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English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
DICKENS
BY ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
JOHNSON Leslie Stephen.
GIBBON J. C. Morison.
SCOTT R. H. Hutton.
SHELLEY J. A. Symonds.
HUME T. H. Huxley.
GOLDSMITH William Black.
DEFOE William Minto.
BURNS J. C. Shairp.
SPENSER R. W. Church.
THACKERAY Anthony Trollope.
BURKE John Morley.
MILTON Mark Pattison.
HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr.
SOUTHEY E. Dowden.
CHAUCER A. W. Ward.
BUNYAN J. A. Froude.
COWPER Goldwin Smith.
POPE Leslie Stephen.
BYRON John Nichol.
LOCKE Thomas Fowler.
WORDSWORTH F. Myers.
DRYDEN G. Saintsbury.
LANDOR Sidney Colvin.
DE QUINCEY David Masson.
LAMB Alfred Ainger.
BENTLEY R. C. Jebb.
DICKENS A. W. Ward.
GRAY E. W. Gosse.
SWIFT Leslie Stephen.
STERNE H. D. Traill.
MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison.
FIELDING Austin Dobson.
SHERIDAN Mrs. Oliphant.
ADDISON W. J. Courthope.
BACON R. W. Church.
COLERIDGE H. D. Traill.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J. A. Symonds.
KEATS Sidney Colvin.
12mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume.
_Other volumes in preparation._
PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.
_Any of the above works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part
of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the price._
PREFACE.
At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend John Forster,
but not to be found in the English editions of the _Life_, the writer adds
to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words: "I
desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the
control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic."
Dickens was a man of few close friendships--"his breast," he said, "would
not hold many people"--but, of these friendships, that with Forster was
one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. To Dickens, at
least, his future biographer must have been the embodiment of two
qualities rarely combined in equal measure--discretion and candour. In
literary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was given, and
nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of Dickens passed through
his faithful helpmate's hands. Nor were there many important decisions
formed by Dickens concerning himself in the course of his manhood to which
Forster was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once counselled in
vain.
On Mr. Forster's _Life of Charles Dickens_, together with the three
volumes of _Letters_ collected by Dickens's eldest daughter and his
sister-in-law--his "dearest and best friend"--it is superfluous to state
that the biographical portion of the following essay is mainly based. It
may be superfluous, but it cannot be considered impertinent, if I add that
the shortcomings of the _Life_ have, in my opinion, been more frequently
proclaimed than defined; and that its merits are those of its author as
well as of its subject.
My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me in connexion
with the production of this little volume by Miss Hogarth, Mr. Charles
Dickens, Professor Henry Morley, Mr. Alexander Ireland, Mr. John Evans,
Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Britton. Mr. Evans has kindly enabled me to correct
some inaccuracies in Mr. Forster's account of Dickens's early Chatham days
on unimpeachable first-hand evidence. I also beg Captain and Mrs. Budden
to accept my thanks for allowing me to see Gad's Hill Place.
I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Librarian of the
Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in
affording me much useful aid and information. With the kind permission of
Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of
Dickens's life, in the period 1838-'41, from a hitherto unpublished
source--a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of _The Law and
Commercial Daily Remembrancer_ for those years. These volumes formed no
part of the Forster bequest, but were added to it, under certain
conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief; and
sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another
with no other note than "Work."
Mr. R. H. Shepherd's _Bibliography of Dickens_ has been of considerable
service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as
a charming reminiscence of the connexion between _Charles Dickens and
Rochester_, Mr. Robert Langton's sketches illustrating a paper recently
printed under that title?
Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor
T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to me on
this, any more than on former occasions.
A. W. W.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE v
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE "PICKWICK" 1
CHAPTER II.
FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS 20
CHAPTER III.
STRANGE LANDS 49
CHAPTER IV.
"DAVID COPPERFIELD" 85
CHAPTER V.
CHANGES 108
CHAPTER VI.
LAST YEARS 146
CHAPTER VII.
THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME 192
DICKENS.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE "PICKWICK."
[1812-1836.]
Charles Dickens, the eldest son, and the second of the eight children, of
John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on
Friday, February 7, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huffham.
