CHANGES.
[1852-1858.]
I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles
Dickens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit
was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his
activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary
successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of
which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he
was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and
cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken
possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country
residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a
stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man's house is
truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little
before, come to such a pass that he wrote to his faithful friend: "I am
become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and
die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way
Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed."
Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him--the boy
whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which
no eccentric humours and fantastic _sobriquets_ could conceal. In May,
1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though
self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet
that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds
of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself.
In the earlier of these years Dickens's movements were still very much of
the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period
described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances
in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in
Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his
working hours in this and the following year--the spring of which was
partly spent at Brighton--he was engaged upon his new story, _Bleak
House_, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853.
"To let you into a secret," he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary
Boyle, from Dover, "I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever
shall like, anything quite so well as _Copperfield_. But I foresee, I
think, some very good things in _Bleak House_." There is no reason to
believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its
publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its
predecessor. According to the author's own testimony it "took
extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months" of its
issue, and "retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear
old _Copperfield_ by a round ten thousand or more." To this day the book
has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by
which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On
the other hand, _Bleak House_ was probably the first of Dickens's works
which furnished a suitable text to a class of censors whose precious balms
have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of
amusing being graciously conceded to the "man of genius," his book was
charged with "absolute want of construction," and with being a
heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a
number of "odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit." Of the
characters themselves it was asserted that, though in the main excessively
funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from
nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as
types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and
while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised,
it was regretted that Dickens should never have succeeded in drawing "a
man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy." He
belonged, unfortunately, "in literature to the same class as his
illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the
illustrator in range and power." In other words, he was essentially a
caricaturist.
As applied to _Bleak House_, with which I am at present alone concerned,
this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as
constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to _Bleak
House_ may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as
compared, not with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, but with its immediate
predecessor, _David Copperfield_, this novel exhibits a decided advance in
that respect. In truth, Dickens in _Bleak House_ for the first time
emancipated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his
great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less
consciously adopted--the novel of adventure, of which the person of the
hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element.
It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon
him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about this time
praising for his unlikeness to the "conceited idiots who suppose that
volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes," was already teaching
something to, as well as learning something from, the elder. It may also
be that the criticism which as editor of _Household Words_ Dickens was now
in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of others,
unconsciously affected his own methods and processes. Certain it is that
from this point of view _Bleak House_ may be said to begin a new series
among his works of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of
those concerned in it are not a disconnected background from which the
mystery of Lady Dedlock's secret stands forth in relief; but the two main
parts of the story are skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot.
Nor is the success of the general action materially affected by the
circumstance that the tone of Esther Summerson's diary is not altogether
true. At the same time there is indisputably some unevenness in the
construction of _Bleak House_. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in
some of its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the reader
is strongly revived when that popular favourite, Mr. Inspector Bucket,
appears on the scene, and when, more especially in the admirably vivid
narrative of Esther's journey with the detective, the nearness of the
catastrophe exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery,
moreover--such as the Smallweed family's part in the plot--is tiresome;
and particular incidents are intolerably horrible or absurd--such as on
the one hand the spontaneous combustion (which is proved possible by the
analogy of historical facts!), and on the other the intrusion of the
oil-grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir Leicester
Dedlock's grief. But in general the parts of the narrative are well knit
together; and there is a subtle skill in the way in which the two main
parts of the story converge towards their common close.
The idea of making an impersonal object like a great Chancery suit the
centre round which a large and manifold group of characters revolves,
seems to savour of a drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme
suggested itself to Dickens with a very real purpose, and on the basis of
facts which he might well think warranted him in his treatment of it; for,
true artist though he was, the thought of exposing some national defect,
of helping to bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his
mind over any mere literary conception. _Prima facie_, at least, and with
all due deference to Chancery judges and eminent silk gowns like Mr.
Blowers, the length of Chancery suits was a real public grievance, as well
as a frequent private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the
idea of Jarndyce _v._ Jarndyce as diversely affecting those who lived by
it, those who rebelled against it, those who died of it, was, in its way,
of unique force; and while Dickens never brought to any other of his
subjects so useful a knowledge of its external details--in times gone by
he had served a "Kenge and Carboys" of his own--hardly any one of those
subjects suggested so wide a variety of aspects for characteristic
treatment.
For never before had his versatility in drawing character filled his
canvas with so multitudinous and so various a host of personages. The
legal profession, with its servitors and hangers-on of every degree,
occupies the centre of the picture. In this group no figure is more
deserving of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently
respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a four-wheeled
affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy manifests itself. We learn
very little about him, and probably care less; but he interests us
precisely as we should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about
whom we might know and care equally little, were we to find him alone in
the twilight, drinking his ancient port in his frescoed chamber in those
fields where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr.
Forster, by-the-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the piety
of American research has since put on record, that Mr. Tulkinghorn's house
was a picture of the biographer's own residence.) The portrait of Mr.
Vholes, who supports an unassailable but unenviable professional
reputation for the sake of "the three dear girls at home," and a father
whom he has to support "in the Vale of Taunton," is less attractive; but
nothing could be more in its place in the story than the clammy tenacity
of this legal ghoul and his "dead glove." Lower down in the great system
of the law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very quintessence
of cockney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour of legal sharpness without
which the rankness of the mixture would be incomplete. To the legal group
Miss Flite, whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the Temple
as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, may likewise be said to
belong. She is quite legitimately introduced into the story--which cannot
be said of all Dickens's madmen--because her madness associates itself
with its main theme.
Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of an eccentric by or
under plot in this story, in which the family of the Jellybys and the
august Mr. Turveydrop are, actively, or by passive endurance, engaged. The
philanthropic section of _le monde ou l'on s'ennuie_ has never been
satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bitterly. Perhaps at
the time of the publication of _Bleak House_ the activity of our Mrs.
Jellybys took a wider and more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for
we read at the end of Esther's diary how Mrs. Jellyby "has been
disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence
of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived the
climate--for rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in
Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more
correspondence than the old one." But Mrs. Jellyby's interference in the
affairs of other people is after all hurtful only because in busying
herself with theirs she forgets her own. The truly offensive benefactress
of her fellow-creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and tract
in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. Among her victims are
her own children, including Alfred, aged five, who has been induced to
take an oath "never to use tobacco in any form."
