A First View of London--Charles Dickens--The Photograph--On
the Coach to Oxford--The Manuscript of _Our Mutual Friend_--
An Unpublished Chapter--Dickens as Reader--The British
Museum Reading Room.
I worked in the ramshackle, bankrupt, old printing office at home until
I was nearly eighteen years of age, and it was then decided to send me
to London to complete my education in the business.
It is like an exhibition of the biograph, in which the scenes depicted
go by at such a racing speed that it is difficult for the eye to follow
them. There is an instantaneous vision of the old kitchen, seen at some
abnormal unaccustomed hour of early morning in the winter-time. Three
o'clock on the morning of January 3, 1865. A gas-lit scene of bustle and
hurry. Gone. A minute's waiting in a snow-powdered road, carpet-bag in
hand, and four-horsed coach ramping along with a frosty gleam of lamps.
A jingle of harness, and an adventurous tooting from the guard's horn,
as if a charge was being sounded. Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white
and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of
strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of
echoes and voices. Gone.
A buffet at Oxford, and an instantaneous glimpse of people scalding
their throats with an intolerable decoction called coffee extract.
The figure of an imperious guard with a waving lamp. The vision of a
stampede. Gone. Then an interlude of sleep, during which an orchestra
plays dream music, with a roll, roll, roll of wheels as a musical
groundwork to the theme. Then Paddington, in a fog--a real London
particular, now for the first time seen, felt, tasted, sneezed at,
coughed at, wept over. Distracted biographic figures rampant everywhere.
Gone. A vision of streets, populous, and full of movement, but
half-invisible in a pea-soup haze, through which the gas that takes the
place of daylight most ineffectually glimmers. Gone. Then a room, still
gas-lit when it should be broad day; a table spread with napery none too
clean; a landlady in a dressing-gown and curl-papers; and breakfast. The
biograph ceases to whirl by at its original speed, and I can take breath
here, and can begin to analyse myself and my own surroundings.
To begin with, this is London; and to continue, I don't think much of
it. This is a London egg, and this is London bacon, and this exiguous
liquid which “laves the milk-jug with celestial blue” is London milk.
All the flavours are strange. The atmosphere is strange. The sight of a
lady in curlpapers at 10 a.m. is strange.
Now, in setting down all these things, I begin to take new notice of a
fact which has long been familiar to me. It has been expressed by more
than one poet, and the reason for it may be found in the works of more
than one man of science; but the fact itself is that every one of these
cinemato-graphical exercises is associated with a special odour. These
special odours have each one so often recurred that they have driven
home certain memories in such wise as to make them stick. The fire
in the old home kitchen had been “raked” as we used to say in South
Staffordshire, overnight, and it gave forth a scent of smouldering ash
which, whenever and wherever I have encountered it, has not failed to
bring back the scene in which I smelt it first. There is an odour less
easy to define, but just as easy to recognise, in the air of the morning
street; in the reek of horse and harness going up Snow Hill; in
a mingling of wet rot and dry rot in the station; in the acrid,
faintly-tinctured coffee smell at Oxford; in the scent of a London fog,
or the fragrance of a London egg--any one of which will infallibly take
me back to the scene and the time at which it was first perceived.
This, however, is an after-reflection; and here am I in London for the
first time as a free man, and, to my own mind, master of my destiny. It
really seems at moments as if one might pat it into any form one chose;
and it really seems at times as if one were an insect without wings
at the bottom of some unfathomable cranny. The fog of my first week
in London is, I believe, historic, and its five or six days of tearful
blindness and catarrh began to look as if they would reach to the very
crack of doom. Those fog-bound days, in which it was impossible for
a Midland-bred stranger to stray ten yards from his own door without
hopelessly losing himself, are amongst the most despondent and mournful
of my life. But, on a sudden, the dawning day revealed to me the other
side of the street in an air as crisp, clear, and invigorating as the
heart of any youngster, inured to the smoke of the Black Country, could
wish for. Then what a joy it was to walk about amongst the bustling
crowds, reading stories in the faces of the passers-by, and identifying
scores and hundreds of people with the creatures of the great fiction
writers. Above all, the people whose life-long friendship we owe to the
works of Charles Dickens declared themselves. I lived off the Goswell
Road, and that fact alone predisposed me to recognise Mr Pickwick in any
spectacled, well-fleshed old gentleman of benevolent aspect. I tumbled
across Sam Weller constantly. I was quite certain as to the living
personality of one of the Cheeryble twins. When I knew him he was a
tailor in Cheapside. It was merely by the accident of time that the
shadows I identified with living men had assumed a dress dissimilar to
that of the early Victorian era, and I think I may honestly say that for
a month or two, at least, my London was mainly peopled by the creations
of the author of _Pickwick, Little Dorrit_, and _Dombey_.
