THE YOUTH OF DICKENS
There are popular phrases so picturesque that even when they are
intentionally funny they are unintentionally poetical. I remember, to
take one instance out of many, hearing a heated Secularist in Hyde Park
apply to some parson or other the exquisite expression, “a sky-pilot.”
Subsequent inquiry has taught me that the term is intended to be comic
and even contemptuous; but in that first freshness of it I went home
repeating it to myself like a new poem. Few of the pious legends have
conceived so strange and yet celestial a picture as this of the pilot
in the sky, leaning on his helm above the empty heavens, and carrying
his cargo of souls higher than the loneliest cloud. The phrase is like
a lyric of Shelley. Or, to take another instance from another language,
the French have an incomparable idiom for a boy playing truant: “Il
fait l’école buissonnière”--he goes to the bushy school, or the school
among the bushes. How admirably this accidental expression, “the
bushy school” (not to be lightly confounded with the Art School at
Bushey)--how admirably this “bushy school” expresses half the modern
notions of a more natural education! The two words express the whole
poetry of Wordsworth, the whole philosophy of Thoreau, and are quite as
good literature as either.
Now, among a million of such scraps of inspired slang there is one
which describes a certain side of Dickens better than pages of
explanation. The phrase, appropriately enough, occurs at least once in
his works, and that on a fitting occasion. When Job Trotter is sent
by Sam on a wild chase after Mr. Perker, the solicitor, Mr. Perker’s
clerk condoles with Job upon the lateness of the hour, and the fact
that all habitable places are shut up. “My friend,” says Mr. Perker’s
clerk, “you’ve got the key of the street.” Mr. Perker’s clerk, who
was a flippant and scornful young man, may perhaps be pardoned if he
used this expression in a flippant and scornful sense; but let us
hope that Dickens did not. Let us hope that Dickens saw the strange,
yet satisfying, imaginative justice of the words; for Dickens himself
had, in the most sacred and serious sense of the term, the key of the
street. When we shut out anything, we are shut out of that thing.
When we shut out the street, we are shut out of the street. Few of
us understand the street. Even when we step into it, we step into
it doubtfully, as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see
through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong
to the street only--the street-walker or the street arab, the nomads
who, generation after generation, have kept their ancient secrets in
the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know even
less. The street at night is a great house locked up. But Dickens had,
if ever man had, the key of the street. His earth was the stones of the
street; his stars were the lamps of the street; his hero was the man in
the street. He could open the inmost door of his house--the door that
leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed
with stars.
This silent transformation into a citizen of the street took place
during those dark days of boyhood, when Dickens was drudging at the
factory. Whenever he had done drudging, he had no other resource but
drifting, and he drifted over half London. He was a dreamy child,
thinking mostly of his own dreary prospects. Yet he saw and remembered
much of the streets and squares he passed. Indeed, as a matter of fact,
he went the right way to work unconsciously to do so. He did not go in
for “observation,” a priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross
to improve his mind or count the lamp-posts in Holborn to practise his
arithmetic. But unconsciously he made all these places the scenes of
the monstrous drama in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness
under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at Charing Cross. So for
him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only belongs to
battlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely
observed. The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the
place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is
to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if
we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the
direction of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which
we did not look at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were
thinking about something else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some
childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see
it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped
his mind on these places. For him ever afterwards these streets were
mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and its
tragedy, and rich with irrevocable sunsets.
Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens
could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are
details in the Dickens descriptions--a window, or a railing, or the
keyhole of a door--which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem
more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does
not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this
kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it
cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a
perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiæ grew upon him in his
trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he
crept in those wretched days “one in St. Martin’s Lane, of which I only
recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there
was an oval glass plate with ‘COFFEE ROOM’ painted on it, addressed
towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of
coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and
read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do
then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.” That wild
word, “Moor Eeffoc,” is the motto of all effective realism! it is the
masterpiece of the good realistic principle--the principle that the
most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish
kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with
inanimate objects. The date on the door danced over Mr. Grewgius, the
knocker grinned at Mr. Scrooge, the Roman on the ceiling pointed down
at Mr. Tulkinghorn, the elderly armchair leered at Tom Smart--these are
all _moor eeffocish_ things. A man sees them because he does not look
at them.
And so the little Dickens Dickensized London. He prepared the way for
all his personages. Into whatever cranny of our city his characters
might crawl, Dickens had been there before them. However wild were
the events he narrated as outside him, they could not be wilder
than the things that had gone on within. However queer a character
of Dickens might be, he could hardly be queerer than Dickens was.
