“The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of his pipe,sighed, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head, and went to sleep too.”
“The cobbler paused to ascertain what effect his story had produced on Sam; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of his pipe,sighed, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head, and went to sleep too.”
Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and more of irony into a single word.
But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details suchas this in view of the broad and universally acknowledged comic effects of this masterpiece of English humour. Its many genuinely comic characters are as broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and as true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison’s art. The author’s humour is certainly not one which eschews simple in favour of subtle means, or which is averse from occasional desipience in the form of the wildest farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter’s garden-party—or rather “public breakfast”—at The Den, Eatanswill; Mr. Pickwick’s nocturnal descent, through three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of Miss Tomkins’s establishment for young ladies; thesupplice d’un hommeof Mr. Pott; Mr. Weller junior’s love-letter, with notes and comments by Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior’s own letter of affliction written by somebody else; the footmen’s “swarry” at Bath, and Mr. Bob Sawyer’s bachelors’ party in the Borough—all these and many other scenes and passages have in them that jovial element of exaggeration which nobody mistakes and nobody resents. Whose duty is it to check the volubility of Mr. Alfred Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness,quot libras, of the Fat Boy? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the contagious high spirits of the author lies one of the chief charms of the book. Not, however, that the effect produced is obtained without the assistance of a very vigilant art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many brilliant additions which the author made to his original group of personages. If there is nothing so humorous in the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it anything more pathetic than the relation between him and his master. As for Sam Weller’s style of speech, scant justicewas done to it by Mr. Pickwick when he observed to Job Trotter, “My man is in the right, although his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and occasionally incomprehensible.” The fashion of Sam’s gnomic philosophy is at least as old as Theocritus;[1]but the special impress which he has given to it is his own, rudely foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the apophthegms of his father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms inOliver TwistandNicholas Nicklebyshow how enduring a hold the whimsical fancy had taken of its creator. For the rest, the freshness of the book continues the same to the end; and farcical as are some of the closing scenes—those, for instance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the movements of the elder Mr. Weller—there is even here no straining after effect. An exception might perhaps be found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is coarsely contrived; but the fun of the character is in itself neither illegitimate nor unwholesome. It will be observed below that it is the constant harping on the same string, the repeated picturing of professional preachers of religion as gross and greasy scoundrels, which in the end becomes offensive in Dickens.
On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bidden farewell to his labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words which he uttered at the table of the ever-hospitable Mr. Wardle at the Adelphi.
“‘I shall never regret,’ said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice—‘I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character; frivolous asmy pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me—I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all.’”
“‘I shall never regret,’ said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice—‘I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character; frivolous asmy pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me—I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all.’”
Of course Mr. Pickwick “filled and drained a bumper” to the sentiment. Indeed, it “snoweth” in this book “of meat and drink.” Wine, ale, and brandy abound there, and viands to which ample justice is invariably done—even under Mr. Tupman’sheart-rendingcircumstances at the (now, alas! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something of this is due to the times in which the work was composed, and to the class of readers for which we may suppose it in the first instance to have been intended; but Dickens, though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia of good cheer, besides cherishing the associations which are inseparable from it. At the same time, there is a little too much of it in thePickwick Papers, however well its presence may consort with the geniality which pervades them. It is difficult to turn any page of the book without chancing on one of those supremely felicitous phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit of the whole—that spirit of true humour which calls forth at once merriment, good-will, and charity.
In the year 1836, which the commencement of thePickwick Papershas made memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the full tide of authorship. In February, 1837, the second number ofBentley’s Miscellany, a new monthly magazine which he hadundertaken to edit, contained the opening chapters of his story ofOliver Twist. Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality toThe Strange Gentleman, a “comic burletta,” or farce, in two acts, founded upon the tale in theSketchescalledThe Great Winglebury Duel. It ran for seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author’s opinion, was “the best thing Harley did.” But the adaptation has no special feature distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the effective bustle of the opening.The Village Coquettes, an operetta represented at the St. James’s Theatre, with music by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort. In this piece Harley took one part, that of “a very small farmer with a very large circle of intimate friends,” and John Parry made hisdébuton the London stage in another. To quote any of the songs in this operetta would be very unfair to Dickens.[2]He was not at all depressed by the unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against which he had to set the round declaration of Braham, that there had been “no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece sinceThe Duenna.” As time went on, however, he became anything but proud of his juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their revival. His third and last attempt of this kind, a farce calledThe Lamplighter, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted, having been withdrawn by Macready’s wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it into a story printed among thePicnicPapers, a collection generously edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy worthy of so distinguished an actor; and, according to his wont, he had even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to forget—No Thoroughfare. But the genius of the age, an influence which is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see mentioned among his literary works theLife of Grimaldi, which he merely edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten memorials of forgotten greatness.
