FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS.
[1836-1841.]
Even in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his
life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the world, had his share of
troubles--troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart,
and vexations manifold in the way of business. But in the history of his
early career as an author the word failure has no place.
Not that the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_, published as they
were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm; for the public
needed two or three months to make up its mind that "Boz" was equal to an
effort considerably in advance of his _Sketches_. But when the popularity
of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity
until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold
man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished
at the present day. Against the productions of _Pickwick_, and of other
works of amusement of which it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought
himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby; and twenty
years later young men at the university talked nothing but _Pickwick_, and
quoted nothing but _Pickwick_, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the
world at large an examination paper in _Pickwick_, over which pretentious
half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to "describe the common
Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory definition of "a red-faced
Nixon." No changes in manners and customs have interfered with the hold of
the work upon nearly all classes of readers at home; and no translation
has been dull enough to prevent its being relished even in countries where
all English manners and customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally
absurd.
So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more than thrice
fortunate book, that the wildest legends have grown up as to the history
of its origin. The facts, however, as stated by Dickens himself, are few
and plain. Attracted by the success of the _Sketches_, Messrs. Chapman &
Hall proposed to him that he should write "something" in monthly numbers
to serve as a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by the comic
draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour; and either the publishers or the artist
suggested as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a "Nimrod Club" of
unlucky sportsmen. The proposition was at Dickens's suggestion so modified
that the plates were "to arise naturally out of the text," the range of
the latter being left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial
machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle's misfortunes by
flood and field hold their place by the side of the philanthropical
meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An
original was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the hero of
the book, and a felicitous name for him soon suggested itself. Only a
single number of the serial had appeared when Mr. Seymour's own hand put
an end to his life. It is well known that among the applicants for the
vacant office of illustrator of the _Pickwick Papers_ was Thackeray--the
senior of Dickens by a few months--whose style as a draughtsman would have
been singularly unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr.
Pickwick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some of Dickens's
books, Mr. Hablot Browne ("Phiz") was chosen as illustrator. Some happy
hits--such as the figure of Mr. Micawber--apart, the illustrations of
Dickens by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, are
apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author's fidelity to nature, and on
the other, to intensify his unreality. _Oliver Twist_, like the
_Sketches_, was illustrated by George Cruikshank, a pencil humourist of no
common calibre, but as a rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of
his heart. Dickens himself was never so well satisfied with any
illustrator as with George Cattermole (_alias_ "Kittenmoles"), a
connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hablot Browne in
_Master Humphrey's Clock_; in his latest works he resorted to the aid of
younger artists, whose reputation has since justified his confidence. The
most congenial of the pictorial interpreters of Dickens, in his brightest
and freshest humour, was his valued friend John Leech, whose services,
together occasionally with those of Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as
well as of his faithful Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his
Christmas books.
The _Pickwick Papers_, of which the issue was completed by the end of
1837, brought in to Dickens a large sum of money, and after a time a
handsome annual income. On the whole this has remained the most general
favourite of all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that
_Pickwick_ defies criticism, but also because the circumstances under
which the book was begun and carried on make it preposterous to judge it
by canons applicable to its author's subsequent fictions. As the serial
proceeded, the interest which was to be divided between the inserted
tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, was absorbed by
the latter. The rise in the style of the book can almost be measured by
the change in the treatment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself.
In a later preface, Dickens endeavoured to illustrate this change by the
analogy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it was only as the
author proceeded that he recognised the capabilities of the character, and
his own power of making it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as
laughable. Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves
himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. Nupkins, there
follows a little bit of the idyl between Sam and the pretty housemaid,
written with a delicacy that could hardly have been suspected in the
chronicler of the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus
Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative will be found
exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos of which Dickens was
afterwards so repeatedly to prove himself master, more especially, of
course, in those prison scenes for which some of our older novelists may
have furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of humour is not
wanting which is content to miss its effect with the less attentive
reader; as in this passage concerning the ruined cobbler's confidences to
Sam in the Fleet:
"The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on
Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of
his pipe, _sighed_, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head,
and went to sleep too."
Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and more of irony into
a single word.