The particular vein of feeling that led Dickens to the delineation of
these satirical figures was one which never ran dry with him, and which
suggested some forcible-feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it
a vein of feeling only; for he could hardly have argued in cold blood that
the efforts which he ridicules were not misrepresented as a whole by his
satire. When poor Jo on his death-bed is "asked whether he ever knew a
prayer," and replies that he could never make anything out of those spoken
by the gentlemen who "came down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin'," but who
"mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong," the author brings a charge
which he might not have found it easy to substantiate. Yet--with the
exception of such isolated passages--the figure of Jo is in truth one of
the most powerful protests that have been put forward on behalf of the
friendless outcasts of our streets. Nor did the romantic element in the
conception interfere with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at
first to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the story, is
in Dickens's best pathetic manner, the Bagnet family is in his happiest
vein of quiet humour. Mr. Inspector Bucket, though not altogether free
from mannerism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For this
character, as the pages of _Household Words_ testify, Dickens had made
many studies in real life. The detective police-officer had at that time
not yet become a standing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the
detective of real life begun to destroy the illusion.
_Bleak House_ was least of all among the novels hitherto published by its
author obnoxious to the charge persistently brought against him, that he
was doomed to failure in his attempts to draw characters taken from any
but the lower spheres of life--in his attempts, in short, to draw ladies
and gentlemen. To begin with, one of the most interesting characters in
the book--indeed, in its relation to the main idea of the story, the most
interesting of all--is the youthful hero, if he is to be so called,
Richard Carson. From the very nature of the conception the character is
passive only; but the art and feeling are in their way unsurpassed with
which the gradual collapse of a fine nature is here exhibited. Sir
Leicester Dedlock, in some measure intended as a type of his class, has
been condemned as wooden and unnatural; and no doubt the machinery of that
part of the story in which he is concerned creaks before it gets under
way. On the other hand, after the catastrophe has overwhelmed him and his
house, he becomes a really fine picture, unmarred by any Grandisonianisms
in either thought or phrase, of a true gentleman, bowed but not warped by
distress. Sir Leicester's relatives, both dead and living; Volumnia's
sprightly ancestress on the wall, and that "fair Dedlock" herself; the
whole cousinhood, debilitated and otherwise, but of one mind on such
points as William Buffy's blameworthy neglect of his duty _when in
office_; all these make up a very probable picture of a house great
enough--or thinking itself great enough--to look at the affairs of the
world from the family point of view. In Lady Dedlock alone a failure must
be admitted; but she, with her wicked double, the uncanny French maid
Hortense, exists only for the sake of the plot.
With all its merits, _Bleak House_ has little of that charm which belongs
to so many of Dickens's earlier stories, and to _David Copperfield_ above
all. In part, at least, this may be due to the excessive severity of the
task which Dickens had set himself in _Bleak House_; for hardly any other
of his works is constructed on so large a scale, or contains so many
characters organically connected with the progress of its plot; and in
part, again, to the half-didactic, half-satirical purport of the story,
which weighs heavily on the writer. An overstrained tone announces itself
on the very first page; an opening full of power--indeed, of genius--but
pitched in a key which we feel at once will not, without effort, be
maintained. On the second page the prose has actually become verse; or how
else can one describe part of the following apostrophe?
"'This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its
blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in
every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; which has its
ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing
and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives
to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which
so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain
and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its
practitioners who would not give--who does not often give--the
warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come
here!"'"
It was possibly with some thought of giving to _Bleak House_ also, though
in a different way, the close relation to his experiences of living men to
which _David Copperfield_ had owed so much, that Dickens introduced into
it two _portraits_. Doubtless, at first, his intention had by no means
gone so far as this. His constant counsellor always disliked his mixing up
in his fictitious characters any personal reminiscences of particular men,
experience having shown that in such cases the whole character came out
_more like_ than the author was aware. Nor can Dickens himself have failed
to understand how such an experiment is always tempting, and always
dangerous; how it is often irreconcilable with good feeling, and quite as
often with good taste. In _Bleak House_, however, it occurred to him to
introduce likenesses of two living men, both more or less well known to
the public and to himself; and both of individualities too clearly marked
for a portrait, or even a caricature, of either to be easily mistaken. Of
that art of mystification which the authors of both English and French
_romans a clef_ have since practised with so much transient success, he
was no master, and fortunately so; for what could be more ridiculous than
that the reader's interest in a character should be stimulated, first, by
its being evidently the late Lord P-lm-rst-n or the P---- of O----, and
then by its being no less evidently somebody else? It should be added
that neither of the two portrait characters in _Bleak House_ possesses the
least importance for the conduct of the story, so that there is nothing to
justify their introduction except whatever excellence may belong to them
in themselves.
Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin as drawn from Walter
Savage Landor with his intellectual greatness left out. It was, of course,
unlikely that his intellectual greatness should be left in, the intention
obviously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways and manner,
with a suggestion of what was noble in the character, of Dickens's famous
friend. Whether, had he attempted to do so, Dickens could have drawn a
picture of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who could put
into a classic dialogue that sense of the _naif_ to which Dickens is
generally a stranger, yet passionately admired the most _sentimental_ of
all his young friend's poetic figures; and it might almost be said that
the intellectual natures of the two men were drawn together by the force
of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate with one another
during Landor's residence at Bath--which began in 1837--and they
frequently met at Gore House. At a celebration of the poet's birthday in
his lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of Landor, "the
fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the _Curiosity Shop_ first
dawned on the genius of its creator." In Landor's spacious mind there was
room for cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius differed
widely from that of his own; and he could thus afford to sympathise with
his whole heart in a creation which men of much smaller intellectual build
have pronounced mawkish and unreal. Dickens afterwards gave to one of his
sons the names of Walter Landor; and when the old man died at last,
_after_ his godson, paid him an eloquent tribute of respect in _All the
Year Round_. In this paper the personal intention of the character of
Boythorn is avowed by implication; but though Landor esteemed and loved
Dickens, it might seem matter for wonder, did not eccentrics after all
sometimes cherish their own eccentricity, that his irascible nature failed
to resent a rather doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is
whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the word, humorous.