To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short pamphlet entitledSunday under Three Heads, is not without a certain biographical interest. This little book was written with immediate reference to a bill “for the better observance of the Sabbath,” which the House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority; and its special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sunday amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunkenness distinguishing what Dickens called a LondonSunday as it is. His own love of fresh air and brightness intensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London, “gloomy, close, and stale,” which he afterwards drew inLittle Dorrit, he almost seems to hold Sabbatarianism and the weather responsible for one another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it “not comfortable,” so that, like others who hate bigotry, he mayperhaps have come to recognise the difficulty of arranging an EnglishSunday as it might be made. On the other hand, he may have remembered his youthful fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church, when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the counterpart ofSunday as Sabbath bills would have it: describing how “the usual preparations are making for the band in the open air in the afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions invariably close.” TheSketches of Young Gentlemen, published in the same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlierSketches by Boz, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a fortnight, and noted in his diary that “one hundred and twenty-five pounds for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well.” TheSketches of Young Couples, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a facetious introduction, suggested by her Majesty’s own announcement of her approaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent itself.
It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production ofPickwick, he began his first long continuous story, theAdventures of Oliver Twist. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with his laterMSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits. But here and there the writing shows traces of excitement; for the author’s heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength.Oliver Twistwas certainly writtenwith a purpose, and with one that was afterwards avowed. The author intended to put before his readers—“so long as their speech did not offend the ear”—a picture of “dregs of life,” hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fiction, Fielding in particular, as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens, however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already relishedPaul Clifford, and which was not to be debarred from exciting itself overJack Sheppard, begun beforeOliver Twisthad been completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens’s purpose was an honest and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the cloud. To that unfailing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the redeeming features in his company of criminals; not only the devotion and the heroism of Nancy, but the irresistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger, and the good-humour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to “plead as earnestly in mitigation of judgment” against him as ever he had done “at the bar for any client he most respected.” Other parts of the story were less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police-magistrate, appears tohave been a rather hasty portrait of a living original; and the whole picture of Bumble and Bumbledom was certainly a caricature of the working of the new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy’s story, and adds to the effect of a marvellously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy’s interview with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes—the flight of Sikes, his death at Jacob’s Island, and the end of the Jew—the action has an intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from some of the “low” domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author’s comic humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types: Bumble and his partner; Noah Claypole, complete in himself, but full of promise for Uriah Heep; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story ofOliver Twistalso contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that is weak and (the author ofEndymionis to be thanked for the word) “gushy.” Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver discreetly “glides” away from the lovers, are barely endurable. But, whatever its shortcomings,Oliver Twistremains an almost unique example of a young author’s brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them; and some of its characters will live by the side of Dickens’s happiest and most finished creations. Even had a sapient critic been right who declared, during the progress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have workedout “the particular vein of humour which had hitherto yielded so much attractive metal,” it would have been worked out to some purpose. After making his readers merry withPickwick, he had thrilled them withOliver Twist; and by the one book as by the other he had made them think better of mankind.
But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his hand content with a single task. In April, 1838, several months before the completion ofOliver Twist, the first number ofNicholas Nicklebyappeared; and while engaged upon the composition of these books he contributed toBentley’s Miscellany, of which he retained the editorship till the early part of 1839, several smaller articles. Of these, theMudfog Papershave been recently thought worth reprinting; but even supposing the satire against the Association for the Advancement of Everything to have not yet altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day before yesterday refuses to be revived.Nicholas Nickleby, published in twenty numbers, was the labour of many months, but was produced under so great a press of work that during the whole time of publication Dickens was never a single number in advance. Yet, though not one of the most perfect of his books, it is indisputably one of the most thoroughly original, and signally illustrates the absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel of the present. Dickens was never so strong as when he produced from the real; and in this instance—starting, no doubt, with a healthy prejudice—so carefully had he inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of which Dotheboys Hall was to be held up as the infamous type, that there seems to be no difficulty in identifying the site of the very school itself; while the PortsmouthTheatre is to the full as accurate a study as the Yorkshire school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers Cheeryble were real personages well known in Manchester,[3]where even the original of Tim Linkinwater still survives in local remembrance. On the other hand, with how conscious a strength has the author’s imaginative power used and transmuted his materials: in the Squeers family creating a group of inimitable grotesqueness; in their humblest victim Smike giving one of his earliest pictures of those outcasts whom he drew again and again with such infinite tenderness; and in Mr. Vincent Crummles and his company, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but a kindly one, for all times! In a third series of episodes in this book, it is universally agreed that the author has no less conspicuously failed. Dickens’s first attempt to picture the manners and customs of the aristocracy certainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people. Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed—who is allowed to redeem his character in the end—is not without touches resembling nature.
“‘I take an interest, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile, ‘such an interest in the drama.’“‘Ye-es. It’s very interasting,’ replied Lord Frederick.“‘I’m always ill after Shakspeare,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I scarcely exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.’“‘Ye-es,’ replied Lord Frederick. ‘He was a clayver man.’”
“‘I take an interest, my lord,’ said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile, ‘such an interest in the drama.’
“‘Ye-es. It’s very interasting,’ replied Lord Frederick.
“‘I’m always ill after Shakspeare,’ said Mrs. Wititterly. ‘I scarcely exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.’
“‘Ye-es,’ replied Lord Frederick. ‘He was a clayver man.’”
