The last page of _Edwin Drood_ was written in the Chalet in the

afternoon of his last day of consciousness; and I have thought there

might be some interest in a facsimile of the greater part of this final

page of manuscript that ever came from his hand, at which he had worked

unusually late in order to finish the chapter. It has very much the

character, in its excessive care of correction and interlineation, of

all his later manuscripts; and in order that comparison may be made

with his earlier and easier method, I place beside it a portion of a

page of the original of _Oliver Twist_. His greater pains and

elaboration of writing, it may be mentioned, become first very obvious

in the later parts of _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but not the least remarkable

feature in all his manuscripts, is the accuracy with which the portions

of each representing the several numbers are exactly adjusted to the

space the printer had to fill. Whether without erasure or so interlined

as to be illegible, nothing is wanting, and there is nothing in excess.

So assured was the habit, that he has himself remarked upon an instance

the other way, in _Our Mutual Friend_, as not having happened to him for

thirty years. But _Edwin Drood_ more startlingly showed him how

unsettled the habit he most prized had become, in the clashing of old

and new pursuits. "When I had written" (22nd of December 1869) "and, as

I thought, disposed of the first two Numbers of my story, Clowes

informed me to my horror that they were, together, _twelve printed pages

too short_!!! Consequently I had to transpose a chapter from number two

to number one, and remodel number two altogether! This was the more

unlucky, that it came upon me at the time when I was obliged to leave

the book, in order to get up the Readings" (the additional twelve for

which Sir Thomas Watson's consent had been obtained), "quite gone out of

my mind since I left them off. However, I turned to it and got it done,

and both numbers are now in type. Charles Collins has designed an

excellent cover." It was his wish that his son-in-law should have

illustrated the story; but, this not being practicable, upon an opinion

expressed by Mr. Millais which the result thoroughly justified, choice

was made of Mr. S. L. Fildes.

* * * * *

[Illustration: Handwritten Notes]

[Illustration: Handwritten Notes]

This reference to the last effort of Dickens's genius had been written

as it thus stands, when a discovery of some interest was made by the

writer. Within the leaves of one of Dickens's other manuscripts were

found some detached slips of his writing, on paper only half the size of

that used for the tale, so cramped, interlined, and blotted as to be

nearly illegible, which on close inspection proved to be a scene in

which Sapsea the auctioneer is introduced as the principal figure, among

a group of characters new to the story. The explanation of it perhaps

is, that, having become a little nervous about the course of the tale,

from a fear that he might have plunged too soon into the incidents

leading on to the catastrophe, such as the Datchery assumption in the

fifth number (a misgiving he had certainly expressed to his

sister-in-law), it had occurred to him to open some fresh veins of

character incidental to the interest, though not directly part of it,

and so to handle them in connection with Sapsea as a little to suspend

the final development even while assisting to strengthen it. Before

beginning any number of a serial he used, as we have seen in former

instances, to plan briefly what he intended to put into it chapter by

chapter; and his first number-plan of _Drood_ had the following: "Mr.

Sapsea. Old Tory jackass. Connect Jasper with him. (He will want a

solemn donkey by and by):" which was effected by bringing together

both Durdles and Jasper, for connection with Sapsea, in the matter of

the epitaph for Mrs. Sapsea's tomb. The scene now discovered might in

this view have been designed to strengthen and carry forward that

element in the tale; and otherwise it very sufficiently expresses

itself. It would supply an answer, if such were needed, to those who

have asserted that the hopeless decadence of Dickens as a writer had set

in before his death. Among the lines last written by him, these are the

very last we can ever hope to receive; and they seem to me a delightful

specimen of the power possessed by him in his prime, and the rarest

which any novelist can have, of revealing a character by a touch. Here

are a couple of people, Kimber and Peartree, not known to us before,

whom we read off thoroughly in a dozen words; and as to Sapsea himself,

auctioneer and mayor of Cloisterham, we are face to face with what

before we only dimly realised, and we see the solemn jackass, in his

business pulpit, playing off the airs of Mr. Dean in his Cathedral

pulpit, with Cloisterham laughing at the impostor.

"HOW MR. SAPSEA CEASED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE EIGHT CLUB.

"TOLD BY HIMSELF.

"Wishing to take the air, I proceeded by a circuitous route to the Club,

it being our weekly night of meeting. I found that we mustered our full

strength. We were enrolled under the denomination of the Eight Club. We

were eight in number; we met at eight o'clock during eight months of the

year; we played eight games of four-handed cribbage, at eightpence the

game; our frugal supper was composed of eight rolls, eight mutton chops,

eight pork sausages, eight baked potatoes, eight marrow-bones, with

eight toasts, and eight bottles of ale. There may, or may not, be a

certain harmony of colour in the ruling idea of this (to adopt a phrase

of our lively neighbours) reunion. It was a little idea of mine.

"A somewhat popular member of the Eight Club, was a member by the name

of Kimber. By profession, a dancing-master. A commonplace, hopeful sort

of man, wholly destitute of dignity or knowledge of the world.

"As I entered the Club-room, Kimber was making the remark: 'And he still

half-believes him to be very high in the Church.'

"In the act of hanging up my hat on the eighth peg by the door, I caught

Kimber's visual ray. He lowered it, and passed a remark on the next

change of the moon. I did not take particular notice of this at the

moment, because the world was often pleased to be a little shy of

ecclesiastical topics in my presence. For I felt that I was picked out

(though perhaps only through a coincidence) to a certain extent to

represent what I call our glorious constitution in Church and State. The

phrase may be objected to by captious minds; but I own to it as mine. I

threw it off in argument some little time back. I said: 'OUR GLORIOUS

CONSTITUTION in CHURCH and STATE.'

"Another member of the Eight Club was Peartree; also member of the Royal

College of Surgeons. Mr. Peartree is not accountable to me for his

opinions, and I say no more of them here than that he attends the poor

gratis whenever they want him, and is not the parish doctor. Mr.

Peartree may justify it to the grasp of _his_ mind thus to do his

republican utmost to bring an appointed officer into contempt. Suffice

it that Mr. Peartree can never justify it to the grasp of _mine_.

"Between Peartree and Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded

alliance. It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by

auction. (Goods taken in execution). He was a widower in a white

under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not

ill-looking. Indeed the reverse. Both daughters taught dancing in

scholastic establishments for Young Ladies--had done so at Mrs.

Sapsea's; nay, Twinkleton's--and both, in giving lessons, presented the

unwomanly spectacle of having little fiddles tucked under their chins.

In spite of which, the younger one might, if I am correctly informed--I

will raise the veil so far as to say I KNOW she might--have soared for

life from this degrading taint, but for having the class of mind

allotted to what I call the common herd, and being so incredibly devoid

of veneration as to become painfully ludicrous.

"When I sold off Kimber without reserve, Peartree (as poor as he can

hold together) had several prime household lots knocked down to him. I

am not to be blinded; and of course it was as plain to me what he was

going to do with them, as it was that he was a brown hulking sort of

revolutionary subject who had been in India with the soldiers, and ought

(for the sake of society) to have his neck broke. I saw the lots shortly

afterwards in Kimber's lodgings--through the window--and I easily made

out that there had been a sneaking pretence of lending them till better

times. A man with a smaller knowledge of the world than myself might

have been led to suspect that Kimber had held back money from his

creditors, and fraudulently bought the goods. But, besides that I knew

for certain he had no money, I knew that this would involve a species of

forethought not to be made compatible with the frivolity of a caperer,

inoculating other people with capering, for his bread.

"As it was the first time I had seen either of those two since the sale,

I kept myself in what I call Abeyance. When selling him up, I had

delivered a few remarks--shall I say a little homely?--concerning

Kimber, which the world did regard as more than usually worth notice. I

had come up into my pulpit;, it was said, uncommonly like--and a murmur

of recognition had repeated his (I will not name whose) title, before I

spoke. I had then gone on to say that all present would find, in the

first page of the catalogue that was lying before them, in the last

paragraph before the first lot, the following words: 'Sold in pursuance

of a writ of execution issued by a creditor.' I had then proceeded to

remind my friends, that however frivolous, not to say contemptible, the

business by which a man got his goods together, still his goods were as

dear to him, and as cheap to society (if sold without reserve), as

though his pursuits had been of a character that would bear serious

contemplation. I had then divided my text (if I may be allowed so to

call it) into three heads: firstly, Sold; secondly, In pursuance of a

writ of execution; thirdly, Issued by a creditor; with a few moral

reflections on each, and winding up with, 'Now to the first lot' in a

manner that was complimented when I afterwards mingled with my hearers.

"So, not being certain on what terms I and Kimber stood, I was grave, I

was chilling. Kimber, however, moving to me, I moved to Kimber. (I was

the creditor who had issued the writ. Not that it matters.)

"'I was alluding, Mr. Sapsea,' said Kimber, 'to a stranger who entered

into conversation with me in the street as I came to the Club. He had

been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and

though you had told him who you were, I could hardly persuade him that

you were not high in the Church.'

"'Idiot!' said Peartree.

"'Ass!' said Kimber.

"'Idiot and Ass!" said the other five members.

"'Idiot and Ass, gentlemen,' I remonstrated, looking around me, 'are

strong expressions to apply to a young man of good appearance and

address.' My generosity was roused; I own it.

"'You'll admit that he must be a Fool,' said Peartree.

"'You can't deny that he must be a Blockhead, said Kimber.

"Their tone of disgust amounted to being offensive. Why should the young

man be so calumniated? What had he done? He had only made an innocent

and natural mistake. I controlled my generous indignation, and said so.

"'Natural?' repeated Kimber; '_He's_ a Natural!'

"The remaining six members of the Eight Club laughed unanimously. It

stung me. It was a scornful laugh. My anger was roused in behalf of an

absent, friendless stranger. I rose (for I had been sitting down).

"'Gentlemen,' I said with dignity, 'I will not remain one of this Club

allowing opprobrium to be cast on an unoffending person in his absence.

I will not so violate what I call the sacred rites of hospitality.

Gentlemen, until you know how to behave yourselves better, I leave you.

Gentlemen, until then I withdraw, from this place of meeting, whatever

personal qualifications I may have brought into it. Gentlemen, until

then you cease to be the Eight Club, and must make the best you can of

becoming the Seven.'

"I put on my hat and retired. As I went down stairs I distinctly heard

them give a suppressed cheer. Such is the power of demeanour and

knowledge of mankind. I had forced it out of them.

"II.

"Whom should I meet in the street, within a few yards of the door of the

inn where the Club was held, but the self-same young man whose cause I

had felt it my duty so warmly--and I will add so disinterestedly--to

take up.

"Is it Mr. Sapsea,' he said doubtfully, 'or is it----'

"'It is Mr. Sapsea,' I replied.

"'Pardon me, Mr. Sapsea; you appear warm, sir,'

"'I have been warm,' I said, 'and on your account.' Having stated the

circumstances at some length (my generosity almost overpowered him), I

asked him his name.

"'Mr. Sapsea,' he answered, looking down, 'your penetration is so acute,

your glance into the souls of your fellow men is so penetrating, that if

I was hardy enough to deny that my name is Poker, what would it avail

me?'

"I don't know that I had quite exactly made out to a fraction that his

name _was_ Poker, but I daresay I had been pretty near doing it.

"'Well, well,' said I, trying to put him at his ease by nodding my head

in a soothing way. 'Your name is Poker, and there is no harm in being

named Poker.'

"'Oh Mr. Sapsea!' cried the young man, in a very well-behaved manner.

'Bless you for those words!' He then, as if ashamed of having given way

to his feelings, looked down again.

"'Come, Poker,' said I, 'let me hear more about you. Tell me. Where are

you going to, Poker? and where do you come from?'

"'Ah Mr. Sapsea!' exclaimed the young man. 'Disguise from you is

impossible. You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going

somewhere else. If I was to deny it, what would it avail me?'

"'Then don't deny it,' was my remark.

"'Or,' pursued Poker, in a kind of despondent rapture, 'or if I was to

deny that I came to this town to see and hear you sir, what would it

avail me? Or if I was to deny----'"

The fragment ends there, and the hand that could alone have completed it

is at rest for ever.

* * * * *

Some personal characteristics remain for illustration before the end is

briefly told.

