“THAT is a very horrible case you tell me of. I would to God I could
get at the parental heart of —, in which event I would so scarify it,
that he should writhe again. But if I were to put such a father as
he into a book, all the fathers going (and especially the bad ones)
would hold up their hands and protest against the unnatural
caricature. I find that a great many people (particularly those who
might have sat for the character) consider even Mr. Pecksniff a
grotesque impossibility, and Mrs. Nickleby herself, sitting bodily
before me in a solid chair, once asked me whether I really believed
there ever was such a woman.
“So — reviewing his own case, would not believe in Jonas Chuzzlewit.
‘I like Oliver Twist,’ says —, ‘for I am fond of children. But the
book is unnatural, for who would think of being cruel to poor little
Oliver Twist!’
“Nevertheless I will bear the dog in my mind, and if I can hit him
between the eyes so that he shall stagger more than you or I have
done this Christmas under the combined effects of punch and turkey, I
will.
“Thank you cordially for your note. Excuse this scrap of paper. I
thought it was a whole sheet until I turned it over.
“My dear Sir,
“Faithfully yours,
“CHARLES DICKENS.”
To a collection of Sketches and Tales by a Working Man, published in
1844, {26} Charles Dickens was induced to contribute a preface, from
which we select the following passages:—
“I do not recommend it as a book of surpassing originality or
transcendent merit . . . I do not claim to have discovered, in humble
life, an extraordinary and brilliant genius. I cannot charge mankind
in general with having entered into a conspiracy to neglect the
author of this volume, or to leave him pining in obscurity. I have
not the smallest intention of comparing him with Burns, the
exciseman; or with Bloomfield, the shoemaker; or with Ebenezer
Elliott, the worker in iron; or with James Hogg, the shepherd. I see
no reason to be hot, or bitter, or lowering, or sarcastic, or
indignant, or fierce, or sour, or sharp, in his behalf. I have
nothing to rail at; nothing to exalt; nothing to flourish in the face
of a stony-hearted world; and have but a very short and simple story
to tell.
“John Overs is, as is set forth in the title-page, a working man. A
man who earns his weekly wages (or who did when he was strong enough)
by plying of the hammer, plane, and chisel. He became known to me
nearly six years ago, when he sent me some songs, appropriate to the
different months of the year, with a letter, stating under what
circumstances they had been composed, and in what manner he was
occupied from morning until night. I was just then relinquishing the
conduct of a monthly periodical, {27} or I would gladly have
published them. As it was, I returned them to him, with a private
expression of the interest I felt in such productions. They were
afterwards accepted, with much readiness and consideration, by Mr.
Tait, of Edinburgh, and were printed in his Magazine.
“Finding, after some further correspondence with my new friend, that
his authorship had not ceased with his verses, but that he still
occupied his leisure moments in writing, I took occasion to
remonstrate with him seriously against his pursuing that course. I
told him, his persistence in his new calling made me uneasy; and I
advised him to abandon it as strongly as I could.
“In answer to this dissuasion of mine, he wrote me as manly and
straightforward, but withal, as modest a letter, as ever I read in my
life. He explained to me how limited his ambition was: soaring no
higher than the establishment of his wife in some light business, and
the better education of his children. He set before me the
difference between his evening and holiday studies, such as they
were; and the having no better resource than an ale-house or a
skittle-ground. He told me how every small addition to his stock of
knowledge made his Sunday walks the pleasanter, the hedge-flowers
sweeter, everything more full of interest and meaning to him.
* * * * *
“He is very ill; the faintest shadow of the man who came into my
little study for the first time, half-a-dozen years ago, after the
correspondence I have mentioned. He has been very ill for a long
period; his disease is a severe and wasting affection of the lungs,
which has incapacitated him these many months for every kind of
occupation. ‘If I could only do a hard day’s work,’ he said to me
the other day, ‘how happy I should be.’