But Sir Mulberry Hawk is a kind of scoundrel not frequently met with in polite society; his henchmen Pluck and Pyke have the air of “followers of Don John,” andthe enjoyments of the “trainers of young noblemen and gentlemen” at Hampton races, together with the riotous debauch which precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct from the transpontine stage. The fact is that Dickens was here content to draw his vile seducers and wicked orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a thousand times before, and will draw them a thousand times again. Much of the hero’s talk is of the same conventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be more genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which finds its outlet in the most unexpected channels, but nowhere so resistlessly as in the invertebrate talk of Mrs. Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary prototype in a character of Miss Austen’s; but even if Mrs. Nickleby was founded on Miss Bates, inEmma, she left her original far behind. Miss Bates, indeed, is verbose, roundabout, and parenthetic; but the widow never deviates into coherence.
Nicholas Nicklebyshows the comic genius of its author in full activity, and should be read with something of the buoyancy of spirit in which it was written, and not with a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a scamp as Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens’s “monstrous failures.” At the same time this book displays the desire of the author to mould his manner on the old models. The very title has a savour of Smollett about it; the style has more than one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of Goldsmith; and the general method of the narrative resembles that of our old novelists and their Spanish and French predecessors. Partly for this reason, and partly, no doubt, because of the rapidity with which the story was written, its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dickens’s earlier works. Coincidences are repeatedly employedto help on the action; and thedénoûment, which, besides turning Mr. Squeers into a thief, reveals Ralph Nickleby as the father of Smike, is oppressively complete. As to the practical aim of the novel, the author’s word must be taken for the fact that “Mr. Squeers and his school were faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible.” The exposure, no doubt, did good in its way, though perhaps Mr. Squeers, in a more or less modified form, has proved a tougher adversary to overcome than Mrs. Gamp.
During these years Dickens was chiefly resident in the modest locality of Doughty Street, whither he had moved his household from the “three rooms,” “three storeys high,” in Furnival’s Inn, early in 1837. It was not till the end of 1839 that he took up his abode, further west, in a house which he came to like best among all his London habitations, in Devonshire Terrace, Regent’s Park. His town life was, however, varied by long rustications at Twickenham and at Petersham, and by sojourns at the sea-side, of which he was a most consistent votary. He is found in various years of his life at Brighton, Dover, and Bonchurch—where he liked his neighbours better than he liked the climate; and in later years, when he had grown accustomed to the Continent, he repeatedly domesticated himself at Boulogne. But already in 1837 he had discovered the little sea-side village, as it then was, which for many years afterwards became his favourite holiday retreat, and of which he would be thegenius loci, even if he had not by a special description immortalisedOur English Watering-place. Broadstairs—whose afternoon tranquillity even to this day is undisturbed except by the Ethiopians on their tramp from Margate toRamsgate—and its constant visitor, are thus described in a letter written to an American friend in 1843: “This is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff, whereon—in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay—our house stands; the sea rolling and dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are the Goodwin Sands (you’ve heard of the Goodwin Sands?), whence floating lights perpetually wink after dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the servants. Also there is a big light-house called the North Foreland on a hill beyond the village, a severe parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children assemble every morning and throw up impossible fortifications, which the sea throws down again at high-water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies flirt after their own manner in two reading-rooms and on a great many scattered seats in the open air. Other old gentlemen look all day through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay-window in a one-pair sits, from nine o’clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name is Boz.”
Not a few houses at Broadstairs may boast of having been at one time or another inhabited by him and his. Of the long-desired Fort House, however, which local perverseness triumphantly points out as the original ofBleak House(no part even ofBleak Housewas written there, though part ofDavid Copperfieldwas), he could not obtain possession till 1850. As like Bleak House as it is like Chesney Wold, it stands at the very highest end of the place, looking straight out to sea, over the little harbour and its two colliers, with a pleasant stretch of cornfields leading along the cliff towards the light-house whichDickens promised Lord Carlisle should serve him as a night-light. But in 1837 Dickens was content with narrower quarters. The “long small procession of sons” and daughters had as yet only begun with the birth of his eldest boy. His life was simple and full of work, and occasional sea-side or country quarters, and now and then a brief holiday tour, afforded the necessary refreshment of change. In 1837 he made his first short trip abroad, and in the following year, accompanied by Mr. Hablot Browne, he spent a week of enjoyment in Warwickshire, noting in hisRemembrancer: “Stratford; Shakspeare; the birthplace; visitors, scribblers, old woman (query whether she knows what Shakspeare did), etc.” Meanwhile, among his truest home enjoyments were his friendships. They were few in number, mostly with men for whom, after he had once taken them into his heart, he preserved a life-long regard. Chief of all these were John Forster and Daniel Maclise, the high-minded painter, to whom we owe a charming portrait of his friend in this youthful period of his life. Losing them, he afterwards wrote when absent from England, was “like losing my arms and legs, and dull and tame I am without you.” Besides these, he was at this time on very friendly terms with William Harrison Ainsworth, who succeeded him in the editorship of theMiscellany, and concerning whom he exclaimed in hisRemembrancer: “Ainsworth has a fine heart.” At the close of 1838, Dickens, Ainsworth, and Forster constituted themselves a club called the Trio, and afterwards the Cerberus. Another name frequent in