production of _Dombey and Son_ (begun in 1846) and _David Copperfield_
(begun in 1849). From many points of view they may be regarded as his
masterpieces, where his art is best seen in depicting character and
constructing a story, though the infectious gaiety of the earlier novels
may at times be missed. Dickens's insight into human nature had ripened,
and he had learnt to group his lesser figures and episodes more
skilfully round the central plot. And _David Copperfield_ has the
peculiar interest which attaches to those works where we seem to read
the story of the author's own life. Evidently we have memories here of
his childhood, of his school-days and his apprenticeship to work, and of
the first gleams of success which met him in life. It is generally
assumed that the book throws light on his own family relations; but it
would be rash to argue confidently about this, as the inventive impulse
was so strong in him. At least we may say that it is the book most
necessary for a student who wishes to understand Dickens himself and his
outlook on the world.
Also _David Copperfield_ may be regarded as the central point and the
culmination of Dickens's career as a novelist. Before it, and again
after it, he had a spell of about fifteen years' steady work at novel
writing, and no one would question that the first spell was productive
of the better work. _Bleak House_, _Hard Times_, _Little Dorrit_, _Our
Mutual Friend_ all show evidence of greater effort and are less happy in
their effect. No man could live the life that Dickens had lived for
fifteen years and not show some signs of exhaustion; the wonder is that
his creative power continued at all. He was capable of brilliant
successes yet. _The Tale of Two Cities_ is among the most thrilling of
his stories, while _Edwin Drood_ and parts of _Great Expectations_ show
as fine imagination and character drawing as anything which he wrote
before 1850; but there is no injustice in drawing a broad distinction
between the two parts of his career.
His home during the most fertile period of his activity was in
Devonshire Terrace, near Regent's Park, a house with a garden of
considerable size. Here he was within reach of his best friends, who
were drawn from all the liberal professions represented in London. First
among them stands John Forster, lawyer, journalist, and author, his
adviser and subsequently his biographer, the friend of Robert Browning,
a man with a genius for friendship, unselfish, loyal, discreet and wise
in counsel. Next came the artists Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, the
actor Macready, Talfourd, lawyer and poet, Douglas Jerrold and Mark
Lemon, the two famous contributors to _Punch_, and some fellow
novelists, of whom Harrison Ainsworth was conspicuous in the earlier
group and Wilkie Collins in later years. Less frequent visitors were
Carlyle, Thackeray, and Bulwer Lytton, but they too were proud to
welcome Dickens among their friends. With some of these he would walk,
ride, or dine, go to the theatre or travel in the provinces and in
foreign countries. His biographer loves to recall the Dickens Dinners,
organized to celebrate the issue of a new book, when songs and speeches
were added to good cheer and when 'we all in the greatest good-humour
glorified each other'. Dickens always retained the English taste for a
good dinner and was frankly fond of applause, and there was no element
of exclusive priggishness about the cordial admiration which these
friends felt for one another and their peculiar enthusiasm for Dickens
and his books. Around him the enthusiasm gathered, and few men have
better deserved it.
When he was writing he needed quiet and worked with complete
concentration; and when he had earned some leisure he loved to spend it
in violent physical exercise. He would suddenly call on Forster to come
out for a long ride on horseback to occupy the middle of the day; and
his diligent friend, unable to resist the lure of such company, would
throw his own work to the winds and come. Till near the end of his life
Dickens clung to these habits, thinking nothing of a walk of from twenty
to thirty miles; and there seems reason to believe that by constant
over-exertion he sapped his strength and shortened his life. But
lameness in one foot, the result of an illness early in 1865,
handicapped him severely at times; and in the same year he sustained a
rude shock in a railway accident where his nerves were upset by what he
witnessed in helping the injured. He ought to have acquired the wisdom
of the middle-aged man, and to have taken things more easily, but with
him it was impossible to be doing nothing; physical and mental activity
succeeded one another and often went together with a high state of
nervous tension.
