ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

1859-1861.

_All the Year Round_ started--_Household Words_

discontinued--Differences with Mr. Bentley--In

Search of a Name for New Periodical--Opening a

Story--Success of New Periodical--At Knebworth

with Bulwer Lytton--Sale of Christmas

Numbers--Commercial Travellers'

Schools--Personal References--Remedy for

Sleeplessness--"Tramp" Experiences--Reduced

Bantams--Bethnal-green Fowls--The Goldfinch and

his Friend--Offers from America--Visit of Mr.

Fields.

IN the interval before the close of the first circuit of readings,

painful personal disputes arising out of the occurrences of the previous

year were settled by the discontinuance of _Household Words_, and the

establishment in its place of _All the Year Round_. The disputes turned

upon matters of feeling exclusively, and involved no charge on either

side that would render any detailed reference here other than gravely

out of place. The question into which the difference ultimately resolved

itself was that of the respective rights of the parties as proprietors

of _Household Words_; and this, upon a bill filed in Chancery, was

settled by a winding-up order, under which the property was sold. It was

bought by Dickens, who, even before the sale, exactly fulfilling a

previous announcement of the proposed discontinuance of the existing

periodical and establishment of another in its place, precisely similar

but under a different title, had started _All the Year Round_. It was to

be regretted perhaps that he should have thought it necessary to move at

all, but he moved strictly within his rights.

To the publishers first associated with his great success in literature,

Messrs. Chapman and Hall, he now returned for the issue of the remainder

of his books; of which he always in future reserved the copyrights,

making each the subject of such arrangement as for the time might seem

to him desirable. In this he was met by no difficulty; and indeed it

will be only proper to add, that, in any points affecting his relations

with those concerned in the production of his books, though his

resentments were easily and quickly roused, they were never very

lasting. The only fair rule therefore was, in a memoir of his life, to

confine the mention of such things to what was strictly necessary to

explain its narrative. This accordingly has been done; and, in the

several disagreements it has been necessary to advert to, I cannot

charge myself with having in a single instance overstepped the rule.

Objection has been made to my revival of the early differences with Mr.

Bentley. But silence respecting them was incompatible with what

absolutely required to be said, if the picture of Dickens in his most

interesting time, at the outset of his career in letters, was not to be

omitted altogether; and, suppressing everything of mere temper that

gathered round the dispute, use was made of those letters only

containing the young writer's urgent appeal to be absolved, rightly or

wrongly, from engagements he had too precipitately entered into.

Wrongly, some might say, because the law was undoubtedly on Mr.

Bentley's side; but all subsequent reflection has confirmed the view I

was led strongly to take at the time, that in the facts there had come

to be involved what the law could not afford to overlook, and that the

sale of brain-work can never be adjusted by agreement with the same

exactness and certainty as that of ordinary goods and chattels. Quitting

the subject once for all with this remark, it is not less incumbent on

me to say that there was no stage of the dispute in which Mr. Bentley,

holding as strongly the other view, might not think it to have

sufficient justification; and certainly in later years there was no

absence of friendly feeling on the part of Dickens to his old publisher.

This already has been mentioned; and on the occasion of Hans Andersen's

recent visit to Gadshill, Mr. Bentley was invited to meet the celebrated

Dane. Nor should I omit to say, that, in the year to which this

narrative has now arrived, his prompt compliance with an intercession

made to him for a common friend pleased Dickens greatly.

At the opening of 1859, bent upon such a successor to _Household Words_

as should carry on the associations connected with its name, Dickens was

deep in search of a title to give expression to them. "My determination

to settle the title arises out of my knowledge that I shall never be

able to do anything for the work until it has a fixed name; also out of

my observation that the same odd feeling affects everybody else." He had

proposed to himself a title that, as in _Household Words_, might be

capable of illustration by a line from Shakespeare; and alighting upon

that wherein poor Henry the Sixth is fain to solace his captivity by the

fancy, that, like birds encaged he might soothe himself for loss of

liberty "at last by notes of household harmony," he for the time forgot

that this might hardly be accepted as a happy comment on the occurrences

out of which the supposed necessity had arisen of replacing the old by a

new household friend. "Don't you think," he wrote on the 24th of

January, "this is a good name and quotation? I have been quite delighted

to get hold of it for our title.

"HOUSEHOLD HARMONY.

"'At last by notes of Household Harmony.'--_Shakespeare._"

He was at first reluctant even to admit the objection when stated to

him. "I am afraid we must not be too particular about the possibility of

personal references and applications: otherwise it is manifest that I

never can write another book. I could not invent a story of any sort, it

is quite plain, incapable of being twisted into some such nonsensical

shape. It would be wholly impossible to turn one through half a dozen

chapters." Of course he yielded, nevertheless; and much consideration

followed over sundry other titles submitted. Reviving none of those

formerly rejected, here were a few of these now rejected in their turn.

THE HEARTH. THE FORGE. THE CRUCIBLE. THE ANVIL OF THE TIME. CHARLES

DICKENS'S OWN. SEASONABLE LEAVES. EVERGREEN LEAVES. HOME. HOME-MUSIC.

CHANGE. TIME AND TIDE. TWOPENCE. ENGLISH BELLS. WEEKLY BELLS. THE

ROCKET. GOOD HUMOUR. Still the great want was the line adaptable from

Shakespeare, which at last exultingly he sent on the 28th of January.

"I am dining early, before reading, and write literally with my mouth

full. But I have just hit upon a name that I think really an admirable

one--especially with the quotation _before_ it, in the place where our

present _H. W._ quotation stands.

"'The story of our lives, from year to year.'--_Shakespeare._"

"ALL THE YEAR ROUND.

"A weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens."

With the same resolution and energy other things necessary to the

adventure were as promptly done. "I have taken the new office," he wrote

from Tavistock House on the 21st of February; "have got workmen in; have

ordered the paper; settled with the printer; and am getting an immense

system of advertising ready. Blow to be struck on the 12th of March. . . .

Meantime I cannot please myself with the opening of my story" (the _Tale

of Two Cities_, which _All the Year Round_ was to start with), "and

cannot in the least settle at it or take to it. . . . I wish you would come

and look at what I flatter myself is a rather ingenious account to which

I have turned the Stanfield scenery here." He had placed the

_Lighthouse_ scene in a single frame; had divided the scene of the

_Frozen Deep_ into two subjects, a British man-of-war and an Arctic sea,

which he had also framed; and the school-room that had been the theatre

was now hung with sea-pieces by a great painter of the sea. To believe

them to have been but the amusement of a few mornings was difficult

indeed. Seen from the due distance there was nothing wanting to the most

masterly and elaborate art.

The first number of _All the Year Round_ appeared on the 30th of April,

and the result of the first quarter's accounts of the sale will tell

everything that needs to be said of a success that went on without

intermission to the close. "A word before I go back to Gadshill," he

wrote from Tavistock House in July, "which I know you will be glad to

receive. So well has _All the Year Round_ gone that it was yesterday

able to repay me, with five per cent. interest, all the money I advanced

for its establishment (paper, print &c. all paid, down to the last

number), and yet to leave a good L500 balance at the banker's!" Beside

the opening of his _Tale of Two Cities_ its first number had contained

another piece of his writing, the "Poor Man and his Beer;" as to which

an interesting note has been sent me. The Rev. T. B. Lawes, of

Rothamsted, St. Alban's, had been associated upon a sanitary commission

with Mr. Henry Austin, Dickens's brother-in-law and counsellor in regard

to all such matters in his own houses, or in the houses of the poor; and

this connection led to Dickens's knowledge of a club that Mr. Lawes had

established at Rothamsted, which he became eager to recommend as an

example to other country neighbourhoods. The club had been set on

foot[237] to enable the agricultural labourers of the parish to have

their beer and pipes independent of the public-house; and the

description of it, says Mr. Lawes, "was the occupation of a drive

between this place (Rothamsted) and London, 25 miles, Mr. Dickens

refusing the offer of a bed, and saying that he could arrange his ideas

on the journey. In the course of our conversation I mentioned that the

labourers were very jealous of the small tradesmen, blacksmiths and

others, holding allotment-gardens; but that the latter did so indirectly

by paying higher rents to the labourers for a share. This circumstance

is not forgotten in the verses on the Blacksmith in the same number,

composed by Mr. Dickens and repeated to me while he was walking about,

and which close the mention of his gains with allusion to

"A share (concealed) in the poor man's field,

Which adds to the poor man's store."

The periodical thus established was in all respects, save one, so

exactly the counterpart of what it replaced, that a mention of this

point of difference is the only description of it called for. Besides

his own three-volume stories of _The Tale of Two Cities_ and _Great

Expectations_, Dickens admitted into it other stories of the same length

by writers of character and name, of which the authorship was avowed. It

published tales of varied merit and success by Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr.

Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. Charles Lever. Mr. Wilkie Collins contributed

to it his _Woman in White_, _No Name_, and _Moonstone_, the first of

which had a pre-eminent success; Mr. Reade his _Hard Cash_; and Lord

Lytton his _Strange Story_. Conferring about the latter Dickens passed a

week at Knebworth, accompanied by his daughter and sister-in-law, in the

summer of 1861, as soon as he had closed _Great Expectations_; and there

met Mr. Arthur Helps, with whom and Lord Orford he visited the

so-called "Hermit" near Stevenage, whom he described as Mr. Mopes in

_Tom Tiddler's Ground_. With his great brother-artist he thoroughly

enjoyed himself, as he invariably did; and reported him as "in better

health and spirits than I have seen him in, in all these years,--a

little weird occasionally regarding magic and spirits, but always fair

and frank under opposition. He was brilliantly talkative, anecdotical,

and droll; looked young and well; laughed heartily; and enjoyed with

great zest some games we played. In his artist-character and talk, he

was full of interest and matter, saying the subtlest and finest

things--but that he never fails in. I enjoyed myself immensely, as we

all did."[238]

In _All the Year Round_, as in its predecessor, the tales for Christmas

were of course continued, but with a surprisingly increased popularity;

and Dickens never had such sale for any of his writings as for his

Christmas pieces in the later periodical. It had reached, before he

died, to nearly three hundred thousand. The first was called the

_Haunted House_, and had a small mention of a true occurrence in his

boyhood which is not included in the bitter record on a former page. "I

was taken home, and there was debt at home as well as death, and we had

a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a

power unknown to me hazily called The Trade, that a brass coal-scuttle,

a roasting jack, and a bird cage were obliged to be put into it to make

a lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard mentioned, and I

wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it must have been to

sing!" The other subjects will have mention in another chapter.

His tales were not his only important work in _All the Year Round_. The

detached papers written by him there had a character and completeness

derived from their plan, and from the personal tone, as well as frequent

individual confessions, by which their interest is enhanced, and which

will always make them specially attractive. Their title expressed a

personal liking. Of all the societies, charitable or self-assisting,

which his tact and eloquence in the "chair" so often helped, none had

interested him by the character of its service to its members, and the

perfection of its management, so much as that of the Commercial

Travellers. His, admiration of their schools introduced him to one who

then acted as their treasurer, and whom, of all the men he had known, I

think he rated highest for the union of business qualities in an

incomparable measure to a nature comprehensive enough to deal with

masses of men, however differing in creed or opinion, humanely and

justly. He never afterwards wanted support for any good work that he did

not think first of Mr. George Moore,[239] and appeal was never made to

him in vain. "Integrity, enterprise, public spirit, and benevolence," he

told the Commercial Travellers on one occasion, "had their synonym in

Mr. Moore's name;" and it was another form of the same liking when he

took to himself the character and title of a Traveller _Un_commercial.