But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details such as this in view
of the broad and universally acknowledged comic effects of this
masterpiece of English humour. Its many genuinely comic characters are as
broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and
as true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison's art. The
author's humour is certainly not one which eschews simple in favour of
subtle means, or which is averse from occasional desipience in the form of
the wildest farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden-party--or rather "public
breakfast"--at The Den, Eatanswill; Mr. Pickwick's nocturnal descent,
through three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of
Miss Tomkins's establishment for young ladies; the _supplice d'un homme_
of Mr. Pott; Mr. Weller junior's love-letter, with notes and comments by
Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior's own letter of affliction
written by somebody else; the footmen's "swarry" at Bath, and Mr. Bob
Sawyer's bachelors' party in the Borough--all these and many other scenes
and passages have in them that jovial element of exaggeration which nobody
mistakes and nobody resents. Whose duty is it to check the volubility of
Mr. Alfred Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness, _quot libras_, of the Fat
Boy? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the contagious high
spirits of the author lies one of the chief charms of the book. Not,
however, that the effect produced is obtained without the assistance of a
very vigilant art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character
which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many brilliant additions
which the author made to his original group of personages. If there is
nothing so humorous in the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it
anything more pathetic than the relation between him and his master. As
for Sam Weller's style of speech, scant justice was done to it by Mr.
Pickwick when he observed to Job Trotter, "My man is in the right,
although his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and
occasionally incomprehensible." The fashion of Sam's gnomic philosophy is
at least as old as Theocritus;[1] but the special impress which he has
given to it is his own, rudely foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the
apophthegms of his father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms in _Oliver Twist_ and
_Nicholas Nickleby_ show how enduring a hold the whimsical fancy had taken
of its creator. For the rest, the freshness of the book continues the same
to the end; and farcical as are some of the closing scenes--those, for
instance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the movements of the elder
Mr. Weller--there is even here no straining after effect. An exception
might perhaps be found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is
coarsely contrived; but the fun of the character is in itself neither
illegitimate nor unwholesome. It will be observed below that it is the
constant harping on the same string, the repeated picturing of
professional preachers of religion as gross and greasy scoundrels, which
in the end becomes offensive in Dickens.
On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bidden farewell to his
labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words which he uttered at the table of
the ever-hospitable Mr. Wardle at the Adelphi.
"'I shall never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice--'I shall
never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing
with different varieties and shades of human character; frivolous as
my pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my
previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of
wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have
dawned upon me--I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the
improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I
trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be
other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the
decline of life. God bless you all.'"
Of course Mr. Pickwick "filled and drained a bumper" to the sentiment.
Indeed, it "snoweth" in this book "of meat and drink." Wine, ale, and
brandy abound there, and viands to which ample justice is invariably
done--even under Mr. Tupman's heart-rending circumstances at the (now,
alas! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something of this is due to the times in
which the work was composed, and to the class of readers for which we may
suppose it in the first instance to have been intended; but Dickens,
though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia of good cheer, besides
cherishing the associations which are inseparable from it. At the same
time, there is a little too much of it in the _Pickwick Papers_, however
well its presence may consort with the geniality which pervades them. It
is difficult to turn any page of the book without chancing on one of those
supremely felicitous phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all
times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit of the
whole--that spirit of true humour which calls forth at once merriment,
good-will, and charity.
In the year 1836, which the commencement of the _Pickwick Papers_ has made
memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the
full tide of authorship. In February, 1837, the second number of
_Bentley's Miscellany_, a new monthly magazine which he had undertaken to
edit, contained the opening chapters of his story of _Oliver Twist_.
Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two
of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of
Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to _The Strange
Gentleman_, a "comic burletta," or farce, in two acts, founded upon the
tale in the _Sketches_ called _The Great Winglebury Duel_. It ran for
seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author's opinion, was "the best
thing Harley did." But the adaptation has no special feature
distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the effective bustle of
the opening. _The Village Coquettes_, an operetta represented at the St.
James's Theatre, with music by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort.
In this piece Harley took one part, that of "a very small farmer with a
very large circle of intimate friends," and John Parry made his _debut_ on
the London stage in another. To quote any of the songs in this operetta
would be very unfair to Dickens.[2] He was not at all depressed by the
unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against
which he had to set the round declaration of Braham, that there had been
"no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since _The
Duenna_." As time went on, however, he became anything but proud of his
juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their
revival. His third and last attempt of this kind, a farce called _The
Lamplighter_, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted,
having been withdrawn by Macready's wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it
into a story printed among the _Picnic Papers_, a collection generously
edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher
towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship
for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy
worthy of so distinguished an actor; and, according to his wont, he had
even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to
forget--_No Thoroughfare_. But the genius of the age, an influence which
is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from
dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see
mentioned among his literary works the _Life of Grimaldi_, which he merely
edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten memorials of forgotten
greatness.
