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 EDITION DE LUXE 
 
 LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COPIES 
 PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS 
 
 ^ifi from 
 
 the Estate Of M/ssRm.kc, 
 
 'ss Ruth Putnam 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Biography of Dickens, by Leslie Stephen ... 1 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The lottery of education; Charles Dickens born 
 February 7, 1812; his pathetic feeling towards 
 his own childhood; happy days at Chatham; 
 family troubles; similarity between little 
 Charles and David Copperfield; John Dickens 
 taken to the Marshalsea; his character; Charles 
 employed in blacking business; over-sensitive 
 in after years about this episode in his career; 
 isolation; is brought back into family and 
 prison circle; family in comparative comfort 
 at the Marshalsea; father released; Charles 
 leaves the blacking business; his mother; he is 
 sent to Wellington House Academy in 1824; 
 character of that place of learning; Dickens 
 masters its humours thoroughly 49 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Dickens becomes a solicitor's clerk in 1827; then a 
 reporter; his experiences in that capacity; 
 first story published in The Old Monthly Mag- 
 azine for January, 1834; writes more 
 Sketches; power of minute observation thus 
 
iv CONTENTS 
 
 early shown; masters the writer's art; is paid 
 for his contributions to the Chronicle; marries 
 Miss Hogarth on April 2, 1836; appearance at 
 that date; power of physical endurance; ad- 
 mirable influence of his peculiar education; and 
 its drawbacks 72 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Origin of Pickwick; Seymour's part therein; 
 first number published on April 1, 1836; early 
 numbers not a success; suddenly the book be- 
 comes the rage; English literature just then in 
 want of its novelist; Dickens's kingship ac- 
 knowledged; causes of the book's popularity; 
 its admirable humour and other excellent qual- 
 ities ; Sam Weller ; Mr. Pickwick himself ; book 
 read by everybody 90 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Dickens works "double tides" from 1836 to 1839; 
 appointed editor of Bentley's Miscellany at be- 
 ginning of 1837, and commences Oliver Twist; 
 Quarterly Review predicts his speedy down- 
 fall; pecuniary position at this time; moves 
 from Furnival's Inn to Doughty Street; death 
 of his sister-in-law Mary Hogarth; his friend- 
 ships; absence of all jealousy in his character; 
 habits of work; riding and pedestrianizing ; 
 walking in London streets necessary to the ex- 
 ercise of his art 102 
 
CONTENTS V 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Oliver Twist; analysis of the book; doubtful prob- 
 ability of Oliver's character; Nicholas Nick- 
 lehy; its wealth of character; Master Hum- 
 phrey's Clock projected and begun in April, 
 1840; the public disappointed in its expecta- 
 tions of a novel; Old Curiosity Shop com- 
 menced, and miscellaneous portion of Master 
 Humphrey's Clock dropped; Dickens's fond- 
 ness for taking a child as his hero or heroine; 
 Little Nell; tears shed over her sorrows; gen- 
 eral admiration for the pathos of her story; 
 is such admiration altogether deserved? Paul 
 Dombey more natural; Little Nell's death too 
 declamatory as a piece of writing; Dickens 
 nevertheless a master of pathos; Barnaby 
 Rudge; a historical novel dealing with times of 
 the Gordon riots 112 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Dickens starts for United States in January, 1842; 
 had been splendidly received a little before at 
 Edinburgh; why he went to the United States; 
 is enthusiastically welcomed; at first he is en- 
 chanted; then expresses the greatest disap- 
 pointment; explanation of the change; what 
 the Americans thought of him; American 
 Notes; his views modified on his second visit to 
 America in 1867-8; takes to fierce private the- 
 atricals for rest; delight of the children on his 
 return to England; an admirable father . .132 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Dickens again at work and play; publication of 
 Martin Chuzzlewit begun in January, 1843; 
 plot not Dickens's strong point; this not of any 
 vital consequence; a novel not really remem- 
 bered by its story; Dickens's books often have 
 a higher unity than that of plot; selfishness 
 the central idea of Martin Chuzzlewit; a great 
 book, and yet not at the time successful; Dick- 
 ens foresees money embarrassments; publishes 
 the admirable Christmas Carol at Christmas, 
 1843; and determines to go for a space to 
 Italy 150 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Journey through France ; Genoa ; the Italy of 1 844 ; 
 Dickens charmed with its untidy picturesque- 
 ness; he is idle for a few weeks; his palace at 
 Genoa; he sets to work upon The Chimes; gets 
 passionately interested in the little book; 
 travels through Italy to read it to his friends 
 in London; reads it on December 2, 1844; is 
 soon back again in Italy; returns to London in 
 the summer of 1845; on January 21, 1846, 
 starts The Daily News; holds the post of edi- 
 tor three weeks; Pictures from Italy first pub- 
 lished in Daily News 162 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Dickens as an amateur actor and stage-manager; 
 he goes to Lausanne in May, 1846, and begins 
 
CONTENTS vii 
 
 Dombey; has great difficulty in getting on with- 
 out streets; the Battle of Life written; Dom- 
 hey; its pathos; pride the subject of the book; 
 reality of the characters ; Dickens's treatment 
 of partial insanity; M. Taine's false criticism 
 thereon; Dickens in Paris in the winter of 
 1846-7; private theatricals again; the Haunted 
 Man; David Copperfeld begun in May, 1849; 
 it marks the culminating point in Dickens's 
 career as a writer; Household Words started 
 on March 30, 1850; character of that periodi- 
 cal and its successor. All the Year Round; do- 
 mestic sorrows cloud the opening of the year 
 1851; Dickens moves in same year from Dev- 
 onshire Terrace to Tavistock House, and be- 
 gins Bleak House; story of the novel ; its Chan- 
 cery episodes; Dickens is overworked and ill, 
 and finds pleasant quarters at Boulogne . .174 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Dickens gives his first public (not paid) readings in 
 December, 1853; was it infra dig. that he 
 should read for money? he begins his paid 
 readings in April, 1858; reasons for their suc- 
 cess; care bestowed on them by the reader; 
 their dramatic character; Carlyle's opinion of 
 them; how the tones of Dickens's voice linger 
 in the memory of one who heard him . . . 200 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Hard Times commenced in Household Words for 
 April 1, 1854; it is an attack on the "hard 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 fact " school of philosophers ; what Macaulay 
 and Mr. Ruskin thought of it; the Russian 
 war of 1854-5, and the cry for " Administra- 
 tive Reform " ; Dickens in the thick of the 
 movement; Little Dorrit and the Circumlocu- 
 tion O^cej character of Mr. Dorrit admirably 
 drawn; Dickens is in Paris from December, 
 1855, to May, 1856; he buys Gad's Hill Place; 
 it becomes his hobby; unfortunate relations 
 with his wife; and separation in May, 1858; 
 lying rumours; how these stung Dickens 
 through his honourable pride in the love which 
 the public bore him; he publishes an indignant 
 protest in Household Words; and writes an un- 
 justifiable letter 207 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 The Tale of Two Cities, a story of the great Frendi 
 Revolution; Phiz's connection with Dickens's 
 works comes to an end; his art and that of 
 Cruikshank; both too essentially caricatur- 
 ists of an old school to be permanently the 
 illustrators of Dickens; other illustrators; 
 Great Expectations; its story and characters; 
 Our Mutual Friend begun in May, 1864; a 
 complicated narrative; Dickens's extraordinary 
 sympathy for Eugene Wrayburn; generally 
 his sympathies are so entirely right; which ex- 
 plains why his books are not vtilgar; he him- 
 self a man of great real refinement .... 225 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 Dickens's health begins to fail; he is much shaken 
 by an accident in June, 1865; but bates no jot 
 of his high courage, and works on at his read- 
 ings; sails for America on a reading tour in 
 November, 1867; is wretchedly ill, and yet 
 continues to read day after day; comes back 
 to England, and reads on; health failing more 
 and more; reading has to be abandoned for a 
 time; begins to write his last and unfinished 
 book, Edwin Droodj except health all seems 
 well with him; on June 8, 1870, he works at 
 his book nearly all day ; at dinner time is struck 
 down; dies on the following day, June the 9th; 
 is buried in Westminster Abbey among his 
 peers; nor will his fame suffer eclipse . . . 239 
 
 Index 259 
 
Biography of Charles Dickens 
 
 By Leslie Stephen 
 
 Charles Dickens (1812-1870), novelist, was 
 bom 7 February, 1812, at 387 Mile End Ter- 
 race, Commercial Road, Landport, Port- 
 sea. His father, John Dickens, a clerk 
 in the navy pay office, with a salary of 
 80Z. a year, was then stationed in the Ports- 
 mouth dockyard. The wife of the first Lord 
 Houghton told Mr. Wemyss Reid that Mrs. 
 Dickens, mother of John, was housekeeper 
 at Crewe, and famous for her powers of 
 story-telling (Wemyss Reid, in Daily News, 
 8 October, 1887). John Dickens had eight 
 children by his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of 
 Charles Barrow, a lieutenant in the navy. The 
 eldest, Fanny, was born in 1810, Charles, the 
 second, was christened Charles John Huffman 
 (erroneously entered Huff ham in the register) , 
 but dropped the last two names. Charles 
 Dickens remembered the little garden of the 
 house at Portsea, though his father was re- 
 called to London when he was only two years 
 
2 LIFE OF 
 
 old. In 1816 (probably) the family moved 
 to Chatham. Dickens was small and sickly ; he 
 amused himself by reading and watching the 
 games of other boys. His mother taught him 
 his letters, and he pored over a small collection 
 of books belonging to his father. Among 
 them were Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wake- 
 field, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and especially 
 Smollett's novels, by which he was deeply im- 
 pressed. He wrote an infantine tragedy 
 called Misnar, founded on the Tales of the 
 Genii. James Lamert, the stepson of his 
 mother's eldest sister, Mary (whose second 
 husband was Dr. Lamert, an army surgeon at 
 Chatham) , had a taste for private theatricals. 
 Lamert took Dickens to the theatre, in which 
 the child greatly delighted. John Dickens's 
 salary was raised to 200/. in 1819, and to 350Z. 
 in 1820, at which amount it remained until he 
 left the service, 9 March, 1825. It was, how- 
 ever, made insufficient by his careless habits, 
 and in 1821 he left his first house, 2 (now 11) 
 Ordnance Terrace, for a smaller house, 18 St. 
 Mary's Place, next to a Baptist chapel. 
 Dickens was then sent to school with the 
 minister, Mr. Giles (see Langton, Childhood 
 of Dickens). In the winter of 1822-3 his 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 3 
 
 father was recalled to Somerset House, and 
 settled in Bayham Street, Camden Town, 
 whither his son followed in the spring. John 
 Dickens, whose character is more or less repre- 
 sented by Micawber, was now in difficulties, 
 and had to make a composition with his 
 creditors. He was (as Dickens emphatically 
 stated) a very affectionate father, and took a 
 pride in his son's precocious talents. Yet at 
 this time (according to the same statement), 
 he was entirely forgetful of the son's claims 
 to a decent education. In spite of the family 
 difficulties, the eldest child, Fanny, was sent 
 as a pupil to the Royal Academy of Music, 
 but Charles was left to black his father's boots, 
 look after the younger children, and do small 
 errands. Lamert made a little theatre for the 
 child's amusement. His mother's elder brother, 
 Thomas Barrow, and a godfather, took notice 
 of him occasionally. The uncle lodged in the 
 upper floor of a house in which a bookselling 
 business was carried on, and the proprietress 
 lent the child some books. His literary tastes 
 were kept alive, and he tried his hand at writing 
 a description of the uncle's barber. His 
 mother now made an attempt to retrieve the 
 family fortunes by taking a house, 4 Gower 
 
4 LIFE OF 
 
 Street North, where a brass plate announced 
 ' Mrs. Dickens's Establishment,' but failed to 
 attract any pupils. The father was at last 
 arrested and carried to the Marshalsea, long 
 afterwards described in Little Dorrit. (Mr. 
 Langton thinks that the prison was the King's 
 Bench, where, as he says, there was a prisoner 
 named Dorrett in 1824.) All the books and 
 furniture went gradually to the pawnbroker's. 
 James Lamert had become manager of a 
 blacking warehouse, and obtained a place for 
 Dickens at 6s. or 7s. a week in the office at 
 Hungerford Stairs. Dickens was treated as a 
 mere drudge, and employed in making up par- 
 cels. He came home at night to the dismantled 
 house in Gower Street till the family followed 
 the father to the Marshalsea, and then lodged 
 in Camden Town with a reduced old lady, a 
 Mrs. Roylance, the original of Mrs. Pipchin 
 in Dombey and Son. Another lodging was 
 found for him near the prison with a family 
 which is represented by the Garlands in his 
 Old Curiosity Shop. The Dickenses were 
 rather better off in prison than they had been 
 previously. The maid-of-all-work who fol- 
 lowed them from Bayham Street became the 
 Marchioness of the Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 5 
 
 The elder Dickens at last took the benefit of 
 the Insolvent Debtors Act, and moved first to 
 Mrs. Roylance's house, and then to a house in 
 Somers Town. Dickens's amazing faculty of 
 observation is proved by the use made in his 
 novels of all that he now saw, especially in the 
 prison scenes of Pickwick and in the earlier 
 part of David Coppei'field. That he suffered 
 acutely is proved by the singular bitterness 
 shown in his own narrative printed by Forster. 
 He felt himself degraded by his occupation. 
 When his sister won a prize at the Royal 
 Academy he was deeply humiliated by the 
 contrast of his own position, though incapable 
 of envying her success. This was about April, 
 1824. 
 
 The family circumstances improved. The 
 elder Dickens had received a legacy, which 
 helped to clear off his debts ; he had a pension, 
 and after some time he obtained employment as 
 reporter to the Morning Chronicle. About 
 1824 Dickens was sent to a school kept by a 
 Mr. Jones in the Hampstead Road, and called 
 the Wellington House Academy. His health 
 improved. His school- fellows remembered him 
 as a handsome lad, overflowing with animal 
 spirits, writing stories, getting up little theat- 
 
6 LIFE OF 
 
 rical performances, and fond of harmless 
 practical jokes, but not distinguishing himself 
 as a scholar. After two j^ears at this school, 
 Dickens went to another kept by a Mr. Daw- 
 son in Henrietta Street, Brunswick Square. 
 He then became clerk in the office of Mr. Mol- 
 loy in New Square, Lincoln's Inn, and soon 
 afterwards (from May, 1827, to November, 
 1828) , clerk in the office of Mr. Edward Black- 
 more, attorney, of Gray's Inn. His salary 
 with Mr. Blackmore rose from 135. Gd. to 155. 
 a week. Dickens's energy had only been stim- 
 ulated by the hardships through which he had 
 passed. He was determined to force his way 
 upwards. He endeavoured to supplement his 
 scanty education by reading at the British 
 Museum, and he studied shorthand writing in 
 the fashion described in David Copperfield, 
 Copperfield's youthful passion for Dora re- 
 flects a passion of the same kind in Dickens's 
 own career, which, though hopeless, stimulated 
 his ambition. He became remarkably expert 
 in shorthand, and after two years' reporting in 
 the Doctors' Commons and other courts, he 
 entered the gallery of the House of Commons 
 as reporter to the True Sun. He was spokes- 
 man for the reporters in a successful strike. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 7 
 
 For two sessions he reported for the Mirror 
 of Parliament, started by a maternal uncle, 
 and in the session of 1835 became reporter for 
 the Morning Chronicle. While still report- 
 ing at Doctors' Commons he had thoughts of 
 becoming an actor. He made an application 
 to George Bartley, manager at Co vent Gar- 
 den, which seems to have only missed accept- 
 ance by an accident, and took great pains to 
 practise the art. He finally abandoned this 
 scheme on obtaining his appointment on the 
 Morning Chronicle (Forster ii., 179). His 
 powers were rapidly developed by the require- 
 ments of his occupation. He was, as he says 
 (Letters J i. 438) , ' the best and most rapid re- 
 porter ever known.' He had to hurry to and 
 from country meetings, by coach and post- 
 chaise, encountering all the adventures incident 
 to travelling in the days before railroads, mak- 
 ing arrangements for forwarding reports, and 
 attracting the notice of his employers by his 
 skill, resource, and energy. John Black, the 
 editor, became a warm friend and was, he says, 
 his ' first hearty out-and-out appreciator.' 
 
 He soon began to write in the periodicals. 
 The appearance of his first article, A Dinner 
 at Poplar Walk (reprinted as Mr, Minn^ 
 
8 LIFE OF 
 
 and his Cousin), in the Monthly Magazine 
 for December, 1833, filled him with exultation. 
 Nine others followed till February, 1835. The 
 paper in August, 1834, first bore the signature 
 ' Boz.' It was the pet name of his youngest 
 brother, Augustus, called * Moses,' after the 
 boy in the Vicar of Wakefield^ which was 
 corrupted into Boses and Boz. An Evening 
 Chronicle as an appendix to the Morning 
 Chronicle, was started in 1835 under the 
 management of George Hogarth, formerly a 
 friend of Scott. The Monthly Magazine 
 was unable to pay for the sketches, and 
 Dickens now offered to continue his sketches 
 in the new venture. His offer was accepted, 
 and his salary raised from five to seven guineas 
 a week. In the spring of 1836 the collected 
 papers were published as Sketches by Boz, 
 with illustrations by Cruikshank, the copy- 
 right being bought for 150/. by a publisher 
 named Macrone. On 2 April, 1836, Dickens 
 married Catherine, eldest daughter of Ho- 
 garth, his colleague on the Morning Chroni- 
 cle. He had just begun the Pickwick 
 Papers. The Sketches, in which it is now 
 easy to see the indications of future success, 
 had attracted some notice in their original 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 9 
 
 form. Albany Fonblanque had warmly 
 praised them, and publishers heard of the 
 young writer. Messrs. Chapman & Hall, then 
 beginning business, had published a book 
 called The Squib Annual in November, 
 1835, with illustrations by Seymour. Seymour 
 was anxious to produce a series of * cockney 
 sporting plates.' Chapman & Hall thought 
 that it might answer to publish such a series 
 in monthly parts accompanied by letterpress. 
 Hall applied to Dickens, suggesting the in- 
 vention of a Nimrod Club, the members of 
 which should get into comic difficulties suitable 
 for Seymour's illustrations. Dickens, wishing 
 for a freer hand, and having no special knowl- 
 edge of sport, substituted the less restricted 
 scheme of the Pickwick Club, and wrote the 
 first number, for which Seymour drew the 
 illustrations. The first two or three numbers 
 excited less attention than the collected 
 Sketches, which had just appeared. Seymour 
 killed himself before the appearance of the 
 second number. Robert William Buss illus- 
 trated the third number. Thackeray, then 
 an unknown youth, applied to Dickens for the 
 post of illustrator; but Dickens finally chose 
 Hablot Knight Browne, who illustrated the 
 
10 LIFE OF 
 
 fourth and all the subsequent numbers, as well 
 as many of the later novels. 
 
 The success of Pickwick soon became ex- 
 traordinary. The binder prepared four hun- 
 dred copies of the first number, and forty 
 thousand of the fifteenth. The marked success 
 began with the appearance of Sam Weller in 
 the fifth number. Sam Weller is in fact the 
 incarnation of the qualities to which the suc- 
 cess was due. Educated like his creator in the 
 streets of London, he is the ideal cockney. His 
 exuberant animal spirits, humorous shrewd- 
 ness, and kindliness under a mask of broad 
 farce, made him the favourite of all cockneys 
 in and out of London, and took the gravest 
 readers by storm. All that Dickens had learnt 
 in his rough initiation into life, with a power 
 of observation unequalled in its way, was 
 poured out with boundless vivacity and prodi- 
 gality of invention. The book, beginning as 
 farce, became admirable comedy, and has 
 caused more hearty and harmless laughter than 
 any book in the language. If Dickens's later 
 works surpassed Pickwick in some ways, 
 Pickwick shows in their highest develop- 
 ment the qualities in which he most surpassed 
 other writers. Sam Weller's peculiar trick of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 11 
 
 speech has been traced with probabihty to 
 Samuel Vale, a popular comic actor, who in 
 1822 performed Simon Spatterdash in a farce 
 called The Boarding House, and gave cur- 
 rency to a similar phraseology. {Notes and 
 Queries, 6th ser. v. 388; and Origin of Sam 
 Weller, with a facsimile of a contemporary 
 piratical imitation of Pickwick, 1883.) 
 
 Dickens was now a prize for which pub- 
 lishers might contend. In the next few years 
 he undertook a great deal of work, with con- 
 fidence natural to a buoyant temperament, en- 
 couraged by unprecedented success, and 
 achieved new triumphs without permitting 
 himself to fall into slovenly composition. Each 
 new book was at least as carefully written as 
 its predecessor. Pickwick appeared from 
 April, 1836, to November, 1837. Oliver 
 Twist began while Pickwick was still pro- 
 ceeding, in January, 1837, and ran till March, 
 1839. Nicholas Nicklehy overlapped Oliver 
 Twist, beginning in April, 1838, and ending 
 in October, 1839. In February, 1838, Dickens 
 went to Yorkshire to look at the schools carica- 
 tured in Dotheboys Hall. (For the original of 
 Dotheboys Hall see Notes and Queries, 4th 
 ser. vi. 245, and 5th ser. iii. 325.) A short 
 
12 LIFE OF 
 
 pause followed. Dickens had thought of a 
 series of papers, more or less on the model of 
 the old Spectator^ in which there was to be a 
 club, including the Wellers, varied essays sa- 
 tirical and descriptive, and occasional stories. 
 The essays were to appear weekly, and for the 
 whole he finally selected the title Master 
 Humphrey's Clock. The plan was carried 
 out with modifications. It appeared at once 
 that the stories were the popular part of the 
 series; the club and the intercalated essay dis- 
 appeared, and Master Humphrey's Clock 
 resolved itself into the two stories. The Old 
 Curiosity Shop, and Barnahy Rudge. Dur- 
 ing 1840 and 1841 Oliver Twist seems to 
 have been at first less popular than its fellow- 
 stories; but Nicholas Nickleby surpassed 
 even Pickwick. Sydney Smith on read- 
 ing it confessed that Dickens had ' con- 
 quered him,* though he had ' stood out as long 
 as he could.' Master Humphrey's Clock 
 began with a sale of seventy thousand copies, 
 which declined when there was no indication 
 of a continuous story, but afterwards revived. 
 The Old Curiosity Shop, as republished, made 
 an extraordinary success. Barnahy Rudge 
 has apparently never been equally popular. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 13 
 
 The exuberant animal spirits, and the amaz- 
 ing fertility in creating comic types, which 
 made the fortune of Pickwick, were now 
 combined with a more continuous story. The 
 ridicule of Bumbledom in Oliver Twist, 
 and of Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nick- 
 lehy, showed the power of satirical portrai- 
 ture already displayed in the prison scenes of 
 Pickwick. The humourist is not yet lost in the 
 satirist, and the extravagance of the caricature 
 is justified by its irresistible fun. Dickens 
 was also showing the command of the pathetic 
 which fascinated the ordinary reader. The 
 critic is apt to complain that Dickens kills his 
 children as if he liked it, and makes his vic- 
 tims attitudinize before the footlights. Yet 
 Landor, a severe critic, thought ' Little Nell ' 
 equal to any character in fiction, and Jeffrey, 
 the despiser of sentimentalism, declared that 
 there had been nothing so good since Cordelia 
 (Forster, i. 177, 226). Dickens had written 
 with sincere feeling, and with thoughts of 
 Mary Hogarth, his wife's sister, whose death 
 in 1837 had profoundly affected him, and 
 forced him to suspend the publication of 
 Pickwick (no number was published in June, 
 1837). When we take into account the com- 
 
14 LIFE OF 
 
 mand of the horrible shown by the murder in 
 Oliver Twisty and the unvarying vivacity and 
 brilhance of style, the secret of Dickens's hold 
 upon his readers is tolerably clear. Barnahy 
 Rudge is remarkable as an attempt at the 
 historical novel, repeated only in his Tale of 
 Two Cities; but Dickens takes little pains to 
 give genuine local colour, and appears to have 
 regarded the eighteenth century chiefly as the 
 reign of Jack Ketch. 
 
 Dickens's fame had attracted acquaintances, 
 many of whom were converted by his genial 
 qualities into fast friends. In March, 1837, 
 he moved from the chambers in Furnival's 
 Inn, which he had occupied for some time 
 previous to his marriage, to 48 Doughty Street, 
 and towards the end of 1839 he moved to a 
 ' handsome house with a considerable garden ' 
 in Devonshire Terrace, facing York Gate, 
 Regent's Park. He spent summer holidays at 
 Broadstairs, always a favourite watering-place, 
 Twickenham, and Petersham, and in the sum- 
 mer of 1841 made an excursion in Scotland, 
 received the freedom of Edinburgh, and was 
 welcomed at a public dinner where Jeffrey took 
 the chair and his health was proposed by 
 Christopher North. He was at this time fond 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 15 
 
 of long rides, and delighted in boyish games. 
 His buoyant spirit and hearty good-nature 
 made him a charming host and guest at social 
 gatherings of all kinds except the formal. He 
 speedily became known to most of his literary 
 contemporaries, such as Landor (whom he 
 visited at Bath in 1841), Talfourd, Procter, 
 Douglas Jerrold, Harrison Ains worth, Wil- 
 kie, and Edwin Landseer. His closest inti- 
 mates were Macready, Maclise, Stanfield, and 
 John Forster. Forster had seen him at the 
 office of the True Sun, and had afterwards 
 met him at the house of Harrison Ainsworth. 
 They had become intimate at the time of Mary 
 Hogarth's death, when Forster visited him, on 
 his temporary retirement, at Hampstead. 
 Forster, whom he afterwards chose as his 
 biographer, was serviceable both by reading 
 his works before publication and by helping 
 his business arrangements. 
 
 Dickens made at starting some rash agree- 
 ments. Chapman & Hall had given him 15/. 
 15s. a number for Pickwick, with additional 
 payments dependent upon the sale. He re- 
 ceived, Forster thinks, 2,500Z. on the whole. 
 He had also, with Chapman & Hall, rebought 
 for 2,000Z. in 1837 the copyright of the 
 
16 LIFE OF 
 
 Sketches sold to Macrone in 1831 for 150Z. 
 The success of Pickwick had raised the 
 value of the book, and Macrone proposed to 
 reissue it simultaneously with Pickwick and 
 Oliver Twist. Dickens thought that this 
 superabundance would be injurious to his 
 reputation, and naturally considered Macrone 
 to be extortionate. When, however, Macrone 
 died, two years later, Dickens edited the Pic- 
 Nic Papers (1841) for the benefit of the 
 widow, contributing the preface and a story 
 which was made out of his farce The Lamp- 
 lighter. In November, 1837, Chapman & 
 Hall agreed that he should have a share after 
 five years in the copyright of Pickwick on 
 condition that he should write a similar book, 
 for which he was to receive 3,000Z., besides 
 having the whole copyright after five years. 
 Upon the success of Nicholas Nicklehy, writ- 
 ten in fulfilment of this agreement, the pub- 
 lishers paid him an additional 1,500Z. in con- 
 sideration of a further agreement, carried out 
 by Master Humphrey's Clock. Dickens was 
 to receive 50Z. for each weekly number, and to 
 have half the profits; the copyright to be 
 equally shared after five years. He had mean- 
 while agreed with Richard Bentley (1794- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 17 
 
 1871) (22 August, 1836) to edit a new maga- 
 zine from January, 1837, to which he was to 
 supply a story; and had further agreed to 
 write two other stories for the same pubKsher. 
 Oliver Twist appeared in Bentley's Miscel- 
 lany in accordance with the first agreement, 
 and, on the conclusion of the story, he 
 handed over the editorship to Harrison Ains- 
 worth. In September, 1837, after some mis- 
 understandings, it was agreed to abandon one 
 of the novels promised to Bentley, Dickens 
 undertaking to finish the other, Barnahy 
 Rudge, by November, 1838. In June, 1840, 
 Dickens bought the copyright of Oliver 
 Twist from Bentley for 2,250/.^ and the agree- 
 ment for Barnahy Budge was cancelled. 
 Dickens then sold Barnahy Budge to Chap- 
 man & Hall, receiving 3,000Z. for the use of the 
 copyright until six months after the publica- 
 tion of the last number. The close of this 
 series of agreements freed him from conflict- 
 ing and harassing responsibilities. 
 
 The weekly appearance of Master Hum- 
 yhrey's Clock had imposed a severe strain. He 
 agreed in August, 1841, to write a new novel 
 in the Pickwick form, for which he was to 
 receive 200Z. a month for twenty numbers, be- 
 
18 LIFE OF 
 
 sides three-fourths of the profits. He stipu- 
 lated, however, in order to secure the much 
 needed rest, that it should not begin until Nov- 
 ember, 1842. During the previous twelve 
 months he was to receive 1501. a month, to be 
 deducted from his share of the profits. When 
 first planning Master Humphrey's Clock 
 he had talked of visiting America to obtain 
 materials for descriptive papers. The pub- 
 lication of The Old Curiosity Shop had 
 brought him a letter from Washington Irving ; 
 his fame had spread beyond the Atlantic, and 
 he resolved to spend part of the interval before 
 his next book in the United States. He had a 
 severe illness in the autumn of 1841 ; he had to 
 undergo a surgical operation, and was sad- 
 dened by the sudden death of his wife's brother 
 and mother. 
 
 He sailed from Liverpool 4 January, 
 1842. He reached Boston on 21 January, 
 1842, and travelled by New York and Phila- 
 delphia to Washington and Richmond. Re- 
 turning to Baltimore, he started for the West, 
 and went by Pittsburg, and Cincinnati, to St. 
 Louis. He returned to Cincinnati, and by the 
 end of April was at the falls of Niagara. He 
 spent a month in Canada, performing in some 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 19 
 
 private theatricals at Montreal, and sailed for 
 England about the end of May. The Ameri- 
 cans received him with an enthusiasm which 
 was at times overpowering, but which was soon 
 mixed with less agreeable feelings. Dickens 
 had come prepared to advocate international 
 copyright, though he emphatically denied, in 
 answer to an article by James Spedding in the 
 Edinburgh Review for January, 1843, that 
 he had gone as a ' missionary ' in that cause. 
 His speeches on this subject met with little 
 response, and the general opinion was in favour 
 of continuing to steal. As a staunch abolition- 
 ist he was shocked by the sight of slavery, and 
 disgusted by the general desire in the free 
 States to suppress any discussion of the dan- 
 gerous topic. To the average Englishman the 
 problem seemed a simple question of elemen- 
 tary morality. Dickens's judgment of America 
 was in fact that of the average Englishman, 
 whose radicalism increased his disappointment 
 at the obvious weaknesses of the republic. He 
 differed from ordinary observers only in the 
 decisiveness of his utterances and in the as- 
 tonishing vivacity of his impressions. The 
 Americans were still provincial enough to 
 fancy that the first impressions of a young 
 
20 LIFE OF 
 
 novelist were really of importance. Their 
 serious faults and the superficial roughness of 
 the half-settled districts thoroughly disgusted 
 him; and though he strove hard to do justice to 
 their good qualities, it is clear that he returned 
 disillusioned and heartily disliking the country. 
 The feeling is still shown in his antipathy to 
 the Northern States during the war {Letters, 
 ii. 203, 204). In the American Notes, pub- 
 lished in October, 1842, he wrote under con- 
 straint upon some topics, but gave careful ac- 
 counts of the excellent institutions which are 
 the terror of the ordinary tourist in America. 
 Four large editions were sold by the end of the 
 year, and the book produced a good deal of 
 resentment. When Macready visited America 
 in the autumn of 1843, Dickens refused to 
 accompany him to Liverpool, thinking that the 
 actor would be injured by any indications of 
 friendship with the author of the Notes and 
 of Martin Chuzzlewit. 
 
 The first of the twenty monthly numbers 
 of this novel appeared in January, 1843. The 
 book shows Dickens at his highest power. 
 Whether it has done much to enforce its in- 
 tended moral, that selfishness is a bad thing, 
 may be doubted. But the humour and the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 21 
 
 tragic power are undeniable. Pecksniff and 
 Mrs. Gamp at once became recognised types of 
 character, and the American scenes, revealing 
 Dickens's real impressions, are perhaps the 
 most surprising proof of his unequalled power 
 of seizing characteristics at a glance. Yet for 
 some reason the sale was comparatively small, 
 never exceeding twenty-three thousand copies, 
 as against the seventy thousand of Master 
 Humphrey's Clock. 
 
 After Dickens's return to England, his sis- 
 ter-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth, became, as 
 she remained till his death, an inmate of his 
 household. He made an excursion to Corn- 
 wall in the autumn of 1842 with Maclise, 
 Stanfield, and Forster, in the highest spirits, 
 ' choking and gasping, and bursting the buckle 
 off the back of his stock (with laughter) all 
 the way.' He spent his summers chiefly at 
 Broadstairs, and took a leading part in many 
 social gatherings and dinners to his friends. 
 He showed also a lively interest in benevolent 
 enterprises, especially in ragged schools. In 
 this and similar work he was often associated 
 with Miss Coutts, afterwards Baroness Bur- 
 dett-Coutts, and in later years he gave much 
 time to the management of a house for fallen 
 
22 LIFE OF 
 
 women established by her in Shepherd's Bush. 
 He was always ready to throw himself heartily 
 into any philanthropical movement, and rather 
 slow to see any possibility of honest objection. 
 His impatience of certain difficulties about the 
 ragged schools raised by clergymen of the Es- 
 tablished Church led him for a year or two to 
 join the congregation of a Unitarian minister, 
 Mr. Edward Tagart. For the rest of his life 
 his sympathies, we are told, were chiefly with 
 the Church of England, as the least sectarian 
 of religious bodies, and he seems to have held 
 that every Dissenting minister was a Stiggins. 
 It is curious that the favourite author of the 
 middle classes should have been so hostile to 
 their favourite form of belief. 
 
 The relatively small sale of Chuzzlewit 
 led to difficulties with his publishers. The 
 Christmas Carol, which appeared at Christ- 
 mas, 1843, was the first of five similar books 
 which have been enormously popular, as none 
 of his books give a more explicit statement of 
 what he held to be the true gospel of the cen- 
 tury. He was, however, greatly disappointed 
 with the commercial results. Fifteen thousand 
 copies were sold, and brought him only 726/.^ 
 a result apparently due to the too costly form 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 23 
 
 in which they were pubhshed. Dickens ex- 
 pressed a dissatisfaction, which resulted in a 
 breach with Messrs. Chapman & Hall and an 
 agreement with Messrs. Bradbury & Evans, 
 who were to advance 2,800/. and have a fourth 
 share of all his writings for the next eight 
 years. Dickens's irritation under these worries 
 stimulated his characteristic restlessness. He 
 had many claims to satisfy. His family was 
 rapidly increasing; his fifth child was born at 
 the beginning of 1844. Demands from more 
 distant relations were also frequent, and 
 though he received what, for an author, was a 
 very large income, he thought that he had 
 worked chiefly for the enrichment of others. 
 He also felt the desire to obtain wider ex- 
 perience natural to one who had been drawing 
 so freely upon his intellectual resources. He 
 resolved, therefore, to economize and refresh 
 his mind in Italy. 
 
 Before starting he presided, in February, 
 1844, at the meetings of the Mechanics' Insti- 
 tution in Liverpool and the Poljrtechnic in 
 Birmingham. He wrote some radical articles 
 in the Morning Chronicle. After the usual 
 farewell dinner at Greenwich, where J. M. W. 
 Turner attended and Lord Normanby took the 
 
24 LIFE OF 
 
 chair, he started for Italy, reaching Marseilles 
 14 July, 1844. On 16 July he settled in a villa 
 at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, and set to work 
 learning Italian. He afterwards moved to the 
 Peschiere Palace in Genoa. There, though 
 missing his long night walks in London streets, 
 he wrote the Chimes, and came back to London 
 to read it to his friends. He started 6 Nov- 
 ember, travelled through northern Italy, and 
 reached London at the end of the month. He 
 read the Chimes at Forster's house to Car- 
 lyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Lemon, Blanchard, 
 Douglas Jerrold, Fox, Harness, and Dyce. 
 He then returned to Genoa. In the middle of 
 January he started with his wife on a journey 
 to Rome, Naples, and Florence. He returned 
 to Genoa for two months and then crossed to 
 St. Gothard, and returned to England at the 
 end of June, 1845. On coming home he took 
 up a scheme for a private theatrical perform- 
 ance, which had been started on the night of 
 reading the Chimes. He threw himself into this 
 with his usual vigour. Jonson's Every Man in 
 his Humour was performed on 21 September 
 at Fanny Kemble's theatre in Dean Street. 
 Dickens took the part of Bobadil, Forster ap- 
 pearing as Kitely, Jerrold as Master Stephen, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 25 
 
 and Leach as Master Matthew. The play suc- 
 ceeded to admiration, and a public performance 
 was afterwards given for a charity. Dickens 
 is said by Forster to have been a very vivid and 
 versatile rather than a finished actor, but an 
 inimitable manager. 
 