But the portrait, however imperfect, was in this instance, beyond all
doubt, both kindly meant and kindly taken; though it cannot be said to
have added to the attractions of the book into which it is introduced.
While no doubt ever existed as to this likeness, the case may not seem so
clear with regard to the original of Harold Skimpole. It would be far more
pleasant to pass by without notice the controversy--if controversy it can
be called--which this character provoked; but a wrong done by one eminent
man of letters to another, however unforeseen its extent may have been,
and however genuine the endeavour to repair its effect, becomes part of
literary history. That the original of Harold Skimpole was Leigh Hunt
cannot reasonably be called into question. This assertion by no means
precludes the possibility, or probability, that a second original
suggested certain features in the portrait. Nor does it contradict the
substantial truthfulness of Dickens's own statement, published in _All the
Year Round_ after Leigh Hunt's death, on the appearance of the new edition
of the _Autobiography_ with Thornton Hunt's admirable introduction. While,
Dickens then wrote, "he yielded to the temptation of too often making the
character speak like his old friend," yet "he no more thought, God forgive
him! that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary
vices of the fictitious creature, than he had himself ever thought of
charging the blood of Desdemona and Othello on the innocent Academy model
who sat for Iago's leg in the picture. Even as to the mere occasional
manner," he declared that he had "altered the whole of that part of the
text, when two intimate friends of Leigh Hunt--both still
living--discovered too strong a resemblance to his 'way.'" But, while
accepting this statement, and suppressing a regret that after discovering
the dangerous closeness of the resemblance Dickens should have, quite at
the end of the story, introduced a satirical reference to Harold
Skimpole's autobiography--Leigh Hunt's having been published only a year
or two before--one must confess that the explanation only helps to prove
the rashness of the offence. While intending the portrait to keep its own
secret from the general public, Dickens at the same time must have wished
to gratify a few keen-sighted friends. In March, 1852, he writes to
Forster, evidently in reference to the apprehensions of his correspondent:
"Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him singularly unlike the
great original." The "great original" was a man for whom, both before and
after this untoward incident in the relations between them, Dickens
professed a warm regard, and who, to judge from the testimony of those who
knew him well,[9] and from his unaffected narrative of his own life,
abundantly deserved it. A perusal of Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_ suffices
to show that he used to talk in Skimpole's manner, and even to write in
it; that he was at one period of his life altogether ignorant of money
matters, and that he cultivated cheerfulness on principle. But it likewise
shows that his ignorance of business was acknowledged by him as a
misfortune in which he was very far from exulting. "Do I boast of this
ignorance?" he writes. "Alas! I have no such respect for the pedantry of
absurdity as that. I blush for it, and I only record it out of a sheer
painful movement of conscience, as a warning to those young authors who
might be led to look upon such folly as a fine thing, which at all events
is what I never thought it myself." On the other hand, as his son showed,
his cheerfulness, which was not inconsistent with a natural proneness to
intervals of melancholy, rested on grounds which were the result of a fine
as well as healthy morality. "The value of cheerful opinions," he wrote,
in words embodying a moral that Dickens himself was never weary of
enforcing, "is inestimable; they will retain a sort of heaven round a man,
when everything else might fail him, and consequently they ought to be
religiously inculcated upon his children." At the same time, no quality
was more conspicuous in his life than his readiness for hard work, even
under the most depressing circumstances; and no feature was more marked in
his moral character than his conscientiousness. "In the midst of the
sorest temptations," Dickens wrote of him, "he maintained his honesty
unblemished by a single stain; and in all public and private transactions
he was the very soul of truth and honour." To mix up with the outward
traits of such a man the detestable obliquities of Harold Skimpole was an
experiment paradoxical even as a mere piece of character-drawing. The
merely literary result is a failure, while a wound was needlessly
inflicted, if not upon Leigh Hunt himself, at least upon all who
cherished his friendship or good name. Dickens seems honestly and deeply
to have regretted what he had done, and the extremely tasteful little
tribute to Leigh Hunt's poetic gifts which, some years before the death of
the latter, Dickens wrote for _Household Words_,[10] must have partaken of
the nature of an _amende honorable_. Neither his subsequent repudiation of
unfriendly intentions, nor his earlier exertions on Leigh Hunt's behalf,
are to be overlooked, but they cannot undo a mistake which forms an
unfortunate incident in Dickens's literary life, singularly free though
that life, as a whole, is from the miseries of personal quarrels, and all
the pettinesses with which the world of letters is too familiar.
While Dickens was engaged upon a literary work such as would have absorbed
the intellectual energies of most men, he not only wrote occasionally for
his journal, but also dictated for publication in it, the successive
portions of a book altogether outside his usual range of authorship. This
was _A Child's History of England_, the only one of his works that was not
written by his own hand. A history of England, written by Charles Dickens
for his own or any one else's children, was sure to be a different work
from one written under similar circumstances by Mr. Freeman or the late M.
Guizot. The book, though it cannot be called a success, is, however, by no
means devoid of interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and
printed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, then a
hopeful student of the age of five, which was composed, as he informed
Douglas Jerrold at the time, "in the exact spirit" of that advanced
politician's paper, "for I don't know what I should do if he were to get
hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of
guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the
parrots' necks in his very cradle." The _Child's History of England_ is
written in the same spirit, and illustrates more directly, and, it must be
added, more coarsely, than any of Dickens's other works his hatred of
ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan is pervaded by
a prejudice which is the fruit of anything but knowledge; Edward the
Confessor is "the dreary old" and "the maudlin Confessor;" and the Pope
and what belongs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which
would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To be sure, if King
John is dismissed as a "miserable brute," King Henry the Eighth is not
more courteously designated as a "blot of blood and grease upon the
history of England." On the other hand, it could hardly be but that
certain passages of the national story should be well told by so great a
master of narrative; and though the strain in which parts of the history
of Charles the Second are recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the
young, to whom irony is in general _caviare_ indeed, yet there are touches
both in the story of "this merry gentleman"--a designation which almost
recalls Fagin--and elsewhere in the book not unworthy of its author. Its
patriotic spirit is quite as striking as its Radicalism; and vulgar as
some of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow in the
passage on King Alfred, which declares the "English-Saxon" character to
have been "the greatest character among the nations of the earth;" and
there is a yet nobler enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any
writer's while to infuse into the young, in the passionate earnestness
with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the truth is enforced that
"nothing can make war otherwise than horrible."
