MORE WIDELY READ THAN ANY OTHER STORY TELLER--THE GREATEST OF
THE MODERN HUMORISTS APPEALS TO THE READERS OF ALL AGES AND
CLASSES.
Charles Dickens is the greatest English novelist since Scott, and he
and Scott, to my mind, are the greatest English writers after
Shakespeare. Many will dissent from this, but my reason for giving him
this foremost place among the modern writers is the range, the
variety, the dramatic power, the humor and the pathos of his work. He
was a great caricaturist rather than a great artist, but he was
supreme in his class, and his grotesque characters have enough in them
of human nature to make them accepted as real people.
To him belongs the first place among novelists, after Scott, because
of his splendid creative imagination, which has peopled the world of
fiction with scores of fine characters. His genial humor which has
brightened life for so many thousands of readers; his tender pathos
which brings tears to the eyes of those who seldom weep over imaginary
or even real grief or pain; his rollicking gayety which makes one
enjoy good food and good drink in his tales almost as much as if one
really shared in those feasts he was so fond of describing; his keen
sympathy with the poor and the suffering; his flaming anger against
injustice and cruelty that resulted in so many great public reforms;
his descriptive power that makes the reader actually see everything
that he depicts--all these traits of Dickens' genius go to make him
the unquestioned leader of our modern story tellers. Without his humor
and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day;
with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with
genuine human feeling, he stands in a class by himself.
Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing Dickens with
Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was
a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears
or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the
great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as
readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and
suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times,
a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited class of
readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch
at will the springs of laughter and tears as Dickens did. Dickens has
created a score of characters that are household words to one that
Thackeray has given us.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM
THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]
Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each
expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of Dickens touched a
thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray
appeals to me far more than Dickens does, but it is foolish to permit
one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set
Dickens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place
with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.
Take it all in all, Dickens had a successful and a happy life. He was
born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his
father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at
nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of
shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for
reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He
was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from
the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper
work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as
_Sketches by Boz_, and in this way came to be engaged to write the
_Pickwick Papers_, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by
Seymour, a popular artist. But Dickens from the outset planned the
story and Seymour lived only to illustrate the first number.
The tale caught the fancy of the public, and Dickens developed
Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusing fashion.
Great success marked the appearance of the _Pickwick Papers_ in book
form, and the public appreciation gave Dickens confidence and
stimulus. Soon appeared _Oliver Twist_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Old
Curiosity Shop_ and the long line of familiar stories that ended with
_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, left unfinished by the master's hand.
All these novels were originally published in monthly numbers. In
these days, when so many new novels come from the press every month,
it is difficult to appreciate the eagerness with which one of these
monthly parts of Dickens' stories was awaited in England as well as in
this country. My father used to tell of the way these numbers of
Dickens' novels were seized upon in New England when he was a young
man and were worn out in passing from hand to hand. Dickens first
developed the Christmas story and made it a real addition to the joy
of the holiday season. His _Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the
Hearth_ still stand as the best of these tales that paint the simple
joys of the greatest of English Holidays. Dickens was also a great
editor, and in HOUSEHOLD WORDS and ALL THE YEAR ROUND he found a means
of giving pleasure to hosts of readers as well as a vehicle for the
monthly publication of his novels.
Dickens was the first to make a great fortune by giving public
readings from his own works. His rare dramatic ability made him an
ideal interpreter of his own work, and those who were fortunate enough
to hear him on his two trips to this country speak always of the
light which these readings cast on his principal characters and of the
pleasure that the audience showed in the novelist's remarkable powers
as a mimic and an elocutionist.
Most of the great English writers have labored until forty or over
before fame came to them. Of such were Scott, Thackeray, Carlyle and
George Eliot. But Dickens had an international fame at twenty-four,
and he was a household word wherever English was spoken by the time he
was thirty. From that day to the day of his death, fame, popularity,
wealth, troops of friends, were his portion, and with these were
joined unusual capacity for work and unusual delight in the exercise
of his great creative powers.
In taking up Dickens' novels it must always be borne in mind that you
will find many digressions, many bits of affectation, some mawkish
pathos. But these defects do not seriously injure the stories. You
cannot afford to leave _Pickwick Papers_ unread, because this novel
contains more spontaneous humor than any other of Dickens' work, and
it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow
with relish the amusing incidents in this book is not normal. Older
readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they
will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam
Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are
fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are,
despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and
peculiarities!
[Illustration: ORIGINAL PICKWICK COVER ISSUED IN 1837 WITH
DICKENS' AUTOGRAPH--MOST OF DICKENS' NOVELS WERE ISSUED IN
SHILLING INSTALLMENTS BEFORE BEING PUBLISHED IN THE COMPLETE
VOLUME]
After the _Pickwick Papers_ the choice of the most characteristic of
Dickens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been _David
Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, the one the most spontaneous,
the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all Dickens' work;
the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its
intense descriptive passages, which make the horrors of the French
Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime
self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only
Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That _David
Copperfield_ is not autobiographical we have the positive assertion of
Charles Dickens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this
book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the
novelist's childhood and youth, and that from real people and real
scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the
Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily
and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not
follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of
Dickens.
Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are _Nicholas Nickleby_,
which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in
Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or _Our
Mutual Friend_ which Dickens attacked the English poor laws; or
_Dombey and Son_, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man
dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or
_Bleak House_, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's
delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn with so much pathos that the
book served as a valuable aid in removing a great public wrong, while
the satire on foreign missions served to draw the English nation's
attention to the wretched heathen at home in the East Side of London,
of whom Poor Jo was a pitiable specimen. In other novels other good
purposes were also served.
But several pages could be filled with a mere enumeration of Dickens'
stories and their salient features. You cannot go wrong in taking up
any of his novels or his short stories, and when you have finished
with them you will have the satisfaction of having added to your
possessions a number of the real people of fiction, whom it is far
better to know than the best characters of contemporary fiction,
because these will be forgotten in a twelvemonth, if not before. The
hours that you spend with Dickens will be profitable as well as
pleasant, for they will leave the memory of a great-hearted man who
labored through his books to make the world better and happier.