FOOTNOTES:

[285] In drawing the agreement for the publication, Mr. Ouvry had, by

Dickens's wish, inserted a clause thought to be altogether needless, but

found to be sadly pertinent. It was the first time such a clause had

been inserted in one of his agreements. "That if the said Charles

Dickens shall die during the composition of the said work of the

_Mystery of Edwin Drood_, or shall otherwise become incapable of

completing the said work for publication in twelve monthly numbers as

agreed, it shall be referred to John Forster, Esq, one of Her Majesty's

Commissioners in Lunacy, or in the case of his death, incapacity, or

refusal to act, then to such person as shall be named by Her Majesty's

Attorney-General for the time being, to determine the amount which shall

be repaid by the said Charles Dickens, his executors or administrators,

to the said Frederic Chapman as a fair compensation for so much of the

said work as shall not have been completed for publication." The sum to

be paid at once for 25,000 copies was L7500; publisher and author

sharing equally in the profit of all sales beyond that impression; and

the number reached, while the author yet lived, was 50,000. The sum paid

for early sheets to America was L1000; and Baron Tauchnitz paid

liberally, as he always did, for his Leipzig reprint. "All Mr. Dickens's

works," M. Tauchnitz writes to me, "have been published under agreement

by me. My intercourse with him lasted nearly twenty-seven years. The

first of his letters dates in October 1843, and his last at the close of

March 1870. Our long relations were not only never troubled by the least

disagreement, but were the occasion of most hearty personal feeling; and

I shall never lose the sense of his kind and friendly nature. On my

asking him his terms for _Edwin Drood_, he replied 'Your terms shall be

mine.'"

[286] "I have a very remarkable story indeed for you to read. It is in

only two chapters. A thing never to melt into other stories in the mind,

but always to keep itself apart." The story was published in the 37th

number of the new series of _All the Year Round_, with the title of "An

Experience." The "new series" had been started to break up the too great

length of volumes in sequence, and the only change it announced was the

discontinuance of Christmas Numbers. He had tired of them himself; and,

observing the extent to which they were now copied in all directions (as

usual with other examples set by him), he supposed them likely to become

tiresome to the public.

[287] The reader curious in such matters will be helped to the clue for

much of this portion of the plot by reference to pp. 90, 103, and 109,

in Chapters XII, XIII, and XIV.

[288] I subjoin what has been written to me by an American

correspondent. "I went lately with the same inspector who accompanied

Dickens to see the room of the opium-smokers, old Eliza and her Lascar

or Bengalee friend. There a fancy seized me to buy the bedstead which

figures so accurately in _Edwin Drood_, in narrative and picture. I gave

the old woman a pound for it, and have it now packed and ready for

shipment to New York. Another American bought a pipe. So you see we have

heartily forgiven the novelist his pleasantries at our expense. Many

military men who came to England from America refuse to register their

titles, especially if they be Colonels; all the result of the basting we

got on that score in _Martin Chuzzlewit_."

CHAPTER XIX.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

1836-1870.

Dickens not a Bookish Man--Character of his

Talk--Dickens made to tell his Own Story--Lord

Russell on Dickens's Letters--No Self-conceit

in Dickens--Letter to his Youngest

Son--Personal Prayer--Hymn in a Christmas

Tale--Objection to Posthumous Honours--Source

of Quarrel with Literary Fund--Small Poets--On

"Royalty" Bargains--Editorship--Relations with

Contributors--Foreign Views of English

People--Editorial Pleasures--Adverse Influences

of Periodical Writing--Anger and Satire--No

desire to enter the House of Commons--Reforms

he took most Interest in--The Liverpool Dinner

in 1869--Tribute to Lord Russell--The People

governing and the People governed--Tone of Last

Book--Alleged Offers from the Queen--The

Queen's Desire to see Dickens act--Her

Majesty's Wish to hear Dickens read--Interview

with the Queen--Dickens's Grateful Impression

from it--"In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps--Rural

Enjoyments--A Winner in the Games--Dickens's

Habits of Life everywhere--Centre and Soul of

his Home--Daily Habits--London Haunts--First

Attack of Lameness--How it affected his Large

Dogs--His Hatred of Indifference--At Social

Meetings--Agreeable Pleasantries--Ghost

Stories--Marvels of Coincidence--Predominant

Impression of his Life--Effects on his Career.

OBJECTION has been taken to this biography as likely to disappoint its

readers in not making them "talk to Dickens as Boswell makes them talk

to Johnson." But where will the blame lie if a man takes up _Pickwick_

and is disappointed to find that he is not reading _Rasselas_? A book

must be judged for what it aims to be, and not for what it cannot by

possibility be. I suppose so remarkable an author as Dickens hardly ever

lived who carried so little of authorship into ordinary social

intercourse. Potent as the sway of his writings was over him, it

expressed itself in other ways. Traces or triumphs of literary labour,

displays of conversational or other personal predominance, were no part

of the influence he exerted over friends. To them he was only the

pleasantest of companions, with whom they forgot that he had ever

written anything, and felt only the charm which a nature of such

capacity for supreme enjoyment causes every one around it to enjoy. His

talk was unaffected and natural, never bookish in the smallest degree.

He was quite up to the average of well read men, but as there was no

ostentation of it in his writing, so neither was there in his

conversation. This was so attractive because so keenly observant, and

lighted up with so many touches of humorous fancy; but, with every

possible thing to give relish to it, there were not many things to bring

away.

Of course a book must stand or fall by its contents. Macaulay said very

truly that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by

what is written about them, but by what is written in them. I offer no

complaint of any remark made upon these volumes, but there have been

some misapprehensions. Though Dickens bore outwardly so little of the

impress of his writings, they formed the whole of that inner life which

essentially constituted the man; and as in this respect he was actually,

I have thought that his biography should endeavour to present him. The

story of his books, therefore, at all stages of their progress, and of

the hopes or designs connected with them, was my first care. With that

view, and to give also to the memoir what was attainable of the value of

autobiography, letters to myself, such as were never addressed to any

other of his correspondents, and covering all the important incidents in

the life to be retraced, were used with few exceptions exclusively; and

though the exceptions are much more numerous in the present volume, this

general plan has guided me to the end. Such were my limits indeed, that

half even of those letters had to be put aside; and to have added all

such others as were open to me would have doubled the size of my book,

not contributed to it a new fact of life or character, and altered

materially its design. It would have been so much lively illustration

added to the subject, but out of place here. The purpose here was to

make Dickens the sole central figure in the scenes revived, narrator as

well as principal actor; and only by the means employed could

consistency or unity be given to the self-revelation, and the picture

made definite and clear. It is the peculiarity of few men to be to their

most intimate friend neither more nor less than they are to themselves,

but this was true of Dickens; and what kind or quality of nature such

intercourse expressed in him, of what strength, tenderness, and delicacy

susceptible, of what steady level warmth, of what daily unresting

activity of intellect, of what unbroken continuity of kindly impulse

through the change and vicissitude of three-and-thirty years, the

letters to myself given in these volumes could alone express. Gathered

from various and differing sources, their interest could not have been

as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the

successive stages of a most attractive career is written with unexampled

candour and truthfulness, and set forth in definite pictures of what he

saw and stood in the midst of, unblurred by vagueness or reserve. Of the

charge of obtruding myself to which their publication has exposed me, I

can only say that I studied nothing so hard as to suppress my own

personality, and have to regret my ill success where I supposed I had

even too perfectly succeeded. But we have all of us frequent occasion to

say, parodying Mrs. Peachem's remark, that we are bitter bad judges of

ourselves.

The other properties of these letters are quite subordinate to this main

fact that the man who wrote them is thus perfectly seen in them. But

they do not lessen the estimate of his genius. Admiration rises higher

at the writer's mental forces, who, putting so much of himself into his

work for the public, had still so much overflowing for such private

intercourse. The sunny health of nature in them is manifest; its

largeness, spontaneity, and manliness; but they have also that which

highest intellects appreciate best. "I have read them," Lord Russell

wrote to me, "with delight and pain. His heart, his imagination, his

qualities of painting what is noble, and finding diamonds hidden far

away, are greater here than even his works convey to me. How I lament he

was not spared to us longer. I shall have a fresh grief when he dies in

your volumes." Shallower people are more apt to find other things. If

the bonhommie of a man's genius is obvious to all the world, there are

plenty of knowing ones ready to take the shine out of the genius, to

discover that after all it is not so wonderful, that what is grave in it

wants depth, and the humour has something mechanical. But it will be

difficult even for these to look over letters so marvellous in the art

of reproducing to the sight what has once been seen, so natural and

unstudied in their wit and fun, and with such a constant well-spring of

sprightly runnings of speech in them, point of epigram, ingenuity of

quaint expression, absolute freedom from every touch of affectation, and

to believe that the source of this man's humour, or of whatever gave

wealth to his genius, was other than habitual, unbounded, and

resistless.

There is another consideration of some importance. Sterne did not more

incessantly fall back from his works upon himself than Dickens did, and

undoubtedly one of the impressions left by the letters is that of the

intensity and tenacity with which he recognized, realized, contemplated,

cultivated, and thoroughly enjoyed, his own individuality in even its

most trivial manifestations. But if any one is led to ascribe this to

self-esteem, to a narrow exclusiveness, or to any other invidious form

of egotism, let him correct the impression by observing how Dickens bore

himself amid the universal blazing-up of America, at the beginning and

at the end of his career. Of his hearty, undisguised, and unmistakeable

enjoyment of his astonishing and indeed quite bewildering popularity,

there can be as little doubt as that there is not a particle of vanity

in it, any more than of false modesty or grimace.[289] While realizing

fully the fact of it, and the worth of the fact, there is not in his

whole being a fibre that answers falsely to the charmer's voice. Few men

in the world, one fancies, could have gone through such grand displays

of fireworks, not merely with so marvellous an absence of what the

French call _pose_, but unsoiled by the smoke of a cracker. No man's

strong individuality was ever so free from conceit.

Other personal incidents and habits, and especially some matters of

opinion of grave importance, will help to make his character better

known. Much questioning followed a brief former reference to his

religious belief, but, inconsistent or illogical as the conduct

described may be, there is nothing to correct or to modify in my

statement of it;[290] and, to what otherwise appeared to be in doubt,

explicit answer will be afforded by a letter, written upon the youngest

of his children leaving home in September 1868 to join his brother in

Australia, than which none worthier appears in his story. "I write this

note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind, and because I

want you to have a few parting words from me, to think of now and then

at quiet times. I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very,

very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up

of partings, and these pains must be borne. It is my comfort and my

sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are

best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than

any experiment in a study or office would have been; and without that

training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation. What you

have always wanted until now, has been a set, steady, constant purpose.

I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do

whatever you have to do, as well as you can do it. I was not so old as

you are now, when I first had to win my food, and to do it out of this

determination; and I have never slackened in it since. Never take a mean

advantage of any one in any transaction, and never be hard upon people

who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to

you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better

for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by

Our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books

for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me

write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child.

Because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the

world; and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human

creature, who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be

guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to

each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all

to guide themselves by this Book, putting aside the interpretations and

inventions of Man. You will remember that you have never at home been

harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always

been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are

old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore

understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the

truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ

Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but

heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are

in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth

about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own

private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself,

and I know the comfort of it. I hope you will always be able to say in

after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection

for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty." They who

most intimately knew Dickens will know best that every word there is

written from his heart, and is radiant with the truth of his nature.

To the same effect, in the leading matter, he expressed himself twelve

years before, and again the day before his death; replying in both cases

to correspondents who had addressed him as a public writer. A clergyman,

the Rev. R. H. Davies, had been struck by the hymn in the Christmas tale

of the Wreck of the Golden Mary (_Household Words_, 1856). "I beg to

thank you" Dickens answered (Christmas Eve, 1856) "for your very

acceptable letter--not the less gratifying to me because I am myself the

writer you refer to. . . . There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a

more humble veneration for the New Testament, or a more profound

conviction of its all-sufficiency, than I have. If I am ever (as you

tell me I am) mistaken on this subject, it is because I discountenance

all obtrusive professions of and tradings in religion, as one of the

main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world; and

because my observation of life induces me to hold in unspeakable dread

and horror, those unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the

spirit out of hundreds of thousands." In precisely similar tone, to a

reader of _Edwin Drood_ (Mr. J. M. Makeham), who had pointed out to him

that his employment as a figure of speech of a line from Holy Writ in

his tenth chapter might be subject to misconstruction, he wrote from

Gadshill on Wednesday the eighth of June, 1870. "It would be quite

inconceivable to me, but for your letter, that any reasonable reader

could possibly attach a scriptural reference to that passage. . . . I am

truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake. I have

always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and

lessons of our Saviour; because I feel it; and because I re-wrote that

history for my children--every one of whom knew it, from having it

repeated to them, long before they could read, and almost as soon as

they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the

house tops."[291]

A dislike of all display was rooted in him; and his objection to

posthumous honours, illustrated by the instructions in his will, was

very strikingly expressed two years before his death, when Mr. Thomas

Fairbairn asked his help to a proposed recognition of Rajah Brooke's

services by a memorial in Westminster Abbey. "I am very strongly

impelled" (24th of June 1868) "to comply with any request of yours. But

these posthumous honours of committee, subscriptions, and Westminster

Abbey are so profoundly unsatisfactory in my eyes that--plainly--I would

rather have nothing to do with them in any case. My daughter and her

aunt unite with me in kindest regards to Mrs. Fairbairn, and I hope you

will believe in the possession of mine until I am quietly buried without

any memorial but such as I have set up in my lifetime." Asked a year

later (August 1869) to say something on the inauguration of Leigh Hunt's

bust at his grave in Kensal-green, he told the committee that he had a

very strong objection to speech-making beside graves. "I do not expect

or wish my feelings in this wise to guide other men; still, it is so

serious with me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a

ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I must decline to

officiate."

