LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,—You receive me with so much cordiality that I fear
you believe that I really did once sit in a Lord Mayor’s state coach.
Permit me to assure you, in spite of the information received from Mr.
Alderman Cotton, that I never had that honour. Furthermore, I beg to
assure you that I never witnessed a Lord Mayor’s show except from the
point of view obtained by the other vagabonds upon the pavement. Now,
ladies and gentlemen, in spite of this great cordiality of yours, I doubt
if you fully know yet what a blessing it is to you that I occupy this
chair to-night, because, having filled it on several previous occasions
for the society on whose behalf we are assembled, and having said
everything that I could think of to say about it, and being, moreover,
the president of the institution itself, I am placed to-night in the
modest position of a host who is not so much to display himself as to
call out his guests—perhaps even to try to induce some among them to
occupy his place on another occasion. And, therefore, you may be safely
sure that, like Falstaff, but with a modification almost as large as
himself, I shall try rather to be the cause of speaking in others than to
speak myself to-night. Much in this manner they exhibit at the door of a
snuff shop the effigy of a Highlander with an empty mull in his hand,
who, having apparently taken all the snuff he can carry, and discharged
all the sneezes of which he is capable, politely invites his friends and
patrons to step in and try what they can do in the same line.
It is an appropriate instance of the universality of the newsman’s
calling that no toast we have drunk to-night—and no toast we shall drink
to-night—and no toast we might, could, should, or would drink to-night,
is separable for a moment from that great inclusion of all possible
subjects of human interest which he delivers at our doors every day.
Further, it may be worthy the consideration of everybody here who has
talked cheerfully to his or her neighbour since we have sat down at the
table, what in the name of Heaven should we have talked about, and how on
earth could we have possibly got on, if our newsman had only for one
single day forgotten us. Now, ladies and gentlemen, as our newsman is
not by any means in the habit of forgetting us, let us try to form a
little habit of not forgetting our newsman. Let us remember that his
work is very arduous; that it occupies him early and late; that the
profits he derives from us are at the best very small; that the services
he renders to us are very great; that if he be a master, his little
capital is exposed to all sorts of mischances, anxieties, and hazards;
and if he be a journeyman, he himself is exposed to all manner of
weathers, of tempers, and of difficult and unreasonable requirements.
Let me illustrate this. I was once present at a social discussion, which
originated by chance. The subject was, What was the most absorbing and
longest-lived passion in the human breast? What was the passion so
powerful that it would almost induce the generous to be mean, the
careless to be cautious, the guileless to be deeply designing, and the
dove to emulate the serpent? A daily editor of vast experience and great
acuteness, who was one of the company, considerably surprised us by
saying with the greatest confidence that the passion in question was the
passion of getting orders for the play.
There had recently been a terrible shipwreck, and very few of the
surviving sailors had escaped in an open boat. One of these on making
land came straight to London, and straight to the newspaper office, with
his story of how he had seen the ship go down before his eyes. That
young man had witnessed the most terrible contention between the powers
of fire and water for the destruction of that ship and of every one on
board. He had rowed away among the floating, dying, and the sinking
dead. He had floated by day, and he had frozen by night, with no shelter
and no food, and, as he told his dismal tale, he rolled his haggard eyes
about the room. When he had finished, and the tale had been noted down
from his lips, he was cheered and refreshed, and soothed, and asked if
anything could be done for him. Even within him that master passion was
so strong that he immediately replied he should like an order for the
play. My friend the editor certainly thought that was rather a strong
case; but he said that during his many years of experience he had
witnessed an incurable amount of self-prostration and abasement having no
outer object, and that almost invariably on the part of people who could
well afford to pay.
