THE LATER NOVELISTS AS SOCIAL REFORMERS.
Bulwer. Changes in Writing. Dickens's Novels. American Notes. His
Varied Powers. Second Visit to America. Thackeray. Vanity Fair. Henry
Esmond. The Newcomes. The Georges. Estimate of his Powers.
The great feature in the realm of prose fiction, since the appearance of
the works of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, had been the Waverley
novels of Sir Walter Scott; but these apart, the prose romance had not
played a brilliant part in literature until the appearance of Bulwer, who
began, in his youth, to write novels in the old style; but who underwent
several organic changes in modes of thought and expression, and at last
stood confessed as the founder of a new school.
BULWER.--Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer was a younger son of General
Bulwer of Heydon Hall, Norfolk, England. He was born, in 1806, to wealth
and ease, but was early and always a student. Educated at Cambridge, he
took the Chancellor's prize for a poem on _Sculpture_. His first public
effort was a volume of fugitive poems, called _Weeds and Wild Flowers_, of
more promise than merit. In 1827 he published _Falkland_, and very soon
after _Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman_. The first was not
received favorably; but _Pelham_ was at once popular, neither for the
skill of the plot nor for its morality, but because it describes the
character, dissipations, and good qualities of a fashionable young man,
which are always interesting to an English public. Those novels that
immediately followed are so alike in general features that they may be
called the Pelham series. Of these the principal are _The Disowned_,
_Devereux_, and _Paul Clifford_--the last of which throws a sentimental,
rosy light upon the person and adventures of a highwayman; but it is too
unreal to have done as much injury as the _Pirate's Own Book_, or the
_Adventures of Jack Sheppard_. It may be safely asserted that _Paul
Clifford_ never produced a highwayman. Of the same period is _Eugene
Aram_, founded upon the true story of a scholar who was a murderer--a
painful subject powerfully handled.
In 1831 Bulwer entered Parliament, and seems to have at once commenced a
new life. With his public duties he combined severe historical study; and
the novels he now produced gave witness of his riper and better learning.
Chief among these were _Rienzi_, and _The Last Days of Pompeii_. The
former is based upon the history of that wonderful and unfortunate man
who, in the fourteenth century, attempted to restore the Roman republic,
and govern it like an ancient tribune. The latter is a noble production:
he has caught the very spirit of the day in which Pompeii was submerged by
the lava-flood; his characters are masterpieces of historic delineation;
he handles like an adept the conflicting theologies, Christian, Roman, and
Egyptian; and his natural scenes--Vesuvius in fury, the Bay of Naples in
the lurid light, the crowded amphitheatre, and the terror which fell on
man and beast, gladiator and lion--are _chef-d'œuvres_ of Romantic art.
CHANGES IN WRITING.--For a time he edited _The New Monthly Magazine_, and
a change came over the spirit of his novels. This was first noticed in his
_Ernest Maltravers_, and the sequel, _Alice, or the Mysteries_, which are
marked by sentimental passion and mystic ideas. In _Night and Morning_ he
is still mysterious: a blind fate seems to preside over his characters,
robbing the good of its free merit and condoning the evil.
In 1838 he was made a baronet. His versatile pen now turned to the drama;
and although he produced nothing great, his _Lady of Lyons_, _Richelieu_,
_Money_, and _The Sea Captain_ have always since been favorites upon the
stage, subsidizing the talents of actors like Macready, Kean, and Edwin
Booth.
We must now chronicle another change, from the mystic to the supernatural,
as displayed in _Zanoni_ and _Lucretia_, and especially in _A Strange
Story_, which is the strangest of all. It was at the same period that he
wrote _The Last of the Barons_, or the story of Warwick the king-maker,
and _Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings_. Both are valuable to the
student of English history as presenting the fruits of his own historic
research.