This book must have been dictated, and some at least of the latter portion
of _Bleak House_ written, at Boulogne, where, after a spring sojourn at
Brighton, Dickens spent the summer of 1853, and where were also passed the
summers of 1854 and 1856. Boulogne, where Le Sage's last years were spent,
was _Our French Watering-place_, so graphically described in a paper in
_Household Words_ as a companion picture to the old familiar Broadstairs.
The family were comfortably settled on a green hill-side close to the
town, "in a charming garden in a very pleasant country," with "excellent
light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two
cows--for milk-punch--vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the
kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains--with no water in
'em--and thirty-seven clocks--keeping, as I conceive, Australian time,
having no reference whatever to the hours on this side of the globe." The
energetic owner of the Villa des Moulineaux was the "M. Loyal Devasseur"
of _Our French Watering-place_--jovial, convivial, genial, sentimental too
as a Buonapartist and a patriot. In 1854 the same obliging personage
housed the Dickens family in another abode, at the top of the hill, close
to the famous Napoleonic column; but in 1856 they came back to the
Moulineaux. The former year had been an exciting one for Englishmen in
France, with royal visits to and fro to testify to the _entente cordiale_
between the governments. Dickens, notwithstanding his humorous assertions,
was only moderately touched by the Sebastopol fever; but when a concrete
problem came before him in the shape of a festive demonstration, he
addressed himself to it with the irrepressible ardour of the born
stage-manager. "In our own proper illumination," he writes, on the
occasion of the Prince Consort's visit to the camp at Boulogne, "I laid
on all the servants, all the children now at home, all the visitors, one
to every window, with everything ready to light up on the ringing of a big
dinner-bell by your humble correspondent. St. Peter's on Easter Monday was
the result."
Of course, at Boulogne, Dickens was cut off neither from his business nor
from his private friends. His hospitable invitations were as urgent to his
French villa in the summer as to his London house in the winter, and on
both sides of the water the _Household Words_ familiars were as sure of a
welcome from their chief. During his absences from London he could have
had no trustier lieutenant than Mr. W. H. Wills, with whom, being always
ready to throw himself into a part, he corresponded in an amusing
paragraphed, semi-official style. And neither in his working nor in his
leisure hours had he by this time any more cherished companion than Mr.
Wilkie Collins, whose progress towards brilliant success he was watching
with the keenest and kindliest interest. With him and his old friend
Augustus Egg, Dickens, in October, 1853, started on a tour to Switzerland
and Italy, in the course of which he saw more than one old friend, and
revisited more than one known scene--ascending Vesuvius with Mr. Layard
and drinking punch at Rome with David Roberts. It would be absurd to make
any lofty demands upon the brief records of a holiday journey; and, for my
part, I would rather think of Dickens assiduous over his Christmas number
at Rome and at Venice, than weigh his moralisings about the electric
telegraph running through the Coliseum. His letters written to his wife
during this trip are bright and gay, and it was certainly no roving
bachelor who "kissed almost all the children he encountered in remembrance
of the sweet faces" of his own, and "talked to all the mothers who
carried them." By the middle of December the travellers were home again,
and before the year was out he had read to large audiences at Birmingham,
on behalf of a public institution, his favourite Christmas stories of _The
Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_. As yet, however, his
mind was not seriously intent upon any labours but those proper to his
career as an author, and the year 1854 saw, between the months of April
and August, the publication in his journal of a new story, which is among
the most characteristic, though not among the most successful, of his
works of fiction.
In comparison with most of Dickens's novels, _Hard Times_ is contained
within a narrow compass; and this, with the further necessity of securing
to each successive small portion of the story a certain immediate degree
of effectiveness, accounts, in some measure, for the peculiarity of the
impression left by this story upon many of its readers. Short as the story
relatively is, few of Dickens's fictions were elaborated with so much
care. He had not intended to write a new story for a twelvemonth, when, as
he says, "the idea laid hold of him by the throat in a very violent
manner," and the labour, carried on under conditions of peculiar
irksomeness, "used him up" after a quite unaccustomed fashion. The book
thus acquired a precision of form and manner which commends it to the
French school of criticism rather than to lovers of English humour in its
ampler forms and more flowing moods. At the same time the work has its
purpose so visibly imprinted on its front, as almost to forbid our
regarding it in the first instance apart from the moral which avowedly it
is intended to inculcate. This moral, by no means new with Dickens, has
both a negative and a positive side. "Do not harden your hearts," is the
negative injunction, more especially do not harden them against the
promptings of that human kindness which should draw together man and man,
old and young, rich and poor; and keep your sympathies fresh by bringing
nourishment to them through channels which prejudice or short-sightedness
would fain narrow or stop up. This hortatory purpose assumes the form of
invective and even of angry menace; and "utilitarian economists, skeletons
of school-masters, commissioners of facts, genteel and used-up infidels,
gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds," are warned: "The poor you
have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the
utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives, so much
in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is
utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand
face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you."
No authority, however eminent, not even Mr. Ruskin's, is required to teach
reflecting minds the infinite importance of the principles which _Hard
Times_ was intended to illustrate. Nor is it of much moment whether the
illustrations are always exact; whether the "commissioners of facts" have
reason to protest that the unimaginative character of their processes does
not necessarily imply an unimaginative purpose in their ends; whether
there is any actual Coketown in existence within a hundred miles of
Manchester; or whether it suffices that "everybody knew what was meant,
but every cotton-spinning town said it was the other cotton-spinning
town." The chief personal grievance of Stephen Blackpool has been removed
or abated, but the "muddle" is not yet altogether cleared up which
prevents the nation and the "national dustmen," its law-givers, from
impartially and sympathetically furthering the interest of all classes. In
a word, the moral of _Hard Times_ has not yet lost its force, however
imperfect or unfair the method may have been in which it is urged in the
book.
Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic purpose is only too
often prone to exaggerate what seems of special importance for the purpose
in question, and to heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the
clearest light. "Thomas Gradgrind, sir"--who announces himself with
something of the genuine Lancashire roll--and his system are a sound and a
laughable piece of satire, to begin with, only here and there marred by
the satirist's imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures.