To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which
their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short
pamphlet entitled _Sunday under Three Heads_, is not without a certain
biographical interest. This little book was written with immediate
reference to a bill "for the better observance of the Sabbath," which the
House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority; and its
special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sunday
amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunkenness distinguishing
what Dickens called a London _Sunday as it is_. His own love of fresh air
and brightness intensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears
to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London,
"gloomy, close, and stale," which he afterwards drew in _Little Dorrit_,
he almost seems to hold Sabbatarianism and the weather responsible for one
another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it "not
comfortable," so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may perhaps have
come to recognise the difficulty of arranging an English _Sunday as it
might be made_. On the other hand, he may have remembered his youthful
fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church,
when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the
counterpart of _Sunday as Sabbath bills would have it_: describing how
"the usual preparations are making for the band in the open air in the
afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are
at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to
the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions
invariably close." The _Sketches of Young Gentlemen_, published in the
same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier _Sketches by
Boz_, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a
fortnight, and noted in his diary that "one hundred and twenty-five pounds
for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well." The _Sketches of
Young Couples_, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a
facetious introduction, suggested by her Majesty's own announcement of her
approaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these
pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a
mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent
itself.
It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to
keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a
bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production of
_Pickwick_, he began his first long continuous story, the _Adventures of
Oliver Twist_. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will
remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with
his later MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits.
But here and there the writing shows traces of excitement; for the
author's heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later
habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of
authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength.
_Oliver Twist_ was certainly written _with a purpose_, and with one that
was afterwards avowed. The author intended to put before his readers--"so
long as their speech did not offend the ear"--a picture of "dregs of
life," hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their
loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fiction, Fielding in particular,
as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had
not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens,
however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already
relished _Paul Clifford_, and which was not to be debarred from exciting
itself over _Jack Sheppard_, begun before _Oliver Twist_ had been
completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens's purpose was an honest
and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the
most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the
cloud. To that unfailing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of
both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the
redeeming features in his company of criminals; not only the devotion and
the heroism of Nancy, but the irresistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger,
and the good-humour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to "plead as
earnestly in mitigation of judgment" against him as ever he had done "at
the bar for any client he most respected." Other parts of the story were
less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police-magistrate, appears to have
been a rather hasty portrait of a living original; and the whole picture
of Bumble and Bumbledom was certainly a caricature of the working of the
new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with
that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of
truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy's story, and adds to
the effect of a marvellously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy's interview
with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes--the flight of Sikes, his
death at Jacob's Island, and the end of the Jew--the action has an
intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this
genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from
some of the "low" domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author's comic
humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types:
Bumble and his partner; Noah Claypole, complete in himself, but full of
promise for Uriah Heep; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of
his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story of _Oliver
Twist_ also contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that
is weak and (the author of _Endymion_ is to be thanked for the word)
"gushy." Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver
discreetly "glides" away from the lovers, are barely endurable. But,
whatever its shortcomings, _Oliver Twist_ remains an almost unique example
of a young author's brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty
and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their
power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them; and some
of its characters will live by the side of Dickens's happiest and most
finished creations. Even had a sapient critic been right who declared,
during the progress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have
worked out "the particular vein of humour which had hitherto yielded so
much attractive metal," it would have been worked out to some purpose.
After making his readers merry with _Pickwick_, he had thrilled them with
_Oliver Twist_; and by the one book as by the other he had made them think
better of mankind.