The last and most decided, and, we may add, most beneficial, change in
Bulwer as a writer, was manifested in his publication of the _Caxtons_,
the chief merit of which is as an usher of the novels which were to
follow. Pisistratus Caxton is the modern Tristram Shandy, and becomes the
putative editor of the later novels. First of these is _My Novel, or
Varieties of English Life_. It is an admirable work: it inculcates a
better morality, and a sense of Christian duty, at which Pelham would have
laughed in scorn. Like it, but inferior to it, is _What Will He do with
It?_ which has an interesting plot, an elevated style, and a rare human
sympathy.
Among other works, which we cannot mention, he wrote _The New Timon_, and
_King Arthur_, in poetry, and a prose history entitled _Athens, its Rise
and Fall_.
Without the highest genius, but with uncommon scholarship and great
versatility, Bulwer has used the materials of many kinds lying about him,
to make marvellous mosaics, which imitate very closely the finest efforts
of word-painting of the great geniuses of prose fiction.
CHARLES DICKENS.--Another remarkable development of the age was the use
of prose fiction, instead of poetry, as the vehicle of satire in the cause
of social reform. The world consents readily to be amused, and it likes to
be amused at the expense of others; but it soon tires of what is simply
amusing or satirical unless some noble purpose be disclosed. The novels of
former periods had interested by the creation of character and scenes; and
there had been numerous satires prompted by personal pique. It is the
glory of this latest age that it demands what shall so satirize the evil
around it in men, in classes, in public institutions, that the evil shall
recoil before the attack, and eventually disappear. Chief among such
reformers are Dickens and Thackeray.
Charles Dickens, the prince of modern novelists, was born at Landsport,
Portsmouth, England, in 1812. His father was at the time a clerk in the
Pay Department of the Navy, but afterwards became a reporter of debates in
Parliament. After a very hard early life and an only tolerable education,
young Dickens made some progress in the study of law; but soon undertook
his father's business as reporter, in which he struggled as he has made
David Copperfield to do in becoming proficient.
His first systematic literary efforts were as a daily writer and reporter
for _The True Sun_; he then contributed his sketches of life and
character, drawn from personal observation, to the _Morning Chronicle_:
these were an earnest of his future powers. They were collected as
_Sketches by Boz_, in two volumes, and published in 1836.
PICKWICK.--In 1837 he was asked by a publisher to prepare a series of
comic sketches of cockney sportsmen, to illustrate, as well as to be
illustrated by, etchings by Seymour. This yoking of two geniuses was a
trammel to both; but the suicide of Seymour dissolved the connection, and
Dickens had free play to produce the _Pickwick Papers_, by Boz, which were
illustrated, as he proceeded, by H. K. Browne (Phiz). The work met and
has retained an unprecedented popularity. Caricature as it was, it
caricatured real, existent oddities; everything was probable; the humor
was sympathetic if farcical, the assertion of humanity bold, and the
philosophy of universal application. He had touched our common nature in
all ranks and conditions; he had exhibited men and women of all types; he
had exposed the tricks of politics and the absurdity of elections; the
snobs of society were severely handled. He was the censor of law courts,
the exposer of swindlers, the dread of cockneys, the friend of rustics and
of the poor; and he has displayed in the principal character, that of the
immortal Pickwick, the power of a generous, simple-hearted, easily
deceived, but always philanthropic man, who comes through all his trials
without bating a jot of his love for humanity and his faith in human
nature. But the master-work of his plastic hand was Sam Weller, whose wit
and wisdom pervaded both hemispheres, and is as potent to excite laughter
to-day as at the first.
In this work he began that assault, not so much on shams as upon
prominent, unblushing evil, which he carried on in some form or other in
all his later works; and which was to make him prominent among the
reformers and benefactors of his age. He was at once famous, and his pen
was in demand to amuse the idle and to aid the philanthropic.
NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.--The _Pickwick Papers_ were in their intention a series
of sketches somewhat desultory and loosely connected. His next work was
_Nicholas Nickleby_, a complete story, in which he was entirely
successful. Wonderful in the variety and reality of his characters, his
powerful satire was here principally directed against the private
boarding-schools in England, where unloved children, exiled and forgotten,
were ill fed, scantily clothed, untaught, and beaten. Do-the-boys' Hall
was his type, and many a school prison under that name was fearfully
exposed and scourged. The people read with wonder and applause; these
haunts of cruelty were scrutinized, some of them were suppressed; and
since Nicholas Nickleby appeared no such school can live, because Squeers
and Smike are on every lip, and punishment awaits the tyrant.