The whole secret of his after-writings is sealed up in those silent
years of which no written word remains. Those years did him harm
perhaps, as his biographer, Forster, has thoughtfully suggested,
by sharpening a certain fierce individualism in him which once or
twice during his genial life flashed like a half-hidden knife. He
was always generous; but things had gone too hardly with him for him
to be always easy-going. He was always kind-hearted; he was not
always good-humoured. Those years may also, in their strange mixture
of morbidity and reality, have increased in him his tendency to
exaggeration. But we can scarcely lament this in a literary sense;
exaggeration is almost the definition of art--and it is entirely the
definition of Dickens’s art. Those years may have given him many moral
and mental wounds, from which he never recovered. But they gave him the
key of the street.
There is a weird contradiction in the soul of the born optimist. He
can be happy and unhappy at the same time. With Dickens the practical
depression of his life at this time did nothing to prevent him from
laying up those hilarious memories of which all his books are made.
No doubt he was genuinely unhappy in the poor place where his mother
kept school. Nevertheless it was there that he noticed the unfathomable
quaintness of the little servant whom he made into the Marchioness.
No doubt he was comfortless enough at the boarding-house of Mrs.
Roylance; but he perceived with a dreadful joy that Mrs. Roylance’s
name was Pipchin. There seems to be no incompatibility between taking
in tragedy and giving out comedy; they are able to run parallel in the
same personality. One incident which he described in his unfinished
“autobiography,” and which he afterwards transferred almost verbatim
to David Copperfield, was peculiarly rich and impressive. It was the
inauguration of a petition to the King for a bounty, drawn up by a
committee of the prisoners in the Marshalsea, a committee of which
Dickens’s father was the president, no doubt in virtue of his oratory,
and also the scribe, no doubt in virtue of his genuine love of literary
flights.
“As many of the principal officers of this body as could be got into
a small room without filling it up, supported him in front of the
petition; and my old friend, Captain Porter (who had washed himself
to do honour to so solemn an occasion), stationed himself close to
it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The
door was then thrown open, and they began to come in in a long file;
several waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his
signature, and went out. To everybody in succession Captain Porter
said, ‘Would you like to hear it read’? If he weakly showed the least
disposition to hear it, Captain Porter in a loud, sonorous voice gave
him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to
such words as ‘Majesty--Gracious Majesty--Your Gracious Majesty’s
unfortunate subjects--Your Majesty’s well-known munificence,’ as if
the words were something real in his mouth and delicious to taste: my
poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author’s vanity and
contemplating (not severely) the spike on the opposite wall. Whatever
was comical or pathetic in this scene, I sincerely believe I perceived
in my corner, whether I demonstrated it or not, quite as well as I
should perceive it now. I made out my own little character and story
for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper.”
Here we see very plainly that Dickens did not merely look back in after
days and see that these humours had been delightful. He was delighted
at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things
existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength. His soul
was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component
colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and
crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.
Seen from the outside, his little pleasures and extravagances seem
more pathetic than his grief. Once the solemn little figure went into
a public-house in Parliament Street, and addressed the man behind the
bar in the following terms--“What is your very best--the VERY _best_
ale a glass?” The man replied, “Twopence.” “Then,” said the infant,
“just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to
it.” “The landlord,” says Dickens, in telling the story, “looked at
me in return over the bar from head to foot with a strange smile on
his face; instead of drawing the beer looked round the screen and said
something to his wife, who came out from behind it with her work in
her hand and joined him in surveying me.... They asked me a good many
questions as to what my name was, how old I was, where I lived, how I
was employed, etc., etc. To all of which, that I might commit nobody,
I invented appropriate answers. They served me with the ale, though I
suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and the landlord’s
wife, opening the little half-door, and bending down, gave me a kiss.”
Here he touches that other side of common life which he was chiefly to
champion; he was to show that there is no ale like the ale of a poor
man’s festival, and no pleasures like the pleasures of the poor. At
other places of refreshment he was yet more majestic. “I remember,”
he says, “tucking my own bread (which I had brought from home in the
morning) under my arm, wrapt up in a piece of paper like a book, and
going into the best dining-room in Johnson’s Alamode Beef House in
Clare Court, Drury Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of
_à-la-mode_ beef to eat with it. What the waiter thought of such a
strange little apparition coming in all alone I don’t know; but I can
see him now staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other
waiter to look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t
taken it.”