His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and employed in
the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was recalled to London when his eldest son was
only two years of age; and two years afterwards was transferred to
Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 1821. Thus Chatham,
and the more venerable city of Rochester adjoining, with their
neighbourhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodland and
marshes, became, in the words of Dickens's biographer, the birthplace of
his fancy. He looked upon himself as, to all intents and purposes, a
Kentish man born and bred, and his heart was always in this particular
corner of the incomparable county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred
Jingle's spasmodic eloquence had, in the very first number of _Pickwick_,
epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, already the scene of
one of the _Sketches_, Dickens returned to the local associations of his
early childhood. It was at Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on
his solitary tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night's sleep "near a
cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps;" and in many a
Christmas narrative or uncommercial etching the familiar features of town
and country, of road and river, were reproduced, before in _Great
Expectations_ they suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his
later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his faithful fancy
once more haunted the well-known precincts. During the last thirteen years
of his life he was again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where,
with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so often made
holiday; where, when hope was young, he had spent his honey-moon; and
whither, after his last restless wanderings, he was to return, to seek
such repose as he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the
daily life of the "very queer small boy" of that early time is only quite
incidentally to be associated with the grand gentleman's house on Gad's
Hill, where his father, little thinking that his son was to act over again
the story of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he might some
day come to live, if he were to be very persevering, and to work hard. The
family abode was in Ordnance (not St. Mary's) Place, at Chatham, amidst
surroundings classified in Mr. Pickwick's notes as "appearing to be
soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and dock-yard men." But
though the half-mean, half-picturesque aspect of the Chatham streets may
already at an early age have had its fascination for Dickens, yet his
childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of observation. Having
learned reading from his mother, he was sent with his elder sister, Fanny,
to a day-school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles,
the eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, whose family had
formed an intimate acquaintance with their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The
younger Giles children were pupils at the school of their elder brother
with Charles and Fanny Dickens, and thus naturally their constant
playmates. In later life Dickens preserved a grateful remembrance, at
times refreshed by pleasant communications between the families, of the
training he had received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as
generous man, who, recognising his pupil's abilities, seems to have
resolved that they should not lie fallow for want of early cultivation.
Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for supposing that this
period of his life was anything but happy. For his sister Fanny he always
preserved a tender regard; and a touching little paper, written by him
after her death in womanhood, relates how the two children used to watch
the stars together, and make friends with one in particular, as belonging
to themselves. But obviously he did not lack playmates of his own sex; and
it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes made him disinclined to take
much part in the rougher sports of his school-fellows, that he found
plenty of time for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came to
pass that already as a child he followed his own likings in the two
directions from which they were never very materially to swerve. He once
said of himself that he had been "a writer when a mere baby, an actor
always."
Of these two passions he could always, as a child and as a man, be "happy
with either," and occasionally with both at the same time. In his tender
years he was taken by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to
see the legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits behind the
scenes at private theatricals; while his own juvenile powers as a teller
of stories and singer of comic songs (he was possessed, says one who
remembers him, of a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs
and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fellows. He also
wrote a--not strictly original--tragedy, which is missing among his
_Reprinted Pieces_. There is nothing unique in these childish doings, nor
in the circumstance that he was an eager reader of works of fiction; but
it is noteworthy that chief among the books to which he applied himself,
in a small neglected bookroom in his father's house, were those to which
his allegiance remained true through much of his career as an author.
Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination for his mind from
his earliest childhood, besides the "Arabian Nights" and kindred tales,
and the English Essayists, he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes
and Le Sage, in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald's
collection of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as he was no
great reader in the days of his authorship, and had to go through hard
times of his own before, it was well that the literature of his childhood
was good of its kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay.
Dickens afterwards made it an article of his social creed that the
imagination of the young needs nourishment as much as their bodies require
food and clothing; and he had reason for gratefully remembering that at
all events the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect.
But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his
family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began.
Misfortune pursued the elder Dickens to town, his salary having been
decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at
economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street,
Camden Town; and here, what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he
was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he
was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son's education to take
care of itself. John Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as
a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him,
and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years; nor would it
be fair, because of a similarity in their experiences, and in the grandeur
of their habitual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the
immortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details of manner and
incident, can the character of the elder Dickens be thought to have
suggested that of the pitiful "Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison,
almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the
unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London.
Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles,
whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive
sketches of odd personages among his acquaintance, had become familiar
with the inside of a pawnbroker's shop, and had sold the paternal
"library" piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller,
with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber's representative. But
neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens's abortive efforts at setting up
an educational establishment had been of avail. Her husband's creditors
_would not_ give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and
more especially for the little eldest son, now ten years old, in which,
as he afterwards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, "but for the
mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of
him, a little robber or a little vagabond."
Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiography, communicated
to him by Dickens five-and-twenty years after the period to which it
refers, and subsequently incorporated with but few changes in the
_Personal History of David Copperfield_. Who can forget the thrill with
which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of the solitary
child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, was an
episode in the life of Charles Dickens himself? Between fact and fiction
there was but a difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby's wine warehouse
down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren's blacking warehouse at Hungerford
Stairs, in which a place had been found for the boy by a relative, a
partner in the concern; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels
were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and the miserable pay,
the uncongenial companionship during worktime, and the speculative devices
of the dinner-hour were the same in each case. At this time, after his
family had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to the little
waif at night was a lodging in Little College Street, Camden Town,
presenting even fewer attractions than Mr. Micawber's residence in Windsor
Terrace, and kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs.
Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. On his urgent
remonstrance--"the first I had ever made about my lot"--concerning the
distance from his family at which he was left through the week, a back
attic was found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, "where Bob Sawyer
lodged many years afterwards;" and he now breakfasted and supped with his
parents in their apartment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon
by a faithful "orfling," who had accompanied the family and its fortunes
from Chatham, and who is said by Forster to have her part in the character
of the Marchioness. Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his
discharge, and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodgings, a
quarrel occurred between the elder Dickens and his cousin, and the boy was
in consequence taken away from the business.
He had not been ill-treated there; nor indeed is it ill-treatment which
leads to David Copperfield's running away in the story. Nevertheless, it
is not strange that Dickens should have looked back with a bitterness very
unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish solitude and
degradation. He never "forgot" his mother's having wished him to remain in
the warehouse; the subject of his employment there was never afterwards
mentioned in the family; he could not bring himself to go near old
Hungerford Market so long as it remained standing; and to no human being,
not even to his wife, did he speak of this passage in his life until he
narrated it in the fragment of autobiography which he confided to his
trusty friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain; for no man is
expected to dilate upon the days "when he lived among the beggars in St.
Mary Axe," and it is only the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or
falsely, in the sordid memories of the time before they became rich or
powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his childhood might have ceased
to be resented by one whom the world on the whole treated so kindly, at
least they left his heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender
to the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion "eaten his bread
with tears" when a puny child.
A happy accident having released the David Copperfield of actual life from
his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at
that time was the lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. "The
world has done much better since in that way, and will do far better yet,"
he writes at the close of his description of _Our School_, the "Wellington
House Academy," situate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest
gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms
his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this
worthy and his usher, "considered to know everything as opposed to the
chief who was considered to know nothing," furnished some of the features
in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly
doubted by an old school-fellow whether the statement "We were First Boy"
is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, when he
entered the school, was "put into Virgil," he was not put there to much
purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the
resumption of the old amusements which were to grow into the occupations
of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the
express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the
manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot.
After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for
Charles Dickens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who
had probably lost his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber's
phrase, "hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking employment as a
parliamentary reporter, and must have rejoiced when a Gray's Inn solicitor
of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son,
took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His
office associates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the
blacking warehouse; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the
vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession
as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequented, in company
with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor theatres, and even occasionally to
have acted there; and assuredly it must have been personal knowledge which
suggested the curiously savage description of _Private Theatres_ in the
_Sketches by Boz_, the all but solitary _unkindly_ reference to theatrical
amusements in his works. But whatever his experiences of this kind may
have been, he passed unscathed through them; and during the year and a
half of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the technicalities
of the law to be able to assail its enormities without falling into
rudimentary errors about it, and sufficient knowledge of lawyers and
lawyers' men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters.
Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the
son into the line of life from which he was easily to pass into the career
where success and fame awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained
employment as a parliamentary reporter for the _Morning Herald_, his son,
who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, resolved to
essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years
of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life,
two of his most marked characteristics--strength of will, and a
determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it thoroughly. The art of
short-hand, which he now resolutely set himself to master, was in those
days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first
efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he had
conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But Dickens, whose education
no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a
reporter of the highest class he needed something besides the knowledge of
short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set
himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British
Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of
Dickens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what
is not less true than obvious; but he had this one quality of the true
lover of reading, that he never professed a familiarity with that of which
he knew little or nothing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even
when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors' Commons. With this
occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years.
Once more David Copperfield, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth,
will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his
soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the
rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story,
but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of
opinion that he had loved particularly wisely; but how well he had loved
is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing
came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit
the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that
Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora; for
it was as such that, not very chivalrously, he could bring himself to
describe her, for the second time, in _Little Dorrit_.
Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a newspaper, he had, and
not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It
was the profession to which--uncommercially--he was attached during so
great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a
stage of his own, he seemed to be but following an irresistible
fascination. His best friend described him to me as "a born actor;" and
who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only--those
whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is behind
them? His love of acting was stronger than himself; and I doubt whether he
ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it.
"Assumption," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, "has charms for me--I
hardly know for how many wild reasons--so delightful that I feel a loss
of, oh! I can't say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being
some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre and
everything which savoured of histrionics with an intensity not even to be
imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same passion. He had
that "belief in a play" which he so pleasantly described as one of the
characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson
Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and
acting which makes a little separate world of the "quality." One of the
staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English
tragedian of his age, Macready; one of the delights of his last years was
his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No
performer, however, was so obscure or so feeble as to be outside the pale
of his sympathy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all manner of
entertainers and entertainments--from Mr. Vincent Crummles and the more or
less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary's horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley's
wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickleson
the giant; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously
applauding a young lady "who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers,
leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon
which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, 'Behold the
abazid power of woobad!'" He was unable to sit through a forlorn
performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a
sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house
when he entered, and which "had warmed up in the course of the evening to
twelve shillings;" and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by
appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as
Pantaloon: "Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir--no one knows it
better, sir--there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own
circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy,
sir!--a boy!" Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the
streets he first sees in the United States remind him irresistibly of the
set-scene in a London pantomime; and at Verona his interest is divided
between _Romeo and Juliet_ and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the
amphitheatre.