Our scope will not permit a review of his numerous novels. In _Oliver
Twist_ he denounces the parish system in its care of orphans, and throws a
Drummond light upon the haunts of crime in London.
_The Old Curiosity Shop_ exposes the mania of gaming, and seems to have
been a device for presenting the pathetic pictures of _Little Nell_ and
her grandfather, the wonderful and rapid learning of the marchioness, and
the uncommon vitality of Mr. Richard Swiveller; and also the compound of
will and hideousness in Quilp.
He affected to find in the receptacle of Master Humphrey's clock, his
_Barnaby Rudge_, a very dramatic picture of the great riot incited by Lord
George Gordon in 1780, which, in its gathering, its fury, and its easy
dispersion, was not unlike that of Wat Tyler. Dickens's delineations are
eminently historic, and present a better notion of the period than the
general history itself.
AMERICAN NOTES.--In 1841 Dickens visited America, where he was received by
the public with great enthusiasm, and annoyed, as the author of his
biography says, by many individuals. On his return to England, he produced
his _American Notes for General Circulation_. They were sarcastic,
superficial, and depreciatory, and astonished many whose hospitalities he
had received. But, in 1843, he published _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which
American peculiarities are treated with the broadest caricature. The
_Notes_ might have been forgiven; but the novel excited a great and just
anger in America. His statements were not true; his pictures were not
just; his prejudice led him to malign a people who had received him with
a foolish hospitality. He had eaten and drunk at the hands of the men whom
he abused, and his character suffered more than that of his intended
victims. In taking a few foibles for his caricature, he had left our
merits untold, and had been guilty of the implication that we had none,
although he knew that there were as elegant gentlemen, as refined ladies,
and as cultivated society in America as the best in England. But a truce
to reproaches; he has been fully forgiven.
His next novel was _Dombey and Son_, in which he attacks British pomp and
pride of state in the haughty merchant. It is full of character and of
pathos. Every one knows, as if they had appeared among us, the proud and
rigid Dombey, J. B. the sly, the unhappy Floy, the exquisite Toots, the
inimitable Nipper, Sol Gills the simple, and Captain Cuttle with his hook
and his notes.
This was followed by _David Copperfield_, which is, to some extent, an
autobiography describing the struggles of his youth, his experience in
acquiring short-hand to become a reporter, and other vicissitudes of his
own life. In it there is an attack upon the system of model prisons; but
the chief interest is found in his wonderful portraitures of varied and
opposite characters: the Peggottys, Steerforth, the inimitable Micawber,
Betsy Trotwood; Agnes, the lovely and lovable; Mr. Dick, with such noble
method in his madness; Dora, the child-wife; the simple Traddles, and
Uriah Heep, the 'umble intriguer and villain.
_Bleak House_ is a tremendous onslaught upon the Chancery system, and is
said to have caused a modification of it; his knowledge of law gave him
the power of an expert in detailing and dissecting its enormities.
_Little Dorrit_ presents the heartlessness of society, and is besides a
full and fearful picture of the system of imprisonment for debt. For
variety, power, and pathos, it is one of his best efforts.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ is a gloomy but vivid story of the French
Revolution, which has by no means the popularity of his other works.
In _Hard Times_, a shorter story, he has shown the evil consequences of a
hard, statistical, cramming education, in which the sympathies are
repressed, and the mind made a practical machine. The failure of Gradgrind
has warned many a parent from imitating him.
_Great Expectations_ failed to fulfil the promise of the name; but Joe
Gargery is as original a character as any he had drawn.