But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his hand content with a
single task. In April, 1838, several months before the completion of
_Oliver Twist_, the first number of _Nicholas Nickleby_ appeared; and
while engaged upon the composition of these books he contributed to
_Bentley's Miscellany_, of which he retained the editorship till the early
part of 1839, several smaller articles. Of these, the _Mudfog Papers_ have
been recently thought worth reprinting; but even supposing the satire
against the Association for the Advancement of Everything to have not yet
altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day before yesterday refuses to
be revived. _Nicholas Nickleby_, published in twenty numbers, was the
labour of many months, but was produced under so great a press of work
that during the whole time of publication Dickens was never a single
number in advance. Yet, though not one of the most perfect of his books,
it is indisputably one of the most thoroughly original, and signally
illustrates the absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between
the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel of the
present. Dickens was never so strong as when he produced from the real;
and in this instance--starting, no doubt, with a healthy prejudice--so
carefully had he inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of
which Dotheboys Hall was to be held up as the infamous type, that there
seems to be no difficulty in identifying the site of the very school
itself; while the Portsmouth Theatre is to the full as accurate a study
as the Yorkshire school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers
Cheeryble were real personages well known in Manchester,[3] where even the
original of Tim Linkinwater still survives in local remembrance. On the
other hand, with how conscious a strength has the author's imaginative
power used and transmuted his materials: in the Squeers family creating a
group of inimitable grotesqueness; in their humblest victim Smike giving
one of his earliest pictures of those outcasts whom he drew again and
again with such infinite tenderness; and in Mr. Vincent Crummles and his
company, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but a kindly one,
for all times! In a third series of episodes in this book, it is
universally agreed that the author has no less conspicuously failed.
Dickens's first attempt to picture the manners and customs of the
aristocracy certainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people.
Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed--who is allowed to redeem his character
in the end--is not without touches resembling nature.
"'I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint
smile, 'such an interest in the drama.'
"'Ye-es. It's very interasting,' replied Lord Frederick.
"'I'm always ill after Shakspeare,' said Mrs. Wititterly. 'I scarcely
exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy,
my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.'
"'Ye-es,' replied Lord Frederick. 'He was a clayver man.'"
But Sir Mulberry Hawk is a kind of scoundrel not frequently met with in
polite society; his henchmen Pluck and Pyke have the air of "followers of
Don John," and the enjoyments of the "trainers of young noblemen and
gentlemen" at Hampton races, together with the riotous debauch which
precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct from the transpontine stage.
The fact is that Dickens was here content to draw his vile seducers and
wicked orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a thousand times
before, and will draw them a thousand times again. Much of the hero's talk
is of the same conventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be more
genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which finds its outlet in the
most unexpected channels, but nowhere so resistlessly as in the
invertebrate talk of Mrs. Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary
prototype in a character of Miss Austen's; but even if Mrs. Nickleby was
founded on Miss Bates, in _Emma_, she left her original far behind. Miss
Bates, indeed, is verbose, roundabout, and parenthetic; but the widow
never deviates into coherence.
_Nicholas Nickleby_ shows the comic genius of its author in full activity,
and should be read with something of the buoyancy of spirit in which it
was written, and not with a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a
scamp as Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens's "monstrous failures." At the same
time this book displays the desire of the author to mould his manner on
the old models. The very title has a savour of Smollett about it; the
style has more than one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of
Goldsmith; and the general method of the narrative resembles that of our
old novelists and their Spanish and French predecessors. Partly for this
reason, and partly, no doubt, because of the rapidity with which the story
was written, its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dickens's
earlier works. Coincidences are repeatedly employed to help on the
action; and the _denoument_, which, besides turning Mr. Squeers into a
thief, reveals Ralph Nickleby as the father of Smike, is oppressively
complete. As to the practical aim of the novel, the author's word must be
taken for the fact that "Mr. Squeers and his school were faint and feeble
pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they
should be deemed impossible." The exposure, no doubt, did good in its way,
though perhaps Mr. Squeers, in a more or less modified form, has proved a
tougher adversary to overcome than Mrs. Gamp.
During these years Dickens was chiefly resident in the modest locality of
Doughty Street, whither he had moved his household from the "three rooms,"
"three storeys high," in Furnival's Inn, early in 1837. It was not till
the end of 1839 that he took up his abode, further west, in a house which
he came to like best among all his London habitations, in Devonshire
Terrace, Regent's Park. His town life was, however, varied by long
rustications at Twickenham and at Petersham, and by sojourns at the
sea-side, of which he was a most consistent votary. He is found in various
years of his life at Brighton, Dover, and Bonchurch--where he liked his
neighbours better than he liked the climate; and in later years, when he
had grown accustomed to the Continent, he repeatedly domesticated himself
at Boulogne. But already in 1837 he had discovered the little sea-side
village, as it then was, which for many years afterwards became his
favourite holiday retreat, and of which he would be the _genius loci_,
even if he had not by a special description immortalised _Our English
Watering-place_. Broadstairs--whose afternoon tranquillity even to this
day is undisturbed except by the Ethiopians on their tramp from Margate to
Ramsgate--and its constant visitor, are thus described in a letter
written to an American friend in 1843: "This is a little fishing-place;
intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon--in the centre of a tiny
semicircular bay--our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the
windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the
Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if
they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big
light-house called the North Foreland on a hill beyond the village, a
severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and
stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where
all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible
fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high-water. Old
gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two
reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other
old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a
bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with
rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought
he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz."