For the boy individually the prospect seemed to be growing drearier
and drearier. This phrase indeed hardly expresses the fact; for, as
he felt it, it was not so much a run of worsening luck as the closing
in of a certain and quiet calamity like the coming on of twilight and
dark. He felt that he would die and be buried in blacking. Through all
this he does not seem to have said much to his parents of his distress.
They who were in prison had certainly a much jollier time than he who
was free. But of all the strange ways in which the human being proves
that he is not a rational being, whatever else he is, no case is so
mysterious and unaccountable as the secrecy of childhood. We learn of
the cruelty of some school or child-factory from journalists; we learn
it from inspectors, we learn it from doctors, we learn it even from
shame-stricken schoolmasters and repentant sweaters; but we never
learn it from the children; we never learn it from the victims. It
would seem as if a living creature had to be taught, like an art of
culture, the art of crying out when it is hurt. It would seem as if
patience were the natural thing; it would seem as if impatience were an
accomplishment like whist. However this may be, it is wholly certain
that Dickens might have drudged and died drudging, and buried the
unborn Pickwick, but for an external accident.
He was, as has been said, in the habit of visiting his father at
the Marshalsea every week. The talks between the two must have been
a comedy, at once more cruel and more delicate than Dickens ever
described. Meredith might picture the comparison between the child
whose troubles were so childish, but who felt them like a damned
spirit, and the middle-aged man whose trouble was final ruin, and who
felt it no more than a baby. Once, it would appear, the boy broke down
altogether--perhaps under the unbearable buoyancy of his oratorical
papa--and implored to be freed from the factory--implored it, I fear,
with a precocious and almost horrible eloquence. The old optimist was
astounded--too much astounded to do anything in particular. Whether
the incident had really anything to do with what followed cannot be
decided, but ostensibly it had not. Ostensibly the cause of Charles’s
ultimate liberation was a quarrel between his father and Lamert, the
head of the factory. Dickens the elder (who had at last left the
Marshalsea) could no doubt conduct a quarrel with the magnificence of
Micawber; the result of this talent, at any rate, was to leave Mr.
Lamert in a towering rage. He had a stormy interview with Charles, in
which he tried to be good-tempered to the boy, but could hardly master
his tongue about the boy’s father. Finally he told him he must go, and
with every observance the little creature was solemnly expelled from
hell.
His mother, with a touch of strange harshness, was for patching up
the quarrel and sending him back. Perhaps, with the fierce feminine
responsibility, she felt that the first necessity was to keep the
family out of debt. But old John Dickens put his foot down here--put
his foot down with that ringing but very rare decision with which
(once in ten years, and often on some trivial matter) the weakest man
will overwhelm the strongest woman. The boy was miserable; the boy
was clever; the boy should go to school. The boy went to school; he
went to the Wellington House Academy, Mornington Place. It was an odd
experience for any one to go from the world to a school, instead of
going from school to the world. Dickens, we may say, had his boyhood
after his youth. He had seen life at its coarsest before he began his
training for it, and knew the worst words in the English language
probably before the best. This odd chronology, it will be remembered,
he retained in his semi-autobiographical account of the adventures
of David Copperfield, who went into the business of Murdstone and
Grinby’s before he went to the school kept by Dr. Strong. David
Copperfield, also, went to be carefully prepared for a world that he
had seen already. Outside David Copperfield, the records of Dickens at
this time reduce themselves to a few glimpses provided by accidental
companions of his schooldays, and little can be deduced from them
about his personality beyond a general impression of sharpness and,
perhaps, of bravado, of bright eyes and bright speeches. Probably the
young creature was recuperating himself for his misfortunes, was making
the most of his liberty, was flapping the wings of that wild spirit
that had just not been broken. We hear of things that sound suddenly
juvenile after his maturer troubles, of a secret language sounding like
mere gibberish, and of a small theatre, with paint and red fire, such
as that which Stevenson loved. It was not an accident that Dickens and
Stevenson loved it. It is a stage unsuited for psychological realism;
the cardboard characters cannot analyze each other with any effect.
But it is a stage almost divinely suited for making surroundings,
for making that situation and background which belong peculiarly
to romance. A toy theatre, in fact, is the opposite of private
theatricals. In the latter you can do anything with the people if you
do not ask much from the scenery; in the former you can do anything
in scenery if you do not ask much from the people. In a toy theatre
you could hardly manage a modern dialogue on marriage, but the Day of
Judgment would be quite easy.