His aversion to every form of what is called patronage of

literature[292] was part of the same feeling. A few months earlier a

Manchester gentleman[293] wrote for his support to such a scheme. "I beg

to be excused," was his reply, "from complying with the request you do

me the honour to prefer, simply because I hold the opinion that there is

a great deal too much patronage in England. The better the design, the

less (as I think) should it seek such adventitious aid, and the more

composedly should it rest on its own merits." This was the belief

Southey held; it extended to the support by way of patronage given by

such societies as the Literary Fund, which Southey also strongly

resisted; and it survived the failure of the Guild whereby it was hoped

to establish a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary

pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give. Though there was no

project of his life into which he flung himself with greater eagerness

than the Guild, it was not taken up by the class it was meant to

benefit, and every renewed exertion more largely added to the failure.

There is no room in these pages for the story, which will add its

chapter some day to the vanity of human wishes; but a passage from a

letter to Bulwer Lytton at its outset will be some measure of the height

from which the writer fell, when all hope for what he had so set his

heart upon ceased. "I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried by the

support which I trust will be given to it, will change the status of the

literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no

government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have

implicit confidence in the scheme--so splendidly begun--if we carry it

out with a stedfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in

our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come,

and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring

benefactor. . . . Oh what a procession of new years may walk out of all

this for the class we belong to, after we are dust."

These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the

clamour with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously small.

"You read that life of Clare?" he wrote (15th of August 1865). "Did you

ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isn't it

expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as _the Poet_? So

another Incompetent used to write to the Literary Fund when I was on the

committee: 'This leaves the Poet at his divine mission in a corner of

the single room. The Poet's father is wiping his spectacles. The Poet's

mother is weaving'--Yah!'" He was equally intolerant of every

magnificent proposal that should render the literary man independent of

the bookseller, and he sharply criticized even a compromise to replace

the half-profits system by one of royalties on copies sold. "What does

it come to?" he remarked of an ably-written pamphlet in which this was

urged (10th of November 1866): "what is the worth of the remedy after

all? You and I know very well that in nine cases out of ten the author

is at a disadvantage with the publisher because the publisher has

capital and the author has not. We know perfectly well that in nine

cases out of ten money is advanced by the publisher before the book is

producible--often, long before. No young or unsuccessful author (unless

he were an amateur and an independent gentleman) would make a bargain

for having that royalty, to-morrow, if he could have a certain sum of

money, or an advance of money. The author who could command that

bargain, could command it to-morrow, or command anything else. For the

less fortunate or the less able, I make bold to say--with some knowledge

of the subject, as a writer who made a publisher's fortune long before

he began to share in the real profits of his books--that if the

publishers met next week, and resolved henceforth to make this royalty

bargain and no other, it would be an enormous hardship and misfortune

because the authors could not live while they wrote. The pamphlet seems

to me just another example of the old philosophical chess-playing, with

human beings for pieces. 'Don't want money.' 'Be careful to be born with

means, and have a banker's account.' 'Your publisher will settle with

you, at such and such long periods according to the custom of his trade,

and you will settle with your butcher and baker weekly, in the meantime,

by drawing cheques as I do.' 'You must be sure not to want money, and

then I have worked it out for you splendidly.'"

Less has been said in this work than might perhaps have been wished, of

the way in which his editorship of _Household Words_ and _All the Year

Round_ was discharged. It was distinguished above all by liberality; and

a scrupulous consideration and delicacy, evinced by him to all his

contributors, was part of the esteem in which he held literature itself.

It was said in a newspaper after his death, evidently by one of his

contributors, that he always brought the best out of a man by

encouragement and appreciation; that he liked his writers to feel

unfettered; and that his last reply to a proposition for a series of

articles had been: "Whatever you see your way to, I will see mine to,

and we know and understand each other well enough to make the best of

these conditions." Yet the strong feeling of personal responsibility was

always present in his conduct of both journals; and varied as the

contents of a number might be, and widely apart the writers, a certain

individuality of his own was never absent. He took immense pains (as

indeed was his habit about everything) with numbers in which he had

written nothing; would often accept a paper from a young or unhandy

contributor, because of some single notion in it which he thought it

worth rewriting for; and in this way, or by helping generally to give

strength and attractiveness to the work of others, he grudged no

trouble.[294] "I have had a story" he wrote (22nd of June 1856) "to

hack and hew into some form for _Household Words_ this morning, which

has taken me four hours of close attention. And I am perfectly addled by

its horrible want of continuity after all, and the dreadful spectacle I

have made of the proofs--which look like an inky fishing-net." A few

lines from another letter will show the difficulties in which he was

often involved by the plan he adopted for Christmas numbers, of putting

within a framework by himself a number of stories by separate writers to

whom the leading notion had before been severally sent. "As yet" (25th

of November 1859), "not a story has come to me in the least belonging to

the idea (the simplest in the world; which I myself described in

writing, in the most elaborate manner); and everyone of them turns, by a

strange fatality, on a criminal trial!" It had all to be set right by

him, and editorship on such terms was not a sinecure.

It had its pleasures as well as pains, however, and the greatest was

when he fancied he could descry unusual merit in any writer. A letter

will give one instance for illustration of many; the lady to whom it was

addressed, admired under her assumed name of Holme Lee, having placed it

at my disposal. (Folkestone: 14th of August 1855.) "I read your tale

with the strongest emotion, and with a very exalted admiration of the

great power displayed in it. Both in severity and tenderness I thought

it masterly. It moved me more than I can express to you. I wrote to Mr.

Wills that it had completely unsettled me for the day, and that by

whomsoever it was written, I felt the highest respect for the mind that

had produced it. It so happened that I had been for some days at work

upon a character externally like the Aunt. And it was very strange to me

indeed to observe how the two people seemed to be near to one another at

first, and then turned off on their own ways so wide asunder. I told Mr.

Wills that I was not sure whether I could have prevailed upon myself to

present to a large audience the terrible consideration of hereditary

madness, when it was reasonably probable that there must be many--or

some--among them whom it would awfully, because personally, address. But

I was not obliged to ask myself the question, inasmuch as the length of

the story rendered it unavailable for _Household Words_. I speak of its

length in reference to that publication only; relatively to what is told

in it, I would not spare a page of your manuscript. Experience shows me

that a story in four portions is best suited to the peculiar

requirements of such a journal, and I assure you it will be an uncommon

satisfaction to me if this correspondence should lead to your enrolment

among its contributors. But my strong and sincere conviction of the

vigour and pathos of this beautiful tale, is quite apart from, and not

to be influenced by, any ulterior results. You had no existence to me

when I read it. The actions and sufferings of the characters affected me

by their own force and truth, and left a profound impression on

me."[295] The experience there mentioned did not prevent him from

admitting into his later periodical, _All the Year Round_, longer serial

stories published with the names of known writers; and to his own

interference with these he properly placed limits. "When one of my

literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task, I hold

that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the

sustainment of his own reputation; and I do not consider myself at

liberty to exercise that control over his text which I claim as to other

contributions." Nor had he any greater pleasure, even in these cases,

than to help younger novelists to popularity. "You asked me about new

writers last night. If you will read _Kissing the Rod_, a book I have

read to-day, you will not find it hard to take an interest in the author

of such a book." That was Mr. Edmund Yates, in whose literary successes

he took the greatest interest himself, and with whom he continued to the

last an intimate personal intercourse which had dated from kindness

shown at a very trying time. "I think" he wrote of another of his

contributors, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, for whom he had also much personal

liking, and of whose powers he thought highly, "you will find _Fatal

Zero_ a very curious bit of mental development, deepening as the story

goes on into a picture not more startling than true." My mention of

these pleasures of editorship shall close with what I think to him was

the greatest. He gave to the world, while yet the name of the writer was

unknown to him, the pure and pathetic verse of Adelaide Procter. "In the

spring of the year 1853 I observed a short poem among the proffered

contributions, very different, as I thought, from the shoal of verses

perpetually setting through the office of such a periodical."[296] The

contributions had been large and frequent under an assumed name, when at

Christmas 1854 he discovered that Miss Mary Berwick was the daughter of

his old and dear friend Barry Cornwall.

But periodical writing is not without its drawbacks, and its effect on

Dickens, who engaged in it largely from time to time, was observable in

the increased impatience of allusion to national institutions and

conventional distinctions to be found in his later books. Party

divisions he cared for less and less as life moved on; but the decisive,

peremptory, dogmatic style, into which a habit of rapid remark on topics

of the day will betray the most candid and considerate commentator,

displayed its influence, perhaps not always consciously to himself, in

the underlying tone of bitterness that runs through the books which

followed _Copperfield_. The resentment against remediable wrongs is as

praiseworthy in them as in the earlier tales; but the exposure of

Chancery abuses, administrative incompetence, politico-economic

shortcomings, and social flunkeyism, in _Bleak House_, _Little Dorrit_,

_Hard Times_, and _Our Mutual Friend_, would not have been made less

odious by the cheerier tone that had struck with much sharper effect at

prison abuses, parish wrongs, Yorkshire schools, and hypocritical

humbug, in _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and _Chuzzlewit_. It

will be remembered of him always that he desired to set right what was

wrong, that he held no abuse to be unimprovable, that he left none of

the evils named exactly as he found them, and that to influences drawn

from his writings were due not a few of the salutary changes which

marked the age in which he lived; but anger does not improve satire, and

it gave latterly, from the causes named, too aggressive a form to what,

after all, was but a very wholesome hatred of the cant that everything

English is perfect, and that to call a thing _un_English is to doom it

to abhorred extinction.

"I have got an idea for occasional papers in _Household Words_ called

the Member for Nowhere. They will contain an account of his views,

votes, and speeches; and I think of starting with his speeches on the

Sunday question. He is a member of the Government of course. The moment

they found such a member in the House, they felt that he must be dragged

(by force, if necessary) into the Cabinet." "I give it up reluctantly,"

he wrote afterwards, "and with it my hope to have made every man in

England feel something of the contempt for the House of Commons that I

have. We shall never begin to do anything until the sentiment is

universal." That was in August 1854; and the break-down in the Crimea

that winter much embittered his radicalism. "I am hourly strengthened in

my old belief," he wrote (3rd of February 1855) "that our political

aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England. In all this

business I don't see a gleam of hope. As to the popular spirit, it has

come to be so entirely separated from the Parliament and Government, and

so perfectly apathetic about them both, that I seriously think it a most

portentous sign." A couple of months later: "I have rather a bright

idea, I think, for _Household Words_ this morning: a fine little bit of

satire: an account of an Arabic MS. lately discovered very like the

_Arabian Nights_--called the Thousand and One Humbugs. With new versions

of the best known stories." This also had to be given up, and is only

mentioned as another illustration of his political discontents and of

their connection with his journal-work. The influences from his early

life which unconsciously strengthened them in certain social directions

has been hinted at, and of his absolute sincerity in the matter there

can be no doubt. The mistakes of Dickens were never such as to cast a

shade on his integrity. What he said with too much bitterness, in his

heart he believed; and had, alas! too much ground for believing. "A

country," he wrote (27th of April 1855) "which is discovered to be in

this tremendous condition as to its war affairs; with an enormous black

cloud of poverty in every town which is spreading and deepening every

hour, and not one man in two thousand knowing anything about, or even

believing in, its existence; with a non-working aristocracy, and a

silent parliament, and everybody for himself and nobody for the rest;

this is the prospect, and I think it a very deplorable one." Admirably

did he say, of a notorious enquiry at that time: "O what a fine aspect

of political economy it is, that the noble professors of the science on

the adulteration committee should have tried to make Adulteration a

question of Supply and Demand! We shall never get to the Millennium,

sir, by the rounds of that ladder; and I, for one, won't hold by the

skirts of that Great Mogul of impostors, Master M'Culloch!" Again he

wrote (30th of September 1855): "I really am serious in thinking--and I

have given as painful consideration to the subject as a man with

children to live and suffer after him can honestly give to it--that

representative government is become altogether a failure with us, that

the English gentilities and subserviences render the people unfit for

it, and that the whole thing has broken down since that great

seventeenth-century time, and has no hope in it."