theRemembrancerentries is that of Talfourd, a generous friend, in whom, as Dickens finely said after his death, “the success of other men made as little change as his own.” All these, together with Stanfield, the Landseers, Douglas Jerrold, Macready, andothers less known to fame, were among the friends and associates of Dickens’s prime. The letters, too, remaining from this part of Dickens’s life, have all the same tone of unaffected frankness. With some of his intimate friends he had his established epistolary jokes. Stanfield, the great marine painter, he pertinaciously treated as a “very salt” correspondent, communications to whom, as to a “block-reeving, main-brace-splicing, lead-heaving, ship-conning, stun’sail-bending, deck-swabbing son of a sea-cook,” needed garnishing with the obscurest technicalities and strangest oaths of his element. (It is touching to turn from these friendly buffooneries to a letter written by Dickens many years afterward—in 1867—and mentioning a visit to “poor dear Stanfield,” when “it was clear that the shadow of the end had fallen on him.... It happened well that I had seen, on a wild day at Tynemouth, a remarkable sea effect, of which I wrote a description to him, and he had kept it under his pillow.”) Macready, after his retirement from the stage, is bantered on the score of his juvenility with a pertinacity of fun recalling similar whimsicalities of Charles Lamb’s; or the jest is changed, and the great London actor in his rural retreat is depicted in the character of a country gentleman strange to the wicked ways of the town. As in the case of many delightful letter-writers, the charm of Dickens as a correspondent vanishes so soon as he becomes self-conscious. Even in his letters to Lady Blessington and Mrs. Watson, a striving after effect is at times perceptible; the homage rendered to Lord John Russell is not offered with a light hand; on the contrary, when writing to Douglas Jerrold, Dickens is occasionally so intent upon proving himself a sound Radical that his vehemence all but passes into a shriek.
In these early years, at all events, Dickens was happy inthe society of his chosen friends. His favourite amusements were a country walk or ride with Forster, or a dinner at Jack Straw’s Castle with him and Maclise. He was likewise happy at home. Here, however, in the very innermost circle of his affections, he had to suffer the first great personal grief of his life. His younger sister-in-law, Miss Mary Hogarth, had accompanied him and his wife into their new abode in Doughty Street, and here, in May, 1837, she died, at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the loss of this dearly-loved girl, “young, beautiful, and good.” “I can solemnly say,” he wrote to her mother a few months after her death, “that, waking or sleeping, I have never lost the recollection of our hard trial and sorrow, and I feel that I never shall.” “If,” ran part of his first entry in the Diary which he began on the first day of the following year, “she were with us now, the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a continuance of such happiness. But she is gone, and pray God I may one day, through his mercy, rejoin her.” It was not till, in after years, it became necessary to abandon the project, that he ceased to cherish the intention of being buried by her side, and through life the memory of her haunted him with strange vividness. At the Niagara Falls, when the spectacle of Nature in her glory had produced in him, as he describes it, a wondrously tranquil and happy peace of mind, he longed for the presence of his dearest friends, and “I was going to add, what would I give if the dear girl, whose ashes lie in Kensal Green, had lived to come so far along with us; but she has been heremany times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight.” “After she died,” he wrote to her mother in May, 1843, “I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or other. And so it did.” Once he dreamt of her, when travelling in Yorkshire; and then, after an interval of many months, as he lay asleep one night at Genoa, it seemed to him as if her spirit visited him and spoke to him in words which he afterwards precisely remembered, when he had awaked, with the tears running down his face. He never forgot her, and in the year before he died he wrote to his friend: “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is!” In a word, she was the object of the one great imaginative passion of his life. Many have denied that there is any likeness to nature in the fictitious figure in which, according to the wont of imaginative workers, he was irresistibly impelled to embody the sentiment with which she inspired him; but the sentiment itself became part of his nature, and part of his history. When in writing theOld Curiosity Shophe approached the death of Little Nell, he shrunk from the task: “Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story.”
TheOld Curiosity Shophas long been freed from the encumbrances which originally surrounded it, and there is little except biographical interest in the half-forgotten history ofMaster Humphrey’s Clock. Early in the year 1840, his success and confidence in his powers inducedhim to undertake an illustrated weekly journal, in which he depended solely on his own name, and, in the first instance, on his own efforts, as a writer. Such was his trust in his versatility that he did not think it necessary even to open with a continuous story. Perhaps the popularity of thePickwick Papersencouraged him to adopt the time-honoured device of wrapping up several tales in one. In any case, his framework was in the present instance too elaborate to take hold of the public mind, while the characters introduced into it possessed little or nothing of the freshness of their models in theTatlerand theSpectator. In order to re-enforce Master Humphrey, the deaf gentleman, and the other original members of his benevolent conclave, he hereupon resorted to a natural, but none the less unhappy, expedient. Mr. Pickwick was revived, together with Sam Weller and his parent; and a Weller of the third generation was brought on the stage in the person of a precocious four-year-old, “standing with his little legs very wide apart as if the top-boots were familiar to them, and actually winking upon the house-keeper with his infant eye, in imitation of his grandfather.” A laugh may have been raised at the time by this attempt, from which, however, every true Pickwickian must have turned sadly away. Nor was there much in the other contents of these early numbers to make up for the disappointment. As, therefore, neither “Master Humphrey’s Clock” nor “Mr. Weller’s Watch” seemed to promise any lasting success, it was prudently determined that the story of theOld Curiosity Shop, of which the first portion had appeared in the fourth number of the periodical, should run on continuously; and when this had been finished, a very short “link” sufficed to introduce another story,Barnaby Rudge, withthe close of whichMaster Humphrey’s Clocklikewise stopped.