“Having these papers by him, amongst others, he bethought himself
that, if he could get a bookseller to purchase them for publication
in a volume, they would enable him to make some temporary provision
for his sick wife, and very young family. We talked the matter over
together, and that it might be easier of accomplishment I promised
him that I would write an introduction to his book.
“I would to Heaven that I could do him better service! I would to
Heaven it were an introduction to a long, and vigorous, and useful
life! But Hope will not trim his lamp the less brightly for him and
his, because of this impulse to their struggling fortunes, and trust
me, reader, they deserve her light, and need it sorely.
“He has inscribed this book to one {28} whose skill will help him,
under Providence, in all that human skill can do. {29} To one who
never could have recognised in any potentate on earth a higher claim
to constant kindness and attention than he has recognized in him. * *
* *”
The beautiful series of Christmas stories, with which during the last
fifteen years the public have become so familiar, was commenced by Mr.
Dickens in December, 1843, with _A Christmas Carol in Prose_, illustrated
by John Leech. What Jeffrey, what Sydney Smith, what Jerrold, what
Thackeray thought and wrote about this little story is well known.
“Blessings on your kind heart, my dear Dickens,” wrote Jeffrey, “and may
it always be as full and as light as it is kind, and a fountain of
goodness to all within reach of its beatings. We are all charmed with
your Carol; chiefly, I think, for the genuine goodness which breathes all
through it, and is the true inspiring angel by which its genius has been
awakened. The whole scene of the Cratchits is like the dream of a
beneficent angel, in spite of its broad reality, and little Tiny Tim in
life and in death almost as sweet and touching as Nelly. You may be sure
you have done more good, and not only fastened more kindly feelings, but
prompted more positive acts of benevolence by this little publication
than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals since Christmas,
1842.”
“It is the work,” writes Thackeray, {30} “of the master of all the
English humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his
place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it.
Think of all we owe Mr. Dickens since those half-dozen years, the
store of happy hours that he has made us pass, the kindly and
pleasant companions whom he has introduced to us; the harmless
laughter, the generous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he has
taught us to feel! Every month of those years has brought us some
kind token from this delightful genius. His books may have lost in
art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait? Since the days when the
_Spectator_ was produced by a man of kindred mind and temper, what
books have appeared that have taken so affectionate a hold of the
English public as these?
“Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It
seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads
it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were
women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said by way of
criticism, ‘God bless him!’ * * * As for Tiny Tim, there is a certain
passage in the book regarding that young gentleman about which a man
should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than
he would of any other affections of his private heart. There is not
a reader in England but that little creature will be a bond of union
between the author and him; and he will say of Charles Dickens, as
the woman just now, ‘God bless him!’ What a feeling is this for a
writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap.”
During six years did Mr. Dickens continue to issue at Christmas these
little volumes: “A Christmas Carol” (December, 1843); “The Chimes”
(December, 1844); “The Cricket on the Hearth” (December, 1845); “The
Battle of Life” (December, 1846); “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s
Bargain” (December, 1848). {31}
Christmas stories are now grown so much the fashion that, whenever the
season of holly and mistletoe comes round they greet us at every turn,
forcing themselves upon our notice through every species of whimsical and
enticing embellishment. Why is it that, amidst such a satiety of
novelties we turn again and again, with an interest as keen as ever, to a
perusal of the pages where little Dot Peerybingle chirps as brightly as
the cricket on her own hearth, where Trotty Veck listens to the voices of
the chimes, striving to comprehend what it is they say to him, and where
old Scrooge’s heart is softened by his ghostly visitants? It is because
Charles Dickens has made such a study of that human nature we all possess
in common that he is able to strike with a practised hand upon the chords
of our hearts, and draw forth harmony that vibrates from soul to soul.
It is not, however, our intention here, to follow Mr. Dickens through the
whole of his long and honourable literary career, far less to undertake
the superfluous task of extolling the numerous and brilliant list of
writings that have followed each other in rapid and welcome succession
from his indefatigable pen. All that remains for us to do now, is to
notice briefly two very grave charges that have been made against the
general tendency of his writings, and to bring forward some evidence in
refutation of them.
These two charges are, 1, a wilful perversion of facts in describing the
political and social condition of our time; 2, an irreverence for and
ridicule of sacred things and persons, which (say the objectors) infuses
a subtle poison through the whole of his works, and unsettles the belief
of the young. We shall take these charges one at a time.
In some of his later novels, such as “Bleak House,” and “Little Dorrit,”
in which he has endeavoured to grapple with the great social and
political problems of the age, certain critics have accused him of
exaggeration, and even of a wilful perversion of facts. Against their
opinion we are pleased to be able to set that of so good an authority as
the author of “Modern Painters:”—
“The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings,” says Mr.
Ruskin, “have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons,
merely because he presents his truth with some colour of caricature.
Unwisely, because Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never
mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he
tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to
limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public
amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national
importance, such as that which he handled in ‘Hard Times,’ that he
would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that
work (to my mind, in several respects the greatest he has written,)
is with many persons seriously diminished, because Mr. Bounderby is a
dramatic monster, instead of a characteristic example of a worldly
master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a
characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the
use of Dickens’s wit and insight because he chooses to speak in a
circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and
purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially
‘Hard Times,’ should be studied with close and earnest care by
persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is
partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine
all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook,
it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the
finally right one, grossly and sharply told.” {33}
Secondly, Mr. Dickens is accused of an irreverence for, and unseemly
ridicule of, sacred things. Any attentive reader of Dickens will have
observed that he is not much in the habit of quoting from, or alluding to
the writings of others; but that when he does quote or allude, it is in
the great majority of cases from or to the Holy Scriptures. {34}
Occasionally we come upon a reference to Shakespeare; now and then we
meet with one from Swift, or Scott, or Byron; but these occur so seldom,
that it may be said, once for all, that the source from which Mr. Dickens
is usually in the habit of making quotations, is the Bible only. It is
very interesting to find that so many of Mr. Dickens’s characters are
represented as being in the habit either of regularly reading and
studying the Bible, or of having it read to them by some one else.
“I ain’t much of a hand at reading writing-hand,” said Betty Higden,
“though I can read my Bible and most print.” Little Nell was in the
constant habit of taking the Bible with her to read while in her quiet
and lonely retreat in the old church, after all her long and weary
wanderings were past. In the happy time which Oliver Twist spent with
Mrs. Maylie and Rose, he used to read, in the evenings, a chapter or two
from the Bible, which he had been studying all the week, and in the
performance of which duty he felt more proud and pleased than if he had
been the clergyman himself. There was Sarah, in the “Sketches by Boz,”
who regularly read the Bible to her old mistress; and in the touching
sketch of “Our Next-door Neighbour” in the same book, we find the mother
of the sick boy engaged in reading the Bible to him when the visitor
called and interrupted her. This incident reminds us of the poor
Chancery prisoner in the Fleet, who, when on his death-bed calmly waiting
the release which would set him free for ever, had the Bible read to him
by an old man in a cobbler’s apron. One of David Copperfield’s earliest
recollections was of a certain Sunday evening, when his mother read aloud
to him and Peggotty the story of Our Saviour raising Lazarus from the
dead. So deep an impression did the story make upon the boy, taken in
connexion with all that had been lately told him about his father’s
funeral, that he requested to be carried up to his bed-room, from the
windows of which he could see the quiet churchyard with the dead all
lying in their graves at rest below the solemn moon. Pip, too, in “Great
Expectations,” was not only in the habit of reading the Bible to the
convict under sentence of death, but of praying with him as well; and
Esther Summerson tells us how she used to come downstairs every evening
at nine o’clock to read the Bible to her god-mother.
Not a few of the dwellings into which Mr. Dickens conducts us in the
course of some of his best-known stories, have their walls decorated with
prints illustrative of familiar scenes from sacred history. Thus when
Martin Chuzzlewit went away from Pecksniff’s, and was ten good miles on
his way to London, he stopped to breakfast in the parlour of a little
roadside inn, on the walls of which were two or three highly-coloured
pictures, representing the Wise Men at the Manger, and the Prodigal Son
returning to his Father. On the walls of Peggotty’s charming
boat-cottage there were prints, showing the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the
Casting of Daniel into the Den of Lions. When Arthur Clennam came home
after his long absence in the East, he found the Plagues of Egypt still
hanging, framed and glazed, on the same old place in his mother’s
parlour. And who has forgotten the fireplace in old Scrooge’s house,
which “was paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to
illustrate the Scriptures?”
Here are a few comparisons. Mr. Larry, in bestowing a bachelor’s
blessing on Miss Cross, before “somebody” came to claim her for his own,
“held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on
the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his little
brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy which, if such things
be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.” As old as Adam here means so
long ago as Adam’s time; while Methuselah suggests great age. Thus Miss
Jellyby relieved her mind to Miss Summerson on the subject of Mr. Quale,
in the following energetic language:—“If he were to come with his great
shining, lumpy forehead, night after night, till he was as old as
Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.” And Mr. Filer, in
his eminently practical remarks on the lamentable ignorance of political
economy on the part of working people in connexion with marriage,
observed to Alderman Cute that a man may live to be as old as Methuselah,
and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people; but there
could be no more hope of persuading them that they had no right or
business to be married, than he could hope to persuade them that they had
no earthly right or business to be born. Miss Betsy Trotwood declared to
Mr. Dick that the natural consequence of David Copperfield’s mother
having married a murderer—or a man with a name very like it—was to set
the boy a-prowling and wandering about the country, “like Cain before he
was grown up.” Joe Gargery’s journeyman, on going away from his work at
night, used to slouch out of the shop like Cain, or the Wandering Jew, as
if he had no idea where he was going, and had no intention of ever coming
back. Describing the state of “the thriving City of Eden,” when Martin
and Mark arrived there, the author of “Martin Chuzzlewit” says—“The
waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before, so choked with
slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name.” The
Deluge suggests Noah’s ark. The following reference to it is from
“Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the gradual approach of darkness up among
the highest ridges of the Alps:—“The ascending night came up the
mountains like a rising water. When at last it rose to the walls of the
convent of the great St. Bernard, it was as if that weather-beaten
structure were another ark, and floated on the shadowy waves.” Here is
something from the Tower of Babel:—“Looming heavy in the black wet night,
the tall chimneys of the Coketown factories rose high into the air, and
looked as if they were so many competing towers of Babel.” When Mortimer
Lightwood inquired of Charley Hexam, with reference to the body of the
man found in the river, whether or not any means had been employed to
restore life, he received this reply:—“You wouldn’t ask, sir, if you knew
his state. Pharoah’s multitude that were drowned in the Red Sea ain’t
more beyond restoring to life.” The boy added, further, “that if Lazarus
were only half as far gone, that was the greatest of all the miracles.”
When the Scotch surgeon was called in professionally to see Mr. Krook’s
unfortunate lodger, the Scotch tongue pronounced him to be “just as dead
as Chairy.” Job’s poverty is not likely to be forgotten among the
comparisons. No, Mr. Mell’s mother was as poor as Job. Nor Samson’s
strength: Dot’s mother had so many infallible recipes for the
preservation of the baby’s health, that had they all been administered,
the said baby must have been done for, though strong as an infant Samson.
Nor Goliath’s importance: John Chivery’s chivalrous feeling towards all
that belonged to Little Dorrit, made him so very respectable, in spite of
his small stature, his weak legs, and his genuine poetic temperament,
that a Goliath might have sat in his place demanding less consideration
at Arthur Clennam’s hands. Nor Solomon’s wisdom: Trotty Veck was so
delighted when the child kissed him that he couldn’t help saying, “She’s
as sensible as Solomon.” Miss Wade having said farewell to her
fellow-travellers in the public room of the hotel at Marseilles, sought
her own apartment. As she passed along the gallery, she heard an angry
sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and, looking into the
room, she saw therein Pet’s attendant, the maid with the curious name of
Tattycoram. Miss Wade asked what was the matter, and received in reply a
few short and angry words in a deeply-injured, ill-used tone. Then again
commenced the sobs and tears and pinching, tearing fingers, making
altogether such a scene as if she were being “rent by the demons of old.”
Let us close these comparisons by quoting another from the same book,
“Little Dorrit,” descriptive of the evening stillness after a day of
terrific glare and heat at Marseilles:—“The sun went down in a red,
green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the
fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the
goodness of a better order of beings; the long, dusty roads and the
interminable plains were in repose, and _so deep a hush was on the sea_,
_that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead_.”
Looking over the familiar pages of “Nicholas Nickleby,” our eye lights
upon a passage, almost at opening, which refers to God’s goodness and
mercy. As Nickleby’s father lay on his death-bed, he embraced his wife
and children, and then “solemnly commended them to One who never deserted
the widow or her fatherless children.” Towards the close of Esther
Summerson’s narrative in “Bleak House” we read these touching, tender
words regarding Ada’s baby:—“The little child who was to have done so
much was born before the turf was planted on its father’s grave. It was
a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father’s name.
The help that my dear counted on did come to her; though it came in the
Eternal Wisdom for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his
mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty
to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand, and how its
touch could heal my darling’s heart and raise up hopes within her, I felt
a new sense of the goodness and tenderness of God.” After these
illustrations of the great lessons of the goodness of God, and that there
is mercy in even our hardest trials, we come next upon one which teaches
the duty of patience and resignation to God’s will. Mrs. Maylie observed
to Oliver Twist, with reference to the dangerous illness of Rose, that
she had seen and experienced enough to “know that it is not always the
youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should
give us comfort in our sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach
us impressively that there is a brighter world than this, and that the
passage to it is speedy. God’s will be done!”
Our Saviour’s life and teaching afford so many interesting illustrations
to Charles Dickens that our great difficulty, in the limited space to
which we are now confined, is to make a good selection. Here is a sketch
entitled “A Christmas Tree,” from one of his reprinted pieces, which
contains this simple and beautiful summary of our Lord’s life on
earth:—“The waits are playing, and they break my childish sleep! What
images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set forth on
the Christmas Tree? Known before all the others, keeping far apart from
all the others, they gather round my little bed. An angel speaking to a
group of shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted,
following a star; a Baby in a manger; a Child in a spacious temple
talking with grave men; a solemn figure, with a mild and beautiful face,
raising a dead girl by the hand; again, near a city gate, calling back
the son of a widow, on his bier, to life; a crowd of people looking
through the opened roof of a chamber where He sits, and letting down a
sick person on a bed with ropes; the same, in a tempest, walking on the
water to a ship; again, on a sea-shore, teaching a great multitude;
again, with a child upon His knee, and other children round; again,
restoring sight to the blind, speech to the dumb, hearing to the deaf,
health to the sick, strength to the lame, knowledge to the ignorant;
again, dying upon a cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness
coming on, the earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard,
‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
These passages, which are only a few out of a very much longer list that
might be made, will be sufficient, we trust, to show how much our
greatest living novelist is in the habit of going to the sacred narrative
for illustrations to many of his most touching incidents, and how
reverent and respectful always is the spirit in which every such
illustration is employed. To think of Charles Dickens’s writings as
containing no religious teaching, is to do them a great injustice.
* * * * *
The first of Mr. Dickens’s famous public Readings was given at
Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853. At a meeting held on
Monday, January 10, 1853, in the theatre of the Philosophical
Institution, “for the purpose of considering the desirableness of
establishing in Birmingham a Scientific and Literary Society upon a
comprehensive plan, having for its object the diffusion,” &c., Mr. Arthur
Ryland read a letter from Mr. Charles Dickens, received by him the day
after the Literary and Artistic Banquet, containing an offer to visit
Birmingham next Christmas, and read his Christmas Carol, in the Town
Hall, for the benefit of the proposed Institution, with the proviso,
however, that as many as possible of the working class should be admitted
free. “It would,” said Mr. Dickens, “take about two hours, with a pause
of ten minutes half-way through. There would be some novelty in the
thing, as I have never done it in public, though I have in private, and
(if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers. I was so
inexpressibly gratified last night by the warmth and enthusiasm of my
Birmingham friends, that I feel half ashamed this morning of so poor an
offer. But as I had decided on making it to you before I came down
yesterday, I propose it nevertheless.”
The readings—three in number—came off with great _éclat_ during the last
week of the year, and brought in a net sum of £400 to the Institute. Mr.
Dickens continued from this time to give similar readings, for charitable
purposes, both in the provinces and in London; but it was not till five
years later (1858) that he began to read on his own account.
As we are writing, that long series of readings—continued through sixteen
years, in both hemispheres—is drawing to a close, and the voice and
figure of Charles Dickens, that have grown so familiar to us all, will
dwell henceforth in the memory alone, but in one of its most honoured
niches.
We ought not to omit to mention what any reader may well surmise, that
Charles Dickens is inimitable in enlivening correspondence or table-talk
with humorous anecdote, appropriate to the occasion. We subjoin a few
specimens. The first is from one of his letters to Douglas Jerrold, and
is dated Paris, 14th February, 1847:—“I am somehow reminded of a good
story I heard the other night from a man who was a witness of it, and an
actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn there was a tremendous
_furore_ about Jenny Lind, who, after driving the whole place mad, left
it, on her travels, early one morning. The moment her carriage was
outside the gates, a party of rampant students, who had escorted it,
rushed back to the inn, demanded to be shown to her bedroom, swept like a
whirlwind upstairs into the room indicated to them, tore up the sheets,
and wore them in strips as decorations. An hour or two afterwards a bald
old gentleman, of amiable appearance, an Englishman, who was staying in
the hotel, came to breakfast at the _table d’hôte_, and was observed to
be much disturbed in his mind, and to show great terror whenever a
student came near him. At last he said, in a low voice, to some people
who were near him at the table, ‘You are English gentlemen, I observe.
Most extraordinary people, these Germans! Students, as a body, raving
mad, gentlemen!’ ‘Oh, no!’ said somebody else; ‘excitable, but very good
fellows, and very sensible.’ ‘By God, sir!’ returned the old gentleman,
still more disturbed, ‘then there’s something political in it, and I am a
marked man. I went out for a little walk this morning after shaving, and
while I was gone’—he fell into a terrible perspiration as he told
it—‘they burst into my bedroom, tore up my sheets, and are now patrolling
the town in all directions with bits of ’em in their button-holes!’ I
needn’t wind up by adding that they had gone to the wrong chamber.”
Dickens now and then administers a little gentle rebuke to affectation,
in a pleasant but unmistakable manner. Here is an instance of how he
silenced a bilious young writer, who was inveighing against the world in
a very “forcible feeble manner.” During a pause in this philippic
against the human race, Dickens said across the table, in the most
self-congratulatory of tones:—“I say—what a lucky thing it is you and I
don’t belong to it? It reminds me,” continued the author of Pickwick,
“of the two men, who on a _raised_ scaffold were awaiting the final
delicate attention of the hangman; the notice of one was aroused by
observing that a bull had got into the crowd of spectators, and was
busily employed in tossing one here, and another there; whereupon one of
the criminals said to the other—‘I say, Bill, how _lucky it is_ for us
that we _are up here_.’”
* * * * *
Here is a humorous and graphic account which he sent to the leading
newspaper of his sensations during the shock of earthquake that was felt
all over England in October, 1863. It is doubly interesting, as giving a
description of his country-house at Gad’s-hill, near Rochester:—
“I was awakened by a violent swaying of my bedstead from side to
side, accompanied by a singular heaving motion. It was exactly as if
some great beast had been crouching asleep under the bedstead, and
were now shaking itself and trying to rise. The time by my watch was
twenty minutes past three, and I suppose the shock to have lasted
nearly a minute. The bedstead, a large iron one, standing nearly
north and south, appeared to me to be the only piece of furniture in
the room that was heavily shaken. Neither the doors nor the windows
rattled, though they rattle enough in windy weather, this house
standing alone, on high ground, in the neighbourhood of two great
rivers. There was no noise. The air was very still, and much warmer
than it had been in the earlier part of the night. Although the
previous afternoon had been wet, the glass had not fallen. I had
mentioned my surprise at its standing near the letter ‘i’ in ‘Fair,’
and having a tendency to rise.”
* * * * *
But the thing which, above all others, has characterised Dickens
throughout his career, that has made his world-wide fame, and rendered
his name a household word, is his broad, genial sympathy with life in all
its phases, and with those most who are manfully toiling towards a better
day. To this “enthusiasm of humanity” John Forster has alluded in the
Dedicatory Sonnet to Charles Dickens, prefixed to his “Life of
Goldsmith,” (March, 1848), when he says:—
“Come with me and behold,
O friend with heart as gentle for distress,
As resolute with wise true thoughts to bind
The happiest to the unhappiest of our kind,
That there is fiercer crowded misery
In garret-toil and London loneliness
Than in cruel islands ’mid the far-off sea.”
The great heart of Dickens has beat in unison with his age and with the
people, and his name will be dear to all English-speaking races long
after this little island of ours, the old home, shall have become a
summer resort—a curiosity to visit—for the children of the great
Anglo-Saxon Republics that are now growing up in the New and the Southern
Worlds.
_December_, 1869.
I.
EDINBURGH, JUNE 25, 1841.
[At a public dinner, given in honour of Mr. Dickens, and presided over by
the late Professor Wilson, the Chairman having proposed his health in a
long and eloquent speech, Mr. Dickens returned thanks as follows:—]
IF I felt your warm and generous welcome less, I should be better able to
thank you. If I could have listened as you have listened to the glowing
language of your distinguished Chairman, and if I could have heard as you
heard the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn,” which he has
uttered, it would have gone hard but I should have caught some portion of
his enthusiasm, and kindled at his example. But every word which fell
from his lips, and every demonstration of sympathy and approbation with
which you received his eloquent expressions, renders me unable to respond
to his kindness, and leaves me at last all heart and no lips, yearning to
respond as I would do to your cordial greeting—possessing, heaven knows,
the will, and desiring only to find the way.
The way to your good opinion, favour, and support, has been to me very
pleasing—a path strewn with flowers and cheered with sunshine. I feel as
if I stood amongst old friends, whom I had intimately known and highly
valued. I feel as if the deaths of the fictitious creatures, in which
you have been kind enough to express an interest, had endeared us to each
other as real afflictions deepen friendships in actual life; I feel as if
they had been real persons, whose fortunes we had pursued together in
inseparable connexion, and that I had never known them apart from you.
It is a difficult thing for a man to speak of himself or of his works.
But perhaps on this occasion I may, without impropriety, venture to say a
word on the spirit in which mine were conceived. I felt an earnest and
humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless
cheerfulness. I felt that the world was not utterly to be despised; that
it was worthy of living in for many reasons. I was anxious to find, as
the Professor has said, if I could, in evil things, that soul of goodness
which the Creator has put in them. I was anxious to show that virtue may
be found in the bye-ways of the world, that it is not incompatible with
poverty and even with rags, and to keep steadily through life the motto,
expressed in the burning words of your Northern poet—
“The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.”
And in following this track, where could I have better assurance that I
was right, or where could I have stronger assurance to cheer me on than
in your kindness on this to me memorable night?
I am anxious and glad to have an opportunity of saying a word in
reference to one incident in which I am happy to know you were
interested, and still more happy to know, though it may sound
paradoxical, that you were disappointed—I mean the death of the little
heroine. When I first conceived the idea of conducting that simple story
to its termination, I determined rigidly to adhere to it, and never to
forsake the end I had in view. Not untried in the school of affliction,
in the death of those we love, I thought what a good thing it would be if
in my little work of pleasant amusement I could substitute a garland of
fresh flowers for the sculptured horrors which disgrace the tomb. If I
have put into my book anything which can fill the young mind with better
thoughts of death, or soften the grief of older hearts; if I have written
one word which can afford pleasure or consolation to old or young in time
of trial, I shall consider it as something achieved—something which I
shall be glad to look back upon in after life. Therefore I kept to my
purpose, notwithstanding that towards the conclusion of the story, I
daily received letters of remonstrance, especially from the ladies. God
bless them for their tender mercies! The Professor was quite right when
he said that I had not reached to an adequate delineation of their
virtues; and I fear that I must go on blotting their characters in
endeavouring to reach the ideal in my mind. These letters were, however,
combined with others from the sterner sex, and some of them were not
altogether free from personal invective. But, notwithstanding, I kept to
my purpose, and I am happy to know that many of those who at first
condemned me are now foremost in their approbation.
If I have made a mistake in detaining you with this little incident, I do
not regret having done so; for your kindness has given me such a
confidence in you, that the fault is yours and not mine. I come once
more to thank you, and here I am in a difficulty again. The distinction
you have conferred upon me is one which I never hoped for, and of which I
never dared to dream. That it is one which I shall never forget, and
that while I live I shall be proud of its remembrance, you must well
know. I believe I shall never hear the name of this capital of Scotland
without a thrill of gratitude and pleasure. I shall love while I have
life her people, her hills, and her houses, and even the very stones of
her streets. And if in the future works which may lie before me you
should discern—God grant you may!—a brighter spirit and a clearer wit, I
pray you to refer it back to this night, and point to that as a Scottish
passage for evermore. I thank you again and again, with the energy of a
thousand thanks in each one, and I drink to you with a heart as full as
my glass, and far easier emptied, I do assure you.
* * * * *
Later in the evening, in proposing the health of Professor Wilson, Mr.
Dickens said:—
I HAVE the honour to be entrusted with a toast, the very mention of which
will recommend itself to you, I know, as one possessing no ordinary
claims to your sympathy and approbation, and the proposing of which is as
congenial to my wishes and feelings as its acceptance must be to yours.
It is the health of our Chairman, and coupled with his name I have to
propose the literature of Scotland—a literature which he has done much to
render famous through the world, and of which he has been for many
years—as I hope and believe he will be for many more—a most brilliant and
distinguished ornament. Who can revert to the literature of the land of
Scott and of Burns without having directly in his mind, as inseparable
from the subject and foremost in the picture, that old man of might, with
his lion heart and sceptred crutch—Christopher North. I am glad to
remember the time when I believed him to be a real, actual, veritable old
gentleman, that might be seen any day hobbling along the High Street with
the most brilliant eye—but that is no fiction—and the greyest hair in all
the world—who wrote not because he cared to write, not because he cared
for the wonder and admiration of his fellow-men, but who wrote because he
could not help it, because there was always springing up in his mind a
clear and sparkling stream of poetry which must have vent, and like the
glittering fountain in the fairy tale, draw what you might, was ever at
the full, and never languished even by a single drop or bubble. I had so
figured him in my mind, and when I saw the Professor two days ago,
striding along the Parliament House, I was disposed to take it as a
personal offence—I was vexed to see him look so hearty. I drooped to see
twenty Christophers in one. I began to think that Scottish life was all
light and no shadows, and I began to doubt that beautiful book to which I
have turned again and again, always to find new beauties and fresh
sources of interest.
* * * * *