“There is no man in the world who could have given me the heartfelt
pleasure you have, by your kind note of the 13th of last month.
There is no living writer—and there are very few among the dead—whose
approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you
have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of
hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. If you could know how
earnestly I write this, you would be glad to read it—as I hope you
will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the hand I autographically
hold out to you over the broad Atlantic.
“I wish I could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention
to visit England. I can’t. I have held it at arm’s length, and
taken a bird’s-eye view of it, after reading it a great many times,
but there is no greater encouragement in it this way than on a
microscopic inspection. I should love to go with you—as I have gone,
God knows how often—into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green
Arbour Court, and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with
you, outside the last of the coaches, down to Bracebridge Hall. It
would make my heart glad to compare notes with you about that shabby
gentleman in the oil-cloth hat, and red nose, who sat in the
nine-cornered back parlour of the _Mason’s Arms_; and about Robert
Preston, and the tallow-chandler’s widow, whose sitting-room is
second nature to me; and about all those delightful places and people
that I used to walk about and dream of in the day-time, when a very
small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy. I have a good
deal to say, too, about that dashing Alonzo de Ojeda, that you can’t
help being fonder of than you ought to be; and much to hear
concerning Moorish legend, and poor, unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich
Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet I should
show you his mutilated carcass with a joy past all expression.
“I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and
happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once
into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were naturally, and by
the very laws of gravity, into your open arms. Questions come
thronging to my pen as to the lips of people who meet after long
hoping to do so. I don’t know what to say first, or what to leave
unsaid, and am constantly disposed to break off and tell you again
how glad I am this moment has arrived.
“My dear Washington Irving, I cannot thank you enough for your
cordial and generous praise, or tell you what deep and lasting
gratification it has given me. I hope to have many letters from you,
and to exchange a frequent correspondence. I send this to say so.
After the first two or three, I shall settle down into a connected
style, and become gradually rational.
“You know what the feeling is, after having written a letter, sealed
it, and sent it off. I shall picture you reading this, and answering
it, before it has lain one night in the post-office. Ten to one that
before the fastest packet could reach New York I shall be writing
again.
“Do you suppose the post-office clerks care to receive letters? I
have my doubts. They get into a dreadful habit of indifference. A
postman, I imagine, is quite callous. Conceive his delivering one to
himself, without being startled by a preliminary double knock!”
In the spring of 1842 Mr. Dickens was at Washington, from whence he wrote
to Irving:—
“We passed through—literally passed through—this place again to-day.
I did not come to see you, for I really have not the heart to say
“good-bye” again, and felt more than I can tell you when we shook
hands last Wednesday.
“You will not be at Baltimore, I fear? I thought, at the time, that
you only said you might be there, to make our parting the gayer.
Wherever you go, God bless you! What pleasure I have had in seeing
and talking with you, I will not attempt to say. I shall never
forget it as long as I live. What _would_ I give, if we could have
but a quiet week together! Spain is a lazy place, and its climate an
indolent one. But if you have ever leisure under its sunny skies, to
think of a man who loves you, and holds communion with your spirit
oftener, perhaps, than any other person alive—leisure from
listlessness, I mean—and will write to me in London, you will give me
an inexpressible amount of pleasure.”
Wishing, in the summer of 1856, to introduce a relation to Irving, Mr.
Dickens sent a pleasant letter of introduction, wherein he says:—
“If you knew how often I write to you individually and personally, in
my books, you would be no more surprised in seeing this note, than
you were in seeing me do my duty by that flowery julep (in what I
dreamily apprehend to have been a former state of existence) at
Baltimore.
“Will you let me present to you a cousin of mine, Mr. B—, who is
associated with a merchant’s house in New York? Of course, he wants
to see you, and know you. How can _I_ wonder at that? How can
anybody?
“I had a long talk with Leslie at the last Academy dinner (having
previously been with him in Paris), and he told me that you were
flourishing. I suppose you know that he wears a moustache—so do I,
for the matter of that, and a beard too—and that he looks like a
portrait of Don Quixote.
“Holland House has four-and-twenty youthful pages in it now—twelve
for my lord, and twelve for my lady; and no clergyman coils his leg
up under his chair all dinner-time, and begins to uncurve it when the
hostess goes. No wheeled chair runs smoothly in, with that beaming
face in it; and —’s little cotton pocket-handkerchief helped to make
(I believe) this very sheet of paper. A half-sad, half-ludicrous
story of Rogers, is all I will sully it with. You know, I daresay,
that, for a year or so before his death, he wandered and lost
himself, like one of the Children in the Wood, grown up there and
grown down again. He had Mrs. Procter and Mrs. Carlyle to breakfast
with him one morning—only those two. Both excessively talkative,
very quick and clever, and bent on entertaining him. When Mrs.
Carlyle had flashed and shone before him for about three-quarters of
an hour on one subject, he turned his poor old eyes on Mrs. Procter,
and, pointing to the brilliant discourser with his poor old finger,
said (indignantly), “Who is _she_?” Upon this, Mrs. Procter, cutting
in, delivered—(it is her own story)—a neat oration on the life and
writings of Carlyle, and enlightened him in her happiest and airiest
manner; all of which he heard, staring in the dreariest silence, and
then said (indignantly as before), “And who are you?”
* * * * *
WITH few of his literary contemporaries has Mr. Dickens held more cordial
and pleasant relations than with the late DOUGLAS JERROLD. During all
the years of their intercourse that sympathy and friendship existed
between them, which two minds so thoroughly manly and honourable could
hardly help feeling for each other. Dickens, though considerably the
younger of the two, had won earlier the prizes of his profession. But
there was no mean envy and jealousy on the one side, and no mean
assumption on the other. The letters that passed between the two men are
altogether delightful to read. We shall proceed to give, as far as our
space will allow, a few extracts from those of Dickens to Jerrold, {330}
with intercalary elucidations explanatory of the circumstances under
which they were written.
In the year 1843, Douglas Jerrold wrote to Mr. Dickens from Herne Bay,
where he had taken up his abode in “a little cabin, built up of ivy and
woodbine, and almost within sound of the sea.”