With the good sense that still overruled all his farthest extremes of

opinion he yet never thought of parliament for himself. He could not

mend matters, and for him it would have been a false position. The

people of the town of Reading and others applied to him during the first

half of his life, and in the last half some of the Metropolitan

constituencies. To one of the latter a reply is before me in which he

says: "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming

earth, it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament

altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever

bothered this much-bothered world." To a private enquiry of apparently

about the same date he replied: "I have thoroughly satisfied myself,

having often had occasion to consider the question, that I can be far

more usefully and independently employed in my chosen sphere of action

than I could hope to be in the House of Commons; and I believe that no

consideration would induce me to become a member of that extraordinary

assembly." Finally, upon a reported discussion in Finsbury whether or

not he should be invited to sit for that borough, he promptly wrote

(November 1861): "It may save some trouble if you will kindly confirm a

sensible gentleman who doubted at that meeting whether I was quite the

man for Finsbury. I am not at all the sort of man; for I believe nothing

would induce me to offer myself as a parliamentary representative of

that place, or of any other under the sun." The only direct attempt to

join a political agitation was his speech at Drury-lane for

administrative reform, and he never repeated it. But every movement for

practical social reforms, to obtain more efficient sanitary

legislation, to get the best compulsory education practicable for the

poor, and to better the condition of labouring people, he assisted

earnestly to his last hour; and the readiness with which he took the

chair at meetings having such objects in view, the help he gave to

important societies working in beneficent ways for themselves or the

community, and the power and attractiveness of his oratory, made him one

of the forces of the time. His speeches derived singular charm from the

buoyancy of his perfect self-possession, and to this he added the

advantages of a person and manner which had become as familiar and as

popular as his books. The most miscellaneous assemblages listened to him

as to a personal friend.

Two incidents at the close of his life will show what upon these matters

his latest opinions were. At the great Liverpool dinner after his

country readings in 1869, over which Lord Dufferin eloquently presided,

he replied to a remonstrance from Lord Houghton against his objection to

entering public life,[297] that when he took literature for his

profession he intended it to be his sole profession; that at that time

it did not appear to him to be so well understood in England, as in some

other countries, that literature was a dignified profession by which any

man might stand or fall; and he resolved that in his person at least it

should stand "by itself, of itself, and for itself;" a bargain which "no

consideration on earth would now induce him to break." Here however he

probably failed to see the entire meaning of Lord Houghton's regret,

which would seem to have been meant to say, in more polite form, that to

have taken some part in public affairs might have shown him the

difficulty in a free state of providing remedies very swiftly for evils

of long growth. A half reproach from the same quarter for alleged

unkindly sentiments to the House of Lords, he repelled with vehement

warmth; insisting on his great regard for individual members, and

declaring that there was no man in England he respected more in his

public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had

received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature,

than Lord Russell.[298] In Birmingham shortly after, discoursing on

education to the members of the Midland Institute, he told them they

should value self-improvement not because it led to fortune but because

it was good and right in itself; counselled them in regard to it that

Genius was not worth half so much as Attention, or the art of taking an

immense deal of pains, which he declared to be, in every study and

pursuit, the one sole, safe, certain, remunerative quality; and summed

up briefly his political belief.--"My faith in the people governing is,

on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the

whole, illimitable." This he afterwards (January 1870) explained to mean

that he had very little confidence in the people who govern us ("with a

small p"), and very great confidence in the People whom they govern

("with a large P"). "My confession being shortly and elliptically

stated, was, with no evil intention I am absolutely sure, in some

quarters inversely explained." He added that his political opinions had

already been not obscurely stated in an "idle book or two"; and he

reminded his hearers that he was the inventor "of a certain fiction

called the Circumlocution Office, said to be very extravagant, but which

I _do_ see rather frequently quoted as if there were grains of truth at

the bottom of it." It may nevertheless be suspected, with some

confidence, that the construction of his real meaning was not far wrong

which assumed it as the condition precedent to his illimitable faith,

that the people, even with the big P, should be "governed." It was his

constant complaint that, being much in want of government, they had only

sham governors; and he had returned from his second American visit, as

he came back from his first, indisposed to believe that the political

problem had been solved in the land of the free. From the pages of his

last book, the bitterness of allusion so frequent in the books just

named was absent altogether; and his old unaltered wish to better what

was bad in English institutions, carried with it no desire to replace

them by new ones.

In a memoir published shortly after his death there appeared this

statement. "For many years past Her Majesty the Queen has taken the

liveliest interest in Mr. Dickens's literary labours, and has frequently

expressed a desire for an interview with him. . . . This interview took

place on the 9th of April, when he received her commands to attend her

at Buckingham Palace, and was introduced by his friend Mr. Arthur Helps,

the clerk of the Privy Council. . . . Since our author's decease the

journal with which he was formerly connected has said: 'The Queen was

ready to confer any distinction which Mr. Dickens's known views and

tastes would permit him to accept, and after more than one title of

honour had been declined, Her Majesty desired that he would, at least,

accept a place in her Privy Council.'" As nothing is too absurd[299] for

belief, it will not be superfluous to say that Dickens knew of no such

desire on her Majesty's part; and though all the probabilities are on

the side of his unwillingness to accept any title or place of honour,

certainly none was offered to him.

It had been hoped to obtain her Majesty's name for the Jerrold

performances in 1857, but, being a public effort in behalf of an

individual, assent would have involved "either perpetual compliance or

the giving of perpetual offence." Her Majesty however then sent, through

Colonel Phipps, a request to Dickens that he would select a room in the

palace, do what he would with it, and let her see the play there. "I

said to Col. Phipps thereupon" (21st of June 1857) "that the idea was

not quite new to me; that I did not feel easy as to the social position

of my daughters, &c. at a Court under those circumstances; and that I

would beg her Majesty to excuse me, if any other way of her seeing the

play could be devised. To this Phipps said he had not thought of the

objection, but had not the slightest doubt I was right. I then proposed

that the Queen should come to the Gallery of Illustration a week before

the subscription night, and should have the room entirely at her own

disposal, and should invite her own company. This, with the good sense

that seems to accompany her good nature on all occasions, she resolved

within a few hours to do." The effect of the performance was a great

gratification. "My gracious sovereign" (5th of July 1857) "was so

pleased that she sent round begging me to go and see her and accept her

thanks. I replied that I was in my Farce dress, and must beg to be

excused. Whereupon she sent again, saying that the dress 'could not be

so ridiculous as that,' and repeating the request. I sent my duty in

reply, but again hoped her Majesty would have the kindness to excuse my

presenting myself in a costume and appearance that were not my own. I

was mighty glad to think, when I woke this morning, that I had carried

the point."

The opportunity of presenting himself in his own costume did not arrive

till the year of his death, another effort meanwhile made having proved

also unsuccessful. "I was put into a state of much perplexity on Sunday"

(30th of March 1858). "I don't know who had spoken to my informant, but

it seems that the Queen is bent upon hearing the _Carol_ read, and has

expressed her desire to bring it about without offence; hesitating about

the manner of it, in consequence of my having begged to be excused from

going to her when she sent for me after the _Frozen Deep_. I parried the

thing as well as I could; but being asked to be prepared with a

considerate and obliging answer, as it was known the request would be

preferred, I said, 'Well! I supposed Col. Phipps would speak to me about

it, and if it were he who did so, I should assure him of my desire to

meet any wish of her Majesty's, and should express my hope that she

would indulge me by making one of some audience or other--for I thought

an audience necessary to the effect.' Thus it stands: but it bothers

me." The difficulty was not surmounted, but her Majesty's continued

interest in the _Carol_ was shown by her purchase of a copy of it with

Dickens's autograph at Thackeray's sale;[300] and at last there came,

in the year of his death, the interview with the author whose popularity

dated from her accession, whose books had entertained larger numbers of

her subjects than those of any other contemporary writer, and whose

genius will be counted among the glories of her reign. Accident led to

it. Dickens had brought with him from America some large and striking

photographs of the Battle Fields of the Civil War, which the Queen,

having heard of them through Mr. Helps, expressed a wish to look at.

Dickens sent them at once; and went afterwards to Buckingham Palace with

Mr. Helps, at her Majesty's request, that she might see and thank him in

person.

It was in the middle of March, not April. "Come now sir, this is an

interesting matter, do favour us with it," was the cry of Johnson's

friends after his conversation with George the Third; and again and

again the story was told to listeners ready to make marvels of its

commonplaces. But the romance even of the eighteenth century in such a

matter is clean gone out of the nineteenth. Suffice it that the Queen's

kindness left a strong impression on Dickens. Upon her Majesty's regret

not to have heard his Readings, Dickens intimated that they were become

now a thing of the past, while he acknowledged gratefully her Majesty's

compliment in regard to them. She spoke to him of the impression made

upon her by his acting in the _Frozen Deep_; and on his stating, in

reply to her enquiry, that the little play had not been very successful

on the public stage, said this did not surprise her, since it no longer

had the advantage of his performance in it. Then arose a mention of some

alleged discourtesy shown to Prince Arthur in New York, and he begged

her Majesty not to confound the true Americans of that city with the

Fenian portion of its Irish population; on which she made the quiet

comment that she was convinced the people about the Prince had made too

much of the affair. He related to her the story of President Lincoln's

dream on the night before his murder. She asked him to give her his

writings, and could she have them that afternoon? but he begged to be

allowed to send a bound copy. Her Majesty then took from a table her own

book upon the Highlands, with an autograph inscription "to Charles

Dickens"; and, saying that "the humblest" of writers would be ashamed to

offer it to "one of the greatest" but that Mr. Helps, being asked to

give it, had remarked that it would be valued most from herself, closed

the interview by placing it in his hands. "Sir," said Johnson, "they may

say what they like of the young King, but Louis the Fourteenth could not

have shown a more refined courtliness"; and Dickens was not disposed to

say less of the young King's granddaughter. That the grateful impression

sufficed to carry him into new ways, I had immediate proof, coupled with

intimation of the still surviving strength of old memories. "As my

sovereign desires" (26th of March 1870) "that I should attend the next

levee, don't faint with amazement if you see my name in that unwonted

connexion. I have scrupulously kept myself free for the second of April,

in case you should be accessible." The name appeared at the levee

accordingly, his daughter was at the drawing-room that followed, and

Lady Houghton writes to me "I never saw Mr. Dickens more agreeable than

at a dinner at our house about a fortnight before his death, when he met

the King of the Belgians and the Prince of Wales at the special desire

of the latter." Up to nearly the hour of dinner, it was doubtful if he

could go. He was suffering from the distress in his foot; and on arrival

at the house, being unable to ascend the stairs, had to be assisted at

once into the dining-room.

The friend who had accompanied Dickens to Buckingham Palace, writing of

him[301] after his death, briefly but with admirable knowledge and

taste, said that he ardently desired, and confidently looked forward to,

a time when there would be a more intimate union than exists at present

between the different classes in the state, a union that should embrace

alike the highest and the lowest. This perhaps expresses, as well as a

few words could, what certainly was always at his heart; and he might

have come to think it, when his life was closing, more possible of

realisation some day than he ever thought it before. The hope of it was

on his friend Talfourd's lips when he died, and his own most jarring

opinions might at last have joined in the effort to bring about such

reconcilement. More on this head it needs not to say. Whatever may be

the objection to special views held by him, he would, wanting even the

most objectionable, have been less himself. It was by something of the

despot seldom separable from genius, joined to a truthfulness of nature

belonging to the highest characters, that men themselves of a rare

faculty were attracted to find in Dickens what Sir Arthur Helps has

described, "a man to confide in, and look up to as a leader, in the

midst of any great peril."

