little suburb of Portsmouth, or Portsea, lying half a mile outside of
the town walls. The date of his birth was Friday, February 7, 1812.
His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at
that time attached to the Portsmouth dockyard. The familiarity which
the novelist shows with sea-ports and sailors is not, however, due to
his birthplace, because his father, in the year 1814, was recalled to
London, and in 1816 went to Chatham. They still show the room in the
dockyard where the elder Dickens worked, and where his son often came
to visit him. The family lived in Ordnance Place, Chatham, and the boy
was sent to a school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by one William
Giles. As a child he is said to have been a great reader, and very
early began to attempt original writing. In 1821, Charles being then
nine years of age, the family fell into trouble; reforms in the
Admiralty deprived the father of his post, and the greater part of his
income. They had to leave Chatham and removed to London, where a mean
house in a shabby street of Camden Town received them. But not for
long. The unfortunate father was presently arrested for debt and
consigned to the Marshalsea, and Charles, then only ten years of age,
and small for his age, was placed in a blacking factory at Hungerford
Market, where all he could do was to put the labels on the
blacking-bottles, with half a dozen rough and rude boys. The
degradation and misery of this occupation sunk deep into the boy's
soul. He could never dare to speak of this time; it was never
mentioned in his presence. Not only were his days passed in this
wretched work, but the child was left entirely to himself at night,
when he made his way home from Hungerford Market to Camden Town, a
distance of four miles, to his lonely bedroom. On Sundays he visited
his father in the prison. Of course such a neglected way of living
could not continue. They presently found a lodging for him in Lant
Street, close to the Marshalsea, where at least he was near his
parents, and his father shortly afterward recovering his liberty, they
all went back to Camden Town, and the boy was sent to school again. It
was to a private school in the Hampstead Road, where he remained for
three or four years of quiet work. It must have been then, one
suspects, rather than at Chatham, that he became so great a devourer
of books. But he was never a scholar in any sense, and the books that
he read were novels and plays. That the family fortunes were still low
is proved by the fact that, when he was taken from school, no better
place could be found for him than a stool at the desk of a solicitor.
Meantime his father had obtained a post as reporter for the _Morning
Herald_, and Charles, feeling small love for the hopeless drudgery of
a lawyer's office, resolved also to attempt the profession of
journalist. He taught himself shorthand with the resolution--even the
rage--which he always threw into everything he undertook; and he
frequented the British Museum daily in order to supplement some of the
shortcomings of his reading. In his seventeenth year he became a
reporter at Doctors' Commons. At this period all his ambitions were
for the stage. He would be an actor. All his life, indeed, he loved
acting and the theatre above all things. As an actor, one feels
certain that he would have succeeded. He would have made an excellent
comedian. Fortunately, he was saved for better work.
It was not until he was two-and-twenty that he succeeded in getting
permanent employment on the staff of a London paper, as a reporter. In
this capacity he was sent about the country to do work which is now
mainly supplied by local reporters. It must be remembered that there
were as yet no railways. He had to travel by stage-coach, by post, by
any means that offered. "I have been upset," he said years afterward,
speaking of this time, "in almost every description of vehicle used in
this country."
About this time he began the real work of his life. In December, 1833,
the _Monthly Magazine_ published his first original paper, called "A
Dinner at Poplar Walk." Other papers followed, but produced nothing
for the contributor except the gratification of seeing them in print,
because the magazine could not afford to pay for anything. However,
they did the writer the best service possible, in enabling him to
prove his power, and he presently made an arrangement with the editor
of the _Evening Chronicle_ to contribute papers and sketches
regularly, continuing to act as reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_,
and getting his salary increased from five guineas to seven guineas a
week. To be making an income of nearly four hundred pounds a year at
the age of two or three and twenty, would be considered fortunate in
any line of life. Sixty years ago, such an income represented a much
more solid success than would now be the case. The sketches were
collected and published in the beginning of the year 1836, the author
receiving a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. He afterward
bought it back for eleven times that amount. In the last week of March
in the same year appeared the first number of the "Pickwick Papers;"
three days afterward Dickens married the daughter of his friend,
George Hogarth, editor of the _Evening Chronicle_, and his early
struggles were finished.