His last completed story is _Our Mutual Friend_, which, although unequal
to his best novels, has still original characters and striking scenes. The
rage for rising in the social scale ruins the Veneerings, and Podsnappery
is a well-chosen name far the heartless dogmatism which rules in English
society.
Besides these splendid works, we must mention the delight he has given,
and the good he has done in expanding individual and public charity, by
his exquisite Christmas stories, of which _The Chimes_, _The Christmas
Carol_, and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ are the best.
His dramatic power has been fully illustrated by the ready adaptations of
his novels to the stage; they are, indeed, in scenes, personages, costume,
and interlocution, dramas in all except the form; and he himself was an
admirable actor.
HIS VARIED POWERS.--His tenderness is touching, and his pathos at once
excites our sympathy. He does not tell us to feel or to weep, but he shows
us scenes like those in the life of Smike, and in the sufferings and death
of Little Nell, which so simply appeal to the heart that we are for the
time forgetful of the wand which conjures them before us.
Dickens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is
the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of class pretension and
oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of
those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear assertions of
Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good
for its own sake,--in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives
herself. His faults are few and venial. His merry life smacks too much of
the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the
self-appointed ministers of the gospel, but he is not careful to draw
contrasted pictures of good pastors. His opinion seems to be based upon a
human perfectibility. But for rare pictures of real life he has never been
surpassed; and he has instructed an age, concerning itself, wisely,
originally, and usefully. He has the simplicity of Goldsmith, and the
truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett, without a spice of
sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to
its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor. He lived for years
separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and, during his
later years at Gadshill, twenty miles from London, to avoid the
dissipations and draughts upon his time in that city.
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA.--In 1868 he again visited America, to read
portions of his own works. He was well received by the public; but society
had learned its lesson on his former visit, and he was not overwhelmed
with a hospitality he had so signally failed to appreciate. And if we had
learned better, he had vastly improved; the genius had become a gentleman.
His readings were a great pecuniary success, and at their close he made an
amend which was graceful and proper; so that when he departed from our
shores his former errors were fully condoned, and he left an admiring
hemisphere behind him.
In the glow of health, and while writing, in serial numbers, a very
promising novel entitled _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, he was struck by
apoplexy, in June, 1870, and in a few hours was dead. England has hardly
experienced a greater loss. All classes of men mourned when he was buried
in Westminster Abbey, in the poets' corner, among illustrious writers,--a
prose-poet, none of whom has a larger fame than he; a historian of his
time of greater value to society than any who distinctively bear the
title. His characters are drawn from life; his own experience is found in
_Nicholas Nickleby_ and _David Copperfield_; _Micawber_ is a caricature of
his own father. _Traddles_ is said to represent his friend Talfourd.
_Skimpole_ is supposed to be an original likeness of Leigh Hunt, and
William and Daniel Grant, of Manchester, were the originals of the
_Brothers Cheeryble_.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.--Dickens gives us real characters in the garb
of fiction; but Thackeray uses fiction as the vehicle of social
philosophy. Great name, second only to Dickens; he is not a story-teller,
but an eastern Cadi administering justice in the form of apologue. Dickens
is eminently dramatic; Thackeray has nothing dramatic, neither scene nor
personage. He is Democritus the laughing philosopher, or Jupiter the
thunderer; he arraigns vice, pats virtue on the shoulder, shouts for
muscular Christianity, uncovers shams,--his personages are only names.
Dickens describes individuals; Thackeray only classes: his men and women
are representatives, and, with but few exceptions, they excite our sense
of justice, but not our sympathy; the principal exception is _Colonel
Newcome_, a real individual creation upon whom Thackeray exhausted his
genius, and he stands alone.
Thackeray was born in Calcutta, of an old Yorkshire family, in 1811. His
father was in the civil service, and he was sent home, when a child of
seven, for his education at the Charter House in London. Thence he was
entered at Cambridge, but left without being graduated. An easy fortune of
£20,000 led him to take life easily; he studied painting with somewhat of
the desultory devotion he has ascribed to Clive Newcome, and, like that
worthy, travelled on the Continent. Partly by unsuccessful investments,
and partly by careless living, his means were spent, and he took up
writing as a profession. The comic was his forte, and his early pieces,
written under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Fitzmarsh and George Fitz
Boodle, are broadly humorous, but by no means in his later finished style.
