in his home. He had not the alternative that under

this disappointment some can discover in what is called society. It did

not suit him, and he set no store by it. No man was better fitted to

adorn any circle he entered, but beyond that of friends and equals he

rarely passed. He would take as much pains to keep out of the houses of

the great as others take to get into them. Not always wisely, it may be

admitted. Mere contempt for toadyism and flunkeyism was not at all times

the prevailing motive with him which he supposed it to be. Beneath his

horror of those vices of Englishmen in his own rank of life, there was a

still stronger resentment at the social inequalities that engender them,

of which he was not so conscious and to which he owned less freely. Not

the less it served secretly to justify what he might otherwise have had

no mind to. To say he was not a gentleman would be as true as to say he

was not a writer; but if any one should assert his occasional preference

for what was even beneath his level over that which was above it, this

would be difficult of disproof. It was among those defects of

temperament for which his early trials and his early successes were

accountable in perhaps equal measure. He was sensitive in a passionate

degree to praise and blame, which yet he made it for the most part a

point of pride to assume indifference to; the inequalities of rank which

he secretly resented took more galling as well as glaring prominence

from the contrast of the necessities he had gone through with the fame

that had come to him; and when the forces he most affected to despise

assumed the form of barriers he could not easily overleap, he was led to

appear frequently intolerant (for he very seldom was really so) in

opinions and language. His early sufferings brought with them the

healing powers of energy, will, and persistence, and taught him the

inexpressible value of a determined resolve to live down difficulties;

but the habit, in small as in great things, of renunciation and

self-sacrifice, they did not teach; and, by his sudden leap into a

world-wide popularity and influence, he became master of everything that

might seem to be attainable in life, before he had mastered what a man

must undergo to be equal to its hardest trials.

Nothing of all this has yet presented itself to notice, except in

occasional forms of restlessness and desire of change of place, which

were themselves, when his books were in progress, so incident as well to

the active requirements of his fancy as to call, thus far, for no other

explanation. Up to the date of the completion of _Copperfield_ he had

felt himself to be in possession of an all-sufficient resource. Against

whatever might befall he had a set-off in his imaginative creations, a

compensation derived from his art that never failed him, because there

he was supreme. It was the world he could bend to his will, and make

subserve to all his desires. He had otherwise, underneath his exterior

of a singular precision, method, and strictly orderly arrangement in all

things, and notwithstanding a temperament to which home and home

interests were really a necessity, something in common with those eager,

impetuous, somewhat overbearing natures, that rush at existence without

heeding the cost of it, and are not more ready to accept and make the

most of its enjoyments than to be easily and quickly overthrown by its

burdens.[213] But the world he had called into being had thus far borne

him safely through these perils. He had his own creations always by his

side. They were living, speaking companions. With them only he was

everywhere thoroughly identified. He laughed and wept with them; was as

much elated by their fun as cast down by their grief; and brought to the

consideration of them a belief in their reality as well as in the

influences they were meant to exercise, which in every circumstance

sustained him.

It was during the composition of _Little Dorrit_ that I think he first

felt a certain strain upon his invention which brought with it other

misgivings. In a modified form this was present during the latter

portions of _Bleak House_, of which not a few of the defects might be

traced to the acting excitements amid which it was written; but the

succeeding book made it plainer to him; and it is remarkable that in the

interval between them he resorted for the first and only time in his

life to a practice, which he abandoned at the close of his next and last

story published in the twenty-number form, of putting down written

"Memoranda" of suggestions for characters or incidents by way of

resource to him in his writing. Never before had his teeming fancy

seemed to want such help; the need being less to contribute to its

fullness than to check its overflowing; but it is another proof that he

had been secretly bringing before himself, at least, the possibility

that what had ever been his great support might some day desert him. It

was strange that he should have had such doubt, and he would hardly have

confessed it openly; but apart from that wonderful world of his books,

the range of his thoughts was not always proportioned to the width and

largeness of his nature. His ordinary circle of activity, whether in

likings or thinkings, was full of such surprising animation, that one

was apt to believe it more comprehensive than it really was; and again

and again, when a wide horizon might seem to be ahead of him, he would

pull up suddenly and stop short, as though nothing lay beyond. For the

time, though each had its term and change, he was very much a man of one

idea, each having its turn of absolute predominance; and this was one of

the secrets of the thoroughness with which everything he took in hand

was done. As to the matter of his writings, the actual truth was that

his creative genius never really failed him. Not a few of his inventions

of character and humour, up to the very close of his life, his

Marigolds, Lirripers, Gargerys, Pips, Sapseas and many others, were as

fresh and fine as in his greatest day. He had however lost the free and

fertile method of the earlier time. He could no longer fill a

wide-spread canvas with the same facility and certainty as of old; and

he had frequently a quite unfounded apprehension of some possible

break-down, of which the end might be at any moment beginning. There

came accordingly, from time to time, intervals of unusual impatience and

restlessness, strange to me in connection with his home; his old

pursuits were too often laid aside for other excitements and

occupations; he joined a public political agitation, set on foot by

administrative reformers; he got up various quasi-public private

theatricals, in which he took the leading place; and though it was but

part of his always generous devotion in any friendly duty to organize

the series of performances on his friend Jerrold's death, yet the

eagerness with which he flung himself into them, so arranging them as to

assume an amount of labour in acting and travelling that might have

appalled an experienced comedian, and carrying them on week after week

unceasingly in London and the provinces, expressed but the craving which

still had possession of him to get by some means at some change that

should make existence easier. What was highest in his nature had ceased

for the time to be highest in his life, and he had put himself at the

mercy of lower accidents and conditions. The mere effect of the

strolling wandering ways into which this acting led him could not be

other than unfavourable. But remonstrance as yet was unavailing.

To one very earnestly made in the early autumn of 1857, in which

opportunity was taken to compare his recent rush up Carrick Fell to his

rush into other difficulties, here was the reply. "Too late to say, put

the curb on, and don't rush at hills--the wrong man to say it to. I have

now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite

confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better

to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way

of life has of late, alas! confirmed. I must accept the drawback--since

it is one--with the powers I have; and I must hold upon the tenure

prescribed to me." Something of the same sad feeling, it is right to

say, had been expressed from time to time, in connection also with home

dissatisfactions and misgivings, through the three years preceding; but

I attributed it to other causes, and gave little attention to it. During

his absences abroad for the greater part of 1854, '55, and '56, while

the elder of his children were growing out of childhood, and his books

were less easy to him than in his earlier manhood, evidences presented

themselves in his letters of the old "unhappy loss or want of something"

to which he had given a pervading prominence in _Copperfield_. In the

first of those years he made express allusion to the kind of experience

which had been one of his descriptions in that favourite book, and,

mentioning the drawbacks of his present life, had first identified it

with his own: "the so happy and yet so unhappy existence which seeks its

realities in unrealities, and finds its dangerous comfort in a perpetual

escape from the disappointment of heart around it."

Later in the same year he thus wrote from Boulogne: "I have had dreadful

thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether by myself. If I could have

managed it, I think possibly I might have gone to the Pyreennees (you

know what I mean that word for, so I won't re-write it) for six months!

I have put the idea into the perspective of six months, but have not

abandoned it. I have visions of living for half a year or so, in all

sorts of inaccessible places, and opening a new book therein. A floating

idea of going up above the snow-line in Switzerland, and living in some

astonishing convent, hovers about me. If _Household Words_ could be got

into a good train, in short, I don't know in what strange place, or at

what remote elevation above the level of the sea, I might fall to work

next. _Restlessness_, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving

me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes

feel as if it had been a year--though I had the strangest nervous

miseries before I stopped. If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should

just explode and perish." Again, four months later he wrote: "You will

hear of me in Paris, probably next Sunday, and I _may_ go on to

Bordeaux. Have general ideas of emigrating in the summer to the

mountain-ground between France and Spain. Am altogether in a dishevelled

state of mind--motes of new books in the dirty air, miseries of older

growth threatening to close upon me. Why is it, that as with poor David,

a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I fall into low spirits,

as of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion

I have never made?"

Early in 1856 (20th of January) the notion revisited him of writing a

book in solitude. "Again I am beset by my former notions of a book

whereof the whole story shall be on the top of the Great St. Bernard. As

I accept and reject ideas for _Little Dorrit_, it perpetually comes back

to me. Two or three years hence, perhaps you'll find me living with the

Monks and the Dogs a whole winter--among the blinding snows that fall

about that monastery. I have a serious idea that I shall do it, if I

live." He was at this date in Paris; and during the visit to him of

Macready in the following April, the self-revelations were resumed. The

great actor was then living in retirement at Sherborne, to which he had

gone on quitting the stage; and Dickens gave favourable report of his

enjoyment of the change to his little holiday at Paris. Then, after

recurring to his own old notion of having some slight idea of going to

settle in Australia, only he could not do it until he should have

finished _Little Dorrit_, he went on to say that perhaps Macready, if he

could get into harness again, would not be the worse for some such

troubles as were worrying himself. "It fills me with pity to think of

him away in that lonely Sherborne place. I have always felt of myself

that I must, please God, die in harness, but I have never felt it more

strongly than in looking at, and thinking of, him. However strange it is

to be never at rest, and never satisfied, and ever trying after

something that is never reached, and to be always laden with plot and

plan and care and worry, how clear it is that it must be, and that one

is driven by an irresistible might until the journey is worked out! It

is much better to go on and fret, than to stop and fret. As to

repose--for some men there's no such thing in this life. The foregoing

has the appearance of a small sermon; but it is so often in my head in

these days that it cannot help coming out. The old days--the old days!

Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame of mind back as it used to be

then? Something of it perhaps--but never quite as it used to be. I find

that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a pretty big one."

It would be unjust and uncandid not to admit that these and other

similar passages in the letters that extended over the years while he

lived abroad, had served in some degree as a preparation for what came

after his return to England in the following year. It came with a great

shock nevertheless; because it told plainly what before had never been

avowed, but only hinted at more or less obscurely. The opening reference

is to the reply which had been made to a previous expression of his wish

for some confidences as in the old time. I give only what is strictly

necessary to account for what followed, and even this with deep

reluctance. "Your letter of yesterday was so kind and hearty, and

sounded so gently the many chords we have touched together, that I

cannot leave it unanswered, though I have not much (to any purpose) to

say. My reference to 'confidences' was merely to the relief of saying a

word of what has long been pent up in my mind. Poor Catherine and I are

not made for each other, and there is no help for it. It is not only

that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I make her so too--and

much more so. She is exactly what you know, in the way of being amiable

and complying; but we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there is

between us. God knows she would have been a thousand times happier if

she had married another kind of man, and that her avoidance of this

destiny would have been at least equally good for us both. I am often

cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is, for her own sake, that I

ever fell in her way; and if I were sick or disabled to-morrow, I know

how sorry she would be, and how deeply grieved myself, to think how we

had lost each other. But exactly the same incompatibility would arise,

the moment I was well again; and nothing on earth could make her

understand me, or suit us to each other. Her temperament will not go

with mine. It mattered not so much when we had only ourselves to

consider, but reasons have been growing since which make it all but

hopeless that we should even try to struggle on. What is now befalling

me I have seen steadily coming, ever since the days you remember when

Mary was born; and I know too well that you cannot, and no one can, help

me. Why I have even written I hardly know; but it is a miserable sort of

comfort that you should be clearly aware how matters stand. The mere

mention of the fact, without any complaint or blame of any sort, is a

relief to my present state of spirits--and I can get this only from you,

because I can speak of it to no one else." In the same tone was his

rejoinder to my reply. "To the most part of what you say--Amen! You are

not so tolerant as perhaps you might be of the wayward and unsettled

feeling which is part (I suppose) of the tenure on which one holds an

imaginative life, and which I have, as you ought to know well, often

only kept down by riding over it like a dragoon--but let that go by. I

make no maudlin complaint. I agree with you as to the very possible

incidents, even not less bearable than mine, that might and must often

occur to the married condition when it is entered into very young. I am

always deeply sensible of the wonderful exercise I have of life and its

highest sensations, and have said to myself for years, and have honestly

and truly felt, This is the drawback to such a career, and is not to be

complained of. I say it and feel it now as strongly as ever I did; and,

as I told you in my last, I do not with that view put all this forward.

But the years have not made it easier to bear for either of us; and, for

her sake as well as mine, the wish will force itself upon me that

something might be done. I know too well it is impossible. There is the

fact, and that is all one can say. Nor are you to suppose that I

disguise from myself what might be urged on the other side. I claim no

immunity from blame. There is plenty of fault on my side, I dare say, in

the way of a thousand uncertainties, caprices, and difficulties of

disposition; but only one thing will alter all that, and that is, the

end which alters everything."

It will not seem to most people that there was anything here which in

happier circumstances might not have been susceptible of considerate

adjustment; but all the circumstances were unfavourable, and the

moderate middle course which the admissions in that letter might wisely

have prompted and wholly justified, was unfortunately not taken. Compare

what before was said of his temperament, with what is there said by

himself of its defects, and the explanation will not be difficult. Every

counteracting influence against the one idea which now predominated over

him had been so weakened as to be almost powerless. His elder children

were no longer children; his books had lost for the time the importance

they formerly had over every other consideration in his life; and he had

not in himself the resource that such a man, judging him from the

surface, might be expected to have had. Not his genius only, but his

whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the

real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against

failure in the realities around him. There was for him no "city of the

mind" against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in

and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and

satisfactions of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world

he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought

there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so

finite, has broken many a stout heart.

At the close of that last letter from Gadshill (5th of September) was

this question--"What do you think of my paying for this place, by

reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. I am very

strongly tempted. Think of it." The reasons against it had great force,

and took, in my judgment, greater from the time at which it was again

proposed. The old ground of opposition remained. It was a substitution

of lower for higher aims; a change to commonplace from more elevated

pursuits; and it had so much of the character of a public exhibition for

money as to raise, in the question of respect for his calling as a

writer, a question also of respect for himself as a gentleman. This

opinion, now strongly reiterated, was referred ultimately to two

distinguished ladies of his acquaintance, who decided against it.[214]

Yet not without such momentary misgiving in the direction of "the

stage," as pointed strongly to the danger, which, by those who took the

opposite view, was most of all thought incident to the particular time

of the proposal. It might be a wild exaggeration to fear that he was in

danger of being led to adopt the stage as a calling, but he was

certainly about to place himself within reach of not a few of its

drawbacks and disadvantages. To the full extent he perhaps did not

himself know, how much his eager present wish to become a public reader

was but the outcome of the restless domestic discontents of the last

four years; and that to indulge it, and the unsettled habits inseparable

from it, was to abandon every hope of resettling his disordered home.

There is nothing, in its application to so divine a genius as

Shakespeare, more affecting than his expressed dislike to a profession,

which, in the jealous self-watchfulness of his noble nature, he feared

might hurt his mind.[215] The long subsequent line of actors admirable

in private as in public life, and all the gentle and generous

associations of the histrionic art, have not weakened the testimony of

its greatest name against its less favourable influences; against the

laxity of habits it may encourage; and its public manners, bred of

public means, not always compatible with home felicities and duties.

But, freely open as Dickens was to counsel in regard of his books, he

was, for reasons formerly stated,[216] less accessible to it on points

of personal conduct; and when he had neither self-distrust nor

self-denial to hold him back, he would push persistently forward to

whatever object he had in view.

An occurrence of the time hastened the decision in this case. An

enterprise had been set on foot for establishment of a hospital for sick

children;[217] a large old-fashioned mansion in Great Ormond-street,

with spacious garden, had been fitted up with more than thirty beds;

during the four or five years of its existence, outdoor and indoor

relief had been afforded by it to nearly fifty thousand children, of

whom thirty thousand were under five years of age; but, want of funds

having threatened to arrest the merciful work, it was resolved to try a

public dinner by way of charitable appeal, and for president the happy

choice was made of one who had enchanted everybody with the joys and

sorrows of little children. Dickens threw himself into the service heart

and soul. There was a simple pathos in his address from the chair quite

startling in its effect at such a meeting; and he probably never moved

any audience so much as by the strong personal feeling with which he

referred to the sacrifices made for the Hospital by the very poor

themselves: from whom a subscription of fifty pounds, contributed in

single pennies, had come to the treasurer during almost every year it

had been open. The whole speech, indeed, is the best of the kind spoken

by him; and two little pictures from it, one of the misery he had

witnessed, the other of the remedy he had found, should not be absent

from the picture of his own life.

"Some years ago, being in Scotland, I went with one of the most humane

members of the most humane of professions, on a morning tour among some

of the worst lodged inhabitants of the old town of Edinburgh. In the

closes and wynds of that picturesque place (I am sorry to remind you

what fast friends picturesqueness and typhus often are), we saw more

poverty and sickness in an hour than many people would believe in, in a

life. Our way lay from one to another of the most wretched dwellings,

reeking with horrible odours; shut out from the sky and from the air,

mere pits and dens. In a room in one of these places, where there was an

empty porridge-pot on the cold hearth, a ragged woman and some ragged

children crouching on the bare ground near it,--and, I remember as I

speak, where the very light, refracted from a high damp-stained wall

outside, came in trembling, as if the fever which had shaken everything

else had shaken even it,--there lay, in an old egg-box which the mother

had begged from a shop, a little, feeble, wan, sick child. With his

little wasted face, and his little hot worn hands folded over his

breast, and his little bright attentive eyes, I can see him now, as I

have seen him for several years, looking steadily at us. There he lay in

his small frail box, which was not at all a bad emblem of the small body

from which he was slowly parting--there he lay, quite quiet, quite

patient, saying never a word. He seldom cried, the mother said; he

seldom complained; 'he lay there, seemin' to woonder what it was a'

aboot.' God knows, I thought, as I stood looking at him, he had his

reasons for wondering. . . . Many a poor child, sick and neglected, I have

seen since that time in London; many have I also seen most

affectionately tended, in unwholesome houses and hard circumstances

where recovery was impossible: but at all such times I have seen my

little drooping friend in his egg-box, and he has always addressed his

dumb wonder to me what it meant, and why, in the name of a gracious God,

such things should be! . . . But, ladies and gentlemen," Dickens added,

"such things need NOT be, and will not be, if this company, which is a

drop of the life-blood of the great compassionate public heart, will

only accept the means of rescue and prevention which it is mine to

offer. Within a quarter of a mile of this place where I speak, stands a

once courtly old house, where blooming children were born, and grew up

to be men and women, and married, and brought their own blooming

children back to patter up the old oak staircase which stood but the

other day, and to wonder at the old oak carvings on the chimney-pieces.

In the airy wards into which the old state drawing-rooms and family

bedchambers of that house are now converted, are lodged such small

patients that the attendant nurses look like reclaimed giantesses, and

the kind medical practitioner like an amiable Christian ogre. Grouped

about the little low tables in the centre of the rooms, are such tiny

convalescents that they seem to be playing at having been ill. On the

doll's beds are such diminutive creatures that each poor sufferer is

supplied with its tray of toys: and, looking round, you may see how the

little tired flushed cheek has toppled over half the brute creation on

its way into the ark; or how one little dimpled arm has mowed down (as

I saw myself) the whole tin soldiery of Europe. On the walls of these

rooms are graceful, pleasant, bright, childish pictures. At the beds'

heads, hang representations of the figure which is the universal

embodiment of all mercy and compassion, the figure of Him who was once a

child Himself, and a poor one. But alas! reckoning up the number of beds

that are there, the visitor to this Child's Hospital will find himself

perforce obliged to stop at very little over thirty; and will learn,

with sorrow and surprise, that even that small number, so forlornly, so

miserably diminutive compared with this vast London, cannot possibly be

maintained unless the Hospital be made better known. I limit myself to

saying better known, because I will not believe that in a Christian

community of fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, it can fail,

being better known, to be well and richly-endowed." It was a brave and

true prediction. The Child's Hospital has never since known want. That

night alone added greatly more than three thousand pounds to its funds,

and Dickens put the crown to his good work by reading on its behalf,

shortly afterwards, his _Christmas Carol_; when the sum realized, and

the urgent demand that followed for a repetition of the pleasure given

by the reading, bore down farther opposition to the project of his

engaging publicly in such readings for himself.

The Child's Hospital night was the 9th of February, its Reading was

appointed for the 15th of April, and, nearly a month before, renewed

efforts at remonstrance had been made. "Your view of the reading

matter," Dickens replied, "I still think is unconsciously taken from

your own particular point. You don't seem to me to get out of yourself

in considering it. A word more upon it. You are not to think I have made

up my mind. If I had, why should I not say so? I find very great

difficulty in doing so because of what you urge, because I know the

question to be a balance of doubts, and because I most honestly feel in

my innermost heart, in this matter (as in all others for years and

years), the honour of the calling by which I have always stood most

conscientiously. But do you quite consider that the public exhibition of

oneself takes place equally, whosoever may get the money? And have you

any idea that at this moment--this very time--half the public at least

supposes me to be paid? My dear F, out of the twenty or five-and-twenty

letters a week that I get about Readings, twenty will ask at what price,

or on what terms, it can be done. The only exceptions, in truth, are

when the correspondent is a clergyman, or a banker, or the member for

the place in question. Why, at this very time half Scotland believes

that I am paid for going to Edinburgh!--Here is Greenock writes to me,

and asks could it be done for a hundred pounds? There is Aberdeen

writes, and states the capacity of its hall, and says, though far less

profitable than the very large hall in Edinburgh, is it not enough to

come on for? W. answers such letters continually. (--At this place,

enter Beale. He called here yesterday morning, and then wrote to ask if

I would see him to-day. I replied 'Yes,' so here he came in. With long

preface called to know whether it was possible to arrange anything in

the way of Readings for this autumn--say, six months. Large capital at

command. Could produce partners, in such an enterprise, also with large

capital. Represented such. Returns would be enormous. Would I name a

sum? a minimum sum that I required to have, in any case? Would I look at

it as a Fortune, and in no other point of view? I shook my head, and

said, my tongue was tied on the subject for the present; I might be more

communicative at another time. Exit Beale in confusion and

disappointment.)--You will be happy to hear that at one on Friday, the

Lord Provost, Dean of Guild, Magistrates, and Council of the ancient

city of Edinburgh will wait (in procession) on their brother freeman, at

the Music Hall, to give him hospitable welcome. Their brother freeman

has been cursing their stars and his own, ever since the receipt of

solemn notification to this effect." But very grateful, when it came,

was the enthusiasm of the greeting, and welcome the gift of the silver

wassail-bowl which followed the reading of the _Carol_. "I had no

opportunity of asking any one's advice in Edinburgh," he wrote on his

return. "The crowd was too enormous, and the excitement in it much too

great. But my determination is all but taken. I must do _something_, or

I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half

so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state."

What is pointed at in those last words had been taken as a ground of

objection, and thus he turned it into an argument the other way. During

all these months many sorrowful misunderstandings had continued in his

home, and the relief sought from the misery had but the effect of making

desperate any hope of a better understanding. "It becomes necessary,"

he wrote at the end of March, "with a view to the arrangements that

would have to be begun next month if I decided on the Readings, to

consider and settle the question of the Plunge. Quite dismiss from your

mind any reference whatever to present circumstances at home. Nothing

can put _them_ right, until we are all dead and buried and risen. It is

not, with me, a matter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good humour,

or making the best of it, or making the worst of it, any longer. It is

all despairingly over. Have no lingering hope of, or for, me in this

association. A dismal failure has to be borne, and there an end. Will

you then try to think of this reading project (as I do) apart from all

personal likings and dislikings, and solely with a view to its effect on

that peculiar relation (personally affectionate, and like no other

man's) which subsists between me and the public? I want your most

careful consideration. If you would like, when you have gone over it in

your mind, to discuss the matter with me and Arthur Smith (who would

manage the whole of the business, which I should never touch); we will

make an appointment. But I ought to add that Arthur Smith plainly says,

'Of the immense return in money, I have no doubt. Of the Dash into the

new position, however, I am not so good a judge.' I enclose you a rough

note[218] of my project, as it stands in my mind."

Mr. Arthur Smith, a man possessed of many qualities that justified the

confidence Dickens placed in him, might not have been a good judge of

the "Dash" into the new position, but no man knew better every

disadvantage incident to it, or was less likely to be disconcerted by

any. His exact fitness to manage the scheme successfully, made him an

unsafe counsellor respecting it. Within a week from this time the

reading for the Charity was to be given. "They have let," Dickens wrote

on the 9th of April, "five hundred stalls for the Hospital night; and

as people come every day for more, and it is out of the question to make

more, they cannot be restrained at St. Martin's Hall from taking down

names for other readings." This closed the attempt at further objection.

Exactly a fortnight after the reading for the children's hospital, on

Thursday the 29th April, came the first public reading for his own

benefit; and before the next month was over, this launch into a new life

had been followed by a change in his old home. Thenceforward he and his

wife lived apart. The eldest son went with his mother, Dickens at once

giving effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other

children remained with himself, their intercourse with Mrs. Dickens

being left entirely to themselves. It was thus far an arrangement of a

strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for

regarding it in any other light, if public attention had not been

unexpectedly invited to it by a printed statement in _Household Words_.

Dickens was stung into this by some miserable gossip at which in

ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent;

but he had now publicly to show himself, at stated times, as a public

entertainer, and this, with his name even so aspersed, he found to be

impossible. All he would concede to my strenuous resistance against such

a publication, was an offer to suppress it, if, upon reference to the

opinion of a certain distinguished man (still living), that opinion

should prove to be in agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in with his

own, and the publication went on. It was followed by another statement,

a letter subscribed with his name, which got into print without his

sanction; nothing publicly being known of it (I was not among those who

had read it privately) until it appeared in the _New York Tribune_. It

had been addressed and given to Mr. Arthur Smith as an authority for

correction of false rumours and scandals, and Mr. Smith had given a copy

of it, with like intention, to the _Tribune_ correspondent in London.

Its writer referred to it always afterwards as his "violated letter."

The course taken by the author of this book at the time of these

occurrences, will not be departed from here. Such illustration of grave

defects in Dickens's character as the passage in his life affords, I

have not shrunk from placing side by side with such excuses in regard to

it as he had unquestionable right to claim should be put forward also.

How far what remained of his story took tone or colour from it, and

especially from the altered career on which at the same time he entered,

will thus be sufficiently explained; and with anything else the public

have nothing to do.

FOOTNOTES:

[213] Anything more completely opposed to the Micawber type could hardly

be conceived, and yet there were moments (really and truly only moments)

when the fancy would arise that if the conditions of his life had been

reversed, something of a vagabond existence (using the word in

Goldsmith's meaning) might have supervened. It would have been an

unspeakable misery to him, but it might have come nevertheless. The

question of hereditary transmission had a curious attraction for him,

and considerations connected with it were frequently present to his

mind. Of a youth who had fallen into a father's weaknesses without the

possibility of having himself observed them for imitation, he thus wrote

on one occasion: "It suggests the strangest consideration as to which of

our own failings we are really responsible, and as to which of them we

cannot quite reasonably hold ourselves to be so. What A. evidently

derived from his father cannot in his case be derived from association

and observation, but must be in the very principles of his individuality

as a living creature."

[214] "You may as well know" (20th of March 1858) "that I went on" (I

designate the ladies by A and B respectively) "and propounded the matter

to A, without any preparation. Result.--'I am surprised, and I should

have been surprised if I had seen it in the newspaper without previous

confidence from you. But nothing more. N--no. Certainly not. Nothing

more. I don't see that there is anything derogatory in it, even now when

you ask me that question. I think upon the whole that most people would

be glad you should have the money, rather than other people. It might be

misunderstood here and there, at first; but I think the thing would very

soon express itself, and that your own power of making it express itself

would be very great.' As she wished me to ask B, who was in another

room, I did so. She was for a moment tremendously disconcerted, '_under

the impression that it was to lead to the stage_' (!!). Then, without

knowing anything of A's opinion, closely followed it. That absurd

association had never entered my head or yours; but it might enter some

other heads for all that. Take these two opinions for whatever they are

worth. A (being very much interested and very anxious to help to a right

conclusion) proposed to ask a few people of various degrees who know

what the Readings are, what _they_ think--not compromising me, but

suggesting the project afar-off, as an idea in somebody else's mind. I

thanked her, and said 'Yes,' of course."

[215 Oh! for my sake do you with Fortune chide

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds.

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. . .

Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd. . .

Sonnet cxi.

And in the preceding Sonnet cx.

Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear. . .

[216] Vol. I. pp. 72-3. I repeat from that passage one or two sentences,

though it is hardly fair to give them without the modifications that

accompany them. "A too great confidence in himself, a sense that

everything was possible to the will that would make it so, laid

occasionally upon him self-imposed burdens greater than might be borne

by any one with safety. In that direction there was in him, at such

times, something even hard and aggressive; in his determinations a

something that had almost the tone of fierceness; something in his

nature that made his resolves insuperable, however hasty the opinions on

which they had been formed."

[217] The Board of Health returns, showing that out of every annual

thousand of deaths in London, the immense proportion of four hundred

were those of children under four years old, had established the

necessity for such a scheme. Of course the stress of this mortality fell

on the children of the poor, "dragged up rather than brought up," as

Charles Lamb expressed it, and perishing unhelped by the way.

[218] Here is the rough note: in which the reader will be interested to

observe the limits originally placed to the proposal. The first Readings

were to comprise only the _Carol_, and for others a new story was to be

written. He had not yet the full confidence in his power or versatility

as an actor which subsequent experience gave him. "I propose to announce

in a short and plain advertisement (what is quite true) that I cannot so

much as answer the numerous applications that are made to me to read,

and that compliance with ever so few of them is, in any reason,

impossible. That I have therefore resolved upon a course of readings of

the _Christmas Carol_ both in town and country, and that those in London

will take place at St. Martin's Hall on certain evenings. Those evenings

will be either four or six Thursdays, in May and the beginning of

June. . . . I propose an Autumn Tour, for the country, extending through

August, September, and October. It would comprise the Eastern Counties,

the West, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. I should read from 35 to

40 times in this tour, at the least. At each place where there was a

great success, I would myself announce that I should come back, on the

turn of Christmas, to read a new Christmas story written for that

purpose. This story I should first read a certain number of times in

London. I have the strongest belief that by April in next year, a very

large sum of money indeed would be gained by these means. Ireland would

be still untouched, and I conceive America alone (if I could resolve to

go there) to be worth Ten Thousand Pounds. In all these proceedings, the

Business would be wholly detached from me, and I should never appear in

it. I would have an office, belonging to the Readings and to nothing

else, opened in London; I would have the advertisements emanating from

it, and also signed by some one belonging to it; and they should always

mention me as a third person--just as the Child's Hospital, for

instance, in addressing the public, mentions me."

CHAPTER VIII.

GADSHILL PLACE.

1856-1870.

First Description of Gadshill

Place--Negociations for Purchase--Becomes his

Home in 1859--Gadshill a Century

Ago--Antecedents of Dickens's House--Exterior

and Porch--Gradual Additions--Later

Changes--Swiss Chalet presented by Mr.

Fechter--Dickens's Writing-table--Making

Gadshill his Home--Planting Trees--New

Conservatory--Course of Daily Life--Dickens's

Dogs--A Dog with a Taste--Favourite

Walks--Cooling Churchyard.

"I WAS better pleased with Gadshill Place last Saturday," he wrote to me

from Paris on the 13th of February 1856, "on going down there, even than

I had prepared myself to be. The country, against every disadvantage of

season, is beautiful; and the house is so old fashioned, cheerful, and

comfortable, that it is really pleasant to look at. The good old Rector

now there, has lived in it six and twenty years, so I have not the heart

to turn him out. He is to remain till Lady-Day next year, when I shall

go in, please God; make my alterations; furnish the house; and keep it

for myself that summer." Returning to England through the Kentish

country with Mr. Wilkie Collins in July, other advantages occurred to

him. "A railroad opened from Rochester to Maidstone, which connects

Gadshill at once with the whole sea coast, is certainly an addition to

the place, and an enhancement of its value. Bye and bye we shall have

the London, Chatham and Dover, too; and that will bring it within an

hour of Canterbury and an hour and a half of Dover. I am glad to hear

of your having been in the neighbourhood. There is no healthier (marshes

avoided), and none in my eyes more beautiful. One of these days I shall

show you some places up the Medway with which you will be charmed."

[Illustration: THE PORCH AT GADSHILL.]

The association with his youthful fancy that first made the place

attractive to him has been told; and it was with wonder he had heard one

day, from his friend and fellow worker at _Household Words_, Mr. W. H.

Wills, that not only was the house for sale to which he had so often

looked wistfully, but that the lady chiefly interested as its owner had

been long known and much esteemed by himself. Such curious chances led

Dickens to his saying about the smallness of the world; but the close

relation often found thus existing between things and persons far apart,

suggests not so much the smallness of the world as the possible

importance of the least things done in it, and is better explained by

the grander teaching of Carlyle, that causes and effects, connecting

every man and thing with every other, extend through all space and time.

It was at the close of 1855 the negociation for its purchase began.

"They wouldn't," he wrote (25th of November), "take L1700 for the

Gadshill property, but 'finally' wanted L1800. I have finally offered

L1750. It will require an expenditure of about L300 more before yielding

L100 a year." The usual discovery of course awaited him that this first

estimate would have to be increased threefold. "The changes absolutely

necessary" (9th of February 1856) "will take a thousand pounds; which

sum I am always resolving to squeeze out of this, grind out of that, and

wring out of the other; this, that, and the other generally all three

declining to come up to the scratch for the purpose." "This day,"[219]

he wrote on the 14th of March, "I have paid the purchase money for

Gadshill Place. After drawing the cheque (L1790) I turned round to give

it to Wills, and said, 'Now isn't it an extraordinary thing--look at the

Day--Friday! I have been nearly drawing it half a dozen times when the

lawyers have not been ready, and here it comes round upon a Friday as a

matter of course.'" He had no thought at this time of reserving the

place wholly for himself, or of making it his own residence except at

intervals of summer. He looked upon it as an investment only. "You will

hardly know Gadshill again," he wrote in January 1858, "I am improving

it so much--yet I have no interest in the place." But continued

ownership brought increased liking; he took more and more interest in

his own improvements, which were just the kind of occasional occupation

and resource his life most wanted in its next seven or eight years; and

any farther idea of letting it he soon abandoned altogether. It only

once passed out of his possession thus, for four months in 1859; in the

following year, on the sale of Tavistock House, he transferred to it his

books and pictures and choicer furniture; and thenceforward, varied only

by houses taken from time to time for the London season, he made it his

permanent family abode. Now and then, even during those years, he would

talk of selling it; and on his last return from America, when he had

sent the last of his sons out into the world, he really might have sold

it if he could then have found a house in London suitable to him, and

such as he could purchase. But in this he failed; secretly to his own

satisfaction, as I believe; and thereupon, in that last autumn of his

life, he projected and carried out his most costly addition to Gadshill.

Already of course more money had been spent upon it than his first

intention in buying it would have justified. He had so enlarged the

accommodation, improved the grounds and offices, and added to the land,

that, taking also into account this final outlay, the reserved price

placed upon the whole after his death more than quadrupled what he had

given in 1856 for the house, shrubbery, and twenty years' lease of a

meadow field. It was then purchased, and is now inhabited, by his eldest

son.

Its position has been described, and one of the last-century-histories

of Rochester quaintly mentions the principal interest of the locality.

"Near the twenty-seventh stone from London is Gadshill, supposed to have

been the scene of the robbery mentioned by Shakespeare in his play of

Henry IV; there being reason to think also that it was Sir John

Falstaff, of truly comic memory, who under the name of Oldcastle

inhabited Cooling Castle of which the ruins are in the neighbourhood. A

small distance to the left appears on an eminence the Hermitage the seat

of the late Sir Francis Head, Bart;[220] and close to the road, on a

small ascent, is a neat building lately erected by Mr. Day. In

descending Strood-hill is a fine prospect of Strood, Rochester, and

Chatham, which three towns form a continued street extending above two

miles in length." It had been supposed[221] that "the neat building

lately erected by Mr. Day" was that which the great novelist made

famous; but Gadshill Place had no existence until eight years after the

date of the history. The good rector who so long lived in it told me, in

1859, that it had been built eighty years before by a then well-known

character in those parts, one Stevens, father-in-law of Henslow the

Cambridge professor of botany. Stevens, who could only with much

difficulty manage to write his name, had begun life as ostler at an inn;

had become husband to the landlord's widow; then a brewer; and finally,

as he subscribed himself on one occasion, "mare" of Rochester.

Afterwards the house was inhabited by Mr. Lynn (from some of the members

of whose family Dickens made his purchase); and, before the Rev. Mr.

Hindle became its tenant, it was inhabited by a Macaroni parson named

Townshend, whose horses the Prince Regent bought, throwing into the

bargain a box of much desired cigars. Altogether the place had notable

associations even apart from those which have connected it with the

masterpieces of English humour. "THIS HOUSE, GADSHILL PLACE, stands on

the summit of Shakespeare's Gadshill, ever memorable for its association

with Sir John Falstaff in his noble fancy. _But, my lads, my lads,

to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill! there are

pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to

London with fat purses: I have vizards for you all; you have horses for

yourselves._" Illuminated by Mr. Owen Jones, and placed in a frame on

the first-floor landing, these words were the greeting of the new tenant

to his visitors. It was his first act of ownership.

All his improvements, it should perhaps be remarked, were not

exclusively matters of choice; and to illustrate by his letters what

befell at the beginning of his changes, will show what attended them to

the close. His earliest difficulty was very grave. There was only one

spring of water for gentlefolk and villagers, and from some of the

houses or cottages it was two miles away. "We are still" (6th of July)

"boring for water here, at the rate of two pounds per day for wages. The

men seem to like it very much, and to be perfectly comfortable." Another

of his earliest experiences (5th of September) was thus expressed:

"Hop-picking is going on, and people sleep in the garden, and breathe in

at the keyhole of the house door. I have been amazed, before this year,

by the number of miserable lean wretches, hardly able to crawl, who go

hop-picking. I find it is a superstition that the dust of the newly

picked hop, falling freshly into the throat, is a cure for consumption.

So the poor creatures drag themselves along the roads, and sleep under

wet hedges, and get cured soon and finally." Towards the close of the

same month (24th of September) he wrote: "Here are six men perpetually

going up and down the well (I know that somebody will be killed), in the

course of fitting a pump; which is quite a railway terminus--it is so

iron, and so big. The process is much more like putting Oxford-street

endwise, and laying gas along it, than anything else. By the time it is

finished, the cost of this water will be something absolutely frightful.

But of course it proportionately increases the value of the property,

and that's my only comfort. . . . The horse has gone lame from a sprain,

the big dog has run a tenpenny nail into one of his hind feet, the bolts

have all flown out of the basket-carriage, and the gardener says all the

fruit trees want replacing with new ones." Another note came in three

days. "I have discovered that the seven miles between Maidstone and

Rochester is one of the most beautiful walks in England. Five men have

been looking attentively at the pump for a week, and (I should hope) may

begin to fit it in the course of October." . . .

With even such varying fortune he effected other changes.[222] The

exterior remained to the last much as it was when he used as a boy to

see it first; a plain, old-fashioned, two-story, brick-built country

house, with a bell-turret on the roof, and over the front door a quaint

neat wooden porch with pillars and seats. But, among his additions and

alterations, was a new drawing-room built out from the smaller existing

one, both being thrown together ultimately; two good bedrooms built on

a third floor at the back; and such rearrangement of the ground floor

as, besides its handsome drawing-room, and its dining-room which he hung

with pictures, transformed its bedroom into a study which he lined with

books and sometimes wrote in, and changed its breakfast-parlour into a

retreat fitted up for smokers into which he put a small billiard-table.

These several rooms opened from a hall having in it a series of Hogarth

prints, until, after the artist's death, Stanfield's noble scenes were

placed there, when the Hogarths were moved to his bedroom; and in this

hall, during his last absence in America, a parquet floor was laid down.

Nor did he omit such changes as might increase the comfort of his

servants. He built entirely new offices and stables, and replaced a very

old coach-house by a capital servants' hall, transforming the loft above

into a commodious school-room or study for his boys. He made at the same

time an excellent croquet-ground out of a waste piece of orchard.

Belonging to the house, but unfortunately placed on the other side of

the high road, was a shrubbery, well wooded though in desolate

condition, in which stood two magnificent cedars; and having obtained,

in 1859, the consent of the local authorities for the necessary

underground work, Dickens constructed a passage beneath the road[223]

from his front lawn; and in the shrubbery thus rendered accessible, and

which he then laid out very prettily, he placed afterwards a Swiss

chalet[224] presented to him by Mr. Fechter, which arrived from Paris in

ninety-four pieces fitting like the joints of a puzzle, but which proved

to be somewhat costly in setting on its legs by means of a foundation of

brickwork. Once up, however, it was a great resource in the summer

months, and much of Dickens's work was done there. "I have put five

mirrors in the chalet where I write,"[225] he told an American friend,

"and they reflect and refract, in all kinds of ways, the leaves that are

quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the

sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and

the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches

shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds

come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and

indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most

delicious." He used to make great boast, too, not only of his crowds of

singing birds all day, but of his nightingales at night.

[Illustration: THE CHALET.]

One or two more extracts from letters having reference to these changes

may show something of the interest to him with which Gadshill thus grew

under his hands. A sun-dial on his back-lawn had a bit of historic

interest about it. "One of the balustrades of the destroyed old

Rochester Bridge," he wrote to his daughter in June 1859, "has been

(very nicely) presented to me by the contractors for the works, and has

been duly stone-masoned and set up on the lawn behind the house. I have

ordered a sun-dial for the top of it, and it will be a very good object

indeed." "When you come down here next month," he wrote to me, "we have

an idea that we shall show you rather a neat house. What terrific

adventures have been in action; how many overladen vans were knocked up

at Gravesend, and had to be dragged out of Chalk-turnpike in the dead of

the night by the whole equine power of this establishment; shall be

revealed at another time." That was in the autumn of 1860, when, on the

sale of his London house, its contents were transferred to his country

home. "I shall have an alteration or two to show you at Gadshill that

greatly improve the little property; and when I get the workmen out this

time, I think I'll leave off." October 1861 had now come, when the new

bedrooms were built; but in the same month of 1863 he announced his

transformation of the old coach-house. "I shall have a small new

improvement to show you at Gads, which I think you will accept as the

crowning ingenuity of the inimitable." But of course it was not over

yet. "My small work and planting," he wrote in the spring of 1866,

"really, truly, and positively the last, are nearly at an end in these

regions, and the result will await summer inspection." No, nor even yet.

He afterwards obtained, by exchange of some land with the trustees of

Watts's Charity, the much coveted meadow at the back of the house of

which heretofore he had the lease only; and he was then able to plant a

number of young limes and chestnuts and other quick-growing trees. He

had already planted a row of limes in front. He had no idea, he would

say, of planting only for the benefit of posterity, but would put into

the ground what he might himself enjoy the sight and shade of. He put

them in two or three clumps in the meadow, and in a belt all round.

Still there were "more last words," for the limit was only to be set by

his last year of life. On abandoning his notion, after the American

Readings, of exchanging Gadshill for London, a new staircase was put up

from the hall; a parquet floor laid on the first landing; and a

conservatory built, opening into both drawing-room and dining-room,

"glass and iron," as he described it, "brilliant but expensive, with

foundations as of an ancient Roman work of horrible solidity." This last

addition had long been an object of desire with him; though he would

hardly even now have given himself the indulgence but for the golden

shower from America. He saw it first in a completed state on the Sunday

before his death, when his younger daughter was on a visit to him.

"Well, Katey," he said to her, "now you see POSITIVELY the last

improvement at Gadshill;" and every one laughed at the joke against

himself. The success of the new conservatory was unquestionable. It was

the remark of all around him that he was certainly, from this last of

his improvements, drawing more enjoyment than from any of its

predecessors, when the scene for ever closed.

[Illustration: HOUSE AND CONSERVATORY: FROM THE MEADOW.]

Of the course of his daily life in the country there is not much to be

said. Perhaps there was never a man who changed places so much and

habits so little. He was always methodical and regular; and passed his

life from day to day, divided for the most part between working and

walking, the same wherever he was. The only exception was when special

or infrequent visitors were with him. When such friends as Longfellow

and his daughters, or Charles Eliot Norton and his wife, came, or when

Mr. Fields brought his wife and Professor Lowell's daughter, or when he

received other Americans to whom he owed special courtesy, he would

compress into infinitely few days an enormous amount of sight seeing and

country enjoyment, castles, cathedrals, and fortified lines, lunches and

picnics among cherry orchards and hop-gardens, excursions to Canterbury

or Maidstone and their beautiful neighbourhoods, Druid-stone and Blue

Bell Hill. "All the neighbouring country that could be shown in so short

a time," he wrote of the Longfellow visit, "they saw. I turned out a

couple of postilions in the old red jackets of the old red royal Dover

road for our ride, and it was like a holiday ride in England fifty years

ago." For Lord Lytton he did the same, for the Emerson Tennents, for Mr.

Layard and Mr. Helps, for Lady Molesworth and the Higginses (Jacob

Omnium), and such other less frequent visitors.

Excepting on such particular occasions however, and not always even

then, his mornings were reserved wholly to himself; and he would

generally preface his morning work (such was his love of order in

everything around him) by seeing that all was in its place in the

several rooms, visiting also the dogs, stables, and kitchen garden, and

closing, unless the weather was very bad indeed, with a turn or two

round the meadow before settling to his desk. His dogs were a great

enjoyment to him;[226] and, with his high road traversed as frequently

as any in England by tramps and wayfarers of a singularly undesirable

description, they were also a necessity. There were always two, of the

mastiff kind, but latterly the number increased. His own favourite was

Turk, a noble animal, full of affection and intelligence, whose death by

a railway-accident, shortly after the Staplehurst catastrophe, caused

him great grief. Turk's sole companion up to that date was Linda, puppy

of a great St. Bernard brought over by Mr. Albert Smith, and grown into

a superbly beautiful creature. After Turk there was an interval of an

Irish dog, Sultan, given by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald; a cross between a St.

Bernard and a bloodhound, built and coloured like a lioness and of

splendid proportions, but of such indomitably aggressive propensities,

that, after breaking his kennel-chain and nearly devouring a luckless

little sister of one of the servants, he had to be killed. Dickens

always protested that Sultan was a Fenian, for that no dog, not a

secretly sworn member of that body, would ever have made such a point,

muzzled as he was, of rushing at and bearing down with fury anything in

scarlet with the remotest resemblance to a British uniform. Sultan's

successor was Don, presented by Mr. Frederic Lehmann, a grand

Newfoundland brought over very young, who with Linda became parent to a

couple of Newfoundlands, that were still gambolling about their master,

huge, though hardly out of puppydom, when they lost him. He had given to

one of them the name of Bumble, from having observed, as he described

it, "a peculiarly pompous and overbearing manner he had of appearing to

mount guard over the yard when he was an absolute infant." Bumble was

often in scrapes. Describing to Mr. Fields a drought in the summer of

1868, when their poor supply of ponds and surface wells had become

waterless, he wrote: "I do not let the great dogs swim in the canal,

because the people have to drink of it. But when they get into the

Medway, it is hard to get them out again. The other day Bumble (the son,

Newfoundland dog) got into difficulties among some floating timber, and

became frightened. Don (the father) was standing by me, shaking off the

wet and looking on carelessly, when all of a sudden he perceived

something amiss, and went in with a bound and brought Bumble out by the

ear. The scientific way in which he towed him along was charming." The

description of his own reception, on his reappearance after America, by

Bumble and his brother, by the big and beautiful Linda, and by his

daughter Mary's handsome little Pomeranian, may be added from his

letters to the same correspondent. "The two Newfoundland dogs coming to

meet me, with the usual carriage and the usual driver, and beholding me

coming in my usual dress out at the usual door, it struck me that their

recollection of my having been absent for any unusual time was at once

cancelled. They behaved (they are both young dogs) exactly in their

usual manner; coming behind the basket phaeton as we trotted along, and

lifting their heads to have their ears pulled, a special attention which

they receive from no one else. But when I drove into the stable-yard,

Linda (the St. Bernard) was greatly excited; weeping profusely, and

throwing herself on her back that she might caress my foot with her

great fore-paws. Mary's little dog too, Mrs. Bouncer, barked in the

greatest agitation on being called down and asked by Mary, 'Who is

this?' and tore round and round me like the dog in the Faust outlines."

The father and mother and their two sons, four formidable-looking

companions, were with him generally in his later walks.

Round Cobham, skirting the park and village and passing the Leather

Bottle famous in the page of _Pickwick_, was a favourite walk with

Dickens. By Rochester and the Medway, to the Chatham Lines, was another.

He would turn out of Rochester High-street through The Vines (where some

old buildings, from one of which called Restoration-house he took

Satis-house for _Great Expectations_, had a curious attraction for him),

would pass round by Fort Pitt, and coming back by Frindsbury would bring

himself by some cross fields again into the high road. Or, taking the

other side, he would walk through the marshes to Gravesend, return by

Chalk church, and stop always to have greeting with a comical old monk

who for some incomprehensible reason sits carved in stone, cross-legged

with a jovial pot, over the porch of that sacred edifice. To another

drearier churchyard, itself forming part of the marshes beyond the

Medway, he often took friends to show them the dozen small tombstones of

various sizes adapted to the respective ages of a dozen small children

of one family which he made part of his story of _Great Expectations_,

though, with the reserves always necessary in copying nature not to

overstep her modesty by copying too closely, he makes the number that

appalled little Pip not more than half the reality. About the whole of

this Cooling churchyard, indeed, and the neighbouring castle ruins,

there was a weird strangeness that made it one of his attractive walks

in the late year or winter, when from Higham he could get to it across

country over the stubble fields; and, for a shorter summer walk, he was

not less fond of going round the village of Shorne, and sitting on a hot

afternoon in its pretty shaded churchyard. But on the whole, though

Maidstone had also much that attracted him to its neighbourhood, the

Cobham neighbourhood was certainly that which he had greatest pleasure

in; and he would have taken oftener than he did the walk through Cobham

park and woods, which was the last he enjoyed before life suddenly

closed upon him, but that here he did not like his dogs to follow.

[Illustration: THE STUDY AT GADSHILL.]

Don now has his home there with Lord Darnley, and Linda lies under one

of the cedars at Gadshill.

FOOTNOTES:

[219] On New Year's Day he had written from Paris. "When in London

Coutts's advised me not to sell out the money for Gadshill Place (the

title of my estate sir, my place down in Kent) until the conveyance was

settled and ready."

[220] Two houses now stand on what was Sir Francis Head's estate, the

Great and Little Hermitage, occupied respectively by Mr. Malleson and

Mr. Hulkes, who became intimate with Dickens. Perry of the _Morning

Chronicle_, whose town house was in that court out of Tavistock-square

of which Tavistock House formed part, had occupied the Great Hermitage

previously.

[221] By the obliging correspondent who sent me this _History of

Rochester_, 8vo. (Rochester, 1772), p. 302.

[222] "As to the carpenters," he wrote to his daughter in September

1860, "they are absolutely maddening. They are always at work yet never

seem to do anything, L. was down on Friday, and said (with his eye fixed

on Maidstone and rubbing his hands to conciliate his moody employer)

that 'he didn't think there would be very much left to do after Saturday

the 29th.' I didn't throw him out of window."

[223] A passage in his paper on Tramps embodies very amusingly

experience recorded in his letters of this brick-work tunnel and the

sinking of the well; but I can only borrow one sentence. "The current of

my uncommercial pursuits caused me only last summer to want a little

body of workmen for a certain spell of work in a pleasant part of the

country; and I was at one time honoured with the attendance of as many

as seven-and-twenty, who were looking at six." Bits of wonderful

observation are in that paper.

[224] This was at the beginning of 1865. "The chalet," he wrote to me on

the 7th of January, "is going on excellently, though the ornamental part

is more slowly put together than the substantial. It will really be a

very pretty thing; and in the summer (supposing it not to be blown away

in the spring), the upper room will make a charming study. It is much

higher than we supposed."

[225] As surely, however, as he did any work there, so surely his

indispensable little accompaniments of work (ii. 226) were carried along

with him; and of these I will quote what was written shortly after his

death by his son-in-law, Mr. Charles Collins, to illustrate a very

touching sketch by Mr. Fildes of his writing-desk and vacant chair.

"Ranged in front of, and round about him, were always a variety of

objects for his eye to rest on in the intervals of actual writing, and

any one of which he would have instantly missed had it been removed.

There was a French bronze group representing a duel with swords, fought

by a couple of very fat toads, one of them (characterised by that

particular buoyancy which belongs to corpulence) in the act of making a

prodigious lunge forward, which the other receives in the very middle of

his digestive apparatus, and under the influence of which it seems

likely that he will satisfy the wounded honour of his opponent by

promptly expiring. There was another bronze figure which always stood

near the toads, also of French manufacture, and also full of comic

suggestion. It was a statuette of a dog-fancier, such a one as you used

to see on the bridges or quays of Paris, with a profusion of little dogs

stuck under his arms and into his pockets, and everywhere where little

dogs could possibly be insinuated, all for sale, and all, as even a

casual glance at the vendor's exterior would convince the most

unsuspicious person, with some screw loose in their physical

constitutions or moral natures, to be discovered immediately after

purchase. There was the long gilt leaf with the rabbit sitting erect

upon its haunches, the huge paper-knife often held in his hand during

his public readings, and the little fresh green cup ornamented with the

leaves and blossoms of the cowslip, in which a few fresh flowers were

always placed every morning--for Dickens invariably worked with flowers

on his writing-table. There was also the register of the day of the week

and of the month, which stood always before him; and when the room in

the chalet in which he wrote his last paragraph was opened, some time

after his death, the first thing to be noticed by those who entered was

this register, set at 'Wednesday, June 8'--the day of his seizure." It

remains to this day as it was found.

[226] Dickens's interest in dogs (as in the habits and ways of all

animals) was inexhaustible, and he welcomed with delight any new trait.

The subjoined, told him by a lady friend, was a great acquisition. "I

must close" (14th of May 1867) "with an odd story of a Newfoundland dog.

An immense black good-humoured Newfoundland dog. He came from Oxford and

had lived all his life at a brewery. Instructions were given with him

that if he were let out every morning alone, he would immediately find

out the river; regularly take a swim; and gravely come home again. This

he did with the greatest punctuality, but after a little while was

observed to smell of beer. She was so sure that he smelt of beer that

she resolved to watch him. Accordingly, he was seen to come back from

his swim, round the usual corner, and to go up a flight of steps into a

beer-shop. Being instantly followed, the beer-shop-keeper is seen to

take down a pot (pewter pot), and is heard to say: 'Well, old chap! Come

for your beer as usual, have you?' Upon which he draws a pint and puts

it down, and the dog drinks it. Being required to explain how this comes

to pass, the man says, 'Yes ma'am. I know he's your dog ma'am, but I

didn't when he first come. He looked in ma'am--as a Brickmaker

might--and then he come in--as a Brickmaker might--and he wagged his

tail at the pots, and he giv' a sniff round, and conveyed to me as he

was used to beer. So I draw'd him a drop, and he drunk it up. Next

morning he come agen by the clock and I drawed him a pint, and ever

since he has took his pint reglar.'"

CHAPTER IX.

FIRST PAID READINGS.

1858-1859.

First Series--Exeter Audience--Impressions of

Dublin--Irish Car-driver--Young Ireland and Old

England--Reception in Belfast--At Harrogate--At

York--At Manchester--Continued Successes--Scene

at Edinburgh--At Dundee--At Aberdeen and

Perth--At Glasgow--Glasgow Audience--Subjects

of First Readings--First Library Edition of his

Books--At Coventry--Frith's Portrait of

Dickens.

DICKENS gave his paid public Readings successively, with not long

intervals, at four several dates; in 1858-9, in 1861-63, in 1866-67, and

in 1868-70; the first series under Mr. Arthur Smith's management, the

second under Mr. Headland's, and the third and fourth, in America as

well as before and after it, under that of Mr. George Dolby, who,

excepting in America, acted for the Messrs. Chappell. The references in

the present chapter are to the first series only.

It began with sixteen nights at St. Martin's Hall, the first on the 29th

of April, the last on the 22nd of July, 1858; and there was afterwards a

provincial tour of 87 readings, beginning at Clifton on the 2nd of

August, ending at Brighton on the 13th of November, and taking in

Ireland and Scotland as well as the principal English cities: to which

were added, in London, three Christmas readings, three in January, with

two in the following month; and, in the provinces in the month of

October, fourteen, beginning at Ipswich and Norwich, taking in Cambridge

and Oxford, and closing with Birmingham and Cheltenham. The series had

comprised altogether 125 Readings when it ended on the 27th of October,

1859; and without the touches of character and interest afforded by his

letters written while thus employed, the picture of the man would not be

complete.

Here was one day's work at the opening which will show something of the

fatigue they involved even at their outset. "On Friday we came from

Shrewsbury to Chester; saw all right for the evening; and then went to

Liverpool. Came back from Liverpool and read at Chester. Left Chester at

11 at night, after the reading, and went to London. Got to Tavistock

House at 5 A.M. on Saturday, left it at a quarter past 10 that morning,

and came down here" (Gadshill: 15th of August 1858).

The "greatest personal affection and respect" had greeted him

everywhere. Nothing could have been "more strongly marked or warmly

expressed;" and the readings had "gone" quite wonderfully. What in this

respect had most impressed him, at the outset of his adventures, was

Exeter. "I think they were the finest audience I ever read to; I don't

think I ever read in some respects so well; and I never beheld anything

like the personal affection which they poured out upon me at the end. I

shall always look back upon it with pleasure." He often lost his voice

in these early days, having still to acquire the art of husbanding it;

and in the trial to recover it would again waste its power. "I think I

sang half the Irish melodies to myself as I walked about, to test it."

An audience of two thousand three hundred people (the largest he had

had) greeted him at Liverpool on his way to Dublin, and, besides the

tickets sold, more than two hundred pounds in money was taken at the

doors. This taxed his business staff a little. "They turned away

hundreds, sold all the books, rolled on the ground of my room knee-deep

in checks, and made a perfect pantomime of the whole thing." (20th of

August.) He had to repeat the reading thrice.[227]

It was the first time he had seen Ireland, and Dublin greatly surprised

him by appearing to be so much larger and more populous than he had

supposed. He found it to have altogether an unexpectedly thriving look,

being pretty nigh as big, he first thought, as Paris; of which some

places in it, such as the quays on the river, reminded him. Half the

first day he was there, he took to explore it; walking till tired, and

then taking a car. "Power, dressed for the character of Teddy the Tiler,

drove me: in a suit of patches, and with his hat unbrushed for twenty

years. Wonderfully pleasant, light, intelligent, and careless."[228] The

number of common people he saw in his drive, "also riding about in cars

as hard as they could split," brought to his recollection a more distant

scene, and but for the dresses he could have thought himself on the

Toledo at Naples.

In respect of the number of his audience, and their reception of him,

Dublin was one of his marked successes. He came to have some doubt of

their capacity of receiving the pathetic, but of their quickness as to

the humorous there could be no question, any more than of their

heartiness. He got on wonderfully well with the Dublin people.[229] The

Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point

of view. "He was waiting for me at the hotel door last night. 'Whaat

sart of a hoose sur?' he asked me. 'Capital.' 'The Lard be praised fur

the 'onor 'o Dooblin!'" Within the hotel, on getting up next morning, he

had a dialogue with a smaller resident, landlord's son he supposed, a

little boy of the ripe age of six, which he presented, in his letter to

his sister-in-law, as a colloquy between Old England and Young Ireland

inadequately reported for want of the "imitation" it required for its

full effect. "I am sitting on the sofa, writing, and find him sitting

beside me.

"_Old England._ Halloa old chap.

"_Young Ireland._ Hal--loo!

"_Old England_ (in his delightful way). What a nice old fellow you are.

I am very fond of little boys.

"_Young Ireland._ Air yes? Ye'r right.

"_Old England._ What do you learn, old fellow?

"_Young Ireland_ (very intent on Old England, and always childish except

in his brogue). I lairn wureds of three sillibils--and wureds of two

sillibils--and wureds of one sillibil.

"_Old England_ (cheerfully). Get out, you humbug! You learn only words

of one syllable.

"_Young Ireland_ (laughs heartily). You may say that it is mostly wureds

of one sillibil.

"_Old England._ Can you write?

"_Young Ireland,_ Not yet. Things comes by deegrays.

"_Old England._ Can you cipher?

"_Young Ireland_ (very quickly). Whaat's that?

"_Old England._ Can you make figures?

"_Young Ireland._ I can make a nought, which is not asy, being roond.

"_Old England._ I say, old boy! Wasn't it you I saw on Sunday morning in

the Hall, in a soldier's cap? You know!--In a soldier's cap?

"_Young Ireland_ (cogitating deeply). Was it a very good cap?

"_Old England._ Yes.

"_Young Ireland._ Did it fit ankommon?

"_Old England._ Yes.

"_Young Ireland._ Dat was me!"

The last night in Dublin was an extraordinary scene. "You can hardly

imagine it. All the way from the hotel to the Rotunda (a mile), I had to

contend against the stream of people who were turned away. When I got

there, they had broken the glass in the pay-boxes, and were offering L5

freely for a stall. Half of my platform had to be taken down, and people

heaped in among the ruins. You never saw such a scene."[230] But he

would not return after his other Irish engagements. "I have positively

said No. The work is too hard. It is not like doing it in one easy room,

and always the same room. With a different place every night, and a

different audience with its own peculiarity every night, it is a

tremendous strain. . . . I seem to be always either in a railway carriage

or reading, or going to bed; and I get so knocked up whenever I have a

minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course."

Belfast he liked quite as much as Dublin in another way. "A fine place

with a rough people; everything looking prosperous; the railway ride

from Dublin quite amazing in the order, neatness, and cleanness of all

you see; every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day

before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright

flowers." The success, too, was quite as great. "Enormous audiences. We

turn away half the town.[231] I think them a better audience on the

whole than Dublin; and the personal affection is something overwhelming.

I wish you and the dear girls" (he is writing to his sister-in-law)

"could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask

me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night, to 'do me

the honor to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not

ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light

you've been in mee house sir (and God love your face!) this many a

year!'"[232] He had never seen men "go in to cry so undisguisedly," as

they did at the Belfast _Dombey_ reading; and as to the _Boots_ and

_Mrs. Gamp_ "it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me

laugh so, that sometimes I _could not_ compose my face to go on." His

greatest trial in this way however was a little later at

Harrogate--"the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading

the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading, and tables

d'hote"--where he noticed, at the same reading, embodiments respectively

of the tears and laughter to which he has moved his fellow creatures so

largely. "There was one gentleman at the _Little Dombey_ yesterday

morning" (he is still writing to his sister-in-law) "who exhibited--or

rather concealed--the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal

without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it

down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion.

He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in

old time. . . . There was a remarkably good fellow too, of thirty or so,

who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he _could not_

compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with

his handkerchief; and whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to

laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a

kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll,

and made me laugh heartily."

At Harrogate he read twice on one day (a Saturday), and had to engage a

special engine to take him back that night to York, which, having

reached at one o'clock in the morning, he had to leave, because of

Sunday restrictions on travel, the same morning at half-past four, to

enable him to fulfil a Monday's reading at Scarborough. Such fatigues

became matters of course; but their effect, not noted at the time, was

grave. "At York I had a most magnificent audience, and might have

filled the place for a week. . . . I think the audience possessed of a

better knowledge of character than any I have seen. But I recollect

Doctor Belcombe to have told me long ago that they first found out

Charles Mathews's father, and to the last understood him (he used to

say) better than any other people. . . . The let is enormous for next

Saturday at Manchester, stalls alone four hundred! I shall soon be able

to send you the list of places to the 15th of November, the end. I shall

be, O most heartily glad, when that time comes! But I must say that the

intelligence and warmth of the audiences are an immense sustainment, and

one that always sets me up. Sometimes before I go down to read

(especially when it is in the day), I am so oppressed by having to do it

that I feel perfectly unequal to the task. But the people lift me out of

this directly; and I find that I have quite forgotten everything but

them and the book, in a quarter of an hour."

The reception that awaited him at Manchester had very special warmth in

it, occasioned by an adverse tone taken in the comment of one of the

Manchester daily papers on the letter which by a breach of confidence

had been then recently printed. "My violated letter" Dickens always

called it. "When I came to Manchester on Saturday I found seven hundred

stalls taken! When I went into the room at night 2500 people had paid,

and more were being turned away from every door. The welcome they gave

me was astounding in its affectionate recognition of the late trouble,

and fairly for once unmanned me. I never saw such a sight or heard such

a sound. When they had thoroughly done it, they settled down to enjoy

themselves; and certainly did enjoy themselves most heartily to the last

minute." Nor, for the rest of his English tour, in any of the towns that

remained, had he reason to complain of any want of hearty greeting. At

Sheffield great crowds came in excess of the places. At Leeds the hall

overflowed in half an hour. At Hull the vast concourse had to be

addressed by Mr. Smith on the gallery stairs, and additional Readings

had to be given, day and night, "for the people out of town and for the

people in town."

The net profit to himself, thus far, had been upwards of three hundred

pounds a week;[233] but this was nothing to the success in Scotland,

where his profit in a week, with all expenses paid, was five hundred

pounds. The pleasure was enhanced, too, by the presence of his two

daughters, who had joined him over the Border. At first the look of

Edinburgh was not promising. "We began with, for us, a poor room. . . .

But the effect of that reading (it was the _Chimes_) was immense; and on

the next night, for _Little Dombey_, we had a full room. It is our

greatest triumph everywhere. Next night (_Poor Traveller_, _Boots_, and

_Gamp_) we turned away hundreds upon hundreds of people; and last night,

for the _Carol_, in spite of advertisements in the morning that the

tickets were gone, the people had to be got in through such a crowd as

rendered it a work of the utmost difficulty to keep an alley into the

room. They were seated about me on the platform, put into the doorway of

the waiting-room, squeezed into every conceivable place, and a multitude

turned away once more. I think I am better pleased with what was done in

Edinburgh than with what has been done anywhere, almost. It was so

completely taken by storm, and carried in spite of itself. Mary and

Katey have been infinitely pleased and interested with Edinburgh. We are

just going to sit down to dinner and therefore I cut my missive short.

Travelling, dinner, reading, and everything else, come crowding together

into this strange life."

Then came Dundee: "An odd place," he wrote, "like Wapping with high

rugged hills behind it. We had the strangest journey here--bits of sea,

and bits of railroad, alternately; which carried my mind back to

travelling in America. The room is an immense new one, belonging to Lord

Kinnaird, and Lord Panmure, and some others of that sort. It looks

something between the Crystal-palace and Westminster-hall (I can't

imagine who wants it in this place), and has never been tried yet for

speaking in. Quite disinterestedly of course, I hope it will succeed."

The people he thought, in respect of taste and intelligence, below any

other of his Scotch audiences; but they woke up surprisingly, and the

rest of his Caledonian tour was a succession of triumphs. "At Aberdeen

we were crammed to the street, twice in one day. At Perth (where I

thought when I arrived, there literally could be nobody to come) the

gentlefolk came posting in from thirty miles round, and the whole town

came besides, and filled an immense hall. They were as full of

perception, fire, and enthusiasm as any people I have seen. At Glasgow,

where I read three evenings and one morning, we took the prodigiously

large sum of six hundred pounds! And this at the Manchester prices,

which are lower than St. Martin's Hall. As to the effect--I wish you

could have seen them after Lilian died in the _Chimes_, or when Scrooge

woke in the _Carol_ and talked to the boy outside the window. And at the

end of _Dombey_ yesterday afternoon, in the cold light of day, they all

got up, after a short pause, gentle and simple, and thundered and waved

their hats with such astonishing heartiness and fondness that, for the

first time in all my public career, they took me completely off my legs,

and I saw the whole eighteen hundred of them reel to one side as if a

shock from without had shaken the hall. Notwithstanding which, I must

confess to you, I am very anxious to get to the end of my Readings, and

to be at home again, and able to sit down and think in my own study.

There has been only one thing quite without alloy. The dear girls have

enjoyed themselves immensely, and their trip with me has been a great

success."

The subjects of his readings during this first circuit were the _Carol_,

the _Chimes_, the _Trial in Pickwick_, the chapters containing _Paul

Dombey_, _Boots at the Holly Tree Inn_, the _Poor Traveller_ (Captain

Doubledick), and _Mrs. Gamp_: to which he continued to restrict himself

through the supplementary nights that closed in the autumn of 1859.[234]

Of these the most successful in their uniform effect upon his audiences

were undoubtedly the _Carol_, the _Pickwick_ scene, _Mrs. Gamp_, and the

_Dombey_--the quickness, variety, and completeness of his assumption of

character, having greatest scope in these. Here, I think, more than in

the pathos or graver level passages, his strength lay; but this is

entitled to no weight other than as an individual opinion, and his

audiences gave him many reasons for thinking differently.[235]

The incidents of the period covered by this chapter that had any general

interest in them, claim to be mentioned briefly. At the close of 1857 he

presided at the fourth anniversary of the Warehousemen and Clerks'

Schools, describing and discriminating, with keenest wit and kindliest

fun, the sort of schools he liked and he disliked. To the spring and

summer of 1858 belongs the first collection of his writings into a

succinct library form, each of the larger novels occupying two volumes.

In March he paid warm public tribute to Thackeray (who had been induced

to take the chair at the General Theatrical Fund) as one for whose

genius he entertained the warmest admiration, who did honour to

literature, and in whom literature was honoured. In May he presided at

the Artists' Benevolent Fund dinner, and made striking appeal for that

excellent charity. In July he took earnest part in the opening efforts

on behalf of the Royal Dramatic College, which he supplemented later by

a speech for the establishment of schools for actors' children; in which

he took occasion to declare his belief that there were no institutions

in England so socially liberal as its public schools, and that there was

nowhere in the country so complete an absence of servility to mere rank,

position, or riches. "A boy, there, is always what his abilities or his

personal qualities make him. We may differ about the curriculum and

other matters, but of the frank, free, manly, independent spirit

preserved in our public schools, I apprehend there can be no kind of

question." In December[236] he was entertained at a public dinner in

Coventry on the occasion of receiving, by way of thanks for help

rendered to their Institute, a gold repeater of special construction by

the watchmakers of the town; as to which he kept faithfully his pledge

to the givers, that it should be thenceforward the inseparable companion

of his workings and wanderings, and reckon off the future labours of his

days until he should have done with the measurement of time. Within a

day from this celebration, he presided at the Institutional Association

of Lancashire and Cheshire in Manchester Free Trade Hall; gave prizes to

candidates from a hundred and fourteen local mechanics' institutes

affiliated to the Association; described in his most attractive language

the gallant toiling fellows by whom the prizes had been won; and ended

with the monition he never failed to couple with his eulogies of

Knowledge, that it should follow the teaching of the Saviour, and not

satisfy the understanding merely. "Knowledge has a very limited power

when it informs the head only; but when it informs the heart as well,

it has a power over life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates

the universe."

This too was the year when Mr. Frith completed Dickens's portrait, and

it appeared upon the walls of the Academy in the following spring. "I

wish," said Edwin Landseer as he stood before it, "he looked less eager

and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should

like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then." There is something in

the objection, and he also would be envious at times of what he too

surely knew could never be his lot. On the other hand who would

willingly have lost the fruits of an activity on the whole so healthy

and beneficent?

FOOTNOTES:

[227] This was the _Carol_ and _Pickwick_. "We are reduced sometimes,"

he adds, "to a ludicrous state of distress by the quantity of silver we

have to carry about. Arthur Smith is always accompanied by an immense

black leather-bag full." Mr. Smith had an illness a couple of days

later, and Dickens whimsically describes his rapid recovery on

discovering the state of their balances. "He is now sitting opposite to

me on a bag of L40 of silver. It must be dreadfully hard."

[228] A letter to his eldest daughter (23rd of Aug.) makes humorous

addition. "The man who drove our jaunting car yesterday hadn't a piece

in his coat as big as a penny roll, and had had his hat on (apparently

without brushing it) ever since he was grown-up. But he was remarkably

intelligent and agreeable, with something to say about everything. For

instance, when I asked him what a certain building was, he didn't say

'Courts of Law' and nothing else, but 'Av yer plase Sir, its the foor

Coorts o' looyers, where Misther O'Connell stood his trial wunst, as

ye'll remimbir sir, afore I till ye ov it.' When we got into the

Phoenix Park, he looked round him as if it were his own, and said

'THAT'S a Park sir, av ye plase!' I complimented it, and he said

'Gintlemen tills me as they iv bin, sir, over Europe and never see a

Park aqualling ov it. Yander's the Vice-regal Lodge, sir; in thim two

corners lives the two Sicretaries, wishing I was thim sir. There's air

here sir, av yer plase! There's scenery here sir! There's mountains thim

sir! Yer coonsider it a Park sir? It is that sir!'"

[229] The Irish girls outdid the American (i. 385) in one particular. He

wrote to his sister-in-law: "Every night, by the bye, since I have been

in Ireland, the ladies have beguiled John out of the bouquet from my

coat; and yesterday morning, as I had showered the leaves from my

geranium in reading _Little Dombey_, they mounted the platform after I

was gone, and picked them all up as a keepsake." A few days earlier he

had written to the same correspondent: "The papers are full of remarks

upon my white tie, and describe it as being of enormous size, which is a

wonderful delusion; because, as you very well know, it is a small tie.

Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my

appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter

at Cork, wherein he says that although only 46, I look like an old man."

[230] "They had offered frantic prices for stalls. Eleven bank-notes

were thrust into a paybox at one time for eleven stalls. Our men were

flattened against walls and squeezed against beams. Ladies stood all

night with their chins against my platform. Other ladies sat all night

upon my steps. We turned away people enough to make immense houses for a

week." Letter to his eldest daughter.

[231] "Shillings get into stalls, and half-crowns get into shillings,

and stalls get nowhere, and there is immense confusion." Letter to his

daughter.

[232] "I was brought very near to what I sometimes dream may be my

Fame," he says in a letter of later date to myself from York, "when a

lady whose face I had never seen stopped me yesterday in the street, and

said to me, _Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled

my house with many friends_." October 1858.

[233] "That is no doubt immense, our expenses being necessarily large,

and the travelling party being always five." Another source of profit

was the sale of the copies of the several Readings prepared by himself.

"Our people alone sell eight, ten, and twelve dozen a night." A later

letter says: "The men with the reading books were sold out, for about

the twentieth time, at Manchester. Eleven dozen of the _Poor Traveller_,

_Boots_, and _Gamp_ being sold in about ten minutes, they had no more

left; and Manchester became green with the little tracts, in every

bookshop, outside every omnibus, and passing along every street. The

sale of them, apart from us, must be very great." "Did I tell you," he

writes in another letter, "that the agents for our tickets who are also

booksellers, say very generally that the readings decidedly increase the

sale of the books they are taken from? We were first told of this by a

Mr. Parke, a wealthy old gentleman in a very large way at Wolverhampton,

who did all the business for love, and would not take a farthing. Since

then, we have constantly come upon it; and M'Glashin and Gill at Dublin

were very strong about it indeed."

[234] The last of them were given immediately after his completion of

the _Tale of Two Cities_: "I am a little tired; but as little, I

suspect, as any man could be with the work of the last four days, and

perhaps the change of work was better than subsiding into rest and rust.

The Norwich people were a noble audience. There, and at Ipswich and

Bury, we had the demonstrativeness of the great working-towns, and a

much finer perception."--14th of October 1859.

[235] Two pleasing little volumes may here be named as devoted to

special descriptions of the several Readings; by his friend Mr. Charles

Kent in England (_Charles Dickens as a Reader_), and by Miss Kate Field

in America (_Pen Photographs_).

[236] Let me subjoin his own note of a less important incident of that

month which will show his quick and sure eye for any bit of acting out

of the common. The lady has since justified its closing prediction.

Describing an early dinner with Chauncy Townshend, he adds (17th of

December 1858): "I escaped at half-past seven, and went to the Strand

Theatre: having taken a stall beforehand, for it is always crammed. I

really wish you would go, between this and next Thursday, to see the

_Maid and the Magpie_ burlesque there. There is the strangest thing in

it that ever I have seen on the stage. The boy, Pippo, by Miss Wilton.

While it is astonishingly impudent (must be, or it couldn't be done at

all), it is so stupendously like a boy, and unlike a woman, that it is

perfectly free from offence. I never have seen such a thing. Priscilla

Horton, as a boy, not to be thought of beside it. She does an imitation

of the dancing of the Christy Minstrels--wonderfully clever--which, in

the audacity of its thorough-going, is surprising. A thing that you _can

not_ imagine a woman's doing at all; and yet the manner, the appearance,

the levity, impulse, and spirits of it, are so exactly like a boy that

you cannot think of anything like her sex in association with it. It

begins at 8, and is over by a quarter-past 9. I never have seen such a

curious thing, and the girl's talent is unchallengeable. I call her the

cleverest girl I have ever seen on the stage in my time, and the most

singularly original."

CHAPTER X.