No article, however short, treating of Charles Dickens, can avoid
entering into the details of his early history with a fulness which
would be out of all proportion to what follows, but for the remarkable
fact that the events of his childhood and his youth impressed his
imagination and influenced the whole of his literary career so
profoundly, that to the very end of his life there is not a single
work in which some of the characters, some of the places, are not
derived from his early recollections. Many other writers there are who
have passed their childish days among the _petites gens_, but none who
have so remembered their ways, their speech, and their mode of
thought. The Marshalsea prison of Little Dorrit is the place where for
two years he went in and out. The Queen's Bench and its Rules were
close to the Marshalsea; Bob Sawyer's lodgings in Lant Street were his
own; David Copperfield, the friendless lad in the dingy warehouse, was
himself; the cathedral of Edwin Drood was that in whose shadow he had
lived; Mrs. Pipehin is his old landlady of Camden Town; the most
delightful features in Mr. Micawber are borrowed from his own father;
the experiences of Doctors' Commons, the solicitor's clerks, the life
in chambers, are all his own; while of individual characters, the list
of those which are known to be portraits more or less true to nature
might be indefinitely extended. And yet, while he was early drawing on
these early recollections, while they constantly furnished him with
scenes and characters, he could not bear to speak of them, and no one
except his friend and biographer, Forster, ever knew that he was
himself, with all the shabby, mean surroundings in early life, exactly
such as David Copperfield.
The rest of Dickens's life has the interest which belongs to success
after success. It was a long, triumphal march. He had no failures; he
suffered no defeats. There were times when his hand was not at his
best, but never a time when his hand lost its power. This indeed seems
the crowning happiness of a successful and singularly happy life, that
when he was cut off--he died June 6, 1870--after fifty-eight years of
continuous work, his brain was still as vigorous, his eye as keen, his
hand as sure as in the first fresh running of his youth. It was indeed
more than literary success which he achieved; he conquered the whole
English-speaking world. This world, which now numbers nigh upon a
hundred millions, loves him; all who can read his books love him. This
love cheered him in his life, and will keep his memory green. Of the
solid wealth which he acquired, the honor he enjoyed, the friends who
gathered round him, and the brave and resolute front which he always
showed, there is no space here to speak.
The following is the list of Dickens' works, in their order of
appearance omitting certain farces and pamphlets which belong to a
more extended notice:
"Sketches by Boz" (1836), "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club"
(1837), "Oliver Twist" (1838), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1839), "The Old
Curiosity Shop" (1840-41), "Barnaby Rudge" (1841), "American Notes"
(1842), "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1843), "The Christmas Tales"--viz., "The
Christmas Carol," "The Chimes," "The Cricket on the Hearth," "The
Battle of Life," "The Haunted Man," and "The Ghost's Bargain"--(1843,
1846, 1848), "Pictures from Italy" (1845), "Dombey and Son" (1846-48),
"David Copperfield" (1849-50), "Bleak House" (1852-53), "The Child's
History of England" (1854), "Hard Times" (1854), "Little Dorrit"
(1855-57), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859), "The Uncommercial Traveller"
(1861), the "Christmas Numbers" in _Household Words_ and _All the Year
Round_, "Great Expectations" (1860-61), "Our Mutual Friend" (1864-65),
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (unfinished). This long roll by no means
represents the whole work of this most active of mankind. Public
readings both in this country and in America, private theatricals,
speeches, letters innumerable, journeys many, pamphlets, plays, the
conduct of a popular magazine--first called _Household Words_, and
then _All the Year Round_--and an ever-present readiness to enjoy the
society of his friends, fill up the space when he was not actually
writing. That he could do so much was mainly due to his orderly and
methodical habits, to his clearness of mind, and to a capacity for
business as wonderful as his genius for fiction. He knew no rest from
the day when he first attacked shorthand, to the day when he fell from
his chair in the fit from which he never recovered. He was
incomparably the most active man, the hardest-working-man of his age.
In the history of letters there are many who have produced more work
in bulk; there is not one who led a life so varied, so full, so
constantly busy, so active, and so rich.
It is as yet too early to speak with certainty as to the lasting
popularity of his work as a whole. Very much of it owed its general
success to the faithful delineation of manners already passed away. He
was the prophet of the middle class, and the manners of that great
section of the community have greatly changed since the days when
Charles Dickens lived among them and observed them. With the decay of
these manners some part of present popularity must certainly pass out
of his work; already a generation has appeared to whom a great deal of
Dickens' work proves of no interest, because it portrays manners with
which they are not familiar. They do not laugh with those who laughed
fifty, forty, twenty years ago, because the people depicted have
vanished. But when the second quarter of this century shall belong so
truly to the past, that not one survives who can remember it, then
these books will become a precious storehouse for the study and the
recovery of part, and that a large part, of its life and manners.