After leaving school, Dickens found employment as a clerk to Mr.
Blackmore, a solicitor, as one of those inconspicuous under-clerks whom
he afterwards turned to many grotesque uses. Here, no doubt, he met
Lowten and Swiveller, Chuckster and Wobbler, in so far as such sacred
creatures ever had embodiments on this lower earth. But it is typical
of him that he had no fancy at all to remain a solicitor’s clerk. The
resolution to rise which had glowed in him even as a dawdling boy, when
he gazed at Gad’s-hill, which had been darkened but not quite destroyed
by his fall into the factory routine, which had been released again
by his return to normal boyhood and the boundaries of school, was not
likely to content itself now with the copying out of agreements. He
set to work, without any advice or help, to learn to be a reporter.
He worked all day at law, and then all night at shorthand. It is an
art which can only be effected by time, and he had to effect it by
overtime. But learning the thing under every disadvantage, without a
teacher, without the possibility of concentration or complete mental
force, without ordinary human sleep, he made himself one of the most
rapid reporters then alive. There is a curious contrast between the
casualness of the mental training to which his parents and others
subjected him and the savage seriousness of the training to which he
subjected himself. Somebody once asked old John Dickens where his son
Charles was educated. “Well, really,” said the great creature, in his
spacious way, “he may be said--ah--to have educated himself.” He might
indeed.
This practical intensity of Dickens is worth our dwelling on, because
it illustrates an elementary antithesis in his character, or what
appears as an antithesis in our modern popular psychology. We are
always talking about strong men against weak men; but Dickens was not
only both a weak man and a strong man, he was a very weak man and also
a very strong man. He was everything that we currently call a weak man;
he was a man hung on wires; he was a man who might at any moment cry
like a child; he was so sensitive to criticism that one may say that
he lacked a skin; he was so nervous that he allowed great tragedies
in his life to arise only out of nerves. But in the matter where all
ordinary strong men are miserably weak--in the matter of concentrated
toil and clear purpose and unconquerable worldly courage--he was like a
straight sword. Mrs. Carlyle, who in her human epithets often hit the
right nail so that it rang, said of him once, “He has a face made of
steel.” This was probably felt in a flash when she saw, in some social
crowd, the clear, eager face of Dickens cutting through those near him
like a knife. Any people who had met him from year to year would each
year have found a man weakly troubled about his worldly decline; and
each year they would have found him higher up in the world. His was a
character very hard for any man of slow and placable temperament to
understand; he was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can
kill.
When he began to report in the House of Commons he was still only
nineteen. His father, who had been released from his prison a short
time before Charles had been released from his, had also become,
among many other things, a reporter. But old John Dickens could enjoy
doing anything without any particular aspiration after doing it well.
But Charles was of a very different temper. He was, as I have said,
consumed with an enduring and almost angry thirst to excel. He learnt
shorthand with a dark self-devotion as if it were a sacred hieroglyph.
Of this self-instruction, as of everything else, he has left humorous
and illuminating phrases. He describes how, after he had learnt the
whole exact alphabet, “there then appeared a procession of new horrors,
called arbitrary characters--the most despotic characters I have ever
known; who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a
cobweb meant ‘expectation,’ and that a pen-and-ink skyrocket stood for
‘disadvantageous.’” He concludes, “It was almost heartbreaking.” But
it is significant that somebody else, a colleague of his, concluded,
“There never _was_ such a shorthand writer.”
Dickens succeeded in becoming a shorthand writer; succeeded in
becoming a reporter; succeeded ultimately in becoming a highly
effective journalist. He was appointed as a reporter of the speeches
in Parliament, first by _The True Sun_, then by _The Mirror of
Parliament_, and last by _The Morning Chronicle_. He reported the
speeches very well, and if we must analyze his internal opinions, much
better than they deserved. For it must be remembered that this lad went
into the reporter’s gallery full of the triumphant Radicalism which
was then the rising tide of the world. He was, it must be confessed,
very little overpowered by the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments: he
regarded the House of Commons much as he regarded the House of Lords,
as a sort of venerable joke. It was, perhaps, while he watched, pale
with weariness from the reporter’s gallery, that there sank into him a
thing that never left him, his unfathomable contempt for the British
Constitution. Then perhaps he heard from the Government benches the
immortal apologies of the Circumlocution Office. “Then would the noble
lord or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to
defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make
a regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to that
house with a slap upon the table and meet the honourable gentleman foot
to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that
the Circumlocution Office was not only blameless in this matter, but
was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this
matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that
although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right, and wholly
right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would he be there
to tell the honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his
honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good
sense, more to half the dictionary of common-places if he had left the
Circumlocution Office alone and never approached this matter. Then
would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution
Office below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the
Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And although one of two
things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office
had nothing to say, and said it, or that it had something to say of
which the noble lord or right honourable gentleman blundered one half
and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted
immaculate by an accommodating majority.” We are now generally told
that Dickens has destroyed these abuses, and that this is no longer a
true picture of public life. Such, at any rate, is the Circumlocution
Office account of this matter. But Dickens as a good Radical would,
I fancy, much prefer that we should continue his battle than that
we should celebrate his triumph; especially when it has not come.