This love of excitement sometimes took forms which modern taste would
call excessive and unwholesome. His attendance at the public execution
of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his
visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that
amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime
among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome
details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a
love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally
morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for
all that is wholesome and genial in life.
In many ways the latter part of his life shows a less even tenor, a less
steady development. Though he was so domestic in his tastes and devoted
to his children, his relations with his wife became more and more
difficult owing to incompatibility of temperament; and from 1858 they
found it desirable to live apart. This no doubt added to his
restlessness and the craving for excitement, which showed itself in the
ardour with which he took up the idea of public readings. These readings
are only less famous than his writings, so prodigious was their success.
His great dramatic gifts, enlisted in the service of his own creations,
made an irresistible appeal to the public, and till the day of his
collapse, ten years later, their popularity showed no sign of waning.
The amount of money which he earned thereby was amazing; the American
tour alone gave him a net profit of £20,000; and he expected to make as
much more in two seasons in England. But he paid dearly for these
triumphs, being often in trouble with his voice, suffering from fits of
sleeplessness, aggravating the pain in his foot, and affecting his
heart. In spite, then, of the success of the readings, his faithful
friends like Forster would gladly have seen him abandon a practice which
could add little to his future fame, while it threatened to shorten his
life. But, however arduous the task which he set himself, when the
moment came Dickens could brace himself to meet the demands and satisfy
the high expectations of his audience. His nerves seemed to harden, his
voice to gain strength; his spirit flashed out undimmed, and he won
triumph after triumph, in quiet cathedral cities, in great industrial
towns, in the more fatiguing climate of America and before the huge
audiences of Philadelphia and New York. He began his programme with a
few chosen pieces from _Pickwick_ and the Christmas Books, and with
selected characters like Paul Dombey and Mrs. Gamp; he added Dotheboys
Hall and the story of David Copperfield in brief; in his last series,
against the advice of Forster, he worked up the more sensational
passages from _Oliver Twist_. His object, he says, was 'to leave behind
me the recollection of something very passionate and dramatic, done with
simple means, if the act would justify the theme'. It was because the
art of reading was unduly strained that Forster protested, and his
judgement is confirmed by Dickens's boast (perhaps humorously
exaggerated) that 'at Clifton we had a contagion of fainting, and yet
the place was not hot--a dozen to twenty ladies taken out stiff and
rigid at various times'. The physical effects of this fresh strain soon
appeared. After a month his doctor ordered him to cease reading; and,
though he resumed it after a few days' rest, in April 1869 he had a
worse attack of giddiness and was obliged to abandon it permanently. The
history of these readings illustrates the character of Dickens perhaps
better than any other episode in his later life.
But the same restless energy is visible even in his life at Gadshill,
which was his home from 1860 to 1870. The house lies on the London road
a few miles west of Rochester, and can easily be seen to-day, almost
unaltered, by the passer-by. It had caught his fancy in his childhood
before the age of ten when he was walking with his father, and his
father had promised that, if he would only work hard enough, he might
one day live in it. The associations of the place with the Falstaff
scenes in _Henry IV_ had also endeared it to him; and so, when in 1855
he heard that it was for sale, he jumped at the opportunity. For some
years after purchasing it he let it to tenants, but from 1860 he made it
his permanent abode. It has no architectural features to charm the eye;
with its many changes and additions made for comfort, its bow-windows
and the plantations in the garden, it is a typical Victorian home. Here
Dickens could live at ease, surrounded by his children, his dogs, his
books, his souvenirs of his friends, and the Kentish scenery which he
loved. To the north lay the flat marshlands of the lower Thames, to the
south and west lay rolling hills crowned with woodlands, with hop
gardens on the lower slopes; to the east lay the valley of the Medway
with the quaint old streets of Rochester and the bustling dockyard of
Chatham. All that makes the familiar beauty and richness of English
landscape was here, above all the charm of associations. So many names
preserved memories of his books. To Rochester the Pickwickians had
driven on their first search for knowledge; to Cobham Mr. Winkle had
fled, and at the 'Leather Bottle' his friends had found him; in the
marshlands Joe Gargery and Pip had watched for the escaped convict; in
the old gateway by the cathedral Jasper had entertained Edwin Drood on
the eve of his disappearance; along that very high-road over which
Dickens's windows looked the child David Copperfield had tramped in his
journey from London to Dover.