The "Manchester School," which the novel strives to expose, is in itself
to a great extent a figment of the imagination, which to this day serves
to round many a hollow period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may
fairly be asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the
member for Coketown, deaf and blind to any consideration but the
multiplication-table? But in any case the cause hardly warrants one of its
consequences as depicted in the novel--the utter brutalization of a stolid
nature like "the Whelp's." When Gradgrind's son is about to be shipped
abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, he reminds his father
that he merely exemplifies the statistical law that "so many people out of
so many will be dishonest." When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly asked
whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiologically assured of
the fact; and to the further inquiry whether this heart of his is
accessible to compassion, makes answer that "it is accessible to reason,
and to nothing else." These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind's philosophy upon
himself savour of the moral justice represented by Gratiano in the fourth
act. So, again, Coketown, with its tall chimneys and black river, and its
thirteen religious denominations, to which whoever else belonged the
working-men did _not_, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But the
influence of Coketown, or of a whole wilderness of Coketowns, cannot
justly be charged with a tendency to ripen such a product as Josiah
Bounderby, who is not only the "bully of humanity," but proves to be a
mean-spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self-help. In
short, _Hard Times_ errs by its attempt to prove too much.
Apart, however, from the didactic purposes which overburden it, the pathos
and humour of particular portions of this tale appear to me to have been
in no wise overrated. The domestic tragedy of Stephen and Rachael has a
subdued intensity of tenderness and melancholy of a kind rare with
Dickens, upon whom the example of Mrs. Gaskell in this instance may not
have been without its influence. Nor is there anything more delicately and
at the same time more appropriately conceived in any of his works than
poor Rachael's dominion over the imagination as well as over the
affections of her noble-minded and unfortunate lover: "As the shining
stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in the
rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life." The
love-story of poor Louisa is of a different kind, and more wordy in the
telling; yet here also the feelings painted are natural and true. The
humorous interest is almost entirely concentrated upon the company of
horse-riders; and never has Dickens's extraordinary power of humorous
observation more genially asserted itself. From Mr. Sleary--"thtout man,
game-eye"--and his protagonist, Mr. E. W. B. Childers, who, when he shook
his long hair, caused it to "shake all at once," down to Master
Kidderminster, who used to form the apex of the human pyramids, and "in
whose young nature there was an original flavour of the misanthrope,"
these honest equestrians are more than worthy to stand by the side of Mr.
Vincent Crummles and his company of actors; and the fun has here, in
addition to the grotesqueness of the earlier picture, a mellowness of its
own. Dickens's comic genius was never so much at its ease and so
inexhaustible in ludicrous fancies as in the depiction of such groups as
this; and the horse-riders, skilfully introduced to illustrate a truth,
wholesome if not novel, would have insured popularity to a far less
interesting and to a far less powerful fiction.
The year after that which saw the publication of _Hard Times_ was one in
which the thoughts of most Englishmen were turned away from the problems
approached in that story. But if the military glories of 1854 had not
aroused in him any very exuberant enthusiasm, the reports from the Crimea
in the ensuing winter were more likely to appeal to his patriotism as well
as to his innate impatience of disorder and incompetence. In the first
instance, however, he contented himself with those grumblings to which, as
a sworn foe of red tape and a declared disbeliever in our parliamentary
system, he might claim to have a special right; and he seems to have been
too restless in and about himself to have entered very closely into the
progress of public affairs. The Christmas had been a merry one at
Tavistock House; and the amateur theatricals of its juvenile company had
passed through a most successful season. Their history has been written by
one of the performers--himself not the least distinguished of the company,
since it was he who, in Dickens's house, caused Thackeray to roll off his
seat in a fit of laughter. Dickens, who with Mark Lemon disported himself
among these precocious minnows, was, as our chronicler relates, like
Triplet, "author, manager, and actor too," organiser, deviser, and
harmoniser of all the incongruous assembled elements; it was he "who
improvised costumes, painted and corked our innocent cheeks, and suggested
all the most effective business of the scene." But, as was usual with him,
the transition was rapid from play to something very like earnest; and
already, in June, 1855, the Tavistock House theatre produced Mr. Wilkie
Collins's melodrama of _The Light-house_, which afterwards found its way
to the public stage. To Dickens, who performed in it with the author, it
afforded "scope for a piece of acting of great power," the old sailor
Aaron Gurnock, which by its savage picturesqueness earned a tribute of
recognition from Carlyle. No less a hand than Stanfield painted the
scenery, and Dickens himself, besides writing the prologue, introduced
into the piece a ballad called _The Story of the Wreck_, a not
unsuccessful effort in Cowper's manner. At Christmas, 1856-'57, there
followed _The Frozen Deep_, another melodrama by the same author; and by
this time the management of his private theatricals had become to Dickens
a serious business, to be carried on seriously for its own sake. "It was
to him," he wrote, "like writing a book in company;" and his young people
might learn from it "that kind of humility which is got from the earned
knowledge that whatever the right hand finds to do must be done with the
heart in it, and in a desperate earnest." _The Frozen Deep_ was several
times repeated, on one occasion for the benefit of the daughter of the
recently deceased Douglas Jerrold; but by the end of January the little
theatre was finally broken up; and though Dickens spent one more winter
season at Tavistock House, the shadow was then already falling upon his
cheerful home.
In the midst of his children's Christmas gaieties of the year 1855 Dickens
had given two or three public readings to "wonderful audiences" in various
parts of the country. A trip to Paris with Mr. Wilkie Collins had
followed, during which, as he wrote home, he was wandering about Paris all
day, dining at all manner of places, and frequenting the theatres at the
rate of two or three a night. "I suppose," he adds, with pleasant
self-irony, "as an old farmer said of Scott, I am 'makin' mysel'' all the
time; but I seem to be rather a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond."
And in truth a roving, restless spirit was strong upon him in these years.
Already, in April, he speaks of himself as "going off; I don't know where
or how far, to ponder about I don't know what." France, Switzerland,
Spain, Constantinople, in Mr. Layard's company, had been successively in
his thoughts, and, for aught he knew, Greenland and the North Pole might
occur to him next. At the same time he foresaw that the end of it all
would be his shutting himself up in some out-of-the-way place of which he
had not yet thought, and going desperately to work there.