Mr. Layard also held that opinion of him. He was at Gadshill during the

Christmas before Dickens went for the last time to America, and

witnessed one of those scenes, not infrequent there, in which the master

of the house was pre-eminently at home. They took generally the form of

cricket matches; but this was, to use the phrase of his friend Bobadil,

more popular and diffused; and of course he rose with the occasion. "The

more you want of the master, the more you'll find in him," said the

gasman employed about his readings. "Foot-races for the villagers," he

wrote on Christmas Day, "come off in my field to-morrow. We have been

all hard at work all day, building a course, making countless flags, and

I don't know what else. Layard is chief commissioner of the domestic

police. The country police predict an immense crowd." There were between

two and three thousand people; and somehow, by a magical kind of

influence, said Layard, Dickens seemed to have bound every creature

present, upon what honour the creature had, to keep order. What was the

special means used, or the art employed, it might have been difficult to

say; but that was the result. Writing on New Year's Day, Dickens himself

described it to me. "We had made a very pretty course, and taken great

pains. Encouraged by the cricket matches experience, I allowed the

landlord of the Falstaff to have a drinking-booth on the ground. Not to

seem to dictate or distrust, I gave all the prizes (about ten pounds in

the aggregate) in money. The great mass of the crowd were labouring men

of all kinds, soldiers, sailors, and navvies. They did not, between

half-past ten, when we began, and sunset, displace a rope or a stake;

and they left every barrier and flag as neat as they found it. There was

not a dispute, and there was no drunkenness whatever. I made them a

little speech from the lawn, at the end of the games, saying that please

God we would do it again next year. They cheered most lustily and

dispersed. The road between this and Chatham was like a Fair all day;

and surely it is a fine thing to get such perfect behaviour out of a

reckless seaport town. Among other oddities we had a Hurdle Race for

Strangers. One man (he came in second) ran 120 yards and leaped over ten

hurdles, in twenty seconds, _with a pipe in his mouth, and smoking it

all the time_. 'If it hadn't been for your pipe,' I said to him at the

winning-post, 'you would have been first.' 'I beg your pardon, sir,' he

answered, 'but if it hadn't been for my pipe, I should have been

nowhere.'" The close of the letter had this rather memorable

announcement. "The sale of the Christmas number was, yesterday evening,

255,380." Would it be absurd to say that there is something in such a

vast popularity in itself electrical, and, though founded on books, felt

where books never reach?

It is also very noticeable that what would have constituted the strength

of Dickens if he had entered public life, the attractive as well as the

commanding side of his nature, was that which kept him most within the

circle of home pursuits and enjoyments. This "better part" of him had

now long survived that sorrowful period of 1857-8, when, for reasons

which I have not thought myself free to suppress, a vaguely disturbed

feeling for the time took possession of him, and occurrences led to his

adoption of other pursuits than those to which till then he had given

himself exclusively. It was a sad interval in his life; but, though

changes incident to the new occupation then taken up remained, and with

them many adverse influences which brought his life prematurely to a

close, it was, with any reference to that feeling, an interval only; and

the dominant impression of the later years, as of the earlier, takes the

marvellously domestic home-loving shape in which also the strength of

his genius is found. It will not do to draw round any part of such a man

too hard a line, and the writer must not be charged with inconsistency

who says that Dickens's childish sufferings,[302] and the sense they

burnt into him of the misery of loneliness and a craving for joys of

home, though they led to what was weakest in him, led also to what was

greatest. It was his defect as well as his merit in maturer life not to

be able to live alone. When the fancies of his novels were upon him and

he was under their restless influence, though he often talked of

shutting himself up in out of the way solitary places, he never went

anywhere unaccompanied by members of his family. His habits of daily

life he carried with him wherever he went. In Albaro and Genoa, at

Lausanne and Geneva, in Paris and Boulogne, his ways were as entirely

those of home as in London and Broadstairs. If it is the property of a

domestic nature to be personally interested in every detail, the

smallest as the greatest, of the four walls within which one lives, then

no man had it so essentially as Dickens. No man was so inclined

naturally to derive his happiness from home concerns. Even the kind of

interest in a house which is commonly confined to women, he was full of.

Not to speak of changes of importance, there was not an additional hook

put up wherever he inhabited, without his knowledge, or otherwise than

as part of some small ingenuity of his own. Nothing was too minute for

his personal superintendence. Whatever might be in hand, theatricals for

the little children, entertainments for those of larger growth, cricket

matches, dinners, field sports, from the first new year's eve dance in

Doughty Street to the last musical party in Hyde Park Place, he was the

centre and soul of it. He did not care to take measure of its greater or

less importance. It was enough that a thing was to do, to be worth his

while to do it as if there was nothing else to be done in the world.

The cry of Laud and Wentworth was his, alike in small and great things;

and to no man was more applicable the German "Echt," which expresses

reality as well as thoroughness. The usual result followed, in all his

homes, of an absolute reliance on him for everything. Under every

difficulty, and in every emergency, his was the encouraging influence,

the bright and ready help. In illness, whether of the children or any of

the servants, he was better than a doctor. He was so full of resource,

for which every one eagerly turned to him, that his mere presence in the

sick-room was a healing influence, as if nothing could fail if he were

only there. So that at last, when, all through the awful night which

preceded his departure, he lay senseless in the room where he had

fallen, the stricken and bewildered ones who tended him found it

impossible to believe that what they saw before them alone was left, or

to shut out wholly the strange wild hope that he might again be suddenly

among them _like_ himself, and revive what they could not connect, even

then, with death's despairing helplessness.

It was not a feeling confined to the relatives whom he had thus taught

to have such exclusive dependence on him. Among the consolations

addressed to those mourners came words from one whom in life he had most

honoured, and who also found it difficult to connect him with death, or

to think that he should never see that blithe face anymore. "It is

almost thirty years," Mr. Carlyle wrote, "since my acquaintance with him

began; and on my side, I may say, every new meeting ripened it into more

and more clear discernment of his rare and great worth as a brother

man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just and

loving man: till at length he had grown to such a recognition with me as

I have rarely had for any man of my time. This I can tell you three, for

it is true and will be welcome to you: to others less concerned I had as

soon _not_ speak on such a subject." "I am profoundly sorry, for _you_,"

Mr. Carlyle at the same time wrote to me; "and indeed for myself and for

us all. It is an event world-wide; a _unique_ of talents suddenly

extinct; and has 'eclipsed,' we too may say, 'the harmless gaiety of

nations.' No death since 1866 has fallen on me with such a stroke. No

literary man's hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, high-gifted,

ever-friendly, noble Dickens,--every inch of him an Honest Man."

Of his ordinary habits of activity I have spoken, and they were

doubtless carried too far. In youth it was all well, but he did not make

allowance for years. This has had abundant illustration, but will admit

of a few words more. To all men who do much, rule and order are

essential; method in everything was Dickens's peculiarity; and between

breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions, was his time of work. But

his daily walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and necessity. In

the midst of his writing they were indispensable, and especially, as it

has often been shown, at night. Mr. Sala is an authority on London

streets, and, in the eloquent and generous tribute he was among the

first to offer to his memory, has described himself encountering Dickens

in the oddest places and most inclement weather, in Ratcliffe-highway,

on Haverstock-hill, on Camberwell-green, in Gray's-inn-lane, in the

Wandsworth-road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at

Kensal New Town. "A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at

Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots,

seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan

Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding

speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting

the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along

the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of

sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way

up the Vauxhall-bridge-road." But he was equally at home in the

intricate byways of narrow streets and in the lengthy thoroughfares.

Wherever there was "matter to be heard and learned," in back streets

behind Holborn, in Borough courts and passages, in city wharfs or

alleys, about the poorer lodging-houses, in prisons, workhouses,

ragged-schools, police-courts, rag-shops, chandlers' shops, and all

sorts of markets for the poor, he carried his keen observation and

untiring study. "I was among the Italian Boys from 12 to 2 this

morning," says one of his letters. "I am going out to-night in their

boat with the Thames Police," says another. It was the same when he was

in Italy or Switzerland, as we have seen; and when, in later life, he

was in French provincial places. "I walk miles away into the country,

and you can scarcely imagine by what deserted ramparts and silent little

cathedral closes, or how I pass over rusty drawbridges and stagnant

ditches out of and into the decaying town." For several consecutive

years I accompanied him every Christmas Eve to see the marketings for

Christmas down the road from Aldgate to Bow; and he had a surprising

fondness for wandering about in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas-day,

past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, and

watching the dinners preparing or coming in. But the temptations of his

country life led him on to excesses in walking. "Coming in just now," he

wrote in his third year at Gadshill, "after twelve miles in the rain, I

was so wet that I have had to change and get my feet into warm water

before I could do anything." Again, two years later: "A south-easter

blowing, enough to cut one's throat. I am keeping the house for my cold,

as I did yesterday. But the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it

does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of

treatment fails to-day, I shall try that to-morrow." He tried it perhaps

too often. In the winter of 1865 he first had the attack in his left

foot which materially disabled his walking-power for the rest of his

life. He supposed its cause to be overwalking in the snow, and that this

had aggravated the suffering is very likely; but, read by the light of

what followed, it may now be presumed to have had more serious origin.

It recurred at intervals, before America, without any such provocation;

in America it came back, not when he had most been walking in the snow,

but when nervous exhaustion was at its worst with him; after America, it

became prominent on the eve of the occurrence at Preston which first

revealed the progress that disease had been making in the vessels of the

brain; and in the last year of his life, as will immediately be seen,

it was a constant trouble and most intense suffering, extending then

gravely to his left hand also, which had before been only slightly

affected.

It was from a letter of the 21st of February 1865 I first learnt that he

was suffering tortures from a "frost-bitten" foot, and ten days later

brought more detailed account. "I got frost-bitten by walking

continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots

hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and

I still forced the boot on; sat in it to write, half the day; walked in

it through the snow, the other half; forced the boot on again next

morning; sat and walked again; and being accustomed to all sorts of

changes in my feet, took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell

lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for

the last three miles--to the remarkable terror, by-the-bye, of the two

big dogs." The dogs were Turk and Linda. Boisterous companions as they

always were, the sudden change in him brought them to a stand-still; and

for the rest of the journey they crept by the side of their master as

slowly as he did, never turning from him. He was greatly moved by the

circumstance, and often referred to it. Turk's look upward to his face

was one of sympathy as well as fear, he said; but Linda was wholly

struck down.

The saying in his letter to his youngest son that he was to do to others

what he would that they should do to him, without being discouraged if

they did not do it; and his saying to the Birmingham people that they

were to attend to self-improvement not because it led to fortune, but

because it was right; express a principle that at all times guided

himself. Capable of strong attachments, he was not what is called an

effusive man; but he had no half-heartedness in any of his likings. The

one thing entirely hateful to him, was indifference. "I give my heart to

very few people; but I would sooner love the most implacable man in the

world than a careless one, who, if my place were empty to-morrow, would

rub on and never miss me." There was nothing he more repeatedly told his

children than that they were not to let indifference in others appear to

justify it in themselves. "All kind things," he wrote, "must be done on

their own account, and for their own sake, and without the least

reference to any gratitude." Again he laid it down, while he was making

some exertion for the sake of a dead friend that did not seem likely to

win proper appreciation from those it was to serve. "As to gratitude

from the family--as I have often remarked to you, one does a generous

thing because it is right and pleasant, and not for any response it is

to awaken in others." The rule in another form frequently appears in his

letters; and it was enforced in many ways upon all who were dear to him.

It is worth while to add his comment on a regret of a member of his

family at an act of self-devotion supposed to have been thrown away:

"Nothing of what is nobly done can ever be lost." It is also to be noted

as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms

he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived

in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he wrote from Paris in 1856.

"Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think

Richardson's manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest

things I ever knew in my life. It makes one's heart beat high, with a

sort of sacred joy." (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the

earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of

Franklin's first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted

emotion.) It was for something higher than mere literature he valued the

most original writer and powerful teacher of the age. "I would go at all

times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive."

Of his attractive points in society and conversation I have

particularized little, because in truth they were himself. Such as they

were, they were never absent from him. His acute sense of enjoyment gave

such relish to his social qualities that probably no man, not a great

wit or a professed talker, ever left, in leaving any social gathering, a

blank so impossible to fill up. In quick and varied sympathy, in ready

adaptation to every whim or humour, in help to any mirth or game, he

stood for a dozen men. If one may say such a thing, he seemed to be

always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting

off his personality. His versatility made him unique. What he said once

of his own love of acting, applied to him equally when at his happiest

among friends he loved; sketching a character, telling a story, acting a

charade, taking part in a game; turning into comedy an incident of the

day, describing the last good or bad thing he had seen, reproducing in

quaint, tragical, or humorous form and figure, some part of the

passionate life with which all his being overflowed. "Assumption has

charms for me so delightful--I hardly know for how many wild

reasons--that I feel a loss of Oh I can't say what exquisite foolery,

when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like

myself." How it was, that, from one of such boundless resource in

contributing to the pleasure of his friends, there was yet, as I have

said, so comparatively little to bring away, may be thus explained. But

it has been also seen that no one at times said better things, and to

happy examples formerly given I will add one or two of a kind he more

rarely indulged. "He is below par on the Exchange," a friend remarked of

a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no

one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that

Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary

friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular

author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when

Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise,

"the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't know," remarked

Dickens, "about his getting his sea-legs on; but if I may judge from his

writing, he certainly has not got his A B C legs on."