 His contributions to the Morning Chronicle 
 seem to have suggested his next undertaking, 
 the only one in which he can be said to have 
 decidedly failed. He became first editor of 
 the Daily News, the first number of which 
 appeared 21 January, 1846. He had not the 
 necessary qualifications for the function of 
 editor of a political organ. On 9 February 
 he resigned his post, to which Forster suc- 
 ceeded for a time. He continued to con- 
 tribute for about three months longer, pub- 
 lishing a series of letters descriptive of his 
 Italian journeys. His most remarkable con- 
 tribution was a series of letters on capital 
 punishment. (For the fullest account of his 
 editorship, see Ward, pp. 68-74.) He then 
 gave up the connection, resolving to pass the 
 next twelve months in Switzerland, and there 
 to write another book on the old model. He 
 left England on 31 May, having previously 
 made a rather singular overture to government 
 
26 LIFE OF 
 
 for an appointment to the paid magistracy of 
 London, and having also taken a share in 
 starting the General Theatrical Fund. He 
 reached Lausanne 11 June, 1846, and took a 
 house called Rosemont. Here he enjoyed the 
 scenery and surrounded himself with a circle 
 of friends, some of whom became his intimates 
 through life. He specially liked the Swiss 
 people. He now began Domhey, and 
 worked at it vigorously, though feeling occa- 
 sionally his oddly characteristic craving for 
 streets. The absence of streets ' worried ' him 
 ' in a most singular manner,' and he was 
 harassed by having on hand both Domhey 
 and his next Christmas book, The Battle of 
 Life. For a partial remedy of the first evil he 
 made a short stay at Geneva at the end of 
 September. The Battle of Life was at last 
 completed, and he was cheered by the success 
 of the first numbers of Domhey. In Novem- 
 ber he started for Paris, where he stayed for 
 three months. He made a visit to London in 
 December, when he arranged for a cheap issue 
 of his writings, which began in the following 
 year. He was finally brought back to England 
 by an illness of his eldest son, then at King's 
 College School. His house in Devonshire Ter- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 27 
 
 race was still let to a tenant, and he did not re- 
 turn tliere until September, 1847. Dombeij 
 and Son had a brilliant success. The first five 
 numbers, with the death, truly or falsely pa- 
 thetic, of Paul Dombey, were among his most 
 striking pieces of work, and the book has had 
 great popularitjr, though it afterwards took 
 him into the kind of social satire in which he 
 was always least successful. For the first half- 
 year he received nearly 3,000Z., and henceforth 
 his pecuniary affairs were prosperous and sav- 
 ings began. He found time during its com- 
 pletion for gratifying on a large scale his 
 passion for theatrical performances. In 1847 
 a scheme was started for the benefit of Leigh 
 Hunt. Dickens became manager of a company 
 which performed Jonson's comedy at Man- 
 chester and Liverpool in July, 1847, and added 
 four hundred guineas to the benefit fund. In 
 1848 it was proposed to buy Shakespeare's 
 house at Stratford-on-Avon and to endow a 
 curatorship to be held by Sheridan Knowles. 
 Though this part of the scheme dropped, the 
 projected performances were given for 
 Knowles's benefit. The Merry Wives of 
 Windsorj in which Dickens played Shallow, 
 Lemon Falstaif, and Forster blaster Ford, 
 
28 LIFE OF 
 
 was performed at Manchester, Liverpool, 
 Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Glasgow, the 
 gross profits from nine nights being 2,5511. 
 In November, 1850, Every Man in his 
 Humour was again performed at Knebworth, 
 Lord Lytton's house. The scheme for a 
 ' Guild of Literature and Art ' was suggested 
 at Knebworth. In aid of the funds, a comedy 
 by Lytton, Not So Bad As We Seem, and a 
 farce by Dickens and Lemon, Mr, Nightin- 
 gale's Diary, were performed at the Duke of 
 Devonshire's house in London (27 May, 1851) , 
 when the Queen and Prince Consort were pres- 
 ent. Similar performances took place during 
 1851 and 1852 at various towns, ending with 
 Manchester and Liverpool. A dinner, with 
 Lytton in the chair, at Manchester had a great 
 success, and the guild was supposed to be 
 effectually started. It ultimately broke down, 
 though Dickens and Bulwer Lytton were en- 
 'thusiastic supporters. During this period 
 Dickens had been exceedingly active. The 
 Haunted Man or Ghostly Bargain, the idea 
 of which had occurred to him at Lausanne, was 
 now written and published with great success 
 at Christmas, 1848. He then began David 
 Copperfield, in many respects the most satis- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 29 
 
 factory of his novels, and especially remark- 
 able for the autobiographical element, which 
 is conspicuous in so many successful fictions. 
 It contains less of the purely farcical or of the 
 satirical caricature than most of his novels, and 
 shows his literary genius mellowed by age with- 
 out loss of spontaneous vigour. It appeared 
 monthly from JNIay, 1849, to November, 1850. 
 The sale did not exceed twenty-five thousand 
 copies; but the book made its mark. He was 
 now accepted by the largest class of readers as 
 the undoubted leader among English novelists. 
 While it was proceeding he finally gave shape 
 to a plan long contemplated for a weekly 
 journal. It was announced at the close of 
 1849, when Mr. W. H. Wills was selected as 
 sub-editor, and continued to work with him 
 until compelled to retire by ill-health in 1868. 
 After many difficulties, the felicitous name. 
 Household Words^ was at last selected, and 
 the first number appeared 30 March, 1849, 
 with the beginning of a story by Mrs. Gaskell. 
 During the rest of his life Dickens gave much 
 of his energy to this journal and its successor. 
 All the Year Bound. He gathered many 
 contributors, several of whom became intimate 
 friends. He spared no pains in his editorial 
 
30 LIFE OF 
 
 duty; he frequently amended his contributors' 
 work and occasionally inserted passages of his 
 own. He was singularly quick and generous 
 in recognising and encouraging talent in 
 hitherto unknown writers. Many of the best 
 of his minor essays appeared in its pages. 
 Dickens's new relation to his readers helped to 
 extend the extraordinary popularity which 
 continued to increase during his life. On the 
 other hand, the excessive strain which it in- 
 volved soon began k) tell seriously upon his 
 strength. In 1848 he had been much grieved 
 by the loss of his elder sister, Fanny. On 31 
 March, 1851, his father, for whom in 1839 he 
 had taken a house in Exeter, died at Malvern. 
 Dickens, after attending his father's death, re- 
 turned to town and took the chair at the dinner 
 of the General Theatrical Fund 14 April, 
 1851. After his speech he was told of the sud- 
 den death of his infant daughter, Dora Annie 
 (born 16 August, 1850) . Dickens left Devon- 
 shire Terrace soon afterwards, and moved into 
 Tavistock House, Tavistock Square. Here in 
 November, 1851, he began Bleak House, 
 which was published from March, 1852, to Sep- 
 tember, 1853. It was followed by Hard 
 Times, which appeared in Household Words, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 31 
 
 between 1 April and 12 August, 1854; and by 
 Little Dorrit, which appeared in monthly 
 numbers from January, 1856, to June, 1857. 
 Forster thinks that the first evidence of exces- 
 sive strain appeared during the composition of 
 Bleak House. ' The spring,' says Dickens, 
 ' does not seem to fly back again directly, as 
 it always did when I put my own work aside 
 and had nothing else to do.' The old buoyancy 
 of spirit is decreasing; the humour is often 
 forced and the mannerism more strongly 
 marked; the satire against the court of chan- 
 cery, the utilitarians, and the ' circumlocution 
 office ' is not relieved by tne irresistible fun of 
 the former caricatures, nor strengthened by 
 additional insight. It is superficial without be- 
 ing good-humoured. Dickens never wrote 
 carelessly; he threw his whole energy into 
 every task which he undertook; and the unde- 
 niable vigour of his books, the infallible in- 
 stinct with which he gauged the taste of his 
 readers, not less than his established reputation, 
 gave him an increasing popularity. The sale 
 of Bleak House exceeded thirty thousand; 
 Hard Times doubled the circulation of 
 Household Words; and Little Dorrit, 
 'beat even- Bleak House out of the field.' 
 
32 LIFE OF 
 
 Thirty-five thousand copies of the second 
 number were sold. Bleak House contained 
 sketches of Landor as Lawrence Boythorn, 
 and of Leigh Hunt as Harold Skimpole. 
 Dickens defended himself for the very un- 
 pleasant caricature of Hunt in All the Year 
 Round, after Hunt's death. While Hunt was 
 still living, Dickens had tried to console him 
 by explaining away the likeness as confined to 
 the flattering part ; but it is impossible to deny 
 that he gave serious ground for offence. Dur- 
 ing this period Dickens was showing signs of 
 increasing restlessness. He sought relief from 
 his labours on Bleak House by spending 
 three months at Dover in the autumn of 1852. 
 In the beginning of 1853 he received a testi- 
 monial at Birmingham, and undertook in 
 return to give a public reading at Christmas on 
 behalf of the New Midland Institute. He 
 read two of his Christmas books and made a 
 great success. He was induced, after some 
 hesitation, to repeat the experiment several 
 times in the next few years. The summer of 
 1853 was spent at Boulogne, and in the au- 
 tumn he made a two months' tour through 
 Switzerland and Italy, with Mr. Wilkie Col- 
 lins and Augustus Egg. In 1854 and 1856 he 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 33 
 
 again spent summers at Boulogne, gaining 
 materials for some very pleasant descriptions; 
 and from November, 1855, to May, 1856, he 
 was at Paris, working at Little Dorrit. Dur- 
 ing 1855 he found time to take part in some 
 political agitations. 
 
 In ^larch, 1856, Dickens bought Gadshill 
 Place. When a boy at Rochester he had con- 
 ceived a childish aspiration to become its 
 owner. On hearing that it was for sale in 
 1855, he began negotiations for its purchase. 
 He bought it with a view to occasional occupa- 
 tion, intending to let it in the intervals ; but he 
 became attached to it, spent much money on 
 improving it, and finally in 1860 sold Tavi- 
 stock House and made it his permanent abode. 
 He continued to improve it till the end of his 
 Hfe. 
 
 In the winter of 1856-7 Dickens amused 
 himself with private theatricals at Tavistock 
 House, and after the death of Douglas Jerrold 
 (6 June, 1857), got up a series of perform- 
 ances for the benefit of his friend's family, 
 one of which was Mr. Wilkie Collins's Frozen 
 Deepj also performed at Tavistock House. 
 For the same purpose he read the Christmas 
 Carol at St. Martin's Hall (30 June, 1857), 
 
34 LIFE OF 
 
 with a success which led him to carry out a plan 
 already conceived, of giving public readings 
 on his own account. He afterwards made an 
 excursion with Mr. Wilkie Collins in the north 
 of England, partly described in A Lazy Tour 
 of Two Idle Apprentices. 
 
 A growing restlessness and a craving for 
 any form of distraction were connected with 
 domestic unhappiness. In the beginning of 
 1858 he was preparing his public readings. 
 Some of his friends objected, but he decided 
 to undertake them, j)artly, it would seem, from 
 the desire to be fully occupied. He gave a 
 reading, 15 April, 1858, for the benefit of the 
 Children's Hospital in Great Ormond Street, 
 in which he was keenly interested, and on 29 
 April gave the first public reading for his own 
 benefit. This was immediately followed by the 
 separation from his wife. The eldest son lived 
 with the mother, while the rest of the children 
 remained with Dickens. Carlyle, mentioning 
 the newspaper reports upon this subject to 
 Emerson, says : ' Fact of separation, I believe, 
 is true, but all the rest is mere lies and non- 
 sense. No crime and no misdemeanour specifi- 
 able on either side; unhappy together, these 
 two, good many years past, and they at length 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 35 
 
 end it' {Carlyle and Emerson Correspon- 
 dence, ii. 269). Dickens chose to publish a 
 statement himself in Household Words, 12 
 June, 1858. He entrusted another and far 
 more indiscreet letter to Mr. Arthur Smith, 
 who now became the agent for his public read- 
 ings, which was to be shown, if necessary, in 
 his defence. It was published without his 
 consent in the New York Tribune. The im- 
 propriety of both proceedings needs no com- 
 ment. But nothing has been made public which 
 would justify any statement as to the merits 
 of the question. Dickens's publication in 
 Household Words, and their refusal to publish 
 the same account in Punch, led to a quarrel 
 with his publishers, which ended in his giving 
 up the paper. He began an exactly similar 
 paper, called All the Year Round (first num- 
 ber 30 April, 1859), and returned to his old 
 publishers, Messrs. Chapman & Hall. Dick- 
 ens seems to have thought that some public 
 statement was made necessary by the quasi- 
 public character which he now assumed. From 
 this time his readings became an important part 
 of his work. They formed four series, given in 
 1858-9, in 1861-3, in 1866-7, and 1868-70. 
 They finally killed him, and it is impossible 
 
36 LIFE OF 
 
 not to regret that he should have spent so much 
 energy in an enterprise not worthy of his best 
 powers. He began with sixteen nights at St. 
 Martin's Hall, from 29 April to 22 July, 1858. 
 A provincial tour of eighty-seven readings fol- 
 lowed, including Ireland and Scotland. He 
 gave a series of readings in London in the be- 
 ginning of 1859, and made a provincial tour 
 in October following. He was everywhere re- 
 ceived with enthusiasm ; he cleared 300Z. a week 
 before reaching Scotland, and in Scotland 
 made 5001. a week. The readings were from 
 the Christmas books, Pickwick, Domhey, Chuz- 
 zlewit, and the Christmas numbers of House- 
 hold Words. The Christmas numbers in his 
 periodicals, and especially in All the Year 
 Round, had a larger circulation than any of his 
 writings, those in All the Year Round reaching 
 three hundred thousand copies. Some of his 
 most charming papers appeared, as the Un- 
 commercial Traveller, in the last periodical. 
 For his short story, Hunted Down, first printed 
 in the New York Ledger, afterwards in All 
 the Year Round, he received lOOOZ. This and 
 a similar sum, paid for the Holiday Romance 
 and George Silverman's Explanation in a 
 child's magazine published by ]\Ir. Fields, and 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 37 
 
 in the Atlantic Monthly, are mentioned by 
 Forster as payments unequalled in the history 
 of literature. 
 
 In March, 1861, he began a second series of 
 readings in London, and after waiting to finish 
 Great Expectations, in All the Year Round, he 
 made another tour in the autumn and winter. 
 He read again in St. James's Hall in the spring 
 of 1862, and gave some readings at Paris in 
 January, 1863. The success was enormous, 
 and he had an offer of 10,000Z., * afterwards 
 raised,' for a visit to Australia. He hesitated 
 for a time, but the plan was finally abandoned, 
 and America, which had been suggested, was 
 closed by the Civil War. For a time he re- 
 turned to writing. The Tale of Two Cities 
 had appeared in All the Year Bound during 
 his first series of readings (April to Novem- 
 ber, 1859). Great Expectations appeared in 
 the same journal from December, 1860, to Au- 
 gust, 1861, during part of the second series. 
 He now set to work upon Our Mutual Friend, 
 which came out in monthly numbers from May, 
 1864, to November, 1865. It succeeded with 
 the public; over thirty thousand copies of the 
 first number were sold at starting, and, though 
 there was a drop in the sale of the second num- 
 
38 LIFE OF 
 
 ber, this circulation was much exceeded. The 
 gloomy river scenes in this and in Great Expec- 
 tations show Dickens's full power, but both 
 stories are too plainly marked by flagging in- 
 vention and spirits. Forster publishes extracts 
 from a book of memoranda kept from 1855 
 to 1865, in which Dickens first began to pre- 
 serve notes for future work. He seems to have 
 felt that he could no longer rely upon spon- 
 taneous suggestions of the moment. 
 
 His mother died in September, 1863, and 
 his son Walter, for whom Miss Coutts had ob- 
 tained a cadetship in the 26th Native Infantry, 
 died at Calcutta on 31 December following. 
 He began a third series of readings under omi- 
 nous symptoms. In February, 1865, he had a 
 severe illness. He ever afterwards suffered 
 from a lameness in his left foot, which gave 
 him great pain and puzzled his physicians. On 
 9 June, 1865, he was in a terrible railway acci- 
 dent at Staplehurst. The carriage in which he 
 travelled left the line, but did not, with others, 
 fall over the viaduct. The shock to his nerves 
 was great and permanent, and he exerted him- 
 self excessively to help the sufferers. The 
 accident is vividly described in his Letters (ii. 
 229-33). In spite of these injuries he never 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 39 
 
 spared himself ; after sleepless nights he walked 
 distances too great for his strength, and he 
 now undertook a series of readings which in- 
 volved greater labour than the previous series. 
 He was anxious to make a provision for his 
 large family, and, probably conscious that his 
 strength would not long be equal to such per- 
 formances, he resolved, as Forster says, to 
 make the most money possible in the shortest 
 time without regard to labour. Dickens was 
 keenly affected by the sympathy of his audi- 
 ence, and the visible testimony to his extraor- 
 dinary popularity and to his singular dra- 
 matic power was no doubt a powerful attrac- 
 tion to a man who was certainly not without 
 vanity, and who had been a popular idol almost 
 from boyhood. 
 
 After finishing Our Mutual Friend, he ac- 
 cepted (in Februar)^ 1866) an offer, from 
 Messrs. Chappell of Bond Street, of 50Z. a 
 night for a series of thirty readings. The ar- 
 rangements made it necessary that the hours 
 not actually spent at the reading-desk or in 
 bed should be chiefly passed in long railway 
 journeys. He began in March and ended in 
 June, 1866. In August he made a new agree- 
 ment for forty nights at 60Z. a night, or 2500Z. 
 
40 LIFE OF 
 
 for forty-two nights. These readings took 
 place between January and May, 1867. The 
 success of the readings again surpassed all 
 precedent, and brought many invitations from 
 America. Objections made by W. H. Wills 
 and Forster were overruled. Dickens said 
 that he must go at once if he went at all, to 
 avoid clashing with the Presidential election of 
 1868. He thought that by going he could 
 realise ' a sufficient fortune.' He ' did not want 
 money,' but the ' likelihood of making a very 
 great addition to his capital in half a year ' was 
 an * immense consideration.' In July Mr. 
 Dolby sailed to America as his agent. An in- 
 flammation of the foot, followed by erysipelas, 
 gave a warning which was not heeded. On 1 
 October, 1867, he telegraphed his acceptance 
 of the engagement, and after a great farewell 
 banquet at Freemasons' Hall (2 November), 
 at which Lord Lytton presided, he sailed for 
 Boston, 9 November, 1867, landing on the 19th. 
 Americans had lost some of their provincial 
 sensibility, and were only anxious to show that 
 old resentments were forgotten. Dickens first 
 read in Boston on 2 December; thence he went 
 to New York ; he read afterwards at Philadel- 
 phia, Baltimore, Washington, again at Phila- 
 
CHAKLES DICKENS 41 
 
 delphia, Syracuse, Rochester, Buif alo, Spring- 
 field, Portland, New Bedford, and finally at 
 Boston and New York again. He received a 
 public dinner at New York (18 April), and 
 reached England in the first week of May, 
 1868. He made nearly 20,000Z. in America, 
 but at a heavy cost in health. He was con- 
 stantly on the verge of a breakdown. He nat- 
 urally complimented Americans, not only for 
 their generous hospitality, but for the many 
 social improvements since his previous visits, 
 though politically he saw little to admire. He 
 promised that no future editions of his Notes 
 or Chuzzlewit should be issued without a men- 
 tion of the improvements which had taken place 
 in America, or in his state of mind. As a kind 
 of thank-offering he had a copy of the Old 
 Curiosity Shop printed in raised letters, and 
 presented it to an American asylum for the 
 Wind. 
 
 Unfortunately Dickens was induced upon 
 his return to give a final series of readings in 
 England. He was to receive 8000Z. for a hun- 
 dred readings. ThejT- began in October, 1868. 
 Dickens had preferred as a novelty a reading 
 of the murder in Oliver Twist. He had thought 
 of this as early as 1863, but it was ' so horrible ' 
 
42 LIFE OF 
 
 that he was then ' afraid to try it in public ' 
 {Letters, ii. 200). The performance was re- 
 garded by Forster as in itself ' illegitimate,' 
 and Forster's protest led to a ' painful corre- 
 spondence.' In any case, it involved an excite- 
 ment and a degree of physical labour which 
 told severely upon his declining strength. He 
 was to give weekly readings in London alter- 
 nately with readings in the country. In Feb- 
 ruary, 1869, he was forced to suspend his work 
 under medical advice. After a few days' rest 
 he began again in spite of remonstrances from 
 his friends and family. At last he broke down 
 at Preston. On 23 April Sir Thomas Watson 
 held a consultation with Mr. Beard, and found 
 that he had been ' on the brink ' of an attack 
 of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of 
 apoplexy, due to overwork, worry, and excite- 
 ment. He was ordered to give up his readings, 
 though after some improvement Sir Thomas 
 consented to twelve readings without railway 
 travelling, which Dickens was anxious to give 
 as some compensation to Messrs. Chappell for 
 their disappointment. In the same autumn he 
 began Edwin Drood. He was to receive 7500/. 
 for twenty-five thousand copies, and fifty thou- 
 sand were sold during his life. It ' very, very 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 43 
 
 far outstripped every one of its predecessors* 
 (J. T. Fields, p. 246) . He passed the year at 
 Gadshill, leaving it occasionally to attend a 
 few meetings, and working at his book. His 
 last readings were given at St. James's Hall, 
 from January to March. On 1 JMarch he took 
 a final leave of his hearers in a few graceful 
 words. In April appeared the first number of 
 Edwin Drood. In the same month he ap- 
 peared for the last time in public, taking the 
 chair at the Newsvendors' dinner, and replying 
 for ' Literature ' at the dinner of the Royal 
 Academy (30 April) , when he spoke feelingly 
 of the death of his old friend Maclise. He was 
 at work upon his novel at Gadshill in June, and 
 showed unusual fatigue. On 8 June he was 
 working in the chalet which had been pre- 
 sented to him in 1859 by Fechter, and put up 
 as a study in his garden. He came into the 
 house about six o'clock, and, after a few words 
 to his sister-in-law, fell to the ground. There 
 was an effusion on the brain; he never spoke 
 again, and died at ten minutes past six on 9 
 June, 1870. He was buried with all possible 
 simplicity in Westminster Abbey, 14 June 
 following. 
 
 Dickens had ten children by his wife: 
 
44 LIFE OF 
 
 Charles, bom 1837; Mary, born 1838; Kate, 
 born 1839, afterwards married to Charles Alls- 
 ton Collins, and now Mrs. Perugini; Walter 
 Landor, born 1841, died 12 December, 1863 
 (see above) ; Francis Jeffrey, born 1843; Al- 
 fred Tennyson, born 1845, settled in Austra- 
 lia; Sydney Smith Haldemand, born 1847, in 
 the navy, buried at sea 2 May, 1867; Henry 
 Fielding, born 1849; Dora Annie, born 1850, 
 died 14 April, 1851 ; and Edward Bulwer Lyt- 
 ton, born 1852, settled in Australia. 
 
 Dickens's appearance is familiar by innu- 
 merable photographs. Among portraits may 
 be mentioned (1) by Maclise in 1839 (en- 
 graved as frontispiece to Nicholas Nickleby), 
 original in possession of Sir Alfred Jodrell of 
 Bayfield, Norfolk; (2) pencil drawing by 
 Maclise in 1842 (with his wife and sister) ; (3) 
 oil-painting by E. M. Ward in 1854 (in pos- 
 session of Mrs. Ward) ; (4) oil-painting by 
 Ary SchefFer in 1856 (in National Portrait 
 Gallery) ; (5) oil-painting by W. P. Frith in 
 1859 (in Forster collection at South Kensing- 
 ton). Dickens was frequently compared in 
 later life to a bronzed sea captain. In early 
 portraits he has a dandified appearance, and 
 was always a little over-dressed. He possessed 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 45 
 
 a wiry frame, implying enormous nervous en- 
 ergy rather than muscular strength, and was 
 most active in his habits, though not really 
 robust. He seems to have overtaxed his 
 strength by his passion for walking. All who 
 knew him, from Carlyle downwards, speak of 
 his many fine qualities, his generosity, sincer- 
 ity, and kindliness. He was intensely fond of 
 his children (see Mrs. Dickens's interesting 
 account in Cornhill Magazine^ January, 1880) ; 
 he loved dogs, and had a fancy for keeping 
 large and eventually savage mastiffs and St. 
 Bernards; and he was kind even to contribu- 
 tors. His weaknesses are sutBciently obvious, 
 and are reflected in his writings. If literary 
 fame could be safel}'' measured by popularity 
 with the half -educated, Dickens must claim 
 the highest position among English novelists. 
 It is said, apparently on authority (Mr. Mow- 
 bray Morris in Fortnightly Review for De- 
 cember, 1882) that 4,239,000 volumes of his 
 works had been sold in England in the twelve 
 years after his death. The criticism of more 
 severe critics chiefly consists in the assertion 
 that his merits are such as suit the half -edu- 
 cated. They admit his fun to be irresistible; 
 his pathos, they say, though it shows bound- 
 
46 LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS 
 
 less vivacity, implies little real depth or ten- 
 derness of feeling; and his amazing powers of 
 observation were out of proportion to his pow- 
 ers of reflection. The social and political views 
 which he constantly inculcates imply a delib- 
 erate preference of spontaneous instinct to 
 genuine reasoned conviction; his style is clear, 
 vigorous, and often felicitous, but mannered 
 and more forcible than delicate; he writes too 
 clearly for readers who cannot take a joke till 
 it has been well hammered into their heads; 
 his vivid perception of external oddities passes 
 into something like hallucination, and in his 
 later books the constant strain to produce ef- 
 fects only legitimate when spontaneous be- 
 comes painful. His books are therefore inim- 
 itable caricatures of contemporary humours, 
 rather than the masterpieces of a great ob- 
 server of human nature. 
 
NOTE 
 
 That I should have to acknowledge a fairly 
 heavy debt to Forster's Life of Charles Dick- 
 ens and The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed- 
 ited by his sister-in-law and his eldest daughter, 
 is almost a matter of course; for these are 
 books from which every present and future 
 biographer of Dickens must necessarily borrow 
 in a more or less degree. My work, too, has 
 been much lightened by Mr. Kitton's excellent 
 Dickensiana. 
 
 F. T. M. 
 
 47 
 
e 
 
 LIFE OF 
 CHARLES DICKENS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 'DUCATION is a kind of lottery in 
 which there are good and evil chances, 
 and some men draw blanks and other 
 men draw prizes. And in saying this I do not 
 use the word education in any restricted sense, 
 as applying exclusively to the course of study 
 in school or college ; nor certainly, when I speak 
 of prizes, am I thinking of scholarships, exhi- 
 bitions, fellowships. By education I mean the 
 whole set of circumstances which go to mould 
 a man's character during the apprentice years 
 of his life; and I call that a prize when those 
 circumstances have been such as to develop the 
 man's powers to the utmost, and to fit him -to 
 do best that of which he is best capable. Looked 
 at in this way, Charles Dickens's education, 
 however untoward and unpromising it may 
 
 49 
 
50 LIFE OF 
 
 often have seemed while in the process, must 
 really be pronounced a prize of value quite 
 inestimable. 
 
 His father, John Dickens, held a clerkship 
 in the Navy Pay Office, and was employed in 
 the Portsmouth Dockyard when little Charles 
 first came into the world, at Landport, in Port- 
 sea, on February 7, 1812. Wealth can never 
 have been one of the familiar friends of the 
 household, nor plenty have always sat at its 
 board. Charles had one elder sister, and six 
 other brothers and sisters were afterwards 
 added to the family; and with eight children, 
 and successive removals from Portsmouth to 
 London, and London to Chatham, and no more 
 than the pay of a Government clerk ^ — pay 
 which not long afterwards dwindled to a pen- 
 sion, — even a better domestic financier than 
 the elder Dickens might have found some diffi- 
 culty in facing his liabilities. It was unques- 
 tionably into a tottering house that the child 
 was born, and among its ruins that he was 
 nurtured. 
 
 ^200Z. a year 'without extras' from 1815 to 1820, 
 and then 350/. See Childhood and Youth of Charles 
 Dichens, by Robert Langton, a very valuable mono- 
 graph. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 51 
 
 But through all these early years I can do 
 nothing better than take him for my guide, and 
 walk as it were in his companionship. Per- 
 haps no novelist ever had a keener feeling for 
 the pathos of childhood than Dickens, or un- 
 derstood more fully how real and overwhelm- 
 ing are its sorrows. No one, too, has entered 
 more sympathetically into its ways. And of 
 the child and boy that he himself had once 
 been, he was wont to think very tenderly and 
 very often. Again and again in his writings 
 he reverts to the scenes and incidents and emo- 
 tions of his earlier days. Sometimes he goes 
 back to his young life directly, speaking as of 
 himself. More often he goes back to it indi- 
 rectly, placing imaginary children and boys 
 in the position he had once occupied. Thus it 
 is almost possible, by judiciously selecting from 
 his works, and using such keys as we possess, 
 to construct as it were a kind of autobiography. 
 Nor, if we make due allowance for the great 
 writer's tendency to idealize the past, and in- 
 tensify its humorous and pathetic aspects, need 
 we at all fear that the self -written story of his 
 life should convey a false impression. 
 
 He was but two years old when his father 
 left Portsea for London, and but four when a 
 
52 LIFE OF 
 
 second migration took the family to Chatham. 
 Here we catch our first glimpse of him, in his 
 own word-painting, as a ' very queer small 
 boy,' a small boy who was sickly and delicate, 
 and could take but little part in the rougher 
 sports of his school companions, but read much, 
 as sickly boys will — the novels of the older 
 novelists in a ' blessed little room,' a kind of 
 palace of enchantment, where ' Roderick Ran- 
 dom, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, 
 Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don 
 Quixote, Gil Bias, and Robinson Crusoe, came 
 out, a glorious host, to keep him company.' 
 And the queer small boy had read Shake- 
 speare's Henry IV., too, and knew all about 
 Falstaif's robbery of the travellers at Gad's 
 Hill, on the rising ground between Rochester 
 and Gravesend, and all about mad Prince 
 Henry's pranks; and, what was more, he had 
 determined that when he came to be a man, 
 and had made his Mvsiy in the world, he should 
 own the house called Gad's Hill Place, with 
 the old associations of its site, and its pleasant 
 outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying 
 levels by the Thames. Was that a child's 
 dream? The man's tenacity and steadfast 
 strength of purpose turned it into fact. The 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 53 
 
 house became the home of his later life. It 
 was there that he died. 
 
 But death was a long way forward in those 
 old Chatham days ; nor, as the time slipped by, 
 and his father's pecuniary embarrassments be- 
 gan to thicken, and make the forward ways of 
 life more dark and difficult, could the purchase 
 of Gad's Hill Place have seemed much less re- 
 mote. There is one of Dickens's works which 
 was his own special favourite, the most cher- 
 ished, as he tells us, among the offspring of his 
 brain. That work is David Copperfield. Nor 
 can there be much difficulty in discovering why 
 it occupied such an exceptional position in ' his 
 heart of hearts ' ; for in its pages he has en- 
 shrined the deepest memories of his own child- 
 hood and youth. Like David Copperfield, he 
 had known what it was to be a poor, neglected 
 lad, set to rough, uncongenial work, with no 
 more than a mechanic's surroundings and out- 
 look, and having to fend for himself in the 
 miry ways of the great city. Like David Cop- 
 perfield, he had formed a very early acquaint- 
 ance with debts and duns, and been initiated 
 into the mysteries and sad expedients of shabby 
 poverty. Like David Copperfield, he had been 
 made free of the interior of a debtor's prison. 
 
54 LIFE OF 
 
 Poor lad, he was not much more than ten or 
 eleven years old when he left Chatham, with 
 all the charms that were ever after to live so 
 brightly in his recollection, — the gay military 
 pageantry, the swarming dockyard, the shift- 
 ing sailor life, the delightful walks in the sur- 
 rounding country, the enchanted room, ten- 
 anted by the first fairy day-dreams of his 
 genius, the day-school, where the master had 
 already formed a good opinion of his parts, 
 giving him Goldsmith's Bee as a keepsake. 
 This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in 
 a dingy London suburb, with squalor for com- 
 panionship, no teaching but the teaching of the 
 streets, and all around and above him the de- 
 pressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With 
 what inimitable humour and pathos has he told 
 the story of these darkest days! Substitute 
 John Dickens for Mr. Micawber, and Mrs. 
 Dickens for Mrs. Micawber, and make David 
 Copperfield a son of Mr. Micawber, a kind of 
 elder Wilkins, and let little Charles Dickens be 
 that son — and then you will have a record, true 
 in every essential respect, of the child's life at 
 this period. ' Poor Mrs. Micawber ! she said 
 she had tried to exert herself ; and so, I have no 
 doubt, she had. The centre of the street door 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 55 
 
 was perfectly covered with a great brass-plate, 
 on which was engraved ' Mrs. Micawber's 
 Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies; ' 
 but I never found that any young lady had 
 ever been to school there; or that any young 
 lady ever came, or proposed to come; or that 
 the least preparation was ever made to receive 
 any young lady. The only visitors I ever saw 
 or heard of were creditors. They used to come 
 at all hours, and some of them were quite fero- 
 cious.' Even such a plate, bearing the inscrip- 
 tion, ' Mrs. Dickens's Establishment,' orna- 
 mented the door of a house in Gower Street 
 North, where the family had hoped, by some 
 desperate effort, to retrieve its ruined fortunes. 
 Even so did the pupils refuse the educational 
 advantages offered to them, though little 
 Charles went from door to door in the neigh- 
 bourhood, carrying hither and thither the most 
 alluring circulars. Even thus was the place 
 besieged by assiduous and angry duns. And 
 when, in the ordinary course of such sad stories, 
 Mr. Dickens is arrested for debt, and carried 
 off to the Marshalsea prison,^ he moralizes over 
 
 ^ Mr. Langton appears to doubt whether John Dickens 
 was not imprisoned in the King's Bench. But this 
 seems scarcely a point on which Dickens himself can 
 have been mistaken. 
 
56 LIFE OF 
 
 the event in precisely the same strain as Mr. 
 Micawber, using, indeed, the very same words, 
 and calls on his son, with many tears, ' to take 
 warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe 
 that if a man had twenty pounds a year, and 
 spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and 
 sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shil- 
 ling spent the other way would make him 
 wretched.' 
 
 The son was taking note of other things be- 
 sides these moral apothegms, and reproduced, 
 in after days, with a quite marvellous detail 
 and fidelity, all the incidents of his father's 
 incarceration. Probably, too, he was begin- 
 ning, as children will, almost unconsciously, to 
 form some estimate of his father's character. 
 And a very queer study in human nature that 
 must have been, giving Dickens, when once he 
 had mastered it, a most exceptional insight into 
 the ways of impecuniositj''. Charles Lamb, as 
 we all remember, divided mankind into two 
 races, the mighty race of the borrowers, and the 
 mean race of the lenders ; and expatiated, with 
 a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon the 
 greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king 
 among those who by process of loan obtain 
 possession of other people's monej^ Shift the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 57 
 
 line of division a little, so that instead of sepa- 
 rating borrowers and lenders, it separates those 
 who pay their debts from those who do not pay 
 them, and then Dickens the elder may succeed 
 to something of Bigod's kingship. He was of 
 the great race of debtors, possessing especially 
 that ideal quality of mind on which Lamb laid 
 such stress. Imagination played the very mis- 
 chief with him. He had evidently little grasp 
 of fact, and moved in a kind of haze, through 
 which all clear outlines would show blurred and 
 unreal. Sometimes — most often, perhaps — 
 that haze would be irradiated with sanguine 
 visionary hopes and expectations. Sometimes 
 it would be fitfully darkened with all the hor- 
 rors of despair. But whether in gloom or 
 gleam, the realities of his position would be 
 lost. He never, certainly, contracted a debt 
 which he did not mean honourably to pay. But 
 either he had never possessed the faculty of 
 forming a just estimate of future possibilities, 
 or else, through the indulgence of what may be 
 called a vague habit of thought, he had lost the 
 power of seeing things as they are. Thus all 
 his excellences and good gifts were neutralized 
 at this time, so far as his family were con- 
 cerned, and went for practically nothing. He 
 
58 LIFE OF 
 
 was, according to his son's testimony, full of 
 industry, most conscientious in the discharge 
 of any business, unwearying in loving patience 
 and solicitude when those bound to him by 
 blood or friendship were ill or in trouble, ' as 
 kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived 
 in the world.' Yet as debts accumulated, and 
 accommodation bills shed their baleful shadow 
 on his life, and duns grew many and furious, he 
 became altogether immersed in mean money 
 troubles, and suffered the son who was to shed 
 such lustre on his name to remain for a time 
 without the means of learning, and to sink first 
 into a little household drudge, and then into a 
 mere warehouse boy. 
 
 So little Charles, aged from eleven to twelve, 
 first blacked boots, and minded the younger 
 children, and ran messages, and effected the 
 family purchases, — which can have been no 
 pleasant task in the then state of the family 
 credit, — and made very close acquaintance with 
 the inside of the pawnbrokers' shops, and with 
 the purchases of second-hand books, disposing, 
 among other things, of the little store of books 
 he loved so well ; and then, when his father was 
 imprisoned, ran more messages hither and 
 thither, and shed many childish tears in his 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 59 
 
 father's company — the father doubtless re- 
 garding the tears as a tribute to his eloquence, 
 though, heaven knows, there were other things 
 to cry over besides his sonorous periods. After 
 which a connection, James Lamert by name, 
 who had lived with the family before they 
 moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, 
 and was manager of a worm-eaten, rat-riddled 
 blacking business, near old Hungerford Mar- 
 ket, offered to employ the lad, on a salary of 
 some six shillings a week, or thereabouts. The 
 duties which commanded these high emolu- 
 ments consisted of the tying up and labelling 
 of blacking pots. At first Charles, in consid- 
 eration probably of his relationship to the man- 
 ager, was allowed to do his tying, clipping, and 
 pasting in the counting-house. But soon this 
 arrangement fell through, as it naturally 
 would, and he descended to the companionship 
 of the other lads, similarly employed, in the 
 warehouse below. They were not bad boys, 
 and one of them, who bore the name of Bob 
 Fagin, was very kind to the poor little better- 
 nurtured outcast, once, in a sudden attack of 
 illness, applying hot blacking-bottles to his side 
 with much tenderness. But, of course, they 
 were rough and quite uncultured, and the sen- 
 
60 LIFE OF 
 
 sitive, bookish, imaginative child felt that there 
 was something uncongenial and degrading in 
 being compelled to associate with them. Nor, 
 though he had already sufficient strength of 
 character to learn to do his work well, did he 
 ever regard the work itself as anything but 
 unsuitable, and almost discreditable. Indeed 
 it may be doubted whether the iron of that time 
 did not unduly rankle and fester as it entered 
 into his soul, and whether the scar caused by 
 the wound was altogether quite honourable. 
 He seems to have felt, in connection with his 
 early employment in a warehouse, a sense of 
 shame such as would be more fittingly associ- 
 ated with the commission of an unworthy act. 
 That he should not have habitually referred to 
 the subject in after life, may readily be under- 
 stood. But why he should have kept unbroken 
 silence about it for long years, even with his 
 wife, even with so very close a friend as Fors- 
 ter, is less clear. And in the terms used, when 
 the revelation was finally made to Forster, 
 there has always, I confess, appeared to me to 
 be a tone of exaggeration. ' My whole na- 
 ture,' he says, * was so penetrated with grief 
 and humiliation, . . . that even now, famous 
 and caressed and happy, I often forget in my 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 61 
 
 dreams that I have a dear wife and children; 
 even that I am a man, and wander desolately- 
 back to that time of my life.' And again: 
 ' From that hour until this, at which I write, no 
 word of that part of my childhood, which I 
 have now gladly brought to a close, has passed 
 my lips to any human being. ... I have 
 never, until now I impart it to this paper, in 
 any burst of confidence with any one, my own 
 wife not excepted, raised the curtain I then 
 dropped, thank God.' Great part, perhaps the 
 greatest part, of Dickens's success as a wi-iter, 
 came from the sympathy and power with which 
 he showed how the lower walks of life no less 
 than the higher are often fringed with beauty. 
 I have never been able to entirely divest myself 
 of a slight feeling of the incongruous in read- 
 ing what he wrote about the warehouse episode 
 in his career. 
 