Before, however, these phantasmagoric schemes had subsided into the quiet
plan of an autumn visit to Folkestone, followed during the winter and
spring by a residence at Paris, he had at least found a subject to ponder
on, which was to suggest an altogether novel element in his next work of
fiction. I have said that though, like the majority of his
fellow-countrymen, Dickens regarded our war with Russia as inevitable, yet
his hatred of all war, and his impatience of the exaggerations of passion
and sentiment which all war produces, had preserved him from himself
falling a victim to their contagion. On the other hand, when in the winter
of 1854-'55 the note of exultation in the bravery of our soldiers in the
Crimea began to be intermingled with complaints against the grievously
defective arrangements for their comfort and health, and when these
complaints, stimulated by the loud-voiced energy of the press, and
extending into censures upon the whole antiquated and perverse system of
our army administration, speedily swelled into a roar of popular
indignation, sincere conviction ranged him on the side of the most
uncompromising malcontents. He was at all times ready to give vent to that
antipathy against officialism which is shared by so large a number of
Englishmen. Though the son of a dock-yard official, he is found roundly
asserting that "more obstruction of good things and patronage of bad
things has been committed in the dock-yards--as in everything connected
with the misdirection of the navy--than in every other branch of the
public service put together, including"--the particularisation is
hard--"even the Woods and Forests." He had listened, we may be sure, to
the scornful denunciations launched by the prophet of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ against Downing Street and all its works, and to the
proclamation of the great though rather vague truth that "reform in that
Downing Street department of affairs is precisely the reform which were
worth all others." And now the heart-rending sufferings of multitudes of
brave men had brought to light, in one department of the public
administration, a series of complications and perversities which in the
end became so patent to the Government itself that they had to be roughly
remedied in the very midst of the struggle. The cry for administrative
reform, which arose in the year 1855, however crude the form it
frequently took, was in itself a logical enough result of the situation;
and there is no doubt that the angriness of the complaint was intensified
by the attitude taken up in the House of Commons by the head of the
Government towards the pertinacious politician who made himself the
mouthpiece of the extreme demands of the feeling outside. Mr. Layard was
Dickens's valued friend; and the share is thus easily explained
which--against his otherwise uniform practice of abstaining from public
meetings--the most popular writer of the day took in the Administrative
Reform meetings, held in Drury Lane Theatre, on June 27, 1855. The speech
which he delivered on this occasion, and which was intended to aid in
forcing the "whole question" of Administrative Reform upon the attention
of an unwilling Government, possesses no value whatever in connexion with
its theme, though of course it is not devoid of some smart and telling
hits. Not on the platform, but at his desk as an author, was Dickens to do
real service to the cause of administrative efficiency. For whilst
invective of a general kind runs off like water from the rock of usage,
even Circumlocution Offices are not insensible to the acetous force of
satire.
Dickens's caricature of British officialism formed the most generally
attractive element in the story of _Little Dorrit_--originally intended to
be called _Nobody's Fault_--which he published in monthly numbers, from
December, 1855, that year, to June, 1857. He was solemnly taken to task
for his audacity by the _Edinburgh Review_, which reproached him for his
persistent ridicule of "the institutions of the country, the laws, the
administration, in a word, the government under which we live." His
"charges" were treated as hardly seriously meant, but as worthy of severe
reprobation, because likely to be seriously taken by the poor, the
uneducated, and the young. And the caricaturist, besides being reminded of
the names of several eminent public servants, was specially requested to
look, as upon a picture contrasting with his imaginary Circumlocution
Office, upon the Post Office, or--for the choice offered was not more
extensive--upon the London police, so liberally praised by himself in his
own journal. The delighted author of _Little Dorrit_ replied to this not
very skilful diatribe in a short and spirited rejoinder in _Household
Words_. In this he judiciously confined himself to refuting an unfounded
incidental accusation in the Edinburgh article, and to dwelling, as upon a
"Curious Misprint," upon the indignant query: "How does he account for the
career of _Mr. Rowland Hill_?" whose name, as an example of the ready
intelligence of the Circumlocution Office, was certainly an odd _erratum_.
Had he, however, cared to make a more general reply to the main article of
the indictment, he might have pointed out that, as a matter of fact, our
official administrative machinery _had_ recently broken down in one of its
most important branches, and that circumlocution in the literal sense of
the word--circumlocution between department and department, or office and
office--had been one of the principal causes of the collapse. The general
drift of the satire was, therefore, in accordance with fact, and the
satire itself salutary in its character. To quarrel with it for not taking
into consideration what might be said on the other side, was to quarrel
with the method of treatment which satire has at all times considered
itself entitled to adopt; while to stigmatise a popular book as likely to
mislead the ill-informed, was to suggest a restraint which would have
deprived wit and humour of most of their opportunities of rendering
service to either a good or an evil cause.
A far more legitimate exception has been taken to these Circumlocution
Office episodes as defective in art by the very reason of their being
exaggerations. Those best acquainted with the interiors of our government
offices may be right in denying that the Barnacles can be regarded as an
existing type. Indeed, it would at no time have been easy to point to any
office quite as labyrinthine, or quite as bottomless, as that permanently
presided over by Mr. Tite Barnacle; to any chief secretary or commissioner
so absolutely wooden of fibre as he; or to any private secretary so
completely absorbed in his eye-glass as Barnacle junior. But as satirical
figures they one and all fulfil their purpose as thoroughly as the picture
of the official sanctum itself, with its furniture "in the higher official
manner," and its "general bamboozling air of how not to do it." The only
question is, whether satire which, if it is to be effective, must be of a
piece and in its way exaggerated, is not out of place in a pathetic and
humorous fiction, where, like a patch of too diverse a thread, it
interferes with the texture into which it is introduced. In themselves
these passages of _Little Dorrit_ deserve to remain unforgotten amongst
the masterpieces of literary caricature; and there is, I do not hesitate
to say, something of Swiftian force in their grotesque embodiment of a
popular current of indignation. The mere name of the Circumlocution Office
was a stroke of genius, one of those phrases of Dickens which Professor
Masson justly describes as, whether exaggerated or not, "efficacious for
social reform." As usual, Dickens had made himself well acquainted with
the formal or outside part of his subject; the very air of Whitehall seems
to gather round us as Mr. Tite Barnacle, in answer to a persistent
enquirer who "wants to know" the position of a particular matter,
concedes that it "may have been, in the course of official business,
referred to the Circumlocution Office for its consideration," and that
"the department may have either originated, or confirmed, a minute on the
subject." In the _Household Words_ paper called _A Poor Man's Tale of a
Patent_ (1850) will be found a sufficiently elaborate study for Mr.