"I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on

the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of

Human-interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy

goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from

my rooms in Covent-garden, London: now about the city streets; now about

the country by-roads: seeing many little things, and some great things,

which, because they interest me, I think may interest others." In a few

words that was the plan and drift of the papers which he began in 1860,

and continued to write from time to time until the last autumn of his

life.

Many of them, such as "Travelling Abroad," "City Churches,"

"Dullborough," "Nurses' Stories," and "Birthday Celebrations," have

supplied traits, chiefly of his younger days, to portions of this

memoir; and parts of his later life receive illustration from others,

such as "Tramps," "Night Walks," "Shy Neighbourhoods," "The Italian

Prisoner," and "Chatham Dockyard." Indeed hardly any is without its

personal interest or illustration. One may learn from them, among other

things, what kind of treatment he resorted to for the disorder of

sleeplessness from which he had often suffered amid his late anxieties.

Experimenting upon it in bed, he found to be too slow and doubtful a

process for him; but he very soon defeated his enemy by the brisker

treatment, of getting up directly after lying down, going out, and

coming home tired at sunrise. "My last special feat was turning out of

bed at two, after a hard day pedestrian and otherwise, and walking

thirty miles into the country to breakfast." One description he did not

give in his paper, but I recollect his saying that he had seldom seen

anything so striking as the way in which the wonders of an equinoctial

dawn (it was the 15th of October 1857) presented themselves during that

walk. He had never before happened to see night so completely at odds

with morning, "which was which." Another experience of his night

ramblings used to be given in vivid sketches of the restlessness of a

great city, and the manner in which _it_ also tumbles and tosses before

it can get to sleep. Nor should anyone curious about his habits and ways

omit to accompany him with his Tramps into Gadshill lanes; or to follow

him into his Shy Neighbourhoods of the Hackney-road, Waterloo-road,

Spitalfields, or Bethnal-green. For delightful observation both of

country and town, for the wit that finds analogies between remote and

familiar things, and for humorous personal sketches and experience,

these are perfect of their kind.

"I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by

a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a

skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot,

and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away

to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the

moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render

illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their

sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all

the tramps with carts or caravans--the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the

Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place;

and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot.

Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have

scorched its grass!" It was there he found Dr. Marigold, and Chops the

Dwarf, and the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes eating meat-pie with

the Giant. So, too, in his Shy Neighbourhoods, when he relates his

experiences of the bad company that birds are fond of, and of the effect

upon domestic fowls of living in low districts, his method of handling

the subject has all the charm of a discovery. "That anything born of an

egg and invested with wings should have got to the pass that it hops

contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls _that_ going home, is

a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this

connexion to wonder at." One of his illustrations is a reduced Bantam

family in the Hackney-road deriving their sole enjoyment from crowding

together in a pawnbroker's side-entry; but seeming as if only newly come

down in the world, and always in a feeble flutter of fear that they may

be found out. He contrasts them with others. "I know a low fellow,

originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole

establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug

Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them

among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and

so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in

the morning. . . . But, the family I am best acquainted with, reside in the

densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among

which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all

come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted

me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours.

After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom

this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions

are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I

judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and

visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office

pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round

the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under

the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing

property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it.

They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and

fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck

at. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I

have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the

early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always

begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and

they salute the Potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as

if he were Phoebes in person." For the truth of the personal adventure

in the same essay, which he tells in proof of a propensity to bad

company in more refined members of the feathered race, I am myself in a

position to vouch. Walking by a dirty court in Spitalfields one day, the

quick little busy intelligence of a goldfinch, drawing water for himself

in his cage, so attracted him that he bought the bird, which had other

accomplishments; but not one of them would the little creature show off

in his new abode in Doughty-street, and he drew no water but by stealth

or under the cloak of night. "After an interval of futile and at length

hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was appealed to.

The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a flat and cushiony nose,

like the last new strawberry. He wore a fur cap, and shorts, and was of

the velveteen race, velveteeny. He sent word that he would 'look round.'

He looked round, appeared in the doorway of the room, and slightly

cocked up his evil eye at the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset

that bird; and when it was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary

buckets of water, leaping about his perch and sharpening his bill with

irrepressible satisfaction."

The Uncommercial Traveller papers, his two serial stories, and his

Christmas tales, were all the contributions of any importance made by

Dickens to _All the Year Round_; but he reprinted in it, on the

completion of his first story, a short tale called "Hunted Down,"

written for a newspaper in America called the _New York Ledger_. Its

subject had been taken from the life of a notorious criminal already

named, and its principal claim to notice was the price paid for it. For

a story not longer than half of one of the numbers of _Chuzzlewit_ or

_Copperfield_, he had received a thousand pounds.[240] It was one of the

indications of the eager desire which his entry on the career of a

public reader had aroused in America to induce him again to visit that

continent; and at the very time he had this magnificent offer from the

New York journal, Mr. Fields of Boston, who was then on a visit to

Europe, was pressing him so much to go that his resolution was almost

shaken. "I am now," he wrote to me from Gadshill on the 9th of July

1859, "getting the _Tale of Two Cities_ into that state that IF I should

decide to go to America late in September, I could turn to, at any time,

and write on with great vigour. Mr. Fields has been down here for a day,

and with the strongest intensity urges that there is no drawback, no

commercial excitement or crisis, no political agitation; and that so

favourable an opportunity, in all respects, might not occur again for

years and years. I should be one of the most unhappy of men if I were

to go, and yet I cannot help being much stirred and influenced by the

golden prospect held before me."

He yielded nevertheless to other persuasion, and for that time the visit

was not to be. In six months more the Civil War began, and America was

closed to any such enterprise for nearly five years.

FOOTNOTES:

[237] It is pleasant to have to state that it was still flourishing when

I received Mr. Lawes's letter, on the 18th of December 1871.

[238] From the same letter, dated 1st of July 1861, I take what follows.

"Poor Lord Campbell's seems to me as easy and good a death as one could

desire. There must be a sweep of these men very soon, and one feels as

if it must fall out like the breaking of an arch--one stone goes from a

prominent place, and then the rest begin to drop. So, one looks, not

without satisfaction (in our sadness) at lives so rounded and complete,

towards Brougham, and Lyndhurst, and Pollock" . . . Yet, of Dickens's own

death, Pollock lived to write to me as the death of "one of the most

distinguished and honoured men England has ever produced; in whose loss

every man among us feels that he has lost a friend and an instructor."

Temple-Hatton, 10th of June 1870.

[239] If space were available here, his letters would supply many proofs

of his interest in Mr. George Moore's admirable projects; but I can only

make exception for his characteristic allusion to an incident that

tickled his fancy very much at the time. "I hope" (20th of Aug. 1863)

"you have been as much amused as I am by the account of the Bishop of

Carlisle at (my very particular friend's) Mr. George Moore's schools? It

strikes me as the funniest piece of weakness I ever saw, his addressing

those unfortunate children concerning Colenso. I cannot get over the

ridiculous image I have erected in my mind, of the shovel-hat and apron

holding forth, at that safe distance, to that safe audience. There is

nothing so extravagant in Rabelais, or so satirically humorous in Swift

or Voltaire."

[240] Eight years later he wrote "Holiday Romance" for a Child's

Magazine published by Mr. Fields, and "George Silverman's

Explanation"--of the same length, and for the same price. There are no

other such instances, I suppose, in the history of literature.

CHAPTER XI.

SECOND SERIES OF READINGS.

1861-1863.

Daughter Kate's Marriage--Wedding Party--Sale

of Tavistock House--Brother Alfred's

Death--Metropolitan Readings--Proposed

Provincial Readings--Good of doing Nothing--New

Subjects for Readings--Mr. Arthur Smith's

Death--Eldest Son's Marriage--Audience at

Brighton--Audiences at Canterbury and

Dover--Alarming Scene at Newcastle--Impromptu

Reading Hall at Berwick-on-Tweed--In

Scotland--At Torquay--At

Liverpool--Metropolitan Success--Offer from

Australia--Writing or Reading not always

possible--Arguments for and against going to

Australia--Readings in Paris--A Religious

Richardson's Show--Exiled Ex-potentate.

AT the end of the first year of residence at Gadshill it was the remark

of Dickens that nothing had gratified him so much as the confidence with

which his poorer neighbours treated him. He had tested generally their

worth and good conduct, and they had been encouraged in illness or

trouble to resort to him for help. There was pleasant indication of the

feeling thus awakened, when, in the summer of 1860, his younger daughter

Kate was married to Charles Alston Collins, brother of the novelist, and

younger son of the painter and academician, who might have found, if

spared to witness that summer-morning scene, subjects not unworthy of

his delightful pencil in many a rustic group near Gadshill. All the

villagers had turned out in honour of Dickens, and the carriages could

hardly get to and from the little church for the succession of triumphal

arches they had to pass through. It was quite unexpected by him; and

when the feu de joie of the blacksmith in the lane, whose enthusiasm had

smuggled a couple of small cannon into his forge, exploded upon him at

the return, I doubt if the shyest of men was ever so taken aback at an

ovation.

To name the principal persons present that day will indicate the faces

that (with addition of Miss Mary Boyle, Miss Marguerite Power, Mr.

Fechter, Mr. Charles Kent, Mr. Edmund Yates, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and

members of the family of Mr. Frank Stone, whose sudden death[241] in the

preceding year had been a great grief to Dickens) were most familiar at

Gadshill in these later years. Mr. Frederic Lehmann was there with his

wife, whose sister, Miss Chambers, was one of the bridesmaids; Mr. and

Mrs. Wills were there, and Dickens's old fast friend Mr. Thomas Beard;

the two nearest country neighbours with whom the family had become very

intimate, Mr. Hulkes and Mr. Malleson, with their wives, joined the

party; among the others were Henry Chorley, Chauncy Townshend, and

Wilkie Collins; and, for friend special to the occasion, the bridegroom

had brought his old fellow-student in art, Mr. Holman Hunt. Mr. Charles

Collins had himself been bred as a painter, for success in which line he

had some rare gifts; but inclination and capacity led him also to

literature, and, after much indecision between the two callings, he took

finally to letters. His contributions to _All the Year Round_ were among

the most charming of its detached papers, and two stories published

independently showed strength of wing for higher flights. But his health

broke down, and his taste was too fastidious for his failing power. It

is possible however that he may live by two small books of description,

the _New Sentimental Journey_ and the _Cruize on Wheels_, which have in

them unusual delicacy and refinement of humour; and if those volumes

should make any readers in another generation curious about the writer,

they will learn, if correct reply is given to their inquiries, that no

man disappointed so many reasonable hopes with so little fault or

failure of his own, that his difficulty always was to please himself,

and that an inferior mind would have been more successful in both the

arts he followed. He died in 1873 in his forty-fifth year; and until

then it was not known, even by those nearest to him, how great must have

been the suffering which he had borne, through many trying years, with

uncomplaining patience.

His daughter's marriage was the chief event that had crossed the even

tenor of Dickens's life since his first paid readings closed; and it was

followed by the sale of Tavistock House, with the resolve to make his

future home at Gadshill. In the brief interval (29th of July) he wrote

to me of his brother Alfred's death. "I was telegraphed for to

Manchester on Friday night. Arrived there at a quarter past ten, but he

had been dead three hours, poor fellow! He is to be buried at Highgate

on Wednesday. I brought the poor young widow back with me yesterday."

