tea-drinking--the result of her suddenly falling in love with the new
usher, and that chiefly by reason of the straightness of his legs, “the
general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked.” How John Browdie
(with his hair damp from washing) appeared upon the occasion in a clean
shirt--“whereof thecollars might have belonged to some giant
ancestor,”--and greeted the assembled company, including his intended,
Tilda Price, “with a grin that even the collars could not conceal,” the
creator of the worthy Yorkshireman went on to describe, with a gusto
akin to the relish with which every utterance of John Browdie's was
caught up by the listeners. Whether he spoke in good humour or in ill
humour, the burly cornfactor was equally delightful. One while saying,
laughingly, to Nicholas, across the bread-and-butter plate which they
had just been emptying between them, “Ye wean't get bread-and-butther
ev'ry neight, I expect, mun. Ecod, they dean't put too much intif 'em.
Ye'll be nowt but skeen and boans if you stop here long eneaf. Ho! ho!
ho!”--all this to Nicholas's unspeakable indignation. Or, another while,
after chafing in jealousy for a long time over the coquetries going on
between Tilda Price and Nicholas--the Yorkshireman flattening his own
nose with his clenched fist again and again, “as if to keep his hand in
till he had an opportunity of exercising it on the nose of some other
gentleman,”--until asked merrily by his betrothed to keep his glum
silence no longer, but to say something: “Say summat?” roared John
Browdie, with a mighty blow on the table; “Weal, then! what I say 's
this--Dang my boans and boddy, if I stan' this ony longer! Do ye gang
whoam wi' me; and do yon loight and toight young whipster look sharp out
for a brokken head next time he cums under my hond. Cum whoam, tell'e,
cum whoam!” After Smike's running away, and his being brought back
again, had been rapidly recounted, what nearly every individual member
of every audience in attendance at this Reading was eagerly on the watch
for all along, at last, in the fullness of time, arrived,--the execrable
Squeers receiving, instead of administering, a frightful beating, in the
presence of the whole school; having carefully provided himself
beforehand, as all were rejoiced to remember, with “a fearful instrument
of flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new!”
So real are the characters described by Charles Dickens in his life-like
fictions, and so exactly do the incidents he relates as having befallen
them resemble actual occurrences, that we recall to recollection at this
moment the delight with which the late accomplished Lady Napier once
related an exact case in point, appealing, as she did so, to her
husband, the author of the “Peninsular War,” to corroborate the-accuracy
of her retrospect! Telling how she perfectly well remembered, when the
fourth green number of “Nicholas Nickleby” was just out, one of her
home group, who had a moment before caught sight of the picture of the
flogging in a shop-window, rushed in with the startling announcement--as
though he were bringing with him the news of some great victory--“What
do you think? _Nicholas has thrashed Squeers!_” As the Novelist read
this chapter, or rather the condensation of this chapter, it was for all
the world like assisting in person at that sacred and refreshing rite!
“Is every boy here?”
Yes, every boy was there, and so was every observant listener, in eager
and--knowing what was coming--in delighted expectation. As Squeers was
represented as “glaring along the lines,” to assure himself that every
boy really _was_ there, what time “every eye drooped and every head
cowered down,” the Reader, instead of uttering one word of what the
ruffianly schoolmaster ought then to have added: “Each boy keep to
his place. Nickleby! you go to your desk, sir!”--instead of saying one
syllable of this, contented himself with obeying his own manuscript
marginal direction, in one word--Pointing! The effect of this simple
gesture was startling--particularly when, after the momentary hush with
which it was always accompanied, he observed quietly,--“There was a
curious expression in the usher's face, but he took his seat without
opening his lips in reply.” Then, when the schoolmaster had dragged in
the wretched Smike by the collar, “or rather by that fragment of his
jacket which was nearest the place where his collar ought to have been,”
there was a horrible relish in his saying, over his shoulder for a
moment, “Stand a little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; _I've
hardly got room enough!_” The instant one cruel blow had fallen--“Stop!”
was cried in a voice that made the rafters ring--even the lofty rafters
of St. James's Hall.
Squeers, with the glare and snarl of a wild beast.--“Who cried stop?”
Nicholas.--“I did! This must not go on!”
Squeers, again, with a frightful look.--“Must not go on?”
Nicholas.--“Must not! Shall not! I will prevent it!”
Then came Nicholas Nickleby's manly denunciation of the scoundrel,
interrupted one while for an instant by Squeers screaming out, “Sit
down, you--beggar!” and followed at its close by the last and crowning
outrage, consequent on a violent outbreak of wrath on the part of
Squeers, who spat at him and struck him a blow across the face with his
instrument of torture: when Nicholas, springing upon him, wrested the
weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat--don't we all exult
in the remembrance of it?--“beat the ruffian till he roared for mercy.”
After that climax has been attained, two other particulars are alone
worthy of being recalled to recollection in regard to this Reading.
First, the indescribable heartiness of John Browdie's cordial
shake-of-the-hand with Nicholas Nickleby on their encountering each
other by accident upon the high road. “Shake honds? Ah! that I weel!”
coupled with his ecstatic shout (so ecstatic that his horse shyed at
it), “Beatten schoolmeasther! Ho! ho! ho! Beatten schoolmeasther!
Who ever heard o' the loike o' that, noo? Give us thee hond agean,
yoongster! Beatten schoolmeasther! Dang it, I loove thee for 't!”
Finally, and as the perfecting touch of tenderness between the two
cousins, then unknown to each other as such, in the early morning light
at Boroughbridge, we caught a glimpse of Nicholas and Smike passing,
hand in hand, out of the old barn together.
MR. BOB SAWYER'S PARTY.
Quite as exhilarating in its way as the all-but dramatised report of the
great breach of promise case tried before Mr. Justice Stareleigh, was
that other condensation of a chapter from “Pickwick,” descriptive of
Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party. It was a Reading, in the delivery of which
the Reader himself had evidently the keenest sense of enjoyment. As
a humorous description, it was effervescent with fun, being written
throughout in the happiest, earliest style of the youthful genius of
Boz, when the green numbers were first shaking the sides of lettered and
unlettered Englishmen alike with Homeric laughter. Besides this, when
given by him as a Reading, it comprised within it one of his very
drollest impersonations. If only as the means of introducing us to Jack
Hopkins, it would have been most acceptable. But, inimitable though Jack
was, he was, at the least, thoroughly well companioned.
As a relish of what was coming, there was that preliminary account of
the locality in which the festivities were held, to wit, Lant Street, in
the borough of Southwark, the prevailing repose of which, we were
told, “sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul”--fully justifying its
selection as a haven of rest by any one who wished “to abstract himself
from the world, to remove himself from the reach of temptation, to place
himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of
window!” As specimens of animated nature, familiarly met with in the
neighbourhood, “the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked potato
man,” had about them a perennial freshness. Whenever we were reminded,
again, in regard to the principal characteristics of the population that
it was migratory, “usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and
generally by night,” her Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in
that happy valley, its rents being pronounced dubious, and its water
communication described as “frequently cut off,” we found in respect to
the whole picture thus lightly-sketched in, that age did not wither nor
custom stale its infinite comicality.
It was when the familiar personages of the story were, one after
another, introduced upon the scene, however, that the broad Pickwickian
humour of it all began in earnest to be realised. After we had listened
with chuckling enjoyment to the ludicrously minute account given of the
elaborate preparations made for the reception of the visitors, even in
the approaches to Mr. Bob Sawyer's apartment, down to the mention of the
kitchen candle with a long snuff, that “burnt cheerfully on the ledge of
the staircase window,” we had graphically rendered the memorable scene
between poor, dejected Bob and his little spitfire of a landlady, Mrs.
Raddle. _So_ dejected and generally suppressed was Bob in the Reading,
however, that we should hardly have recognised that very archetype
of the whole _genus_ of rollicking Medical Students, as originally
described in the pages of Pickwick, where he is depicted as attired
in “a coarse blue coat, which, without being either a great-coat or a
surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both,” having about him
that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait peculiar to young
gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, and shout and scream in the
same by night, calling waiters by their Christian names, and altogether
bearing a resemblance upon the whole to something like a dissipated
Robinson Crusoe. Habited, Bob still doubtless was, in the plaid trousers
and the large, rough coat and double-breasted waistcoat, but as for the
“swaggering gait” just mentioned not a vestige of it remained. Nor could
that be wondered at, indeed, for an instant, beholding and hearing, as
we did, the shrill ferocity with which Mrs. Raddle had it out with him
about the rent immediately before the arrival of his guests.