Doyce's experiences of the government of his country, as wrathfully
narrated by Mr. Meagles.
With the exception of the Circumlocution Office passages--adventitious as
they are to the progress of the action--_Little Dorrit_ exhibits a
palpable falling-off in inventive power. Forster illustrates by a striking
fac-simile the difference between the "labour and pains" of the author's
short notes for _Little Dorrit_ and the "lightness and confidence of
handling" in what hints he had jotted down for _David Copperfield_.
Indeed, his "tablets" had about this time begun to be an essential part of
his literary equipment. But in _Little Dorrit_ there are enough internal
signs of, possibly unconscious, lassitude. The earlier, no doubt, is, in
every respect, the better part of the book; or, rather, the later part
shows the author wearily at work upon a canvas too wide for him, and
filling it up with a crowd of personages in whom it is difficult to take
much interest. Even Mr. Merdle and his catastrophe produce the effect
rather of a ghastly allegory than of an "extravagant conception," as the
author ironically called it in his preface, derived only too directly from
real life. In the earlier part of the book, in so far as it is not once
again concerned with enforcing the moral of _Hard Times_ in a different
way, by means of Mrs. Clennam and her son's early history, the humour of
Dickens plays freely over the figure of the Father of the Marshalsea. It
is a psychological masterpiece in its way; but the revolting selfishness
of Little Dorrit's father is not redeemed artistically by her own
long-suffering; for her pathos lacks the old irresistible ring. Doubtless
much in this part of the story--the whole episode, for instance, of the
honest turnkey--is in the author's best manner. But, admirable as it is,
this new picture of prison-life and prison-sentiment has an undercurrent
of bitterness, indeed, almost of contemptuousness, foreign to the best
part of Dickens's genius. This is still more perceptible in a figure not
less true to life than the Father of the Marshalsea himself--Flora, the
overblown flower of Arthur Clennam's boyish love. The humour of the
conception is undeniable, but the whole effect is cruel; and, though
greatly amused, the reader feels almost as if he were abetting a
profanation. Dickens could not have become what he is to the great
multitude of his readers had he, as a humourist, often indulged in this
cynical mood.
There is in general little in the characters of this fiction to compensate
for the sense of oppression from which, as he follows the slow course of
its far from striking plot, the reader finds it difficult to free himself.
A vein of genuine humour shows itself in Mr. Plornish, obviously a
favourite of the author's, and one of those genuine working-men, as rare
in fiction as on the stage, where Mr. Toole has reproduced the species;
but the relation between Mr. and Mrs. Plornish is only a fainter revival
of that between Mr. and Mrs. Bagney. Nor is there anything fresh or novel
in the characters belonging to another social sphere. Henry Gowan,
apparently intended as an elaborate study in psychology, is only a very
tedious one; and his mother at Hampton Court, whatever phase of a
dilapidated aristocracy she may be intended to caricature, is merely
ill-bred. As for Mrs. General, she is so sorry a burlesque that she could
not be reproduced without extreme caution even on the stage--to the
reckless conventionalities of which, indeed, the whole picture of the
Dorrit family as _nouveaux riches_ bears a striking resemblance. There is,
on the contrary, some good caricature, which, in one instance at least,
was thought transparent by the knowing, in the _silhouettes_ of the great
Mr. Merdle's professional guests; but these are, like the Circumlocution
Office puppets, satiric sketches, not the living figures of creative
humour.
I have spoken of this story with a censure which may be regarded as
exaggerated in its turn. But I well remember, at the time of its
publication in numbers, the general consciousness that _Little Dorrit_ was
proving unequal to the high-strung expectations which a new work by
Dickens then excited in his admirers, both young and old. There were new
and striking features in it, with abundant comic and serious effect, but
there was no power in the whole story to seize and hold, and the feeling
could not be escaped that the author was not at his best. And Dickens was
not at his best when he wrote _Little Dorrit_. Yet while nothing is more
remarkable in the literary career of Dickens than this apparently speedy
decline of his power, nothing is more wonderful in it than the degree to
which he righted himself again, not, indeed, with his public, for the
public never deserted its favourite, but with his genius.
A considerable part of _Little Dorrit_ must have been written in Paris,
where, in October, after a quiet autumn at Folkestone, Dickens had taken a
family apartment in the Avenue des Champs Elysees, "about half a quarter
of a mile above Franconi's." Here, after his fashion, he lived much to
himself, his family, and his guests, only occasionally finding his way
into a literary or artistic _salon_; but he sat for his portrait to both
Ary and Henri Scheffer, and was easily persuaded to read his _Cricket on
the Hearth_ to an audience in the atelier. Macready and Mr. Wilkie Collins
were in turn the companions of many "theatrical and lounging" evenings.
Intent as Dickens now had become upon the technicalities of his own form
of composition, this interest must have been greatly stimulated by the
frequent comparison of modern French plays, in most of which nicety of
construction and effectiveness of situation have so paramount a
significance. At Boulogne, too, Mr. Wilkie Collins was a welcome summer
visitor. And in the autumn the two friends started on the _Lazy Tour of
Two Idle Apprentices_. It came to an untimely end as a pedestrian
excursion, but the record of it is one of the pleasantest memorials of a
friendship which brightened much of Dickens's life and intensified his
activity in work as well as in pleasure.