England is still ruled by the great Barnacle family. Parliament is
still ruled by the great Barnacle trinity--the solemn old Barnacle, who
knew that the Circumlocution Office was a protection, the sprightly
young Barnacle who knew that it was a fraud, and the bewildered young
Barnacle who knew nothing about it. From these three types our Cabinets
are still exclusively recruited. People talk of the tyrannies and
anomalies which Dickens denounced as things of the past like the Star
Chamber. They believe that the days of the old stupid optimism and the
old brutal indifference are gone for ever. In truth, this very belief
is only the continuance of the old stupid optimism and the old brutal
indifference. We believe in a free England and a pure England, because
we still believe in the Circumlocution Office account of this matter.
Undoubtedly our serenity is wide-spread. We believe that England is
really reformed, we believe that England is really democratic, we
believe that English politics are free from corruption. But this
general satisfaction of ours does not show that Dickens has beaten the
Barnacles. It only shows that the Barnacles have beaten Dickens.
It cannot be too often said, then, that we must read into young
Dickens and his works this old Radical tone towards institutions. That
tone was a sort of happy impatience. And when Dickens had to listen for
hours to the speech of the noble lord in defence of the Circumlocution
Office, when, that is, he had to listen to what he regarded as the last
vaporings of a vanishing oligarchy, the impatience rather predominated
over the happiness. His incurably restless nature found more pleasure
in the wandering side of journalism. He went about wildly in
post-chaises to report political meetings for the _Morning Chronicle_.
“And what gentlemen they were to serve,” he exclaimed, “in such things
at the old _Morning Chronicle_. Great or small it did not matter. I
have had to charge for half a dozen breakdowns in half a dozen times
as many miles. I have had to charge for the damage of a great-coat
from the drippings of a blazing wax candle, in writing through the
smallest hours of the night in a swift flying carriage and pair.” And
again, “I have often transcribed for the printer from my shorthand
notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was
required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man
severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of
a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild
country and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate
of fifteen miles an hour.” The whole of Dickens’s life goes with the
throb of that nocturnal gallop. All its real wildness shot through with
an imaginative wickedness he afterwards uttered in the drive of Jonas
Chuzzlewit through the storm.
All this time, and indeed from a time of which no measure can be taken,
the creative part of his mind had been in a stir or even a fever. While
still a small boy he had written for his own amusement some sketches
of queer people he had met; notably, one of his uncle’s barber, whose
principal hobby was pointing out what Napoleon ought to have done
in the matter of military tactics. He had a note-book full of such
sketches. He had sketches not only of persons, but of places which
were to him almost more personal than persons. In the December of 1833
he published one of these fragments in the _Old Monthly Magazine_.