Other agreeable pleasantries might be largely cited from his letters.

"An old priest" (he wrote from France in 1862), "the express image of

Frederic Lemaitre got up for the part, and very cross with the

toothache, told me in a railway carriage the other day, that we had no

antiquities in heretical England. 'None at all?' I said. 'You have some

ships however.' 'Yes; a few.' 'Are they strong?' 'Well,' said I, 'your

trade is spiritual, my father: ask the ghost of Nelson.' A French

captain who was in the carriage, was immensely delighted with this small

joke. I met him at Calais yesterday going somewhere with a detachment;

and he said--Pardon! But he had been so limited as to suppose an

Englishman incapable of that bonhommie!" In humouring a joke he was

excellent, both in letters and talk; and for this kind of enjoyment his

least important little notes are often worth preserving. Take one small

instance. So freely had he admired a tale told by his friend and

solicitor Mr. Frederic Ouvry, that he had to reply to a humorous

proposal for publication of it, in his own manner, in his own

periodical. "Your modesty is equal to your merit. . . . I think your way of

describing that rustic courtship in middle life, quite matchless. . . . A

cheque for L1000 is lying with the publisher. We would willingly make it

more, but that we find our law charges so exceedingly heavy." His

letters have also examples now and then of what he called his

conversational triumphs. "I have distinguished myself" (28th of April

1861) "in two respects lately. I took a young lady, unknown, down to

dinner, and, talking to her about the Bishop of Durham's nepotism in the

matter of Mr. Cheese, I found she was Mrs. Cheese. And I expatiated to

the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy, generally conceiving him to be

an Irish member, on the contemptible character of the Marylebone

constituency and Marylebone representation."

Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost

story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his

briefer pieces will know; and such was his interest generally in things

supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common

sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was,

the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable

superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of

natural coincidence; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a

ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency

to believe in any such, "well-authenticated," as made perfect his manner

of telling one. Such a story is related in the 125th number of _All the

Year Round_, which before its publication both Mr. Layard and myself saw

at Gadshill, and identified as one related by Lord Lytton. It was

published in September, and in a day or two led to what Dickens will

relate. "The artist himself who is the hero of that story" (to Lord

Lytton, 15th of September 1861) "has sent me in black and white his own

account of the whole experience, so very original, so very

extraordinary, so very far beyond the version I have published, that all

other like stories turn pale before it." The ghost thus reinforced came

out in the number published on the 5th of October; and the reader who

cares to turn to it, and compare what Dickens in the interval (17th of

September) wrote to myself, will have some measure of his readiness to

believe in such things. "Upon the publication of the ghost story, up has

started the portrait-painter who saw the phantoms! His own written story

is out of all distance the most extraordinary that ever was produced;

and is as far beyond my version or Bulwer's, as Scott is beyond James.

Everything connected with it is amazing; but conceive this--the

portrait-painter had been engaged to write it elsewhere as a story for

next Christmas, and not unnaturally supposed, when he saw himself

anticipated in _All the Year Round_, that there had been treachery at

his printer's. 'In particular,' says he, 'how else was it possible that

the date, the 13th of September, could have been got at? For I never

told the date, until I wrote it.' Now, _my_ story had NO DATE; but

seeing, when I looked over the proof, the great importance of having _a_

date, I (C. D.) wrote in, unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of

the proof!" The reader will remember the Doncaster race story; and to

other like illustrations of the subject already given, may be added this

dream. "Here is a curious case at first-hand" (30th of May 1863). "On

Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I

saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to

be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she

said 'I am Miss Napier.' All the time I was dressing next morning, I

thought--What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream

about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss

Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into my

retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and _the_ Lady in the red

shawl whom they present as 'Miss Napier!' These are all the

circumstances, exactly told."

Another kind of dream has had previous record, with no superstition to

build itself upon but the loving devotion to one tender memory. With

longer or shorter intervals this was with him all his days. Never from

his waking thoughts was the recollection altogether absent; and though

the dream would leave him for a time, it unfailingly came back. It was

the feeling of his life that always had a mastery over him. What he said

on the sixth anniversary of the death of his sister-in-law, that friend

of his youth whom he had made his ideal of all moral excellence, he

might have said as truly after twenty-six years more. In the very year

before he died, the influence was potently upon him. "She is so much in

my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have

greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an

essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as

the beating of my heart is." Through later troubled years, whatever was

worthiest in him found in this an ark of safety; and it was the nobler

part of his being which had thus become also the essential. It gave to

success what success by itself had no power to give; and nothing could

consist with it, for any length of time, that was not of good report and

pure. What more could I say that was not better said from the pulpit of

the Abbey where he rests?

"He whom we mourn was the friend of mankind, a philanthropist in the

true sense; the friend of youth, the friend of the poor, the enemy of

every form of meanness and oppression. I am not going to attempt to draw

a portrait of him. Men of genius are different from what we suppose them

to be. They have greater pleasures and greater pains, greater affections

and greater temptations, than the generality of mankind, and they can

never be altogether understood by their fellow men. . . . But we feel that

a light has gone out, that the world is darker to us, when they depart.

There are so very few of them that we cannot afford to lose them one by

one, and we look vainly round for others who may supply their places. He

whose loss we now mourn occupied a greater space than any other writer

in the minds of Englishmen during the last thirty-three years. We read

him, talked about him, acted him; we laughed with him; we were roused by

him to a consciousness of the misery of others, and to a pathetic

interest in human life. Works of fiction, indirectly, are great

instructors of this world; and we can hardly exaggerate the debt of

gratitude which is due to a writer who has led us to sympathize with

these good, true, sincere, honest English characters of ordinary life,

and to laugh at the egotism, the hypocrisy, the false respectability of

religious professors and others. To another great humourist who lies in

this Church the words have been applied that his death eclipsed the

gaiety of nations. But of him who has been recently taken I would rather

say, in humbler language, that no one was ever so much beloved or so

much mourned."

FOOTNOTES:

[289] Mr. Grant Wilson has sent me an extract from a letter by

Fitz-Greene Halleck (author of one of the most delightful poems ever

written about Burns) which exactly expresses Dickens as he was, not only

in 1842, but, as far as the sense of authorship went, all his life. It

was addressed to Mrs. Rush of Philadelphia, and is dated the 8th of

March 1842. "You ask me about Mr. Boz. I am quite delighted with him. He

is a thorough good fellow, with nothing of the author about him but the

reputation, and goes through his task as Lion with exemplary grace,

patience, and good nature. He has the brilliant face of a man of

genius. . . . His writings you know. I wish you had listened to his

eloquence at the dinner here. It was the only real specimen of eloquence

I have ever witnessed. Its charm was not in its words, but in the manner

of saying them."

[290] In a volume called _Home and Abroad_, by Mr. David Macrae, is

printed a correspondence with Dickens on matters alluded to in the text,

held in 1861, which will be found to confirm all that is here said.

[291] This letter is facsimile'd in _A Christmas Memorial of Charles

Dickens by A. B. Hume_ (1870), containing an Ode to his Memory written

with feeling and spirit.

[292] I may quote here from a letter (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 5th Sept. 1858)

sent me by the editor of the _Northern Express_. "The view you take of

the literary character in the abstract, or of what it might and ought to

be, expresses what I have striven for all through my literary

life--never to allow it to be patronized, or tolerated, or treated like

a good or a bad child. I am always animated by the hope of leaving it a

little better understood by the thoughtless than I found it."--To James

B. Manson, Esq.

[293] Henry Ryder-Taylor, Esq. Ph.D. 8th Sept. 1868.

[294] By way of instance I subjoin an amusing insertion made by him in

an otherwise indifferently written paper descriptive of the typical

Englishman on the foreign stage, which gives in more comic detail

experiences of his own already partly submitted to the reader (ii. 127).

"In a pretty piece at the Gymnase in Paris, where the prime minister of

England unfortunately ruined himself by speculating in railway shares, a

thorough-going English servant appeared under that thorough-going

English name Tom Bob--the honest fellow having been christened Tom, and

born the lawful son of Mr. and Mrs. Bob. In an Italian adaptation of

DUMAS' preposterous play of KEAN, which we once saw at the great theatre

of Genoa, the curtain rose upon that celebrated tragedian, drunk and

fast asleep in a chair, attired in a dark blue blouse fastened round the

waist with a broad belt and a most prodigious buckle, and wearing a dark

red hat of the sugar-loaf shape, nearly three feet high. He bore in his

hand a champagne-bottle, with the label RHUM, in large capital letters,

carefully turned towards the audience; and two or three dozen of the

same popular liquor, which we are nationally accustomed to drink neat as

imported, by the half gallon, ornamented the floor of the apartment.

Every frequenter of the Coal Hole tavern in the Strand, on that

occasion, wore a sword and a beard. Every English lady, presented on the

stage in Italy, wears a green veil; and almost every such specimen of

our fair countrywomen carries a bright red reticule, made in the form of

a monstrous heart. We do not remember to have ever seen an Englishman on

the Italian stage, or in the Italian circus, without a stomach like

Daniel Lambert, an immense shirt-frill, and a bunch of watch-seals each

several times larger than his watch, though the watch itself was an

impossible engine. And we have rarely beheld this mimic Englishman,

without seeing present, then and there, a score of real Englishmen

sufficiently characteristic and unlike the rest of the audience, to whom

he bore no shadow of resemblance." These views as to English people and

society, of which Count d'Orsay used always to say that an average

Frenchman knew about as much as he knew of the inhabitants of the moon,

may receive amusing addition from one of Dickens's letters during his

last visit to France; which enclosed a cleverly written Paris journal

containing essays on English manners. In one of these the writer

remarked that he had heard of the venality of English politicians, but

could not have supposed it to be so shameless as it is, for, when he

went to the House of Commons, he heard them call out "Places! Places!"

"Give us Places!" when the Minister entered.

[295] The letter is addressed to Miss Harriet Parr, whose book called

_Gilbert Massenger_ is the tale referred to.

[296] See the introductory memoir from his pen now prefixed to every

edition of the popular and delightful _Legends and Lyrics_.

[297] On this remonstrance and Dickens's reply the _Times_ had a leading

article of which the closing sentences find fitting place in his

biography. "If there be anything in Lord Russell's theory that Life

Peerages are wanted specially to represent those forms of national

eminence which cannot otherwise find fitting representation, it might be

urged, for the reasons we have before mentioned, that a Life Peerage is

due to the most truly national representative of one important

department of modern English literature. Something may no doubt be said

in favour of this view, but we are inclined to doubt if Mr. Dickens

himself would gain anything by a Life Peerage. Mr. Dickens is

pre-eminently a writer of the people and for the people. To our

thinking, he is far better suited for the part of the 'Great Commoner'

of English fiction than for even a Life Peerage. To turn Charles Dickens

into Lord Dickens would be much the same mistake in literature that it

was in politics to turn William Pitt into Lord Chatham."

[298] One of the many repetitions of the same opinion in his letters may

be given. "Lord John's note" (September 1853) "confirms me in an old

impression that he is worth a score of official men; and has more

generosity in his little finger than a Government usually has in its

whole corporation." In another of his public allusions, Dickens

described him as a statesman of whom opponents and friends alike felt

sure that he would rise to the level of every occasion, however exalted;

and compared him to the seal of Solomon in the old Arabian story

inclosing in a not very large casket the soul of a giant.

[299] In a memoir by Dr. Shelton McKenzie which has had circulation in

America, there is given the following statement, taken doubtless from

publications at the time, of which it will be strictly accurate to say,

that, excepting the part of its closing averment which describes Dickens

sending a copy of his works to her Majesty by her own desire, _there is

in it not a single word of truth_. "Early in 1870 the Queen presented a

copy of her book upon the Highlands to Mr. Dickens, with the modest

autographic inscription, 'from the humblest to the most distinguished

author of England.' This was meant to be complimentary, and was accepted

as such by Mr. Dickens, who acknowledged it in a manly, courteous

letter. Soon after, Queen Victoria wrote to him, requesting that he

would do her the favour of paying her a visit at Windsor. He accepted,

and passed a day, very pleasantly, in his Sovereign's society. It is

said that they were mutually pleased, that Mr. Dickens caught the royal

lady's particular humour, that they chatted together in a very friendly

manner, that the Queen was never tired of asking questions about certain

characters in his books, that they had almost a _tete-a-tete_ luncheon,

and that, ere he departed, the Queen pressed him to accept a baronetcy

(a title which descends to the eldest son), and that, on his declining,

she said, 'At least, Mr. Dickens, let me have the gratification of

making you one of my Privy Council.' This, which gives the personal

title of 'Right Honourable,' he also declined--nor, indeed, did Charles

Dickens require a title to give him celebrity. The Queen and the author

parted, well pleased with each other. The newspapers reported that a

peerage had been offered and declined--_but even newspapers are not

invariably correct_. Mr. Dickens presented his Royal Mistress with a

handsome set of all his works, and, on the very morning of his death, a

letter reached Gad's Hill, written by Mr. Arthur Helps, by her desire,

acknowledging the present, and describing the exact position the books

occupied at Balmoral--so placed that she could see them before her when

occupying the usual seat in her sitting-room. When this letter arrived,

Mr. Dickens was still alive, but wholly unconscious. What to him, at

that time, was the courtesy of an earthly sovereign?" I repeat that the

only morsel of truth in all this rigmarole is that the books were sent

by Dickens, and acknowledged by Mr. Helps at the Queen's desire. The

letter did not arrive on the day of his death, the 9th of June, but was

dated from Balmoral on that day.