_The Great Hoggarty Diamond_ (1841) did not disclose his full powers.
In 1841, _Punch_, a weekly comic illustrated sheet, was begun, and it
opened to Thackeray a field which exactly suited him. Short scraps of
comedy, slightly connected sketches, and the weekly tale of brick, chimed
with his humor, and made him at once a favorite. The best of these serial
contributions were _The Snob Papers_: they are as fine specimens of
humorous satire as exist in the language. But these would not have made
him famous, as they did not disclose his power as a novelist.
VANITY FAIR.--This was done by his _Vanity Fair_, which was published, in
monthly numbers, between 1846 and 1848. It was at once popular, and is the
most artistic of all his works. He called it a novel without a hero, and
he is right; the mind repudiates all aspirants for the post, and settles
upon poor Major Sugar-Plums as the best man in it. He could not have said
_without a heroine_, for does not the world since ring with the fame of
Becky Sharpe, the cleverest and wickedest little woman in England? The
virtuous reader even is sorry that Becky must come to grief, as, with a
proper respect to morality, the novelist makes her.
Never had the Vanity Fair of European society received so scathing a
dissection; and its author was immediately recognized as one of the
greatest living satirists and novelists. If he adheres more to the old
school of Fielding, who was his model, in his plots and handling of the
story, he was evidently original in his satire.
In 1847, upon the completion of this work, he began his _History of
Pendennis_, in serial numbers, in which he presents the hero, Arthur
Pendennis, as an average youth of the day, full of faults and foibles, but
likewise generous and repentant. Here he enlists the sympathies which one
never feels for perfection; and here, too, he portrays female loveliness
and endurance in his Mrs. Pendennis and Laura. Arthur is a purer Tom Jones
and Laura a superior Sophia Western.
In 1851 he gave a course of lectures, repeated in America the next year,
on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." There was no one
better fitted to write such a course; he felt with them and was of them.
But if this enabled him to present them sympathetically, it also caused
him to overrate them, and in some cases to descend to the standpoint of
their own partial views. He is wrong in his estimate of Swift, and too
eulogistic of Addison; but he is thoroughly English in both.
HENRY ESMOND.--The study of history necessary to prepare these led to his
undertaking a novel on the time of Queen Anne, entitled _The History of
Henry Esmond, Esq., written by himself_. His appreciation of the age is
excellent; but the book, leaving for the most part the comic field in
which he was most at home, is drier and less read than his others; as an
historical presentation a great success, with rare touches of pathos; as a
work of fiction not equal to his other stories. The comic muse assumes a
tragic, or at least a very sombre, dress. We have a portraiture of Queen
Anne in her last days, and a sad picture of him who, to the Protestant
succession, was the pretender, and to the hopeful Jacobites, James III.
The character of Marlborough is given with but little of what was really
meritorious in that great captain.
His novel of _Pendennis_ gave him, after the manner of Bulwer's _Caxton_,
an editor in _Arthur Pendennis_, who presents us _The Newcomes, Memoirs of
a Most Respectable Family_, which he published in a serial form,
completing it in 1855.
THE NEWCOMES.--In that work we have the richest culture, the finest
satire, and the rarest social philosophy. The character--the hero by
pre-eminence--is Colonel Newcome, a nobleman of nature's creation,
generous, simple, a yearningly affectionate father, a friend to all the
poor and afflicted, one of the best men ever delineated by a novelist; few
hearts are so hard as not to be touched by the story of his death in his
final retirement at the Charter House. When, surrounded by weeping
friends, he heard the bell, "a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face,
and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said 'Adsum,' and fell
back: it was the word we used at school when names were called; and, lo!
he, whose heart was that of a little child, had answered to his name, and
stood in the presence of the Master."