In theOld Curiosity Shop, though it abounds in both grotesquely terrible and boisterously laughable effects, the key-note is that of an idyllic pathos. The sense of this takes hold of the reader at the very outset, as he lingers over the picture, with which the first chapter concludes, of little Nell asleep through the solitary night in the curiosity-dealer’s warehouse. It retains possession of him as he accompanies the innocent heroine through her wanderings, pausing with her in the church-yard where all is quiet save the cawing of the satirical rooks, or in the school-master’s cottage by the open window, through which is borne upon the evening air the distant hum of the boys at play upon the green, while the poor school-master holds in his hand the small cold one of the little scholar that has fallen asleep. Nor is it absent to the last when Nell herself lies at rest in her little bed. “Her little bird—a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed—was stirring nimbly in its cage; and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and motionless forever.” The hand which drew Little Nell afterwards formed other figures not less affecting, but none so essentially poetic. Like many such characters, this requires, for its full appreciation, a certain tension of the mind; and those who will not, or cannot, pass in some measure out of themselves, will be likely to tire of the conception, or to declare its execution artificial. Curiously enough, not only was Little Nell a favourite of Landor, a poet and critic utterly averse from meretricious art, but she also deeply moved the sympathy of Lord Jeffrey, who at least knew his own mind, and spoke it in both praise and blame. As already stated, Dickens onlywith difficulty brought himself to carry his story to its actual issue, though it is hard to believe that he could ever have intended a different close from that which he gave to it. His whole heart was in the story, nor could he have consoled himself by means of an ordinary happy ending.
Dickens’s comic humour never flowed in a pleasanter vein than in theOld Curiosity Shop, and nowhere has it a more exquisite element of pathos in it. The shock-headed, red-cheeked Kit is one of the earliest of those ungainly figures who speedily find their way into our affections—the odd family to which Mr. Toots, Tom Pinch, Tommy Traddles, and Joe Gargery alike belong. But the triumph of this serio-comic form of art in theOld Curiosity Shopis to be found in the later experiences of Dick Swiveller, who seems at first merely a more engaging sample of the Bob Sawyer species, but who ends by endearing himself to the most thoughtless laugher. Dick Swiveller and his protégée have gained a lasting place among the favourite characters of English fiction, and the privations of the Marchioness have possibly had a result which would have been that most coveted by Dickens—that of helping towards the better treatment of a class whose lot is among the dust and ashes, too often very bitter ashes, of many households. Besides these, the story contains a variety of incidental characters of a class which Dickens never grew weary of drawing from the life. Messrs. Codlin, Short, and Company, and the rest of the itinerant showmen, seem to have come straight from the most real of country fairs; and if ever atroupeof comedians deserved pity on their wanderings through a callous world, it was the most diverting and the most dismal of all the mountebanks that gathered round the stewof tripe in the kitchen of The Jolly Sandboys—Jerry’s performing dogs.
“‘Your people don’t usually travel in character, do they?’ said Short, pointing to the dresses of the dogs. ‘It must come expensive if they do.’“‘No,’ replied Jerry—‘no, it’s not the custom with us. But we’ve been playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new wardrobe at the races, so I didn’t think it worth while to stop to undress. Down, Pedro!’”
“‘Your people don’t usually travel in character, do they?’ said Short, pointing to the dresses of the dogs. ‘It must come expensive if they do.’
“‘No,’ replied Jerry—‘no, it’s not the custom with us. But we’ve been playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new wardrobe at the races, so I didn’t think it worth while to stop to undress. Down, Pedro!’”
In addition to these public servants we have a purveyor of diversion—or instruction—of an altogether different stamp. “Does the caravan look as ifitknow’d em?” indignantly demands the proprietress of Jarley’s wax-work, when asked whether she is acquainted with the men of the Punch show. She too is drawn, or moulded, in the author’s most exuberant style of fun, together withhercompany, in which “all the gentlemen were very pigeon-breasted and very blue about the beards, and all the ladies were miraculous figures; and all the ladies and all the gentlemen were looking intensely nowhere, and staring with extraordinary earnestness at nothing.”