Not a few houses at Broadstairs may boast of having been at one time or
another inhabited by him and his. Of the long-desired Fort House, however,
which local perverseness triumphantly points out as the original of _Bleak
House_ (no part even of _Bleak House_ was written there, though part of
_David Copperfield_ was), he could not obtain possession till 1850. As
like Bleak House as it is like Chesney Wold, it stands at the very highest
end of the place, looking straight out to sea, over the little harbour and
its two colliers, with a pleasant stretch of cornfields leading along the
cliff towards the light-house which Dickens promised Lord Carlisle should
serve him as a night-light. But in 1837 Dickens was content with narrower
quarters. The "long small procession of sons" and daughters had as yet
only begun with the birth of his eldest boy. His life was simple and full
of work, and occasional sea-side or country quarters, and now and then a
brief holiday tour, afforded the necessary refreshment of change. In 1837
he made his first short trip abroad, and in the following year,
accompanied by Mr. Hablot Browne, he spent a week of enjoyment in
Warwickshire, noting in his _Remembrancer_: "Stratford; Shakspeare; the
birthplace; visitors, scribblers, old woman (query whether she knows what
Shakspeare did), etc." Meanwhile, among his truest home enjoyments were
his friendships. They were few in number, mostly with men for whom, after
he had once taken them into his heart, he preserved a life-long regard.
Chief of all these were John Forster and Daniel Maclise, the high-minded
painter, to whom we owe a charming portrait of his friend in this youthful
period of his life. Losing them, he afterwards wrote when absent from
England, was "like losing my arms and legs, and dull and tame I am without
you." Besides these, he was at this time on very friendly terms with
William Harrison Ainsworth, who succeeded him in the editorship of the
_Miscellany_, and concerning whom he exclaimed in his _Remembrancer_:
"Ainsworth has a fine heart." At the close of 1838, Dickens, Ainsworth,
and Forster constituted themselves a club called the Trio, and afterwards
the Cerberus. Another name frequent in the _Remembrancer_ entries is that
of Talfourd, a generous friend, in whom, as Dickens finely said after his
death, "the success of other men made as little change as his own." All
these, together with Stanfield, the Landseers, Douglas Jerrold, Macready,
and others less known to fame, were among the friends and associates of
Dickens's prime. The letters, too, remaining from this part of Dickens's
life, have all the same tone of unaffected frankness. With some of his
intimate friends he had his established epistolary jokes. Stanfield, the
great marine painter, he pertinaciously treated as a "very salt"
correspondent, communications to whom, as to a "block-reeving,
main-brace-splicing, lead-heaving, ship-conning, stun'sail-bending,
deck-swabbing son of a sea-cook," needed garnishing with the obscurest
technicalities and strangest oaths of his element. (It is touching to turn
from these friendly buffooneries to a letter written by Dickens many years
afterward--in 1867--and mentioning a visit to "poor dear Stanfield," when
"it was clear that the shadow of the end had fallen on him.... It happened
well that I had seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea effect,
of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it under his
pillow.") Macready, after his retirement from the stage, is bantered on
the score of his juvenility with a pertinacity of fun recalling similar
whimsicalities of Charles Lamb's; or the jest is changed, and the great
London actor in his rural retreat is depicted in the character of a
country gentleman strange to the wicked ways of the town. As in the case
of many delightful letter-writers, the charm of Dickens as a correspondent
vanishes so soon as he becomes self-conscious. Even in his letters to Lady
Blessington and Mrs. Watson, a striving after effect is at times
perceptible; the homage rendered to Lord John Russell is not offered with
a light hand; on the contrary, when writing to Douglas Jerrold, Dickens is
occasionally so intent upon proving himself a sound Radical that his
vehemence all but passes into a shriek.