I never exchanged a word with Dickens in my life; but at this period, by
some extraordinary chance, I met him twice. I knew his personal aspect
well, for I had heard him read his own works in Birmingham. I was,
indeed, a unit in the packed audience which greeted his very first
professional appearance as a platform exponent of his own pages. That
event took place at the old Broad Street Music Hall in Birmingham, a
building which was superseded by the Prince of Wales' Theatre. It was
not easy to mistake so characteristic a figure for that of any other man
living.
There used to be in Cheapside, at the time of which I write, a window
in which the Stereoscopic Company exhibited the latest achievements in
photography; and it was my custom, in the dinner hour, to spend some
odd minutes in front of this display. I was impressed one day by a new
life-sized portrait of Dickens, an enlargement by a process then quite
novel. The hair and beard, I remember, had a look of being made out of
telegraph wire; but the features were quite natural and unexaggerated.
I had taken a good look at the picture, and had, indeed, so firmly fixed
it in my mind that I can positively see it now, and could, if I were
artist enough, reproduce it; when, having an unoccupied quarter of an
hour still on my hands, I turned to stroll towards St Paul's Churchyard,
and there, at my elbow, stood the original of the picture. He was
looking at it with his head a little thrown back, and somewhat set on
one side, and his look was very keen and critical. I gave a start which
attracted his attention, and, in the extremity of my surprise, I
am afraid that I stared at him rather rudely. I looked back at the
photograph, and I looked back at the living face of the great master of
tears and laughter, who was then my reigning deity. I can only suppose
that my face was full of a foolish wonder and worship, for when I had
looked from Dickens to the portrait again, and then back to Dickens, the
great man laughed, and gave me a little comic affirmative nod, as much
as to say: “It is so, my young friend.” With that he turned briskly, and
walked away along Cheapside, leaving me wonder-stricken at what was not,
perhaps, so very wonderful an adventure after all.
I rubbed shoulders with the great man again, within a month or two, on
a coach which travelled from Thame to Oxford. I climbed that coach
on purpose to enjoy the privilege of sitting next to him. He had a
travelling companion, who was nursing between his knees quite a little
stack of walking-sticks and umbrellas, and I overheard a brief colloquy
between him and Dickens.
“Charles,” said the man with the bundle, “why don't you have your name
engraved on these?”
“Good God!” said Dickens, in a tone of almost querulous indignation.
“Isn't it bad enough already?”
One can well believe that the poor great man found it hard to get about
England without being stared at, and pointed out and run after; and
we know, from his own pen, that outside his public hours he had a
self-respecting passion for privacy.
I came into contact with Dickens in a far different way in the course of
that spring. It is a little boast of mine that I was the first person in
the world to make acquaintance with Silas Wegg and Nicodemus Boffin and
Mr. Venus. My name-father, David Christie, was chief reader at Clowes'
printing office in Stamford Street, Blackfriars, and month by month
as the proofs of _Our Mutual Friend_ were printed, it was his habit
to borrow the Dickens manuscript from Mr Day, the overseer of the
establishment, and to take it home with him for his own delectation
before it reached the hands of the compositors. On each occasion, until
I left London behind me, Christie would wire me always in the same
phrase: “Dickens is here,” and I would go down to his lodgings in Duke
Street and would read aloud to him the work fresh from the master's
hand. It was written on long ruled foolscap on rather darkish blue paper
in a pale blue ink, and it needed young eyes to decipher it. There
were only a few of such nights, but the enjoyment of them remains as a
remembrance. I shall never forget how he laughed over Mr Wegg's earlier
lapses into poetry:
“And my elder brother leaned upon his sword, Mr Boffin, And wiped away a
tear, Sir.”