In contrast with these genial products of observation and humour stand the grotesquely hideous personages who play important parts in the machinery of the story, the vicious dwarf Quilp and the monstrous virago Sally Brass. The former is among the most successful attempts of Dickens in a direction which was full of danger for him, as it is for all writers; the malevolent little demon is so blended with his surroundings—the description of which forms one of the author’s most telling pictures of the lonely foulnesses of the river-side—that his life seems natural in its way, and his death a most appropriate ending to it. Sally Brass, “whose accomplishments were allof a masculine and strictly legal kind,” is less of a caricature, and not without a humorously redeeming point of feminine weakness; yet the end of her and her brother is described at the close of the book with almost tragic earnestness. On the whole, though the poetic sympathy of Dickens when he wrote this book was absorbed in the character of his heroine, yet his genius rarely asserted itself after a more diversified fashion.
OfBarnaby Rudge, though in my opinion an excellent book after its kind, I may speak more briefly. With the exception ofA Tale of Two Cities, it was Dickens’s only attempt in the historical novel. In the earlier work the relation between the foreground and background of the story is skilfully contrived, and the colouring of the whole, without any elaborate attempt at accurate fidelity, has a generally true and harmonious effect. With the help of her portrait by a painter (Mr. Frith) for whose pictures Dickens had a great liking, Dolly Varden has justly taken hold of the popular fancy as a charming type of a pretty girl of a century ago. And some of the local descriptions in the early part of the book are hardly less pleasing: the Temple in summer, as it was before the charm of Fountain Court was destroyed by its guardians; and the picturesque comforts of the Maypole Inn, described beforehand, by way of contrast to the desecration of its central sanctuary. The intrigue of the story is fairly interesting in itself, and the gentlemanly villain who plays a principal part in it, though, as usual, over-elaborated, is drawn with more skill than Dickens usually displays in such characters. After the main interest of the book has passed to the historical action of the George Gordon riots, the story still retains its coherence, and, a few minor improbabilities apart, is successfully conducted to its close. No historical novel canaltogether avoid the banalities of the species; and though Dickens, like all the world, had his laugh at the late Mr. G. P. R. James, he is constrained to introduce the historical hero of the tale, with his confidential adviser, and his attendant, in the familiar guise of three horsemen. As for Lord George Gordon himself, and the riots of which the responsibility remains inseparable from his unhappy memory, the representation of them in the novel sufficiently accords both with poetic probability and with historical fact. The poor lord’s evil genius, indeed, Gashford—who has no historical original—tries the reader’s sense of verisimilitude rather hard; such converts are uncommon except among approvers. The Protestant hangman, on the other hand, has some slight historical warranty; but the leading part which he is made to play in the riots, and his resolution to go any lengths “in support of the great Protestant principle of hanging,” overshoot the mark. It cannot be said that there is any substantial exaggeration in the description of the riots; thus, the burning of the great distiller’s house in Holborn is a well-authenticated fact; and there is abundant vigour in the narrative. Repetition is unavoidable in treating such a theme, but inBarnaby Rudgeit is not rendered less endurable by mannerism, nor puffed out with rhetoric.
One very famous character in this story was, as personages in historical novels often are, made up out of two originals.[4]This was Grip the Raven, who, after seeingthe idiot hero of the tale safe through his adventures, resumed his addresses on the subject of the kettle to the horses in the stable; and who, “as he was a mere infant when Barnaby was gray, has very probably gone on talking to the present time.” In a later preface toBarnaby Rudge, Dickens, with infinite humour, related his experiences of the two originals in question, and how he had been ravenless since the mournful death before the kitchen fire of the second of the pair, theGripof actual life. This occurred in the house at Devonshire Terrace, into which the family had moved two years before (in 1839).
As Dickens’s fame advanced his circle of acquaintances was necessarily widened; and in 1841 he was invited to visit Edinburgh, and to receive there the first great tribute of public recognition which had been paid to him. He was entertained with great enthusiasm at a public banquet, voted the freedom of the city, and so overwhelmed with hospitalities that, notwithstanding his frank pleasure in these honours, he was glad to make his escape at last, and refreshed himself with a tour in the Highlands. These excitements may have intensified in him a desire which had for some time been active in his mind, and which in any case would have been kept alive by an incessant series of invitations. He had signed an agreement with his publishers for a new book before this desire took the shape of an actual resolution. There is no great difficulty in understanding why Dickens made up his mind to go to America, and thus to interrupt for the moment a course of life and work which was fast leading him on to great heights of fame and fortune. The question of international copyright alone would hardly have induced him to cross the seas. Probably he felt instinctively that to see men and cities was part of the training as well as of the recreationwhich his genius required. Dickens was by nature one of those artists who when at work always long to be in sympathy with their public, and to know it to be in sympathy with them. And hitherto he had not met more than part of his public of readers face to face.
STRANGE LANDS.
[1842-1847.]
A journey across the Atlantic in midwinter is no child’s-play even at the present day, when, bad though their passage may have been, few people would venture to confess doubts, as Dickens did, concerning the safety of such a voyage by steam in heavy weather. The travellers—for Dickens was accompanied by his wife—had an exceptionally rough crossing, the horrors of which he has described in hisAmerican Notes. His powers of observation were alive in the midst of the lethargy of sea-sickness, and when he could not watch others he found enough amusement in watching himself. At last, on January 28, 1842, they found themselves in Boston harbour. Their stay in the United States lasted about four months, during which time they saw Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Buffalo. Then they passed by Niagara into Canada, and after a pleasant visit to Montreal, diversified by private theatricals with the officers there, were safe at home again in July.