In these early years, at all events, Dickens was happy in the society of
his chosen friends. His favourite amusements were a country walk or ride
with Forster, or a dinner at Jack Straw's Castle with him and Maclise. He
was likewise happy at home. Here, however, in the very innermost circle of
his affections, he had to suffer the first great personal grief of his
life. His younger sister-in-law, Miss Mary Hogarth, had accompanied him
and his wife into their new abode in Doughty Street, and here, in May,
1837, she died, at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to
have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens
like that for the loss of this dearly-loved girl, "young, beautiful, and
good." "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her
death, "that, waking or sleeping, I have never lost the recollection of
our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall." "If," ran part
of his first entry in the Diary which he began on the first day of the
following year, "she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable
companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than any
one I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but
a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one
day, through his mercy, rejoin her." It was not till, in after years, it
became necessary to abandon the project, that he ceased to cherish the
intention of being buried by her side, and through life the memory of her
haunted him with strange vividness. At the Niagara Falls, when the
spectacle of Nature in her glory had produced in him, as he describes it,
a wondrously tranquil and happy peace of mind, he longed for the presence
of his dearest friends, and "I was going to add, what would I give if the
dear girl, whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to come so far along
with us; but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet
face faded from my earthly sight." "After she died," he wrote to her
mother in May, 1843, "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and
always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that
I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one
shape or other. And so it did." Once he dreamt of her, when travelling in
Yorkshire; and then, after an interval of many months, as he lay asleep
one night at Genoa, it seemed to him as if her spirit visited him and
spoke to him in words which he afterwards precisely remembered, when he
had awaked, with the tears running down his face. He never forgot her, and
in the year before he died he wrote to his friend: "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!" In a word, she was the object of the one great imaginative
passion of his life. Many have denied that there is any likeness to nature
in the fictitious figure in which, according to the wont of imaginative
workers, he was irresistibly impelled to embody the sentiment with which
she inspired him; but the sentiment itself became part of his nature, and
part of his history. When in writing the _Old Curiosity Shop_ he
approached the death of Little Nell, he shrunk from the task: "Dear Mary
died yesterday, when I think of this sad story."
The _Old Curiosity Shop_ has long been freed from the encumbrances which
originally surrounded it, and there is little except biographical interest
in the half-forgotten history of _Master Humphrey's Clock_. Early in the
year 1840, his success and confidence in his powers induced him to
undertake an illustrated weekly journal, in which he depended solely on
his own name, and, in the first instance, on his own efforts, as a writer.
Such was his trust in his versatility that he did not think it necessary
even to open with a continuous story. Perhaps the popularity of the
_Pickwick Papers_ encouraged him to adopt the time-honoured device of
wrapping up several tales in one. In any case, his framework was in the
present instance too elaborate to take hold of the public mind, while the
characters introduced into it possessed little or nothing of the freshness
of their models in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_. In order to
re-enforce Master Humphrey, the deaf gentleman, and the other original
members of his benevolent conclave, he hereupon resorted to a natural, but
none the less unhappy, expedient. Mr. Pickwick was revived, together with
Sam Weller and his parent; and a Weller of the third generation was
brought on the stage in the person of a precocious four-year-old,
"standing with his little legs very wide apart as if the top-boots were
familiar to them, and actually winking upon the house-keeper with his
infant eye, in imitation of his grandfather." A laugh may have been raised
at the time by this attempt, from which, however, every true Pickwickian
must have turned sadly away. Nor was there much in the other contents of
these early numbers to make up for the disappointment. As, therefore,
neither "Master Humphrey's Clock" nor "Mr. Weller's Watch" seemed to
promise any lasting success, it was prudently determined that the story of
the _Old Curiosity Shop_, of which the first portion had appeared in the
fourth number of the periodical, should run on continuously; and when this
had been finished, a very short "link" sufficed to introduce another
story, _Barnaby Rudge_, with the close of which _Master Humphrey's Clock_
likewise stopped.