 At first, when he began his daily toil at the 
 blacking business, some poor dregs of family 
 life were left to the child. His father was at 
 the Marshalsea. But his mother and brothers 
 and sisters were, to use his own words, ' still 
 encamped, with a young servant girl from 
 Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in 
 the emptied house in Gower Street North.' 
 
62 LIFE OF 
 
 And there he lived with them, in much * hug- 
 ger-mugger/ merely taking his humble mid- 
 day meal in nomadic fashion, on his own ac- 
 count. Soon, however, his position became 
 even more forlorn. The paternal creditors 
 proved insatiable. The gypsy home in 
 Gower Street had to be broken up. Mrs. 
 Dickens and the children went to live at 
 the Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed 
 under the roof — it cannot be called under 
 the care — of a * reduced old lady,' dwell- 
 ing in Camden Town, who must have been 
 a clever and prophetic old lady if she an- 
 ticipated that her diminutive lodger would 
 one day give her a kind of indirect unen- 
 viable immortality by making her figure, under 
 the name of Mrs. Pipchin, in Domhey and 
 Son. 
 
 Here the boy seems to have been left al- 
 most entirely to his own devices. He spent 
 his Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of 
 his recollection, his lodgings at ' Mrs. Pip- 
 chin's ' were paid for. Otherwise, he ' found 
 himself,' in childish fashion, out of the six or 
 seven weekly shillings, breakfasting on two 
 pennyworth of bread and milk, and supping 
 on a penny loaf and a bit of cheese, and dining 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 63 
 
 hither and thither, as his boy's appetite dictated 
 — now, sensibly enough, on a la mode beef or a 
 saveloy; then, less sensibly, on pudding; and 
 anon not dining at all, the wherewithal having 
 been expended on some morning treat of cheap 
 stale pastry. But are not all these things, the 
 lad's shifts and expedients, his sorrows and 
 despair, his visits to the public-house, where the 
 kindly publican's wife stoops down to kiss the 
 pathetic little face — are they not all written in 
 David Copper field? And if so be that I have 
 a reader unacquainted with that peerless book, 
 can I do better than recommend him, or her, 
 to study therein the story of Dickens's life at 
 this particular time ? 
 
 At last the child's solitude and sorrows seem 
 to have grown unbearable. His fortitude broke 
 down. One Sunday night he appealed to his 
 father, with many tears, on the subject, not of 
 his employment, which he seems to have ac- 
 cepted at the time manfully, but of his f orlorn- 
 ness and isolation. The father's kind, thought- 
 less heart was touched. A back attic was found 
 for Charles near the Marshalsea, at Lant 
 Street, in the Borough — where Bob Sawyer, it 
 will be remembered, afterwards invited Mr. 
 Pickwick to that disastrous party. The boy 
 
64 LIFE OF 
 
 moved into his new quarters with the same feel- 
 ing of elation as if he had been entering a 
 palace. 
 
 The change naturally brought him more 
 fully into the prison circle. He used to break- 
 fast there every morning, before going to the 
 warehouse, and would spend the larger portion 
 of his spare time among the inmates. Nor do 
 Mr. Dickens and his family, and Charles, who 
 is to us the family's most important member, 
 appear to have been relatively at all uncom- 
 fortable while under the shadow of the Mar- 
 shalsea. 
 
 There is in David Copperfield a passage 
 of inimitable humour, where Mr. Micaw- 
 ber, enlarging on the pleasures of imprison- 
 ment for debt, apostrophizes the King's Bench 
 Prison as being the place ' where, for the first 
 time in many revolving years, the overwhelm- 
 ing pressure of pecuniary liabilities was not 
 proclaimed from day to day, by importunate 
 voices declining to vacate the passage; where 
 there was no knocker on the door for any cred- 
 itor to appeal to; where personal service of 
 process was not required, and detainers were 
 lodged merely at the gate.' There is a similar 
 passage in Little Dorrit, where the tipsy medi- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 65 
 
 cal practitioner of the Marshalsea comforts 
 Mr. Dorrit in his affliction by saying : * We are 
 quiet here ; we don't get badgered here ; there's 
 no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by cred- 
 itors, and bring a man's heart into his mouth. 
 Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at home, 
 and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is. 
 Nobody writes threatening letters about money 
 to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's freedom I ' 
 One smiles as one reads ; and it adds a pathos, 
 I think, to the smile, to find that these are rec- 
 ords of actual experience. The Marshalsea 
 prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of peace, 
 and to his household a place of plenty. Not 
 only could he pursue his career there untrou- 
 bled by fears of arrest, but he exercised among 
 the other ' gentlemen gaol-birds ' a supremacy, 
 a kind of kingship, such as that to which 
 Charles Lamb referred. They recognized in 
 him the superior spirit, ready of pen, and afflu- 
 ent of speech, and with a certain grandeur in 
 his conviviality. He it was who drew up their 
 memorial to George of England on an occa- 
 sion no less important than the royal birthday, 
 when they, the monarch's * unfortunate sub- 
 jects ' — so they were described in the memo- 
 rial — besought the king's ' gracious majesty,' 
 
66 LIFE OF 
 
 of his ' well-known munificence,' to grant them 
 a something towards the drinking of the royal 
 health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and pene- 
 trative genius did little Charles, from his cor- 
 ner, watch the strange sad stream of humanity 
 that trickled through the room, and may be 
 said to have smeared its approval of that peti- 
 tion!) And while Mr. Dickens was enjoying 
 his prison honours, he was also enjoying his 
 Admiralty pension,^ which was not forfeited 
 by his imprisonment ; and his wife and children 
 were consequently enjoying a larger measure 
 of the necessaries of life than had been theirs 
 for many a month. So all went on merrily 
 enough at the Marshalsea. 
 
 But even under the old law, imprisonment 
 for debt did not always last for ever. A 
 legacy, and the Insolvent Debtors Act, enabled 
 Mr. Dickens to march out of durance, in some 
 sort with the honours of war, after a few 
 months' incarceration — this would be early in 
 1824; — and he went with his family, including 
 Charles, to lodge with the ' Mrs. Pipchin * 
 already mentioned. Charles meanwhile still 
 toiled on in the blacking warehouse, now re- 
 
 ^ According to Mr. Langton's dates, he would still be 
 drawing his pay. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 67 
 
 moved to Chandos Street, Covent Garden; 
 and had reached such skill in the tying, pasting, 
 and labelling of the bottles, that small crowds 
 used to collect at the window for the purpose 
 of watching his deft fingers. There was pride 
 in this, no doubt, but also humiliation ; and re- 
 lease was at hand. His father and Lamert 
 quarrelled about something — about what, 
 Dickens seems never to have known — and he 
 was sent home. Mrs. Dickens acted the part 
 of the peacemaker on the next day, probably 
 feeling that amid the shadowy expectations on 
 which she and her husband had subsisted for 
 so long, even six or seven shillings a week was 
 something tangible, and not to be despised. 
 Yet in spite of this, he did not return to the 
 business. His father decided that he should 
 go to school. * I do not write resentfully or 
 angrily,' said Dickens, in the confidential com- 
 munication made long afterwards to Forster, 
 and to which reference has already been made ; 
 ' but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall 
 forget, I never can forget, that my mother 
 was warm for my being sent back.' 
 
 The mothers of great men is a subject that 
 has been handled often, and eloquently. How 
 many of those who have achieved distinction 
 
68 LIFE OF 
 
 can trace their inherited gifts to a mother's 
 character, and their acquired gifts to a mother's 
 teaching and influence! Mrs. Dickens seems 
 not to have been a mother of this stamp. She 
 scarcely, I fear, possessed those admirable 
 qualities of mind and heart which one can 
 clearly recognize as having borne fruit in the 
 greatness and goodness of her famous son. So 
 far as I can discover, she exercised no influence 
 upon him at all. Her name hardly appears in 
 his biographies. He never, that I can recollect, 
 mentions her in his correspondence ; only refers 
 to her on the rarest occasions. And perhaps, 
 on the whole, this is not to be wondered at, if 
 we accept the constant tradition that she had, 
 unknown to herself, sat to her son for the por- 
 trait of Mrs. Nickleby, and suggested to him 
 the main traits in the character of that incon- 
 sequent and not very wise old lady. Mrs. 
 Nickleby, I take it, was not the kind of person 
 calculated to form the mind of a boy of genius. 
 As well might one expect some very domestic 
 bird to teach an eaglet how to fly. 
 
 The school to which our callow eaglet was 
 sent (in the spring or early summer of 1824), 
 belonged emphatically to the old school of 
 schools. It bore the goodly name of Welling- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 69 
 
 ton House Academy^ and was situated in 
 Mornington Place, near the Hampstead Road. 
 A certain Mr. Jones held chief rule there ; and 
 as more than fifty years have now elapsed 
 since Dickens's connection with the establish- 
 ment ceased, I trust there may be nothing 
 libellous in giving further currency to his 
 statement, or rather, perhaps, to his recorded 
 impression,^ that the head master's one quali- 
 fication for his office was dexterity in the use of 
 the cane ; — especially as another ' old boy ' 
 corroborates that impression, and declares Mr. 
 Jones to have been ' a most ignorant fellow, 
 and a mere tyrant.' Dickens, however, escaped 
 with comparatively little beating, because he 
 was a day-boy, and sound policy dictated that 
 day-boys, who had facilities for carrying home 
 their complaints, should be treated with some 
 leniency. So he had to get his learning with- 
 out tears, which was not at all considered the 
 orthodox method in the good old days; and, 
 indeed, I doubt if he finally took away from 
 Wellington House Academy very much of the 
 book knowledge that would tell in a modern 
 competitive examination. For though in his 
 own account of the school it is implied that he 
 
 * See paper entitled " Our School." 
 
70 LIFE OF 
 
 resumed his interrupted studies with Virgil, 
 and was, before he left, head boy, and the 
 possessor of many prizes, yet this is not cor- 
 roborated by the evidence of his surviving fel- 
 low pupils; nor can we, of course, in the face 
 of their direct counter evidence, treat state- 
 ments made in a fictitious or half-fictitious 
 narrative as if made in what professed to be a 
 sober autobiography. Dickens, I repeat, seems 
 to have acquired a very scant amount of classic 
 lore while under the instruction of Mr. Jones, 
 and not too much lore of any kind. But if he 
 learned little, he observed much. He thor- 
 oughly mastered the humours of the place, just 
 as he had mastered the humours of the Mar- 
 shalsea. He had got to know all about the 
 masters, and all about the boys, and all about 
 the white mice — of which there were manj'' in 
 various stages of civilization. He acquired, in 
 short, a fund of school knowledge that seemed 
 inexhaustible, and on which he drew again and 
 again, with the most excellent results, in 
 David Copperfieldj in Dombey, in such inim- 
 itable short papers as Old Cheeseman. And 
 while thus, half unconsciously perhaps, assim- 
 ilating the very life of the school, he was 
 himself a thorough schoolboy, bright, alert, in- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 71 
 
 teUigent; taking part in all fun and frolic; 
 amply indemnifying himself for his enforced 
 abstinence from childish games during the 
 dreary warehouse days; good at recitations and 
 mimic plays; and already possessed of a repu- 
 tation among his peers as a writer of tales. 
 
72 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 OICKENS cannot have been very long 
 at Wellington House Academy, for 
 before May, 1827, he had been at an- 
 other school near Brunswick Square, and had 
 also obtained, and quitted, some employment 
 in the office of a solicitor in ISTew Square, Lin- 
 coln's Inn Fields. It seems clear, therefore, 
 that the whole of his school life might easily 
 be computed in months; and in May, 1827, it 
 will be remembered, he was still but a lad of 
 fifteen. At that date he entered the office of 
 a second solicitor, in Gray's Inn this time, on 
 a salary of thirteen shillings and sixpence a 
 week, afterwards increased to fifteen shillings. 
 Here he remained till November, 1828, again 
 picking up a good deal of information that 
 cannot perhaps be regarded as strictly legal, 
 but such as he was afterwards able to turn to 
 admirable account. He would seem to have 
 studied the profession exhaustively in all its 
 branches, from the topmost Tulkinghorns and 
 Parkers, to the lowest pettifoggers like Pell 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 73 
 
 and Brass, and also to have given particular 
 attention to the parasites of the law — the 
 Guppys and Chucksters; and altogether to 
 have stored his mind, as he had done at school, 
 with a series of invaluable notes and observa- 
 tions. All very well, no doubt, as we look at 
 the matter now. But then it must often have 
 seemed to the ambitious, energetic lad, that he 
 was wasting his time. Was he to remain for- 
 ever a lawyer's clerk who has not the means to 
 be an articled clerk, and who can never, there- 
 fore, aspire to become a full-blown solicitor? 
 Was he to spend the future obscurely in the 
 dingy purlieus of the law? His father, in 
 whose career ' something,' as Mr. Micawber 
 would have said, had at last ' turned up,' was 
 now a reporter for the press. The son deter- 
 mined to be a reporter too. 
 
 He threw himself into this new career with 
 characteristic energy. Of course a reporter is 
 not made in a day. It takes many months of 
 drudgery to obtain such skill in shorthand as 
 shall enable the pen of the ready-writer to 
 keep up with the winged words of speech, and 
 make dots and lines that shall be readable. 
 Dickens laboured hard to acquire the art. In 
 the intervals of his work he made it a kind of 
 
74 LIFE OF 
 
 holiday task to attend the Reading-room of the 
 British Museum, and so remedy the defects in 
 the literary part of his education. But the best 
 powers of his mind were directed to ' Gurney's 
 system of shorthand.* And in time he had his 
 reward. He earned and justified the reputa- 
 tion of being one of the best reporters of his 
 day. 
 
 I shall not quote the autobiographical pas- 
 sages in David Copperfield which bear on 
 the difficulties of stenography. The book is 
 in everybody's hands. But I cannot forego 
 the pleasure of brightening my pages with 
 Dickens's own description of his experience 
 as a reporter, a description contained in one 
 of those charming felicitous speeches of his 
 which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. 
 Speaking in May, 1865, as chairman of a pub- 
 lic dinner on behalf of the Newspaper Press 
 Fund, he said : * I have pursued the calling of 
 a reporter under circumstances of which many 
 of my brethren at home in England here, many 
 of my modern successors, can form no ade- 
 quate conception. I have often transcribed for 
 the printer, from my shorthand notes, impor- 
 tant public speeches, in which the strictest 
 accuracy was required, and a mistake in which 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 75 
 
 would have been, to a young man, severely 
 compromising, writing on the palm of my 
 hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post- 
 chaise and four, galloping through a wild 
 country, and through the dead of the night, 
 at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an 
 hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I 
 strolled into the castle-yard there to identify, 
 for the amusement of a friend, the spot on 
 which I once took, as we used to call it, an 
 election speech of my noble friend Lord Rus- 
 sell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained 
 by all the vagabonds in that division of the 
 county, and under such pelting rain, that I 
 remember two good-natured colleagues, who 
 chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-hand- 
 kerchief over my note-book, after the manner 
 of a State canopy in an ecclesiastical proces- 
 sion. I have worn my knees by writing on 
 them on the old back row of the old gallery in 
 the old House of Commons; and I have worn 
 my feet by standing to write in a preposterous 
 pen in the old House of Lords, where we used 
 to be huddled together like so many sheep, 
 kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might 
 want re-stuffing. Returning home from ex- 
 cited political meetings in the country to the 
 
76 LIFE OF 
 
 waiting press in London, I do verily believe I 
 have been upset in almost every description of 
 vehicle known in this country. I have been, 
 in my time, belated in miry by-roads, towards 
 the small hours, forty or fifty miles from Lon- 
 don, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted 
 horses, and drunken postboys, and have got 
 back in time for publication, to be received with 
 never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. 
 Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from 
 the broadest of hearts I ever knew.' 
 
 What shall I add to this? That the papers 
 on which he was engaged as a reporter were 
 The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament, and 
 The Morning Chronicle; that long afterwards, 
 little more than two years before his death, 
 when addressing the journalists of New York, 
 he gave public expression to his * grateful re- 
 membrance of a calling that was once his own,' 
 and declared * to the wholesome training of 
 severe newspaper work, when I was a very 
 young man, I constantly refer my first suc- 
 cess'; that his income as a reporter appears 
 latterly to have been some five guineas a week, 
 of course in addition to expenses and general 
 breakages and damages; that there is inde- 
 pendent testimony to his exceptional quickness 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 77 
 
 in reporting and transcribing, and to his intelli- 
 gence in condensing; that to an observer so 
 keen and apt, the experiences of his business 
 journeys in those more picturesque and event- 
 ful ante-railway days must have been invalu- 
 able; and, finally, that his connection with 
 journalism lasted far into 1836, and so did not 
 cease till some months after Pickwick had 
 begun to add to the world's store of merriment 
 and laughter. 
 
 But I have not really reached Pickwick 
 yet, nor anything like it. That master-work 
 was not also a first work. With all Dickens's 
 genius, he had to go through some apprentice- 
 ship in the writer's art before coming upon the 
 public as the most popular novelist of his time. 
 Let us go back for a little to the twilight be- 
 fore the full sunrise, nay, to the earliest streak 
 upon the greyness of night, to his first original 
 published composition. Dickens himself, and 
 in his preface to Pickwick too, has told us 
 somewhat about that first paper of his; how 
 it was ' dropped stealthily one evening at twi- 
 light, with fear and trembling, into a dark let- 
 ter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in 
 Fleet Street ' ; how it was accepted, and ' ap- 
 peared in all the glory of print ' ; and how he 
 
78 LIFE OF 
 
 was so filled with pleasure and pride on pur- 
 chasing a copy of the magazine in which it was 
 published, that he went into Westminster Hall 
 to hide the tears of joy that would come into 
 his eyes. The paper thus joyfully wept over 
 was originally entitled A Dinner at Poplar 
 Walk, and now bears, among the Sketches 
 by Boz, the name of Mr, Minns and his 
 Cousin; the periodical in which it was pub- 
 lished was The Old Monthly Magazine, and the 
 date of publication was 1 January, 1834. 
 
 A Dinner at Poplar Walk may be pro- 
 nounced a very fairly told tale. It is, no doubt, 
 always easy to be wise after the event, in 
 criticism particularly easy, and when once a 
 writer has achieved success, there is but too 
 little difficulty in showing that his earlier pro- 
 ductions were prophetic of his future great- 
 ness. At the risk, however, of incurring a 
 charge of this kind, I repeat that Dickens's 
 first story is well told, and that the editor of 
 The Old Monthly Magazine showed due dis- 
 cernment in accepting it and encouraging his 
 unknown ccncributor to further efforts. Quite 
 apart from the fact that the author was only 
 a young fellow of some two or three and 
 twenty, both this first story and the stories that 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 79 
 
 followed it in The Old Monthly Magazine, 
 during 1834 and the early part of 1835, pos- 
 sessed qualities of a very remarkable kind. So 
 also did the humorous descriptive papers 
 shortly afterwards published in The Evening 
 Chronicle^ papers that, with the stories, now 
 compose the book known as Sketches by Boz. 
 Sir Arthur Helps, speaking of Dickens, just 
 after Dickens's death,^ said, ' His powers of 
 
 observation were almost unrivalled 
 
 Indeed, I have said to myself when I have been 
 with him, he sees and observes nine facts for 
 any two that I see and observe.' This particu- 
 lar faculty is, I think, almost as clearly dis- 
 cernible in the Sketches as in the author's 
 later and greater works. London — its sins and 
 sorrows, its gaieties and amusements, its subur- 
 ban gentilities, and central squalor, the aspects 
 of its streets, and the humours of the dingier 
 classes among its inhabitants, — all this had 
 certainly never been so seen and described be- 
 fore. The power of exact minute delineation 
 lavished upon the picture is admirable. Again, 
 the dialogue in the dramatic parts is natural, 
 well-conducted, characteristic, and so used as 
 to help, not impede, the narrative. The speech, 
 ^ Macmillan's Magazine, July, 1870. 
 
80 LIFE OF 
 
 for instance, of Mr. Bung, the broker*s man, is 
 a piece of very good Dickens. Of course there 
 is humour, and very excellent fooling some of 
 it is; and equally, of course, there is pathos, 
 and some of that is not bad. Do I mean at all 
 that this earlier work stands on the same level 
 of excellence as the masterpieces of the writer? 
 Clearly not. It were absurd to expect the 
 stripling, half-furtively coming forward, first 
 without a name at all, and then under the 
 pseudonym of Boz,^ to write with the superb 
 practised ease and mastery of the Charles 
 Dickens who penned David Copperfield. By 
 dint of doing blacksmith's work, says the 
 French proverb, one becomes a blacksmith. 
 The artist, like the handicraftsman, must learn 
 his art. Much in the Sketches betrays inex- 
 perience; or, perhaps, it would be more just to 
 say, comparative clumsiness of hand. The de- 
 scriptions, graphic as they undoubtedly are, 
 lack for the most part the final imaginative 
 touch; the kind of inbreathing of life which 
 afterwards gave such individual charm to 
 Dickens's word-painting. The humour is more 
 obvious, less delicate, turns too readily on the 
 
 ^ It was the pet name of one of his brothers; that was 
 why he took it. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 81 
 
 claim of the elderly spinster to be considered 
 young, and the desire of all spinsters to get 
 married. The pathos is often spoilt by over- 
 emphasis and declamation. It lacks simplicity. 
 For the Sketches published in The Old 
 Monthly Magazine, Dickens got nothing, be- 
 yond the pleasure of seeing himself in print. 
 The Chronicle treated him somewhat more 
 liberally, and, on his application, increased his 
 salary, giving him, in view of his original con- 
 tributions, seven guineas a week, instead of the 
 five guineas which he had been drawing as a 
 reporter. Not a particularly brilliant augmen- 
 tation, perhaps, and one at which he must often 
 have smiled in after years, when his pen was 
 dropping gold as well as ink. Still, the addi- 
 tion to his income was substantial, and the son 
 of John Dickens must always, I imagine, have 
 been in special need of money. Moreover the 
 circumstances of the next few months would 
 render any increased earnings doubly pleasant. 
 For Dickens was shortly after this engaged to 
 be married to Miss Catherine Hogarth, the 
 daughter of one of his fellow-workers on the 
 Chronicle, There had been, so Forster tells 
 us, a previous very shadowy love aiFair in his 
 career, — an aiFair so visionary indeed, and 
 
82 LIFE OF 
 
 boyish, as scarcely to be worthy of mention in 
 this history, save for three facts : first, that his 
 devotion, dreamlike as it was, seems to have 
 had love's highest practical effect in in- 
 ducing him to throw his whole strength 
 into the study of shorthand; secondly, 
 that the lady of his love appears to have 
 had some resemblance to Dora, the child- 
 wife of David Copperfield; and thirdly, 
 that he met her again long years after- 
 wards, when time had worked its changes, and 
 the glamour of love had" left his eyes, and that 
 to that meeting we owe the passages in Little 
 Dorrit relating to poor Flora. This, how- 
 ever, is a.parenthesis. The engagement to Miss 
 Hogarth was neither shadowy nor unreal — an 
 engagement only in dreamland. Better for 
 both, perhaps — who knows? — if it had been. 
 Ah me, if one could peer into the future, how 
 many weddings there are at which tears would 
 be more appropriate than smiles and laughter ! 
 Would Charles Dickens and Catherine Ho- 
 garth have f oreborne to plight their troth, one 
 wonders, if they could have foreseen how 
 slowly and surely the coming years were to 
 sunder their hearts and lives ? — They were mar- 
 ried on 2d April, 1836. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 83 
 
 This date again leads me to a time subse- 
 quent to the publication of the first number 
 of Pickwick which had appeared a day or 
 two before ; — and again I refrain from dealing 
 with that great book. For before I do so, I 
 wish to pause a brief space to consider what 
 manner of man Charles Dickens was when he 
 suddenly broke on the world in his full popu- 
 larity; and also what were the influences, 
 for good and evil, which his early career 
 had exercised upon his character and in- 
 tellect. 
 
 What manner of man he was? In outward 
 aspect all accounts agree that he was singu- 
 larly, noticeably prepossessing — ^bright, ani- 
 mated, eager, with energy and talent written 
 in every line of his face. Such he was when 
 Forster saw him, on the occasion of their first 
 meeting, when Dickens was acting as spokes- 
 man for tlie insurgent reporters engaged on 
 the Mirror. So Carlyle, who met him at dinner 
 shortly after this, and was no flatterer, sketches 
 him for us with a pen of unwonted kindliness. 
 ' He is a fine little fellow — Boz, I think. Clear, 
 blue, intelligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches 
 amazingly, large protrusive rather loose mouth, 
 a face of most extreme mobility, which he 
 
84 LIFE OF 
 
 shuttles about — eyebrows, eyes, mouth and all 
 — in a very singular manner while speaking. 
 Surmount this with a loose coil of common- 
 coloured hair, and set it on a small compact 
 figure, very small, and dressed a la D'Orsay 
 rather than well — this is Pickwick. For the 
 rest, a quiet, shrewd-looking little fellow, who 
 seems to guess pretty well what he is and what 
 others are.' ^ Is not this a graphic little pic- 
 ture, and characteristic even to the touch about 
 D'Orsay, the dandy French Count? For 
 Dickens, like the young men of the time — • 
 Disraeli, Bulwer, and the rest — was a great 
 fop. We, of these degenerate days, shall never 
 see again that antique magnificence in coloured 
 velvet waistcoats. 
 
 But to return. Dickens, it need scarcely be 
 said, had by this long out-lived the sickliness 
 of his earlier years. The hardships and trials 
 of his childhood and boyhood had served but 
 to brace his young manhood, knitting the frame 
 and strengthening the nerves. Light and 
 small, as Carlyle describes him, he was wiry 
 and very active, and could bear without injury 
 an amount of intellectual work and bodily 
 
 ' Froude's Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in 
 London. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 85 
 
 fatigue that would have killed many men of 
 seemingly stronger build. And as what might 
 have seemed unfortunate in his youth had 
 helped perchance to develop his physical 
 powers, so had it assisted to strengthen his 
 character and foster his genius. I go back 
 here to the point from which I started. No 
 doubt a weaker man would have been crushed 
 by such a youth. He would have been indo- 
 lently content to remain a warehouse drudge, 
 would have listlessly fallen into his father's 
 ways about money, would have had no ambition 
 beyond his desk and salary as a lawyer's clerk, 
 would have never cared to piece together and 
 supplement the scattered scraps of his educa- 
 tion, would have rested on his oars when he 
 had once shot into the waters of ordinary 
 journalism. 
 
 With Dickens it was not so. The al- 
 chemy of a fine nature had transmuted his 
 disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons 
 of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, 
 were energy, self-reliance, a determination to 
 overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of 
 life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. 
 From the muddle of his father's affairs he had 
 taken away a lesson of method, order, and 
 
86 LIFE OF 
 
 punctuality in business and other arrange- 
 ments. ' What is worth doing at all is worth 
 doing well,' was not only one of his favourite 
 maxims — it was the rule of his life. 
 
 And for what was to be his life work, what 
 better preparation could there have been than 
 that which he received? I am far from recom- 
 mending warehouses, squalid solitary lodgings, 
 pawnshops, debtors' prisons, — if such could 
 now be found, — ill-conducted private schools, 
 — which probably could be found, — attorneys' 
 offices, and the hand-to-mouth of journalism, 
 as constituting generally the highest ideal of 
 a liberal education. I am equally far from 
 asserting that the majority of men do not re- 
 quire more training of a purely scholastic kind 
 than fell to Dickens's lot. But Dickens was 
 not a bookish man. His genius did not lie in 
 that direction. To have forced him unduly 
 into the world of books would have made him, 
 doubtless, an average scholar, but might have 
 weakened his hold on life. Such a risk was 
 certainly not worth the running. Fate ar- 
 ranged it otherwise. What he was above all 
 was a student of the world of men, a pas- 
 sionately keen observer of the ways of hu- 
 manity. Men were to be his books, his special 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 87 
 
 branch of knowledge ; and in order to graduate 
 and take high honours in that school, I repeat, 
 he could have had no better training. Not only 
 had he passed through a range of most un- 
 wonted experiences, experiences calculated to 
 quicken to the uttermost his superb faculties 
 of observation and insight; but he had been 
 placed in sympathetic communication vdth a 
 strange assortment of characters, lying quite 
 out of the usual ken of the literary classes. 
 Knowledge and sympathy, the seeing eye and 
 the feeling heart — were these nothing to Iiave 
 acquired? 
 
 That so abnormal an education can have been 
 entirely without drawbacks, it is no part of my 
 purpose to affirm. Tossed, as one may say, to 
 sink or swim amid the waves of life, where 
 those waves ran turbid and brackish, Dickens 
 had emerged strengthened, triumphant. But 
 that some little signs should not remain of the 
 straining and effort with which he had won the 
 land, w-as scarcely to be expected. He him- 
 self, in his more confidential communications 
 with Forster, seems to avow a consciousness 
 that this was so ; and Forster, though he speaks 
 guardedly, lovingly, appears to be of opinion 
 that a certain self-assertiveness and fierce in- 
 
88 LIFE OF 
 
 tolerance of advice or control * occasionally 
 discernible in his friend, might justly be at- 
 tributed to the harsh influence of early strug- 
 gles and privations. But what then? That 
 system of education has yet to be devised which 
 shall mould this poor human clay of ours into 
 flawless shapes of use and beauty. A man may 
 be considered fortunate indeed, when his train- 
 ing has left in him only what the French call 
 the * defects of his virtues,' that is, the exag- 
 geration of his good qualities till they turn into 
 faults. Without his immense strength of pur- 
 pose and iron will, Dickens might never have 
 emerged from obscurity, and the world would 
 have been very distinctly the poorer. One can- 
 
 * ' I have heard Dickens described by those who knew 
 him,' says Mr. Edmund Yates, in his Recollections, 
 ' as aggressive, imperious, and intolerant, and I can 
 comprehend the accusation. . . . He was imperious in 
 the sense that his life was conducted on the sic volo sic 
 jubeo principle, and that everything gave way before 
 him. The society in which he mixed, the hours which 
 he kept, the opinions which he held, his likes and dis- 
 likes, his ideas of what should or should not be, were all 
 settled by himself, not merely for himself, but for all 
 those brought into connection with him, and it was never 
 imagined they could be called in question. . . . He had 
 immense powers of will.' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 89 
 
 not be very sorry that he possessed these gifts 
 in excess. 
 
 And now, at last, having slightly sketched 
 the history of his earlier years, and endeavoured 
 to show, however imperfectly, what influences 
 had gone to the formation of his character, I 
 proceed to consider the book that lifted him 
 to fame and fortune. The years of appren- 
 ticeship are over, and the master-workman 
 brings forth his finished work in its flower of 
 perfection. Let us study Pickwick. 
 
90 LIFE OF. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 OICKENS has told us, in his preface to 
 the later editions, much of how Pick- 
 wick came to be projected and pub- 
 lished. It was in this wise: Seymour, a 
 caricaturist of very considerable merit, though 
 not, as we should now consider, in the first rank 
 of the great caricaturists, had proposed to 
 Messrs. Chapman and Hall, then just starting 
 on their career as publishers, a ' series of Cock- 
 ney sporting plates.' Messrs. Chapman and 
 Hall entertained the idea favourably, but 
 opined that the plates would require illustra- 
 tive letter-press; and casting about for some 
 suitable author, bethought themselves of 
 Dickens, whose tales and sketches had been 
 exciting some little sensation in the world of 
 journalism; and who had, indeed, already 
 written for the firm a story, the Tuggs at 
 Ramsgate, which may be read among the 
 Sketches. Accordingly Mr. Hall called on 
 Dickens for the purpose of proposing the 
 scheme. This would be in 1835, towards the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 91 
 
 latter end of the year ; and Dickens, who had 
 apparently left the paternal roof for some lit- 
 tle time, was living bachelorwise, in Furnival's 
 Inn. What was his astonishment, when Mr. 
 Hall came in, to find he was the same person 
 who had sold him the copy of the magazine 
 containing his first story — that memorable 
 copy at which he had looked, in Westminster 
 Hall, through eyes bedimmed with joyful 
 tears. Such coincidences always had for 
 Dickens a peculiar, almost a superstitious, in- 
 terest. The circumstance seemed of happy 
 augury to both the ' high contracting parties.' 
 Publisher and author were for the nonce on 
 the best of terms. The latter, no doubt, saw 
 his opening; was more than ready to under- 
 take the work, and had no quarrel with the re- 
 muneration offered. But even then he was not 
 the man to plaj^ second fiddle to anybody. Be- 
 fore they parted, he had quite succeeded in 
 turning the tables on Sej^mour. The original 
 proposal had been that the artist should pro- 
 duce four caricatures on sporting subjects 
 every month, and that the letter-press should 
 be in illustration of the caricatures. Dickens 
 got Mr. Hall to agree to reverse that position. 
 He, Dickens, was to have the command of the 
 
 ^M 
 
92 LIFE OF 
 
 story, and the artist was to illustrate him. How 
 far these altered relations would have worked 
 quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if 
 Dickens's story had not so soon assumed the 
 proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to 
 speculate. Seymour died by his own hand be- 
 fore the second number was published, and so 
 ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It 
 was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent 
 of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his disastrous 
 sporting proclivities, made part of the first con- 
 ception of the book; and it is also very sig- 
 nificant of the book's origin, that the design 
 on the green wrapper in which the monthly 
 parts made their appearance, should have had 
 a purely sporting character, and exhibited Mr. 
 Pickwick sleepily fishing in a punt, and Mr. 
 Winkle shooting at what looks like a cock- 
 sparrow, — the whole surrounded by a chaste 
 arabesque of guns, rods, and landing-nets. 
 To Seymour, too, we owe the portrait of Mr. 
 Pickwick, which has impressed that excellent 
 old gentleman's face and figure upon all our 
 memories. 
 
 But to return to Dickens's interview with 
 Mr. Hall. They seem to have parted in 
 mutual satisfaction. At least it is certain 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 98 
 
 Dickens was satisfied, for in a letter written, 
 apparently on the same day, to ' my dearest 
 Kate,' he thus sums up the proposals of the 
 publishers : ' They have made me an offer of 
 fourteen pounds a month to write and edit a 
 new publication they contemplate, entirely by 
 myself, to be published monthly, and each 
 number to contain four wood-cuts. . . . 
 The work will be no joke, but the emolument 
 is too tempting to resist.' ^ 
 
 So, little thinking how soon he would begin 
 to regard the ' emolument ' as ludicrously in- 
 adequate, he set to work on Pickwick. The 
 first part was published on 31 March or 1 
 April, 1836. 
 
 The part seems scarcely to have created any 
 sensation. Mr. James Grant, the novelist, says 
 indeed, that the first five parts were * a dead 
 failure,' and that the publishers were even de- 
 bating whether the enterprise had not better be 
 abandoned altogether, when suddenly Sam 
 Weller appeared upon the scene, and turned 
 their gloom into laughter. Be that as it may, 
 certain it is that before many months had 
 passed, Messrs. Chapman and Hall must have 
 been thoroughly confirmed in a policy of per- 
 
 * See the Letters published by Chapman & Hall. 
 
94 LIFE OF 
 
 severance. ' The first order for Part I.,' that 
 is, the first order for binding, ' was,' says the 
 bool?:binder who executed the work, ' for four 
 hundred copies only.' The order for Part XV. 
 had risen to forty thousand. All contemporary 
 accounts agree that the success was sudden, 
 immense. The author, like Lord Byron, some 
 twenty-five years before, ' awoke and found 
 himself famous.' Young as he was, not having 
 yet numbered more than twenty-four summers, 
 he at one stride reached the topmost height of 
 popularity. Everybody read his book. Every- 
 body laughed over it. Everybody talked about 
 it. Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but 
 very surely, that a new and vital force had 
 arisen in English literature. 
 
 And English literature just then was in one 
 of its times of slackness, rather than full flow. 
 The great tide of the beginning of the century 
 had ebbed. The tide of the Victorian age had 
 scarcely begun to do more than ripple and 
 flash on the horizon. Byron was dead, and 
 Shelley and Keats and Coleridge and Lamb; 
 Southey's life was on the decline ; Wordsworth 
 had long executed his best work; while of the 
 coming men, Carlyle, though in the plenitude 
 of his power, having published Sartor Resar- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 95 
 
 tuSj had not yet published his French Revolu- 
 tion/ or dehvered his lectures on the ' Heroes,' 
 and was not yet in the plenitude of his fame 
 and influence; and Macaulay, then in India, 
 was known only as the essayist and politician; 
 and Lord Tennyson and the Brownings were 
 more or less names of the future. Looking 
 especially at fiction, the time may be said to 
 have been waiting for its master-novelist. Five 
 years had gone by since the good and great Sir 
 Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh 
 Abbey, there to sleep, as is most fit, amid the 
 ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved 
 so well, with the babble of the Tweed for 
 lullaby. Nor had any one shown himself of 
 stature to step into his vacant place, albeit 
 Bulwer, more precocious even than Dickens, 
 was already known as the author of Pelham, 
 Eugene Aram^ and the Last Days of 
 Pompeii; and Disraeli had written Vivian 
 Grey, and his earlier books; while Thackeray, 
 Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, George Eliot 
 were all, of course, to come later. No, there 
 was a vacant throne among the novelists. Here 
 was the hour — and here, too, was the man. In 
 
 2 It was finished in January, 1837, and not published 
 till six months afterwards. 
 
96 LIFE OF 
 
 virtue of natural kingship he took up his 
 sceptre unquestioned. 
 
 Still, it may not be superfluous to inquire 
 into the why and wherefore of his success. All 
 effects have a cause. What was the cause of 
 this special phenomenon? In the first place, 
 the admirable freshness of the book won its 
 way into every heart. There is a fervour of 
 youth and healthy good spirits about the whole 
 thing. In a former generation, Byron had 
 uttered his wail of despair over a worthless 
 world. We, in our own time, have got back to 
 the dreary point of considering whether life 
 be worth living. Here was a writer who had 
 no such misgivings. For him life was pleasant, 
 useful, full of delight — to be not only toler- 
 ated, but enjoyed. He liked its sights, its play 
 of character, its adventures — afl*ected no su- 
 periority to its amusements and convivialities 
 — thoroughly laid himself out to please and to 
 be pleased. And his characters were in the 
 same mood. Their fund of animal spirits 
 seemed inexhaustible. For life's jollities they 
 were never unprepared. No doubt there were 
 * mighty mean moments ' in their existence, as 
 there have been in the existence of most of us. 
 It cannot have been pleasant to Mr. Winkle 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 97 
 
 to have his eye blackened by the obstreperous 
 cabman. !Mr. Tracy Tupman probably felt a 
 passing pang when jilted by the maiden aunt 
 in favour of the audacious Jingle. No man 
 would elect to occupy the position of defend- 
 ant in an action for breach of promise, or pre- 
 fer to sojourn in a debtors' prison. But how 
 jauntily do Mr. Pickwick and his friends shake 
 off such discomforts ! How buoyantly do they 
 override the billows that beset their course! 
 And what excellent digestions they have, and 
 how slightly do they seem to suffer the next 
 day from any little excesses in the matter of 
 milk punch! 
 
 Then besides the good spirits and good tem- 
 per, there is Dickens's royal gift of humour. 
 As some actors have only to show their face 
 and utter a word or two, in order to convulse 
 an audience with merriment, so here does 
 almost every sentence hold good and honest 
 laughter. Not, perhaps, objects the superfine 
 and too dainty critic, humour of the most deli- 
 cate sort — not humour that for its rare and 
 exquisite quality can be placed beside the 
 masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, 
 or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted 
 freely; not humour of that special character. 
 
98 LIFE OF 
 
 But very good humour nevertheless, the thor- 
 oughly popular humour of broad comedy and 
 obvious farce — the humour that finds its ac- 
 count where absurd characters are placed in 
 ridiculous situations, that delights in the oddi- 
 ties of the whimsical and eccentric, that irradi- 
 ates stupidity and makes dulness amusing. 
 How thoroughly wholesome it is too! To be 
 at the same time merry and wise, says the old 
 adage, is a hard combination. Dickens was 
 both. With all his boisterous merriment, his 
 volleys of inextinguishable laughter, he never 
 makes game of what is at all worthy of 
 respect. Here, as in his later books, right 
 is right, and wrong wrong, and he is never 
 tempted to jingle his jester's bell out of 
 season, and make right look ridiculous. 
 And if the humour of Pickwick be whole- 
 some, it is also most genial and kindly. 
 We have here no acrid cynic, sneeringly point- 
 ing out the plague spots of humanity, and 
 showing pleasantly how even the good are 
 tainted with evil. Rather does Dickens delight 
 in finding some touch of goodness, some linger- 
 ing memory of better things, some hopeful 
 aspiration, some trace of unselfish devotion in 
 characters where all seems soddened and lost. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 99 
 
 In brief, the laughter is the laughter of one 
 who sees the foibles, and even the vices of his 
 fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly 
 and helpfully. 
 
 So much the first readers of Pickwick 
 might note as the book unfolded itself to them, 
 part by part; and they might also note one or 
 two things besides. They might note — they 
 could scarcely fail to do so — that though there 
 was a touch of caricature in nearly all the 
 characters, yet those characters were, one and 
 all, wonderfully real, and very much alive. It 
 was no world of shadows to which the author 
 introduced them. Mr. Pickwick had a very 
 distinct existence, and so had his three friends, 
 and Bob Sawyer, and Benjamin Allen, and 
 Mr. Jingle, and Tony Weller, and all the 
 swarm of minor characters. While as to Sam 
 Weller, if it be really true that he averted im- 
 pending ruin from the book, and turned defeat 
 into victory, one can only say that it was like 
 him. When did he ever ' stint stroke ' in 
 ' f oughten field ' ? By what array of adverse 
 circumstances was he ever taken at a disad- 
 vantage? To have created a character of this 
 vitality, of this individual force, would be a 
 feather in the cap of any novelist who ever 
 
100 LIFE OF 
 
 lived. Something I think of Dickens's own 
 blood passed into this special progeniture of 
 his. It has been irreverently said that Falstaff 
 might represent Shakespeare in his cups, just 
 as Hamlet might represent him in his more 
 sober moments. So I have always had a kind 
 of fancy that Sam Weller might be regarded 
 as Dickens himself seen in a certain aspect — a 
 sort of Dickens, shall I say? — in an humbler 
 sphere of life, and who had never devoted him- 
 self to literature. There is in both the same 
 energy, pluck, essential goodness of heart, fer- 
 tility of resource, abundance of animal spirits, 
 and also an imagination of a peculiar kind, in 
 which wit enters as a main ingredient. And 
 having noted how highly vitalized were the 
 characters in Pickwick^, I think the first 
 readers might also fairly be expected to note, 
 — and, in fact, it is clear from Dickens's pre- 
 face that they did note — how greatly the book 
 increased in scope and power as it proceeded. 
 The beginning was conceived almost in a spirit 
 of farce. The incidents and adventures had 
 scarcely any other object than to create amuse- 
 ment. Mr. Pickwick himself appeared on the 
 scene with fantastic honours and the badge of 
 absurdity, as ' the man who had traced to their 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 101 
 
 source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and 
 agitated the scientific world with the Theory 
 of Tittlebats.' But in all this there is a grad- 
 ual change. Mr. Pickwick is presented to us 
 latterly as an exceedingly sound-headed as well 
 as sound-hearted old gentleman, whom we 
 should never think of associating with the 
 sources of Hampstead Ponds or any other 
 folly. While in such scenes as those at the 
 Fleet Prison, the author is clearly endeavour- 
 ing to do much more than raise a laugh. He 
 is sounding the deeper, more tragic chords in 
 human feeling. 
 
 Ah, if we add to all this — to the freshness, 
 the * go,' the good spirits, the keen observation, 
 the graphic painting, the humour, the vitality 
 of the characters, the gradual development of 
 power — if we add to all this that something 
 which is in all, and greater than all, viz., genius, 
 and genius of a highly popular kind, then we 
 shall have no difficulty in understanding why 
 everybody read Pickwick, and how it came 
 to pass that its publishers made some 20,000Z. 
 by a work that they had once thought of 
 abandoning as worthless.^ 
 
 ^ They acknowledged to Dickens that they had made 
 14,000Z. by the sale of the monthly parts alon?. 
 
102 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 OICKENS was not at all the man to rest 
 on his oars while Pickwick was giv- 
 ing such a magnificent impetus to the 
 boat that contained his fortunes. The amount 
 of work which he accomplished in the years 
 1836, 1837, 1838, and 1839 is, if we consider 
 its quality, amazing. Pickwick^ as we have 
 seen, was begun early in the first of these years, 
 and its publication continued till the November 
 of 1837. Independently of his work on Pick- 
 wick j he was, in the year 1836, engaged in 
 the arduous profession of a reporter till the 
 close of the parliamentary session, and also 
 wrote a pamphlet on Sabbatarianism, a farce 
 in two acts, ' The Strange Gentleman,' for the 
 St. James's Theatre, and a comic opera, ' The 
 Village Coquettes,' which was set to music by 
 Hullah. With the very commencement of 
 1837 — Pickwick, it will be remembered, go- 
 ing on all the while — he entered upon the duties 
 of editor of Bentley^s Miscellany, and in the 
 second number began the publication of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 103 
 
 Oliver Twist, which was continued into the 
 early months of 1839, when his connection with 
 the magazine ceased. In the April of 1838, 
 and simultaneously, of course, with Oliver 
 Twist, appeared the first part of Nicholas 
 Nicklehy — the last part appearing in the 
 October of the following year. Three novels 
 of more than full size and of first-rate import- 
 ance, in less than four years, besides a good 
 deal of other miscellaneous work — certainly 
 that was ' good going.' The pace was de- 
 cidedly fast. No wonder that The Quarterly 
 Review, even so early as October, 1837, was 
 tempted to croak about ' Mr. Dickens ' as 
 ■s^Titing ' too often and too fast, and putting 
 forth in their crude, unfinished, undigested 
 state, thoughts, feelings, observations, and 
 plans which it required time and study to ma- 
 ture,' and to warn him that as he had * risen 
 like a rocket,' so he was in danger of ' coming 
 down like the stick.' No wonder, I say, and 
 yet to us now, how unjust the accusation 
 appears, and how false the prophecy. Rapidly 
 as those books were executed, Dickens, like 
 the real artist that he was, had put into them 
 his best work. There was no scamping. The 
 critics of the time judged superficially, not 
 
104 LIFE OF 
 
 making allowance for the ample fund of ob- 
 servations he had amassed, for the genuine 
 fecundity of his genius, and for the admirable 
 industry of an extremely industrious man. 
 The World's Workers — there exists under 
 that general designation a series of short biog- 
 raphies, for which Miss Dickens has written a 
 sketch of her father's Hfe. To no one could 
 the description more fittingly apply. Through- 
 out his life he worked desperately hard. He 
 possessed, in a high degree, the ' infinite fac- 
 ulty for taking pains,' which is so great an ad- 
 junct to genius, though it is not, as the good 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds held, genius itself. Thus 
 what he had done rapidly was done well; and, 
 for the rest, the writer, who had yet to give the 
 world Martin Chuzzlewit, The Christmas 
 Carol, David Copperfield, and Dombey, was 
 not ' coming down like a stick.' There were 
 many more stars, and of very brilliant colours, 
 to be showered out by that rocket; and the 
 stick has not even yet fallen to the ground.* 
 Naturally, with the success of Pickwick, 
 
 ^ I think critics, and perhaps I myself, have been a 
 little hard on this Quarterly Reviewer. He did not, after 
 all, say that Dickens would come down like a stick, only 
 that he might do so if he wrote too fast and furiously. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 105 
 
 came a great change in Dickens's pecuniary 
 position. He had, as we have seen, been glad 
 enough, before he began the book, to close 
 with the offer of 14Z. for each monthly part. 
 That sum was afterwards increased to ISl.j 
 and the two first payments seem to have been 
 made in advance for the purpose of helping 
 him to defray the expenses of his marriage. 
 But as the sale leapt up, the publishers them- 
 selves felt that such a rate of remuneration was 
 altogether insufficient, and sent him first and 
 last, a goodly number of supplementary 
 cheques, for sums amounting in the aggregate, 
 as they computed, to 3000Z., and as Forster 
 computes to about 2500Z. This Dickens, who, 
 to use his own words, * never undervalued his 
 own work,* considered a very inadequate per- 
 centage on their gains — forgetting a little, per- 
 haps, that the risks had been wholly theirs, and 
 that he had been more than content with the 
 original bargain. Similarly he was soon ut- 
 terly dissatisfied with his arrangements with 
 Bentley about the editorship of the Miscellany 
 and Oliver Twist, — arrangements which had 
 been entered into in August, 1836, while Pick- 
 wick was in progress ; and he utterly refused to 
 let that publisher have Gabriel Varden, The 
 
106 LIFE OF 
 
 Locksmith of London (Barnahy Rudge) on 
 the terms originally agreed upon. With Mac- 
 rone also, who had made some 4000Z. by the 
 Sketches, and given him about 400Z.^ he was no 
 better pleased, especially when that enterpris- 
 ing gentleman threatened a re-issue in monthly 
 parts, and so compelled him to re-purchase the 
 copyright for 2000Z. But however much he 
 might consider himself ill-treated by the pub- 
 lishing fraternity, he was, of course, rapidly 
 getting far richer than he had been, and so able 
 to enlarge his mode of life. He had begun, 
 modestly enough, by taking his wife to live 
 with him in his bachelor's quarters in Furni- 
 val's Inn, — much as Tommy Traddles, in Da- 
 vid Copperfieldj, took his wife to live in cham- 
 bers at Gray's Inn; and there, in Furnival's 
 Inn, his first child, a boy, was born on the 6th 
 of January, 1837. But in the March of that 
 year he moved to a more commodious dwelling, 
 at 48 Doughty Street, where he remained till 
 the end of 1839, when still increasing means 
 enabled him to move to a still better house at 
 1 Devonshire Terrace, Regent's Park. But 
 the house in Doughty Street must have been 
 endeared to him by many memories. It was 
 there, on 7 May, 1837, that he lost, at 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 107 
 
 the early age of seventeen, and quite suddenly, 
 a sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, to whom he was 
 greatly attached. The blow fell so heavily at 
 the time as to incapacitate him from all work, 
 and delayed the publication of one of the num- 
 bers of Pickwick. Nor was the sorrow only 
 sharp and transient. He speaks of her in the 
 preface to the first edition of that book. Her 
 spirit seemed to be hovering near as he stood 
 looking at Niagara. He felt her hallowing 
 influence when in danger of growing too much 
 elated by his first reception in America. She 
 came back to him in dreams in Italy. Her 
 image remained in his heart, unchanged by 
 time, as he declared, to the very end. She 
 represented to his mind all that was pure and 
 lovely in opening womanhood, and lives, in 
 the world created by his art, as the Little Nell 
 of The Old Curiosity Shop. It was in 
 Doughty Street, too, that he began to gather 
 round him the circle of friends whose names 
 seem almost like a muster-roll of the famous 
 men and women in the first thirty years of 
 Queen Victoria's reign. I shall not enumerate 
 them. The list of writers, artists, actors, 
 would be too long. But this at least it would 
 be unjust not to note, that among his friends 
 
108 LIFE OF 
 
 were included nearly all those who by any 
 stretch of fancy could be regarded as his 
 rivals in the fields of humour and fiction. 
 With Washington Irving, Hood, Douglas 
 Jerrold, Lord Lytton, Harrison Ainsworth, 
 Mr. Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell, and, save 
 for a passing foolish quarrel, with Thackeray, 
 the novelist who really was his peer, he main- 
 tained the kindliest and most cordial relations. 
 Nor when George Eliot published her first 
 books, The Scenes of Clerical Life and 
 Adam Bede, did any one acknowledge their 
 excellence more freely. Petty jealousies 
 found no place in the nature of this great 
 writer. 
 
 It was also while living at Doughty Street 
 that he seems, in great measure, to have 
 formed those habits of work and relaxation 
 which every artist fashions so as to suit his 
 own special needs and idiosyncrasies. His 
 favourite time for work was the morning, be- 
 tween the hours of breakfast and lunch; and 
 though, at this particular period, the enormous 
 pressure of his engagements compelled him to 
 work * double tides,' and often far into the 
 night, yet he was essentially a day-worker, not 
 a night-worker. Like the great German poet 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 109 
 
 Goethe, he preferred to exercise his art in the 
 fresh morning hours, when the dewdrops, as 
 it were, lay bright upon his imagination and 
 fancy. And for relaxation and sedative, when 
 he had thoroughly worn himself out with 
 mental toil, he would have recourse to the 
 hardest bodily exercise. At first riding seems to 
 have contented him — fifteen miles out and fif- 
 teen miles in, with a halt at some road-side inn 
 for refreshment. But soon walking took the 
 place of riding, and he became an indefatiga- 
 ble pedestrian. He would think nothing of 
 a walk of twenty or thirty miles, and that not 
 merely in the vigorous heyday of youth, but 
 afterwards, to the very last. He was always 
 on those alert, quick feet of his, perambulating 
 London from end to end, and in every direc- 
 tion; perambulating the suburbs, perambulat- 
 ing the ' greater London ' that lies within a 
 radius of twenty miles, round the central core 
 of metropolitan houses. In short, he was 
 everywhere, in all weathers, at all hours. Nor 
 was London, smaller and greater, his only 
 walking field. He would walk wherever he 
 was — walked through and through Genoa, 
 and all about Genoa, when he lived there; 
 knew every inch of the Kent country round 
 
110 LIFE OF 
 
 Broadstairs and round Gad's Hill — was, as I 
 have said, always, always, always on his feet. 
 But if he would pedestrianize everywhere, 
 London remained the walking ground of his 
 heart. As Dr. Johnson held that nothing 
 equalled a stroll down Fleet Street, so did 
 Dickens, sitting in full view of Genoa's per- 
 fect bay, and with the blue Mediterranean 
 sparkling at his feet, turn in thought for in- 
 spiration to his old haunts. ' Never,' he writes 
 to Forster, when about to begin The Chimes^ 
 ' never did I stagger so upon the threshold be- 
 fore. I seem as if I had plucked myself out 
 of my proper soil when I left Devonshire 
 Terrace, and could take root no more until I 
 return to it. . . . Did I tell you how 
 many fountains we have here? No matter. 
 If they played nectar, they wouldn't please me 
 half so well as the West Middlesex Water- 
 works at Devonshire Terrace. . . . Put me 
 down on Waterloo Bridge at eight o'clock in 
 the evening, with leave to roam about as long 
 as I like, and I would come home, as you know, 
 panting to go on. I am sadly strange as it is, 
 and can't settle.' ' Eight o'clock in the even- 
 ing,' — that points to another of his peculiari- 
 ties. As he liked best to walk in London, so 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 111 
 
 he liked best to walk at night. The darkness 
 of the great city had a strange fascination for 
 him. He never grew tired of it, would find 
 pleasure and refreshment, when most weary 
 and jaded, in losing himself in it, in abandon- 
 ing himself to its mysteries. Looked at with 
 this knowledge, the opening of the Old Curios- 
 ity Shop becomes a passage of autobiography. 
 And how all these wanderings must have 
 served him in his art ! Remember what a keen 
 observer he was, perhaps one of the keenest 
 that ever lived, and then think what food for 
 observation he would thus be constantly col- 
 lecting. To the eye that knows how to see, 
 there is no stage where so many scenes from 
 the drama of life are being always enacted as 
 the streets of London. Dickens frequented 
 that theatre very assiduously, and of his power 
 of sight there can be no question. 
 
112 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 QICKWICK had been a novel without 
 any plot. The story, if story it can 
 be called, bore every trace of its hasty 
 origin. Scene succeeded scene, and incident 
 incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three 
 friends were hurried about from place to 
 place, and through adventures of all kinds, 
 without any particularly defined purpose. In 
 truth, many people, and myself among the 
 number, find some difficulty in reading the 
 book as a connected narrative, and prefer to 
 take it piecemeal. But in Oliver Twist there 
 is a serious eff'ort to work out a coherent plot, 
 and real unity of conception. Whether that 
 conception be based on probability, is another 
 point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a 
 young lady who has lapsed from virtue under 
 circumstances of great temptation, but still 
 lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving 
 him birth. He is brought up as a pauper child 
 in a particularly ill-managed workhouse, and 
 apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 113 
 
 escapes, and walks to London, where he falls 
 in with a gang of thieves. His legitimate 
 brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to 
 see him in London, and recognizing him by a 
 likeness to their common father, bribes the 
 thieves to recapture him when he has escaped 
 from their clutches. Now I would rather not 
 say whether I consider it quite likely that a 
 boy of this birth and nurture would fly at a 
 boy much bigger than himself in vindication 
 of the fair fame of a mother whom he had 
 never known, or would freely risk his life to 
 warn a sleeping household that they were be- 
 ing robbed, or would, on all occasions, exhibit 
 the most excellent manners and morals, and a 
 delicacy of feeling that is quite dainty. But 
 this is the essence of the book. To show purity 
 and goodness of disposition as self-sufficient 
 in themselves to resist all adverse influences, 
 is Dickens's main object. Take Oliver's sweet 
 uncontaminated character away, and the story 
 crumbles to pieces. With mere improbabilities 
 of plot, I have no quarrel. Of course it is not 
 likely that the boy, on the occasion of his first 
 escape from the thieves, should be rescued by 
 his father's oldest friend, and, on the second 
 occasion, come across his aunt. But such co- 
 
114 LIFE OF 
 
 incidences must be accepted in any story; they 
 violate no truth of character. I am afraid I 
 can't say as much of Master Oliver's graces 
 and virtues. 
 
 With this reservation, however, how much 
 there is in the book to which unstinted ad- 
 miration can be given! As Pickwick first 
 fully exhibited the humorous side of Dickens's 
 genius, so Oliver Twist first fully exhibited its 
 tragic side; — the pathetic side was to come 
 somewhat later. The scenes at the workhouse ; 
 at the thieves' dens in London; the burglary; 
 the murder of poor Nancy; the escape and 
 death of the horror-haunted Sikes, — all are 
 painted with a master's hand. And the book, 
 like its predecessor, and like those that were 
 to follow, contains characters that have passed 
 into common knowledge as tj^pes, — characters 
 of the keenest individuality, and that yet seem 
 in themselves to sum up a whole class. Such 
 are Bill Sikes, whose ruffianism has an almost 
 epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the 
 Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of 
 youth in the way they should not go ; and Mas- 
 ter Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, 
 is Mr. Bumble, greatest and most unhappy 
 of beadles. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 115 
 
 Comedy had predominated in Pickwick, 
 tragedy in Oliver Twist. The more complete 
 fusion of the two was effected in Nicholas 
 Nickleby. But as the mighty actor Garrick, in 
 the well-known picture by Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds, is drawn towards the more mirthful of 
 the two sisters, so, here again, I think that 
 comedy decidedly bears away the palm, — 
 though tragedy is not beaten altogether with- 
 out a struggle either. Here is the story as it 
 unfolds itself. The two heroes are Ralph 
 Nickleby and his nephew Nicholas. They 
 stand forth, almost from the beginning, as 
 antagonists, in battle array the one against 
 the other; and the story is, in the main, a his- 
 tory of the campaigns between them — cun- 
 ning and greed being mustered on the one 
 side, and young, generous courage on the 
 other. At first Nicholas believes in his uncle, 
 who promises to befriend Nicholas's mother 
 and sister, and obtains for Nicholas himself a 
 situation as usher in a Yorkshire school kept 
 by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge 
 rises at the sickening cruelty exercised in the 
 school, and he leaves it, having first beaten Mr. 
 Squeers, — leaves it followed by a poor shat- 
 tered creature called Smike. Meanwhile 
 
116 LIFE OF 
 
 Ralph, the usurer, befriends his sister-in-law 
 and niece after his own fashion, and tries to 
 use the latter's beauty in furtherance of his 
 trade as a money-lender. Nicholas discovers 
 his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, 
 and ultimately marries, a young lady who had 
 been immeshed in one of them; and Ralph, at 
 last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on find- 
 ing that Smike, through whom he had been 
 endeavouring all through to injure Nicholas, 
 and who is now dead, was his own son. Such 
 are the book's dry bones, its skeleton, which 
 one is almost ashamed to expose thus nakedly. 
 For the beauty of these novels lies not at all 
 in the plot; it is in the incidents, situations, 
 characters. And with beauty of this kind how 
 richly dowered is Nicholas Nickleby! Take 
 the characters alone. What lavish profusion 
 of humour in the theatrical group that clusters 
 round Mr. Vincent Crumules, the country 
 manager; and in the Squeers family too; and 
 in the little shop-world of Mrs. Mantalini, the 
 fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheerible 
 Brothers, the golden-hearted old merchants 
 who take Nicholas into their counting-house. 
 Then for single characters commend me to 
 Mrs. Nickleby, whose logic, which some cyn- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 117 
 
 ics would call feminine, is positively sublime 
 in its want of coherence ; and to John Browdie, 
 the honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a 
 fellow almost as Dandie Dinmont, the Border 
 yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The 
 high-life personages are far less successful. 
 Dickens had small gift that way, and seldom 
 succeeded in his society pictures. Nor, if the 
 truth must be told, do I greatly care for the 
 description of the duel between Sir Mulberry 
 Hawk and Lord Verisopht, though it was 
 evidently very much admired at the time and 
 is quoted, as a favourable specimen of 
 Dickens's style, in Charles Knight's Half- 
 hours with the Best Authors. The writing is 
 a little too tall. It lacks simplicity, as is some- 
 times the case with Dickens, when he wants to 
 be particularly impressive. 
 
 And this leads me, by a kind of natural se- 
 quence, to what I have to say about his next 
 book, The Old Curiosity Shop; for here, again, 
 though in a very much more marked degree, 
 I fear I shall have to run counter to a popular 
 opinion. 
 
 But first a word as to the circumstances 
 under which the book was published. Cast- 
 ing about, after the conclusion of Nicholas 
 
118 LIFE OF 
 
 Nicklehy, for further literary ventures, 
 Dickens came to the conclusion that the public 
 must be getting tired of his stories in monthlj'^ 
 parts. It occurred to him that a weekly 
 periodical, somewhat after the manner of Ad- 
 dison's Spectator or Goldsmith's Bee^ and con- 
 taining essays, stories, and miscellaneous 
 papers, — to be written mainly, but not en- 
 tirely, by himself, — would be just the thing to 
 revive interest, and give his popularity a spur. 
 Accordingly an arrangement was entered into 
 with Messrs. Chapman and Hall, by which 
 they covenanted to give him 50Z. for each 
 weekly number of such a periodical, and half 
 profits; — and the first number of Master 
 Humphrey^ s Clock made its appearance in 
 the April of 1840. Unfortunately Dickens 
 had reckoned altogether without his host. The 
 public were not to be cajoled. What they ex- 
 pected from their favourite was novels, not 
 essays, short stories, or sketches, however ad- 
 mirable. The orders for the first number had 
 amounted to seventy thousand; but they fell 
 oiF as soon as it was discovered that Master 
 Humphrey, sitting by his clock, had no in- 
 tention of beguiling the world with a contin- 
 uous narrative, — that the title, in short, did 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 119 
 
 not stand for the title of a novel. Either the 
 times were not ripe for the Household 
 Words, which, ten years afterwards, proved 
 to he such a great and permanent success, or 
 Dickens had laid his plans hadly. Vainly did 
 he put forth all his powers, vainly did he bring 
 back upon the stage those old popular favour- 
 ites, Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Tony 
 We'ller. All was of no avail. Clearly, in 
 order to avoid defeat, a change of front had 
 become necessary. The novel of The Old 
 Curiosity Shop was accordingly commenced 
 in the fourth number of the Clock, and very 
 soon acted the cuckoo's part of thrusting Mas- 
 ter Humphrey and all that belonged to him out 
 of the nest. He disappeared pretty well from 
 the periodical, and when the novel was repub- 
 lised, the whole machinery of the Clock had 
 gone;— and with it I may add, some very 
 characteristic and admirable writing. Dickens 
 himself confessed that he ' winced a little,' 
 when the ' opening paper, ... in which 
 Master Humphrey described himself and his 
 manner of hf e,' ' became the property of the 
 trunkmaker and the butterman'; and most 
 Dickens lovers will agree with me in rejoicing 
 that the omitted parts have now at last been 
 
120 LIFE OF 
 
 tardily rescued from unmerited neglect, and 
 finds a place in the recently issued * Charles 
 Dickens ' edition of the works. 
 
 There is no hero in The Old Curiosity Shop, 
 — unless Mr. Richard Swiveller, * perpetual 
 grand-master of the Glorious ApoUos,' be the 
 questionable hero; and the heroine is Little 
 Nell, a child. Of Dickens's singular feeling 
 for the pathos and humour of childhood, I 
 have already spoken. Many novelists, per- 
 haps one might even say, most novelists, have 
 no freedom of utterance when they come to 
 speak about children, do not know what to do 
 with a child if it chances to stray into their 
 pages. But how different with Dickens! He 
 is never more thoroughly at home than with 
 the little folk. Perhaps his best speech, and 
 they all are good, is the one uttered at the 
 dinner given on behalf of the Children's Hos- 
 pital. Certainly there is no figure in Dombey 
 and Son on which more loving care has been 
 lavished than the figure of little Paul, and 
 when the lad dies one quite feels that the light 
 has gone out of the book. David Copperfield 
 shorn of David's childhood and youth would 
 be a far less admirable performance. The 
 hero of Oliver Twist is a boy. Pip is a boy 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 121 
 
 through a fair portion of Great Expectations. 
 The heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop is, as 
 I have just said, a girl. And of all these 
 children, the one who seems, from the first, to 
 have stood highest in popular favour, and 
 won most hearts, is Little Nell. Ay me, what 
 tears have been shed over her weary wander- 
 ings with that absurd old gambling grand- 
 father of hers; how many persons have sor- 
 rowed over her untimely end as if she had been 
 a daughter or a sister. High and low, literate 
 and illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her 
 spell. Hood, he who sang the Song of the 
 Shirt, paid her the tribute of his admiration, 
 and Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and 
 editor of The Edinburgh Review, the tribute 
 of his tears. Landor volleyed forth his thun- 
 derous praises over her grave, likening her to 
 Juliet and Desdemona. Nay, Dickens him- 
 self sadly bewailed her fate, described himself 
 as being the ' wretchedest of the wretched ' 
 when it drew near, and shut himself from all 
 society as if he had suffered a real bereave- 
 ment. While as to the feeling which she has 
 excited in the breasts of the illiterate, we may 
 take Mr. Bret Harte's account of the haggard 
 golddiggers by the roaring California camp 
 
122 LIFE OF 
 
 fire, who throw down their cards to listen to 
 her story, and, for the nonce, are softened and 
 humanized/ — Such is the sympathy she has 
 created. And for the description of her death 
 and burial, as a superb piece of pathetic writ- 
 ing, there has been a perfect chorus of praise, 
 broken here and there no doubt by a discordant 
 voice, but still of the loudest and most heart- 
 felt. Did not Home, a poet better known to 
 the last generation than to this, point out that 
 though printed as prose, these passages were, 
 perhaps as ' the result of harmonious accident,' 
 essentially poetry, and * written in blank verse 
 of irregular metres and rhythms, which 
 Southey and Shelley and some other poets 
 have occasionally adopted ' ? Did he not print 
 part of the passages in this form, substituting 
 only, as a concession to the conventionalities 
 of verse, the word ' grandames ' for ' grand- 
 mothers ' ; and did he not declare of one of the 
 extracts so printed that it was ' worthy of the 
 best passages in Wordsworth ' ? 
 
 If it ' argues an insensibility ' to stand some- 
 what unmoved among all these tears and ad- 
 miration, I am afraid I must be rather pebble- 
 hearted. To tell the whole damaging truth, 
 
 ■^ Dickens in Camp. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 123 
 
 I am, and always have been, only slightly 
 affected by the story of Little Nell; have 
 never felt any particular inclination to shed a 
 tear over it, and consider the closing chapters 
 as failing of their due effect, on me at least, 
 because they are pitched in a key that is alto- 
 gether too high and unnatural. Of course 
 one makes a confession of this kind with diffi- 
 dence. It is no light thing to stem the cur- 
 rent of a popular opinion. But one can only 
 go with the stream when one thinks the stream 
 is flowing in a right channel. And here I 
 think the stream is meandering out of its 
 course. For me, Little Nell is scarcely more 
 than a figure in cloudland. Possibly part of the 
 reason why I do not feel as much sympathy 
 with her as I ought, is because I do not seem 
 to know her very well. With Paul Dombey I 
 am intimately acquainted. I should recog- 
 nize the child anywhere, should be on the best 
 of terms with him in five minutes. Few things 
 would give me greater pleasure than an hour's 
 saunter by the side of his little invalid's car- 
 riage along the Parade at Brighton. How we 
 should laugh, to be sure, if we happened to 
 come across Mr. Toots, and smile, too, if we 
 met Feeder, B.A., and give a furtive glance of 
 
124 LIFE OF 
 
 recognition at Glubb, the discarded charioteer. 
 Then the classic CorneHa Blimber would pass, 
 on her constitutional, and we should quail a 
 little — at least I am certain / should — as she 
 bent upon us her scholastic spectacles; and a 
 glimpse of Dr. Blimber would chill us even 
 more ; till — ah ! what's this ? Why does a flush 
 of happiness mantle over my little friend's 
 pale face? Why does he utter a faint cry of 
 pleasure? Yes, there she is — he has caught 
 sight of Floy running forward to meet him. — 
 So am I led, almost instinctively, whenever 
 the figure of Paul flashes into my mind, to 
 think of him as a child I have actually known. 
 But Nell — she has no such reality of existence. 
 She has been etherealized, vapourized, rhapso- 
 dized about, till the flesh and blood have gone 
 out of her. I recognize her attributes, unsel- 
 fishness, sweetness of disposition, gentleness. 
 But these do not constitute a human being. 
 They do not make up a recognizable individ- 
 uality. If I met her in the street, I am afraid 
 I should not know her; and if I did, I am sure 
 we should both find it difficult to keep up a 
 conversation. 
 
 Do the passages describing her death and 
 burial really possess the rhythm of poetry? 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 125 
 
 That would seem to me, I confess, to be as ill 
 a compliment as to say of a piece of poetry 
 that it was really prose. The music of prose 
 and of poetry are essentially different. They 
 do not affect the ear in the same way. The 
 one is akin to song, the other to speech. Give 
 to prose the recurring cadences, the measure, 
 and the rhythmic march of verse, and it be- 
 comes bad prose without becoming good 
 poetry.^ So, in fairness to Dickens, one is 
 bound, as far as one can, to forget Home's 
 misapplied praise. But even thus, and looking 
 upon it as prose alone, can we say that the ac- 
 count of Nell's funeral is, in the high artistic 
 sense, a piece of good work? Here is an ex- 
 tract : * And now the bell — the bell she had so 
 often heard, by night and day, and listened to 
 with solemn pleasure as a living voice — rang 
 its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so beau- 
 tiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous 
 life, and blooming yoiith, and helpless infancy, 
 poured forth — on crutches, in the pride of 
 strength and health, in the full blush of prom- 
 ise, in the mere dawn of life — to gather round 
 
 ^ Dickens himself knew that he had a tendency to 
 fall into blank verse in moments of excitement, and tried 
 to guard against it. 
 
126 LIFE OF 
 
 her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes 
 were dim and senses failing — grandmothers, 
 who might have died ten years ago, and still 
 been old, — the deaf, the blind, the lame, the 
 palsied, the living dead in many shapes and 
 forms, to see the closing of that earthly grave. 
 What was the death it would shut in, to that 
 which still could crawl and creep above it? ' 
 Such is the tone throughout, and one feels in- 
 clined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate 
 tone in which to speak of the funeral of a 
 child in a country churchyard. All this pomp 
 of rhetoric seems to me — shall I say it? — as 
 much out of place as if Nell had been buried 
 like some great soldier or minister of state — 
 with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding 
 plumes, drawn by a long train of sable steeds, 
 and with a final discharge of artillery over the 
 grave. The verbal honours paid here to the 
 deceased are really not much less incongruous 
 and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject, 
 above all others, the pathos of simplicity 
 would have been most effective. 
 
 There are some, indeed, who deny to 
 Dickens the gift of pathos altogether. Such 
 persons acknowledge, for the most part a lit- 
 tle unwillingly, that he was a master of hu- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 127 
 
 mour of the broader, more obvious kind. But 
 they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish 
 and overstrained, and that his efforts to com- 
 pel our tears are so obvious as to defeat their 
 own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what 
 I have said about Little Nell, that I am capa- 
 ble of appreciating the force of any criticism 
 of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to ac- 
 knowledge that Dickens occasionally lays him- 
 self open to it. But go one inch beyond this 
 I cannot. Of course we may, if we like, take 
 up a position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos 
 altogether, in life as in art. We may regard 
 all human affairs but as a mere struggle for 
 existence, and say that might makes right, and 
 that the weak is only treated according to his 
 deserts when he goes to the wall. We may 
 hold that neither sorrow nor suffering call for 
 any meed of sympathy. Such is mainly the 
 attitude which the French novelist adopts to- 
 wards the world of his creation.^ But once 
 admit that feeling is legitimate; once allow 
 that tears are due to those who have been 
 crushed and left bleeding by this great world 
 of ours as it goes crashing, blundering on its 
 
 ' M. Daudet, in many respects a follower of Dickens, 
 is a fine and notable exception. 
 
128 LIFE OF 
 
 way; once grant that the writer's art can 
 properly embrace what Shakespeare calls * the 
 pity of it/ the sorrows interwoven in all our 
 human relationships; once acknowledge all 
 this, and then I affirm, most confidently, that 
 Dickens, working at his best, was one of the 
 greatest masters of pathos who ever lived. I 
 can myself see scarce a strained discordant note 
 in the account of the short life and early death 
 of Paul Dombey, and none in the description 
 of the death of Paul Dombey 's mother, or in 
 the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of 
 David Copperfield's childhood and boyhood. 
 I consider the passage in American Notes de- 
 scribing the traits of gentle kindliness among 
 the emigrants as being nobly, pathetically elo- 
 quent. Did space allow, I could support my 
 position by quotations and example to any ex- 
 tent. And my conclusion is that, though he 
 failed with Little Nell, yet he succeeded else- 
 where, and superbly. 
 
 The number of Master Humphrey's Clock, 
 containing the conclusion of The Old Curiosity 
 Shop, appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, 
 and Barndby JRudge began its course in the 
 ensuing week. The first had been essentially 
 a tale of modern life. All the characters that 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 129 
 
 made a kind of background, mostly grotesque 
 or hideous, for the figure of Little Nell, were 
 characters of to-day, or at least of the day 
 when the book was written ; for I must not for- 
 get that that day ran into the past some six 
 and forty years ago. Quilp, the dwarf, — and 
 a far finer specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in 
 every respect, than that poor stage villain 
 Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister 
 Sally, a goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and 
 plain of body, who so barely escapes from the 
 plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to 
 prove him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing 
 of notaries' clerks; Mrs. Jarley, the good- 
 natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there 
 would be naught save kindliness, only that she 
 cannot bring herself to tolerate Punch and 
 Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy 
 men; the little misused servant, whom Dick 
 Swiveller in his grandeur creates a marchion- 
 ess; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, 
 prince among the idle and impecunious, justi- 
 fying by his snatches of song, and flowery 
 rhetoric, his high position as ' perpetual grand- 
 master ' among the ' Glorious Apollers,' — all 
 these, making allowance perhaps for some 
 idealization, were personages of Dickens' own 
 
180 LIFE OF 
 
 time. But in Barnaby Rudge, Dickens threw 
 himself back into the last century. The book 
 is a historical novel, one of the two which he 
 wrote, the other being the Tale of Two Cities, 
 and its scenes are many of them laid among the 
 No Popery Riots of 1780. 
 
 A ghastly time, a time of aimless, brutal 
 incendiarism and mad turbulence on the part 
 of the mob ; a time of weakness and ineptitude 
 on the part of the government; a time of 
 wickedness, folly, and misrule! Dickens de- 
 scribes it admirably. His picture of the riots 
 themselves seems painted in pigments of blood 
 and fire; and yet, through all the hurry and 
 confusion, he retains the clearness of arrange- 
 ment and lucidity which characterize the pic- 
 tures of such subjects when executed by the 
 great masters of the art — as Carlyle, for ex- 
 ample. His portrait of the poor, crazy- 
 brained creature. Lord George Gordon, who 
 sowed the wind which the country was to reap 
 in whirlwind, is excellent. Nor is what may 
 be called the private part of the story unskil- 
 fully woven with the historical part. The plot, 
 though not good, rises perhaps above the aver- 
 age of Dickens's plots ; for even we, his admir- 
 ers, are scarcely bound to maintain that plot 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 131 
 
 was his strong point. Beyond this, I think I 
 may say that the book is, on the whole, the least 
 characteristic of his books. It is the one which 
 those who are most out of sympathy with his 
 peculiar vein of humour and pathos will prob- 
 ably think the best, and the one which the true 
 Dickens lovers will generally regard as bear- 
 ing the greatest resemblance to an ordinary 
 novel. 
 
132 LIFE OF. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ^^^!^HE last number of Barnahy Budge 
 £ J appeared in November, 1841, and, on 
 ^^^ the 4th of the following January, 
 Dickens sailed with his wife for a six months' 
 tour in the United States. What induced him 
 to undertake this journey, more formidable 
 then, of course, than now? 
 
 Mainly, I think, that restless desire to see 
 the world which is strong in a great many men, 
 and was specially strong in Dickens. Ride as 
 he might, and walk as he might, his abounding 
 energies remained unsatisfied. In 1837 there 
 had been trips to Belgium, Broadstairs, 
 Brighton; in 1838 to Yorkshire, "Broadstairs, 
 North Wales, and a fairly long stay at Twick- 
 enham; in 1839 a similar stay at Petersham — 
 where, as at Twickenham, frolic, gaiety and 
 athletics had prevailed; — and trips to Broad- 
 stairs and Devonshire; in 1840 trips again to 
 Bath, Birmingham, Shakespeare's country, 
 Broadstairs, Devonshire; in 1841 more trips, 
 and a very notable visit to Edinburgh, with 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 133 
 
 which Little Nell had a great deal to do. For 
 Lord Jeffrey was enamoured of that young 
 lady, declaring to whomsoever would hear that 
 there had been ' nothing so good . . . since 
 Cordelia ' ; and inoculating the citizens of the 
 northern capital with his enthusiasm, he had in- 
 duced them to offer to Dickens a right royal 
 banquet, and the freedom of their city. Ac- 
 cordingly to Edinburgh he repaired, and the 
 dinner took place on the 26th of June, with 
 three hundred of the chief notabilities for 
 entertainers, and a reception such as kings 
 might have envied. Jeffrey himself was ill 
 and unable to take the chair, but Wilson, the 
 leonine ' Christopher North,' editor of Black- 
 wood, and author of those Nodes Ambrosianm 
 which were read so eagerly as they came out, 
 and which some of us find so difficult to read 
 now — Wilson presided most worthily. Of 
 speechifying there was of course much, and 
 compliments abounded. But the banquet 
 itself, the whole reception at Edinburgh were 
 the most magnificent of compliments. Never, 
 I imagine, can such efforts have been made to 
 turn any young man's brain, as were made, 
 during this and the following year, to turn the 
 head of Dickens, who was still, be it remem- 
 
134 LIFE OF 
 
 bered, under thirty. Nevertheless he came un- 
 scathed through the ordeal. A kind of manly 
 genuineness bore him through. Amid all the 
 adulation and excitement, the public and pri- 
 vate hospitalities, the semi-regal state appear- 
 ance at the theatre, he could write, and write 
 truly, to his friend Forster: ' The moral of 
 this is, that there is no place like home; and I 
 thank God most heartily for having given me 
 a quiet spirit and a heart that won't hold many 
 people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and 
 Broadstairs, for battledore and shuttlecock; I 
 want to dine in a blouse with you and Mac 
 (Maclise). . . . On Sunday evening, the 
 17th July, I shall revisit my household gods, 
 please heaven. I wish the day were here.' 
 
 Yes, except during the few years when he 
 and his wife lived unhappily together, he was 
 greatly attached to his home, with its friend- 
 ships and simple pleasures; but yet, as I have 
 said, a desire to see more of the world, and to 
 garner new experiences, was strong upon him. 
 The two conflicting influences often warred in 
 his life, so that it almost seemed sometimes as 
 if he were being driven by relentless furies. 
 Those furies pointed now with stern fingers 
 towards America, though ' how ' he was ' to get 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 135 
 
 on ' ' for seven or eight months without * his 
 friends, he could not upon his ' soul conceive ' ; 
 though he dreaded ' to think of breaking up 
 all ' his ' old happy habits for so long a time * ; 
 though ' Kate,' remembering doubtless her 
 four little children, wept whenever the subject 
 was ' spoken of.' Something made him feel 
 that the going was ' a matter of imperative 
 necessity.' Washington Irving beckoned from 
 across the Atlantic, speaking, as Jeffrey had 
 spoken from Edinburgh, of Little Nell and 
 her far-extended influence. There was a great 
 reception foreshadowed, and a new world to 
 be seen, and a book to be written about it. 
 While as to the strongest of the home ties — 
 the children that brought the tears into Mrs. 
 Dickens's eyes, — the separation, after all, 
 would not be eternal, and the good Macready, 
 tragic actor and true friend, would take charge 
 of the little folk while their parents were away. 
 So Dickens, who had some time before * begun 
 counting the days between this and coming 
 home again,' set sail for America on the 4th of 
 January, 1842. 
 
 And a very rough experience he, and Mrs. 
 Dickens, and Mrs. Dickens's maid seem to have 
 had during that January passage from Liver- 
 
136 LIFE OF 
 
 pool to Halifax and Boston. Most of the 
 time it blew horribly, and they were direfully 
 ill. Then a storm supervened, which swept 
 away the paddle-boxes and stove in the life- 
 boats, and they seem to have been in real peril. 
 Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But 
 dangers and discomforts must have been for- 
 gotten, at any rate to begin with, in the glories 
 of the reception that awaited the ' inimitable,' 
 — as Dickens whimsically called himself in 
 those days, — when he landed in the New 
 World. If he had been received with princely 
 honours in Edinburgh, he was treated now as 
 an emperor in some triumphal progress, Hali- 
 fax sounded the first note of welcome, gave, as 
 it were, the preliminary trumpet flourish. 
 From that town he writes : ' I wish you could 
 have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable 
 in the streets. I wish you could have seen 
 judges, law-officers, bishops, and law-makers 
 welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could 
 have seen the inimitable shown to a great elbow- 
 chair by the Speaker's throne, and sitting alone 
 in the middle of the floor of the House of 
 Commons, the observed of all observers, listen- 
 ing with exemplary gravity to the queerest 
 speaking possible, and breaking, in spite of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 137 
 
 himself, into a smile as he thought of this com- 
 mencement to the thousand and one stories in 
 reserve for home.' At Boston the enthusiasm 
 had swelled to even greater proportions. ' How 
 can I give you,' he writes, ' the faintest notion 
 of my reception here ; of the crowds that pour 
 in and out the whole day; of the people that 
 line the streets when I go out ; of the cheering 
 when I went to the theatre; of the copies of 
 verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of 
 all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without 
 end? . , . There is to be a dinner in New 
 York, ... to which I have had an invita- 
 tion with every known name in America ap- 
 pended to it. . . . I have had deputations 
 from the Far West, who have come from more 
 than two thousand miles' distance; from the 
 lakes, the rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, 
 the cities, factories, villages and towns. Au- 
 thorities from nearly all the states have written 
 to me. I have heard from the universities, 
 congress, senate, and bodies, public and pri- 
 vate, of every sort and kind.' All was indeed 
 going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not 
 rightly say that the world was conspiring to 
 spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth 
 had certainly not been passed in the splendour 
 
138 LIFE OF 
 
 of opulence or power? What wonder if in the 
 dawn of his American experiences, and of such 
 a reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? 
 Is it matter for surprise if he found the 
 women * very beautiful,' the ' general breeding 
 neither stiff nor forward,' ' the good nature 
 universal ' ; if he expatiated, not without a 
 backward look at unprogressive Old England, 
 on the comparative comfort among the work- 
 ing classes, and the absence of beggars in the 
 streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as 
 rosy dawns sometimes will, in sleet and mist 
 and very dirty weather. Before many weeks, 
 before many days had flown, Dickens was 
 writing in a very different spirit. On the 24th 
 of February, in the midst of a perfect ovation 
 of balls and dinners, he writes ' with reluctance, 
 disappointment, and sorrow,' that ' there is no 
 country on the face of the earth, where there 
 is less freedom of opinion on any subject in 
 reference to which there is a broad difference 
 of opinion, than in ' the United States. On 
 the 22d of March he writes again, to Mac- 
 ready, who seems to have remonstrated with 
 him on his growing discontent :' It is of no use, 
 I am disappointed. This is not the republic 
 I came to see; this is not the republic of my 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 139 
 
 imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal mon- 
 archy—even with its sickening accompaniment 
 of Court circulars— to such a government as 
 this. The more I think of its youth and 
 strength, the poorer and more trifling in a 
 thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. In 
 everything of which it has made a boast, ex- 
 cepting its education of the people, and its 
 care for poor children, it sinks immeasurably 
 below the level I had placed it upon, and Eng- 
 land, even England, bad and faulty as the old 
 land is, and miserable as miUions of her people 
 are, rises in the comparison. . . . Free- 
 dom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more 
 mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than 
 any country I ever knew. ... In the 
 respects of not being left alone, and of being 
 horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and 
 tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably.' 
 Extracts like these could be multiplied to 
 any extent, and the question arises, why did 
 such a change come over the spirit of Dickens? 
 Washington Irving, at the great New York 
 dinner, had called him ' the guest of the nation.' 
 Why was the guest so quickly dissatisfied with 
 his host, and quarrelling with the character of 
 his entertainment? Sheer physical fatigue, I 
 
140 LIFE OF 
 
 think, had a good deal to do with it. Even at 
 Boston, before he had begun to travel over the 
 unending railways, water-courses, and chaotic 
 coach-roads of the great Republic, that key- 
 note had been sounded. * We are already,' he 
 had written, ' weary at times, past all expres- 
 sion.' Few men can wander with impunity 
 out of their own professional sphere, and un- 
 dertake duties for which they have neither the 
 training nor acquired tastes. Dickens was a 
 writer, not a king; and here he was expected 
 to hold a king's state, and live in a king's pub- 
 licity, but without the formal etiquette that 
 hedges a king from intruders, and makes his 
 position tolerable. He was hemmed in by 
 curious eyes, mobbed in the streets, stared at in 
 his own private rooms, interviewed by the hour, 
 shaken by the hand till his arm must often 
 have been ready to drop off, waylaid at every 
 turn with formal addresses. If he went to 
 church the people crowded into the adjacent 
 pews, and the preacher preached at him. If 
 he got into a public conveyance, every one in- 
 side insisted on an introduction, and the people 
 outside — say before the train started — would 
 pull down the windows and comment freely 
 on his nose and eyes and personal appearance 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 141 
 
 generally, some even touching him as if to see 
 if he were real. He was safe from intrusion 
 nowhere — no, not when he was washing and 
 his wife in bed. Such attentions must have 
 been exhausting to a degree that can scarcely 
 be imagined. But there was more than mere 
 physical weariness in his growing distaste for 
 the United States. Perfectly outspoken at 
 all times, and eager for the strife of tongues 
 in any cause which he had at heart, it horrified 
 him to find that he was expected not to express 
 himself freely on such subjects as Inter- 
 national Copyright, and that even in private, 
 or semi-private intercourse, slavery was a topic 
 to be avoided. Then I fear, too, that as he 
 left cultured Boston behind, he was brought 
 into close and habitual contact with natives 
 whom he did not appreciate. Rightly or 
 wrongly, he took a strong dislike for Brother 
 Jonathan as Brother Jonathan existed, in the 
 rough, five and forty years ago. He was 
 angered by that young gentleman's brag, of- 
 fended by the rough familiarity of his man- 
 ners, indignant at his determination by all 
 means to acquire dollars, incensed by his utter 
 want of care for literature and art, sickened 
 by his tobacco-chewing and expectorations. 
 
142 LIFE OF 
 
 So when Dickens gets to ' Niagara Falls, upon 
 the English side,' he puts ten dashes under the 
 word English; and, meeting two English of- 
 ficers, contrasts them in thought with the men 
 whom he has just left, and seems, by note of 
 exclamation and italics, to call upon the world 
 to witness, ' what gentlemen^ what noblemen 
 of nature they seemed ' ! 
 
 And Brother Jonathan, how did he regard 
 his young guest? Well, Jonathan, great as 
 he was, and greater as he was destined to be, 
 did not possess the gift of prophecy, and could 
 not of course foresee the scathing satire of 
 American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. But 
 still, amid all his enthusiasm, I think there must 
 have been a feeling of uneasiness and disap- 
 pointment. Part, as there is no doubt, of the 
 fervour with which he greeted Dickens, was 
 due to his regarding Dickens as the representa- 
 tive of democratic feeling in aristocratic Eng- 
 land, as the advocate of the poor and down- 
 trodden against the wealthy and the strong; 
 * and ' — thus argued Jonathan — ' because we 
 are a democracy, therefore Dickens will ad- 
 mire and love us, and see how immeasurably 
 superior we are to the retrograde Britishers 
 of his native land.' But unfortunately 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 143 
 
 Dickens showed no signs of being impressed 
 in that particular way. On the contrary, as 
 we have seen, such comparison as he made in 
 his own mind was infinitely to the disadvantage 
 of the United States. ' We must be cracked 
 up,' says Hannibal ChoUop, in Martin Chuz- 
 zlewitj, speaking of his fellow countrymen. 
 And Dickens, even while feted and honoured, 
 would not ' crack up ' the Americans. He 
 lectured them almost with truculence on their 
 sins in the matter of copyright; he could 
 scarcely be restrained from testifying against 
 slavery; he was not the man to say he liked 
 manners and customs which he loathed. Jona- 
 than must have been very doubtfully satisfied 
 with his guest. 
 
 It is no part of my purpose to follow 
 Dickens lingeringly, and step by step, from 
 the day when he landed at Halifax, to the 7th 
 of June, when he re-embarked at New York 
 for England. From Boston he went to New 
 York, where the great dinner was given with 
 Washington Irving in the chair, and thence to 
 Philadelphia and Washington, — which was 
 still the empty ' city of magnificent distances,' 
 that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares it has now 
 ceased to be; — and thence again westward. 
 
144 LIFE OF 
 
 and by Niagara and Canada back to New 
 York. And if any persons want to know what 
 he thought about these and other places, and 
 the railway travelling, and the coach travel- 
 ling, and the steamboat travelling, and the 
 prisons and other public institutions — aye, and 
 many other things besides, they cannot do bet- 
 ter than read the American Notes for gen- 
 eral circulation, which he wrote and published 
 within the year after his return. Nor need 
 such persons be deterred by the fact that Mac- 
 aulay thought meanly of the book ; for Macau- 
 lay, with all his great gifts, did not, as he 
 himself knew full well, excel in purely literary 
 criticism. 
 
 So when he pronounces, that * what is 
 meant to be easy and sprightly is vulgar and 
 flippant,' and * what is meant to be fine is a 
 great deal too fine for me, as the description 
 of the Falls of Niagara,' one can venture to 
 differ without too great a pang. The book, 
 though not assuredly one of Dickens's best, 
 contains admirable passages which none but 
 he could have written, and the description of 
 Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the 
 subject being remembered, as a piece of im- 
 passioned prose. Whether satire so bitter and 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 145 
 
 unfriendly as that in which he indulged, both 
 here and in Martin Chuzzlewit, was justifiable 
 from what may be called an international point 
 of view, is another question. Publicists do not 
 always remember that a cut which would smart 
 for a moment, and then be forgotten, if aimed 
 at a countryman, rankles and festers if ad- 
 ministered to a foreigner. And if this be true 
 as regards the English publicist's conmient on 
 the foreigner who does not understand our 
 language, it is, of course, true with tenfold 
 force as regards the foreigner whose language 
 is our own. He understands only too well the 
 jibe and the sneer, and the tone of superiority, 
 more offensive perhaps than either. Looked 
 at in this way, it can, I think, but be accounted 
 a misfortune that the most popular of English 
 writers penned two books containing so much 
 calculated to wound American feeling, as the 
 Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. Nor are signs 
 entirely wanting that, as the years went by, the 
 mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some 
 such suspicion. A quarter of a century later, 
 he visited the United States a second time ; and 
 speaking at a public dinner given in his honour 
 by the journalists of New York, he took occa- 
 sion to comment on the enormous strides which 
 
146 LIFE OF 
 
 the country had made in the interval, and then 
 said, ' Nor am I, beheve me, so arrogant as to 
 suppose that in five and twenty years there 
 have been no changes in me, and that I had 
 nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions 
 to correct when I was here first.' And he 
 added that, in all future editions of the two 
 books just named, he would cause to be re- 
 corded, that, ' wherever he had been, in the 
 smallest place equally with the largest, he had 
 been received with unsurpassable politeness, 
 delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, considera- 
 tion, and with unsurpassable respect for the 
 privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature 
 of his avocation there' (as a public reader), 
 * and the state of his health.' 
 
 And now, with three observations, I will 
 conclude what I have to say about the visit to 
 America in 1842. The first is that the Notes 
 are entirely void of all vulgarity of reference 
 to the private life of the notable Americans 
 whom Dickens had met. He seems to have 
 known, more or less intimately, the chief 
 writers of the time — Washington Irving, 
 Channing, Dana, Bryant, Longfellow, Ban- 
 croft; but his intercourse with them he held 
 sacred, and he made no literary capital out of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 147 
 
 it. Secondly, it is pleasant to note that there 
 was, so far, no great ' incompatibility of tem- 
 per ' between him and his wife. He speaks of 
 her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as 
 a ' most admirable traveller,' and expatiates on 
 the good temper and equanimity with which 
 she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most 
 trying journey. And the third point to which 
 I will call attention is the thoroughly charac- 
 teristic form of rest to which he had recourse 
 in the midst of all his toil and travel. Most 
 men would have sought relaxation in being 
 quiet. He found it in vigorously getting up 
 private theatricals with the officers of the Cold- 
 stream Guards, at Montreal. Besides acting 
 in all the three pieces played, he also accepted 
 the part of stage manager; and ' I am not,' he 
 says, ' placarded as stage manager for noth- 
 ing. Everybody was told that they would have 
 to submit to the most iron despotism, and 
 didn't I come Macready over them? Oh no, 
 by no means ; certainly not. The pains I have 
 taken with them, and the perspiration I have 
 expended, during the last ten days, exceed in 
 amount anything you can imagine.' What 
 bright vitality, and what a singular charm of 
 exuberant animal spirits! 
 
148 LIFE OF 
 
 And who was glad one evening — which 
 would be about the last evening in June, or the 
 first of July — when a hackney coach rattled 
 up to the door of the house in Devonshire Ter- 
 race, and four little folk, two girls and two 
 boys, were hurried down, and kissed through 
 the bars of the gate, because their father was 
 too eager to wait till it was opened? Who 
 were glad but the little folk aforementioned — 
 I say nothing of the joy of father and mother; 
 for children as they were, a sense of sorrow- 
 ful loss had been theirs while their parents were 
 away, and greater strictness seems to have 
 reigned in the good JNIacready's household than 
 in their own joyous home. It is Miss Dickens 
 herself who tells us this, and in whose memory 
 has lingered that pretty scene of the kiss 
 through the bars in the summer gloaming. 
 And she has much to tell us too of her father's 
 tenderness and care, — of his sympathy with 
 the children's terrors, so that, for instance, he 
 would sit beside the cot of one of the little girls 
 who had been startled, and hold her hand in his 
 till she fell asleep; of his having them on his 
 knees, and singing to them the merriest of 
 comic songs; of his interest in all their small 
 concerns ; of the many pet names with which he 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 149 
 
 invested them/ Then, as they grew older, 
 there were Twelfth Night parties and magic 
 lanterns. ' Never such magic lanterns as those 
 shown by him,' she says. ' Never such con- 
 juring as his.' There was dancing, too, and 
 the little ones taught him his steps, which he 
 practised with much assiduity, once even 
 jumping out of bed in terror, lest he had for- 
 gotten the polka, and indulging in a solitary 
 midnight rehearsal. Then, as the children 
 grew older still, there were private theatricals. 
 * He never,' she says again, ' was too busy to 
 interest himself in his children's occupations, 
 lessons, amusements, and general welfare.' 
 Clearly not one of those brilliant men, a 
 numerous race, who when away from their 
 homes, in general society, sparkle and scintil- 
 late, flash out their wit, and irradiate all with 
 their humour, but who, when at home, are dull 
 as rusted steel. Among the many tributes to 
 his greatness, that of his own child has a place 
 at once touching and beautiful. 
 
 ^ Miss Dickens evidently bears proudly still her pet 
 name of ' Mamie,' and signs it to her book. 
 
150 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 ^W^ITH the return from America began 
 
 1 I # *^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ work and hard 
 ^^^ play. There was much industrious 
 writing of American Notes, at Broadstairs 
 and elsewhere; and there were many dinners 
 of welcome home, and strolls, doubtless, with 
 Forster and Maclise, and other intimates, to 
 old haunts, as Jack Straw's Castle on Hamp- 
 stead Heath, and similar houses of public en- 
 tertainment. And then in the autumn there 
 was ' such a trip . . . into Cornwall,' 
 with Forster, and the painters Stanfield and 
 Maclise for travelling companions. How they 
 enjoyed themselves, and with what bubbling, 
 bursting merriment ! ' I never laughed in my 
 life as I did on this journey,' writes Dickens, 
 * ... I was choking and gasping. . . 
 all the way. And Stanfield got into such 
 apoplectic entanglements that we were often 
 obliged to beat him on the back with portman- 
 teaus before we could recover him.' Imme- 
 diately on their return, refreshed and invigo- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 151 
 
 rated by this wholesome hilarity and enjoy- 
 ment, he threw himself into the composition of 
 his next book, and the first number of Martin 
 Chuzdewit appeared in January, 1843. 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit is unquestionably one of 
 Dickens's great works. He himself held it to 
 be ' in a hundred points ' and ' immeasurably ' 
 superior to anything he had before written, 
 and that verdict may, I think, on the whole, be 
 accepted. The plot, as plot is usually under- 
 stood, can scarcely indeed be commended. But 
 then plot was never his strong point. Later 
 in hfe, and acting, as I have always surmised, 
 under the influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie 
 CoUins, he endeavoured to construct ingen- 
 ious stories that turned on mysterious dis- 
 appearances, and the substitution of one per- 
 son for another, and murders real or suspected. 
 All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens 
 had no real gift for the manufacture of these 
 ingenious pieces of mechanism. He did not 
 even many times succeed in disposing the 
 events and marshalling the characters in his 
 narratives so as to work, by seemingly un- 
 forced and natural means, to a final situation 
 and climax. Too oftei?, in order to hold his 
 story together and make it move forward at 
 
152 LIFE OF 
 
 all, he was compelled to make his personages 
 pursue a line of conduct preposterous and im- 
 probable, and even antagonistic to their nature. 
 Take this very book. Old Martin Chuzzlewit 
 is a man who has been accustomed, all through 
 a long life, to have his own way, and to take it 
 with a high hand. Yet he so far sets aside, 
 during a course of months, every habit of his 
 life, as to simulate the weakest subservience 
 to Pecksniff — and that not for the purpose of 
 unmasking Pecksniff, who wanted no unmask- 
 ing, but only in order to disappoint him. Is 
 it believable that old Martin should have 
 thought Pecksniff worth so much trouble, per- 
 sonal inconvenience, and humiliation? Or take 
 again Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend. Mr. 
 Boffin is a simple, guileless, open-hearted, 
 open-handed old man. Yet, in order to prove 
 to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be 
 mercenary, he, again, goes through a long 
 course of dissimulation, and does some ad- 
 mirable comic business in the character of a 
 miser. I say it boldly, I do not believe Mr. 
 Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic 
 talent. Plots requiring to be worked out by 
 such means are ill-constructed plots; or, to put 
 it in another way, a man who had any gift for 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 153 
 
 the construction of plots would never have had 
 recourse to such means. Nor would he, I think, 
 have adopted, as Dickens did habitually and 
 for all his stories, a mode of publication so de- 
 structive of unity of eif ect, as the publication 
 in monthly or weekly parts. How could the 
 reader see as a whole that which was presented 
 to him at intervals of time more or less distant? 
 How, and this is of infinitely greater import- 
 ance, how could the writer produce it as a 
 whole? For Dickens, it must be remembered, 
 never finished a book before the commence- 
 ment of publication. At first he scarcely did 
 more than complete each monthly instalment 
 as required; and though afterwards he was 
 generally some little way in advance, yet 
 always he wrote by parts, having the interest 
 of each separate part in his mind, as well as the 
 general interest of the whole novel. Thus, 
 however desirable in the development of the 
 story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame 
 and uneventful number. Moreover, any por- 
 tion once issued was unalterable and irrevoca- 
 ble. If, as sometimes happened, any modifi- 
 cation seemed desirable as the book progressed, 
 there was no possibility of changing anything 
 in the chapters already in the hands of the pub- 
 
154 LIFE OF 
 
 lie, and so making them harmonize better with 
 the new. 
 
 But of course, with all this, the question 
 still remains how far Dickens's comparative 
 failure as a constructor of plots really de- 
 tracts from his fame and standing as a novel- 
 ist. To my mind, I confess, not very much. 
 Plot I regard as the least essential element in 
 the novelist's art. A novel can take the very 
 highest rank without it. There is not any plot 
 to speak of in Lesage's Gil Bias, and just as 
 little in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and only a 
 very bad one in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake- 
 field. Coleridge admired the plot of Tom 
 Jones, but though one naturally hesitates to 
 differ from a critic of such superb mastery 
 and power, I confess I have never been struck 
 by that plot, any more than by the plots, such 
 as they are, in Joseph Andrews, or in Smol- 
 lett's works. Nor, if I can judge of other peo- 
 ple's memories by my own, is it by the mecha- 
 nism of the story, or by the intrigue, however 
 admirably woven and unravelled, that one re- 
 members a work of fiction. These may exer- 
 cise an intense passing interest of curiosity, 
 especially during a first perusal. But after- 
 wards they fade from the mind, while the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 155 
 
 characters, if highly vitalized and strong, will 
 stand out in our thoughts, fresh and full 
 coloured, for an indefinite time. Scott's Cruy 
 Mannering is a well-constructed story. The 
 plot is deftly laid, the events are prepared for 
 with a cunning hand; the coincidences are so 
 arranged as to be made to look as probable as 
 may be. Yet we remember and love the book, 
 not for such excellences as these, but for Dan- 
 die Dinmont, the Border farmer, and Pleydell, 
 the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg Merrilies, 
 the gypsy. The book's life is in its flesh and 
 blood, not in its plot. And the same is true of 
 Dickens's novels. He crowds them so full of 
 human creatures, each with its own individu- 
 ality and character, that we have no care for 
 more than just as much story as may serve to 
 show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, lov- 
 ing. If the incidents will do this for us we 
 are satisfied. It is not necessary that those in- 
 cidents should be made to go through cunning 
 evolutions to a definite end. Each is admirable 
 in itself, and admirably adapted to its imme- 
 diate purpose. That should more than suffice. 
 And Dickens sometimes succeeds in reach- 
 ing a higher unity than that of mere plot. He 
 takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul 
 
156 LIFE OF 
 
 of his novel, animating and vivifying every 
 part. That central idea in Martin Cliuzzlewit 
 is the influence of selfishness. The Chuzzle- 
 wits are a selfish race. Old Martin is selfish; 
 and so, with many good qualities and possi- 
 bilities of better things, is his grandson, young 
 Martin. The other branch of the family, An- 
 thony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas, are much 
 worse. The latter especially is a horrible 
 creature. Brought up to think of nothing ex- 
 cept his own interests and the main chance, he 
 is only saved by an accident from the crime of 
 parricide, and afterwards commits a murder 
 and poisons himself. As his career is one of 
 terrible descent, so young Martin's is one of 
 gradual regeneration from his besetting weak- 
 ness. He falls in love with his cousin Mary — 
 the only unselfish member of the family, by 
 the by — and quarrels about this love affair 
 with his grandfather, and so passes into the 
 hard school of adversity. There he learns 
 much. Specially valuable is the teaching which 
 he gets as a settler in the swampy backwoods 
 of the United States in company with Mark 
 Tapley, j oiliest and most helpful of men. On 
 his return, he finds his grandfather seemingly 
 under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 157 
 
 the English TartuiFe. But that, as I have 
 already mentioned, is only a ruse. Old Mar- 
 tin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time re- 
 ceives the reward of his deeds, and all ends 
 happily for those who deserve happiness. 
 Such is something like a bare outline of the 
 story, with the beauty eliminated. For what 
 makes its interest, we must go further, to the 
 household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, 
 Charity and Mercy, and Tom Pinch, whose 
 beautiful, unselfish character stands so in con- 
 trast to that of the grasping self-seekers by 
 whom he is surrounded ; we must study young 
 Martin himself, whose character is admirably 
 drawn, and without Dickens's usual tendency 
 to caricature ; we must laugh in sympathy with 
 Mark Tapley; we must follow them both 
 through the American scenes, which, in- 
 tensely amusing as they are, must have bitterly 
 envenomed the wounds inflicted on the na- 
 tional vanity by American Notes, and, accord- 
 ing to Dickens's own expression, ' sent them 
 all stark staring raving mad across the water ' ; 
 we must frequent the boarding establishment 
 for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs. 
 Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy 
 Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, 
 
158 LIFE OF 
 
 or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we 
 must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand 
 of murder, and note how even his felon nature 
 is appalled by the blackness and horror of his 
 guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts 
 and cows him. A great book, I say again, a 
 very great book. 
 
 Yet not at the time a successful book. Why 
 Fortune, the fickle jade, should have taken it 
 into her freakish head to frown, or half frown, 
 upon Dickens at this particular juncture, who 
 shall tell? He was wooing her with his very 
 best work, and she turned from him. The sale 
 of Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby had been 
 from forty to fifty thousand copies of each 
 part; the sale of Master Humphrey's Clock 
 had risen still higher ; the sale of even the most 
 popular parts of Martin Chuzzlewit fell to 
 twenty-three thousand. This was, as may 
 be supposed, a grievous disappointment. 
 Dickens's personal expenditure had not per- 
 haps been lavish in view of what he thought he 
 could calculate on earning; but it had been 
 freely based on that calculation. Demands, 
 too, were being made upon his purse by rela- 
 tions, — probably by his father, and certainly 
 by his brother Frederic, which were frequent. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 159 
 
 embarrassing, and made in a way which one 
 may call worse than indelicate. Any perma- 
 nent loss of popularity would have meant 
 serious money entanglements. With his 
 father's career in full view, such a prospect 
 must have been anything but pleasant. He 
 cast about what he should do, and determined 
 to leave England for a space, live more eco- 
 nomically on the Continent, and gather ma- 
 terials in Italy or Switzerland for a new travel 
 book. But before carrying out this project, 
 he would woo Fortune once again, and in a 
 different form. During the months of Octo- 
 ber and November, 1843, in the intervals of 
 Chuzzlewitj, he wrote a short story that has 
 taken its place, by almost universal consent, 
 among his masterpieces, nay, among the mas- 
 terpieces of English literature : The Christmas 
 Carol. 
 
 All Dickens's great gifts seem reflected, 
 sharp and distinct, in this little book, as in a 
 convex mirror. His humour, his best pathos, 
 which is not that of grandiloquence, but of 
 simplicity, his bright poetic fancy, his kindli- 
 ness, all here find a place. It is great painting 
 in miniature, genius in its quintessence, a gem 
 of perfect water. We may apply to it any 
 
160 LIFE OF 
 
 simile that implies excellence in the smallest 
 compass. None but a fine imagination would 
 have conceived the supernatural agency that 
 works old Scrooge's moral regeneration — the 
 ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, 
 that each in turn speaks to the weazened heart 
 of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, 
 he is softened by the tender memories of child- 
 hood, warmed by sympathy for those who 
 struggle and suffer, and appalled by the pros- 
 pect of his own ultimate desolation and black 
 solitude. Then the episodes: the scenes to 
 which these ghostly visitants convey Scrooge; 
 the story of his earlier years as shown in vis- 
 ion; the household of the Cratchits, and poor 
 little crippled Tiny Tim; the party given by 
 Scrooge's nephew; nay, before all these, the 
 terrible interview with Marley's Ghost. All 
 are admirably executed. Sacrilege would it 
 be to suggest the alteration of a word. First 
 of the Christmas books in the order of time, 
 it is also the best of its own kind; it is in its 
 own order perfect. 
 
 Nor did the public of Christmas, 1843, fail 
 to appreciate that something of very excellent 
 quality had been brought forth for their bene- 
 fit, ' The first edition of six thousand copies,' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 161 
 
 says Forster, * was sold ' on the day of publi- 
 cation, and about as many more would seem 
 to have been disposed of before the end of 
 February, 1844. But, alas, Dickens had set 
 his heart on a profit of 1000/., whereas in Feb- 
 ruary he did not see his way to much more than 
 460Z./ and his unpaid bills for the previous 
 year he described as ' terrific' So something, 
 as I have said, had to be done. A change of 
 front became imperative. Messrs. Bradbury 
 and Evans advanced him 2800Z. ' for a fourth 
 share in whatever he might write during the 
 ensuing eight years,' — he purchased at the 
 Pantechnicon ' a good old shabby devil of a 
 coach,' also described as ' an English travelling 
 carriage of considerable proportions ' ; en- 
 gaged a courier who turned out to be the 
 courier of couriers, a very conjurer among 
 couriers; let his house in Devonshire Terrace; 
 and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the 
 dates, on the 1st of July, 1844. 
 
 ^ The profit at the end of 1844 was 7261. 
 
162 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 V'^fTI, those eventful, picturesque, uncom- 
 K I fortable old travelling days, when 
 ^' ^ railways were unborn, or in their in- 
 fancy; those interminable old dusty drives, in 
 diligence or private carriage, along miles and 
 miles of roads running straight to the low 
 horizon, through a line of tall poplars, across 
 the plains of France! What an old-world 
 memory it seems, and yet, as the years go, not 
 so very long since after all. The party that 
 rumbled from Boulogne to Marseilles in the 
 old ' devil of a coach ' aforesaid, ' and another 
 conveyance for luggage,' and I know not 
 what other conveyances besides, consisted of 
 Dickens himself; Mrs. Dickens; her sister, 
 Miss Georgina Hogarth, who had come to live 
 with them on their return from America; five 
 children, for another boy had been born some 
 six months before; Roche, the prince of 
 couriers ; * Anne,' apparently the same maid 
 who had accompanied them across the Atlan- 
 tic; 9,nd other dependents: a somewhat for- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 163 
 
 midable troupe and cavalcade. Of their mode 
 of travel, and what they saw on the way, or 
 perhaps, more accurately, of what Dickens 
 saw, with those specially keen eyes of his, at 
 Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, and other places 
 — one may read the master's own account in 
 the Pictures from Italy. Marseilles was 
 reached on the 14th of July, and thence a 
 steamer took them, coasting the fairy Mediter- 
 ranean shores, to Genoa, their ultimate desti- 
 nation, where they landed on the 16th. 
 
 The Italy of 1844 was like, and yet unlike 
 the Italy of to-day. It was the old disunited 
 Italy of several small kingdoms and princi- 
 palities, the Italy over which lowered the 
 shadow of despotic Austria, and of the Pope's 
 temporal power, not the Italy which the genius 
 of Cavour has welded into a nation. It was 
 a land whose interest came altogether from the 
 past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of 
 time's sunset. How unlike the United States ! 
 The contrast has always, I confess, seemed to 
 me a piquant one. It has often struck me with 
 a feeling of quaintness that the two countries 
 which Dickens specially visited and described, 
 were, the one this lovely land of age and hoar 
 antiquity, and the other that young giant land 
 
164 LIFE OF 
 
 of the West, which is still in the garish strong 
 light of morning, and whose great day is in 
 the future. 'Nor, I think, before he had seen 
 both, would Dickens himself have been able to 
 tell on which side his sympathies would lie. 
 Thoroughly popular in his convictions, thor- 
 oughly satisfied that to-day was in all respects 
 better than yesterday, it is clear that he ex- 
 pected to find more pleasure in the brand new 
 Republic than his actual experience warranted. 
 The roughness of the strong, uncultured 
 young life grated upon him. It jarred upon 
 his sensibilities. But of Italy he wrote with 
 very different feeling. What though the 
 places were dirty, the people shiftless, idle, 
 unpunctual, unbusinesslike, and the fleas as 
 the sand which is upon the sea-shore for multi- 
 tude? It mattered not while life was so pic- 
 turesque and varied, and manners were so full 
 of amenity. Your inn might be, and probably 
 was, ill-appointed, untidy, the floors of brick, 
 the doors agape, the windows banging — a con- 
 trast in every way to the palatial hotel in New 
 York or Washington. But then how cheerful 
 and amusing were mine host and hostess, and 
 how smilingly determined all concerned to 
 make things pleasant. So the artist in Dickens 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 165 
 
 turned from the new to the old, and Italy, as 
 she is wont, cast upon him her spell. 
 
 First impressions, however, were not alto- 
 gether satisfactory. Dickens owns to a pang 
 when he was ' set down ' at Albaro, a suburb 
 of Genoa, * in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard, 
 attached to a kind of pink jail, and told he 
 lived there.' But he immediately adds : * I 
 little thought that day that I should ever come 
 to have an attachment for the very stones in 
 the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon 
 the city with affection, as connected with many 
 hours of happiness and quiet.' In sooth, he 
 enjoyed the place thoroughly. Martin Chuz- 
 zlewit had left his hands. He was fairly en- 
 titled for a few weeks to the luxury of idle- 
 ness, and he threw himself into doing nothing, 
 as he was accustomed to throw himself into his 
 work, with all energy. And there was much to 
 do, much especially to see. So Dickens bathed 
 and walked; and strolled about the city hither 
 and thither, and about the suburbs and about 
 the surrounding country; and visited public 
 buildings and private palaces; and noted the 
 ways of the inhabitants ; and saw Genoese life 
 in its varied formis; and wrote light glancing 
 letters about it all to friends at home; and 
 
166 LIFE OF 
 
 learnt Italian; and, in the end of September, 
 left his * pink jail,' which had been taken for 
 him at a disproportionate rent, and moved into 
 the Palazzo Peschiere, in Genoa itself : a won- 
 derful palace, with an entranoe-hall fifty feet 
 high, and larger than ' the dining-room of the 
 Academy,' and bedrooms ' in size and shape 
 like those at Windsor Castle, but greatly 
 higher,' and a view from the windows over 
 gardens where the many fountains sparkled, 
 and the gold fish glinted, and into Genoa itself, 
 with its ' many churches, monasteries, and con- 
 vents pointing to the sunny sky,' and into the 
 harbour, and over the sapphire sea, and up 
 again to the encircling hills — a view, as 
 Dickens declared, that ' no custom could im- 
 pair, and no description enhance.' 
 
 But with the beginning of October came 
 again the time for work ; and beautiful beyond 
 all beauty as were his surroundings, the child 
 of London turned to the home of his heart, 
 and pined for the London streets. For some 
 little space he seemed to be thinking in vain, 
 and cudgelling his brains for naught, when 
 suddenly the chimes of Genoa's many churches, 
 that seemed to have been clashing and clang- 
 ing nothing but distraction and madness, rang 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 167 
 
 harmony into his mind. The subject and title 
 of his new Christmas book were found. He 
 threw himself into the composition of The 
 Chimes. 
 
 Earnest at all times in what he wrote, living 
 ever in intense and passionate sympathy with 
 the world of his imagination, he seems specially 
 to have put his whole heart into this book. ' All 
 my affections and passions got twined and 
 knotted up in it, and I became as haggard as 
 a murderer long before I wrote " the end," ' — 
 so he told Lady Blessington on the 20th of 
 November; and to Forster he expressed the 
 yearning that was in him to ' leave ' his ' hand 
 upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with 
 one tender touch for the mass of toiling peo- 
 ple that nothing could obliterate.' This was 
 the keynote of The Chimes. He intended in 
 it to strike a great and memorable blow on be- 
 half of the poor and down-trodden. His pur- 
 pose, so far as I can make it out, was to show 
 how much excuse there is for their shortcom- 
 ings, and how in their errors, nay even in their 
 crimes, there linger traces of goodness and 
 kin-dly feeling. On this I shall have some- 
 thing to say when discussing Hard Times, 
 which is somewhat akin to The Chimes in 
 
168 LIFE OF 
 
 scope and purpose. Meanwhile it cannot 
 honestly be affirmed that the story justifies the 
 passion that Dickens threw into its composi- 
 tion. The supernatural machinery is weak as 
 compared with that of the Carol. Little 
 Trotty Veck, dreaming to the sound of the 
 bells in the old church tower, is a bad sub- 
 stitute for Scrooge on his midnight rambles. 
 Nor are his dreams at all equal, for humour 
 or pathos, to Scrooge's visions and exper- 
 iences. And the moral itself is not clearly 
 brought out. I confess to being a little doubt- 
 ful as to what it exactly is, and how it follows 
 from the premises furnished. I wish, too, that 
 it had been carried home to some one with more 
 power than little Trotty to give it effect. 
 What was the good of convincing that kindly 
 old soul that the people of his own class had 
 warm hearts? He knew it very well. Take 
 from the book the fine imaginative description 
 of the goblin music that leaps into life with the 
 ringing of the bells, and there remain the most 
 excellent intentions — and not much more. 
 
 Such, however, was very far from being 
 Dickens's view. He had ' undergone,' he said, 
 
 * as much sorrow and agitation ' in the writing 
 
 * as if the thing were real,' and on the 3d of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 169 
 
 November, when the last page was written, had 
 indulged ' in M^hat women call a good cry ' ; 
 and, as usually happens, the child that had cost 
 much sorrow was a child of special love/ So, 
 when all was over, nothing would do but he 
 must come to London to read his book to the 
 choice literary spirits whom he specially loved. 
 Accordingly he started from Genoa on the 6th 
 of November, travelled by Parma, Modena, 
 Bologna, Ferrara, Venice — where, such was 
 the enchantment of the place, that he felt it 
 * cruel not to have brought Kate and Georgy, 
 positively cruel and base ' ; — and thence again 
 by Verona, Mantua, JMilan, the Simplon Pass, 
 Strasbourg, Paris, and Calais, to Dover, and 
 wintry England. Sharp work, considering all 
 he had seen by the way, and how effectually he 
 had seen it, for he was in London on the even- 
 ing of the 30th of November, and, on the 2d 
 of December, reading his little book to the 
 choice spirits aforesaid, all assembled for the 
 purpose at Forster's house. There they are: 
 they live for us still in Maclise's drawing, 
 though Time has plied his scythe among them 
 so effectually, during the forty-tv/o years 
 since flown, that each has passed into the silent 
 
 1 He read The Chimes at his first reading as a paid 
 reader. 
 
170 LIFE OF 
 
 land. There they sit : Carlyle, not the shaggy 
 Scotch terrier with the melancholy eyes that 
 we were wont to see in his latter days, but close 
 shaven and alert; and swift-witted Douglas 
 Jerrold; and Laman Blanchard, whose name 
 goes darkling in the literature of the last gen- 
 eration; and Forster himself, journalist and 
 author of many books ; and the painters Dyce, 
 Maclise, and Stanfield; and Byron's friend 
 and school companion, the clergyman Harness, 
 who; like Dyce, pays to the story the tribute of 
 his tears. 
 
 Dickens can have been in London but the 
 fewest of few days, for on the 13th of De- 
 cember he was leaving Paris for Genoa, and 
 that after going to the theatre more than once. 
 From Genoa he started again, on the. 20th of 
 January, 1845, with Mrs. Dickens, to see the 
 Carnival at Rome. Thence he went to Naples, 
 returning to Rome for the Holy Week; and 
 thence again by Florence to Genoa. He 
 finally left Italy in the beginning of June, and 
 was back with his family in Devonshire Ter- 
 race at the end of that month. 
 
 To what use of a literary kind should he 
 turn his Italian observations and experiences? 
 In what form should he publish the notes made 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 171 
 
 by the way? Events soon answered that ques- 
 tion. The year 1845 stands in the history of 
 Queen Victoria's reign as a time of intense 
 poHtical excitement. The Corn Law agitation 
 raged somewhat furiously. Dickens felt 
 strongly impelled to throw himself into the 
 strife. Why should he not influence his fel- 
 low-men, and ' battle for the true, the just,' 
 as the able editor of a daily newspaper? Ac- 
 cordingly, after all the negotiations which 
 enterprises of this kind necessitate, he made 
 the due arrangements for starting a new pa- 
 per. The Daily News. It was to be edited by 
 himself, to ' be kept free,' the prospectus said, 
 * from personal influence or party bias,' and to 
 be ' devoted to the advocacy of all rational and 
 honest means by which wrong may be re- 
 dressed, just rights maintained, and the happi- 
 ness and welfare of society promoted.' His 
 salary, so I have seen it stated, was to be 
 2000/. a year; and the first number came out 
 on the morning of the 21st of January, 1846. 
 He held the post of editor three M^eeks. 
 
 The world may, I think, on the whole, be 
 congratulated that he did not hold it longer. 
 Able editors are more easily found than such 
 writers as Dickens. There were higher claims 
 
172 LIFE OF 
 
 upon his time. But to return to the Italian 
 notes: it was in the columns of The Daily 
 News that they first saw the light. They were 
 among the baby attractions and charms, if I 
 may so speak, of the nascent paper, which is 
 now, as I need not remind my readers, enjoy- 
 ing a hale and vigorous manhood. And ad- 
 mirable sketches they are. Much, very much 
 has been written about Italy. The subject has 
 been done to death by every variety of pen, 
 and in every civilized tongue. But amid all 
 this writing, T)ickens*s Pictures from Italy 
 still holds a high and distinctive position. That 
 the descriptions, whether of places and works 
 of art, or of life's pageantry, and what may be 
 called the social picturesque, should be graphic, 
 vivid, animated, was almost a matter of course. 
 But a priori, I think one might have feared 
 lest he should * chaff ' the place and its inhabi- 
 tants overmuch, and yield to the temptation of 
 making merriment over matters which hoar 
 age and old associations had hallowed. We 
 can all imagine the kind of observation that 
 would occur to Sam Weller in strolling 
 through St. Mark's at Venice, or the Vatican ; 
 and, guessing beforehand, guessing before the 
 Pictures were produced, one might, I repeat, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 173 
 
 have been afraid lest Dickens should go 
 through Italy as a kind of educated Sam 
 Weller. Such prophecies would have been 
 falsified by the event. The book as a whole is 
 very free from banter or persiflage. Once and 
 again the comic side of some situation strikes 
 him, of course. Thus, after the ceremony of 
 the Pope washing the feet of thirteen poor 
 men, in memory of our Lord washing the feet 
 of the Apostles, Dickens says : ' The whole 
 thirteen sat down to dinner; grace said by the 
 Pope; Peter in the chair.' But these humour- 
 ous touches are rare, and not in bad taste; 
 while for the historic and artistic grandeurs of 
 Italy he shows an enthusiasm which is individ- 
 ual and discriminating. We feel, in what he 
 says about painting, that we are getting the 
 fresh impressions of a man not specially 
 trained in the study of the old masters, but 
 who yet succeeds, by sheer intuitive sympathy, 
 in appreciating much of their greatness. His 
 criticism of the paintings at Venice, for in- 
 stance, is very decidedly superior to that of 
 Macaulay. In brief the Pictures, to give to 
 the book the name which Dickens gave it, are 
 painted with a brush at once kindly and bril- 
 liant. 
 
174 LIFE OE 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 ^^^!^HE publication of the Pictures, though 
 B J I have dealt with it as a sort of com- 
 ^^^ plement to Dickens's sojourn in Italy, 
 carries us to the year 1846. But before going 
 on with the history of that year, there are one 
 or two points to be taken up in the history of 
 1845. The first is the performance, on the 
 21st of September, of Ben Jonson's play of 
 Every Man in his Humour , by a select com- 
 pany of amateur actors, among whom Dickens 
 held chief place. ' He was the life and soul 
 of the entire affair,' says Forster. ' I never 
 seem till then to have known his business capa- 
 bilities. He took everything on himself and 
 did the whole of it without an effort. He was 
 stage director, very often stage carpenter, 
 scene arranger, property man, prompter, and 
 band-master. Without offending any one, he 
 kept every one in order. For all he had useful 
 suggestions. . . . He adjusted scenes, 
 assisted carpenters, invented costumes, de- 
 vised playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 175 
 
 as well as exhibited in his own proper person, 
 everything of which he urged the necessity on 
 others.' Dickens had once thought of the 
 stage as a profession, and was, according to all 
 accounts, an amateur actor of very unusual 
 power. But of course he only acted for his 
 amusement, and I don't know that I should 
 have dwelt upon this performance, which was 
 followed by others of a similar kind, if it did 
 not, in Forster's description, afford such a 
 signal instance of his efficiency as a practical 
 man. The second event to be mentioned as 
 happening in 1845, is the publication of an- 
 other very pretty Christmas story, Tlie Cricket 
 on the Hearth. 
 
 Though Dickens had ceased to edit The 
 Daily News on the 9th of February, 1846, he 
 contributed to the paper for some few weeks 
 longer. But by the month of May his connec- 
 tion with it had entirely ceased; and on the 31st 
 of that month, he started, by Belgium and the 
 Rhine, for Lausanne in Switzerland, where 
 he had determined to spend some time, and 
 commence his next great book, and write his 
 next Christmas story. 
 
 A beautiful place is Lausanne, as many of 
 my readers will know; and a beautiful house 
 
176 LIFE OF 
 
 the house called Rosemont, situated on a hill 
 that rises from the Lake of Geneva, with the 
 lake's blue waters stretching below, and across, 
 on the other side, a magnificent panorama of 
 snowy mountains, the Simplon, St. Gothard, 
 Mont Blanc, towering to the sky. This de- 
 lightful place Dickens took at a rent of some 
 lOZ. a month. Then he re-arranged all the fur- 
 niture, as was his energetic wont. Then he 
 spent a fortnight or so in looking about him, 
 and writing a good deal for Lord John Rus- 
 sell on Ragged Schools, and for Miss Coutts 
 about her various charities; and finally, on the 
 28th of June, as he announced to Forster in 
 capital letters, Began Dombey. 
 
 But as the Swiss pine with home-sickness 
 when away from their own dear land, so did 
 this Londoner, amid all the glories of the Alps, 
 pine for the London streets. It seemed 
 almost as if they were essential to the exercise 
 of his genius. The same strange mental phe- 
 nomenon which he had observed in himself at 
 Genoa was reproduced here. Everything else 
 in his surroundings smiled most congenially. 
 The place was fair beyond speech. The shift- 
 ing, changing beauty of the mountains en- 
 tranced him. The walks offered an endless 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 177 
 
 variety of enjoyment. He liked the peoj)le. 
 He liked the English colony. He had made 
 several dear friends among them and among 
 the natives. He was interested in the poli- 
 ties of the country, which happened, just 
 then, to he in a state of peculiar excitement 
 and revolution. Everything was charming; 
 — ' but,' he writes, ' the toil and labour of 
 writing, day after day, without that magic- 
 lantern (of the London streets) is immense! ' 
 It literally knocked him up. He had ' bad 
 nights,' was 'sick and giddy,' desponding 
 over his book, more than half inclined to 
 abandon the Christmas story altogether for 
 that year. However, a short trip to Geneva, 
 and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its 
 thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of 
 what streets were like, and a week of ' idle- 
 ness ' ' rusting and devouring,' ' complete and 
 unbroken,' set him comparatively on his legs 
 again, and before he left Lausanne for Paris 
 on the 16th of November, he had finished three 
 parts of Domhey, and the Battle of Life. 
 
 Of the latter I don't know that I need say 
 anything. It is decidedly the weakest of his 
 Christmas books. But Domhey is very differ- 
 ent work, and the first five numbers especially. 
 
178 LIFE OF 
 
 which carry the story to the death of little 
 Paul, contain passages of humour and pathos, 
 and of humour and pathos mingled together 
 and shot in warp and woof, like some daint- 
 iest silken fabric, that are scarcely to be 
 matched in the language. As I go in my 
 mind through the motherless child's short his- 
 tory — his birth, his christening, the engage- 
 ment of the wet-nurse, the time when he is 
 consigned to the loveless care of Mrs. Pipchin, 
 his education in Dr. Blimber's Academy under 
 the classic Cornelia, and his death — as I follow 
 it all in thought, now smiling at each well- 
 remembered touch of humour, and now sad- 
 dened and solemnized as the shadow of death 
 deepens over the frail little life, I confess to 
 something more than critical admiration for 
 the writer as an artist. I feel towards him as 
 towards one who has touched my heart. Of 
 course it is the misfortune of the book, regard- 
 ing it as a whole, that the chapters relating to 
 Paul, which are only an episode, should be of 
 such absorbing interest, and come so early. 
 Dickens really wrote them too well. They 
 dwarf the rest of the story. We find a diffi- 
 culty in resuming the thread of it with the same 
 zest when the child is gone. But though the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 179 
 
 remainder of the book inevitably suffers in this 
 way, it ought not to suffer unduly. Even apart 
 from little Paul the novel is a fine one. Pride 
 is its subject, as selfishness is that of Martin 
 Chuzzlewit. Mr. Dombey, the city merchant, 
 has as much of the arrogance of caste and po- 
 sition as any blue-blooded hidalgo. He is as 
 proud of his name as if he had inherited it from 
 a race of princes. That he neglects and 
 slights his daughter, and loves his son, is 
 mainly because the latter will add a sort of 
 completeness to the firm, and make it truly 
 Dombey and Son^ while the girl, for all com- 
 mercial purposes, can be nothing but a cipher. 
 And through his pride he is struck to the 
 heart, and ruined. Mr. Carker, his confiden- 
 tial agent and manager, trades upon it for all 
 vile ends, first to feather his own nest, and then 
 to launch his patron into large and unsound 
 business ventures. The second wife, whom he 
 marries, certainly with no affection on either 
 side, but purely because of her birth and con- 
 nections, and because her great beauty will add 
 to his social prestige — she, with ungovernable 
 pride equal to his own, revolts against his au- 
 thority, and, in order to humiliate him the more, 
 pretends to elope with Carker, whom in turn 
 
180 LIFE OF 
 
 she scorns and crushes. Broken thus in for- 
 tune and honour, Mr. Dombey yet falls not 
 ignobly. His creditors he satisfies in full, re- 
 serving to himself nothing ; and with a softened 
 heart turns to the daughter he had slighted, 
 and in her love finds comfort. Such is the 
 main purport of the story, and round it, in 
 graceful arabesques, are embroidered, after 
 Dickens's manner, a whole world of subsidiary 
 incidents thronged with all sorts of characters. 
 What might not one say about Dr. Blimber's 
 genteel academy at Brighton ; and the Toodles 
 family, so humble in station and intellect and 
 so large of heart; and the contrast between 
 Carker the manager and his brother, who for 
 some early dishonest act, long since repented 
 of, remains always Carker the junior; and 
 about Captain Cuttle, and that poor, muddled 
 nautical philosopher. Captain Bunsby, and the 
 Game Chicken, and Mrs. Pipchin, and Miss 
 Tox; and Cousin Feenix with wilful legs so 
 little under control, and yet to the core of him 
 a gentleman; and the apoplectic Major Bag- 
 stock, the Joey B. who claimed to be ' rough 
 and tough and devilish sly ' ; and Susan Nip- 
 per, as swift of tongue as a rapier, and as 
 sharp? Reader, don't you know all these 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 181 
 
 people? For myself, I have jostled against 
 them constantly any time the last twenty years. 
 They are as much part of my hfe as the people 
 I meet every day. 
 
 But there is one person whom I have left out 
 of my enumeration, not certainly because I 
 don't know him, for I know him very well, but 
 because I want to speak about him more par- 
 ticularly. That person is my old friend Mr. 
 Toots; and the special point in his character 
 which induces me to linger is the slight touch 
 of craziness that sits so charmingly upon him. 
 M. Taine, the French critic, in his chapters 
 on Dickens, repeats the old remark that genius 
 and madness are near akin.^ He observes, 
 and observes truly, that Dickens describes so 
 well because an imagination of singular inten- 
 sity enables him to see the object presented, and 
 at the same time to impart to it a kind of vis- 
 ionary life. ' That imagination,' says M. 
 Taine, ' is akin to the imagination of the mono- 
 maniac' And, starting from this point, he 
 proceeds to show, here again quite truly, with 
 what admirable sympathetic power and insight 
 Dickens has described certain cases of madness, 
 as in Mr. Dick. But here, having said some 
 right things, M. Taine goes all wrong. Ac- 
 
 ^ History of English Literature, vol. v. 
 
182 LIFE OF 
 
 cording to him, these portraits of persons who 
 have lost their wits, ' however amusing they 
 may seem at first sight,' are ' horrible.' They 
 could only have been painted by ' an imagina- 
 tion such as that of Dickens, excessive, disor- 
 dered, and capable of hallucination.' He 
 seems to be not far from thinking that only 
 our splenetic and melancholy race could have 
 given birth to such literary monsters. To 
 speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular 
 misconception of the instinct or set purpose 
 that led Dickens to introduce these characters 
 into his novels at all. It is perfectly true that 
 he has done so several times. Barnaby Rudge, 
 the hero of the book of the same name, is half- 
 witted. Mr. Dick, in David Copperfield, is 
 decidedly crazy. Mr. Toots is at least simple. 
 Little Miss Flite, in Bleak House, haunting 
 the Law Courts in expectation of a judgment 
 on the Day of Judgment, is certainly not 
 compos mentis. And one may concede to M. 
 Taine that some element of sadness must 
 always be present when we see a human 
 creature imperfectly gifted with man's noblest 
 attribute of reason. But, granting this to the 
 full, is it possible to conceive of anything more 
 kindly and gentle in the delineation of partial 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 183 
 
 insanity than the portraits which the French 
 critic finds horrible? Barnaby Rudge's luna- 
 tic symptoms are compatible with the keenest 
 enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh 
 air and free sunlight and compatible with loy- 
 alty and high courage. Many men might profit- 
 ably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. 
 Dick's flightiness is allied to an intense devo- 
 tion and gratitude to the woman who had res- 
 cued him from confinement in an asylum ; there 
 lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor 
 bewildered brains. Of Mr. Toots, Susan Nip- 
 per says truly, ' he may not be a Solomon, nor 
 do I say he is, but this I do say, a less selfish 
 human creature human nature never knew.' 
 And to this one may add that he is entirely 
 high-minded, generous, and honourable. Miss 
 Elite's crazes do not prevent her from being 
 full of all womanly sympathies. Here I think 
 lies the charm these characters had for Dick- 
 ens. As he was fond of showing a soul of 
 goodness in the ill-favoured and uncouth, so 
 he liked to make men feel that even in a dis- 
 ordered intellect all kindly virtues might find a 
 home, and a happy one. M. Taine may call 
 this ' horrible ' if he likes. I think myself it 
 would be possible to find a better adjective. 
 
184 LIFE OF 
 
 Dickens was at work on Domhey and Son 
 during the latter part of the year 1846, and the 
 whole of 1847, and the early part of 1848. We 
 left him on the 16th of November, in the first 
 of these years, starting from Lausanne for 
 Paris, which he reached on the evening of the 
 20th. Here he took a house — a ' preposterous ' 
 house, according to his own account, with only 
 gleams of reason in it; and visited many thea- 
 tres; and went very often to the Morgue, 
 where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant 
 friendly intercourse with the notable French 
 authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the 
 Great, most prolific of romance writers; and 
 Scribe of the innumerable plays ; and the poets 
 Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateau- 
 briand, then in his sad and somewhat morose 
 old age. And in Paris too, with the help of 
 streets and crowded ways, he wrote the great 
 number of Domhey, the number in which little 
 Paul dies. Three months did Dickens spend 
 in the French capital, the incomparable city, 
 and then was back in London, at the old life 
 of hard work; but with even a stronger infu- 
 sion than before of private theatricals — private 
 theatricals on a grandiose scale, that were ap- 
 plauded by the Queen herself, and took him 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 185 
 
 and his troupe starring about during the next 
 three or four years, hither and thither, and here 
 and there, in London and the provinces. 
 * Splendid strolHng,' Forster calls it; and a 
 period of unmixed jollity and enjoyment it 
 seems to have been. Of course Dickens was 
 the life and soul of it all. Mrs. Cowden Clarke, 
 one of the few survivors, looking back to that 
 happy time, says enthusiastically, ' Charles 
 Dickens, beaming in look, alert in manner, 
 radiant with good humour, genial-voiced, gay, 
 the very soul of enjoyment, fun, good taste, 
 and good spirits, admirable in organizing de- 
 tails and suggesting novelty of entertainment, 
 was of all beings the very man for a holiday 
 season.' ^ The proceeds of the performances 
 were devoted to various objects, but chiefly to 
 an impossible ' Guild of Literature and Art,' 
 which, in the sanguine confidence of its pro- 
 jectors, and especially of Dickens, was to in- 
 augurate a golden age for the author and 
 the artist. But of all this, and of Dickens's 
 speeches at the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, 
 and Glasgow AthenaBum, in the December of 
 1847, I don't know that I need say very much. 
 
 2 Recollections of Writers, by Charles and Mary 
 Cowden Clarke. 
 
186 LIFE OF 
 
 The interest of a great writer's life is, after all, 
 mainly in what he writes ; and when I have said 
 that Domhey proved to be a pecuniary success, 
 the first six numbers realizing as much as 
 2820/., I think I may fairly pass on to Dick- 
 ens's next book, the Haunted Man. 
 
 This was his Christmas story for 1848; the 
 last, and not the worst of his Christmas stories. 
 Both conception and treatment are thoroughly 
 characteristic. Mr. Redlaw, a chemist, brood- 
 ing over an ancient wrong, comes to the con- 
 clusion that it would be better for himself, bet- 
 ter for all, if, in each of us, every memory of 
 the past could be cancelled. A ghostly vis- 
 itant, born of his own resentment and gloom, 
 gives him the boon he seeks, and enables him to 
 go about the world freezing all recollection in 
 those he meets. And lo, the boon turns out 
 to be a curse. His presence blights those 
 on whom it falls. For with the memory of 
 past wrongs, goes the memory of past benefits, 
 of all the mutual kindlinesses of life, and each 
 unit of humanity becomes self-centred and 
 selfish. Two beings alone resist his influence 
 — one, a creature too selfishly nurtured for any 
 of mankind's better recollections ; and the other 
 a woman so good as to resist the spell, and even. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 187 
 
 finally, to exorcise it in Mr. Redlaw's own 
 breast. 
 
 David Copyerfield was published between 
 May, 1849, and the autumn of 1850, and 
 marks, I think, the culminating point in Dick- 
 ens's career as a writer. So far there had been, 
 not perhaps from book to book, but on the 
 whole, decided progress, the gradual attain- 
 ment of greater ease, and of the power of ob- 
 taining results as strong, and better, by simpler 
 means. Beyond this there was, if not absolute 
 declension, for he never wrote anything that 
 could properly be called careless or unworthy 
 of himself, yet at least no advance. Of the 
 interest that attaches to the book from the fact 
 that so many portions are autobiographical, I 
 have already spoken; nor need I go over the 
 adventitious attractions, the novel is an admir- 
 able one. All the scenes of little David's 
 childhood in the Norfolk home — the Blunder- 
 stone rookery, where there were no rooks — are 
 among the most beautiful pictures of child- 
 hood in existence. In what sunshine of love 
 does the lad bask with his mother and Peg- 
 gotty, till Mrs. Copperfield contracts her dis- 
 astrous second marriage with Mr. Murdstone! 
 Then how the scene changes. There come 
 
188 LIFE OF 
 
 harshness and cruelty; banishment to Mr. 
 Creakle's villainous school; the poor mother's 
 death; the worse banishment to London, and 
 descent into warehouse drudgery; the strange 
 shabby genteel, happy-go-lucky life with the 
 Micawbers; the flight from intolerable ills in 
 the forlorn hope that David's aunt will take 
 pity on him. Here the scene changes again. 
 Miss Betsy Trotwood, a fine old gnarled piece 
 of womanhood, places the boy at school at Can- 
 terbury, where he makes acquaintance with 
 Agnes, the woman whom he marries far, far 
 on in the story ; and with her father, Mr. Wick- 
 ham, a somewhat port- wine-loving lawyer ; and 
 with Uriah Heep, the fawning villain of the 
 piece. How David is first articled to a proc- 
 tor in Doctors' Commons, and then becomes a 
 reporter, and then a successful author; and 
 how he marries his first wife, the childish Dora, 
 who dies ; and how, meanwhile, Uriah is effect- 
 ing the general ruin, and aspiring to the hand 
 of Agnes, till his villainies are detected and his 
 machinations defeated by Micawber — how all 
 this comes about, would be a long story to tell. 
 But, as is usual with Dickens, there are subsid- 
 iary rills of story running into the main stream, 
 and by one of these I should like to linger a 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 189 
 
 moment. The head-boy, and a kind of par- 
 lour-boarder, at Mr. Creakle's establishment, 
 is one Steerforth, the spoilt only son of a 
 widow. This Steerforth, David meets again 
 when both are young men, and they go down 
 together to Yarmouth, and there David is the 
 means of making him known to a family of 
 fisherfolk. He is rich, handsome, with an in- 
 describable charm, according to his friend's 
 testimony, and he induces the fisherman's niece, 
 the pretty Em'ly, to desert her home, and the 
 young boat-builder to whom she is engaged, 
 and to fly to Italy. Now to this story, as 
 Dickens tells it, French criticism objects that 
 he dwells exclusively on the sin and sorrow, 
 and sets aside that in which the French novel- 
 ist would delight, viz., the mad force and irre- 
 sistible sway of passion. To which English 
 criticism may, I think, reply, that the * pity of 
 it,' the wide-working desolation, are as essen- 
 tially part of such an event as the passion ; and, 
 therefore, even from an exclusively artistic 
 point of view, just as fit subjects for the 
 novelist. 
 
 While David Copperfield was in progress, 
 Dickens started on a new venture. He had 
 often before projected a periodical, and twice, 
 
190 LIFE OF 
 
 as we have seen, — once in Master Humphrey's 
 Clock J and again as editor of The Daily News, 
 — had attempted quasi- journalism or its real- 
 ity. But now at last he had struck the right 
 vein. He had discovered a means of utilizing 
 his popularity, and imparting it to a paper, 
 without being under the crushing necessity of 
 writing the whole of that paper himself. The 
 first number of Household Words appeared 
 on the 30th of March, 1850. 
 
 The ' preliminary word ' heralds the paper 
 in thoroughly characteristic fashion, and is, not 
 unnaturally, far more personal in tone than the 
 first leading article of the first number of The 
 Daily News, though that, too, be it said in pass- 
 ing, bears traces, through all its officialism, of 
 having come from the same pen.^ In intro- 
 ducing Household Words to his new readers, 
 Dickens speaks feelingly, eloquently, of his 
 own position as a wi'iter, and the responsibili- 
 ties attached to his popularity, and tells of his 
 hope that a future of instruction, and amuse- 
 ment, and kindly playful fancy may be in store 
 
 ^ As, for instance, in such expressions as this : * This 
 stamp on newspapers is not like the stamp on universal 
 medicine bottles, which licenses anything, however false 
 and monstrous.' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 191 
 
 for the paper. Nor were his happy anticipa- 
 tions belied. All that he had promised, he 
 gave. Household Words found an entrance 
 into innumerable homes, and was everywhere 
 recognized as a friend. Never did editor more 
 strongly impress his own personality upon his 
 staff. The articles were sprightly, amusing, 
 interesting, and instructive too — often very 
 instructive, but always in an interesting way. 
 That was one of the periodical's main features. 
 The pill of knowledge was always presented 
 gilt. Taking Household Words and All the 
 Year Bound together — and for this purpose 
 they may properly be regarded as one and the 
 same paper, because the change of name and 
 proprietorship in 1859 ^ brought no change in 
 form or character, — taking them together, I 
 say, they contain a vast quantity of very pleas- 
 ant, if not very profound, reading. Even 
 apart from the stories, one can do very much 
 worse than while away an hour, now and again, 
 in gleaning here and there in their pages. 
 Among Dickens's own contributions may be 
 mentioned The Child's History of England^ 
 
 * The last number of Household Words appeared on 
 the 28th of May, 1859, and the first of All the Year 
 Round on the 30th of April, 1859. 
 
192 LIFE OF 
 
 and Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices — 
 being the record of an excursion made by him 
 in 1857, with Mr. Wilkie CoUins; and The 
 Uncommercial Traveler papers. While as to 
 stories, Hard Times appeared in Household. 
 Words; and The Tale of Two Cities and 
 Great Expectations, in All the Year Round. 
 And to the Christmas numbers he gave some of 
 his best and daintiest work. Nor were novels 
 and tales by other competent hands wanting. 
 Here it was that Mrs. Gaskell gave to the world 
 those papers on Cranford that are so full of a 
 dainty, delicate humour, and My Lady Lud- 
 low, and North and South, and A Dark Night's 
 Work, Here, too, Mr. Wilkie Collins wove 
 together his ingenious threads of plot and 
 mystery, in The Moonstone, The Woman in 
 White, and No Name. And here also Lord 
 Lytton published A Strange Story, and 
 Charles Reade his Very Hard Cash. 
 
 The year 1851 opened sadly for Dickens. 
 His wife, who had been oonfined of a daughter 
 in the preceding August, was so seriously un- 
 well that he had to take her to Malvern. His 
 father, to whom, notwithstanding all financial 
 peculiarities and eccentricities, he was greatly 
 attached, died on the 31st of March; and on the 
 
CPIARLES DICKENS 193 
 
 14th of April his infant daughter died also. 
 In connection with this latter death there oc- 
 curred an incident of great pathos. Dickens 
 had come up from Malvern on the 14th, to take 
 the chair at the dinner on behalf of the Theat- 
 rical Fund, and looking in at Devonshire Ter- 
 race on his way, played with the children, as 
 was his wont, and fondled the baby, and then 
 went on to the London Tavern.^ Shortly after 
 he left the house, the child died, suddenly. The 
 news was communicated to Forster, who was 
 also at the dinner, and he decided that it would 
 be better not to tell the poor father till the 
 speech of the evening had been made. So 
 Dickens made his speech, and a brilliant one 
 it was — it is brilliant even as one reads it now, 
 in the coldness of print, without the glamour 
 of the speaker's voice and presence; and yet 
 brilliant with an undertone of sadness, which 
 the recent death of the speaker's father would 
 fully explain. And Forster, wlio knew of the 
 yet later blow impending on his friend, had 
 to sit by and listen as that dear friend, all 
 
 ^ There are one or two slight discrepancies between 
 Forster's narrative and that of Miss Dickens and Miss 
 Hogarth. The latter are clearly more likely to be right 
 on such a matter. 
 
194 LIFE OF 
 
 unconscious of the dread application of the 
 words, spoke of * the actor ' having * sometimes 
 to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, 
 ay, even of death itself, to play his part ; ' and 
 then he went on to tell how 'all of us, in our 
 spheres, have often to do violence to our feel- 
 ings, and to hide our hearts in fighting this 
 great battle of life, and in discharging our 
 duties and responsibilities.' 
 
 In the same year, 1851, Dickens left the 
 house in Devonshire Terrace, now grown too 
 small for his enlarging household, and, after 
 a long sojourn at Broadstairs, moved into Tav- 
 istock House, in Tavistock Square. Here 
 Bleak House was begun at the end of Novem- 
 ber, the first number being published in the 
 ensuing March. It is a fine work of art un- 
 questionably, a very fine work of art — the can- 
 vas all crowded with living figures, and yet 
 the main lines of the composition well-ordered 
 and harmonious. Two threads of interest run 
 through the story, one following the career of 
 Lady Dedlock, and the other tracing the influ- 
 ence of a great Chancery suit on the victims 
 immeshed in its toils. From the first these two 
 threads are distinct, and yet happily inter- 
 woven. Let us take Lady Dedlock's thread 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 195 
 
 first. She is the wife of Sir Leicester Ded- 
 lock, whose ' family is as old as the hills, and a 
 great deal more respectable ' ; and she is still 
 very beautiful, though no longer in the bloom 
 of youth, and she is cold and haughty of man- 
 ner, as a woman of highest fashion sometimes 
 may be. But in her past lurks an ugly hidden 
 secret ; and a girl of sweetest disposition walks 
 her kindly course through the story, who might 
 call Lady Dedlock * mother.' This secret, or 
 perhaps rather the fact that there is a secret at 
 all, she reveals in a moment of surprise to the 
 family lawyer; and she lays herself still further 
 open to his suspicions by going, disguised in 
 her maid's clothes, to the poor graveyard where 
 her former lover lies buried. The lawyer 
 worms the whole story out, and, just as he is 
 going to reveal it, is murdered by the French 
 maid aforesaid. But the murder comes too 
 late to save my lady, nay, adds to her difficul- 
 ties. She flies, in anticipation of the disclosure 
 of her secret, and is found dead at the grave- 
 yard gate. To such end has the sin of her 
 youth led her. So once again has Dickens 
 dwelt, not on the passionate side of wrongful 
 love, but on its sorrow. Now take the other 
 thread — the Chancery suit — * Jarndyce versus 
 
196 LIFE OF 
 
 J arndyce,' a suit held in awful reverence by the 
 profession as a * monument of Chancery prac- 
 tice ' — a suit seemingly interminable, till, after 
 long, long years of wrangling and litigation, 
 the fortuitous discovery of a will settles it all, 
 with the result that the whole estate has been 
 swallowed up in the costs. And how about 
 the litigants? How about poor Richard Car- 
 stone and his wife, whom we see, in the open- 
 ing of the story, in all the heyday and happi- 
 ness of 'their youth, strolling down to the court 
 — they are its wards, — and wondering sadly 
 over the ' headache and heartache ' of it all, 
 and then saying, gleefully, * at all events Chan- 
 cery will work none of its bad influence on us ^• 
 ' None of its bad influence on us!' — poor lad, 
 whose life is wasted and character impaired in 
 following the mirage of the suit, and who is 
 killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the 
 two intertwined stories run; but apart from 
 these, though all in place and keeping, and 
 helping on the general development, there is a 
 whole profusion of noticeable characters. In 
 enumerating them, however baldly, one 
 scarcely knows where to begin. The lawyer 
 group — clerks and all — is excellent. Dickens's 
 early experiences stood him in good stead here. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 197 
 
 Excellent too are those studies in the ways of 
 impecuniosity and practical shiftlessness, Har- 
 old Skimpole, the airy, irresponsible, light- 
 hearted epicurean, with his pretty tastes and 
 dilettante accomplishments, and Mrs. Jellyby, 
 the philanthropist, whose eyes ' see nothing 
 nearer ' than Borrioboola-Gha, on the banks 
 of the far Niger, and never dwell to any pur- 
 pose on the utter discomfort of the home of her 
 husband and children. Characters of this kind 
 no one ever delineated better than Dickens. 
 That Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who 
 had sat for the portrait of Skimpole, was not 
 altogether flattered by the likeness, is compre- 
 hensible enough ; and in truth it is unfair, both 
 to painter and model, that we should take such 
 portraits too seriously. Landor, who sat for 
 the thunderous and kindly Boythorn, had more 
 reason to be satisfied. Besides these one may 
 mention Joe, the outcast; and Mr. Turveydrop, 
 the beau of the school of the Regency — how 
 horrified he would have been at the juxtapo- 
 sition — and George, the keeper of the rifle 
 gallery, a fine soldierly figure ; and Mr. Bucket, 
 the detective — though Dickens had a tendency 
 to idealize the abilities of the police force. As 
 to Sir Leicester Dedlock, I think he is, on the 
 
198 LIFE OF 
 
 whole, ' mine author's ' best study of the aris- 
 tocracy, a direction in which Dickens's forte did 
 not lie, for Sir Leicester is a gentleman, and 
 receives the terrible blow that falls on him in 
 a spirit at once chivalrous and human. 
 
 What between Bleak Houses Household 
 Words, and The Child's History of England, 
 Dickens, in the spring of 1853, was overworked 
 and ill. Brighton failed to restore him; and 
 he took his family over to Boulogne in June, 
 occupying there a house belonging to a certain 
 M. de Beaucourt. Town, dwelling, and land- 
 lord, all suited him exactly. Boulogne he de- 
 clared to be admirable for its picturesqueness 
 in buildings and life, and equal in some respects 
 to Naples itself. The dwelling, ' a doll's house 
 of many rooms,' embowered in roses, and with 
 a terraced garden, was a place after his own 
 heart. While as to the landlord — he was 
 ' wonderful.' Dickens never tires of extolling 
 his virtues, his generosity, his kindness, his 
 anxiety to please, his pride in ' the property.' 
 All the pleasant delicate quaint traits in the 
 man's character are irradiated as if with French 
 sunshine in his tenant's description. It is a 
 dainty little picture and painted with the kind- 
 liest of brushes. Poor Beaucourt, he was 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 199 
 
 * inconsolable ' when he and Dickens finally- 
 parted three years afterwards — for twice again 
 did the latter occupy a house, but not this same 
 house, on ' the property.' Many were the 
 tears that he shed, and even the garden, the 
 loved garden, went forlorn and unweeded. 
 But that was in 1856. The parting was not 
 so final and terrible in the October of 1853, 
 when Dickens, having finished Bleak House^ 
 started with Mr. Wilkie Collins, and Augustus 
 Egg, the artist, for a holiday tour in Switzer- 
 land and Italy. 
 
200 LIFE OF 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ON his return to England, just after the 
 Christmas of 1853, Dickens gave his 
 first public readings. He had, as we 
 have seen, read The Chimes some nine years 
 before, to a select few among his literary 
 friends ; and at Lausanne he had similarly read 
 portions of Domhey and Son. But the three 
 readings given at Birmingham, on the 27th, 
 29th, and 30th December, 1853, were, in every 
 sense, public entertainments, and, except that 
 the proceeds were devoted entirely to the local 
 Institute, differed in no way from the famous 
 readings by which he afterwards realized what 
 may almost be called a fortune. The idea of 
 coming before the world in this new character 
 had long been in his mind. As early as 1846, 
 after the private reading at Lausanne, he had 
 written to Forster: * I was thinking the other 
 day that in these days of lectures and readings, 
 a great deal of money might possibly be made 
 (if it were not infra dig.) by one's having read- 
 ings of one's own books. I think it would take 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 201 
 
 immensely. What do you say? ' Forster said 
 then, and said consistently throughout, that he 
 held the thing to he ' infra dig.f and unworthy 
 of Dickens's position; and in this I think one 
 may venture to assert that Forster was wrong. 
 There can surely be no reason why a popular 
 "WTiter, who happens also to be an excellent 
 elocutionist, should not afford general pleasure 
 by giving sound to his prose, and a voice to his 
 imaginary characters. Nor is it opposed to 
 the fitness of things that he should be paid for 
 his skill. If, however, one goes further in 
 Dickens's case, and asks whether the readings 
 did not involve too great an expenditure of 
 time, energy, and, as we shall see, ultimately of 
 life, and whether he would not, in the highest 
 sense, have been better employed over his 
 books, — why then the question becomes more 
 difficult of solution. But, after all, each man 
 must answer such questions for himself. 
 Dickens may have felt, as the years began to 
 tell, that he required the excitement of the 
 readings for mental stimulus, and that he 
 would not even have written as much as he did 
 without them. Be that as it may, the success 
 at Birmingham, where a sum of from 400/. to 
 500Z. was realized, the requests that poured in 
 
202 LIFE OF 
 
 upon him to read at other places, the invariably 
 renewed success whenever he did so, the clear 
 evidence that very much money might be 
 earned if he determined to come forward on 
 his own account, all must have contributed to 
 scatter Forster's objections to the winds. On 
 the 29th of April, 1858, at St. Martin's Hall, 
 in London, he started his career as a paid pub- 
 lic reader, and he continued to read, with 
 shorter or longer periods of intermission, till 
 his death. But into the storj^ of his profes- 
 sional tours it is not my intention just now to 
 enter. I shall only stay to say a few words 
 about the character and quality of his readings. 
 That they were a success can readily be 
 accounted for. The mere desire to see and 
 hear Dickens, the great Dickens, the novelist 
 who was more than popular, who was the ob- 
 ject of real personal affection on the part of 
 the English-speaking race, — this would have 
 drawn a crowd at any time. But Dickens was 
 not the man to rely upon such sources of attrac- 
 tion, any more than an actress who is really an 
 actress will consent to rely exclusively on her 
 good looks. ' Whatever is worth doing at all 
 is worth doing well,' such as we have seen was 
 one of the governing principles of his life ; and 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 203 
 
 he read very well. Of nervousness there was 
 no trace in his composition. To some one who 
 asked him whether he ever felt any shyness as 
 a speaker, he answered, ' Not in the least ; the 
 first time I took the chair (at a public dinner) 
 I felt as much confidence as if I had done the 
 thing a hundred times.' This of course 
 helped him much as a reader, and gave him full 
 command over all his gifts. But the gifts 
 were also assiduously cultivated. He laboured, 
 one might almost say, agonized, to make him- 
 self a master of the art. Mr. Dolby, who acted 
 as his * manager,' during the tours undertaken 
 from 1866 to 1870, tells us that before produc- 
 ing Dr. Marigold, he not only gave a kind 
 of semi-public rehearsal, but had rehearsed it 
 to himself considerably over two hundred 
 times. Writing to Forster Dickens says : ' You 
 have no idea how I have worked at them [the 
 readings] ... I have tested all the seri- 
 ous passion in them by everything I know, 
 made the humorous points much more humor- 
 ous; corrected my utterance of certain 
 words; ... I learnt Dombey like the 
 rest, and did it to myself often twice a day, 
 with exactly the same pains as at night, over, 
 and over, and over again.' 
 
204 LIFE OF 
 
 The results justified the care and effort be- 
 stowed. There are, speaking generally, two 
 schools of readers: those who dramatize what 
 they read, and those who read simply, audibly, 
 with every attention to emphasis and point, 
 but with no effort to do more than slightly 
 indicate differences of personage or character. 
 To the latter school Thackeray belonged. He 
 read so as to be perfectly heard, and perfectly 
 understood, and so that the innate beauty of 
 his literary style might have full effect. 
 Dickens read quite differently. He read not 
 as a writer to whom style is everything, but as 
 an actor throwing himself into the world he 
 wishes to bring before his hearers. He was so 
 careless indeed of pure literature, in this par- 
 ticular matter, that he altered his books for the 
 readings, eliminating much of the narrative, 
 and emphasizing the dialogue. He was pre- 
 eminently the dramatic reader. Carlyle, who 
 had been dragged to Hanover Rooms, to 
 * the complete upsetting,* as he says, * of my 
 evening habitudes, and spiritual composure,' 
 was yet constrained to declare : * Dickens does 
 it capitally, such as it is; acts better than any 
 Macready in the world; a whole tragic, comic, 
 heroic, theatre visible, performing under one 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 205 
 
 hat, and keeping us laughing — in a sorry way, 
 some of us thought — the whole night. He is 
 a good creature, too, and makes fifty or sixty 
 pounds by each of these readings.' ' A whole 
 theatre ' — that is just the right expression 
 minted for us by the great coiner of phrases. 
 Dickens, by mere play of voice, for the ges- 
 tures were comparatively sober, placed before 
 you, on his imaginary stage, the men and 
 women he had created. There Dr. Marigold 
 pattered his cheap- jack phrases; and Mrs. 
 Gamp and Betsy Prig, with throats rendered 
 husky by much gin, had their memorable quar- 
 rel; and Sergeant Buzfuz bamboozled that 
 stupid jury; and Boots at the Swan told his 
 pretty tale of child elopement; and Fagin, in 
 his hoarse Jew whisper, urged Bill Sikes to his 
 last foul deed of murder. Ay me, in the great 
 hush of the past there are tones of the reader's 
 voice that still linger in my ears! I seem to 
 hear once more the agonized quick utterance 
 of poor Nancy, as she pleads for life, and the 
 dread stillness after the ruffian's cruel blows 
 have fallen on her upturned face. Again 
 comes back to me the break in Bob Cratchit's 
 voice, as he speaks of the death of Tiny Tim. 
 As of old I listen to poor little Chops, the 
 
206 LIFE OF 
 
 dwarf, declaring, very piteously, that his ' fash- 
 ionable friends ' don't use him well, and put 
 him on the mantel-piece when he refuses to 
 * have in more champagne-wine,' and lock him 
 in the sideboard when he ' won't give up his 
 property.' And I see — ^yes, I declare I see, 
 as I saw when Dickens was reading, such was 
 the illusion of voice and gesture — that dying 
 flame of Scrooge's fire, which leaped up when 
 Marley's ghost came in, and then fell again. 
 Nor can I forbear to mention, among these 
 reminiscences, that there is also a passage in 
 one of Thackeray's lectures that is still in my 
 ears as on the evening when I heard it. It is 
 a passage in which he spoke of the love that 
 children had for the works of his more popular 
 rival, and told how his own children would 
 come to him and ask, ' Why don't you write 
 books like Mr. Dickens | ' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 207 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 GHANCERY had occupied a prominent 
 place in Bleak House. Philosophical 
 radicalism occupied the same kind of 
 position in Hard Times, which was commenced 
 in the number of Household Words for the 1st 
 of April, 1854. The book, when afterwards 
 published in a complete form, bore a dedica- 
 tion to Carlyle ; and very fittingly so, for much 
 of its philosophy is his. Dickens, like Kings- 
 ley, and like Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude, and 
 so many other men of genius and ability, had 
 come under the influence of the old Chelsea 
 sage.^ And what are the ideas which Hard 
 Times is thus intended to popularize? These: 
 that men are not merely intellectual calculating 
 machines, with reason and self-interest for 
 motive power, but creatures possessing also 
 afl'ections, feelings, fancy — a whole world of 
 emotions that lie outside the ken of the older 
 
 ^ Dickens did not accept the whole Carlyle creed. He 
 retained a sort of belief in the collective wisdom of the 
 people^ which Carlyle certainly did not share. 
 
208 LIFE OF 
 
 school of political economists. Therefore, to 
 imagine that they can live and flourish on facts 
 alone is a fallacy and pernicious ; as is also the 
 notion that any human relations can be perma- 
 nently established on a basis of pure supply 
 and demand. If we add to this an unlimited 
 contempt for Parliament, as a place where the 
 national dustmen are continually stirring the 
 national dust to no purpose at all, why then we 
 are pretty well advanced in the philosophy of 
 Carlyle. And how does Dickens illustrate 
 these points? We are at Coketown, a place, 
 as its name implies, of smoke and manufacture. 
 Here lives and flourishes Thomas Gradgrind, 
 ' a man of realities ; a man of facts and calcu- 
 lations ' ; not essentially a bad man, but bound 
 in an iron system as in a vice. He brings up 
 his children on knowledge and enlightened 
 self-interest exclusively; and the boy becomes 
 a cub and a mean thief, and the girl marries, 
 quite without love, a certain blustering Mr. 
 Bounderby, and is as nearly as possible led 
 astray by the first person who approaches her 
 with the language of gallantry and sentiment. 
 Mr. Bounderby, her husband, is, one may add, 
 a man who, in mere lying bounce, makes out 
 his humble origin to be more humble than it is. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 209 
 
 On the other side of the picture are Mr. Sleary 
 and his circus troupe; and Cissy Jupe, the 
 daughter of the clown; and the almost saintly 
 figures of Stephen Blackpool, and Rachel, a 
 working man and a working woman. With 
 these people facts are as naught, and self- 
 interest as dust in the balance. Mr. Sleary has 
 a heart which no brandy-and-water can harden, 
 and he enables Mr. Gradgrind to send off the 
 wretched cub to America, refusing any guer- 
 don but a glass of his favourite beverage. 
 The circus troupe are kindly, simple, loving 
 folk. Cissy Jupe proves the angel of the 
 Gradgrind household. Stephen is the victim 
 of unjust persecution on the part of his own 
 class, is suspected, by young Gradgrind's 
 machinations, of the theft committed by that 
 young scoundrel, falls into a disused pit as he 
 is coming to vindicate his character, and only 
 lives long enough to forgive his wrongs, and 
 clasp in death the hand of Rachel — a hand 
 which in life could not be his, as he had a wife 
 alive who was a drunkard and worse. A 
 marked contrast, is it not? On one side all 
 darkness, and on the other all light. The 
 demons of fact and self-interest opposed to 
 the angels of fancy and unselfishness. A con- 
 
210 LIFE OF 
 
 trast too violent unquestionably. Exaggera- 
 tion is the fault of the novel. One may at once 
 allow, for instance, that Rachel and Stephen, 
 though human nature in its infinite capacity 
 may include such characters, are scarcely a 
 typical working woman and working man. 
 But then neither, heaven be praised, are Cou- 
 peau the sot, and Gervaise the drab, in M. 
 Zola's Drink — and, for my part, I think 
 Rachel and Stephen the better company. 
 
 * Sullen socialism ' — such is Macaulay's view 
 of the political philosophy of Hard Times. 
 * Entirely right in main drift and purpose ' — 
 such is the verdict of Mr. Ruskin. Who shall 
 decide between the two? or, if a decision be 
 necessary, then I would venture to say, yes, 
 entirely right in feeling. Dickens is right in 
 sympathy for those who toil and suffer, right 
 in desire to make their lives more human and 
 beautiful, right in belief that the same human 
 heart beats below all class distinctions. But, 
 beyond this, a novelist only, not a philosopher, 
 not fitted to grapple effectively with complex 
 social and political problems, and to solve them 
 to right conclusions. There are some things 
 unfortunately which even the best and kindest 
 instincts cannot accomplish. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 211 
 
 The last chapter of Hard Times appeared 
 in the number of Household Words for the 
 12th of August, 1854, and the first number of 
 Little Dorrit came out at Christmas, 1855. 
 Between these dates a great war had waxed 
 and waned. The heart of England had been 
 terribly moved by the story of the sufferings 
 and privations which the army had had to 
 undergo amid the snows of a Russian winter. 
 From the trenches before Sebastopol the news- 
 paper correspondents had sent terrible ac- 
 counts of death and disease, and of ills which, 
 as there seemed room for suspicion, might 
 have been prevented by better management. 
 Through long disuse the army had rusted in 
 its scabbard, and everything seemed to go 
 wrong but the courage of officers and men. 
 A great demand arose for reform in the whole 
 administration of the country. A movement, 
 now much forgotten, though not fruitless at 
 the time, was started for the purpose of making 
 the civil service more efficient, and putting 
 John Bull's house in order. ' Administrative 
 Reform,' such was the cry of the moment, and 
 Dickens uttered it with the full strength of his 
 lungs. He attended a great meeting held at 
 Drury Lane Theatre on the 27th of June, in 
 
212 LIFE OF 
 
 furtherance of the cause, and made what he 
 declared to be his first political speech. He 
 spoke on the subject again at the dinner of the 
 Theatrical Fund. He urged on his friends in 
 the press to the attack. He was in the fore- 
 front of the battle. And when his next novel, 
 Little Dorritj appeared, there was the Civil 
 Service, like a sort of gibbeted Punch, execut- 
 ing the strangest antics. 
 
 But the * Circumlocution Office,* where the 
 clerks sit lazily devising all day long ' how not 
 to do ' the business of the country, and devote 
 their energies alternately to marmalade and 
 general insolence, — the * Circumlocution Of- 
 fice ' occupies after all only a secondary posi- 
 tion in the book. The main interest of it cir- 
 cles round the place that had at one time been 
 almost a home to Dickens. Again he drew 
 upon his earlier experiences. We are once 
 more introduced into a debtor's prison. Lit- 
 tle Dorrit is the child of the Marshalsea, born 
 and bred within its walls, the sole thing living 
 about the place on which its taint does not fall. 
 Her worthless brother, her sister, her father — 
 who is not only her father, but the ' father of 
 the Marshalsea ' — ^the prison blight is on all 
 three. Her father especially is a piece of 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 213 
 
 admirable character-drawing. Dickens has 
 often been accused of only catching the sur- 
 face peculiarities of his personages, their out- 
 ward tricks and obvious habits of speech and 
 of mind. Such a study as Mr. Dorrit would 
 alone be sufficient to rebut the charge. No 
 novelist specially famed for dissecting charac- 
 ter to its innermost recesses could exhibit a finer 
 piece of mental analysis. We follow the poor 
 weak creature's deterioration from the time 
 when the helpless muddle in his affairs brings 
 him into durance. We note how his sneaking 
 pride seems to feed even on the garbage of his 
 degradation. We see how little inward change 
 there is in the man himself when there comes 
 a transformation scene in his fortunes, and 
 he leaves the Marshalsea wealthy and prosper- 
 ous. It is all thoroughly worked out, perfect, 
 a piece of really great art. No wonder that 
 Mr. Clennam pities the child of such a father; 
 indeed, considering what a really admirable 
 woman she is, one only wonders that his pity 
 does not sooner turn to love. 
 
 Little Dorrit ran its course from December, 
 1855, to June, 1857, and within that space of 
 time there occurred two or three incidents in 
 Dickens's career which should not pass unno- 
 
214 LIFE OF 
 
 ticed. At the first of these dates he was in 
 Paris, where he remained till the middle of 
 May, 1856, greatly feted by the French world 
 of letters and art; dining hither and thither; 
 now enjoying an Arabian Nights sort of ban- 
 quet given by Emile de Girardin, the popular 
 journalist; now meeting George Sand, the 
 great novelist, whom he describes as ' just the 
 sort of woman in appearance whom you might 
 suppose to be the queen's monthly nurse — 
 chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed ' ; then 
 studying French art, and contrasting it with 
 English art, somewhat to the disadvantage of 
 the latter; anon superintending the translation 
 of his works into French, and working hard 
 at Little Dorrit; and all the while frequenting 
 the Paris theatres with great assiduity and 
 admiration. Meanwhile, too, on the 14th of 
 March, 1856, a Friday, his lucky day as he con- 
 sidered it, he had written a cheque for the pur- 
 chase of Gad's Hill Place, at which he had so 
 often looked when a little lad, living penuri- 
 ously at Chatham — the house which it had been 
 the object of his childish ambition to win for 
 his own. 
 
 So had merit proved to be not without its 
 visible prize, literally a prize for good conduct. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 215 
 
 He took possession of the house in the follow- 
 ing February, and turned workmen into it, 
 and finished Little Dorrit there. At first the 
 purchase was intended mainly as an invest- 
 ment, and he only purposed to spend some por- 
 tion of his time at Gad's Hill, letting it at 
 other periods, and so recouping himself for the 
 interest on the 1790Z. which it had cost, and for 
 the further sums which he expended on im- 
 provements. But as time went on it became 
 his hobby, the love of his advancing years. 
 He beautified here and beautified there, built a 
 new drawing-room, added bedrooms, con- 
 structed a tunnel under the road, erected in the 
 ' wilderness ' on the other side of the road a 
 Swiss chalet, which had been presented to him 
 by Fechter, the French-English actor, and in 
 short indulged in all the thousand and one 
 vagaries of a proprietor who is enamoured of 
 his property. The matter seems to have been 
 one of the family jokes; and when, on the 
 Sunday before his death, he showed the con- 
 servatory to his younger daughter, and said, 
 ' Well, Katey, now you see positively the last 
 improvement at Gad's Hill,' there was a gen- 
 eral laugh. But this is far on in the story; 
 and very long before the building of the con- 
 
216 LIFE OF 
 
 servatory, long indeed before the main other 
 changes had been made, the idea of an in- 
 vestment had been abandoned. In 1860 he 
 sold Tavistock House, in London, and made 
 Gad's Hill Place his final home. 
 
 Even here, however, I am anticipating; for 
 before getting to 1860 there is in Dickens's 
 history a page which one would willingly turn 
 over, if that were possible, in silence and sad- 
 ness. But it is not possible. No account of 
 his life would be complete, and what is of more 
 importance, true, if it made no mention of his 
 relations with his wife. 
 
 For some time before 1858 Dickens had 
 been in an over-excited, nervous, morbid state. 
 During earlier manhood his animal spirits and 
 fresh energy had been superb. Now, as the 
 years advanced, and especially at this particu- 
 lar time, the energy was the same; but it was 
 accompanied by something of feverishness 
 and disease. He could not be quiet. In the 
 autumn of 1857 he wrote to Forster, ' I have 
 now no relief but in action. I am become in- 
 capable of rest. I am quite confident I should 
 rust, break, and die if I spared myself. Much 
 better to die doing.' And again, a little later, 
 ' If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 217 
 
 explode and perish.' It was the foreshadowing 
 of such utterances as these, and the constant 
 wanderings to and fro for readings and 
 theatricals and what not, that led Harriet Mar- 
 tineau, who had known and greatly liked 
 Dickens, to say after perusing the second vol- 
 ume of his life, ' I am much struck by his hys- 
 terical restlessness. It must have been terribly 
 wearing to his wife.' On the other hand, there 
 can be no manner of doubt that his wife wore 
 7iim. ' Why is it,' he had said to Forster in 
 one of the letters from which I have just 
 quoted, 'that, as with poor David (Copper- 
 field), a sense comes always crushing on me 
 now, when I fall into low spirits, as of one 
 happiness I have missed in life, and one friend 
 and .companion I have never made? ' And 
 again : ' I find that the skeleton in my domes- 
 tic closet is becoming a pretty big one.' Then 
 come even sadder confidences : ' Poor Cather- 
 ine and I are not made for each other, and 
 there is no help for it. It is not only that she 
 makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I 
 make her so too, and much more so. She is 
 exactly what you know in the way of being 
 amiable and complying, but we are strangely 
 ill-assorted for the bond there is between 
 
218 LIFE OF 
 
 us. . . . Her temperament will not go with 
 mine.' And at last, in March, 1858, two 
 months before the end: * It is not with me a 
 matter of will, or trial, or sufferance, or good 
 humour, or making the best of it, or making 
 the worst of it, any longer. It is all despair- 
 ingly over.' So, after living together for 
 twenty years, these two went their several 
 ways in May, 1858. Dickens allowed to his 
 wife an income of 600Z. a year, and the eldest 
 son went to live with her. The other children 
 and their aunt, Miss Hogarth, remained with 
 Dickens himself. 
 
 Scandal has not only a poisonous, but a busy 
 tongue, and when a well-known public man 
 and his wife agree to live apart, the beldame 
 seldom neglects to give her special version of 
 the affair. So it happened here. Some miser- 
 able rumour was whispered about to the detri- 
 ment of Dickens's morals. He was at the 
 time, as we have seen, in an utterly morbid, 
 excited state, sore doubtless with himself, and 
 altogether out of mental condition, and the lie 
 stung him almost to madness. He published 
 an article branding it as it deserved in the num- 
 ber of Household Words for the 12th of June, 
 1858. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 219 
 
 So far his course of action was justifiable. 
 Granted that it was judicious to notice the 
 rumour at all, and to make his private affairs 
 the matter of public comment, then there was 
 nothing in the terms of the article to which 
 objection could be taken. It contained no re- 
 flection of any kind on Mrs. Dickens. It was 
 merely an honest man's indignant protest 
 against an anonymous libel which implicated 
 others as well as himself. Whether the publi- 
 cation, however, was judicious is a different 
 matter. Forster thinks not. He holds that 
 Dickens had altogether exaggerated the pub- 
 lic importance of the rumour, and the extent 
 of its circulation. And this, according to my 
 own recollection, is entirely true. I was a lad 
 at the time, but a great lover of Dickens's 
 works, as most lads then were, and I well re- 
 member the feeling of surprise and regret 
 which that article created among us of the 
 general public. At the same time, it is only 
 fair to Dickens to recollect that the lying story 
 was, at least, so far fraught with danger to 
 his reputation, that Mrs. Dickens would seem 
 for a time to have believed it ; and further, that 
 Dickens occupied a very peculiar position to- 
 wards the public, and a position that might 
 
220 LIFE OF 
 
 well iri his own estimation, and even in ours, 
 give singular importance to the general belief 
 in his personal character. 
 
 This point will bear dwelling upon. Dickens 
 claimed, and claimed truly, that the relation 
 between himself and the public was one of 
 exceptional sympathy and affection. Perhaps 
 an illustration will best show what that kind 
 of relationship was. Thackeray tells of two 
 ladies with whom he had, at different times, 
 discussed The Christmas Carol, and how each 
 had concluded by saying of the author, ' God 
 bless him ! ' God bless him ! — that was the sort 
 of feeling towards himself which Dickens had 
 succeeded in producing in most English hearts. 
 He had appealed from the first and so con- 
 stantly to every kind and gentle emotion, had 
 illustrated so often what is good and true in 
 human character, had pleaded the cause of the 
 weak and suffering with such assiduity, had 
 been so scathingly indignant at all wrong ; and 
 he had moreover shown such a manly and 
 chivalrous purity in all his utterances with re- 
 gard to women, that his readers felt for him a 
 kind of personal tenderness, quite distinct 
 from their mere admiration for his genius as 
 a writer. Nor was that feeling based on his 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 221 
 
 books alone. So far as one could learn at the 
 time, no great dissimilarity existed between 
 the author and the man. We all remember 
 Byron's corrosive remark on the sentimentalist 
 Sterne, that he ' whined over a dead ass, and 
 allowed his mother to die of hunger.* But 
 Dickens's feelings were by no means confined 
 to his pen. He was known to be a good father 
 and a good friend, and of perfect truth and 
 honesty. The kindly tolerance for the frailties 
 of a father or brother which he admired in Lit- 
 tle Dorrit, he was ready to extend to his own 
 father and his own brother. He was most 
 assiduous in the prosecution of his craft as a 
 wi'iter, and yet had time and leisure of heart at 
 command for all kinds of good and charitable 
 work. His private character had so far stood 
 above all floating cloud of suspicion. 
 
 That Dickens felt an honourable pride in the 
 general affection he inspired, can readily be 
 understood. He also felt, even more honour- 
 ably, its great responsibility. He knew that 
 his books and he himself were a power for 
 good, and he foresaw how greatly his in- 
 fluence would suffer if a suspicion of hypoc- 
 risy — the vice at which he had always girded — 
 were to taint his reputation. Here, for in- 
 
222 LIFE OF 
 
 stance, in Little Dorrit, the work written in 
 the thick of his home troubles, he had written 
 of Clennam as ' a man who had, deep-rooted 
 in his nature, a behef in all the gentle and good 
 things his life had been without,' and had 
 shown how this belief had * saved Clennam 
 still from the whimpering weakness and cruel 
 selfishness of holding that because such a hap- 
 piness or such a virtue had not come into his 
 little path, or worked well for him, therefore 
 it was not in the great scheme, but was re- 
 ducible, when found in appearance, to the 
 basest elements.' A touching utterance if it 
 expressed the real feeling of a writer sorely 
 disappointed and in great trouble; but an 
 utterance moving rather to contempt if it came 
 from a writer who had transferred his affec- 
 tions from his wife to some other woman. I 
 do not wonder, therefore, that Dickens, excited 
 and exasperated, spoke out, though I think 
 it would have been better if he had kept 
 silence. 
 
 But he did other things that were not jus- 
 tifiable. He quarrelled with Messrs. Brad- 
 bury and Evans, his publishers, because they 
 did not use their influence to get Punchy a 
 periodical in which Dickens had no interest. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 223 
 
 to publish the personal statement that had 
 appeared in Household Words; and worse, 
 much worse, he wrote a letter, which ought 
 never to have been written, detailing the 
 grounds on which he and his wife had sepa- 
 rated. This letter, dated the 28th of May, 
 1858, was addressed to his secretary, Arthur 
 Smith, and was to be shown to any one in- 
 terested. Arthur Smith showed it to the Lon- 
 don correspondent of The New York Tribune, 
 who naturally caused it to be published in that 
 paper. Then Dickens was horrified. He was 
 a man of far too high and chivalrous feeling 
 not to know that the letter contained statements 
 with regard to his wife's failings which ought 
 never to have been made public. He knew as 
 well as any one, that a literary man ought not 
 to take the world into his confidence on such 
 a subject. Ever afterwards he referred to the 
 letter as his ' violated letter.' But, in truth, 
 the wrong went deeper than the publication. 
 The letter should never have been written, 
 certainly never sent to Arthur Smith for gen- 
 eral perusal. Dickens's only excuse is the fact 
 that he was clearly not himself at the time, 
 and that he never fell into a like error again. 
 It is, however, sad to notice how entirely his 
 
224 LIFE OF 
 
 wife seems to have passed out of his affection. 
 The reference to her in his will is almost 
 unkind; and when death was on him she 
 seems not to have been summoned to his 
 bedside. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 225 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 OICKENS'S career as a reader reading 
 for money commenced on the 29th of 
 April, 1858, while the trouble about 
 his wife was at the thickest; and, after 
 reading in London on sixteen nights, he 
 made a reading tour in the provinces, and in 
 Scotland and Ireland. In the following year 
 he read likewise. But meanwhile, which is 
 more important to us than his readings, he was 
 writing another book. On the 30th of April, 
 1859, in the first number of All the Year 
 Rounds was begun The Tale of Two Cities, 
 a simultaneous publication in monthly parts 
 being also commenced. 
 
 The Tale of Two Cities is a tale of the great 
 French Revolution of 1793, and the two cities 
 in question are London and Paris, — London 
 as it lay comparatively at peace in the days 
 when George III. was king, and Paris run- 
 ning blood and writhing in the fierce fire of 
 
 ^ His foolish quarrel with Bradbury and Evans had 
 necessitated the abandonment of Household Words. 
 
226 LIFE OF 
 
 anarchy and mob rule. A powerful book, un- 
 questionably. No doubt there is in its heat and 
 glare a reflection from Carlyle's French Revo- 
 lution, a book for which Dickens had the great- 
 est admiration. But that need not be regarded 
 as a demerit. Dickens is no pale copyist, and 
 adds fervour to what he borrows. His pic- 
 tures of Paris in revolution are as fine as the 
 London scenes in Barnahy Rudge; and the 
 interweaving of the story with public events 
 is even better managed in the later book than 
 in the earlier story of the Gordon riots. And 
 the story, what does it tell? It tells of a cer- 
 tain Dr. Manette, who, after long years of 
 imprisonment in the Bastile, is restored to his 
 daughter in London; and of a young French 
 noble, who has assumed the name of Darnay, 
 and left France in horror of the doings of his 
 order, and who marries Dr. JVIanette's daugh- 
 ter; and of a young English barrister, able 
 enough in his profession, but careless of per- 
 sonal success, and much addicted to port wine, 
 and bearing a striking personal resemblance to 
 the young French noble. These persons, and 
 others, being drawn to Paris by various strong 
 inducements, Darnay is condemned to death 
 as a ci-devant noble, and the ne'er-do-weel bar- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 227 
 
 rister, out of the great pure love he bears to 
 Darnay's wife, succeeds in dying for him. 
 That is the tale's bare outline; and if any one 
 says of the book that it is in parts melodra- 
 matic, one may fitly answer that never was any 
 portion of the world's history such a thorough 
 piece of melodrama as the French Revo- 
 lution. 
 
 With The Tale of Two Cities Hablot K. 
 Browne's connection with Dickens, as the illus- 
 trator of his books, came to an end. The 
 Sketches had been illustrated by Cruikshank, 
 who was the great popular illustrator of the 
 time, and it is amusing to read, in the preface 
 to the first edition of the first series, pub- 
 lished in 1836, how the trembling young 
 author placed himself, as it were, under the 
 protection of the ' well-known individual who 
 had frequently contributed to the success of 
 similar undertakings.' Cruikshank also illus- 
 trated Oliver Twist; and indeed, with an arro- 
 gance which unfortunately is not incompatible 
 with genius, afterwards set up a rather pre- 
 posterous claim to have been the real originator 
 of that book, declaring that he had worked 
 out the story in a series of etchings, and that 
 Dickens had illustrated hirrij and not he 
 
228 LIFE OF 
 
 Dickens.^ But apart from the drawings for 
 the Sketches and Oliver Twist, and the first 
 few drawings by Seymour and two drawings 
 by Buss ^ in Pickwick, and some drawings by 
 Cattermole in Master Humphrey's Clock, and 
 by Samuel Palmer in the Pictures from Italy, 
 and by various hands in the Christmas stories 
 — apart from these, Browne, or ' Phiz,' had 
 executed the illustrations to Dickens's novels. 
 Nor, with all my admiration for certain excel- 
 lent qualities which his work undeniably pos- 
 sessed, do I think that this was altogether a 
 good thing. Such, I know, is not a popular 
 opinion. But I confess I am unable to agree 
 with those critics who, from their remarks on 
 the recent jubilee edition of Pickwick, seem 
 to think his illustrations sp pre-eminently fine 
 that they should be permanently associated 
 with Dickens's stories. The editor of that 
 edition was, in my view, quite right in treating 
 Browne's illustrations as practically obsolete. 
 
 2 See his pamphlet, The Artist and the Author. 
 The matter is fully discussed in his life by Mr. Blan- 
 chard Jerrold. 
 
 * Buss's illustrations were executed under great dis- 
 advantages, and are bad. Those of Seymour are ex- 
 cellent. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 229 
 
 The value of Dickens's works is perennial, and 
 Browne's illustrations represent the art fashion 
 of a time only. So, too, I am unable to see 
 any great cause to regret that Cruikshank's 
 artistic connection with Dickens came to an 
 end so soon.* For both Browne and Cruik- 
 shank were pre-eminently caricaturists, and 
 caricaturists of an old school. The latter had 
 no idea of beauty. His art, very great art in 
 its way, was that of grotesqueness and exag- 
 geration. He never drew a lady or gentleman 
 in his life. And though Browne, in my view 
 much the lesser artist, was superior in these 
 respects to Cruikshank, yet he too drew the 
 most hideous Pecksniffs, and Tom Pinches, 
 and Joey B.'s, and a whole host of characters 
 quite unreal and absurd. The mischief of it 
 is, too, that Dickens's humour will not bear 
 caricaturing. The defect of his own art as a 
 writer is that it verges itself too often on cari- 
 cature. Exaggeration is its bane. When, for 
 instance, he makes the rich alderman in The 
 Chimes eat up poor Trotty Veck's little last 
 tit-bit of tripe, we are clearly in the region of 
 broad farce. When Mr. Pancks, in Little 
 
 * I am always sorry, however^ that Cruikshank did not 
 illustrate the Christmas stories. 
 
230 LIFE OF 
 
 Dorritj so far abandons the ordinary ways of 
 mature rent collectors as to ask a respectable 
 old accountant to * give him a back/ in the 
 Marshalsea court, and leaps over his head, we 
 are obviously in a world of pantomime. 
 Dickens's comic effects are generally quite 
 forced enough, and should never be further 
 forced when translated into the sister art of 
 drawing. Rather, if anything, should they 
 be attenuated. But unfortunately exaggera- 
 tion happened to be inherent in the draftsman- 
 ship of both Cruikshank and Browne. And, 
 having said this, I may as well finish with the 
 subject of the illustrations to Dickens's books. 
 Our Mutual Friend was illustrated by Mr. 
 Marcus Stone, R.A., then a rising young art- 
 ist, and the son of Dickens's old friend, Frank 
 Stone. Here the designs fall into the opposite 
 defect. They are, some of them, pretty 
 enough, but they want character. Mr. Fildes's 
 pictures for Edwin Drood are a decided im- 
 provement. As to the illustrations for the 
 later * Household Edition,' they are very in- 
 ferior. The designs for a great many are 
 clearly bad, and the mechanical execution 
 almost uniformly so. Even Mr. Barnard's 
 skill has had no fair chance against poor wood- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 231 
 
 cutting, careless engraving, and inferior pa- 
 per. And this is the more to be regretted, in 
 that Mr. Barnard, by natural affinity of talent, 
 has, to my thinking, done some of the best art 
 work that has been done at all in connection 
 with Dickens. His Character Sketches, espe- 
 cially the lithographed series, are admirable. 
 The Jingle is a masterpiece; but all are good, 
 and he even succeeds in making something pic- 
 torially acceptable of Little Nell and Little 
 Dorrit. 
 
 Just a year, almost to a day, elapsed between 
 the conclusion of The Tale of Two Cities, and 
 the commencement of Great Expectations. 
 The last chapter of the former appeared in the 
 number of All the Year Round for the 26th of 
 November, 1859, and the first chapter of the 
 latter in the number of the same periodical for 
 the 1st of December, 1860. Poor Pip — for 
 such is the name of the hero of the book — poor 
 Pip, I think he is to be pitied. Certainly he 
 lays himself open to the charge of snobbish- 
 ness, and is unduly ashamed of his connections. 
 But then circumstances were decidedly against 
 him. Through some occult means he is re- 
 moved from his natural sphere, from the care 
 of his ' rampageous ' sister, and of her bus- 
 
232 LIFE OF 
 
 band, the good, kind, honest Joe, and taken up 
 to London, and brought up as a gentleman, 
 and started in chambers in Barnard's Inn. All 
 this is done through the instrumentality of 
 Mr. Jaggers, a barrister in highest repute 
 among the criminal brotherhood. But Pip not 
 unnaturally thinks that his unknown benefac- 
 tress is a certain Miss Havisham, who, having 
 been bitterly wronged in her love affairs, lives 
 in eccentric fashion near his native place, amid 
 the mouldering mementoes of her wedding 
 day. What is his horror when he finds that his 
 education, comfort, and prospects have no 
 more reputable foundation than the bounty of 
 a murderous criminal called Magwitch, who 
 has showered all these benefits upon him from 
 the antipodes, in return for the gift of food 
 and a file when he, Magwitch, was trying to 
 escape from the hulks, and Pip was a little lad. 
 Magwitch, the transported convict, comes back 
 to England, at the peril of his life, to make 
 himself known to Pip, and to have the pleasure 
 of looking at that young gentleman. He is 
 again tracked by the police, and caught, not- 
 withstanding Pip's efforts to get him off, and 
 dies in prison. Pip ultimately, very ultimately, 
 marries a young lady oddly brought up by the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 233 
 
 queer Miss Havisham, and who turns out to 
 be IVIagwitch's daughter. 
 
 Such, as I have had occasion to say before 
 in speaking of similar analyses, such are the 
 dry bones of the story. Pip's character is well 
 drawn. So is that of Joe. And Mr. Jaggers, 
 the criminal's friend, and his clerk, Wemmick, 
 are striking and full of a grim humour. Miss 
 Havisham and her protegee, Estella, whom she 
 educates to be the scourge of men, belong to 
 what may be called the melodramatic side of 
 Dickens's art. They take their place with Mrs. 
 Dombey and with Miss Dartle in David Cop- 
 perfield, and JSIiss Wade in Little Dorrit — fe- 
 male characters of a fantastic and haughty 
 type, and quite devoid, Miss Dartle and Miss 
 Wade especially, of either verisimilitude or the 
 milk of human kindness. 
 
 Great Expectations was completed in Au- 
 gust, 1861, and the first number of Our Mutual 
 Friend appeared in May, 1864. This was an 
 unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty 
 of invention was beginning to lose its fresh 
 spring and spontaneity. And besides he had 
 not been idle. Though writing no novel, he 
 had been busy enough with readings, and his 
 work on All the Year Round. He had also 
 
234 LIFE OF 
 
 written a short, but very graceful paper ^ on 
 Thackeray, whose death, on the Christmas 
 Eve of 1863, had greatly affected him. Now, 
 however, he again braced himself for one of 
 his greater efforts. 
 
 Scarcely, I think, as all will agree, with the 
 old success. In Our Mutual Friend he is not 
 at his best. It is a strange complicated story 
 that seems to have some difficulty in unravel- 
 ling itself: the story of a man who pretends 
 to be dead in order that he may, under a 
 changed name, investigate the character and 
 eligibility of the young woman whom an 
 erratic father has destined to be his bride; a 
 golden-hearted old dust contractor, who hides 
 a will that will give him all that erratic father's 
 property, and disinherit the man aforesaid, 
 and who, to crown his virtues, pretends to be 
 a miser in order to teach the young woman, 
 also aforesaid, how bad it is to be mercenary, 
 and to induce her to marry the unrecognized 
 and seemingly penniless son; their marriage 
 accordingly, with ultimate result that the 
 bridegroom turns out to be no poor clerk, but 
 the original heir, who, of course, is not dead, 
 and is the inheritor of thousands; subsidiary 
 
 ^ See Cornhill Magazine for February, 1 864. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 235 
 
 groups of characters, one among which I think 
 rather uninteresting, of some brand-new peo- 
 ple called the Veneerings and their acquain- 
 tances, for they have no friends ; and some fine 
 sketches of the river-side population; striking 
 and amusing characters too — Silas Wegg, the 
 scoundrelly vendor of songs, who ferrets 
 among the dust for wills in order to confound 
 the good dustman, his benefactor; and the lit- 
 tle deformed dolls' dressmaker, with her sot of 
 a father; and Betty Higden, the sturdy old 
 woman who has determined neither in life nor 
 death to suffer the pollution of the workhouse ; 
 such, with more added, are the ingredients of 
 the story. 
 
 One episode, however, deserves longer com- 
 ment. It is briefly this: Eugene Wrayburn 
 is a young barrister of good family and educa- 
 tion, and of excellent abilities and address, all 
 gifts that he has turned to no creditable pur- 
 pose whatever. He falls in with a girl, Lizzie 
 Hexham, of more than humble rank, but of 
 great beauty and good character. She inter- 
 ests him, and in mere wanton carelessness, for 
 he certainly has no idea of offering marriage, 
 he gains her affection, neither meaning, in any 
 definite way, to do anything good nor anything 
 
236 LIFE OF 
 
 bad with it. There is another man who loves 
 Lizzie, a schoohnaster, who, in his dull, plod- 
 ding way, has made the best of his intellect, 
 and risen in life. He naturally, and we may 
 say properly, for no good can come of them, 
 resents Wrayburn's attentions, as does the 
 girl's biother. Wrayburn uses the superior 
 advantages of his position to insult them in the 
 most offensive and brutal manner, and to tor- 
 ture the schoolmaster, just as he has used those 
 advantages to win the girl's heart. Where- 
 upon, after being goaded to heart's desire for 
 a considerable time, the schoolmaster as nearly 
 as possible beats out Wrayburn's life, and 
 commits suicide. Wrayburn is rescued by 
 Lizzie as he lies by the river bank sweltering 
 in blood, and tended by her, and they are mar- 
 ried and live happy ever afterwards. 
 
 Now the amazing part of this story is, that 
 Dickens's sympathies throughout are with 
 Wrayburn. How this comes to be so I confess 
 I do not know. To me Wrayburn's conduct 
 appears to be heartless, cruel, unmanly, and the 
 use of his superior social position against the 
 schoolmaster to be like a foul blow, and quite 
 unworthy of a gentleman. Schoolmasters 
 ought not to beat people about the head, de- 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 237 
 
 cidedly. But if Wrayburn's thoughts took a 
 right course during convalescence, I think he 
 may have reflected that he deserved his beating, 
 and also that the woman whose affection he 
 had won was a great deal too good for him. 
 
 Dickens's misplaced sympathy in this par- 
 ticular story has, I repeat, always struck me 
 with amazement. Usually his sympathies are 
 so entirely right. Nothing is more common 
 than to hear the accusation of vulgarity made 
 against his books. A certain class of people 
 seem to think, most mistakenly, that because 
 he so often wrote about vulgar people, uned- 
 ucated people, people in the lower ranks 
 of society, therefore his writing was vulgar, 
 nay more, he himself vulgar too. Such an 
 opinion can only be based on a strange con- 
 fusion between subject and treatment. There 
 is scarcely any subject not tainted by impurity, 
 that cannot be treated with entire refinement. 
 Washington Irving wrote to Dickens, most 
 justly, of ' that exquisite tact that enabled him 
 to carry his reader through the veriest dens of 
 vice and villainy withoi^t a breath to shock the 
 ear or a stain to sully the robe of the most 
 shrinking delicacy ' ; and added : ' It is a rare 
 gift to be able to paint low life without being 
 
238 LIFE OF 
 
 low, and to be comic without the least taint 
 of vulgarity.' This is well said; and if we 
 look for the main secret of the inherent refine- 
 ment of Dickens's books, we shall find it, I 
 think, in this : that he never intentionally pal- 
 tered with right and wrong. He would make 
 allowance for evil, would take pleasure in 
 showing that there were streaks of lingering 
 good in its blackness, would treat it kindly, 
 gently, humanly. But it always stood for evil, 
 and nothing else. He made no attempt by 
 cunning jugglery to change its seeming. He 
 had no sneaking affection for it. And there- 
 fore, I say again, his attachment to Eugene 
 Wrayburn has always struck me with surprise. 
 As regards Dickens's own refinement, I can- 
 not perhaps do better than quote the words of 
 Sir Arthur Helps, an excellent judge. ' He 
 was very refined in his conversation — at least, 
 what I call refined — for he was one of those 
 persons in whose society one is comfortable 
 from the certainty that they will never say any- 
 thing which can shock other people, or hurt 
 their feelings, be they ever so fastidious or 
 sensitive.* 
 
• CHARLES DICKENS 239 
 
 © 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 UT we are now, alas, nearing the point 
 where the * rapid ' of Dickens's Hfe 
 began to ' shoot to its fall.' The year 
 1865, during which he partly wrote Our Mu- 
 tual Friend, was a fatal one in his career. In 
 the month of February he had been very ill, 
 with an affection of the left foot, at first 
 thought to be merely local, but which really 
 pointed to serious mischief, and never after- 
 wards wholly left him. Then, on June 9th, 
 when returning from France, where he had 
 gone to recruit, he as nearly as possible lost 
 his life in a railway accident at Staplehurst. 
 A bridge had broken in ; some of the carriages 
 fell through, and were smashed; that in which 
 Dickens was, hung down the side of the chasm. 
 Of courage and presence of mind he never 
 showed any lack. They were evinced, on one 
 occasion, at the readings, when an alarm of fire 
 arose. They shone conspicuous here. He 
 quieted two ladies who were in the same com- 
 partment of the carriage; helped to extricate 
 
240 LIFE OF 
 
 them, and others from their perilous position; 
 gave such help as he could to the wounded and 
 dying; probably was the means of saving the 
 life of one man, whom he was the first to hear 
 faintly groaning under a heap of wreckage; 
 and then, as he tells in the ' postscript ' to the 
 book, scrambled back into the carriage to find 
 the crumpled MS. of a portion of Our Mutual 
 Friend} But even pluck is powerless to pre- 
 vent a ruinous shock to the nerves. Though 
 Dickens had done so manfully what he had to 
 do at the time, he never fully recovered from 
 the blow. His daughter tells us how he would 
 often, * when travelling home from London, 
 suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble 
 all over, clutch the arms of the railway car- 
 riage, large beads of perspiration standing on 
 his face, and suffer agonies of terror. . . . 
 He had . . . apparently no idea of our 
 presence.' And Mr. Dolby tells us also how 
 in travelling it was often necessary for him to 
 ward off such attacks by taking brandy. 
 Dickens had been failing before only too 
 surely ; and this accident, like a coward's blow, 
 struck him heavily as he fell. 
 
 ^ For his own graphic account of the accident, see his 
 Letters, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 241 
 
 But whether failing or stricken, he bated no 
 jot of energy or courage; nay, rather, as his 
 health grew weaker, did he redouble the pres- 
 sure of his work. I think there is a grandeur 
 in the story of the last five years of his life, 
 that dwarfs even the tale of his rapid and 
 splendid rise. It reads like some antique myth 
 of the Titans defying Jove's thunder. There 
 is about the man something indomitable and 
 heroic. He had, as we have seen, given a 
 series of readings in 1858-59; and he gave an- 
 other in the years 1861 to 1863 — successful 
 enough in a pecuniary sense, but through fail- 
 ure of business capacity on the part of the 
 manager, entailing on the reader himself a 
 great deal of anxiety and worry.^ Now, in 
 the spring of 1866, with his left foot giving 
 him unceasing trouble, and his nerves shat- 
 tered, and his heart in an abnormal state, he 
 accepted an offer from Messrs. Chappell to 
 read ' in England, Ireland, Scotland, and 
 Paris,' for 1500Z.^ and the payment of all ex- 
 penses, and then to give forty-two more read- 
 ings for 2500Z. Mr. Dolby, who accompanied 
 Dickens as business manager in this and the 
 
 ^ He computed that he had made 12^000/. by the two 
 first series of readir.g's. 
 
242 LIFE OF 
 
 remaining tours, has told their story in an in- 
 teresting volume.^ Of course the wear was 
 immense. The readings themselves involved 
 enormous fatigue to one who so identified him- 
 self with what he read, and, whose whole being 
 seemed to vibrate not only with the emotions 
 of the characters in his stories, but of the 
 audience. Then there was the weariness of 
 long railway journeys in all seasons and 
 weathers — journeys that at first must have 
 been rendered doubly tedious, as he could not 
 bear to travel by express trains. Yet, not- 
 withstanding failure of strength, notwith- 
 standing fatigue, his native gaiety and good 
 spirits smile like a gleam of winter sunlight 
 over the narrative. As he had been the bright- 
 est and most genial of companions in the old 
 holiday days when strolling about the country 
 with his actor-troupe, so now he was occasion- 
 ally as frolic as a boy, dancing a hornpipe in 
 the train for the amusement of his companions, 
 compounding bowls of punch in which he 
 shared but sparingly — for he was really con- 
 vivial only in idea — and always considerate 
 
 3 Charles Dickens as I Knew Him. By George 
 Dolby. Miss Dickens considers this ' the best and 
 truest picture of her father yet written.' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 243 
 
 and kindly towards his companions and de- 
 pendents. And mingled pathetically with all 
 this are confessions of pain, weariness, illness, 
 faintness, sleeplessness, internal bleeding, — all 
 bravely borne, and never for an instant suf- 
 fered to interfere with any business arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 But if the strain of the readings was too 
 heavy here at home, what was it likely to be 
 during a winter in America? Nevertheless he 
 determined, against all remonstrances, to go 
 thither. It would almost seem as if he felt that 
 the day of his life was waning, and that it was 
 his duty to gather in a golden harvest for those 
 he loved ere the night came on. So he sailed 
 for Boston once more on the 9th of November, 
 1867. The Americans, it must be said, be- 
 haved nobly. All the old grudges connected 
 with The American Notes, and Martin Chuz- 
 zlewitj sank into oblivion. The reception was 
 everywhere enthusiastic, the success of the 
 readings immense. Again and again people 
 waited all night, amid the rigours of an almost 
 arctic winter, in order to secure an opportunity 
 of purchasing tickets as soon as the ticket 
 office opened. There were enormous and in- 
 telligent audiences at Boston, New York, 
 
244 LIFE OF 
 
 Washington, Philadelphia — everywhere. The 
 sum which Dickens realized by the tour, 
 amounted to the splendid total of nearly 
 19,000Z. Nor, in this money triumph, did he 
 fail to excite his usual charm of personal fasci- 
 nation, though the public affection and en- 
 thusiasm were manifested in forms less 
 objectionable and offensive than of old. On 
 his birthday, the 7th of February, 1868, he 
 says, ' I couldn't help laughing at myself. . . ; 
 it was observed so much as though I were a 
 little boy.' Flowers, garlands were set about 
 his room; there were presents on his dinner- 
 table, and in the evening the hall where he read 
 was decorated by kindly unknown hands. Of 
 public and private entertainment he might 
 have had just as much as he chose. 
 
 But to this medal there was a terrible re- 
 verse. Travelling from New York to Boston, 
 just before Christmas, he took a most disas- 
 trous cold, which never left him so long as he 
 remained in the country. He was constantly 
 faint. He ate scarcely anything. He slept 
 very little. Latterly he was so lame, as 
 scarcely to be able to walk. Again and again 
 it seemed impossible that he should fulfil his 
 night's engagement. He was constantly so 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 245 
 
 exhausted at the conclusion of the reading, 
 that he had to lie down for twenty minutes or 
 half an hour, ' before he could undergo the 
 fatigue even of dressing.' Mr. Dolby lived 
 in daily fear lest he should break down alto- 
 gether. ' I used to steal into his room,' he 
 says, * at all hours of the night and early 
 morning, to see if he were awake, or in want 
 of anything; always though to find him wide 
 awake, and as cheerful and jovial as circum- 
 stances would admit — never in the least com- 
 plaining, and only reproaching me for not tak- 
 ing my night's rest.' ' Only a man of iron will 
 could have accomplished what he did,' says 
 Mr. Fields, who knew him well, and saw him 
 often during the tour. 
 
 In the first week of May, 1868, Dickens was 
 back in England, and soon again in the thick 
 of his work and play. Mr. Wills, the sub- 
 editor of All the Year Round, had met with an 
 accident. Dickens supplied his place. Chauncy 
 Hare Townshend had asked him to edit a 
 chaotic mass of religious lucubrations. He 
 toilfully edited them. Then, with the autumn, 
 the readings began again; — for it marks the 
 indomitable energy of the man that, even amid 
 the terrible physical trials incident to his tour 
 
246 LIFE OF 
 
 in America, he had agreed with Messrs. Chap- 
 pell, for a sum of 8000/.^ to give one hundred 
 more readings after his return. So in October 
 the old work began again, and he was here, 
 there, and everywhere, now reading at Man- 
 chester and Liverpool, now at Edinburgh and 
 Glasgow, anon coming back to read fitfully in 
 London, then off again to Ireland, or the 
 West of England. Nor is it necessary to say 
 that he spared himself not one whit. In order 
 to give novelty to these readings, which were 
 to be positively the last, he had laboriously got 
 up the scene of Nancy's murder, in Oliver 
 Twist, and persisted in giving it night after 
 night, though of all his readings it was the one 
 that exhausted him most terribly.* But of 
 course this could not last. The pain in his foot 
 * was always recurring at inconvenient and un- 
 expected moments,' says Mr. Dolby, and occa- 
 sionally the American cold caipe back too. In 
 February, in London, the foot was worse than 
 it had ever been, so bad that Sir Henry Thomp- 
 
 * Mr. Dolby remonstrated on this, and it was in con- 
 nection with a very slight show of temper on the oc- 
 casion that he says : 'In all my experiences with the 
 Chief that was the only time I ever heard him address 
 angry words to any one.' 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 247 
 
 son, and Mr. Beard, his medical adviser, 
 compelled him to postpone a reading. At 
 Edinburgh, a few days afterwards, Mr. 
 Syme, the eminent surgeon, strongly recom- 
 mended perfect rest. Still he battled on, but 
 ' with great personal suffering such as few 
 men could have endured.' Sleeplessness was 
 on him too. And still he fought on, deter- 
 mined, if it were physically possible, to fulfil 
 his engagement with Messrs. Chappell, and 
 complete the hundred nights. But it was not 
 to be. Symptoms set in that pointed alarm- 
 ingly towards paralysis of the left side. At 
 Preston, on the 22d of April, Mr. Beard, 
 who had come post-haste from London, put a 
 stop to the readings, and afterwards decided, 
 in consultation with Sir Thomas Watson, that 
 they ought to be suspended entirely for the 
 time, and never resumed in connection with 
 any railway travelling. 
 
 Even this, however, was not quite the end; 
 for a summer of comparative rest, or what 
 Dickens considered rest, seemed so far to have 
 set him up that he gave a final series of twelve 
 readings in London between the 11th of Jan- 
 uary and 15th of March, 1870, thus bringing 
 to its real conclusion an enterprise by which, at 
 
248 LIFE OF 
 
 whatever cost to himself, he had made a sum 
 of about 45,000Z. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1869, he had 
 gone back to the old work, and was writing a 
 novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It is 
 a good novel unquestionably. Without going 
 so far as Longfellow, who had doubts whether 
 it was not ' the most beautiful of all ' Dickens's 
 works, one may admit that there is about it a 
 singular freshness, and no sign at all of mental 
 decay. As for the ' mystery,' I do not think 
 that need baffle us altogether. But then I see 
 no particular reason to believe that Dickens 
 had wished to baffle us, or specially to rival 
 Edgar Allen Poe or Mr. Wilkie Collins in the 
 construction of criminal puzzles. Even though 
 only half the case is presented to us, and the 
 book remains forever unfinished, we need have, 
 I think, no difficulty in working out its con- 
 clusion. The course pursued by Mr. Jasper, 
 Lay Precentor of the Cathedral at Cloister- 
 ham, is really too suspicious. No intelligent 
 British jury, seeing the facts as they are pre- 
 sented to us, the readers, could for a moment 
 think of acquitting him of the murder of his 
 nephew, Edwin Drood. Take these facts 
 seriatim. First, we have the motive: he is 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 249 
 
 passionately in love with the girl to whom his 
 nephew is engaged. Then we have a terrible 
 coil of compromising circumstances : his extrav- 
 agant profession of devotion to his nephew, his 
 attempts to establish a hidden influence over 
 the girl's mind to his nephew's detriment and 
 his own advantage, his gropings amid the dark 
 recesses of the Cathedral and inquiries into the 
 action of quicklime, his endeavours to foment 
 a quarrel between Edwin Drood and a fiery- 
 young gentleman from Ceylon, on the night 
 of the murder, and his undoubted doctoring of 
 the latter's drink. Then, after the murder, 
 how damaging is his conduct. He falls into 
 a kind of fit on discovering that his nephew's 
 engagement had been broken off, which he 
 might well do if his crime turned out to be not 
 only a crime but also a blunder. And his con- 
 duct to the girl is, to say the least of it, strange. 
 Nor will his character help him. He frequents 
 the opium dens of the east end of London. 
 Guilty, guilty, most certainly guilty. There 
 is nothing to be said in arrest of judgment. 
 Let the judge put on the black cap, and Jasper 
 be devoted to his merited doom. 
 
 Such was the story that Dickens was un- 
 ravelling in the spring and early summer of 
 
250 LIFE OF 
 
 1870. And fortune smiled upon it. He had 
 sold the copyright for the large sum of 7500/.^ 
 and a half share of the profits after a sale of 
 twenty-five thousand copies, plus lOOOZ. for 
 the advance sheets sent to America; and 
 the sale was more than answering his expec- 
 tations. 
 
 Nor did prosperity look favourably on the 
 book alone. It also, in one sense, showered 
 benefits on the author. He was worth, as the 
 evidence of the Probate Court was to show 
 only too soon, a sum of over 80,000Z. He was 
 happy in his children. He was universally 
 loved, honoured, courted. * Troops of friends,' 
 though, alas ! death had made havoc among the 
 oldest, were still his. Never had man exhibited 
 less inclination to pay fawning court to great- 
 ness and social rank. Yet when the Queen ex- 
 pressed a desire to see him, as she did in March, 
 1870, he felt not only pride, but a gentleman's 
 pleasure in acceding to her wish, and came 
 away charmed from a long chatting interview. 
 But, while prosperity was smiling thus, the 
 shadows of his day of life were lengthening, 
 lengthening, and the night was at hand. 
 
 On Wednesday, June 8th, he seemed in ex- 
 cellent spirits; worked all the morning in the 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 251 
 
 Chalet ^ as was his wont, returned to the house 
 for lunch and a cigar, and then, being anxious 
 to get on with Edwin Drood, went back to his 
 desk once more. The weather was superb. All 
 round the landscape lay in fullest beauty of 
 leafage and flower, and the air rang musically 
 with the song of birds. What were his 
 thoughts that summer day as he sat there at 
 his work ? Writing many years before, he had 
 asked whether the ' subtle liquor of the blood ' 
 may not ' perceive, by properties within itself,' 
 when danger is imminent, and so ' run cold and 
 dull ' ? Did any such monitor within, one won- 
 ders, warn him at all that the hand of death 
 was uplifted to strike, and that its shadow lay 
 upon him? Judging from the words that fell 
 from his pen that day we might almost think 
 that it was so — we might almost go further, 
 and guess with what hopes and fears he looked 
 into the darkness beyond. Never at any time 
 does he appear to have been greatly troubled 
 
 ^ The Chalet, since sold and removed, stood at the 
 edge of a kind of ' wilderness,' which is separated from 
 Gad's Hill Place by the high road. A tunnel, con- 
 structed by Dickens, connects the wilderness and the 
 garden of the house. Close to the road, in the wilder- 
 ness, and fronting the house, are two fine cedars. 
 
252 LIFE OF 
 
 by speculative doubt. There is no evidence in 
 his life, no evidence in his letters, no evidence 
 in his books, that he had ever seen any cause to 
 question the truth of the reply which Chris- 
 tianity gives to the world-old problems of 
 man's origin and destiny. For abstract specu- 
 lation he had not the slightest turn or taste. 
 In no single one of his characters does he ex- 
 hibit any fierce mental struggle as between 
 truth and error. All that side of human ex- 
 perience, with its anguish of battle, its de- 
 spairs, and its triumphs, seems to have been 
 unknown to him. Perhaps he had the stronger 
 grasp of other matters in consequence — who 
 knows? But the fact remains. With a trust 
 quite simple and untroubled, he held through 
 life to the faith of Christ. When his children 
 were little, he had written prayers for them, 
 had put the Bible into simpler language for 
 their use. In his will, dated May 12, 1869, he 
 had said, ' I commit my soul to the mercy of 
 God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly 
 to try to guide themselves by the broad teach- 
 ing of the New Testament in its broad spirit, 
 and to put no faith in any man's narrow con- 
 struction of its letter here or there.' And now, 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 253 
 
 on this last day of his life, in probably the last 
 letter that left his pen, he wrote to one who had 
 objected to some passage in Edwin Drood as 
 irreverent : * I have always striven in my writ- 
 ings to express veneration for the life and 
 lessons of our Saviour — because I feel it.' 
 And with a significance, of which, as I have 
 said, he may himself have been dimly half- 
 conscious, among the last words of his un- 
 finished story, written that very afternoon, are 
 words that tell of glorious summer sunshine 
 transfiguring the city of his imagination, and 
 of the changing lights, and the song of birds, 
 and the incense from garden and meadow that 
 * penetrate into the cathedral ' of Cloisterham, 
 ' subdue its earthy odour, and preach the 
 Resurrection and the Life.' 
 
 For now the end had come. When he went 
 in to dinner Miss Hogarth noticed that he 
 looked very ill, and wished at once to send for 
 a doctor. But he refused, struggled for a 
 short space against the impending fit, and tried 
 to talk, at last very incoherently. Then, when 
 urged to go up to his bed, he rose, and, almost 
 immediately, slid from her supporting arm, 
 and fell on the floor. Nor did consciousness 
 return. He passed from the unrest of life 
 
254 LIFE OF 
 
 into the peace of eternity on the following day, 
 June 9, 1870, at ten minutes past six in the 
 evening. 
 
 And now he lies in Westminster Abbey, 
 among the men who have most helped, by deed 
 or thought, to make this England of ours what 
 it is. Dean Stanley only gave effect to the 
 national voice when he assigned to him that 
 place of sepulture. The most popular, and in 
 most respects the greatest novelist of his time; 
 the lord over the laughter and tears of a whole 
 generation; the writer, in his own field of fic- 
 tion, whose like we shall probably not see again 
 for many a long, long year, if ever; where 
 could he be laid more fittingly for his last long 
 sleep than in the hallowed resting-place which 
 the country sets apart for the most honoured 
 of her children? 
 
 So he lies there among his peers in the 
 Southern Transept. Close beside him sleep 
 Dr. Johnson, the puissant literary autocrat of 
 his own time ; and Garrick, who was that time's 
 greatest actor ; and Handel, who may fittingly 
 claim to have been one of the mightiest musi- 
 cians of all time. There sleeps, too, after the 
 fitful fever of his troubled life, the witty, the 
 eloquent Sheridan. In close proximity rests 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 255 
 
 Macaulay, the artist-historian and essayist. 
 Within the radius of a few yards lies all that 
 will ever die of Chaucer, who five hundred 
 years ago sounded the spring note of English 
 literature, and gave to all after-time the best, 
 brightest glimpse into mediaeval England ; and 
 all that is mortal also of Spenser of the honey'd 
 verse; and of Beaumont, who had caught an 
 echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his 
 power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his 
 own day a not unworthy rival of Shakespeare's 
 self; and of ' glorious ' and most masculine 
 John Dryden. From his monument Shake- 
 speare looks upon the place with his kindly 
 eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and 
 one can almost imagine a smile of fellowship 
 upon the marble faces of those later dead — 
 Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Thackeray. 
 
 Nor in that great place of the dead does 
 Dickens enjoy cold barren honour alone. 
 Nearly seventeen years have gone by since he 
 was laid there — yes, nearly seventeen years, 
 though it seems only yesterday that I was lis- 
 tening to the funeral sermon in which Dean 
 Stanley spoke of the simple and sufficient 
 faith in which he had lived and died. But 
 though seventeen years have gone by, yet 
 
256 . LIFE OF 
 
 are outward signs not wanting of the peculiar 
 love that clings to him still. As I strolled 
 through the Abbey this last Christmas Eve, I 
 found his grave, and his grave alone, made gay 
 with the season's hollies. ' Lord, keep my 
 memory green,' — in another sense than he 
 used the words, that prayer is answered. 
 
 And of the future what shall we say? His 
 fame had a brilliant day while he lived; it has 
 a brilliant day now. Will it fade into twilight, 
 without even an afterglow; will it pass alto- 
 gether into the night of oblivion? I cannot 
 think so. The vitality of Dickens's works is 
 singularly great. They are all a-throb, as it 
 were, with hot human blood. They are popular 
 in the highest sense because their appeal is uni- 
 versal, to the uneducated as well as the edu- 
 cated. The humour is superb, and most of it, 
 so far as one can judge, of no ephemeral kind. 
 The pathos is more questionable, but that too, 
 at its simplest and best, and especially when 
 the humour is shot with it — is worthy of a bet- 
 ter epithet than excellent. It is supremely 
 touching. Imagination, fancy, wit, eloquence, 
 the keenest observation, the most strenuous en- 
 deavour to reach the highest artistic excellence, 
 the largest kindliness, — all these he brought to 
 
CHARLES DICKENS 257 
 
 his life-work. And that work, as I think, will 
 live, I had almost dared to prophesy for ever. 
 Of course fashions change. Of course no 
 writer of fiction, writing for his own little day, 
 can permanently meet the needs of all after 
 times. Some loss of immediate vital interest is 
 inevitable. Nevertheless, in Dickens's case, all 
 will not die. Half a century, a century hence, 
 he will still be read ; not perhaps as he was read 
 when his words flashed upon the world in their 
 first glory and freshness, nor as he is read now 
 in the noon of his fame. But he will be read 
 much more than we read the novelists of the 
 last century — be read as much, shall I say, as 
 we still read Scott. And so long as he is read, 
 there will be one gentle and humanizing influ- 
 ence the more at work among men. 
 
INDEX 
 
 " Administrative Reform " 
 agitation, 211 
 
 All the Year Round, 191, 192 
 
 America, Dickens's first visit 
 to United States in 1842, 
 132, 135-147, 163, 164; sec- 
 ond visit in 1867-8, 243-245 
 
 American Notes, 128, 144-146 
 
 Barnahy Budge, 106, 130, 183 
 
 Barnard, Mr., his illustrations 
 to Dickens's works, 230 
 
 Battle of Life, 177 
 
 Bentley's Miscellany edited 
 by Dickens, 102, 105 
 
 Bleak House, 194-198 
 
 Boulogne, 198, 199 
 
 Bret Harte, Mr., on Little 
 Nell, 121 
 
 Browne, or " Phiz," his illus- 
 trations to Dickens's works, 
 227-230 
 
 C 
 
 Carlyle, his description of 
 Dickens quoted, 83; and of 
 Dickens's reading, 204-205 ; 
 his influence on Dickens, 
 
 207-208; see also 170 and 
 
 226 
 Chapman and Hall, 90, 91, 92, 
 
 93, 105, 118 
 Chatham, 52 
 Childhood, Dickens's feeling 
 
 for its pathos, 51, 120 
 Child's History of England, 
 
 191 
 Chimes, 110, 167-170, 229 
 Christmas Carol, 159-161, 205 
 Christopher North, 133 
 Cowden Clarke, Mrs., quoted, 
 
 185 
 Cruikshank, his illustrations 
 
 in Sketches and Oliver 
 
 Twist, 227-230 
 
 D 
 
 Daily News, started with 
 Dickens as editor, 171, 172, 
 175, 190 
 
 David Copperfleld — in many 
 respects autobiographical, 
 53-56, 63, 217; analysis of, 
 120, 128, 187-189 
 
 Dick, Mr., 181, 182, 183 
 
 Dickens, Charles, birth, 50; 
 childhood and boyhood, 50- 
 71 ; school experiences, 68- 
 70; law experiences, 72, 73; 
 
 959 
 
260 
 
 INDEX 
 
 experiences as reporter for 
 the press, 73, 75; first at- 
 tempts at authorship, 77- 
 81; marriage, 81; his per- 
 sonal appearance in early 
 manhood, 83, 84; influence 
 of his early training, 84- 
 89; pecuniary position after 
 publication of Pickwick, 
 105,106; habits of work and 
 relaxation, 109-111; re- 
 ception at Edinburgh, 132- 
 134; American experiences, 
 135-146; afi'ection for h5s 
 children, 148, 149; Italian 
 experiences, 162-170; ap- 
 pointed editor of Daily 
 News, 171, 172; efficiency in 
 practical matters, 174, 175; 
 his charm as a holiday 
 companion, 185; first pub- 
 lic readings in 1853, 200; 
 character of his reading, 
 204-206; purchase of Gad's 
 Hill Place, 214-216; sepa- 
 ration from his wife, 216- 
 224; general love in which 
 he was held, 220, 221; ten- 
 dency to caricature in his 
 art, 229; essential refine- 
 ment in his writing and in 
 himself, 237, 238; his pres- 
 ence of mind, 239-240; his 
 brave battle against failing 
 strength, 239-247 ; with 
 what thoughts he faced 
 death, 252, 253; his death. 
 
 253-254; resting-place in 
 Westminster Abbey, 254- 
 256; love that clings to his 
 memory, 256; future of his 
 fame, 256-257 
 
 Dickens, John, his character, 
 56-58; his imprisonment, 
 64-65; his death, 192 
 
 Dickens, Miss, biography of 
 her father, quoted, 104, 148, 
 240 
 
 Dickens, Mrs., (Dickens's 
 mother), 67, 68 
 
 Dickens, Mrs., 147; sepa- 
 rated from her husband, 
 216-224 
 
 Dolby, Mr., manager for the 
 readings, 240, 241, 245 
 
 Dombey and Son, 120, 176- 
 180, 186 
 
 Dombey, Paul, 120, 123-124, 
 128, 179 
 
 E 
 
 Edinburgh, Dickens's recep- 
 tion there, 132-134 
 Edwin Drood, 230, 248-251 
 
 F 
 
 Fildes, Mr. L., A.R.A., illus- 
 trates Edwin Drood, 230 
 
 Elite, Miss, 182, 183 
 
 Forster, John, 60, 87, 170, 
 193; his opinion on the ad- 
 visability of public read- 
 ings, 200-201 
 
INDEX 
 
 261 
 
 Gad's Hill Place, 52; pur- 
 chase of, 214, 215, 216 
 
 Genoa, 109, 110, 165-166, 169, 
 170 
 
 Grant, Mr. James, 93 
 
 Great Expectations, 121, 231- 
 233 
 
 H 
 
 Hard Times, 207-211 
 
 Haunted Man, The, 186 
 
 Helps, Sir Arthur, on 
 Dickens's powers of obser- 
 vation, 79; on his essential 
 refinement, 238 
 
 Hogarth, Mary, her death 
 and character, 106-107 
 
 Home, on description of 
 Little Nell's death and 
 burial, 66, 122 
 
 Household Words, 190-192, 
 218 
 
 Humour of Dickens, 79, 80, 
 97, 98, 99, 229, 256 
 
 Italy in 1844, 163-165 
 
 J 
 
 Jeffrey, his opinion of Little 
 
 Nell, 121, 133 
 
 Landor, his admiration for 
 Little Nell, 121 ; his likeness 
 to Mr. Boy thorn, 198 
 
 Lausanne, 175, 177 
 
 Leigh Hunt, 197 
 
 Little Dorrit, 64, 212-215, 
 
 229-231 
 Little Nell, criticism on her 
 
 character and story, 120- 
 
 126, 133, 135 
 London, Dickens's knowledge 
 
 of, and walks in, 79, 109- 
 
 111 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, 144, 210, 255 
 Macready, the tragic actor, 
 
 135, 138, 147, 148 
 Marshalsea Prison, Dickens's 
 
 father imprisoned there, 
 
 55, 61, 63-66; made the 
 
 chief scene of Little Dorrit, 
 
 213 
 Martin Chvzzlewit, 151-152, 
 
 156-158 
 Master Humphrey's Clock, 
 
 118, 119, 158, 228 
 Micawber, Mr., 54, 56, 64 
 
 N 
 Nickleby, Mrs., 68 
 Nicholas Nickleby, 1(^, 115- 
 117, 158 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, 117, 119- 
 
 129 
 Oliver Twist, 103, 105, 112- 
 
 115, 120, 228 
 Our Mutual Friend, 162, 230, 
 
 234-237 
 
262 INDEX " "^//^'^ 
 
 P Sketches by Boz, 78-81, 106, 
 
 Paris, 184, 214 227, 228 
 
 Pathos of Dickens, 80, 81, Stanley, Dean, 254, 255 
 
 126-128, 256 Stone, Mr. Marcus, R.A., il- 
 
 Pickwick, 90-101, 102, 104, lustrates Our Mutual 
 
 158, 228 Friend, 230 
 
 Pictures from Italy, 172-173 
 
 Pipchin, Mrs., 62, 66 j. 
 
 Plots, Dickens's, 151-156 „ . „ , . 
 
 laine, M., his criticism criti- 
 
 cised, 181-183 
 
 ^ Tale of Two Cities, 225-227 
 
 Quarterly Review foretells Thackeray, 108, 220, 234; as 
 
 Dickens's speedy downfall, ^ reader, 204, 206 
 
 ^^^' ^^* Tiny Tim, 128, 205 
 
 Toots, Mr., 181, 182 
 R 
 
 Readings, Dickens's, 200-206, 
 
 241-247 
 
 Ruskin, Mr., his opinion of ^ates, Edmund, Mr., quoted. 
 
 Hard Times, 210 ^^"• 
 
 S Wi 
 Sam Weller, 99, 100 Washington, Irving, 135, 237 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 95, 155, 257 Westminster Abbey, Dick- 
 Seymour, his connection with ens's place of burial, 254- 
 Pickwick, 90, 92, 228 256 
 
 THE END 
 
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