Meanwhile, though his creative vein may have been less fertile than of
old, his efforts for the good of his fellow men were no less continuous
and sincere. His first books had aimed at killing by ridicule certain
social institutions which had sunk into abuses. The pictures of
parliamentary elections, of schools, of workhouses, had not only created
a hearty laugh, but they had disposed the public to listen to the
reformers and to realize the need for reform. As he grew older he went
deeper into the evil, and he also blended his reforming purpose better
with his story. The characters of Mr. Dombey and the Chuzzlewits are not
mere incidents in the tale, nor are they monstrosities which call forth
immediate astonishment and horror. But in each case the ingrained
selfishness which spreads misery through a family is the very mainspring
of the story; and the dramatic power by which Dickens makes it reveal
itself in action has something Shakespearian in it. Here there is still
a balance between the different elements, the human interest and the
moral lesson, and as works of art they are on a higher plane than _Hard
Times_, where the purpose is too clearly shown. Still if we wish to
understand this side of Dickens's work, it is just such a book as _Hard
Times_ that we must study.
It deals with the relation of classes to one another in an industrial
district, and especially with the faults of the class that rose to power
with the development of manufacturing. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby,
the well-meaning pedant and the offensive parvenu, preach the same
gospel. Political economy, as they understand it, is to rule life, and
this dismal science is not concerned with human well-being and
happiness, but only with the profit and loss on commercial undertakings.
Hard facts then are to be the staple of education; memory and accurate
calculation are to be cultivated; the imagination is to be driven out.
In depicting the manner of this education Dickens rather overshoots the
mark. The visit of Mr. Gradgrind to Mr. M'Choakumchild's school (when
the sharp-witted Bitzer defines the horse according to the scientific
handbook, while poor Cissy, who has only an affection for horses,
indulges in fancies and collapses in disgrace) is too evident a
caricature. But the effects of this kind of teaching are painted with a
powerful hand, and we see the faculty for joy blighted almost in the
cradle. And the lesson is enforced not only by the working man and his
family but by Gradgrind's own daughter, who pitilessly convicts her
father of having stifled every generous impulse in her and of having
sacrificed her on the altar of fancied self-interest.
Side by side with the dismal Mr. Gradgrind is the poor master of the
strolling circus, Mr. Sleary, with his truer philosophy of life. He can
see the real need that men have for amusement and for brightness in
their lives; and, though he lives under the shadow of bankruptcy, he can
hold his head up and preach the gospel of happiness. This was a cause
which never failed to win the enthusiastic advocacy of Dickens. He
fought, as men still have to fight to-day, against those Pharisees who
prescribe for the working classes how they should spend their weekly day
of freedom; he supported the opening on Sunday of parks, museums, and
galleries; whole-heartedly he loved the theatre and the circus, and he
wished as many as possible to share those delights. In defiance of 'Mrs.
Grundy' he ventured to maintain that the words 'music-hall' and
'public-house', rightly understood, should be held in honour. It is one
thing to hate drunkenness and indecency; it is quite another to assume
that these must be found in the poor man's place of recreation, and this
roused him to anger. To him 'public-house' meant a place of fellowship,
and 'music-hall' a place of song and mirth; and if some critics complain
of an excess of material good-cheer in his picture of life, Dickens is
certainly here in sympathy with the bulk of his fellow-countrymen.