[300] The book was thus entered in the catalogue. "DICKENS (C.), A

CHRISTMAS CAROL, in prose, 1843; _Presentation Copy_, inscribed '_W. M.

Thackeray, from Charles Dickens (whom he made very happy once a long way

from home_).'" Some pleasant verses by his friend had affected him much

while abroad. I quote the Life of Dickens published by Mr. Hotten. "Her

Majesty expressed the strongest desire to possess this presentation

copy, and sent an unlimited commission to buy it. The original published

price of the book was 5_s._ It became Her Majesty's property for L25

10_s._, and was at once taken to the palace."

[301] "In Memoriam" by Arthur Helps, in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for July

1870.

[302] An entry, under the date of July 1833, from a printed but

unpublished Diary by Mr. Payne Collier, appeared lately in the

_Athenaeum_, having reference to Dickens at the time when he first

obtained employment as a reporter, and connecting itself with what my

opening volume had related of those childish sufferings. "Soon

afterwards I observed a great difference in C. D.'s dress, for he had

bought a new hat and a very handsome blue cloak, which he threw over his

shoulder _a l' Espagnole_. . . . We walked together through Hungerford

Market, where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his little rosy but

grimy child looking over his shoulder; and C. D. bought a

halfpenny-worth of cherries, and as we went along he gave them one by

one to the little fellow without the knowledge of the father. . . . He

informed me as we walked through it that he knew Hungerford Market

well. . . . He did not affect to conceal the difficulties he and his family

had had to contend against."

CHAPTER XX.

THE END.

1869-1870.

Visit from Mr. and Mrs. Fields--Places shown to

Visitor--Last Paper in _All the Year

Round_--Son Henry's Scholarship--A Reading of

_Edwin Drood_--Medical Attendance at

Readings--Excitement after _Oliver Twist_

Scenes--Farewell Address--Results of Over

Excitement--Last Appearances in Public--Death

of Daniel Maclise--Temptations of

London--Another Attack in the Foot--Noteworthy

Incident--Tribute of Gratitude for his

Books--Last Letter from him--Last

Days--Thoughts on his Last Day of

Consciousness--The Close--General

Mourning--Wish to bury him in the Abbey--His

Own Wish--The Burial--Unbidden Mourners--The

Grave.

THE summer and autumn of 1869 were passed quietly at Gadshill. He

received there, in June, the American friends to whom he had been most

indebted for unwearying domestic kindness at his most trying time in the

States. In August, he was at the dinner of the International boat-race;

and, in a speech that might have gone far to reconcile the victors to

changing places with the vanquished, gave the healths of the Harvard and

the Oxford crews. He went to Birmingham, in September, to fulfil a

promise that he would open the session of the Institute; and there,

after telling his audience that his invention, such as it was, never

would have served him as it had done, but for the habit of commonplace,

patient, drudging attention, he declared his political creed to be

infinitesimal faith in the people governing and illimitable faith in the

People governed. In such engagements as these, with nothing of the kind

of strain he had most to dread, there was hardly more movement or change

than was necessary to his enjoyment of rest.

He had been able to show Mr. Fields something of the interest of London

as well as of his Kentish home. He went over its "general post-office"

with him, took him among its cheap theatres and poor lodging-houses, and

piloted him by night through its most notorious thieves' quarter. Its

localities that are pleasantest to a lover of books, such as Johnson's

Bolt-court and Goldsmith's Temple-chambers, he explored with him; and,

at his visitor's special request, mounted a staircase he had not

ascended for more than thirty years, to show the chambers in Furnival's

Inn where the first page of _Pickwick_ was written. One more book,

unfinished, was to close what that famous book began; and the original

of the scene of its opening chapter, the opium-eater's den, was the last

place visited. "In a miserable court at night," says Mr. Fields, "we

found a haggard old woman blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old

ink-bottle; and the words which Dickens puts into the mouth of this

wretched creature in _Edwin Drood_, we heard her croon as we leaned over

the tattered bed in which she was lying."

Before beginning his novel he had written his last paper for his weekly

publication. It was a notice of my _Life of Landor_, and contained some

interesting recollections of that remarkable man. His memory at this

time dwelt much, as was only natural, with past pleasant time, as he saw

familiar faces leaving us or likely to leave; and, on the death of one

of the comedians associated with the old bright days of Covent Garden, I

had intimation of a fancy that had never quitted him since the

Cheltenham reading. "I see in the paper to-day that Meadows is dead. I

had a talk with him at Coutts's a week or two ago, when he said he was

seventy-five, and very weak. Except for having a tearful eye, he looked

just the same as ever. My mind still constantly misgives me concerning

Macready. Curiously, I don't think he has been ever, for ten minutes

together, out of my thoughts since I talked with Meadows last. Well, the

year that brings trouble brings comfort too: I have a great success in

the boy-line to announce to you. Harry has won the second scholarship at

Trinity Hall, which gives him L50 a year as long as he stays there; and

I begin to hope that he will get a fellowship." I doubt if anything ever

more truly pleased him than this little success of his son Henry at

Cambridge. Henry missed the fellowship, but was twenty-ninth wrangler in

a fair year, when the wranglers were over forty.

He finished his first number of _Edwin Drood_ in the third week of

October, and on the 26th read it at my house with great spirit. A few

nights before we had seen together at the Olympic a little drama taken

from his _Copperfield_, which he sat out with more than patience, even

with something of enjoyment; and another pleasure was given him that

night by its author, Mr. Halliday, who brought into the box another

dramatist, Mr. Robertson, to whom Dickens, who then first saw him, said

that to himself the charm of his little comedies was "their unassuming

form," which had so happily shown that "real wit could afford to put off

any airs of pretension to it." He was at Gadshill till the close of the

year; coming up for a few special occasions, such as Procter's

eighty-second birthday; and at my house on new-year's eve he read to us,

again aloud, a fresh number of his book. Yet these very last days of

December had not been without a reminder of the grave warnings of April.

The pains in somewhat modified form had returned in both his left hand

and his left foot a few days before we met; and they were troubling him

still on that day. But he made so light of them himself; so little

thought of connecting them with the uncertainties of touch and tread of

which they were really part; and read with such an overflow of humour

Mr. Honeythunder's boisterous philanthropy; that there was no room,

then, for anything but enjoyment. His only allusion to an effect from

his illness was his mention of a now invincible dislike which he had to

railway travel. This had decided him to take a London house for the

twelve last readings in the early months of 1870, and he had become Mr.

Milner-Gibson's tenant at 5, Hyde Park Place.

St. James's Hall was to be the scene of these Readings, and they were to

occupy the interval from the 11th of January to the 15th of March; two

being given in each week to the close of January, and the remaining

eight on each of the eight Tuesdays following. Nothing was said of any

kind of apprehension as the time approached; but, with a curious absence

of the sense of danger, there was certainly both distrust and fear.

Sufficient precaution was supposed to have been taken[303] by

arrangement for the presence, at each reading, of his friend and medical

attendant, Mr. Carr Beard; but this resolved itself, not into any

measure of safety, the case admitting of none short of stopping the

reading altogether, but simply into ascertainment of the exact amount of

strain and pressure, which, with every fresh exertion, he was placing on

those vessels of the brain where the Preston trouble too surely had

revealed that danger lay. No supposed force in reserve, no dominant

strength of will, can turn aside the penalties sternly exacted for

disregard of such laws of life as were here plainly overlooked; and

though no one may say that it was not already too late for any but the

fatal issue, there will be no presumption in believing that life might

yet have been for some time prolonged if these readings could have been

stopped.

"I am a little shaken," he wrote on the 9th of January, "by my journey

to Birmingham to give away the Institution's prizes on Twelfth Night,

but I am in good heart; and, notwithstanding Lowe's worrying scheme for

collecting a year's taxes in a lump, which they tell me is damaging

books, pictures, music, and theatres beyond precedent, our 'let' at St.

James's Hall is enormous." He opened with _Copperfield_ and the

_Pickwick Trial_; and I may briefly mention, from the notes taken by Mr.

Beard and placed at my disposal, at what cost of exertion to himself he

gratified the crowded audiences that then and to the close made these

evenings memorable. His ordinary pulse on the first night was at 72; but

never on any subsequent night was lower than 82, and had risen on the

later nights to more than 100. After _Copperfield_ on the first night it

went up to 96, and after _Marigold_ on the second to 99; but on the

first night of the _Sikes and Nancy_ scenes (Friday the 21st of January)

it went from 80 to 112, and on the second night (the 1st of February) to

118. From this, through the six remaining nights, it never was lower

than 110 after the first piece read; and after the third and fourth

readings of the _Oliver Twist_ scenes it rose, from 90 to 124 on the

15th of February, and from 94 to 120 on the 8th of March; on the former

occasion, after twenty minutes' rest, falling to 98, and on the latter,

after fifteen minutes' rest, falling to 82. His ordinary pulse on

entering the room, during these last six nights, was more than once

over 100, and never lower than 84; from which it rose, after _Nickleby_

on the 22nd of February, to 112. On the 8th of February, when he read

_Dombey_, it had risen from 91 to 114; on the 1st of March, after

_Copperfield_, it rose from 100 to 124; and when he entered the room on

the last night it was at 108, having risen only two beats more when the

reading was done. The pieces on this occasion were the _Christmas

Carol_, followed by the _Pickwick Trial_; and probably in all his life

he never read so well. On his return from the States, where he had to

address his effects to audiences composed of immense numbers of people,

a certain loss of refinement had been observable; but the old delicacy

was now again delightfully manifest, and a subdued tone, as well in the

humorous as the serious portions, gave something to all the reading as

of a quiet sadness of farewell. The charm of this was at its height when

he shut the volume of _Pickwick_ and spoke in his own person. He said

that for fifteen years he had been reading his own books to audiences

whose sensitive and kindly recognition of them had given him instruction

and enjoyment in his art such as few men could have had; but that he

nevertheless thought it well now to retire upon older associations, and

in future to devote himself exclusively to the calling which had first

made him known. "In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you

may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my

assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish

now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate

farewell." The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and

the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and

again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any

present.

Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed pain and

sorrow. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they

closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement

shown by the notes of Mr. Beard. On the 23rd of January, when for the

last time he met Carlyle, he came to us with his left hand in a sling;

on the 7th of February, when he passed with us his last birthday, and on

the 25th, when he read the third number of his novel, the hand was still

swollen and painful; and on the 21st of March, when he read admirably

his fourth number, he told us that as he came along, walking up the

length of Oxford-street, the same incident had recurred as on the day of

a former dinner with us, and he had not been able to read, all the way,

more than the right-hand half of the names over the shops. Yet he had

the old fixed persuasion that this was rather the effect of a medicine

he had been taking than of any grave cause, and he still strongly

believed his other troubles to be exclusively local. Eight days later he

wrote: "My uneasiness and hemorrhage, after having quite left me, as I

supposed, has come back with an aggravated irritability that it has not

yet displayed. You have no idea what a state I am in to-day from a

sudden violent rush of it; and yet it has not the slightest effect on my

general health that I know of." This was a disorder which troubled him

in his earlier life; and during the last five years, in his intervals of

suffering from other causes, it had from time to time taken aggravated

form.