Again, it is the essential quality of genius to create the type. In
this Dickens has been more successful than any other novelist, ancient
or modern. With him every leading character stands for his class.
Squeers is the representative of the schoolmaster, then too common,
ignorant, brutal, and grasping; Winkle is the Cockney sportsman; it is
impossible to think of red tape without naming Mr. Tite Barnacle; and
so on through all the books. If he sometimes too plainly labels his
characters with their qualities and defects, it is a fault caused by
his own clearness of conception and of execution. It is another note
of genius to suffer every character to work out its own fate without
weakness or pity, and though Dickens deals seldom with the greater
tragedies of the world in his domestic dramas, necessity pursues his
characters as grimly and certainly as in real life. The villain Quilp
and his tool make us forget, in the amusement which they cause, their
own baseness. But their creator is not deceived. He makes them bring
their own ruin upon their heads. To be true, not only to the outward
presentment and speech and thought of a character, but also to the
laws which surround him, and to the consequences of his actions, is a
rare thing indeed with those who practise the art of fiction. Further,
in this art there are permissible certain exaggerations, as upon the
stage. There is exaggeration of feature, exaggeration of talk,
exaggeration in action. There are degrees of exaggeration, by which
one passes through tragedy, comedy, farce, and burlesque; but in all
there must be an exaggeration. Dickens was master of exaggeration--if
he sometimes carried it too far, he produced farce, but never
burlesque. As for selection, which is perhaps the most important point
after exaggeration, it came to him by instinct; he knew from the very
outset how to select. It is by selection that the novelist maintains
the interest of his story and develops his characters. There are
countless things that are said and done in the progress of the history
which have little interest and small bearing on the things which have
to be told; and it is the first mark of the bad novelist that he does
not know how to suppress irrelevant scenes. In the constructive branch
of his art Dickens continually advanced. His earlier stories seem,
like the "Pickwick Papers," to be made up of scenes. "Nicholas
Nickleby" is a long series of scenes brilliantly drawn, in which new
characters are always appearing and playing their disconnected part
and disappearing. But as he grew older his conceptions of the story
itself grew clearer, and his arrangement more artistic. It is,
however, in description that Dickens proved himself so great a master.
He laid his hand by instinct upon the salient and characteristic
features, and he never failed in finding the right--the only--words
fit for their illustration. In description he is never conventional,
always real, and yet he allows himself, here as in his scenes of
character and dialogue, a certain exaggeration which produces the
happiest effects. In the hands of his imitators it becomes grotesque
and intolerable.
As to his great and splendid gallery of portraits, it is difficult to
speak briefly. The whole of London life--the life of the streets, of
the city, of the middle class--seems at first sight depicted in this
gallery. Here are merchant, shopkeeper and clerk, lawyer and client,
money-lender and victim, dressmaker, actor--one knows not what. Yet
there are great omissions. The scholar, the divine, the statesman, the
country gentleman, are absent, partly because Dickens had no knowledge
of them, and partly because he forbore to hold them up to the ridicule
which he loved to pour over his characters. His methods imposed upon
him certain limitations; he aimed at commanding his reader's attention
by compelling laughter and tears, but especially laughter. He who can
command neither the one nor the other is no true artist in fiction.
But in his laughter and in his tears one feels always the kindly heart
as well as the skilful hand. It is for the former--for the deeply
human heart--even more than for the latter, that the world will
continue to love the memory of Charles Dickens.
ROBERT BROWNING
(1812-1889)
[Illustration: Robert Browning.]
Robert Browning was born in 1812, at Camberwell, England. His father
was a clerk highly placed in the house of Rothschild, and there are
still living those who remember the excitement of the elder man and of
his friends in New Court, when the time came for the son's first play
to be produced at Covent Garden. He was a Dissenter, and for this
reason his son's education did not proceed on the ordinary English
lines. The training which Robert Browning received was more
individual, and his reading was wider and less accurate, than would
have been the case had he gone to Eton or Winchester. Thus, though to
the end he read Greek with the deepest interest, he never could be
called a Greek scholar. His poetic turn declared itself rather early,
and in 1835 he had a poem, "Pauline," ready for the press. But
publication costs money, and his business-like father did not see any
chance of returns from poetry. A kind aunt, however, came to the
rescue, and presented the young poet with the cost of printing the
little book, L30. It was published at the price of a few shillings,
and of course did not sell; but the author had the curious
satisfaction of seeing a copy of this original edition bring
twenty-five guineas under the hammer a few years ago. "Pauline" was
not reprinted till the issue of the six-volume edition of Mr.