Another cause in which Dickens was always ready to lead a crusade was
the amendment of the Poor Law. This will remind us of the early days of
Oliver Twist, of such a friendless outcast as Jo in _Bleak House_, of
the struggle of Betty Higden in _Our Mutual Friend_ and her
determination never to be given up to 'the Parish'. But, even more than
the famous novels, the casual writings of Dickens in his own magazines
and elsewhere throw light on his activities in this cause and on the
researches which he made into the working of the system. Mr. Crotch
describes visits which he paid to the workhouses in Wapping and
Whitechapel, quoting his comments on the 'Foul Ward' in one, on the old
men's ward in the other, and on the torpor of despair which settled down
on these poor wrecks of humanity. Could such a system, he asked himself,
be wise which robbed men not of liberty alone but of all hope for the
future, which left them no single point of interest except the
statistics of their fellows who had gone before them and who had been
finally liberated by death? A still more striking passage, just because
Dickens here shows unusual restraint and moderation in his language,
tells us of the five women whom he saw sleeping all night outside the
workhouse through no fault of any official, but simply because there was
no room for them inside and because society had nothing to offer, no
form of 'relief' which could touch these unfortunates. Many will be
familiar with passages in Ruskin, where he denounces similar tragedies
due to our inhuman disregard of what is happening at our doors.
Though the most valuable part of his work was the effective appeal to
the hearts of his brother men, Dickens had the practical wisdom to
suggest definite remedies in some cases. He saw that the districts in
the East End of London, even with a heavy poor rate, failed to supply
adequate relief for their waifs and strays, while the wealthy
inhabitants of the West End, having few paupers, paid on their riches a
rate that was negligible, and he boldly suggested the equalization of
rates. All London should jointly share the burden of maintaining those
for whose welfare they were responsible and should pay shares
proportioned to their wealth. This wise reform was not carried into
effect till some thirty or forty years later; but the principle is now
generally accepted. Though in this case, as in his famous attack on the
Court of Chancery in _Bleak House_, Dickens failed in obtaining any
immediate effect, it is unquestionable that he influenced the minds of
thousands and changed the temper in which they looked at the problem of
the poor. In this nothing that he wrote was more powerful than the
series of Christmas Books, in which his imagination, with the power of a
Rembrandt, threw on to a smaller canvas the lights and shades of London
life, the grim background of mean streets, and the cheerful virtues
which throw a glamour over their humble homes. His advocacy of these
social causes came to be known far and wide and contributed a second
element to the popularity won by his novels; long before his death
Dickens stood on a pinnacle alone, loved by the vast reading public
among those who toil in our towns and villages, and wherever English is
read and understood. He was not only their entertainer, but their friend
and brother; he had been through his days of sorrow and suffering and he
had kept that vast fund of cheerfulness which overflowed into his books
and gladdened the lives of so many thousands. When he died in 1870 after
a year of intermittent illness, following on his breakdown over the
public readings, there was naturally a widespread desire that he should
be buried in Westminster Abbey, as a great Englishman and a true
representative of his age. During life he had expressed his desire for a
private funeral, unheralded in the press, and he had thought of two or
three quiet churches in the neighbourhood of Rochester and Gadshill.
These particular graveyards were found to be already closed, and the
family consented to a compromise by which their father should be buried
in the Abbey at an early hour when no strangers would be aware of it.
After his body was laid to rest, the people were admitted to pay their
homage; the universality and the sincerity of their feelings was shown
in a wonderful way. Among men of letters he had reigned in the hearts of
the people, as Queen Victoria reigned among our sovereigns. In the
annals of her reign his name will outlive those of soldiers, of
prelates, and of politicians.
The causes for which he fought have not all been won yet. Officialdom
still dawdles over the work of the State, hearts are still broken by the
law's delays, the path of crime still lies too easily open to the young.