His last public appearances were in April. On the 5th he took the chair

for the Newsvendors, whom he helped with a genial address in which even

his apology for little speaking overflowed with irrepressible humour. He

would try, he said, like Falstaff, "but with a modification almost as

large as himself," less to speak himself than to be the cause of

speaking in others. "Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a

snuff-shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand,

who, apparently having taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged

all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and

patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line." On the

30th of the same month he returned thanks for "Literature" at the Royal

Academy dinner, and I may preface my allusion to what he then said with

what he had written to me the day before. Three days earlier Daniel

Maclise had passed away. "Like you at Ely, so I at Higham, had the shock

of first reading at a railway station of the death of our old dear

friend and companion. What the shock would be, you know too well. It has

been only after great difficulty, and after hardening and steeling

myself to the subject by at once thinking of it and avoiding it in a

strange way, that I have been able to get any command over it or over

myself. If I feel at the time that I can be sure of the necessary

composure, I shall make a little reference to it at the Academy

to-morrow. I suppose you won't be there."[304] The reference made was

most touching and manly. He told those who listened that since he first

entered the public lists, a very young man indeed, it had been his

constant fortune to number among his nearest and dearest friends members

of that Academy who had been its pride; and who had now, one by one, so

dropped from his side that he was grown to believe, with the Spanish

monk of whom Wilkie spoke, that the only realities around him were the

pictures which he loved, and all the moving life but a shadow and a

dream. "For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and

most constant companions of Mr. Maclise, to whose death the Prince of

Wales has made allusion, and the President has referred with the

eloquence of genuine feeling. Of his genius in his chosen art, I will

venture to say nothing here; but of his fertility of mind and wealth of

intellect I may confidently assert that they would have made him, if he

had been so minded, at least as great a writer as he was a painter. The

gentlest and most modest of men, the freshest as to his generous

appreciation of young aspirants and the frankest and largest hearted as

to his peers, incapable of a sordid or ignoble thought, gallantly

sustaining the true dignity of his vocation, without one grain of

self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at the first, 'in wit

a man, simplicity a child,'--no artist of whatsoever denomination, I

make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden memory more

pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer chivalry to the

art-goddess whom he worshipped." These were the last public words of

Dickens, and he could not have spoken any worthier.

Upon his appearance at the dinner of the Academy had followed some

invitations he was led to accept; greatly to his own regret, he told me

on the night (7th of May) when he read to us the fifth number of _Edwin

Drood_; for he was now very eager to get back to the quiet of Gadshill.

He dined with Mr. Motley, then American minister; had met Mr. Disraeli

at a dinner at Lord Stanhope's; had breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone; and

on the 17th was to attend the Queen's ball with his daughter. But she

had to go there without him; for on the 16th I had intimation of a

sudden disablement. "I am sorry to report, that, in the old preposterous

endeavour to dine at preposterous hours and preposterous places, I have

been pulled up by a sharp attack in my foot. And serve me right. I hope

to get the better of it soon, but I fear I must not think of dining with

you on Friday. I have cancelled everything in the dining way for this

week, and that is a very small precaution after the horrible pain I have

had and the remedies I have taken." He had to excuse himself also from

the General Theatrical Fund dinner, where the Prince of Wales was to

preside; but at another dinner a week later, where the King of the

Belgians and the Prince were to be present, so much pressure was put

upon him that he went, still suffering as he was, to dine with Lord

Houghton.

We met for the last time on Sunday the 22nd of May, when I dined with

him in Hyde Park Place. The death of Mr. Lemon, of which he heard that

day, had led his thoughts to the crowd of friendly companions in letters

and art who had so fallen from the ranks since we played Ben Jonson

together that we were left almost alone. "And none beyond his sixtieth

year," he said, "very few even fifty." It is no good to talk of it, I

suggested. "We shall not think of it the less" was his reply; and an

illustration much to the point was before us, afforded by an incident

deserving remembrance in his story. Not many weeks before, a

correspondent had written to him from Liverpool describing himself as a

self-raised man, attributing his prosperous career to what Dickens's

writings had taught him at its outset of the wisdom of kindness, and

sympathy for others; and asking pardon for the liberty he took in hoping

that he might be permitted to offer some acknowledgment of what not only

had cheered and stimulated him through all his life, but had contributed

so much to the success of it. The letter enclosed L500. Dickens was

greatly touched by this; and told the writer, in sending back his

cheque, that he would certainly have taken it if he had not been, though

not a man of fortune, a prosperous man himself; but that the letter, and

the spirit of its offer, had so gratified him, that if the writer

pleased to send him any small memorial of it in another form he would

gladly receive it. The memorial soon came. A richly worked basket of

silver, inscribed "from one who has been cheered and stimulated by Mr.

Dickens's writings, and held the author among his first remembrances

when he became prosperous," was accompanied by an extremely handsome

silver centrepiece for the table, of which the design was four figures

representing the Seasons. But the kindly donor shrank from sending

Winter to one whom he would fain connect with none but the brighter and

milder days, and he had struck the fourth figure from the design. "I

never look at it," said Dickens, "that I don't think most of the

Winter."

A matter discussed that day with Mr. Ouvry was briefly resumed in a note

of the 29th of May, the last I ever received from him; which followed me

to Exeter, and closed thus. "You and I can speak of it at Gads by and

by. Foot no worse. But no better." The old trouble was upon him when we

parted, and this must have been nearly the last note written before he

quitted London. He was at Gadshill on the 30th of May; and I heard no

more until the telegram reached me at Launceston on the night of the 9th

of June, which told me that the "by and by" was not to come in this

world.

The few days at Gadshill had been given wholly to work on his novel. He

had been easier in his foot and hand; and, though he was suffering

severely from the local hemorrhage before named, he made no complaint of

illness. But there was observed in him a very unusual appearance of

fatigue. "He seemed very weary." He was out with his dogs for the last

time on Monday the 6th of June, when he walked with his letters into

Rochester. On Tuesday the 7th, after his daughter Mary had left on a

visit to her sister Kate, not finding himself equal to much fatigue, he

drove to Cobhamwood with his sister-in-law, there dismissed the

carriage, and walked round the park and back. He returned in time to put

up in his new conservatory some Chinese lanterns sent from London that

afternoon; and, the whole of the evening, he sat with Miss Hogarth in

the dining-room that he might see their effect when lighted. More than

once he then expressed his satisfaction at having finally abandoned all

intention of exchanging Gadshill for London; and this he had done more

impressively some days before. While he lived, he said, he should like

his name to be more and more associated with the place; and he had a

notion that when he died he should like to lie in the little graveyard

belonging to the Cathedral at the foot of the Castle wall.

On the 8th of June he passed all the day writing in the Chalet. He came

over for luncheon; and, much against his usual custom, returned to his

desk. Of the sentences he was then writing, the last of his long life of

literature, a portion has been given in facsimile on a previous page;

and the reader will observe with a painful interest, not alone its

evidence of minute labour at this fast-closing hour of time with him,

but the direction his thoughts had taken. He imagines such a brilliant

morning as had risen with that eighth of June shining on the old city of

Rochester. He sees in surpassing beauty, with the lusty ivy gleaming in

the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air, its antiquities and

its ruins; its Cathedral and Castle. But his fancy, then, is not with

the stern dead forms of either; but with that which makes warm the cold

stone tombs of centuries, and lights them up with flecks of brightness,

"fluttering there like wings." To him, on that sunny summer morning, the

changes of glorious light from moving boughs, the songs of birds, the

scents from garden, woods, and fields, have penetrated into the

Cathedral, have subdued its earthy odour, and are preaching the

Resurrection and the Life.

* * * * *

He was late in leaving the Chalet; but before dinner, which was ordered

at six o'clock with the intention of walking afterwards in the lanes, he

wrote some letters, among them one to his friend Mr. Charles Kent

appointing to see him in London next day; and dinner was begun before

Miss Hogarth saw, with alarm, a singular expression of trouble and pain

in his face. "For an hour," he then told her, "he had been very ill;"

but he wished dinner to go on. These were the only really coherent words

uttered by him. They were followed by some, that fell from him

disconnectedly, of quite other matters; of an approaching sale at a

neighbour's house, of whether Macready's son was with his father at

Cheltenham, and of his own intention to go immediately to London; but at

these latter he had risen, and his sister-in-law's help alone prevented

him from falling where he stood. Her effort then was to get him on the

sofa, but after a slight struggle he sank heavily on his left side. "On

the ground" were the last words he spoke. It was now a little over ten

minutes past six o'clock. His two daughters came that night with Mr.

Beard, who had also been telegraphed for, and whom they met at the

station. His eldest son arrived early next morning, and was joined in

the evening (too late) by his younger son from Cambridge. All possible

medical aid had been summoned. The surgeon of the neighbourhood was

there from the first, and a physician from London was in attendance as

well as Mr. Beard. But all human help was unavailing. There was effusion

on the brain; and though stertorous breathing continued all night, and

until ten minutes past six o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 9th of

June, there had never been a gleam of hope during the twenty-four hours.

He had lived four months beyond his 58th year.

* * * * *

The excitement and sorrow at his death are within the memory of all.

Before the news of it even reached the remoter parts of England, it had

been flashed across Europe; was known in the distant continents of

India, Australia, and America; and not in English-speaking communities

only, but in every country of the civilised earth, had awakened grief

and sympathy. In his own land it was as if a personal bereavement had

befallen every one. Her Majesty the Queen telegraphed from Balmoral "her

deepest regret at the sad news of Charles Dickens's death;" and this was

the sentiment alike of all classes of her people. There was not an

English journal that did not give it touching and noble utterance; and

the _Times_ took the lead in suggesting[305] that the only fit

resting-place for the remains of a man so dear to England was the Abbey

in which the most illustrious Englishmen are laid.

With the expression thus given to a general wish, the Dean of

Westminster lost no time in showing ready compliance; and on the morning

of the day when it appeared was in communication with the family and

representatives. The public homage of a burial in the Abbey had to be

reconciled with his own instructions to be privately buried without

previous announcement of time or place, and without monument or

memorial. He would himself have preferred to lie in the small graveyard

under Rochester Castle wall, or in the little churches of Cobham or

Shorne; but all these were found to be closed; and the desire of the

Dean and Chapter of Rochester to lay him in their Cathedral had been

entertained, when the Dean of Westminster's request, and the considerate

kindness of his generous assurance that there should be only such

ceremonial as would strictly obey all injunctions of privacy, made it a

grateful duty to accept that offer. The spot already had been chosen by

the Dean; and before mid-day on the following morning, Tuesday the 14th

of June, with knowledge of those only who took part in the burial, all

was done. The solemnity had not lost by the simplicity. Nothing so grand

or so touching could have accompanied it, as the stillness and the

silence of the vast Cathedral. Then, later in the day and all the

following day, came unbidden mourners in such crowds, that the Dean had

to request permission to keep open the grave until Thursday; but after

it was closed they did not cease to come, and "all day long," Doctor

Stanley wrote on the 17th, "there was a constant pressure to the spot,

and many flowers were strewn upon it by unknown hands, many tears shed

from unknown eyes." He alluded to this in the impressive funeral

discourse delivered by him in the Abbey on the morning of Sunday the

19th, pointing to the fresh flowers that then had been newly thrown (as

they still are thrown, in this fourth year after the death), and saying

that "the spot would thenceforward be a sacred one with both the New

World and the Old, as that of the representative of the literature, not

of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue." The stone

placed upon it is inscribed

CHARLES DICKENS.

BORN FEBRUARY THE SEVENTH 1812. DIED JUNE THE

NINTH 1870.

[Illustration]

The highest associations of both the arts he loved surround him where

he lies. Next to him is RICHARD CUMBERLAND. Mrs. PRITCHARD'S monument

looks down upon him, and immediately behind is DAVID GARRICK'S. Nor is

the actor's delightful art more worthily represented than the nobler

genius of the author. Facing the grave, and on its left and right, are

the monuments of CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, and DRYDEN, the three immortals

who did most to create and settle the language to which CHARLES DICKENS

has given another undying name.

FINIS.

FOOTNOTES:

[303] I desire to guard myself against any possible supposition that I

think these Readings might have been stopped by the exercise of medical

authority. I am convinced of the contrary. Dickens had pledged himself

to them; and the fact that others' interests were engaged rather than

his own supplied him with an overpowering motive for being determinedly

set on going through with them. At the sorrowful time in the preceding

year, when, yielding to the stern sentence passed by Sir Thomas Watson,

he had dismissed finally the staff employed on his country readings, he

had thus written to me. "I do believe" (3rd of May 1869) "that such

people as the Chappells are very rarely to be found in human affairs. To

say nothing of their noble and munificent manner of sweeping away into

space all the charges incurred uselessly, and all the immense

inconvenience and profitless work thrown upon their establishment, comes

a note this morning from the senior partner, to the effect that they

feel that my overwork has been 'indirectly caused by them, and by my

great and kind exertions to make their venture successful to the

extreme.' There is something so delicate and fine in this, that I feel

it deeply." That feeling led to his resolve to make the additional

exertion of these twelve last readings, and nothing would have turned

him from it as long as he could stand at the desk.