Dickens had met with an enthusiastic welcome in every part of the States where he had not gone out of the wayof it; in New York, in particular, he had been fêted, with a fervour unique even in the history of American enthusiasms, under the resounding title of “the Guest of the Nation.” Still, even this imposed no moral obligation upon him to take the advice tendered to him in America, and to avoid writing about that country—“we are so very suspicious.” On the other hand, whatever might be his indignation at the obstinate unwillingness of the American public to be moved a hair’s-breadth by his championship of the cause of international copyright,[5]this failure could not, in a mind so reasonable as his, have outweighed the remembrance of the kindness shown to him and to his fame. But the truth seems to be that he had, if not at first, at least very speedily, taken a dislike to American ways which proved too strong for him to the last. In strange lands, most of all in a country which, like the United States, is not in the least ashamed to be what it is, travellers are necessarily at the outset struck by details; and Dickens’s habit of minute observation was certain not to let him lose many of them. He was neither long enough in the country to study very closely, nor was it in his way to ponder very deeply, the problems involved in the existence of many of the institutions with which he found fault. Thus, he was indignant at the sight of slavery, and even ventured to “tell a piece of his mind” on the subject to a judge in the South; but when, twenty years later, the great struggle came, at the root of which this question lay, his sympathies were with the cause of disunion and slavery in its conflict with the “mad andvillanous” North. In short, his knowledge of America and its affairs was gained in such a way and under such circumstances as to entitle him, if he chose, to speak to the vast public which he commanded as an author of men and manners as observed by him; but he had no right to judge the destinies and denounce the character of a great people on evidence gathered in the course of a holiday tour.
Nor, indeed, did theAmerican Notes, published by him after his return home, furnish any serious cause of offence. In an introductory chapter, which was judiciously suppressed, he had taken credit for the book as not having “a grain of any political ingredient in its whole composition.” Indeed, the contents were rather disappointing from their meagreness. The author showed good taste in eschewing all reference to his personal reception, and good judgment in leaving the copyright question undiscussed. But though his descriptions were as vivid as usual—whether of the small steamboat, “of about half a pony power,” on the Connecticut river, or of the dismal scenery on the Mississippi, “great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him!”—and though some of the figure-sketches were touched off with the happiest of hands, yet the public, even in 1842, was desirous to learn something more about America than this. It is true that Dickens had, with his usual conscientiousness, examined and described various interesting public institutions in the States—prisons, asylums, and the like; but the book was not a very full one; it was hardly anything but a sketch-book, with more humour, but with infinitely less poetic spirit, than theSketch-bookof the illustrious American author whose friendship had been one of the chief personal gains of Dickens’s journey.
TheAmerican Notes, for which the letters to Forster had furnished ample materials, were published in the year of Dickens’s return, after he had refreshed himself with a merry Cornish trip in the company of his old friend, and his two other intimates, “Stanny” and “Mac.” But he had not come home, as he had not gone out, to be idle. On the first day of the following year, 1843, appeared the first number of the story which was to furnish the realcasus discriminisbetween Dickens and the enemies, as well no doubt as a very large proportion of the friends, whom he had left behind him across the water. The American scenes inMartin Chuzzlewitdid not, it is true, begin till the fifth number of the story; nor is it probable from the accounts of the sale, which was much smaller than Dickens had expected, that these particular episodes at first produced any strong feeling in the English public. But the merits of the book gradually obtained for it a popularity at home which has been surpassed by that of but one or two other of Dickens’s works; and in proportion to this popularity was the effect exercised by its American chapters. What that effect has been, it would be hypocrisy to question.