Browning's works, in 1869. It was followed by the more ambitious
"Paracelsus," a striking attempt to fill a mediaeval outline with a
compact body of modern thought; but in spite of the lovely lyric,
"Over the sea our galleys went," and in spite of other beauties, the
public did not heed the book, and it had no success except with a very
small circle. It must be remembered that those days were days of
poetic exhaustion. Shelley, Byron, and Scott were dead; the year
before, Coleridge had followed them to the grave; Wordsworth was old,
and his muse no longer spoke with her accents of an earlier day. Amid
a mass of "keepsake" literature, affectations, and mediocrity, the
still, small voice of the "Poems by Two Brothers" was heard by few,
and that of "Paracelsus" was heard by fewer still.
Two years later the young poet came forward with the historical play
of "Strafford," which was produced at Covent Garden with Macready in
the title-part. It was not exactly a failure, but though the play
itself and Macready's acting attracted the admiration of the critics,
it was at once seen that the drama contained too much psychology and
too little movement for a popular success. Mr. Browning, however, did
not, for a long time to come, cease to be a "writer of plays," though
it was not till eleven years after that another drama of his, "A Blot
on the Scutcheon," was performed on the stage. The interval, however,
was full of poetic activity. The energetic search of the members of
the Browning Society, and especially of its founder, Mr. Furnivall,
has succeeded in putting on record the place of first publication of
several scattered poems of about this date. Four of them, including
"Porphyria," and "Johannes Agricola," appeared in the _Monthly
Repository_, edited by W. J. Fox, the Unitarian minister who was
afterward so well known for his eloquent speeches against the Corn
Laws. In 1840 came a small volume, bound, after the fashion of the
time, in gray paper boards, and called "Sordello," after the Provencal
poet mentioned in the "Purgatory" of Dante. The book appeared without
preface or dedication, but in the collected edition of 1863 it bears a
note addressed by Mr. Browning to his friend Monsieur Milsand, of
Dijon, which contains the characteristic expressions, "I wrote it
twenty-five years ago for only a few.... My stress lay on the
incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study. I,
at least, always thought so." "Sordello" in its original form is very
rare and valuable now, as all the early editions of Mr. Browning's
poetry have become; but on its first appearance nobody cared for
it--it was regarded as nothing but a hopeless puzzle by a bewildered
and defeated public. Even now, when Mr. Browning has long since formed
his own public, "Sordello" is probably less read than any other work
of his; it is too obscure and confused both in plot and in thought.
But all the same, there are many interesting things in "Sordello,"
and among them, especially at this moment, are the references to the
place which, for fifty yours, has fascinated the poet. Only the other
day he wrote "Asolando,"' and half a century ago we find him writing:
"Lo, on a healthy, brown, and nameless hill
By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,
Morning just up, higher and higher runs
A child, bare-foot and rosy."
Asolo appears again very soon afterward in the lovely opening of the
play "Pippa Passes." This came first in the series which appeared in
the years 1841-46, under the odd title of "Bells and Pomegranates."
There were eight numbers of this publication--thin, yellow-covered
pamphlets, printed in double columns of small type, by Mr. Moxon;
surely us unattractive a way as a poet ever attempted of bringing his
wares before the world. Doubtless it was done in order that the low
price might appeal to a large audience, but we doubt whether the sale
of "Bells and Pomegranates" was ever large. The series is exceedingly
rare now, and the curious who prefer to read those noble poems in this
unsightly form have to pay L10 or L12 for the privilege of possessing
them. In this first series appeared all the author's plays except
"Strafford," namely, "Pippa Passes," "King Victor and King Charles,"
"The Return of the Druses," "A Blot on the Scutcheon," "Colombe's
Birthday," "Luria," and "A Soul's Tragedy." But, alternating with
these, appealed many of the shorter poems which have long since passed
into the common treasure-house of all who care for poetry throughout
the English-speaking world. One of the numbers contains the set called
"Dramatic Lyrics," including "In a Gondola," "Waring," and "The Pied
Piper of Hamelin." Another number contained "Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics," among which are to be found such favorite poems as "How they
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," and "Saul." In this group of
poems were also to be found the celebrated lines called "The Lost
Leader." People at the time supposed that these indignant verses were
aimed at the Tory backsliding of Wordsworth; and, indeed, though Mr.