Hereabouts befell the first tragedy of my life. In his time Christie had
been “reader's” boy at Ballantyne's, in Edinburgh, and in that capacity
he had laid hands with a jackdaw assiduity on every scrap of literary
interest which he could secure. He had proof sheets corrected by the
hands of every notable man of his time. He had been engaged for at least
fifty years in making his collection, and he kept it all loosely tumbled
together in a big chest, which he used to tell me would become my
property on the occasion of his death. Amongst other treasures, I
remember the first uncorrected proofs of _Marmion_ and a manuscript play
by Sheridan Knowles.
When Christie died I was in Ireland, and on my return to London I
discovered that the whole collection had been sold to a butterman as
waste-paper at a farthing per pound. There was one literary relic,
however, of inestimable value; it consisted of an unpublished chapter
in _Our Mutual Friend_, in which the golden dustman was killed by Silas
Wegg. Dickens excised this chapter, had the type broken up, and all the
proofs, with the exception of this unique survival, were destroyed. I
am not ashamed to confess that when I got back to London and learned the
fate which had befallen my old friend's collection, I had a bitter
cry over it, which lasted me a good two hours. Christie was a very
accomplished man, and was on terms of friendly correspondence with most
writers of his time.
I think that first and last I heard Charles Dickens in everything he
read in public. What an amazing artist he was in this direction can be
realised only by those who heard him. A great actor is always a
legend. In these days he may leave something behind him by means of the
phonograph and science may yet contrive such an exhibition of facial
display and gesture as will enable those who come after us to appreciate
his greatness, but in a few years at the utmost, the last man who sat
spellbound under the magic of the Dickens personality will have vanished
from the face of the earth and nothing but a record will be left.
He depended, as I remember, in a most extraordinary degree upon the
temper of his audience. I have heard him read downright flatly and badly
to an unresponsive house, and I have seen him vivified and quickened to
the most extraordinary display of genius by an audience of the opposite
kind. The first occasion on which he ever read for his own profit was in
the old Broad Street Music Hall at Birmingham, which for many years now
has been known as the Prince of Wales' Theatre. There is so little that
is subtle about his work as a writer that it was surprising to find
what an illumination he sometimes cast over passages in his work.
For example, in his reading of the _Christmas Carol_, there was one
astonishing little episode where the ghost of Jacob Marley first
appears to Scrooge. “The dying fire leapt up as if it cried: I know
him--Marley's ghost.” The unexpected wild vehemence and weirdness of it
were striking in the extreme. He peopled a whole stage sometimes in his
best hours, and his Sykes and Fagin, his Claypole and Nancy, were all
as real and as individual as if the parts had been sustained by separate
performers, and each one a creature of genius. Who that saw it could
forget the clod-pated glutton, with the huge imaginary sandwich and the
great clasp knife in his hands, bolting the bulging morsel in the midst
of the torrent of Fagin's instructions, and complaining “that a man got
no time to eat his victuals in that house.” Concerning the scene between
Sykes and Nancy, Charles Dickens the younger told me a curious story, at
the time when I was writing for him on _All the Year Round_. They were
living at Gad's Hill, and it was the novelist's practice to rehearse in
a grove at the bottom of a big field behind the house. Nobody knew of
this practice until one day the younger Charles heard sounds of violent
threatening in a gruff, manly voice, and shrill calls of appeal rising
in answer, and thinking that murder was being done, he unfastened a
great household mastiff and raced along the field to find the tragedy of
Sykes and Nancy in full swing.
I am afraid that like most newly emancipated lads I used my freedom
in many foolish ways; but most of them were harmless, and some of my
truancies from work were even useful to me. Do what I would, I could not
find the strength of will to go and pick up types in a frowsy printing
office when the picture-gazing fit was on me; and many a time I shirked
my duties for the vicious pleasure of a long day's intercourse with
Turner in the National Gallery, or for a lingering stroll amongst
the marbles at the Museum. One never-to-be forgotten day, my old
name-father, David Christie, lent me a reader's ticket, and I found
myself for the first time in that central citadel of books, the Museum
Library. I went in gaily, with a heart full of ardour; but as I looked
about me my spirits fell to zero. I knew that what I saw in the storied
shelves which run round the walls, under the big glass dome, made but
a little part of the vast collection stored away below and around them;
and the impossibility of making even a surface acquaintance with that
which lay in sight came strongly home to me.