In the _Old Curiosity Shop_, though it abounds in both grotesquely
terrible and boisterously laughable effects, the key-note is that of an
idyllic pathos. The sense of this takes hold of the reader at the very
outset, as he lingers over the picture, with which the first chapter
concludes, of little Nell asleep through the solitary night in the
curiosity-dealer's warehouse. It retains possession of him as he
accompanies the innocent heroine through her wanderings, pausing with her
in the church-yard where all is quiet save the cawing of the satirical
rooks, or in the school-master's cottage by the open window, through which
is borne upon the evening air the distant hum of the boys at play upon the
green, while the poor school-master holds in his hand the small cold one
of the little scholar that has fallen asleep. Nor is it absent to the last
when Nell herself lies at rest in her little bed. "Her little bird--a poor
slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed--was stirring
nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute
and motionless forever." The hand which drew Little Nell afterwards formed
other figures not less affecting, but none so essentially poetic. Like
many such characters, this requires, for its full appreciation, a certain
tension of the mind; and those who will not, or cannot, pass in some
measure out of themselves, will be likely to tire of the conception, or to
declare its execution artificial. Curiously enough, not only was Little
Nell a favourite of Landor, a poet and critic utterly averse from
meretricious art, but she also deeply moved the sympathy of Lord Jeffrey,
who at least knew his own mind, and spoke it in both praise and blame. As
already stated, Dickens only with difficulty brought himself to carry his
story to its actual issue, though it is hard to believe that he could ever
have intended a different close from that which he gave to it. His whole
heart was in the story, nor could he have consoled himself by means of an
ordinary happy ending.
Dickens's comic humour never flowed in a pleasanter vein than in the _Old
Curiosity Shop_, and nowhere has it a more exquisite element of pathos in
it. The shock-headed, red-cheeked Kit is one of the earliest of those
ungainly figures who speedily find their way into our affections--the odd
family to which Mr. Toots, Tom Pinch, Tommy Traddles, and Joe Gargery
alike belong. But the triumph of this serio-comic form of art in the _Old
Curiosity Shop_ is to be found in the later experiences of Dick Swiveller,
who seems at first merely a more engaging sample of the Bob Sawyer
species, but who ends by endearing himself to the most thoughtless
laugher. Dick Swiveller and his protegee have gained a lasting place among
the favourite characters of English fiction, and the privations of the
Marchioness have possibly had a result which would have been that most
coveted by Dickens--that of helping towards the better treatment of a
class whose lot is among the dust and ashes, too often very bitter ashes,
of many households. Besides these, the story contains a variety of
incidental characters of a class which Dickens never grew weary of drawing
from the life. Messrs. Codlin, Short, and Company, and the rest of the
itinerant showmen, seem to have come straight from the most real of
country fairs; and if ever a _troupe_ of comedians deserved pity on their
wanderings through a callous world, it was the most diverting and the most
dismal of all the mountebanks that gathered round the stew of tripe in
the kitchen of The Jolly Sandboys--Jerry's performing dogs.
"'Your people don't usually travel in character, do they?' said Short,
pointing to the dresses of the dogs. 'It must come expensive if they
do.'
"'No,' replied Jerry--'no, it's not the custom with us. But we've been
playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new
wardrobe at the races, so I didn't think it worth while to stop to
undress. Down, Pedro!'"
In addition to these public servants we have a purveyor of diversion--or
instruction--of an altogether different stamp. "Does the caravan look as
if _it_ know'd em?" indignantly demands the proprietress of Jarley's
wax-work, when asked whether she is acquainted with the men of the Punch
show. She too is drawn, or moulded, in the author's most exuberant style
of fun, together with _her_ company, in which "all the gentlemen were very
pigeon-breasted and very blue about the beards, and all the ladies were
miraculous figures; and all the ladies and all the gentlemen were looking
intensely nowhere, and staring with extraordinary earnestness at nothing."
In contrast with these genial products of observation and humour stand the
grotesquely hideous personages who play important parts in the machinery
of the story, the vicious dwarf Quilp and the monstrous virago Sally
Brass. The former is among the most successful attempts of Dickens in a
direction which was full of danger for him, as it is for all writers; the
malevolent little demon is so blended with his surroundings--the
description of which forms one of the author's most telling pictures of
the lonely foulnesses of the river-side--that his life seems natural in
its way, and his death a most appropriate ending to it. Sally Brass,
"whose accomplishments were all of a masculine and strictly legal kind,"
is less of a caricature, and not without a humorously redeeming point of
feminine weakness; yet the end of her and her brother is described at the
close of the book with almost tragic earnestness. On the whole, though the
poetic sympathy of Dickens when he wrote this book was absorbed in the
character of his heroine, yet his genius rarely asserted itself after a
more diversified fashion.