What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the
present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he
achieved as an amateur actor and manager, and in his more than
half-dramatic readings. But, the influence of early associations and
personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom
he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the
genius of Frederic Lemaitre, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. "Sound
melodrama and farce" were the dramatic species which he affected, and in
which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might
have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more
in the other; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his
thoroughness, which extended itself to every detail of performance or
make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was
preserved for literature. But he had carefully prepared himself for his
intended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a
preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of
the illness of the applicant.
Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last--in the year
1831--obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter, and after some
earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the
famous Whig _Morning Chronicle_, then in its best days under the
editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had
an opportunity of putting forth the energy that was in him. He shrunk from
none of the difficulties which in those days attended the exercise of his
craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his
death he "held a brief for his brothers" at the dinner of the Newspaper
Press Fund: "I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand
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.... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back
row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my
feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords,
where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep kept in waiting,
say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from excited
political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do
verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle
known in this country. I have been in my time belated on miry by-roads,
towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless
carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back
in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments
by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest
of hearts I ever knew." Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of
throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and of half
achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When
at the close of the parliamentary session of the year 1836 his labours as
a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gallery.
During this period his naturally keen powers of observation must have been
sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which
constitutes, perhaps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice
of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dickens's experience
as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed,
in which there was a good deal of infidelity; or, at all events, his
determined contempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the
mouth of "Thisman" or of "Thatman," and his rooted dislike of the
"cheap-jacks" and "national dustmen" whom he discerned among our orators
and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of
Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words.
Moreover, the period of Dickens's most active labours as a reporter was
one that succeeded a time of great political excitement; and when men wish
thankfully to rest after deeds, words are in season.
Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the
significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, Dickens
had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a
writer as a "baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer's clerk, and the time
had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In
December, 1833, the _Monthly Magazine_ published a paper which he had
dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes "dimmed with joy and pride" the
young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called _A Dinner
at Poplar Walk_, was afterwards reprinted in the _Sketches by Boz_ under
the title of _Mr. Minns and his Cousin_, and is laughable enough. His
success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to
the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February,
1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a
nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens
used this signature not only as the author of the _Sketches_ and a few
other minor productions, but also as "editor" of the _Pickwick Papers_, it
is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and
in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on
a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman
complaining to his wife: "Boz keeps himself very close."
But the _Monthly Magazine_, though warmly welcoming its young
contributor's lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was
therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the
conductor of the _Evening Chronicle_, a paper in connexion with the great
morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had
gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal
favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors
of the _Morning Chronicle_ that Dickens should be duly remunerated for
this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of,
as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's
Inn--one of those old legal inns which he loved so well--he might already
in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By
the beginning of 1836 the _Sketches by Boz_ printed in the _Evening
Chronicle_ were already numerous enough, and their success was
sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their
republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank,
and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the
copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last
day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the
_Pickwick Papers_, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days
afterwards Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the
friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures.
Mr. George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of two masters of
English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet
in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. Dickens's
apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and
he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of
popularity. As for the _Sketches by Boz_, their author soon repurchased
the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to
him for it.
In their collected form these _Sketches_ modestly described themselves as
"illustrative of every-day life and every-day people." Herein they only
prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was
never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to
term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little
difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse,
the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few
of the most peculiar features of Dickens's humour are already here,
together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true
that in these early _Sketches_ the latter is at times strained, but its
power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief
narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the
humour--more especially that of the _Tales_--is not of the most refined
sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The
style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the
bane of "light" journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it,
very pardonable under the circumstances, but generally absent from
Dickens's later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but
rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which _Pickwick_
and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's favourite passions and
favourite aversions alike reflect themselves here in small. In the
description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the
manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its
full freshness upon it--however he may pretend at Astley's that his
"histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly
delights him. But of course the gift which these _Sketches_ pre-eminently
revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight
of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous
in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river,
a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the
old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades
and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How
inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of "the last cab-driver, and the
first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," was
not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets.
Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and
in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces
are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the
_Sketches_ may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love
to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due
to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have
followed the days of coaching; "Honest Tom" no more paces the lobby in a
black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D'Orsay hat; the Hickses
of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house
dinner-tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young
men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to "Satan" Montgomery. But the
_Sketches by Boz_ have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be
remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner
begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet,
however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to
which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to
mount.