This was followed by nine others in the same paper, and when the paper
(which was a romantically Radical venture, run by a veteran soldier of
Bolivar) itself collapsed, Dickens continued the series in the _Evening
Chronicle_, an off-shoot of the morning paper of the same name. These
were the pieces afterwards published and known as the “Sketches by
Boz”; and with them Dickens enters literature. He also enters many
other things about this time; he enters manhood, and among other
things marriage. A friend of his on the _Chronicle_, George Hogarth,
had several daughters. With all of them Dickens appears to have been
on terms of great affection. This sketch is wholly literary, and I do
not feel it necessary to do more than touch upon such incidents as his
marriage, just as I shall do no more than touch upon the tragedy that
ultimately overtook it. But it may be suggested here that the final
misfortunes were in some degree due to the circumstances attending the
original action. A very young man fighting his way, and excessively
poor, with no memories for years past that were not monotonous
and mean, and with his strongest and most personal memories quite
ignominious and unendurable, was suddenly thrown into the society of a
whole family of girls. I think it does not overstate his weakness, and
I think it partly constitutes his excuse, to say that he fell in love
with all of them. As sometimes happens in the undeveloped youth, an
abstract femininity simply intoxicated him. And again, I think we shall
not be mistakenly accused of harshness if we put the point in this way;
that by a kind of accident he got hold of the wrong sister. In what
came afterwards he was enormously to blame. But I do not think that his
was a case of cold division from a woman whom he had once seriously
and singly loved. He had been bewildered in a burning haze, I will not
say even of first love, but of first flirtations. His wife’s sisters
stimulated him before he fell in love with his wife; and they continued
to stimulate him long after he had quarrelled with her for ever. This
view is strikingly supported by all the details of his attitude towards
all the other members of the sacred house of Hogarth. One of the
sisters remained, of course, his dearest friend till death. Another who
had died, he worshipped as a saint, and he always asked to be buried
in her grave. He was married on April 2, 1836. Forster remarks that a
few days before the announcement of their marriage in the _Times_, the
same paper contained another announcement that on the 31st would be
published the first number of a work called “The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club.” It is the beginning of his career.
The “Sketches,” apart from splendid splashes of humour here and there,
are not manifestations of the man of genius. We might almost say
that this book is one of the few books by Dickens which would not,
standing alone, have made his fame. And yet standing alone it did
make his fame. His contemporaries could see a new spirit in it, where
we, familiar with the larger fruits of that spirit, can only see a
continuation of the prosaic and almost wooden wit of the comic books
of that day. But in any case we should hardly look in the man’s first
book for the fulness of his contribution to letters. Youth is almost
everything else, but it is hardly ever original. We read of young men
bursting on the old world with a new message. But youth in actual
experience is the period of imitation and even obedience. Subjectively
its emotions may be furious and headlong; but its only external outcome
is a furious imitation and a headlong obedience. As we grow older we
learn the special thing we have to do. As a man goes on towards the
grave he discovers gradually a philosophy he can really call fresh, a
style he can really call his own, and as he becomes an older man he
becomes a newer writer. Ibsen, in his youth, wrote almost classic plays
about vikings; it was in his old age that he began to break windows and
throw fireworks. The only fault, it was said, of Browning’s first poems
was that they had “too much beauty of imagery, and too little wealth of
thought.” The only fault, that is, of Browning’s first poems, was that
they were not Browning’s.
In one way, however, the “Sketches by Boz” do stand out very
symbolically in the life of Dickens. They constitute in a manner
the dedication of him to his especial task; the sympathetic and yet
exaggerated painting of the poorer middle-class. He was to make men
feel that this dull middle-class was actually a kind of elf-land.
But here, again, the work is rude and undeveloped; and this is shown
in the fact that it is a great deal more exaggerative than it is
sympathetic. We are not, of course, concerned with the kind of people
who say that they wish that Dickens was more refined. If those people
are ever refined it will be by fire. But there is in this earliest
work, an element which almost vanished in the later ones, an element
which is typical of the middle-classes in England, and which is in a
more real sense to be called vulgar. I mean that in these little farces
there is a trace, in the author as well as in the characters, of that
petty sense of social precedence, that hub-hub of little unheard-of
oligarchies, which is the only serious sin of the bourgeoisie of
Britain. It may seem pragmatical, for example, to instance such a rowdy
farce as the story of Horatio Sparkins, which tells how a tuft-hunting
family entertained a rhetorical youth thinking he was a lord, and
found he was a draper’s assistant. No doubt they were very snobbish
in thinking that a lord must be eloquent; but we cannot help feeling
that Dickens is almost equally snobbish in feeling it so very funny
that a draper’s assistant should be eloquent. A free man, one would
think, would despise the family quite as much if Horatio had been a
peer. Here, and here only, there is just a touch of the vulgarity, of
the only vulgarity of the world out of which Dickens came. For the only
element of lowness that there really is in our populace is exactly that
they are full of superiorities and very conscious of class. Shades,
imperceptible to the eyes of others, but as hard and haughty as a
Brahmin caste, separate one kind of charwoman from another kind of
charwoman. Dickens was destined to show with inspired symbolism all
the immense virtues of the democracy. He was to show them as the most
humorous part of our civilization; which they certainly are. He was to
show them as the most promptly and practically compassionate part of
our civilization; which they certainly are. The democracy has a hundred
exuberant good qualities; the democracy has only one outstanding
sin--it is not democratic.