Of the outward appearance, or, as _Sartor Resartus_ would have called it,
the Time-Vesture and Flesh-Garment of that flaming light-particle which
was cast hither from Heaven in the person of Charles Dickens, and of his
ways and manners while he hasted jubilantly and stormfully across the
astonished Earth, something must be said here.
Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, in 1812, an offspring of what the
accurate English call the “lower middle class.” Inheriting something
from a father who was decidedly Micawberish, and a mother who resembled
Mrs. Nickleby, Charles was not likely to be a humdrum child. But the
remarkable thing about him was the intense, aspiring, and gaily sensible
spirit with which he entered into the business of developing whatever
gifts he had received from his vague and amiable parents.
The fat streak of comfort in his childish years, when his proud father
used to stand the tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an
applauding audience of relatives, could not spoil him. The lean streak
of misery, when the improvident family sprawled in poverty, with its
head in a debtors’ prison, while the bright, delicate, hungry boy roamed
the streets, or drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not starve
him. The two dry years of school at Wellington House Academy could not
fossilize him. The years from fifteen to nineteen, when he was earning
his bread as office-boy, lawyers’ clerk, shorthand reporter, could
not commercialize him. Through it all he burned his way painfully and
joyously.
He was not to be detailed as a perpetual comic songster in upholstered
parlors; nor as a prosperous frock-coated citizen with fatty degeneration
of the mind; nor as a newspaper politician, a power beneath the
footstool. None of these alluring prospects delayed him. He passed them
by, observing everything as he went, now hurrying, now sauntering, for
all the world like a boy who has been sent somewhere. Where it was, he
found out in his twenty-fifth year, when the extraordinary results of his
self-education bloomed in the _Pickwick Papers_ and _Oliver Twist._
Never was a good thing coming out of Nazareth more promptly welcomed.
The simple-minded critics of that day had not yet discovered the damning
nature of popularity, and they hailed the new genius in spite of the fact
that hundreds of thousands of people were reading his books. His success
was exhilarating, overwhelming, and at times intoxicating.