"Mr. Thomas Idle" had indeed a busy time of it in this year 1857. The
publication of _Little Dorrit_ was not finished till June, and in August
we find him, between a reading and a performance of _The Frozen Deep_ at
Manchester--then in the exciting days of the great Art Exhibition--thus
describing to Macready his way of filling up his time: "I hope you have
seen my tussle with the _Edinburgh_. I saw the chance last Friday week, as
I was going down to read the _Carol_ in St. Martin's Hall. Instantly
turned to, then and there, and wrote half the article, flew out of bed
early next morning, and finished it by noon. Went down to Gallery of
Illustration (we acted that night), did the day's business, corrected the
proofs in Polar costume in dressing-room, broke up two numbers of
_Household Words_ to get it out directly, played in _Frozen Deep_ and
_Uncle John_, presided at supper of company, made no end of speeches, went
home and gave in completely for four hours, then got sound asleep, and
next day was as fresh as you used to be in the far-off days of your lusty
youth." It was on the occasion of the readings at St. Martin's Hall, for
the benefit of Douglas Jerrold's family, that the thought of giving
readings for his own benefit first suggested itself to Dickens; and, as
will be seen, by April, 1858, the idea had been carried into execution,
and a new phase of life had begun for him. And yet at this very time, when
his home was about to cease being in the fullest sense a home to Dickens,
by a strange irony of fortune, he had been enabled to carry out a
long-cherished fancy and to take possession, in the first instance as a
summer residence, of the house on Gad's Hill, of which a lucky chance had
made him the owner rather more than a twelvemonth before.
"My little place," he wrote in 1858, to his Swiss friend Cerjat, "is a
grave red-brick house (time of George the First, I suppose), which I have
added to and stuck bits upon in all manner of ways, so that it is as
pleasantly irregular, and as violently opposed to all architectural ideas,
as the most hopeful man could possibly desire. It is on the summit of
Gad's Hill. The robbery was committed before the door, on the man with the
treasure, and Falstaff ran away from the identical spot of ground now
covered by the room in which I write. A little rustic ale-house, called
'The Sir John Falstaff,' is over the way--has been over the way ever
since, in honour of the event.... The whole stupendous property is on the
old Dover road...."
Among "the blessed woods and fields" which, as he says, had done him "a
world of good," in a season of unceasing bodily and mental unrest, the
great English writer had indeed found a habitation fitted to become
inseparable from his name and fame. It was not till rather later, in 1860,
that, after the sale of Tavistock House, Gad's Hill Place became his
regular abode, a London house being only now and then taken for the
season, while furnished rooms were kept at the office in Wellington Street
for occasional use. And it was only gradually that he enlarged and
improved his Kentish place so as to make it the pretty and comfortable
country-house which at the present day it appears to be; constructing, in
course of time, the passage under the high-road to the shrubbery, where
the Swiss chalet given to him by Mr. Fechter was set up, and building the
pretty little conservatory, which, when completed, he was not to live many
days to enjoy. But an old-fashioned, homely look, free from the slightest
affectation of quietness, belonged to Gad's Hill Place, even after all
these alterations, and belongs to it even at this day, when Dickens's
solid old-fashioned furniture has been changed. In the pretty little front
hall still hangs the illuminated tablet recalling the legend of Gad's
Hill; and on the inside panels of the library door remain the facetious
sham book-titles: "Hudson's _Complete Failure_," and "_Ten Minutes in
China_," and "Cats' _Lives_" and, on a long series of leather backs,
"Hansard's _Guide to Refreshing Sleep_." The rooms are all of a modest
size, and the bedrooms--amongst them Dickens's own--very low; but the
whole house looks thoroughly habitable, while the views across the
cornfields at the back are such as in their undulation of soft outline are
nowhere more pleasant than in Kent. Rochester and the Medway are near,
even for those who do not--like Dickens and his dogs--count a stretch past
three or four "mile-stones on the Dover road" as the mere beginning of an
afternoon's walk. At a distance little greater there are in one direction
the green glades of Cobham Park, with Chalk and Gravesend beyond; and in
another the flat country towards the Thames, with its abundance of
market-gardens. There, too, are the marshes on the border of which lie
the massive ruin of Cooling Castle, the refuge of the Lollard martyr who
was _not_ concerned in the affair on Gad's Hill, and Cooling Church and
church-yard, with the quaint little gravestones in the grass. London and
the office were within easy reach, and Paris itself was, for practical
purposes, not much farther away, so that, in later days at all events,
Dickens found himself "crossing the Channel perpetually."
The name of Dickens still has a good sound in and about Gad's Hill. He was
on very friendly terms with some families whose houses stand near to his
own; and though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, than to
"wear topboots" and play the squire, yet he had in him not a little of
what endears so many a resident country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He
was head organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of cricket
matches and foot races; and his house was a dispensary for the poor of the
parish. He established confidential relations between his house and the
Falstaff Inn over the way, regulating his servants' consumption of beer on
a strict but liberal plan of his own devising; but it is not for this
reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin Trood--for such was the
veritable name of mine host of the "Falstaff" in Dickens's time--declares
that it was a bad day for the neighbourhood when Dickens was taken away
from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which surrounded
him in his own country, and Forster has described his astonishment at the
manifestation of it on the occasion of the wedding of the youngest
daughter of the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popular, and
specially among those by whom he was beloved as a friend or honoured as a
benefactor.
But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest that Dickens was
to settle down in his pleasant country house, nor was he ever, except
quite at the last, to sit down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a
wanderer no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his residence for
the summer on Gad's Hill, his home, and that of his younger children, was
his wife's home no longer. The separation, which appears to have been
preparing itself for some, but no very long, time, took place in May,
1858, when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. Dickens left her husband,
who henceforth allowed her an ample separate maintenance, and occasionally
corresponded with her, but never saw her again. The younger children
remained in their father's house under the self-sacrificing and devoted
care of Mrs. Dickens's surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. Shortly afterwards,
Dickens thought it well, in printed words which may be left forgotten, to
rebut some slanderous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had
misrepresented the circumstances of this separation. The causes of the
event were an open secret to his friends and acquaintances. If he had ever
loved his wife with that affection before which so-called
incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness,
there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to
her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of
that resignation which love and duty together made possible to David
Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as
many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its
disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction.
It was not incumbent upon his faithful friend and biographer, and much
less can it be upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of Dickens's
genius entitles to speak of him at all, to declare the standard by which
the most painful transaction in his life is to be judged. I say the most
painful, for it is with a feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in
a letter three years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter's
wedding: "I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but
I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving
that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand
me when I say so, and no more." A shadow, too--who would deny it?--falls
on every one of the pictures in which the tenderest of modern humourists
has painted the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life of
which to his generation he had become almost the poet and the prophet,
when we remember how he was himself neither blessed with its full
happiness nor capable of accepting with resignation the imperfection
inherent in it, as in all things human.