THE GEORGES.--While he was writing _The Newcomes_, he had prepared a
course of four lectures on the _Four Georges_, kings of England, with
which he made his second visit to the United States, and which he
delivered in the principal cities, to make a fund for his daughters and
for his old age. It was entirely successful, and he afterwards read them
in England and Scotland. They are very valuable historically, as they give
us the truth with regard to men whose reigns were brilliant and on the
whole prosperous, but who themselves, with the exception of the third of
the name, were as bad men as ever wore crowns. George III. was continent
and honest, but a maniac, and Mr. Thackeray has treated him with due
forbearance and eulogy.
In 1857, Mr. Thackeray was a candidate for Parliament from Oxford, but
was defeated by a small majority; his conduct in the election was so
magnanimous, that his defeat may be regarded as an advantage to his
reputation.
In the same year he began _The Virginians_, which may be considered his
failure; it is historically a continuation of _Esmond_,--some of the
English characters, the Esmonds in Virginia, being the same as in that
work. But his presentation and estimate of Washington are a caricature,
and his sketch of General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, is tame and
untrue to life. His descriptions of Virginia colonial life are unlike the
reality; but where he is on his own ground, describing English scenes and
customs in that day, he is more successful. To paint historical characters
is beyond the power of his pencil, and his Doctor Johnson is not the man
whom Boswell has so successfully presented.
In 1860 he originated the _Cornhill Magazine_, to which his name gave
unusual popularity: it attained a circulation of one hundred
thousand--unprecedented in England. In that he published _Lovel the
Widower_, which was not much liked, and a charming reproduction of the
Newcomes,--for it is nothing more,--entitled _The Adventures of Philip on
His Way through the World_. Philip is a more than average Englishman, with
a wicked father and rather a stupid wife; but "the little sister" is a
star--there is no finer character in any of his works. _Philip_, in spite
of its likeness to _The Newcomes_, is a delightful book.
With an achieved fame, a high position, a home which he had just built at
Kensington, a large income, he seemed to have before him as prosperous an
old age as any one could desire, when, such are the mysteries of
Providence, he was found dead in his room on the morning of December 24,
1863.
ESTIMATE OF HIS POWERS.--Thackeray's excellences are manifest: he was the
master of idiomatic English, a great moralist and reformer, and the king
of satire, all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had
a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix
prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he
played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the
words of Miss Bronté, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the
very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the
warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in
the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, but not a novelist; he
could not create character. His dramatic persons do not speak for
themselves; he tells us what they are and do. His mission seems to have
been to arraign and demolish evil rather than to applaud good, and thus he
enlists our sinless anger as crusaders rather than our sympathy as
philanthropists. In Dickens we are sometimes disposed to skip a little, in
our ardor, to follow the plot and find the dénouement. In Thackeray we
read every word, for it is the philosophy we want; the plot and personages
are secondary, as indeed he considered them; for he often tells us, in the
time of greatest depression of his hero, that it will all come out right
at the end,--that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income,
while the poor soul is wrestling with the _res augusta domi_. Dickens and
Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former
philosophizing more in his _Little Dorrit_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, and
the latter attempting more of the descriptive in _The Newcomes_ and
_Philip_. Of minor pieces we may mention his _Rebecca_ and _Rowena_, and
his _Kickleburys on the Rhine_; his _Essay on Thunder_ and _Small Beer_;
his _Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, in 1846, and his
published collection of smaller sketches called _The Roundabout Papers_.
That Thackeray was fully conscious of the dignity of his functions may be
gathered from his own words in _Henry Esmond_. "I would have history
familiar rather than heroic, and think Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding.
[and, we may add, Mr. Thackeray,] will give our children a much better
idea of the manners of that age in England than the _Court Gazette_ and
the newspapers which we get thence." At his death he left an unfinished
novel, entitled _Dennis Duval_. A gifted daughter, who was his kind
amanuensis. Miss ANNE E. THACKERAY, has written several interesting tales,
among which are _The Village on the Cliff_ and _The Story of Elizabeth_.