Of _Barnaby Rudge_, though in my opinion an excellent book after its kind,
I may speak more briefly. With the exception of _A Tale of Two Cities_, it
was Dickens's only attempt in the historical novel. In the earlier work
the relation between the foreground and background of the story is
skilfully contrived, and the colouring of the whole, without any elaborate
attempt at accurate fidelity, has a generally true and harmonious effect.
With the help of her portrait by a painter (Mr. Frith) for whose pictures
Dickens had a great liking, Dolly Varden has justly taken hold of the
popular fancy as a charming type of a pretty girl of a century ago. And
some of the local descriptions in the early part of the book are hardly
less pleasing: the Temple in summer, as it was before the charm of
Fountain Court was destroyed by its guardians; and the picturesque
comforts of the Maypole Inn, described beforehand, by way of contrast to
the desecration of its central sanctuary. The intrigue of the story is
fairly interesting in itself, and the gentlemanly villain who plays a
principal part in it, though, as usual, over-elaborated, is drawn with
more skill than Dickens usually displays in such characters. After the
main interest of the book has passed to the historical action of the
George Gordon riots, the story still retains its coherence, and, a few
minor improbabilities apart, is successfully conducted to its close. No
historical novel can altogether avoid the banalities of the species; and
though Dickens, like all the world, had his laugh at the late Mr. G. P. R.
James, he is constrained to introduce the historical hero of the tale,
with his confidential adviser, and his attendant, in the familiar guise of
three horsemen. As for Lord George Gordon himself, and the riots of which
the responsibility remains inseparable from his unhappy memory, the
representation of them in the novel sufficiently accords both with poetic
probability and with historical fact. The poor lord's evil genius, indeed,
Gashford--who has no historical original--tries the reader's sense of
verisimilitude rather hard; such converts are uncommon except among
approvers. The Protestant hangman, on the other hand, has some slight
historical warranty; but the leading part which he is made to play in the
riots, and his resolution to go any lengths "in support of the great
Protestant principle of hanging," overshoot the mark. It cannot be said
that there is any substantial exaggeration in the description of the
riots; thus, the burning of the great distiller's house in Holborn is a
well-authenticated fact; and there is abundant vigour in the narrative.
Repetition is unavoidable in treating such a theme, but in _Barnaby Rudge_
it is not rendered less endurable by mannerism, nor puffed out with
rhetoric.
One very famous character in this story was, as personages in historical
novels often are, made up out of two originals.[4] This was Grip the
Raven, who, after seeing the idiot hero of the tale safe through his
adventures, resumed his addresses on the subject of the kettle to the
horses in the stable; and who, "as he was a mere infant when Barnaby was
gray, has very probably gone on talking to the present time." In a later
preface to _Barnaby Rudge_, Dickens, with infinite humour, related his
experiences of the two originals in question, and how he had been
ravenless since the mournful death before the kitchen fire of the second
of the pair, the _Grip_ of actual life. This occurred in the house at
Devonshire Terrace, into which the family had moved two years before (in
1839).
As Dickens's fame advanced his circle of acquaintances was necessarily
widened; and in 1841 he was invited to visit Edinburgh, and to receive
there the first great tribute of public recognition which had been paid to
him. He was entertained with great enthusiasm at a public banquet, voted
the freedom of the city, and so overwhelmed with hospitalities that,
notwithstanding his frank pleasure in these honours, he was glad to make
his escape at last, and refreshed himself with a tour in the Highlands.
These excitements may have intensified in him a desire which had for some
time been active in his mind, and which in any case would have been kept
alive by an incessant series of invitations. He had signed an agreement
with his publishers for a new book before this desire took the shape of an
actual resolution. There is no great difficulty in understanding why
Dickens made up his mind to go to America, and thus to interrupt for the
moment a course of life and work which was fast leading him on to great
heights of fame and fortune. The question of international copyright alone
would hardly have induced him to cross the seas. Probably he felt
instinctively that to see men and cities was part of the training as well
as of the recreation which his genius required. Dickens was by nature one
of those artists who when at work always long to be in sympathy with their
public, and to know it to be in sympathy with them. And hitherto he had
not met more than part of his public of readers face to face.