This made a great impression on my mind, and I really lived in this faith
until some years ago it happened upon a stormy night I was kindly
escorted from a bleak railway station to the little out-of-the-way town
it represented by a sprightly and vivacious newsman, to whom I
propounded, as we went along under my umbrella—he being most excellent
company—this old question, what was the one all-absorbing passion of the
human soul? He replied, without the slightest hesitation, that it
certainly was the passion for getting your newspaper in advance of your
fellow-creatures; also, if you only hired it, to get it delivered at your
own door at exactly the same time as another man who hired the same copy
four miles off; and, finally, the invincible determination on the part of
both men not to believe the time was up when the boy called.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have not had an opportunity of verifying this
experience with my friends of the managing committee, but I have no doubt
from its reception to-night that my friend the newsman was perfectly
right. Well, as a sort of beacon in a sufficiently dark life, and as an
assurance that among a little body of working men there is a feeling of
brotherhood and sympathy—which is worth much to all men, or they would
herd with wolves—the newsvendors once upon a time established the
Benevolent and Provident Institution, and here it is. Under the
Provident head, certain small annuities are granted to old and
hard-working subscribers. Under the Benevolent head, relief is afforded
to temporary and proved distress. Under both heads, I am bound to say
the help rendered is very humble and very sparing, but if you like it to
be handsomer you have it in your power to make it so. Such as it is, it
is most gratefully received, and does a deal of good. Such as it is, it
is most discreetly and feelingly administered; and it is encumbered with
no wasteful charges for management or patronage.
You know upon an old authority, that you may believe anything except
facts and figures, but you really may believe that during the last year
we have granted £100 in pensions, and some £70 in temporary relief, and
we have invested in Government securities some £400. But, touching this
matter of investments, it was suggested at the anniversary dinner, on the
high and kind authority of Sir Benjamin Phillips that we might grant more
pensions and invest less money. We urged, on the other hand, that we
wished our pensions to be certain and unchangeable—which of course they
must be if they are always paid out of our Government interest and never
out of our capital. However, so amiable is our nature, that we profess
our desire to grant more pensions and to invest more money too. The more
you give us to-night again, so amiable is our nature, the more we promise
to do in both departments. That the newsman’s work has greatly
increased, and that it is far more wearing and tearing than it used to
be, you may infer from one fact, not to mention that we live in railway
times. It is stated in Mitchell’s “Newspaper Press Directory,” that
during the last quarter of a century the number of newspapers which
appeared in London had more than doubled, while the increase in the
number of people among whom they were disseminated was probably beyond
calculation.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have stated the newsman’s simple case. I leave
it in your hands. Within the last year the institution has had the good
fortune to attract the sympathy and gain the support of the eminent man
of letters I am proud to call my friend, {309} who now represents the
great Republic of America at the British Court. Also it has the honour
of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name
of Longfellow. I beg to propose to you to drink “Prosperity to the
Newsvendors’ Benevolent and Provident Institution.”
LIII.
MACREADY.
LONDON, MARCH 1, 1851.
[On the evening of the above day the friends and admirers of Mr. Macready
entertained him at a public dinner. Upwards of six hundred gentlemen
assembled to do honour to the great actor on his retirement from the
stage. Sir E. B. Lytton took the chair. Among the other speakers were
Baron Bunsen, Sir Charles Eastlake, Mr. Thackeray, Mr. John Forster, Mr.
W. J. Fox, and Mr. Charles Dickens, who proposed “The Health of the
Chairman” in the following words:—]
GENTLEMEN,—After all you have already heard, and so rapturously received,
I assure you that not even the warmth of your kind welcome would embolden
me to hope to interest you if I had not full confidence in the subject I
have to offer to your notice. But my reliance on the strength of this
appeal to you is so strong that I am rather encouraged than daunted by
the brightness of the track on which I have to throw my little shadow.
Gentlemen, as it seems to me, there are three great requisites essential
to the perfect realisation of a scene so unusual and so splendid as that
in which we are now assembled. The first, and I must say very difficult
requisite, is a man possessing the stronghold in the general remembrance,
the indisputable claim on the general regard and esteem, which is
possessed by my dear and much valued friend our guest. The second
requisite is the presence of a body of entertainers,—a great multitude of
hosts so cheerful and good-humoured (under, I am sorry to say, some
personal inconvenience),—so warm-hearted and so nobly in earnest, as
those whom I have the privilege of addressing. The third, and certainly
not the least of these requisites, is a president who, less by his social
position, which he may claim by inheritance, or by fortune, which may
have been adventitiously won, and may be again accidentally lost, than by
his comprehensive genius, shall fitly represent the best part of him to
whom honour is done, and the best part of those who unite in the doing of
it. Such a president I think we have found in our chairman of to-night,
and I need scarcely add that our chairman’s health is the toast I have to
propose to you.
Many of those who now hear me were present, I daresay, at that memorable
scene on Wednesday night last, {311} when the great vision which had been
a delight and a lesson,—very often, I daresay, a support and a comfort to
you, which had for many years improved and charmed us, and to which we
had looked for an elevated relief from the labours of our lives, faded
from our sight for ever. I will not stop to inquire whether our guest
may or may not have looked backward, through rather too long a period for
us, to some remote and distant time when he might possibly bear some
far-off likeness to a certain Spanish archbishop whom Gil Blas once
served. Nor will I stop to inquire whether it was a reasonable
disposition in the audience of Wednesday to seize upon the words—
“And I have brought,
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon—” {312}
but I will venture to intimate to those whom I am addressing how in my
mind I mainly connect that occasion with the present. When I looked
round on the vast assemblage, and observed the huge pit hushed into
stillness on the rising of the curtain, and that mighty surging gallery,
where men in their shirt-sleeves had been striking out their arms like
strong swimmers—when I saw that boisterous human flood become still water
in a moment, and remain so from the opening to the end of the play, it
suggested to me something besides the trustworthiness of an English
crowd, and the delusion under which those labour who are apt to disparage
and malign it: it suggested to me that in meeting here to-night we
undertook to represent something of the all-pervading feeling of that
crowd, through all its intermediate degrees, from the full-dressed lady,
with her diamonds sparkling upon her breast in the proscenium-box, to the
half-undressed gentleman; who bides his time to take some refreshment in
the back row of the gallery. And I consider, gentlemen, that no one who
could possibly be placed in this chair could so well head that
comprehensive representation, and could so well give the crowning grace
to our festivities, as one whose comprehensive genius has in his various
works embraced them all, and who has, in his dramatic genius, enchanted
and enthralled them all at once.
Gentlemen, it is not for me here to recall, after what you have heard
this night, what I have seen and known in the bygone times of Mr.
Macready’s management, of the strong friendship of Sir Bulwer Lytton for
him, of the association of his pen with his earliest successes, or of Mr.
Macready’s zealous and untiring services; but it may be permitted me to
say what, in any public mention of him I can never repress, that in the
path we both tread I have uniformly found him from the first the most
generous of men; quick to encourage, slow to disparage, ever anxious to
assert the order of which he is so great an ornament; never condescending
to shuffle it off, and leave it outside state rooms, as a Mussulman might
leave his slippers outside a mosque.
There is a popular prejudice, a kind of superstition to the effect that
authors are not a particularly united body, that they are not invariably
and inseparably attached to each other. I am afraid I must concede
half-a-grain or so of truth I to that superstition; but this I know, that
there can hardly be—that there hardly can have been—among the followers
of literature, a man of more high standing farther above these little
grudging jealousies, which do sometimes disparage its brightness, than
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.
And I have the strongest reason just at present to bear my testimony to
his great consideration for those evils which are sometimes unfortunately
attendant upon it, though not on him. For, in conjunction with some
other gentlemen now present, I have just embarked in a design with Sir
Bulwer Lytton, to smoothe the rugged way of young labourers, both in
literature and the fine arts, and to soften, but by no eleemosynary
means, the declining years of meritorious age. And if that project
prosper as I hope it will, and as I know it ought, it will one day be an
honour to England where there is now a reproach; originating in his
sympathies, being brought into operation by his activity, and endowed
from its very cradle by his generosity. There are many among you who
will have each his own favourite reason for drinking our chairman’s
health, resting his claim probably upon some of his diversified
successes. According to the nature of your reading, some of you will
connect him with prose, others will connect him with poetry. One will
connect him with comedy, and another with the romantic passions of the
stage, and his assertion of worthy ambition and earnest struggle against
“those twin gaolers of the human heart,
Low birth and iron fortune.”
Again, another’s taste will lead him to the contemplation of Rienzi and
the streets of Rome; another’s to the rebuilt and repeopled streets of
Pompeii; another’s to the touching history of the fireside where the
Caxton family learned how to discipline their natures and tame their wild
hopes down. But, however various their feelings and reasons may be, I am
sure that with one accord each will help the other, and all will swell
the greeting, with which I shall now propose to you “The Health of our
Chairman, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.”
LIV.
SANITARY REFORM.
LONDON, MAY 10, 1851.
[The members and friends of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association dined
together on the above evening at Gore House, Kensington. The Earl of
Carlisle occupied the chair. Mr. Charles Dickens was present, and in
proposing “The Board of Health,” made the following speech:—]
THERE are very few words for me to say upon the needfulness of sanitary
reform, or the consequent usefulness of the Board of Health. That no man
can estimate the amount of mischief grown in dirt,—that no man can say
the evil stops here or stops there, either in its moral or physical
effects, or can deny that it begins in the cradle and is not at rest in
the miserable grave, is as certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane
will be carried by an easterly wind into Mayfair, or that the furious
pestilence raging in St. Giles’s no mortal list of lady patronesses can
keep out of Almack’s. Fifteen years ago some of the valuable reports of
Mr. Chadwick and Dr. Southwood Smith, strengthening and much enlarging my
knowledge, made me earnest in this cause in my own sphere; and I can
honestly declare that the use I have since that time made of my eyes and
nose have only strengthened the conviction that certain sanitary reforms
must precede all other social remedies, and that neither education nor
religion can do anything useful until the way has been paved for their
ministrations by cleanliness and decency.
I do not want authority for this opinion: you have heard the speech of
the right reverend prelate {316} this evening—a speech which no sanitary
reformer can have heard without emotion. Of what avail is it to send
missionaries to the miserable man condemned to work in a foetid court,
with every sense bestowed upon him for his health and happiness turned
into a torment, with every month of his life adding to the heap of evils
under which he is condemned to exist? What human sympathy within him is
that instructor to address? what natural old chord within him is he to
touch? Is it the remembrance of his children?—a memory of destitution,
of sickness, of fever, and of scrofula? Is it his hopes, his latent
hopes of immortality? He is so surrounded by and embedded in material
filth, that his soul cannot rise to the contemplation of the great truths
of religion. Or if the case is that of a miserable child bred and
nurtured in some noisome, loathsome place, and tempted, in these better
days, into the ragged school, what can a few hours’ teaching effect
against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole existence? But give them a
glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water;
help them to be clean; lighten that heavy atmosphere in which their
spirits flag and in which they become the callous things they are; take
the body of the dead relative from the close room in which the living
live with it, and where death, being familiar, loses its awe; and then
they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much
with the poor, and who had compassion for all human suffering.
The toast which I have to propose, The Board of Health, is entitled to
all the honour which can be conferred upon it. We have very near us, in
Kensington, a transparent illustration that no very great thing can ever
be accomplished without an immense amount of abuse being heaped upon it.
In connexion with the Board of Health we are always hearing a very large
word which is always pronounced with a very great relish—the word
centralization. Now I submit that in the time of the cholera we had a
pretty good opportunity of judging between this so called centralization
and what I may, I think, call “vestrylisation.” I dare say the company
present have read the reports of the Cholera Board of Health, and I
daresay they have also read reports of certain vestries. I have the
honour of belonging to a constituency which elected that amazing body,
the Marylebone vestry, and I think that if the company present will look
to what was done by the Board of Health at Glasgow, and then contrast
those proceedings with the wonderful cleverness with which affairs were
managed at the same period by my vestry, there will be very little
difficulty in judging between them. My vestry even took upon itself to
deny the existence of cholera as a weak invention of the enemy, and that
denial had little or no effect in staying the progress of the disease.
We can now contrast what centralization is as represented by a few noisy
and interested gentlemen, and what centralization is when worked out by a
body combining business habits, sound medical and social knowledge, and
an earnest sympathy with the sufferings of the working classes.
Another objection to the Board of Health is conveyed in a word not so
large as the other,—“Delay.” I would suggest, in respect to this, that
it would be very unreasonable to complain that a first-rate chronometer
didn’t go when its master had not wound it up. The Board of Health may
be excellently adapted for going and very willing and anxious to go, and
yet may not be permitted to go by reason of its lawful master having
fallen into a gentle slumber and forgotten to set it a going. One of the
speakers this evening has referred to Lord Castlereagh’s caution “not to
halloo until they were out of the wood.” As regards the Board of Trade I
would suggest that they ought not to halloo until they are out of the
Woods and Forests. In that leafy region the Board of Health suffers all
sorts of delays, and this should always be borne in mind. With the toast
of the Board of Health I will couple the name of a noble lord (Ashley),
of whose earnestness in works of benevolence, no man can doubt, and who
has the courage on all occasions to face the cant which is the worst and
commonest of all—the cant about the cant of philanthropy.
LV.
GARDENING.
LONDON, JUNE 9, 1851.
[At the anniversary dinner of the Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution, held
under the presidency of Mr., afterwards Sir Joseph Paxton, Mr. Charles
Dickens made the following speech:—]
I FEEL an unbounded and delightful interest in all the purposes and
associations of gardening. Probably there is no feeling in the human
mind stronger than the love of gardening. The prisoner will make a
garden in his prison, and cultivate his solitary flower in the chink of a
wall. The poor mechanic will string his scarlet bean from one side of
his window to the other, and watch it and tend it with unceasing
interest. It is a holy duty in foreign countries to decorate the graves
of the dead with flowers, and here, too, the resting-places of those who
have passed away from us will soon be gardens. From that old time when
the Lord walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, down to the day
when a Poet-Laureate sang—
“Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,
From yon blue heaven above us bent
The gardener Adam and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent,”
at all times and in all ages gardens have been amongst the objects of the
greatest interest to mankind. There may be a few, but I believe they are
but a few, who take no interest in the products of gardening, except
perhaps in “London Pride,” or a certain degenerate kind of “Stock,” which
is apt to grow hereabouts, cultivated by a species of frozen-out
gardeners whom no thaw can ever penetrate: except these, the gardeners’
art has contributed to the delight of all men in their time. That there
ought to be a Benevolent Provident Institution for gardeners is in the
fitness of things, and that such an institution ought to flourish and
does flourish is still more so.
I have risen to propose to you the health of a gentleman who is a great
gardener, and not only a great gardener but a great man—the growth of a
fine Saxon root cultivated up with a power of intellect to a plant that
is at this time the talk of the civilized world—I allude, of course, to
my friend the chairman of the day. I took occasion to say at a public
assembly hard-by, a month or two ago, in speaking of that wonderful
building Mr. Paxton has designed for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park,
that it ought to have fallen down, but that it refused to do so. We were
told that the glass ought to have been all broken, the gutters all choked
up, and the building flooded, and that the roof and sides ought to have
been blown away; in short that everything ought to have done what
everything obstinately persisted in not doing. Earth, air, fire, and
water all appear to have conspired together in Mr. Paxton’s favour—all
have conspired together to one result, which, when the present generation
is dust, will be an enduring temple to his honour, and to the energy, the
talent, and the resources of Englishmen.
“But,” said a gentleman to me the other day, “no doubt Mr. Paxton is a
great man, but there is one objection to him that you can never get over,
that is, he is a gardener.” Now that is our case to-night, that he is a
gardener, and we are extremely proud of it. This is a great age, with
all its faults, when a man by the power of his own genius and good sense
can scale such a daring height as Mr. Paxton has reached, and composedly
place his form on the top. This is a great age, when a man impressed
with a useful idea can carry out his project without being imprisoned, or
thumb-screwed, or persecuted in any form. I can well understand that
you, to whom the genius, the intelligence, the industry, and the
achievements of our friend are well known, should be anxious to do him
honour by placing him in the position he occupies to-night; and I assure
you, you have conferred great gratification on one of his friends, in
permitting him to have the opportunity of proposing his health, which
that friend now does most cordially and with all the honours.
LVI.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY DINNER.
LONDON, MAY 2, 1870.
[On the occasion of the Second Exhibition of the Royal Academy in their
new galleries in Piccadilly, the President, Sir F. Grant, and the council
gave their usual inaugurative banquet, and a very distinguished company
was present. The dinner took place in the large central room, and covers
were laid for 200 guests. The Prince of Wales acknowledged the toast of
his health and that of the Princess, the Duke of Cambridge responded to
the toast of the army, Mr. Childers to the navy, Lord Elcho to the
volunteers, Mr. Motley to “The Prosperity of the United States,” Mr.
Gladstone to “Her Majesty’s Ministers,” the Archbishop of York to, “The
Guests,” and Mr. Dickens to “Literature.” The last toast having been
proposed in a highly eulogistic speech, Mr. Dickens responded.]
MR. PRESIDENT, your Royal Highnesses, my Lords and Gentlemen,—I beg to
acknowledge the toast with which you have done me the great honour of
associating my name. I beg to acknowledge it on behalf of the
brotherhood of literature, present and absent, not forgetting an
illustrious wanderer from the fold, whose tardy return to it we all hail
with delight, and who now sits—or lately did sit—within a few chairs of
or on your left hand. I hope I may also claim to acknowledge the toast
on behalf of the sisterhood of literature also, although that “better
half of human nature,” to which Mr. Gladstone rendered his graceful
tribute, is unworthily represented here, in the present state of its
rights and wrongs, by the devouring monster, man.
All the arts, and many of the sciences, bear witness that women, even in
their present oppressed condition, can attain to quite as great
distinction, and can attain to quite as lofty names as men. Their
emancipation (as I am given to understand) drawing very near, there is no
saying how soon they may “push us from our stools” at these tables, or
how soon our better half of human nature, standing in this place of mine,
may eloquently depreciate mankind, addressing another better half of
human nature sitting in the president’s chair.
The literary visitors of the Royal Academy to-night desire me to
congratulate their hosts on a very interesting exhibition, in which risen
excellence supremely asserts itself, and from which promise of a
brilliant succession in time to come is not wanting. They naturally see
with especial interest the writings and persons of great men—historians,
philosophers, poets, and novelists, vividly illustrated around them here.
And they hope that they may modestly claim to have rendered some little
assistance towards the production of many of the pictures in this
magnificent gallery. For without the patient labours of some among them
unhistoric history might have long survived in this place, and but for
the researches and wandering of others among them, the most preposterous
countries, the most impossible peoples, and the absurdest superstitions,
manners, and customs, might have usurped the place of truth upon these
walls. Nay, there is no knowing, Sir Francis Grant, what unlike
portraits you yourself might have painted if you had been left, with your
sitters, to idle pens, unchecked reckless rumours, and undenounced lying
malevolence.
I cannot forbear, before I resume my seat, adverting to a sad theme (the
recent death of Daniel Maclise) to which his Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales made allusion, and to which the president referred with the
eloquence of genuine feeling. Since I first entered the public lists, a
very young man indeed, it has been my constant fortune to number amongst
my nearest and dearest friends members of the Royal Academy who have been
its grace and pride. They have so dropped from my side one by one that I
already, begin to feel like the Spanish monk of whom Wilkie tells, who
had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures
which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had seen,
was a shadow and a dream.
For many years I was one of the two most intimate friends and most
constant companions of the late Mr. Maclise. Of his genius in his chosen
art I will venture to say nothing here, but of his prodigious fertility
of mind and wonderful wealth of intellect, I may confidently assert that
they would have made him, if he had been so minded, at least as great a
writer as he was a painter. The gentlest and most modest of men, the
freshest as to his generous appreciation of young aspirants, and the
frankest and largest-hearted as to his peers, incapable of a sordid or
ignoble thought, gallantly sustaining the true dignity of his vocation,
without one grain of self-ambition, wholesomely natural at the last as at
the first, “in wit a man, simplicity a child,” no artist, of whatsoever
denomination, I make bold to say, ever went to his rest leaving a golden
memory more pure from dross, or having devoted himself with a truer
chivalry to the art goddess whom he worshipped.
[These were the last public words of Charles Dickens.]