All that this death involved,[242] the troubles of his change of home,

and some difficulties in working out his story, gave him more than

sufficient occupation till the following spring; and as the time arrived

for the new Readings, the change was a not unwelcome one.

The first portion of this second series was planned by Mr. Arthur Smith,

but he only superintended the six readings in London which opened it.

These were the first at St. James's Hall (St. Martin's Hall having been

burnt since the last readings there) and were given in March and April

1861. "We are all well here and flourishing," he wrote to me from

Gadshill on the 28th of April. "On the 18th I finished the readings as I

purposed. We had between seventy and eighty pounds _in the stalls_,

which, at four shillings apiece, is something quite unprecedented in

these times. . . . The result of the six was, that, after paying a large

staff of men and all other charges, and Arthur Smith's ten per cent. on

the receipts, and replacing everything destroyed in the fire at St.

Martin's Hall (including all our tickets, country-baggage, cheque-boxes,

books, and a quantity of gas-fittings and what not), I got upwards of

L500. A very great result. We certainly might have gone on through the

season, but I am heartily glad to be concentrated on my story."

It had been part of his plan that the Provincial Readings should not

begin until a certain interval after the close of his story of _Great

Expectations_. They were delayed accordingly until the 28th of October,

from which date, when they opened at Norwich, they went on with the

Christmas intervals to be presently named to the 30th of January 1862,

when they closed at Chester. Kept within England and Scotland, they took

in the border town of Berwick, and, besides the Scotch cities, comprised

the contrasts and varieties of Norwich and Lancaster, Bury St. Edmunds

and Cheltenham, Carlisle and Hastings, Plymouth and Birmingham,

Canterbury and Torquay, Preston and Ipswich, Manchester and Brighton,

Colchester and Dover, Newcastle and Chester. They were followed by ten

readings at the St. James's Hall, between the 13th of March and the 27th

of June 1862; and by four at Paris in January 1863, given at the Embassy

in aid of the British Charitable Fund. The second series had thus in the

number of the readings nearly equalled the first, when it closed at

London in June 1863 with thirteen readings in the Hanover Square Rooms;

and it is exclusively the subject of such illustrations or references as

this chapter will supply.

On _Great Expectations_ closing in June 1861, Bulwer Lytton, at

Dickens's earnest wish, took his place in _All the Year Round_ with the

"Strange Story;" and he then indulged himself in idleness for a little

while. "The subsidence of those distressing pains in my face the moment

I had done my work, made me resolve to do nothing in that way for some

time if I could help it."[243] But his "doing nothing" was seldom more

than a figure of speech, and what it meant in this case was soon told.

"Every day for two or three hours, I practise my new readings, and

(except in my office work) do nothing else. With great pains I have made

a continuous narrative out of _Copperfield_, that I think will reward

the exertion it is likely to cost me. Unless I am much mistaken, it will

be very valuable in London. I have also done _Nicholas Nickleby_ at the

Yorkshire school, and hope I have got something droll out of Squeers,

John Browdie, & Co. Also, the Bastille prisoner from the _Tale of Two

Cities_. Also, the Dwarf from one of our Christmas numbers." Only the

first two were added to the list for the present circuit.

It was in the midst of these active preparations that painful news

reached him. An illness under which Mr. Arthur Smith had been some time

suffering took unexpectedly a dangerous turn, and there came to be but

small chance of his recovery. A distressing interview on the 28th of

September gave Dickens little hope. "And yet his wakings and wanderings

so perpetually turn on his arrangements for the Readings, and he is so

desperately unwilling to relinquish the idea of 'going on with the

business' to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, that I had not the

heart to press him for the papers. He told me that he believed he had by

him '70 or 80 letters unanswered.' You may imagine how anxious it makes

me, and at what a deadstop I stand." Another week passed, and with it

the time fixed at the places where his work was to have opened; but he

could not bring himself to act as if all hope had gone. "With a sick man

who has been so zealous and faithful, I feel bound to be very tender and

patient. When I told him the other day about my having engaged

Headland--'to do all the personally bustling and fatiguing part of your

work,' I said--he nodded his heavy head with great satisfaction, and

faintly got out of himself the words, 'Of course I pay him, and not

you.'" The poor fellow died in October; and on the day after attending

the funeral,[244] Dickens heard of the death of his brother-in-law and

friend, Mr. Henry Austin, whose abilities and character he respected as

much as he liked the man. He lost much in losing the judicious and safe

counsel which had guided him on many public questions in which he took

lively interest, and it was with a heavy heart he set out at last upon

his second circuit. "With what difficulty I get myself back to the

readings after all this loss and trouble, or with what unwillingness I

work myself up to the mark of looking them in the face, I can hardly

say. As for poor Arthur Smith at this time, it is as if my right arm

were gone. It is only just now that I am able to open one of the books,

and screw the text out of myself in a flat dull way. Enclosed is the

list of what I have to do. You will see that I have left ten days in

November for the Christmas number, and also a good Christmas margin for

our meeting at Gadshill. I shall be very glad to have the money that I

expect to get; but it will be earned." That November interval was also

the date of the marriage of his eldest son to the daughter of Mr. Evans,

so long, in connection with Mr. Bradbury, his publisher and printer.

The start of the readings at Norwich was not good, so many changes of

vexation having been incident to the opening announcements as to leave

some doubt of their fulfilment. But the second night, when trial was

made of the _Nickleby_ scenes, "we had a splendid hall, and I think

_Nickleby_ will top all the readings. Somehow it seems to have got in

it, by accident, exactly the qualities best suited to the purpose; and

it went last night, not only with roars, but with a general hilarity and

pleasure that I have never seen surpassed."[245] From this night onward,

the success was uninterrupted, and here was his report to me from

Brighton on the 8th of November. "We turned away half Dover and half

Hastings and half Colchester; and, if you can believe such a thing, I

may tell you that in round numbers we find 1000 stalls already taken

here in Brighton! I left Colchester in a heavy snow-storm. To-day it is

so warm here that I can hardly bear the fire, and am writing with the

window open down to the ground. Last night I had a most charming

audience for _Copperfield_, with a delicacy of perception that really

made the work delightful. It is very pretty to see the girls and women

generally, in the matter of Dora; and everywhere I have found that

peculiar personal relation between my audience and myself on which I

counted most when I entered on this enterprise. _Nickleby_ continues to

go in the wildest manner."

A storm was at this time sweeping round the coast, and while at Dover he

had written of it to his sister-in-law (7th of November): "The bad

weather has not in the least touched us, and the storm was most

magnificent at Dover. All the great side of the Lord Warden next the

sea had to be emptied, the break of the waves was so prodigious, and the

noise so utterly confounding. The sea came in like a great sky of

immense clouds, for ever breaking suddenly into furious rain; all kinds

of wreck were washed in; among other things, a very pretty brass-bound

chest being thrown about like a feather. . . . The unhappy Ostend packet,

unable to get in or go back, beat about the Channel all Tuesday night,

and until noon yesterday; when I saw her come in, with five men at the

wheel, a picture of misery inconceivable. . . . The effect of the readings

at Hastings and Dover really seems to have outdone the best usual

impression; and at Dover they wouldn't go, but sat applauding like mad.

The most delicate audience I have seen in any provincial place, is

Canterbury" ("an intelligent and delightful response in them," he wrote

to his daughter, "like the touch of a beautiful instrument"); "but the

audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover. The

people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously

unreserved way; and they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment,

when Squeers read the boys' letters, that the contagion extended to me.

For, one couldn't hear them without laughing too. . . . So, I am thankful

to say, all goes well, and the recompense for the trouble is in every

way Great."

From the opposite quarter of Berwick-on-Tweed he wrote again in the

midst of storm. But first his mention of Newcastle, which he had also

taken on his way to Edinburgh, reading two nights there, should be

given. "At Newcastle, against the very heavy expenses, I made more than

a hundred guineas profit. A finer audience there is not in England, and

I suppose them to be a specially earnest people; for, while they can

laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with

what is pathetic or passionate. An extraordinary thing occurred on the

second night. The room was tremendously crowded and my gas-apparatus

fell down. There was a terrible wave among the people for an instant,

and God knows what destruction of life a rush to the stairs would have

caused. Fortunately a lady in the front of the stalls ran out towards

me, exactly in a place where I knew that the whole hall could see her.

So I addressed her, laughing, and half-asked and half-ordered her to sit

down again; and, in a moment, it was all over. But the men in attendance

had such a fearful sense of what might have happened (besides the real

danger of Fire) that they positively shook the boards I stood on, with

their trembling, when they came up to put things right. I am proud to

record that the gas-man's sentiment, as delivered afterwards, was, 'The

more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him.' With which

complimentary homage, and with the wind blowing so that I can hardly

hear myself write, I conclude."[246]

It was still blowing, in shape of a gale from the sea, when, an hour

before the reading, he wrote from the King's Arms at Berwick-on-Tweed.

"As odd and out of the way a place to be at, it appears to me, as ever

was seen! And such a ridiculous room designed for me to read in! An

immense Corn Exchange, made of glass and iron, round, dome-topp'd,

lofty, utterly absurd for any such purpose, and full of thundering

echoes; with a little lofty crow's nest of a stone gallery, breast high,

deep in the wall, into which it was designed to put----_me_! I instantly

struck, of course; and said I would either read in a room attached to

this house (a very snug one, capable of holding 500 people), or not at

all. Terrified local agents glowered, but fell prostrate, and my men

took the primitive accommodation in hand. Ever since, I am alarmed to

add, the people (who besought the honour of the visit) have been coming

in numbers quite irreconcileable with the appearance of the place, and

what is to be the end I do not know. It was poor Arthur Smith's

principle that a town on the way paid the expenses of a long

through-journey, and therefore I came." The Reading paid more than

those expenses.

Enthusiastic greeting awaited him in Edinburgh. "We had in the hall

exactly double what we had on the first night last time. The success of

_Copperfield_ was perfectly unexampled. Four great rounds of applause

with a burst of cheering at the end, and every point taken in the finest

manner." But this was nothing to what befell on the second night, when,

by some mistake of the local agents, the tickets issued were out of

proportion to the space available. Writing from Glasgow next day (3rd of

December) he described the scene. "Such a pouring of hundreds into a

place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such a

rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humour on

the whole, I never saw the faintest approach to. While I addressed the

crowd in the room, G addressed the crowd in the street. Fifty frantic

men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other

frantic men made speeches to the walls. The whole B family were borne in

on the top of a wave, and landed with their faces against the front of

the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them

to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau or gigantic

pic-nic--one pretty girl in full dress, lying on her side all night,

holding on to one of the legs of my table! It was the most extraordinary

sight. And yet, from the moment I began to the moment of my leaving off,

they never missed a point, and they ended with a burst of cheers. . . . The

expenditure of lungs and spirits was (as you may suppose) rather great;

and to sleep well was out of the question. I am therefore rather fagged

to-day; and as the hall in which I read to-night is a large one, I must

make my letter a short one. . . . My people were torn to ribbons last

night. They have not a hat among them--and scarcely a coat." He came

home for his Christmas rest by way of Manchester, and thus spoke of the

reading there on the 14th of December. "_Copperfield_ in the Free Trade

Hall last Saturday was really a grand scene."