Dickens, it is very clear, had been unable to resist the temptation of at once drawing upon the vast addition to his literary capital as a humourist. That the satire of many of the American scenes inMartin Chuzzlewitis, as satire, not less true than telling, it needs but a small acquaintance with American journalism and oratory even at the present day to perceive; and the heartrending history of Eden, as a type of some of the settlements “vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope,” at least had the warrant of something more than hearsay and a look in passing. Nor, as has already been observed, would it havebeen in accordance either with human nature, or with the fitness of things, had Dickens allowed his welcome in America to become to him (as he termed it in the suppressed Preface to theNotes) “an iron muzzle disguised beneath a flower or two.” But the frankness, to say the least, of the mirror into which he now invited his late hosts to gaze was not likely to produce grateful compliments to its presenter, nor was the effect softened by the despatch with which thissouvenirof the “guest of the nation” was pressed upon its attention. No doubt it would have been easy to reflect that only the evil, not the good, sides of social life in America were held up to derision and contempt, and that an honourable American journalist had no more reason to resent the portraiture of Mr. Jefferson Brick than a virtuous English paterfamilias had to quarrel with that of Mr. Pecksniff. Unfortunately, offence is usually taken where offence is meant; and there can be little doubt as to theanimuswith which Dickens had written. Only two months after landing at Boston Dickens had declared to Macready, that “however much he liked the ingredients of this great dish, he could not but say that the dish itself went against the grain with him, and that he didn’t like it.” It was not, and could not be, pleasant for Americans to find the “New York Sewer, in its twelfth thousand, with a whole column of New Yorkers to be shown up, and all their names printed,” introduced as the first expression of “the bubbling passions of their country;” or to be certified, apropos of a conversation among American “gentlemen” after dinner, that dollars, and dollars only, at the risk of honesty and honour, filled their souls. “No satirist,” Martin Chuzzlewit is told by a candid and open-minded American, “could, I believe, breathe this air.” But satire in such passages asthese borders too closely on angry invective; and neither the irresistible force nor the earnest pathos of the details which follow can clear away the suspicion that at the bottom lay a desire to depreciate. Nor was the general effect of the American episodes inMartin Chuzzlewitmaterially modified by their conclusion, to which, with the best of intentions, the author could not bring himself to give a genuinely complimentary turn. The Americans did not like all this, and could not be expected to like it. The tone of the whole satire was too savage, and its tenor was too hopelessly one-sided, for it to pass unresented; while much in it was too near the truth to glance off harmless. It is well known that in time Dickens came himself to understand this. Before quitting America, in 1868, he declared his intention to publish in every future edition of hisAmerican NotesandMartin Chuzzlewithis testimony to the magnanimous cordiality of his second reception in the States, and to the amazing changes for the better which he had seen everywhere around him during his second sojourn in the country. But it is not likely that the postscript, all the more since it was added under circumstances so honourable to both sides, has undone, or will undo, the effect of the text. Very possibly the Americans may, in the eyes of the English people as well as in their own, cease to be chargeable with the faults and foibles satirised by Dickens; but the satire itself will live, and will continue to excite laughter and loathing, together with the other satire of the powerful book to which it belongs.
For in none of his books is that power, which at times filled their author himself with astonishment, more strikingly and abundantly revealed than inThe Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Never was his inventiveforce more flexible and more at his command; yet none of his books cost him more hard work. The very names of hero and novel were only the final fortunate choice out of a legion of notions; though “Pecksniff” as well as “Charity” and “Mercy” (“not unholy names, I hope,” said Mr. Pecksniff to Mrs. Todgers) were first inspirations. The MS. text too is full of the outward signs of care. But the author had his reward in the general impression of finish which is conveyed by this book as compared with its predecessors; so thatMartin Chuzzlewitmay be described as already one of the masterpieces of Dickens’s maturity as a writer. Oddly enough, the one part of the book which moves rather heavily is the opening chapter, an effort in the mock-heroic, probably suggested by the author’s eighteenth century readings.
A more original work, however, thanMartin Chuzzlewitwas never composed, or one which more freshly displays the most characteristic qualities of its author’s genius. Though the actual construction of the story is anything but faultless—for what could be more slender than the thread by which the American interlude is attached to the main action, or more wildly improbable than the hazardous stratagem of old Martin upon which that action turns?—yet it is so contrived as to fulfil the author’s avowed intention of exhibiting under various forms the evil and the folly of selfishness. This vice is capable of both serious and comic treatment, and commended itself in each aspect to Dickens as being essentially antagonistic to his moral and artistic ideals of human life. A true comedy of humours thus unfolded itself with the progress of his book, and one for which the types had not been fetched from afar: “Your homes the scene; yourselves the actors here,” had been the motto which he had at firstintended to put upon his title-page. Thus, while in “the old-established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son” selfishness is cultivated as a growth excellent in itself, and the son’s sentiment, “Do other men, for they would do you,” is applauded by his admiring father, in young Martin the vice rather resembles a weed strong and rank, yet not so strong but that it gives way at last before a manly endeavour to uproot it. The character of the hero, though very far from heroic, is worked out with that reliance upon the fellow-feeling of candid readers which in our great novelists of the eighteenth century has obtained sympathy for much less engaging personages. More especially is the young man’s loss of self-respect in the season of his solitary wretchedness depicted with admirable feeling. It would not, I think, be fanciful to assert that in this story Dickens has with equal skill distinguished between two species of unselfishness. Mark Tapley’s is the actively unselfish nature, and though his reiteration of his guiding motive is wearisome and occasionally absurd, yet the power of coming out jolly under unpropitious circumstances is a genuinely English ideal of manly virtue. Tom Pinch’s character, on the other hand, is unselfish from innate sweetness; and never has the art of Dickens drawn a type which, while closely approaching the border-line of the grotesque, is yet so charmingly true to nature.
Grotesque characters proper are numerous enough in this book, but all the others pale before the immortal presence of Mrs. Gamp. She had been traced to an original in real life, but her literary right to stand on her own legs has been most properly vindicated against any supposition of likeness to the different type, the subject of Leigh Hunt’sMonthly Nurse—a paper, by-the-way, distinguished by shrewdness as well as feeling. Imagination has nevertaken bolder flights than those requisite for the development of Mrs. Gamp’s mental processes: