comfortable night's sleep, passed by the child in a bed shared with “the
Constantinopolitan chambermaid,” Polly, “by that time a mere heap of
dimples,” poses poor, unwieldy Barbox by asking him, in a wheedling
manner, “What are we going to do, you dear old thing?” On his suggesting
their having a sight, at the Circus, of two long-tailed ponies, speckled
all over--“No, no, no!” cries Polly, in an ecstasy. When he afterwards
throws out a proposition that they shall also look in at the toy-shop,
and choose a doll--“Not dressed,” ejaculates Polly; “No, no, no--not
dressed!” Barbox replying, “Full dressed; together with a house, and
all things necessary for housekeeping!” Polly gives a little scream, and
seems in danger of falling into a swoon of bliss. “What a darling you
are!” she languidly exclaims, leaning back in her chair: “Come and
be hugged.” All this will indicate plainly enough the difficulties
investing every sentence of this Reading, capped as they all are by the
astounding _denouement_ of the plot--Polly turning out to be (sly
little thing!) the purposely-lost daughter of Barbox Brothers' old love,
Beatrice, and of her husband, Tresham, for whom Barbox had not only been
jilted, but by whom Barbox had been simultaneously and rather heavily
defrauded.
Perhaps the pleasantest recollection of the whole Reading is, not
Polly--the small puss turns out to be such a cunningly reticent little
emissary--but her Doll, a “lovely specimen of Circassian descent,
possessing as much boldness of beauty as was reconcileable with
extreme feebleness of mouth,” and combining a sky-blue pelisse with
rose-coloured satin trousers, and a black velvet hat, “the latter
seemingly founded on the portraits of the late Duchess of Kent.” One is
almost reconciled to Polly, however,--becoming oblivious for the moment
of her connivance in her mother's secret device, and reminiscent only
of her own unsophisticated mixture of prattle and impertinence--on
learning, immediately after this elaborate description of the gorgeous
doll of her choice, that “the name of this distinguished foreigner was
(on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka.”
THE BOY AT MUGBY.
Several _gamins_ have been contributed to our literature by
Dickens--quite as typical and quite as truthful in their way, each of
them, as Hugo's Gavroche. There is Jo the poor crossing-sweeper. There
is the immortal Dodger. There is his pal the facetious Charley Bates.
And there is that delightful boy at the end of “The Carol,” who conveys
such a world of wonder through his simple reply of “Why, Christmas Day!”
The boy who is “as big,” he says himself, as the prize turkey, and who
gets off at last quicker than a shot propelled by the steadiest hand at
a trigger! Scattered up and down the Boz fictions, there are abundant
specimens of a _genus_ that, in one instance, is actually termed by
the Humorist, “a town-made little boy”--this is in the memorable street
scene where Squeers hooks Smike by the coat-collar with the handle of
his umbrella. He is always especially great in his delineation of what
one might call the human cock-sparrows of London. Kit, at the outset of
his career, is another example; and Tom Scott yet another.
Sloppy carries us away into the suburbs, thereby taking us in a manner
off the stones, and otherwise represents in his own proper person,
buttons and all, less one of the dapper urchins we are now more
particularly referring to, than the shambling hobbledehoy. Even in
the unfinished story with which the Author's voluminous writings were
closed, there was portrayed an entirely novel specimen, one marked by
the most grotesque extravagance, in the shape of that impish malignant,
“the Deputy,” whose pastime at once and whole duty in life seemed to be
making a sort of vesper cock-shy of Durdles and his dinner-bundle.
Conspicuous among these comic boys of Dickens may be remembered one who,
instead of being introduced in any of the Novelist's larger works, from
the Pickwick Papers clown to Edwin Drood, interpolates himself, as
may be said, among one of the groups of Christmas stories, through
the medium of a shrill monologue. “The Boy at Mugby,” to wit, the one
exhilarated and exhilarating appreciate of the whole elaborate system of
Refreshmenting in this Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free, by which
he means to say Britannia.
Laconically, “I am the Boy at Mugby,” he announces. “That's about what
_I_ am.” His exact location he describes almost with the precision of
one giving latitude and longitude--explaining to a nicety where his
stand is taken. “Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby
Junction,” in the height of twenty-seven draughts [he's counted 'em,
he tells us parenthetically, as they brush the First Class, hair
twenty-seven ways], bounded on the nor'-west by the beer, and so on. He
himself, he frankly informs you--in the event of your ever presenting
yourself there before him at the counter, in quest of nourishment of any
kind, either liquid or solid--will seem not to hear you, and will appear
“in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium
composed of your head and body,” determined evidently not to serve you,
that is, as long as you can possibly bear it! “That's me!” cries the
Boy at Mugby, exultantly,--adding, with an intense relish for his
occupation, “what a delightful lark it is!” As for the eatables and
drinkables habitually set forth upon the counter, by what he generally
speaks of as the Refreshmenters, quoth the Boy at Mugby, in a _naif_
confidence, addressed to you in your capacity at once as applicant and
victim, “when you're telegraphed, you should see 'em begin to pitch the
stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sang-wiches under
the glass covers, and get out the--ha, ha!--the sherry--O, my eye, my
eye!--for your refreshment.” Once or twice in a way only, “The Boy at
Mugby” was introduced among the Readings, and then merely as a slight
stop-gap or interlude. Thoroughly enjoying the delivery of it himself,
and always provoking shouts of laughter whenever this colloquial morsel
was given, the Novelist seemed to be perfectly conscious himself that
it was altogether too slight and trivial of its kind, to be worthy of
anything like artistic consideration; that it was an “airy nothing” in
its way, to which it was scarcely deserving that he should give more
than name and local habitation.
Critically regarded, it had its inconsistencies too, both as a writing
and as a Reading. There was altogether too much precocity for a genuine
boy, in the nice discrimination with which the Boy at Mugby hit off the
contrasting nationalities. The foreigner, for example, who politely,
hat in hand, “beseeched Our Young Ladies, and our Missis,” for a “leetel
gloss hoif prarndee,” and who, after being repelled, on trying to help
himself, exclaims, “with hands clasped and shoulders riz: 'Ah! is it
possible this; that these disdaineous females are placed here by the
administration, not only to empoisen the voyagers, but to affront them!
Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave?
Or idiot?'” Hardly would a veritable boy, even an urchin so well “to the
fore” with his epoch, as the Boy at Mugby, depict so accurately, much
less take off, with a manner so entirely life-like, the astounded
foreigner, any more than he would the thoroughly wide-awake and gaily
derisive American. The latter he describes as alternately trying and
spitting out first the sawdust and then the--ha, ha!--the sherry, until
finally, on paying for both and consuming neither, he says, very loud,
to Our Missis, and very good tempered, “I tell Yew what 'tis ma'arm. I
la'af. Theer! I la'af, I Dew. I oughter ha' seen most things, for I hail
from the unlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled
right slick over the Limited, head on, through Jeerusalem and the East,
and likeways France and Italy, Europe, Old World, and I am now upon the
track to the Chief European Village; but such an Institution as Yew and
Yewer fixins, solid _and_ liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never
did see yet! And if I hain't found the eighth wonder of Monarchical
Creation, in finding Yew and Yewer fixins, solid and liquid, in a
country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra
Double Darned with a nip and frizzle to the innermost grit!
Wheerfore--Theer!--I la'af! I Dew, ma'arm. I la'af!” A calotype, or
rather, literally, a speaking likeness, so true to the life as that,
would be a trifle, we take it, beyond the mimetic powers and the keenly
observant faculties even of a Boy whose senses had been wakened up by
the twenty-seven cross draughts of the Refreshment Room at Mugby.
As to the fun made of the bandolining by Our Young Ladies, and of Our
Missis's lecture on Foreign Refreshmenting, and of Sniff's corkscrew
and his servile disposition, it is intentionally fooling, no doubt,
but it is--excellent fooling! As was admirably said in the number of
_Macmillan_ for January, 1871, by the anonymous writer of a Reminiscence
of the Amateur Theatricals at Tavistock House,--the remark following
immediately after Charles Dickens's version of the Ghost's Song in Henry
Fielding's burlesque of Tom Thumb,--“Nonsense, it may be said, all this;
but the nonsense of a great genius has always something of genius in
it.” Had not Swift his “little language” to Stella, to “Stellakins,” to
“roguish, impudent, pretty M. D.?” Than some of which little language,
quoth Thackeray, in commenting upon it, “I know of nothing more manly,
more tender, more exquisitely touching.” Again, had not Pope, in
conjunction with the Dean, his occasional unbending also as a _farceur_,
in the wilder freaks and oddities of Martinus Scriblerus? So was it
here with one who was beyond all doubt, more intensely a Humorist
than either, when he wrote or read such harmless sarcasms and innocent
whimsicalities, as those alternately underlying, and overlaying the
boyish fun of this juvenile Refreshmenter at Mugby Junction.
DOCTOR MARIGOLD.
Already mention has been made of the extraordinary care lavished, as
a general rule, by the Novelist upon the preparation of these Readings
before they were, each in turn, submitted for the first time to public
scrutiny. A strikingly illustrative instance of this may be here
particularised. It occurred upon the occasion of a purely experimental
Reading of “Doctor Marigold,” which came off privately, on the evening
of the 18th of March, 1866, in the drawing-room of Charles Dickens's
then town residence, in Southwick Place, Tyburnia. Including, among
those present, the members of his own home circle, his entire audience
numbered no more than ten persons altogether. Four, at any rate, of that
party may be here identified, each of whom doubtless still bears the
occasion referred to vividly in his remembrance,--Robert Browning the
poet, Charles Fechter the actor, Wilkie Collins the novelist, and John
Forster the historian of the Commonwealth. Even in private, Dickens had
never Read “Doctor Marigold” until that evening. Often as he Read it
afterwards, he never Read it with a more contagious air of exhilaration.
He hardly ever, in fact, gave one of his almost wholly comic and but
incidentally pathetic Readings _so_ effectively. In every sentence there
was a zest or relish that was irresistible. The volubility of the “poor
chap in the sleeved-waistcoat” sped the Reading on with a rapidity quite
beyond anticipation, when the time, which had been carefully marked at
the commencement of the Reading, came to be notified at its conclusion.
That the merest first rehearsal should have run off thus glibly seemed
just simply incomprehensible. With the sense of this surprise still
fresh upon us, the tentative Reading being at the time only a
few seconds completed, everything was explained, however, by a
half-whispered remark made, to the present writer, in passing, by the
Novelist--made by him half-weariedly, yet half-laughingly--“There! If
I have gone through that already to myself once, I have gone through it
two--hundred--times!” It was not lightly or carelessly therefore, as
may now be seen, that Charles Dickens, in his later capacity--not
pen-in-hand, or through green monthly numbers, but standing at a
reading-desk upon a public platform--undertook the office of a popular
entertainer.
Resolved throughout his career as a Reader to acquit himself of those
newly-assumed responsibilities to the utmost of his powers, to the
fullest extent of his capabilities, both physical and intellectual, he
applied his energies to the task, with a zeal that, it is impossible not
to recognise now, amounted in the end to nothing less than (literally)
self-sacrifice. But for the devotion of his energies thus unstintingly
to the laborious task upon which he had adventured--a task involving in
its accomplishment an enormous amount of rapid travelling by railway,
keeping him for months together, besides, in one ceaseless whirl of
bodily and mental excitement--his splendid constitution, sustained and
strengthened as it was by his wholesome enjoyment of out-of-door life,
and his habitual indulgence in bathing and pedes-trianism, gave him
every reasonable hope of reaching the age of an octogenarian.
Bearing in mind in addition to the wear-and-tear of the Readings in
England and America, the nervous shock of that terrible railway accident
at Staplehurst, on the 9th of June, 1865, the lamentable catastrophe of
exactly five years afterwards to the very day, that of the 9th of June,
1870, becomes readily comprehensible. Because of his absorption in his
task, however, all through, he was unconscious for the most part of the
wasting influence of his labours, or, if he was so at all towards the
close of his career, he was so, even then, only fitfully and at the
rarest intervals. Precisely in the same way, it may be remarked, in
regard to those who watched his whole course as a Reader, that so facile
and so pleasureable to himself, as well as to them, appeared to be the
novel avocation which had come of late years to be alternated with
his more accustomed toil as an author, that it rendered even the most
observant amongst them unconscious in their turn of the disastrously
exhausting influence of this unnatural blending together of two
professions. A remorseful sense of this comes back upon us now, when it
is all too late, in our remembrance of that remark made by the Novelist
immediately after the Private Reading of “Doctor Marigold,” a remark
then regarded as simply curious and interesting, but now having about it
an almost painful significance. Never was work more thoroughly or more
conscientiously done, from first to last, than in the instance of these
Readings.
In the minute elaboration of the care with which they were prepared, in
the vivacity with which they were one and all of them delivered, in the
punctuality with which, whirled like a shuttle in a loom, to and fro,
hither and thither, through all parts of the United Kingdom and of the
United States, the Reader kept, link by link, an immensely-lengthened
chain of appointments, until the first link was broken suddenly at
Preston--one can recognise at length the full force of those simple
words uttered by him upon the occasion of his Farewell Reading, where
he spoke of himself as “a faithful servant of the public, always imbued
with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best.”
Among the many radiant illustrations that have been preserved of how
thoroughly he did his best, not the least brilliant in its way was this
eminently characteristic Reading of “Doctor Mari-gold.”
All through it, from the very beginning down to the very end of
his Confidences, the Cheap Jack, in his belcher neckcloth and his
sleeved-waistcoat with the mother-o'-pearl buttons, was there talking
to us, as only he could talk to us, from the foot-board of his cart. He
remained thus before us from his first mention of his own father having
always consistently called himself Willum to the moment when little
Sophy--the third little Sophy--comes clambering up the steps, and
reveals that she at least is not deaf and dumb by crying out to him,
“Grandfather!” As for the patter of Doctor Marigold, it is among the
humorous revelations of imaginative literature. Hear him when he is
perhaps the best worth listening to, when he is in his true rostrum,
when his bluchers are on his native foot-board, and his name is, more
intensely than ever, Doctor Marigold! Don't we all remember him there,
for example, on a Saturday night in the market-place--“Here's a pair of
razors that'll shave you closer than the board of guardians; here's a
flat-iron worth its weight in gold; here's a frying-pan artificially
flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got
for the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there
you are replete with animal food; here's a genuine chronometer-watch, in
such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when you
come home late from a social meeting, and rouse your wife and family
and save up your knocker for the postman; and here's half a dozen
dinner-plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm the baby when
it's fractious. Stop! I'll throw you in another article, and I'll give
you that, and it's a rolling-pin; and if the baby can only get it well
into it's mouth when its teeth is coming, and rub the gums once with
it, they'll come through double in a fit of laughter equal to being
tickled.” And so on, ringing the changes on a thousand wonderful
conceits and whimsicalities that come tumbling out one after another in
inexhaustible sequence and with uninterrupted volubility.
The very Prince of Cheap Jacks, surely, is this Doctor Marigold! And,
more than that, one who makes good his claim to the title of wit,
humorist, satirist, philanthropist, and philosopher.
As for his philosophic contentment, what can equal that as implied in
his summing up of his own humble surroundings? “A roomy cart, with the
large goods hung outside, and the bed slung underneath it when on the
road; an iron-pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold weather, a
chimney for the smoke, a hanging-shelf and a cupboard, a dog and a
horse. What more do you want? You draw off on a bit of turf in a green
lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse and turn him grazing,
you light your fire upon the ashes of the last visitors, you cook your
stew, and you wouldn't call the Emperor of France your father.”
As for his wit, hear him describe--“What? Why, I'll tell you! It's made
of fine gold, and it's not broke, though there's a hole in the middle of
it, and it's stronger than any fetter that was ever forged. What else
is it? I'll tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold wrapped in a
silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the
ever-beautiful old lady in Threadneedle Street, London city. I wouldn't
tell you so, if I hadn't the paper to show, or you mightn't believe it
even of me. Now, what else is it? It's a man-trap, and a hand-cuff, the
parish stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all in one. Now, what else
is it? It's a wedding-ring!”
As for something far better than any mere taste of his skill as a
satirist, see the whole of his delectable take off--in contradistinction
to himself, the itinerant Cheap Jack--of the political Dear Jack in the
public marketplace.
As for his philanthropy, it is unobtrusively proclaimed by the drift
of his whole narrative, and especially by two or three among the more
remarkable of its closing incidents.
As for his powers as a humorist, they may be found there _passim_, being
scattered broadcast all through his autobiographic recollections.
To those recollections are we not indebted for a whole gallery of
inimitable delineations? The Cheap Jack's very dog, for instance, who
had taught himself out of his own head to growl at any person in the
crowd that bid as low as sixpence! Or Pickleson the giant, with a
little head and less in it. Of whom, observes Doctor Marigold, “He was
a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his
extremities.” About whom, when a sixpence is given to him by Doctor
Marigold, the latter remarks in a preposterous parenthesis, “(for he
was kept as short as he was long!)” As for Dickens's high falsetto, when
speaking in the person of this same Pickleson, with a voice that, as
Doctor Marigold says, seemed to come from his eyebrows, it was only just
a shade more excruciatingly ridiculous than his guttural and growling
objurgations in the character of the giant's proprietor, the fe-rocious
Mim.
With all his modest appetite for the simpler pleasures of existence,
Doctor Marigold betrays in one instance, by the way, the taste of a
_gourmet_. “I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one,” he says, “with
two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in:”
adding, with a fine touch of nature drawn from experience, “It's a
pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two
bottom buttons of his waistcoat.”
Incomparably the finest portion of all this wonderfully original sketch
of Doctor Marigold, both in the Writing and in the Reading, was that in
which the poor Cheap Jack is represented as going through his customary
patter on the foot-board with his poor little Sophy--the first of the
three Sophies, his own by birth, and not simply by adoption--the while
she is slowly dying on his shoulder. Thackeray was right when he said of
the humour of Dickens, “It is a mixture of love and wit.” Laughter and
tears, with him, lay very near--speaking of him as an author, we may say
by preference--lie very near indeed together. It is in those passages
in which they come in astonishingly rapid alternation, and at moments
almost simultaneously, that he is invariably at his very best. The
incident here alluded to is one of these more exquisite descriptions,
and it was one, that, by voice and look and manner, he himself most
exquisitely delineated. When the poor Cheap Jack, with Sophy holding
round his neck, steps out from the shelter of the cart upon the
foot-board, and the waiting crowd all set up a laugh on seeing
them--“one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) making a bid
'tuppence for her!'”--Doctor Marigold begins his tragi-comic allocution.
It is sown thickly all through with the most whimsical of his conceits,
but it is interrupted also here and there with infinitely pathetic
touches of tenderness.
Fragmentary illustrations of either would but dimly shadow forth,
instead of clearly elucidating, what is here meant in the recollection
of those who can still recall this Reading of “Doctor Marigold” to
their remembrance. Those who never heard it as it actually fell from the
Author's lips, by turning to the original sketch, and running through
that particular portion of it to themselves, may more readily conjecture
than by the aid of mere piecemeal quotation, all that the writer of
those riant and tearful pages would be capable of accomplishing by its
utterance, bringing to its delivery, as he could, so many of the rarer
gifts of genius, and so many also of the rarest accomplishments of art.
SIKES AND NANCY.
On Saturday, the 14th of November, 1868, there were assembled together
in front of the great platform in St. James's Hall, Piccadilly, as fit
audience, but few, somewhere about fifty of the critics, artists, and
literary men of London. A card of invitation, stamped with a facsimile
of the well-known autograph of Charles Dickens, and countersigned by
the Messrs. Chappell and Company, had, with a witty significance, bidden
them to that rendezvous for a “Private Trial of the Murder in Oliver
Twist.” The occasion, in point of fact, was a sort of experimental
rehearsal of the last and most daring of all these vividly dramatic
Readings by the popular Novelist.