Browning in after-years denied their special applicability to the old
Laureate, there can be no doubt that when he wrote them he had
Wordsworth more or less in his mind.
In 1846 there happened to Mr. Browning something much more important
than the publication of this or that poem; for it was then, on
September 12th, in Marylebone parish church, that he was married to
the poetess, Elizabeth Barrett. Their union was the direct result, in
the first instance, of poetic and intellectual sympathy, and it was to
the admiration which Miss Barrett, then an invalid, felt for the
author of "Bells and Pomegranates," that they owed their first
introduction. For the greater part of their married life Mr. and Mrs.
Browning lived almost entirely in Italy, and especially at that house
in Florence, close by the Porta Romana, which now bears a tablet with
her name, and which gave its title to one of her best-known volumes of
poetry. They had one child, born in 1849, Robert Barrett Browning,
favorably known as a painter and a sculptor After just fifteen years'
marriage, Mrs. Browning died, in 1861; the frail body almost literally
burnt up by the fiery soul within. Of the closeness of their union Mr.
Browning, of course, never spoke, except to his intimate friends; but
that it was of a degree of happiness to which it is seldom given to
poor humanity to attain was made evident to the world when he wrote
the splendid invocation to his "Lyric Love" at the opening of "The
Ring and the Book."
During the first years of married life, Mr. Browning wrote little, but
he read widely and deeply, and in 1849 he published, in two
reasonable-sized volumes, "Paracelsus" and "Bells and Pomegranates,"
under the title of "Poems, by Robert Browning." Next year followed his
most definitely Christian poem, "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"--a
small volume in which the mysteries of the Christian religion were
handled in their relations with the modern world. Then, in 1852,
followed a prose publication, which was, unfortunately, founded upon a
mistake, and which was at once suppressed and not brought to light
until the Browning Society reprinted it years afterward. This was the
celebrated introductory essay to a volume purporting to consist of
letters from Shelley. The letters were soon discovered to be
fabrications, but Mr. Browning's essay was quite independent of their
genuineness, being really a very interesting discussion on subjective
and objective poetry, and of Shelley's writings as a type of the
former. In 1855 came the two volumes called "Men and Women," and in
their pages were to be found many of the poems best worth reading of
all Mr. Browning's productions, and many of those that are best
remembered at the present day.
It is only somewhat exasperating to the student, to find that in
subsequent collected editions of his works, Mr. Browning has allowed
his fondness for renaming and rearrangement to break up these volumes,
and to distribute the greater part of their contents under other
titles. In "Men and Women" the intensely dramatic quality of his
genius found its best scope, for here are to be found such
masterpieces as "Karshish," "The Arab Physician," "Fra Lippo Lippi,"
"Bishop Blougram," and "Cleon." It is amusing to note, if the
authority of the bibliographers is to be trusted, that these volumes
were reviewed, in the Roman Catholic paper called _The Rambler_, by no
less a person than Cardinal Wiseman, who was extremely complimentary
to "Bishop Blougram," and did not by any means despair of the writer's
conversion. After "Men and Women" the poet was silent for a long time.
His wife's health was failing, though at the time of the war in
Lombardy her burning energy burst out in the "Poems before Congress,"
and though she watched the course of the struggle with never-ceasing
excitement.
In 1861 the great grief of his life fell upon Mr. Browning, and he
published nothing new till 1864, when there appeared the volume called
"Dramatis Personae." It is pretty safe, however, to declare that in
this volume, with "The Ring and the Book," which was published in
1868, he reached his greatest height of performance. It is enough to
recall to the memory of readers that "Dramatis Personae" contains
"James Lea's Wife," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and "Prospice." Then, four
years later, as we have said, appeared four volumes of that marvellous
performance, "The Ring and the Book," a poetic and psychological
grappling with the question suggested to the poet by the account of a
Roman trial that took place a couple of centuries ago. Whether anyone
else in any country has ever before ventured to publish a poem in four
simultaneous volumes, we cannot say; but, in spite of its length and
difficulty, "The Ring and the Book" was and is one of the most
successful of the author's works. It has every right to be so, for
nowhere does he exhibit in a manner so sustained, and yet so varied,
his own extraordinary insight into characters and motives entirely
dissimilar.