It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of Charles Dickens as a
humorous Novelist, that the cream or quintessence of a jest is very
often given by him quite casually in a parenthesis. It was equally
distinctive of his peculiarities as a Reader, that the especial charm
of his drollery was often conveyed by the merest aside. Thus it was with
him in reference to Mrs. Raddle's “confounded little bill,” when--in
between Ben Allen's inquiry, “How long has it been running?” and Bob
Sawyer's reply, “Only about a quarter and a month or so”--the Reader
parenthetically remarked, with a philosophic air, “A bill, by the way,
is the most extraordinary locomotive engine that the genius of man ever
produced: it would keep on running during the longest lifetime without
ever once stopping of its own accord.” Thus also was it, when he added
meditatively to Bob's hesitating explanation to Mrs. Raddle, “the fact
is that I have been disappointed in the City to-day”--“Extraordinary
place that City: astonishing number of men always _are_ getting
disappointed there.” Hereupon it was that that fiercest of little women,
Mrs. Raddle, who had entered “in a tremble with passion and pale with
rage,” fairly let out at her lodger. Her incidental bout with Mr. Ben
Allen, when he soothingly(!) interpolated, “My good soul,” was, in
the Reading, in two senses, a memorable diversion. Beginning with a
sarcastic quivering in her voice, “I am not _aweer_, sir, that you have
any right to address your conversation to _me_. I don't think I let
these apartments to _you_, sir--” Mrs. Raddle's anger rose through an
indignant _crescendo_, on Ben Allen's remonstrating, “But you are such
an unreasonable woman”--to the sharp and biting interrogation, “I beg
your parding, young man, but will you have the goodness to call me that
again, sir?”
Ben Allen, meekly and somewhat uneasy on his own account,--“I didn't
make use of the word in any invidious sense, ma'am.”
Landlady, louder and more imperatively,--“I beg your parding, young man,
but _who_ do you call a woman? Did you make that remark to me, sir?”
“_Why, bless my heart!_”
“Did you apply that name to me, I ask of you, sir?”
On his answering, Well, of course he did!--then, as she retreated
towards the open room-door, came the last outburst of her invectives,
high-pitched in their voluble utterance, against him, against them
both, against everybody, including Mr. Raddle in the kitchen--“a base,
faint-hearted, timorous wretch, that's afraid to come upstairs and face
the ruffinly creaturs--that's _afraid_ to come--that's afraid!”
Ending with her screaming descent of the stairs in the midst of a loud
double-knock, upon the arrival just then of the Pickwickians, when, “in
an uncontrollable burst of mental agony,” Mrs. Raddle threw down all
the umbrellas in the passage, disappearing into the back parlour with an
awful crash. In answer to the cheerful inquiry from Mr. Pickwick,--“Does
Mr. Sawyer live here?” came the lugubrious and monotonously intoned
response, all on one note, of the aboriginal young person, the gal
Betsey (one of the minor characters in the original chapter, and yet,
as already remarked, a superlatively good impersonation in the
Reading)--“Yes; first-floor. It's the door straight afore you when you
get's to the top of the stairs”--with which the dirty slipshod in
black cotton stockings disappeared with the candle down the kitchen
stair-case, leaving the unfortunate arrivals to grope their way up as
they best could. Welcomed rather dejectedly by Bob on the first-floor
landing, where Mr. Pickwick put, not, as in the original work, his hat,
but, in the Reading, “his foot” in the tray of glasses, they were very
soon followed, one after another, by the remainder of the visitors.
Notably by a sentimental young gentleman with a nice sense of honour,
and, most notably of all (with a heavy footstep, very welcome indeed
whenever heard) by Jack Hopkins. Jack was at once the Hamlet and the
Yorick of the whole entertainment--all-essential to it--whose very look
(with his chin rather stiff in the stock), whose very words (short,
sharp, and decisive) had about them a drily and all-but indescribably
humorous effect. As spoken by the Novelist himself, Jack Hopkins's
every syllable told to perfection. His opening report immediately on
his arrival, of “rather a good accident” just brought into the casualty
ward--only, it was true, a man fallen out of a four-pair-of-stairs
window; but a very fair case, _very_ fair case indeed!--was of itself
a dexterous forefinger between the small ribs to begin with. Would the
patient recover? Well, no--with an air of supreme indifference--no, he
should rather say he wouldn't. But there must be a splendid operation,
though, on the morrow--magnificent sight if Slasher did it! Did he
consider Mr. Slasher a good operator? “Best alive: took a boy's leg
out of the socket last week--boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake
exactly two minutes after it was all over;--boy said he wouldn't lie
there to be made game of; and he'd tell his mother if they didn't
begin.” To hear Dickens say this in the short, sharp utterances of Jack
Hopkins, to see his manner in recounting it, stiff-necked, and with a
glance under the drooping eyelids in the direction of Mr. Pickwick's
listening face, was only the next best thing to hearing him and seeing
him, still in the person of Jack Hopkins, relate the memorable anecdote
about the child swallowing the necklace--pronounced in Jack Hopkins's
abbreviated articulation of it, _neck-luss_--a word repeated by him
a round dozen times at the least within a few seconds in the reading
version of that same anecdote. How characteristically and comically the
abbreviations were multiplied for the delivery of it, by the very voice
and in the very person, as it were, of Jack Hopkins, who shall say! As,
for example--“Sister, industrious girl, seldom treated herself to bit
of finery, cried eyes out, at loss of--neck-luss; looked high and low
for--neck-luss. Few days afterwards, family at dinner--baked, shoulder
of mutton and potatoes, child wasn't hungry, playing about the room,
when family suddenly heard devil of a noise like small hail-storm.”
How abbreviated passages like these look, as compared with the
original--could only be rendered comprehensible upon the instant, by
giving in this place a facsimile of one of the pages relating to Jack
Hopkins's immortal story about the--neck-luss, exactly as it appears
in the marked copy of the Reading of “Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party,” a page
covered all over, as will be observed, with minute touches in the
Novelist's own handwriting.
Nothing at all in the later version of this Reading was said about the
prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the
evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of “Pickwick” will very well
remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about
a great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a
particularly happy reply to another illustrious individual whom he had
never been able to identify, and, after enlarging with great minuteness
upon divers collateral circumstances distantly connected with the
anecdote, could not for the life of him recollect at that precise
moment what the anecdote was--although he had been in the habit, for the
last ten years, of telling the story with great applause! While disposed
to regret the omission of this preposterously natural incident from the
revised version of the Reading, and especially Bob Sawyer's concluding
remark in regard to it, that he should very much like to hear the end of
it, for, _so far as it went_, it was, without exception, the very best
story he had ever heard--we were more than compensated by another
revisive touch, by which Mr. Hopkins, instead of Mr. Gunter, in the pink
shirt, was represented as one of the two interlocutors in the famous
quarrel-scene: the other being Mr. Noddy, the scorbutic youth, with the
nice sense of honour. Through this modification the ludicrous effect of
the squabble was wonderfully enhanced, as where Mr. Noddy, having been
threatened with being “pitched out o' window” by Mr. Jack Hopkins,
said to the latter, “I should like to see you do it, sir,” Jack Hopkins
curtly retaliating--“You shall _feel_ me do it, sir, in half a minute.”
The reconciliation of the two attained its climax of absurdity in
the Reading, when Mr. Noddy, having gradually allowed his feelings to
overpower him, professed that he had ever entertained a devoted personal
attachment to Mr. Hopkins. Consequent upon this, Mr. Hopkins, we were
told, replied, that, “on the whole, he rather preferred Mr. Noddy to
his own _mother_”--the word standing, of course, as “brother” in the
original. Summing it all up, the Reader would then add, with a rise and
fall of the voice at almost every other word in the sentence, the mere
sound of which was inexpressibly ludicrous--“Everybody said the whole
dispute had been conducted in a manner” (here he would sometimes gag)
“that did equal credit to the head and heart of both parties concerned.”
Another gag, of which there is no sign in the marked copy, those who
attended any later delivery of this Reading will well remember he was
fond of introducing. This was immediately after Mrs. Raddle had put an
end to the evening's enjoyment in the very middle of Jack Hopkins' song
(with a chorus) of “The King, God bless him,” carolled forth by Jack
to a novel air compounded of the “Bay of Biscay” and “A Frog he would
a-wooing go”--when poor, discomfited Bob (after turning pale at the
voice of his dreaded landlady, shrilly calling out, “Mr. Saw-yer! Mr.
Saw-yer!”) turned reproachfully on the over-boisterous Jack Hopkins,
with, “I _thought_ you were making too much noise, Jack. You're such
a fellow for chorusing! You're always at it. You came into the world
chorusing; and I believe you'll go out of it chorusing.” Through their
appreciation of which--more even than through their remembrance of
Mrs. Raddle's withdrawal of her nightcap, with a scream, from over the
staircase banisters, on catching sight of Mr. Pickwick, saying, “Get
along with you, you old wretch! Old enough to be his grandfather, you
willin! You're worse than any of 'em!”--the hearers paid to the Reader
of Bob Sawyer's Party their last tribute of laughter.
THE CHIMES.
As poetical in its conception, and also, intermittently, in its
treatment, as anything he ever wrote, this Goblin Story of Some Bells
that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, was, in those purely
goblin, or more intensely imaginative portions of it, one of the most
effective of our Author's Readings. Hence its selection by him for his
very first Reading on his own account in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre.
Listening, as we did, then and afterwards, to the tale, as it was told
by his own sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no
doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear
altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer
little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between
Trotty Veck, in his “breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed,
stony-toed, tooth-chattering” stand-point by the old church-door, and
the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among
the roof-beams of the great church-tower. As the story was related in
its original form, it was rung out befittingly from the Chimes in four
quarters. As a Reading it was subdivided simply into three parts.
Nothing whatever was preserved (by an error as it always seemed to
us) of the admirable introduction. The story-teller piqued no one into
attention by saying--to begin with--“There are not many people who
would care to sleep in a church.” Adding immediately, with delightful
particularity, “I don't mean at sermon time in warm weather (when the
thing has actually been done once or twice), but in the night, and
alone.” Not a word was uttered in the exordium of the Reading about
the dismal trick the night-wind has in those ghostly hours of wandering
round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; of its
trying with a secret hand the windows and the doors, fumbling for some
crevice by which to enter, and, having got in, “as one not finding what
it seeks, whatever that may be,” of its wailing and howling to issue
forth again; of its stalking through the aisles and gliding round and
round the pillars, and “tempting the deep organ;” of its soaring up to
the roof, and after striving vainly to rend the rafters, flinging itself
despairingly upon the stones below, and passing mutteringly into the
vaults! Anon, coming up stealthily--the Christmas book goes on to
say--“It has a ghostly sound, lingering within the Altar, where it
seems to chant in its wild way of Wrong and Murder done, and false Gods
worshipped, in defiance of the Tables of the Law, which look so fair and
smooth, but are so flawed and broken. Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting
snugly round the fire!--it has an awful voice that Wind at Midnight,
singing in a church!” Of all this and of yet more to the like purpose,
not one syllable was there in the Reading, which, on the contrary, began
at once point-blank: “High up in the steeple of an old church, far
above the town, and far below the clouds, dwelt the 'Chimes' I tell
of.” Directly after which the Reader, having casually mentioned the
circumstance of their just then striking twelve at noon, gave utterance
to Trotty Yeck's ejaculatory reflection: “Dinner-time, eh? Ah! There's
nothing more regular in its coming round than dinner-time, and there's
nothing less regular in its coming round than dinner.” Followed by his
innocently complacent exclamation: “I wonder whether it would be worth
any gentleman's while, now, to buy that observation for the Papers, or
the Parliament!” The Reader adding upon the instant, with an explanatory
aside, that “Trotty was only joking,” striving to console himself
doubtless for the exceeding probability there was before him, at the
moment, of his going, not for the first time, dinnerless.
In the thick of his meditations Trotty was startled--those who ever
attended this Reading will remember how pleasantly--by the unlooked-for
appearance of his pretty daughter Meg. “And not alone!” as she told him
cheerily. “Why you don't mean to say,” was the wondering reply of the
old ticket-porter, looking curiously the while at a covered basket
carried in Margaret's hand, “that you have brought------”