Vast progress has been made; a humane spirit is to be found in the
working of our Government, and a truer knowledge of social problems is
spreading among all classes. But the world cannot afford to relegate
Charles Dickens to oblivion, and shows no desire to do so; his books are
and will be a wellspring of cheerfulness, of faith in human nature, and
of true Christian charity from which all will do well to drink.
ALFRED TENNYSON
1809-92
1809. Born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, August 6.
1816-20. At school at Louth.
1820-7. Educated at home.
1827. _Poems by Two Brothers_, Charles and Alfred.
1828-31. Trinity College, Cambridge.
1830-2. Early volumes of poetry published.
1833. Death of Arthur Hallam at Vienna.
1837. High Beech, Essex.
1840. Tunbridge Wells.
1842. Collected poems, including 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'English Idyls'.
1846. Cheltenham.
1847. _The Princess_.
1850. _In Memoriam_, printed and given to friends before March; published
June. Marriage, June. Poet Laureate, November.
1852. 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.'
1853. Becomes tenant--1856, owner--of Farringford, Isle of Wight.
1855. _Maud_.
1859. First four 'Idylls of the King' published.
1864. _Enoch Arden_.
1869. Second home at Aldworth, near Haslemere.
1875-84. _Plays_ (1875 'Queen Mary', 1876 'Harold', 1884 'Becket').
1880. _Ballads and other Poems_ ('The Revenge', &c.).
1884. Created a Peer of the realm.
1892. October 6, death at Aldworth. October 12, funeral at
Westminster Abbey.
TENNYSON
POET
The Victorians, as a whole, were a generation of fighters. They battled
against Nature's forces, subduing floods and mountain barriers,
pestilence and the worst extremes of heat and cold; they also went forth
into the market-place and battled with their fellow men for laws, for
tariffs, for empire. Their triumphs, like those of the Romans, are
mostly to be seen in the practical sphere. But there were others of that
day who chose the contemplative life of the recluse, and who yet, by
high imaginings, contributed in no less degree to enrich the fame of
their age; and among these the first name is that of Alfred Tennyson,
the most representative of Victorian poets.
[Illustration: ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]
His early environment may be said to have marked him out for such a
life. He was born in one of the remotest districts of a rural county.
The village of Somersby lies in a hollow among the Lincolnshire wolds,
twenty miles east of Lincoln, midway between the small towns of Spilsby,
Horncastle, and Louth. There are no railways to disturb its peace; no
high roads or broad rivers to bring trade to its doors. The 'cold
rivulet' that rises just above the village flows down some twenty miles
to lose itself in the sea near Skegness; in the valley the alders sigh
and the aspens quiver, while around are rolling hills covered by long
fields of corn broken by occasional spinneys. It is not a country to
draw tourists for its own sake; but Tennyson knew, as few other poets
know, the charm that human association lends to the simplest English
landscape, and he cherished the memory of these scenes long after he had
gone to live among the richer beauties of the south. From the garners of
memory he drew the familiar features of this homely land showing that he
had forgotten
No grey old grange, or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the winding wold.[23]
[Note 23: _In Memoriam_, c.]
There are days when the wolds seem dreary and monotonous; but if change
is wanted, a long walk or an easy drive will take us from Somersby, as
it often took the Tennyson brothers, to the coast at Mablethorpe, where
the long rollers of the North Sea beat upon the sandhills that guard
the flat stretches of the marshland. Here the poet as a child used to
lie upon the beach, his imagination conjuring up Homeric pictures of the
Grecian fleet besieging Troy; and if, on his last visit before leaving
Lincolnshire, he found the spell broken, he could still describe vividly
what he saw with the less fanciful vision of manhood.
Grey sandbanks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind,
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea![24]
[Note 24: Lines written in 1837 and published in the _Manchester
Athenæum Album_, 1850.]
These wide expanses of sea, sand, and sky figure many times in his
poetry and furnish a background for the more tragic scenes in the
_Idylls of the King_.