He was in southern latitudes after Christmas, and on the 8th of January

wrote from Torquay: "We are now in the region of small rooms, and

therefore this trip will not be as profitable as the long one. I imagine

the room here to be very small. Exeter I know, and that is small too. I

am very much used up on the whole, for I cannot bear this moist warm

climate. It would kill me very soon. And I have now got to the point of

taking so much out of myself with _Copperfield_ that I might as well do

Richard Wardour. . . . This is a very pretty place--a compound of Hastings,

Tunbridge Wells, and little bits of the hills about Naples; but I met

four respirators as I came up from the station, and three pale curates

without them who seemed in a bad way." They had been not bad omens,

however. The success was good, at both Torquay and Exeter; and he closed

the month, and this series of the country readings, at the great towns

of Liverpool and Chester. "The beautiful St. George's Hall crowded to

excess last night" (28th of January 1862) "and numbers turned away.

Brilliant to see when lighted up, and for a reading simply perfect. You

remember that a Liverpool audience is usually dull; but they put me on

my mettle last night, for I never saw such an audience--no, not even in

Edinburgh! The agents (alone, and of course without any reference to

ready money at the doors) had taken for the two readings two hundred

pounds." But as the end approached the fatigues had told severely on

him. He described himself sleeping horribly, and with head dazed and

worn by gas and heat. Rest, before he could resume at the St. James's

Hall in March, was become an absolute necessity.

Two brief extracts from letters of the dates respectively of the 8th of

April[247] and the 28th of June will sufficiently describe the London

readings. "The money returns have been quite astounding. Think of L190 a

night! The effect of _Copperfield_ exceeds all the expectations which

its success in the country led me to form. It seems to take people

entirely by surprise. If this is not new to you, I have not a word of

news. The rain that raineth every day seems to have washed news away or

got it under water." That was in April. In June he wrote: "I finished my

readings on Friday night to an enormous hall--nearly L200. The success

has been throughout complete. It seems almost suicidal to leave off

with the town so full, but I don't like to depart from my public pledge.

A man from Australia is in London ready to pay L10,000 for eight months

there. If----" It was an If that troubled him for some time, and led to

agitating discussion. The civil war having closed America, an increase

made upon the just-named offer tempted him to Australia. He tried to

familiarize himself with the fancy that he should thus also get new

material for observation, and he went so far as to plan an Uncommercial

Traveller Upside Down.[248] It is however very doubtful if such a

scheme would have been entertained for a moment, but for the unwonted

difficulties of invention that were now found to beset a twenty-number

story. Such a story had lately been in his mind, and he had just chosen

the title for it (_Our Mutual Friend_); but still he halted and

hesitated sorely. "If it was not," (he wrote on the 5th of October 1862)

"for the hope of a gain that would make me more independent of the

worst, I could not look the travel and absence and exertion in the face.

I know perfectly well beforehand how unspeakably wretched I should be.

But these renewed and larger offers tempt me. I can force myself to go

aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I

have done a hundred times; but whether, with all this unsettled

fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of

it, is another question." On the 22nd, still striving hard to find

reasons to cope with the all but irresistible arguments against any such

adventure, which indeed, with everything that then surrounded him, would

have been little short of madness, he thus stated his experience of his

two circuits of public reading. "Remember that at home here the thing

has never missed fire, but invariably does more the second time than it

did the first; and also that I have got so used to it, and have worked

so hard at it, as to get out of it more than I ever thought was in it

for that purpose. I think all the probabilities for such a country as

Australia are immense." The terrible difficulty was that the home

argument struck both ways. "If I were to go it would be a penance and a

misery, and I dread the thought more than I can possibly express. The

domestic life of the Readings is all but intolerable to me when I am

away for a few weeks at a time merely, and what would it be----." On the

other hand it was also a thought of home, far beyond the mere personal

loss or gain of it, that made him willing still to risk even so much

misery and penance; and he had a fancy that it might be possible to take

his eldest daughter with him. "It is useless and needless for me to say

what the conflict in my own mind is. How painfully unwilling I am to go,

and yet how painfully sensible that perhaps I ought to go--with all the

hands upon my skirts that I cannot fail to feel and see there, whenever

I look round. It is a struggle of no common sort, as you will suppose,

you who know the circumstances of the struggler." It closed at once when

he clearly saw that to take any of his family with him, and make

satisfactory arrangement for the rest during such an absence, would be

impossible. By this time also he began to find his way to the new story,

and better hopes and spirits had returned.

In January 1863 he had taken his daughter and his sister-in-law to

Paris, and he read twice at the Embassy in behalf of the British

Charitable Fund, the success being such that he consented to read twice

again.[249] He passed his birthday of that year (the 7th of the

following month) at Arras. "You will remember me to-day, I know. Thanks

for it. An odd birthday, but I am as little out of heart as you would

have me be--floored now and then, but coming up again at the call of

Time. I wanted to see this town, birthplace of our amiable Sea Green"

(Robespierre); "and I find a Grande Place so very remarkable and

picturesque that it is astonishing how people miss it. Here too I found,

in a bye-country place just near, a Fair going on, with a Religious

Richardson's in it--THEATRE RELIGIEUX--'donnant six fois par jour,

l'histoire de la Croix en tableaux vivants, depuis la naissance de notre

Seigneur jusqu'a son sepulture. Aussi l'immolation d'Isaac, par son pere

Abraham.' It was just before nightfall when I came upon it; and one of

the three wise men was up to his eyes in lamp oil, hanging the

moderators. A woman in blue and fleshings (whether an angel or Joseph's

wife I don't know) was addressing the crowd through an enormous

speaking-trumpet; and a very small boy with a property lamb (I leave you

to judge who _he_ was) was standing on his head on a barrel-organ."

Returning to England by Boulogne in the same year, as he stepped into

the Folkestone boat he encountered a friend, Mr. Charles Manby (for, in

recording a trait of character so pleasing and honourable, it is not

necessary that I should suppress the name), also passing over to

England. "Taking leave of Manby was a shabby man of whom I had some

remembrance, but whom I could not get into his place in my mind.

Noticing when we stood out of the harbour that he was on the brink of

the pier, waving his hat in a desolate manner, I said to Manby, 'Surely

I know that man.'--'I should think you did,' said he: 'Hudson!' He is

living--just living--at Paris, and Manby had brought him on. He said to

Manby at parting, 'I shall not have a good dinner again, till you come

back.' I asked Manby why he stuck to him? He said, Because he (Hudson)

had so many people in his power, and had held his peace; and because he

(Manby) saw so many Notabilities grand with him now, who were always

grovelling for 'shares' in the days of his grandeur."

Upon Dickens's arrival in London the second series of his readings was

brought to a close; and opportunity may be taken, before describing the

third, to speak of the manuscript volume found among his papers,

containing Memoranda for use in his writings.

FOOTNOTES:

[241] "You will be grieved," he wrote (Saturday 19th of Nov. 1859) "to

hear of poor Stone. On Sunday he was not well. On Monday, went to Dr.

Todd, who told him he had aneurism of the heart. On Tuesday, went to Dr.

Walsh, who told him he hadn't. On Wednesday I met him in a cab in the

Square here, and he got out to talk to me. I walked about with him a

little while at a snail's pace, cheering him up; but when I came home, I

told them that I thought him much changed, and in danger. Yesterday at 2

o'clock he died of spasm of the heart. I am going up to Highgate to look

for a grave for him."

[242] He was now hard at work on his story; and a note written from

Gadshill after the funeral shows, what so frequently was incident to his

pursuits, the hard conditions under which sorrow, and its claim on his

exertion, often came to him. "To-morrow I have to work against time and

tide and everything else, to fill up a No. keeping open for me, and the

stereotype plates of which must go to America on Friday. But indeed the

enquiry into poor Alfred's affairs; the necessity of putting the widow

and children somewhere; the difficulty of knowing what to do for the

best; and the need I feel under of being as composed and deliberate as I

can be, and yet of not shirking or putting off the occasion that there

is for doing a duty; would have brought me back here to be quiet, under

any circumstances."

[243] The same letter adds: "The fourth edition of _Great Expectations_

is now going to press; the third being nearly out. Bulwer's story keeps

us up bravely. As well as we can make out, we have even risen fifteen

hundred."

[244] "There was a very touching thing in the Chapel" (at Brompton).

"When the body was to be taken up and carried to the grave, there

stepped out, instead of the undertaker's men with their hideous

paraphernalia, the men who had always been with the two brothers at the

Egyptian Hall; and they, in their plain, decent, own mourning clothes,

carried the poor fellow away. Also, standing about among the

gravestones, dressed in black, I noticed every kind of person who had

ever had to do with him--from our own gas man and doorkeepers and

billstickers, up to Johnson the printer and that class of man. The

father and Albert and he now lie together, and the grave, I suppose,

will be no more disturbed I wrote a little inscription for the stone,

and it is quite full."

[245] Of his former manager he writes in the same letter: "I miss him

dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me

while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten

minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something

cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of

them are always somewhere, and he was always everywhere."

[246] The more detailed account of the scene which he wrote to his

daughter is also well worth giving. "A most tremendous hall here last

night. Something almost terrible in the cram. A fearful thing might have

happened. Suddenly, when they were all very still over Smike, my Gas

Batten came down, and it looked as if the room were falling. There were

three great galleries crammed to the roof, and a high steep flight of

stairs; and a panic must have destroyed numbers of people. A lady in the

front row of stalls screamed, and ran out wildly towards me, and for one

instant there was a terrible wave in the crowd. I addressed that lady,

laughing (for I knew she was in sight of everybody there), and called

out as if it happened every night--'There's nothing the matter I assure

you; don't be alarmed; pray sit down----' and she sat down directly, and

there was a thunder of applause. It took some five minutes to mend, and

I looked on with my hands in my pockets; for I think if I had turned my

back for a moment, there might still have been a move. My people were

dreadfully alarmed--Boycott" (the gas-man) "in particular, who I suppose

had some notion that the whole place might have taken fire--'but there

stood the master,' he did me the honour to say afterwards, in addressing

the rest, 'as cool as ever I see him a lounging at a Railway Station.'"

[247] The letter referred also to the death of his American friend

Professor Felton. "Your mention of poor Felton's death is a shock of

surprise as well as grief to me, for I had not heard a word about it.

Mr. Fields told me when he was here that the effect of that hotel

disaster of bad drinking water had not passed away; so I suppose, as you

do, that he sank under it. Poor dear Felton! It is 20 years since I told

you of the delight my first knowledge of him gave me, and it is as

strongly upon me to this hour. I wish our ways had crossed a little

oftener, but that would not have made it better for us now. Alas! alas!

all ways have the same finger-post at the head of them, and at every

turning in them."

[248] I give the letter in which he put the scheme formally before me,

after the renewed and larger offers had been submitted. "If there were

reasonable hope and promise, I could make up my mind to go to Australia

and get money. I would not accept the Australian people's offer. I would

take no money from them; would bind myself to nothing with them; but

would merely make them my agents at such and such a per centage, and go

and read there. I would take some man of literary pretensions as a

secretary (Charles Collins? What think you?) and with his aid" (he

afterwards made the proposal to his old friend Mr. Thomas Beard) "would

do, for _All the Year Round_ while I was away, The Uncommercial

Traveller Upside Down. If the notion of these speculators be anything

like accurate, I should come back rich. I should have seen a great deal

of novelty to boot. I should have been very miserable too. . . . Of course

one cannot possibly count upon the money to be realized by a six months'

absence, but, L12,000 is supposed to be a low estimate. Mr. S. brought

me letters from members of the legislature, newspaper editors, and the

like, exhorting me to come, saying how much the people talk of me, and

dwelling on the kind of reception that would await me. No doubt this is

so, and of course a great deal of curious experience for after use would

be gained over and above the money. Being my own master too, I could

'work' myself more delicately than if I bound myself for money

beforehand. A few years hence, if all other circumstances were the same,

I might not be so well fitted for the excessive wear and tear. This is

about the whole case. But pray do not suppose that I am in my own mind

favourable to going, or that I have any fancy for going." That was late

in October. From Paris in November (1862), he wrote: "I mentioned the

question to Bulwer when he dined with us here last Sunday, and he was

all for going. He said that not only did he think the whole population

would go to the Readings, but that the country would strike me in some

quite new aspect for a Book; and that wonders might be done with such

book in the way of profit, over there as well as here."

[249] A person present thus described (1st of February 1863) the second

night to Miss Dickens. "No one can imagine the scene of last Friday

night at the Embassy . . . a two hours' storm of excitement and pleasure.

They actually murmured and applauded right away into their carriages and

down the street."

CHAPTER XII.

HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN.

1855-1865.

Book of MS. Memoranda--Home of the

Barnacles--Original of Mrs. Clennam--River and

Ferryman--Notions for _Little Dorrit_--Original

of _Hunted Down_--Titles for _Tale of Two

Cities_--Hints for _Mutual Friend_--Reprobate's

Notion of Duty--Proposed Opening for a

Story--England first seen by an

Englishman--Touching Fancy--Story from State

Trials--Sentimentalist and her Fate--Female

Groups--Children Farming--Subjects for

Description--Fancies not worked upon--Available

Names--Mr. Brobity's Snuff-box.

DICKENS began the Book of Memoranda for possible use in his work, to

which occasional reference has been made, in January 1855, six months

before the first page of _Little Dorrit_ was written; and I find no

allusion leading me to suppose, except in one very doubtful instance,

that he had made addition to its entries, or been in the habit of

resorting to them, after the date of _Our Mutual Friend_. It seems to

comprise that interval of ten years in his life.

In it were put down any hints or suggestions that occurred to him. A

mere piece of imagery or fancy, it might be at one time; at another the

outline of a subject or a character; then a bit of description or

dialogue; no order or sequence being observed in any. Titles for stories

were set down too, and groups of names for the actors in them; not the

least curious of the memoranda belonging to this class. More rarely,

entry is made of some oddity of speech; and he has thus preserved in it,

_verbatim et literatim_, what he declared to have been as startling a

message as he ever received. A confidential servant at Tavistock House,

having conferred on some proposed changes in his bed-room with the party

that was to do the work, delivered this ultimatum to her master. "The

gas-fitter says, sir, that he can't alter the fitting of your gas in

your bed-room without taking up almost the ole of your bed-room floor,

and pulling your room to pieces. He says, of course you can have it done

if you wish, and he'll do it for you and make a good job of it, but he

would have to destroy your room first, and go entirely under the

jistes."[250]

It is very interesting in this book, last legacy as it is of the

literary remains of such a writer, to compare the way in which fancies

were worked out with their beginnings entered in its pages. Those

therefore will first be taken that in some form or other appeared

afterwards in his writings, with such reference to the latter as may

enable the reader to make comparison for himself.

"Our House. Whatever it is, it is in a first-rate situation, and a

fashionable neighbourhood. (Auctioneer called it 'a gentlemanly

residence.') A series of little closets squeezed up into the corner of a

dark street--but a Duke's Mansion round the corner. The whole house

just large enough to hold a vile smell. The air breathed in it, at the

best of times, a kind of Distillation of Mews." He made it the home of

the Barnacles in _Little Dorrit_.

What originally he meant to express by Mrs. Clennam in the same story

has narrower limits, and a character less repellent, in the Memoranda

than it assumed in the book. "Bed-ridden (or room-ridden)

twenty--five-and-twenty--years; any length of time. As to most things,

kept at a standstill all the while. Thinking of altered streets as the

old streets--changed things as the unchanged things--the youth or girl I

quarrelled with all those years ago, as the same youth or girl now.

Brought out of doors by an unexpected exercise of my latent strength of

character, and then how strange!"

One of the people of the same story who becomes a prominent actor in it,

Henry Gowan, a creation on which he prided himself as forcible and new,

seems to have risen to his mind in this way. "I affect to believe that I

would do anything myself for a ten-pound note, and that anybody else

would. I affect to be always book-keeping in every man's case, and

posting up a little account of good and evil with every one. Thus the

greatest rascal becomes 'the dearest old fellow,' and there is much less

difference than you would be inclined to suppose between an honest man

and a scoundrel. While I affect to be finding good in most men, I am in

reality decrying it where it really is, and setting it up where it is

not. Might not a presentation of this far from uncommon class of

character, if I could put it strongly enough, be likely to lead some

men to reflect, and change a little? I think it has never been done."

In _Little Dorrit_ also will be found a picture which seems to live with

a more touching effect in his first pleasing fancy of it. "The ferryman

on a peaceful river, who has been there from youth, who lives, who grows

old, who does well, who does ill, who changes, who dies--the river runs

six hours up and six hours down, the current sets off that point, the

same allowance must be made for the drifting of the boat, the same tune

is always played by the rippling water against the prow."

Here was an entry made when the thought occurred to him of the close of

old Dorrit's life. "First sign of the father failing and breaking down.

Cancels long interval. Begins to talk about the turnkey who first called

him the Father of the Marshalsea--as if he were still living. 'Tell Bob

I want to speak to him. See if he is on the Lock, my dear.'" And here

was the first notion of Clennam's reverse of fortune. "His falling into

difficulty, and himself imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Then she, out of

all her wealth and changed station, comes back in her old dress, and

devotes herself in the old way."

He seems to have designed, for the sketches of society in the same tale,

a "Full-length portrait of his lordship, surrounded by worshippers;" of

which, beside that brief memorandum, only his first draft of the general

outline was worked at. "Sensible men enough, agreeable men enough,

independent men enough in a certain way;--but the moment they begin to

circle round my lord, and to shine with a borrowed light from his

lordship, heaven and earth how mean and subservient! What a competition

and outbidding of each other in servility."

The last of the Memoranda hints which were used in the story whose

difficulties at its opening seem first to have suggested them, ran thus:

"The unwieldy ship taken in tow by the snorting little steam tug"--by

which was prefigured the patriarch Casby and his agent Panks.

In a few lines are the germ of the tale called _Hunted Down_: "Devoted

to the Destruction of a man. Revenge built up on love. The secretary in

the Wainewright case, who had fallen in love (or supposed he had) with

the murdered girl."--The hint on which he worked in his description of

the villain of that story, is also in the Memoranda. "The man with his

hair parted straight up the front of his head, like an aggravating

gravel-walk. Always presenting it to you. 'Up here, if you please.

Neither to the right nor left. Take me exactly in this direction.

Straight up here. Come off the grass--'"

His first intention as to the _Tale of Two Cities_ was to write it upon

a plan proposed in this manuscript book. "How as to a story in two

periods--with a lapse of time between, like a French Drama? Titles for

such a notion. TIME! THE LEAVES OF THE FOREST. SCATTERED LEAVES. THE

GREAT WHEEL. ROUND AND ROUND. OLD LEAVES. LONG AGO. FAR APART. FALLEN

LEAVES. FIVE AND TWENTY YEARS. YEARS AND YEARS. ROLLING YEARS. DAY AFTER

DAY. FELLED TREES. MEMORY CARTON. ROLLING STONES. TWO GENERATIONS." That

special title of _Memory Carton_ shows that what led to the greatest

success of the book as written was always in his mind; and another of

the memoranda is this rough hint of the character itself. "The

drunken?--dissipated?--What?--LION--and his JACKALL and Primer, stealing

down to him at unwonted hours."

The studies of Silas Wegg and his patron as they exist in _Our Mutual

Friend_, are hardly such good comedy as in the form which the first

notion of them seems to have intended. "Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The

two characters. One reporting to the other as he reads. Both getting

confused as to whether it is not all going on now." In the same story

may be traced, more or less clearly, other fancies which had found their

first expression in the Memoranda. A touch for Bella Wilfer is here.

"Buying poor shabby--FATHER?--a new hat. So incongruous that it makes

him like African King Boy, or King George; who is usually full dressed

when he has nothing upon him but a cocked hat or a waistcoat." Here

undoubtedly is the voice of Podsnap. "I stand by my friends and

acquaintances;--not for their sakes, but because they are _my_ friends

and acquaintances. _I_ know them, _I_ have licensed them, they have

taken out _my_ certificate. Ergo, I champion them as myself." To the

same redoubtable person another trait clearly belongs. "And by denying a

thing, supposes that he altogether puts it out of existence." A third

very perfectly expresses the boy, ready for mischief, who does all the

work there is to be done in Eugene Wrayburn's place of business. "The

office boy for ever looking out of window, who never has anything to

do."

The poor wayward purposeless good-hearted master of the boy, Eugene

himself, is as evidently in this: "If they were great things, I, the

untrustworthy man in little things, would do them earnestly--But O No, I

wouldn't!" What follows has a more direct reference; being indeed almost

literally copied in the story. "As to the question whether I, Eugene,

lying ill and sick even unto death, may be consoled by the

representation that coming through this illness, I shall begin a new

life, and have energy and purpose and all I have yet wanted: 'I _hope_ I

should, but I _know_ I shouldn't. Let me die, my dear.'"

In connection with the same book, the last in that form which he lived

to complete, another fancy may be copied from which, though not

otherwise worked out in the tale, the relation of Lizzie Hexam to her

brother was taken. "A man, and his wife--or daughter--or niece. The man,

a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or girl) with good in her, and with

compunctions. He believes nothing, and defies everything; yet has

suspicions always, that she is 'praying against' his evil schemes, and

making them go wrong. He is very much opposed to this, and is always

angrily harping on it. 'If she _must_ pray, why can't she pray in their

favour, instead of going against 'em? She's always ruining me--she

always is--and calls that, Duty! There's a religious person! Calls it

Duty to fly in my face! Calls it Duty to go sneaking against me!'"

Other fancies preserved in his Memoranda were left wholly unemployed,

receiving from him no more permanent form of any kind than that which

they have in this touching record; and what most people would probably

think the most attractive and original of all the thoughts he had thus

set down for future use, are those that were never used.

Here were his first rough notes for the opening of a story. "Beginning

with the breaking up of a large party of guests at a country house:

house left lonely with the shrunken family in it: guests spoken of, and

introduced to the reader that way.--OR, beginning with a house abandoned

by a family fallen into reduced circumstances. Their old furniture

there, and numberless tokens of their old comforts. Inscriptions under

the bells downstairs--'Mr. John's Room,' 'Miss Caroline's Room.' Great

gardens trimly kept to attract a tenant: but no one in them. A landscape

without figures. Billiard room: table covered up, like a body. Great

stables without horses, and great coach-houses without carriages. Grass

growing in the chinks of the stone-paving, this bright cold winter day.

_Downhills._" Another opening had also suggested itself to him. "Open a

story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted

sets of people, into the connexion necessary for the story, by means of

an electric message. Describe the message--_be_ the message--flashing

along through space, over the earth, and under the sea."[251] Connected

with which in some way would seem to be this other notion, following it

in the Memoranda. "Representing London--or Paris, or any other great

place--in the new light of being actually unknown to all the people in

the story, and only taking the colour of their fears and fancies and

opinions. So getting a new aspect, and being unlike itself. An _odd_

unlikeness of itself."

The subjects for stories are various, and some are striking. There was

one he clung to much, and thought of frequently as in a special degree

available for a series of papers in his periodical; but when he came to

close quarters with it the difficulties were found to be too great.

"English landscape. The beautiful prospect, trim fields, clipped hedges,

everything so neat and orderly--gardens, houses, roads. Where are the

people who do all this? There must be a great many of them, to do it.

Where are they all? And are _they_, too, so well kept and so fair to

see? Suppose the foregoing to be wrought out by an Englishman: say, from

China: who knows nothing about his native country." To which may be

added a fancy that savours of the same mood of discontent, political and

social. "How do I know that I, a man, am to learn from insects--unless

it is to learn how little my littlenesses are? All that botheration in

the hive about the queen bee, may be, in little, me and the court

circular."

A domestic story he had met with in the State Trials struck him greatly

by its capabilities, and I may preface it by mentioning another subject,

not entered in the Memoranda, which for a long time impressed him as

capable of attractive treatment. It was after reading one of the

witch-trials that this occurred to him; and the heroine was to be a girl

who for a special purpose had taken a witch's disguise, and whose trick

was not discovered until she was actually at the stake. Here is the

State Trials story as told by Dickens. "There is a case in the State

Trials, where a certain officer made love to a (supposed) miser's

daughter, and ultimately induced her to give her father slow poison,

while nursing him in sickness. Her father discovered it, told her so,

forgave her, and said 'Be patient my dear--I shall not live long, even

if I recover: and then you shall have all my wealth.' Though penitent

then, she afterwards poisoned him again (under the same influence), and

successfully. Whereupon it appeared that the old man had no money at

all, and had lived on a small annuity which died with him, though always

feigning to be rich. He had loved this daughter with great affection."

A theme touching closely on ground that some might think dangerous, is

sketched in the following fancy. "The father (married young) who, in

perfect innocence, venerates his son's young wife, as the realization of

his ideal of woman. (He not happy in his own choice.) The son slights

her, and knows nothing of her worth. The father watches her, protects

her, labours for her, endures for her,--is for ever divided between his

strong natural affection for his son as his son, and his resentment

against him as this young creature's husband." Here is another, less

dangerous, which he took from an actual occurrence made known to him

when he was at Bonchurch. "The idea of my being brought up by my mother

(me the narrator), my father being dead; and growing up in this belief

until I find that my father is the gentleman I have sometimes seen, and

oftener heard of, who has the handsome young wife, and the dog I once

took notice of when I was a little child, and who lives in the great

house and drives about."

Very admirable is this. "The girl separating herself from the lover who

has shewn himself unworthy--loving him still--living single for his

sake--but never more renewing their old relations. Coming to him when

they are both grown old, and nursing him in his last illness." Nor is

the following less so. "Two girls _mis-marrying_ two men. The man who

has evil in him, dragging the superior woman down. The man who has good

in him, raising the inferior woman up." Dickens would have been at his

best in working out both fancies.

In some of the most amusing of his sketches of character, women also

take the lead. "The lady un peu passee, who is determined to be

interesting. No matter how much I love that person--nay, the more so for

that very reason--I MUST flatter, and bother, and be weak and

apprehensive and nervous, and what not. If I were well and strong,

agreeable and self-denying, my friend might forget me." Another not

remotely belonging to the same family is as neatly hit off. "The

sentimental woman feels that the comic, undesigning, unconscious man, is

'Her Fate.'--I her fate? God bless my soul, it puts me into a cold

perspiration to think of it. _I_ her fate? How can _I_ be her fate? I

don't mean to be. I don't want to have anything to do with

her--Sentimental woman perceives nevertheless that Destiny must be

accomplished."

Other portions of a female group are as humorously sketched and hardly

less entertaining. "The enthusiastically complimentary person, who

forgets you in her own flowery prosiness: as--'I have no need to say to

a person of your genius and feeling, and wide range of experience'--and

then, being shortsighted, puts up her glass to remember who you

are."--"Two sisters" (these were real people known to him). "One going

in for being generally beloved (which she is not by any means); and the

other for being generally hated (which she needn't be)."--"The

bequeathed maid-servant, or friend. Left as a legacy. And a devil of a

legacy too."--"The woman who is never on any account to hear of anything

shocking. For whom the world is to be of barley-sugar."--"The lady who

lives on her enthusiasm; and hasn't a jot."--"Bright-eyed creature

selling jewels. The stones and the eyes." Much significance is in the

last few words. One may see to what uses Dickens would have turned them.

A more troubled note is sounded in another of these female characters.

"I am a common woman--fallen. Is it devilry in me--is it a wicked

comfort--what is it--that induces me to be always tempting other women

down, while I hate myself!" This next, with as much truth in it, goes

deeper than the last. "The prostitute who will not let one certain youth

approach her. 'O let there be some one in the world, who having an

inclination towards me has not gratified it, and has not known me in my

degradation!' She almost loving him.--Suppose, too, this touch in her

could not be believed in by his mother or mistress: by some handsome and

proudly virtuous woman, always revolting from her." A more agreeable

sketch than either follows, though it would not please M. Taine so well.

"The little baby-like married woman--so strange in her new dignity, and

talking with tears in her eyes, of her sisters 'and all of them' at

home. Never from home before, and never going back again." Another from

the same manuscript volume not less attractive, which was sketched in

his own home, I gave upon a former page.

The female character in its relations with the opposite sex has lively

illustration in the Memoranda. "The man who is governed by his wife, and

is heartily despised in consequence by all other wives; who still want

to govern _their_ husbands, notwithstanding." An alarming family pair

follows that. "The playful--and scratching--family. Father and

daughter." And here is another. "The agreeable (and wicked) young-mature

man, and his devoted sister." What next was set down he had himself

partly seen; and, by enquiry at the hospital named, had ascertained the

truth of the rest. "The two people in the Incurable Hospital.--The poor

incurable girl lying on a water-bed, and the incurable man who has a

strange flirtation with her; comes and makes confidences to her; snips

and arranges her plants; and rehearses to her the comic songs(!) by

writing which he materially helps out his living."[252]

Two lighter figures are very pleasantly touched. "Set of circumstances

which suddenly bring an easy, airy fellow into near relations with

people he knows nothing about, and has never even seen. This, through

his being thrown in the way of the innocent young personage of the

story. 'Then there is Uncle Sam to be considered,' says she. 'Aye to be

sure,' says he, 'so there is! By Jupiter, I forgot Uncle Sam. He's a

rock ahead, is Uncle Sam. He must be considered, of course; he must be

smoothed down; he must be cleared out of the way. To be sure. I never

thought of Uncle Sam.--By the bye, who _is_ Uncle Sam?'"

There are several such sketches as that, to set against the groups of

women; and some have Dickens's favourite vein of satire in them. "The

man whose vista is always stopped up by the image of Himself. Looks down

a long walk, and can't see round himself, or over himself, or beyond

himself. Is always blocking up his own way. Would be such a good thing

for him, if he could knock himself down." Another picture of selfishness

is touched with greater delicacy. "'Too good' to be grateful to, or

dutiful to, or anything else that ought to be. 'I won't thank you: you

are too good.'--'Don't ask me to marry you: you are too good.'--In

short, I don't particularly mind ill-using you, and being selfish with

you: for you are _so_ good. Virtue its own reward!" A third, which seems

to reverse the dial, is but another face of it: frankly avowing faults,

which are virtues. "In effect--I admit I am generous, amiable, gentle,

magnanimous. Reproach me--I deserve it--I know my faults--I have striven

in vain to get the better of them." Dickens would have made much, too,

of the working out of the next. "The knowing man in distress, who

borrows a round sum of a generous friend. Comes, in depression and

tears, dines, gets the money, and gradually cheers up over his wine, as

he obviously entertains himself with the reflection that his friend is

an egregious fool to have lent it to him, and that _he_ would have known

better." And so of this other. "The man who invariably says apposite

things (in the way of reproof or sarcasm) THAT HE DON'T MEAN. Astonished

when they are explained to him."

Here is a fancy that I remember him to have been more than once bent

upon making use of: but the opportunity never came. "The two men to be

guarded against, as to their revenge. One, whom I openly hold in some

serious animosity, whom I am at the pains to wound and defy, and whom I

estimate as worth wounding and defying;--the other, whom I treat as a

sort of insect, and contemptuously and pleasantly flick aside with my

glove. But, it turns out to be the latter who is the really dangerous

man; and, when I expect the blow from the other, it comes from _him_."

We have the master hand in the following bit of dialogue, which takes

wider application than that for which it appears to have been intended.

"'There is some virtue in him too.'

"'Virtue! Yes. So there is in any grain of seed in a seedsman's

shop--but you must put it in the ground, before you can get any good out

of it.'

"'Do you mean that _he_ must be put in the ground before any good comes

of _him_?'

"'Indeed I do. You may call it burying him, or you may call it sowing

him, as you like. You must set him in the earth, before you get any good

of him.'"

One of the entries is a list of persons and places meant to have been

made subjects for special description, and it will awaken regret that

only as to one of them (the Mugby Refreshments) his intention was

fulfilled. "A Vestryman. A Briber. A Station Waiting-Room. Refreshments

at Mugby. A Physician's Waiting-Room. The Royal Academy. An Antiquary's

house. A Sale Room. A Picture Gallery (for sale). A Waste-paper Shop. A

Post-Office. A Theatre."

All will have been given that have particular interest or value, from

this remarkable volume, when the thoughts and fancies I proceed to

transcribe have been put before the reader.

* * * * *

"The man who is incapable of his own happiness. Or who is always in

pursuit of happiness. Result, Where is happiness to be found then?

Surely not Everywhere? Can that be so, after all? Is _this_ my

experience?"

* * * * *

"The people who persist in defining and analysing their (and everybody

else's) moral qualities, motives and what not, at once in the narrowest

spirit and the most lumbering manner;--as if one should put up an

enormous scaffolding for the building of a pigstye."

* * * * *

"The house-full of Toadies and Humbugs. They all know and despise one

another; but--partly to keep their hands in, and partly to make out

their own individual cases--pretend not to detect one another."

* * * * *

"People realising immense sums of money,

imaginatively--speculatively--counting their chickens before hatched.

Inflaming each other's imaginations about great gains of money, and

entering into a sort of intangible, impossible, competition as to who is

the richer."

* * * * *

"The advertising sage, philosopher, and friend: who educates 'for the

bar, the pulpit, or the stage.'"

* * * * *

"The character of the real refugee--not the conventional; the real."

* * * * *

"The mysterious character, or characters, interchanging confidences.

'Necessary to be very careful in that direction.'--'In what

direction?'--'B'--'You don't say so. What, do you mean that C----?'--'Is

aware of D. Exactly.'"

"The father and boy, as I dramatically see them. Opening with the wild

dance I have in my mind."

* * * * *

"The old child. That is to say, born of parents advanced in life, and

observing the parents of other children to be young. Taking an old tone

accordingly."

* * * * *

"A thoroughly sulky character--perverting everything. Making the good,

bad--and the bad, good."

* * * * *

"The people who lay all their sins negligences and ignorances, on

Providence."

* * * * *

"The man who marries his cook at last, after being so desperately

knowing about the sex."

* * * * *

"The swell establishment, frightfully mean and miserable in all but the

'reception rooms.' Those very showy."

* * * * *

"B. tells M. what my opinion is of his work, &c. Quoting the man you

have once spoken to as if he had talked a life's talk in two minutes."

* * * * *

"A misplaced and mis-married man; always, as it were, playing hide and

seek with the world; and never finding what Fortune seems to have hidden

when he was born."

"Certain women in Africa who have lost children, carry little wooden

images of children on their heads, and always put their food to the lips

of those images, before tasting it themselves. This is in a part of

Africa where the mortality among children (judging from the number of

these little memorials) is very great."

* * * * *

Two more entries are the last which he made. "AVAILABLE NAMES"

introduces a wonderful list in the exact following classes and order; as

to which the reader may be left to his own memory for selection of such

as found their way into the several stories from _Little Dorrit_ to the

end. The rest, not lifted into that higher notice by such favour of

their creator, must remain like any other undistinguished crowd. But

among them may perhaps be detected, by those who have special insight

for the physiognomy of a name, some few with so great promise in them of

fun and character as will make the "mute inglorious" fate which has

befallen them a subject for special regret; and much ingenious

speculation will probably wait upon all. Dickens has generally been

thought, by the curious, to display not a few of his most characteristic

traits in this particular field of invention.

First there are titles for books; and from the list subjoined were taken

two for Christmas numbers and two for stories, though _Nobody's Fault_

had ultimately to give way to _Little Dorrit_.

"THE LUMBER ROOM.

SOMEBODY'S LUGGAGE.

TO BE LEFT TILL CALLED FOR.

SOMETHING WANTED.

EXTREMES MEET.

NOBODY'S FAULT.

THE GRINDSTONE.

ROKESMITH'S FORGE.

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.

THE CINDER HEAP.

TWO GENERATIONS.

BROKEN CROCKERY.

DUST.

THE HOME DEPARTMENT.

THE YOUNG PERSON.

NOW OR NEVER.

MY NEIGHBOURS.

THE CHILDREN OF THE FATHERS.

NO THOROUGHFARE."

Then comes a batch of "Christian names": Girls and Boys: which stand

thus, with mention of the source from which he obtained them. These

therefore can hardly be called pure invention. Some would have been

reckoned too extravagant for anything but reality.

"_Girls from Privy Council Education lists._

"LELIA.

MENELLA.

RUBINA.

IRIS.

REBECCA.

ETTY.

REBINAH.

SEBA.

PERSIA.

ARAMANDA.

DORIS.

BALZINA.

PLEASANT.

GENTILLA.

"_Boys from Privy Council Education lists._

"DOCTOR.

HOMER.

ODEN.

BRADLEY.

ZERUBBABEL.

MAXIMILIAN.

URBIN.

SAMILIAS.

PICKLES.

ORANGE.

FEATHER.

"_Girls and Boys from Ditto._

"AMANDA, ETHLYNIDA; BOETIUS, BOLTIUS."

To which he adds supplementary lists that appear to be his own.

"_More Boys._

"ROBERT LADLE.

JOLY STICK.

BILL MARIGOLD.

STEPHEN MARQUICK.

JONATHAN KNOTWELL.

PHILIP BROWNDRESS.

HENRY GHOST.

GEORGE MUZZLE.

WALTER ASHES.

ZEPHANIAH FERRY (or FURY).

WILLIAM WHY.

ROBERT GOSPEL.

THOMAS FATHERLY.

ROBIN SCUBBAM.

"_More Girls._

"SARAH GOLDSACKS.

ROSETTA DUST.

SUSAN GOLDRING.

CATHERINE TWO.

MATILDA RAINBIRD.

MIRIAM DENIAL.

SOPHIA DOOMSDAY.

ALICE THORNEYWORK.

SALLY GIMBLET.

VERITY HAWKYARD.

BIRDIE NASH.

AMBROSINA EVENTS.

APAULINA VERNON.

NELTIE ASHFORD."

And then come the mass of his "available names," which stand thus,

without other introduction or comment:

"TOWNDLING.

MOOD.

GUFF.

TREBLE.

CHILBY.

SPESSIFER.

WODDER.

WHELPFORD.

FENNERCK.

GANNERSON.

CHINKERBLE.

BINTREY.

FLEDSON.

HIRLL.

BRAYLE.

MULLENDER.

TRESLINGHAM.

BRANKLE.

SITTERN.

DOSTONE.

CAY-LON.

SLYANT.

QUEEDY.

BESSELTHUR.

MUSTY.

GROUT.

TERTIUS JOBBER.

AMON HEADSTON.

STRAYSHOTT.

HIGDEN.

MORFIT.

GOLDSTRAW.

BARREL.

INGE.

JUMP.

JIGGINS.

BONES.

COY.

DAWN.

TATKIN.

DROWVEY.

PUDSEY.

PEDSEY.

DUNCALF.

TRICKLEBANK.

SAPSEA.

READYHUFF.

DUFTY.

FOGGY.

TWINN.

BROWNSWORD.

PEARTREE.

SUDDS.

SILVERMAN.

KIMBER.

LAUGHLEY.

LESSOCK.

TIPPINS.

MINNITT.

RADLOWE.

PRATCHET.

MAWDETT.

WOZENHAM.

SNOWELL.

LOTTRUM.

LAMMLE.

FROSER.

HOLBLACK.

MULLEY.

REDWORTH.

REDFOOT.

TARBOX (B).

TINKLING.

DUDDLE.

JEBUS.

POWDERHILL.

GRIMMER.

SKUSE.

TITCOOMBE.

CRABBLE.

SWANNOCK.

TUZZEN.

TWEMLOW.

SQUAB.

JACKMAN.

SUGG.

BREMMIDGE.

SILAS BLODGET.

MELVIN BEAL.

BUTTRICK.

EDSON.

SANLORN.

LIGHTWORD.

TITBULL.

BANGHAM.

KYLE--NYLE.

PEMBLE.

MAXEY.

ROKESMITH.

CHIVERY.

WABBLER.

PEEX--SPEEX.

GANNAWAY.

MRS. FLINKS.

FLINX.

JEE.

HARDEN.

MERDLE.

MURDEN.

TOPWASH.

PORDAGE.

DORRET--DORRIT.

CARTON.

MINIFIE.

SLINGO.

JOAD.

KINCH.

MAG.

CHELLYSON.

BLENNAM--CL.

BARDOCK.

SNIGSWORTH.

SWENTON.

CASBY--PEACH.

LOWLEIGH--LOWELY.

PIGRIN.

YERBURY.

PLORNISH.

MAROON.

BANDY-NANDY.

STONEBURY.

MAGWITCH.

MEAGLES.

PANCKS.

HAGGAGE.

PROVIS.

STILTINGTON.

STILTWALK.

STILTINGSTALK.

STILTSTALKING.

RAVENDER.

PODSNAP.

CLARRIKER.

COMPERY.

STRIVER-STRYVER.

PUMBLECHOOK.

WANGLER.

BOFFIN.

BANTINCK.

DIBTON.

WILFER.

GLIBBERY.

MULVEY.

HORLICK.

DOOLGE.

GANNERY.

GARGERY.

WILLSHARD.

RIDERHOOD.

PRATTERSTONE.

CHINKIBLE.

WOPSELL.

WOPSLE.

WHELPINGTON.

WHELPFORD.

GAYVERY.

WEGG.

HUBBLE.

URRY.

KIBBLE.

SKIFFINS.

WODDER.

ETSER.

AKERSHEM."

The last of the Memoranda, and the last words written by Dickens in the

blank paper book containing them, are these. "'Then I'll give up

snuff.' Brobity.--An alarming sacrifice. Mr. Brobity's snuff-box. The

Pawnbroker's account of it?" What was proposed by this must be left to

conjecture; but "Brobity" is the name of one of the people in his

unfinished story, and the suggestion may have been meant for some

incident in it. If so, it is the only passage in the volume which can be

in any way connected with the piece of writing on which he was last

engaged. Some names were taken for it from the lists, but there is

otherwise nothing to recall _Edwin Drood_.

FOOTNOTES:

[250] From the same authority proceeded, in answer to a casual question

one day, a description of the condition of his wardrobe of which he has

also made note in the Memoranda. "Well, sir, your clothes is all shabby,

and your boots is all burst."

[251] The date when this fancy dropped into his Memoranda is fixed by

the following passage in a letter to me of the 25th of August 1862. "I

am trying to coerce my thoughts into hammering out the Christmas number.

And I have an idea of opening a book (not the Christmas number--a book)

by bringing together two strongly contrasted places and two strongly

contrasted sets of people, with which and with whom the story is to

rest, through the agency of an electric message. I think a fine thing

might be made of the message itself shooting over the land and under the

sea, and it would be a curious way of sounding the key note."

[252] Following this in the "Memoranda" is an advertisement cut from the

_Times_: of a kind that always expressed to Dickens a child-farming that

deserved the gallows quite as much as the worst kind of starving, by way

of farming, babies. The fourteen guineas a-year, "tender" age of the

"dear" ones, maternal care, and no vacations or extras, to him had only

one meaning.

EDUCATION FOR LITTLE CHILDREN.--Terms 14 to 18

guineas per annum; no extras or vacations. The

system of education embraces the wide range of

each useful and ornamental study suited to the

tender age of the dear children. Maternal care

and kindness may be relied on.--X., Heald's

Library, Fulham-road.

CHAPTER XIII.

THIRD SERIES OF READINGS.

1864-1867.

Death of Thackeray--Dickens on

Thackeray--Mother's Death--Death of his Second

Son--_Our Mutual Friend_--Revising a

Play--Sorrowful New Year--Lameness--Fatal

Anniversary--New Readings undertaken--Offer of

Messrs. Chappell--Relieved from

Management--Greater Fatigues involved--A

Memorable Evening--Mrs. Carlyle--Offer for more

Readings--Result of the Last--Grave

Warnings--At Liverpool--At Manchester--At

Birmingham--In Scotland--Exertion and its

Result--An Old Malady--Audiences at

Newcastle--Scene at Tynemouth--In Dublin--At

Cambridge--Close of the Third Series--Desire in

America to hear Dickens read--Sends Agent to

America--Warning unheeded--For and against

reading in America--Decision to go--Departure.

THE sudden death of Thackeray on the Christmas eve of 1863 was a painful

shock to Dickens. It would not become me to speak, when he has himself

spoken, of his relations with so great a writer and so old a friend.

"I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to

become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last,[253] shortly

before Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he told me that he had

been in bed three days . . . and that he had it in his mind to try a new

remedy which he laughingly described. He was cheerful, and looked very

bright. In the night of that day week, he died. The long interval

between these two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many

occasions when he was extremely humorous, when he was irresistibly

extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with

children. . . . No one can be surer than I, of the greatness and goodness

of his heart. . . . In no place should I take it upon myself at this time

to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his

subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his

delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching

ballads, of his mastery over the English language. . . . But before me lies

all that he had written of his latest story . . . and the pain I have felt

in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in

the healthiest vigour of his powers when he worked on this last

labour. . . . The last words he corrected in print were 'And my heart

throbbed with an exquisite bliss.' God grant that on that Christmas Eve

when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up his arms as he had

been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and of

Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his

own heart so to throb, when he passed away to his Redeemer's rest. He

was found peacefully lying as above described, composed, undisturbed,

and to all appearance asleep."

Other griefs were with Dickens at this time, and close upon them came

the too certain evidence that his own health was yielding to the

overstrain which had been placed upon it by the occurrences and

anxieties of the few preceding years. His mother, whose infirm health

had been tending for more than two years to the close, died in September

1863; and on his own birthday in the following February he had tidings

of the death of his second son Walter, on the last day of the old year

in the officers' hospital at Calcutta; to which he had been sent up

invalided from his station, on his way home. He was a lieutenant in the

26th Native Infantry regiment, and had been doing duty with the 42nd

Highlanders. In 1853 his father had thus written to the youth's

godfather, Walter Savage Landor: "Walter is a very good boy, and comes

home from school with honorable commendation and a prize into the

bargain. He never gets into trouble, for he is a great favourite with

the whole house and one of the most amiable boys in the boy-world. He

comes out on birthdays in a blaze of shirt pin." The pin was a present

from Landor; to whom three years later, when the boy had obtained his

cadetship through the kindness of Miss Coutts, Dickens wrote again.

"Walter has done extremely well at school; has brought home a prize in

triumph; and will be eligible to 'go up' for his India examination soon

after next Easter. Having a direct appointment he will probably be sent

out soon after he has passed, and so will fall into that strange life

'up the country' before he well knows he is alive, or what life

is--which indeed seems to be rather an advanced state of knowledge." If

he had lived another month he would have reached his twenty-third year,

and perhaps not then the advanced state of knowledge his father speaks

of. But, never forfeiting his claim to those kindly paternal words, he

had the goodness and simplicity of boyhood to the last.

Dickens had at this time begun his last story in twenty numbers, and my

next chapter will show through what unwonted troubles, in this and the

following year, he had to fight his way. What otherwise during its

progress chiefly interested him, was the enterprise of Mr. Fechter at

the Lyceum, of which he had become the lessee; and Dickens was moved to

this quite as much by generous sympathy with the difficulties of such a

position to an artist who was not an Englishman, as by genuine

admiration of Mr. Fechter's acting. He became his helper in disputes,

adviser on literary points, referee in matters of management; and for

some years no face was more familiar than the French comedian's at

Gadshill or in the office of his journal. But theatres and their affairs

are things of a season, and even Dickens's whim and humour will not

revive for us any interest in these. No bad example, however, of the

difficulties in which a French actor may find himself with English

playwrights, will appear in a few amusing words from one of his letters

about a piece played at the Princess's before the Lyceum management was

taken in hand.

"I have been cautioning Fechter about the play whereof he gave the plot

and scenes to B; and out of which I have struck some enormities, my

account of which will (I think) amuse you. It has one of the best first

acts I ever saw; but if he can do much with the last two, not to say

three, there are resources in his art that _I_ know nothing about. When

I went over the play this day week, he was at least 20 minutes, _in a

boat, in the last scene_, discussing with another gentleman (also in the

boat) whether he should kill him or not; after which the gentleman dived

overboard and swam for it. Also, in the most important and dangerous

parts of the play, there was a young person of the name of Pickles who

was constantly being mentioned by name, in conjunction with the powers

of light or darkness; as, 'Great Heaven! Pickles?'--'By Hell, 'tis

Pickles!'--'Pickles? a thousand Devils!'--'Distraction! Pickles?'"[254]

The old year ended and the new one opened sadly enough. The death of

Leech in November affected Dickens very much,[255] and a severe attack

of illness in February put a broad mark between his past life and what

remained to him of the future. The lameness now began in his left foot

which never afterwards wholly left him, which was attended by great

suffering, and which baffled experienced physicians. He had persisted

in his ordinary exercise during heavy snow-storms, and to the last he

had the fancy that his illness was merely local. But that this was an

error is now certain; and it is more than probable that if the nervous

danger and disturbance it implied had been correctly appreciated at the

time, its warning might have been of priceless value to Dickens.

Unhappily he never thought of husbanding his strength except for the

purpose of making fresh demands upon it, and it was for this he took a

brief holiday in France during the summer. "Before I went away," he

wrote to his daughter, "I had certainly worked myself into a damaged

state. But the moment I got away, I began, thank God, to get well. I

hope to profit by this experience, and to make future dashes from my

desk before I want them." At his return he was in the terrible railway

accident at Staplehurst, on a day[256] which proved afterwards more

fatal to him; and it was with shaken nerves but unsubdued energy he

resumed the labour to be presently described. His foot troubled him more

or less throughout the autumn;[257] he was beset by nervous

apprehensions which the accident had caused to himself, not lessened by

his generous anxiety to assuage the severer sufferings inflicted by it

on others;[258] and that he should nevertheless have determined, on the

close of his book, to undertake a series of readings involving greater

strain and fatigue than any hitherto, was a startling circumstance. He

had perhaps become conscious, without owning it even to himself, that

for exertion of this kind the time left him was short; but, whatever

pressed him on, his task of the next three years, self-imposed, was to

make the most money in the shortest time without any regard to the

physical labour to be undergone. The very letter announcing his new

engagement shows how entirely unfit he was to enter upon it.

"For some time," he wrote at the end of February 1866, "I have been very

unwell. F. B. wrote me word that with such a pulse as I described, an

examination of the heart was absolutely necessary. 'Want of muscular

power in the heart,' B said. 'Only remarkable irritability of the

heart,' said Doctor Brinton of Brook-street, who had been called in to

consultation. I was not disconcerted; for I knew well beforehand that

the effect could not possibly be without the one cause at the bottom of

it, of some degeneration of some function of the heart. Of course I am

not so foolish as to suppose that all my work can have been achieved

without _some_ penalty, and I have noticed for some time a decided

change in my buoyancy and hopefulness--in other words, in my usual

'tone.' But tonics have already brought me round. So I have accepted an

offer, from Chappells of Bond-street, of L50 a night for thirty nights

to read 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris;' they undertaking all

the business, paying all personal expenses, travelling and otherwise, of

myself, John" (his office servant), "and my gasman; and making what they

can of it. I begin, I believe, in Liverpool on the Thursday in Easter

week, and then come to London. I am going to read at Cheltenham (on my

own account) on the 23rd and 24th of this month, staying with Macready

of course."

The arrangement of this series of Readings differed from those of its

predecessors in relieving Dickens from every anxiety except of the

reading itself; but, by such rapid and repeated change of nights at

distant places as kept him almost wholly in a railway carriage when not

at the reading-desk or in bed, it added enormously to the physical

fatigue. He would read at St. James's Hall in London one night, and at

Bradford the next. He would read in Edinburgh, go on to Glasgow and to

Aberdeen, then come back to Glasgow, read again in Edinburgh, strike off

to Manchester, come back to St. James's Hall once more, and begin the

same round again. It was labour that must in time have broken down the

strongest man, and what Dickens was when he assumed it we have seen.

He did not himself admit a shadow of misgiving. "As to the readings"

(11th of March), "all I have to do is, to take in my book and read, at

the appointed place and hour, and come out again. All the business of

every kind, is done by Chappells. They take John and my other man,

merely for my convenience. I have no more to do with any detail

whatever, than you have. They transact all the business at their own

cost, and on their own responsibility. I think they are disposed to do

it in a very good spirit, because, whereas the original proposition was

for thirty readings 'in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Paris,' they

wrote out their agreement 'in London, the Provinces, or elsewhere, _as

you and we may agree_.' For this they pay L1500 in three sums; L500 on

beginning, L500 on the fifteenth Reading, L500 at the close. Every

charge of every kind, they pay besides. I rely for mere curiosity on

_Doctor Marigold_ (I am going to begin with him in Liverpool, and at St.

James's Hall). I have got him up with immense pains, and should like to

give you a notion what I am going to do with him."

The success everywhere went far beyond even the former successes. A

single night at Manchester, when eight hundred stalls were let, two

thousand five hundred and sixty-five people admitted, and the receipts

amounted to more than three hundred pounds, was followed in nearly the

same proportion by all the greater towns; and on the 20th of April the

outlay for the entire venture was paid, leaving all that remained, to

the middle of the month of June, sheer profit. "I came back last

Sunday," he wrote on the 30th of May, "with my last country piece of

work for this time done. Everywhere the success has been the same. St.

James's Hall last night was quite a splendid spectacle. Two more

Tuesdays there, and I shall retire into private life. I have only been

able to get to Gadshill once since I left it, and that was the day

before yesterday."

One memorable evening he had passed at my house in the interval, when he

saw Mrs. Carlyle for the last time. Her sudden death followed shortly

after, and near the close of April he had thus written to me from

Liverpool. "It was a terrible shock to me, and poor dear Carlyle has

been in my mind ever since. How often I have thought of the unfinished

novel. No one now to finish it. None of the writing women come near her

at all." This was an allusion to what had passed at their meeting. It

was on the second of April, the day when Mr. Carlyle had delivered his

inaugural address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and a couple

of ardent words from Professor Tyndall had told her of the triumph just

before dinner. She came to us flourishing the telegram in her hand, and

the radiance of her enjoyment of it was upon her all the night. Among

other things she gave Dickens the subject for a novel, from what she had

herself observed at the outside of a house in her street; of which the

various incidents were drawn from the condition of its blinds and

curtains, the costumes visible at its windows, the cabs at its door, its

visitors admitted or rejected, its articles of furniture delivered or

carried away; and the subtle serious humour of it all, the truth in

trifling bits of character, and the gradual progress into a

half-romantic interest, had enchanted the skilled novelist. She was well

into the second volume of her small romance before she left, being as

far as her observation then had taken her; but in a few days exciting

incidents were expected, the denouement could not be far off, and

Dickens was to have it when they met again. Yet it was to something far

other than this amusing little fancy his thoughts had carried him, when

he wrote of no one being capable to finish what she might have begun. In

greater things this was still more true. No one could doubt it who had

come within the fascinating influence of that sweet and noble nature.

With some of the highest gifts of intellect, and the charm of a most

varied knowledge of books and things, there was something "beyond,

beyond." No one who knew Mrs. Carlyle could replace her loss when she

had passed away.

The same letter which told of his uninterrupted success to the last,

told me also that he had a heavy cold upon him and was "very tired and

depressed." Some weeks before the first batch of readings closed,

Messrs. Chappell had already tempted him with an offer for fifty more

nights to begin at Christmas, for which he meant, as he then said, to

ask them seventy pounds a night. "It would be unreasonable to ask

anything now on the ground of the extent of the late success, but I am

bound to look to myself for the future. The Chappells are speculators,

though of the worthiest and most honourable kind. They make some bad

speculations, and have made a very good one in this case, and will set

this against those. I told them when we agreed: 'I offer these thirty

Readings to you at fifty pounds a night, because I know perfectly well

beforehand that no one in your business has the least idea of their real

worth, and I wish to prove it.' The sum taken is L4720." The result of

the fresh negotiation, though not completed until the beginning of

August, may be at once described. "Chappell instantly accepts my

proposal of forty nights at sixty pounds a night, and every conceivable

and inconceivable expense paid. To make an even sum, I have made it

forty-two nights for L2500. So I shall now try to discover a Christmas

number" (he means the subject for one), "and shall, please Heaven, be

quit of the whole series of readings so as to get to work on a new story

for the new series of _All the Year Round_ early in the spring. The

readings begin probably with the New Year." These were fair designs, but

the fairest are the sport of circumstance, and though the subject for

Christmas was found, the new series of _All the Year_ Round never had a

new story from its founder. With whatever consequence to himself, the

strong tide of the Readings was to sweep on to its full. The American

war had ceased, and the first renewed offers from the States had been

made and rejected. Hovering over all, too, were other sterner

dispositions. "I think," he wrote in September, "there is some strange

influence in the atmosphere. Twice last week I was seized in a most

distressing manner--apparently in the heart; but, I am persuaded, only

in the nervous system."