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Charles Dickens 
 
 A Critical Study 
 
 By 
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 
 LONDON 
 BLACKIE & SON, Limited, 50 OLD BAILEY, E.G. 
 
 GLASGOW AND DUBLIN 
 1808 
 
i8i2. Dickens born at Landport (Feb. 17). 
 
 1821. Removal to London. 
 
 1831-6. Life as Reporter and Journalist. 
 
 1836. Marriage (Apr. 2). 
 
 „ Sketches by Boz, 2 vols. 
 
 ,, „ „ Second Series, I vol. 
 
 1837. Pickwick. 
 
 1838. Oliver Twist, 3 vols. 
 
 1839. Nicholas Nickleby. 
 
 1840. Old Curiosity Shop. 
 
 1 841. Bamaby Rudge. 
 
 1842. Dickens's first visit to America. 
 ,, American Notes, 2 vols. 
 
 1843. Christmas Carol. 
 
 1844. Martin Chuzzlewit. 
 „ The Chimes. 
 
 1845. Visit to Italy. 
 
 „ The Cricket on the Hearth. 
 
 1846. Pictures from Italy. 
 „ The Battle of Life. 
 
 1848. Dombey and Son. 
 , , The Haunted Man. 
 
 1850. David Copperfield. 
 „ Household Words (March 30, 1850, 
 to May 28, 1859). 
 
 1853. Bleak House. 
 
 „ A ChiltTs History of England. 
 
 1854. Hard Times. 
 
 1856. Dickens purchases Gadshill Place. 
 
 1857. Little Dorrit. 
 
 1858-9. First Series of Public Readings. 
 1859. All the Year Round begun (Apr. 
 30). 
 
 „ A Tale of Two Cities. 
 i860. The Uncommercial Traveller. 
 1 861-3. Second Series of Public Readings. 
 1861. Great Expectations, 3 vols. 
 1865. Our Mutual Friend, 2 vols. 
 1866-7. Third Series of Public Readings. 
 1867-8. Second visit to America. 
 1 868-70. Fourth Series of Public Readings. 
 1870. Edwin Drood. 
 
 „ Death, June 9, at Gadshill. 
 
 „ Buried in Westminster Abbey. 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Pag€ 
 
 His Times 7 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 The Growth of Man and Writer - - - - t8 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Story-teller ...^ 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Arty Veracity y and Moral Purpose - - - -63 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Characterization 84 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Satiric Portraiture no 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Women and Children i^i 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Humour and Pathos 163 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Style 184 
 
vi Contents 
 
 Page 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 The Radical 194 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Comparisons -------- 21S 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 The Latter Years 227 
 
 INDEX 243 
 
Charles Dickens. 
 
 Chapter I. 
 His Times. 
 
 More than a quarter of a century has now elapsed 
 since the death of Charles Dickens. The time 
 which shaped him and sent him forth is so far 
 behind us, as to have become a matter of historical 
 study for the present generation; the time which 
 knew him as one of its foremost figures, and owed 
 so much to the influences of his wondrous person- 
 ality, is already made remote by a social revolution 
 of which he watched the mere beginning. It seems 
 possible to regard Dickens from the standpoint of 
 posterity; to consider his career, to review his 
 literary work, and to estimate his total activity in 
 relation to an age which, intelligibly speaking, is 
 no longer our own. 
 
 When Queen Victoria came to the throne Charles 
 Dickens was twenty-five years old. To say that he 
 was twenty in the year 1832 is to point more sig- 
 nificantly the period of his growth into manhood. 
 At least a year before the passing of that Reform 
 Bill which was to give political power to English 
 capitalism (a convenient word of our day) Dickens 
 had begun work as a shorthand writer, and as 
 journalist. Before 1837 he had written his Sketches^ 
 had published them in volumes which gave some 
 
8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 vogue to the name of **Boz", and was already 
 engaged upon Pickwick. In short, Dickens's years 
 of apprenticeship to life and literature were those 
 which saw the rise and establishment of the Middle 
 Class, commonly called ** Great'' — of the new 
 power in political and social England which owed 
 its development to coal and steam and iron me- 
 chanism. By birth superior to the rank of prole- 
 tary, inferior to that of capitalist, this young man, 
 endowed with original genius, and with the invin- 
 cible vitality demanded for its exercise under such 
 conditions, observed in a spirit of lively criticism, 
 not seldom of jealousy, the class so rapidly achiev- 
 ing wealth and rule. He lived to become, in all 
 externals, and to some extent in the tone of his 
 mind, a characteristic member of this privileged 
 society; but his criticism of its foibles, and of its 
 grave shortcomings, never ceased. The landed 
 proprietor of Gadshill could not forget (the great 
 writer could never desire to forget) a miserable 
 childhood imprisoned in the limbo of squalid 
 London; his grudge against this memory was in 
 essence a class feeling; to the end his personal 
 triumph gratified him, however unconsciously, as 
 the vindication of a social claim. 
 
 Walter Scott, inheriting gentle blood and feudal 
 enthusiasm, resisted to the last the theories of '32 ; 
 and yet by irony of circumstance owed his ruin to 
 commercial enterprise. Charles Dickens, humbly 
 born, and from first to last fighting the battle of 
 those in like estate, wore himself to a premature 
 end in striving to found his title of gentleman on 
 something more substantial than glory. The one 
 came into the world too late; the other, from this 
 point of view, was but too thoroughly of his time. 
 
His Times. 9 
 
 A time of sufifering, of conflict, of expansion, of 
 progress. In the year of Dickens's birth (181 2) we 
 read of rioting workmen who smash machinery, 
 and are answered by the argument of force. Be- 
 tween then and 1834, the date of the Poor Law 
 Amendment Act, much more machinery is broken, 
 power-looms and threshing-engines, north and 
 south; but hungry multitudes have no chance 
 against steam and capital. Statisticians, with rows 
 of figures, make clear to us the vast growth of 
 population and commerce in these same years; we 
 are told, for instance, that between 1821 and 1841 
 the people of Sheffield and of Birmingham increased 
 by 80 per cent. It is noted, too, that savings-bank 
 deposits increased enormously during the same 
 years; a matter for congratulation. Nevertheless, 
 with the new Poor Law comes such a demand for 
 new workhouses that in some four-and-twenty years 
 we find an expenditure of five millions sterling in 
 this hopeful direction. To be sure, a habit of 
 pauperdom was threatening the ruin of the country 
 — or of such parts of it as could not be saved by 
 coal and steam and iron. Upon the close of the 
 Napoleonic wars followed three decades of hardship 
 for all save the inevitably rich, and those who were 
 able to take time by the forelock; so that side by 
 side we have the beginnings of vast prosperity and 
 wide prevalence of woe. Under the old law pro- 
 viding for the destitute by means of outdoor relief, 
 pauperdom was doubtless encouraged; but the 
 change to sterner discipline could not escape the 
 charge of harshness, and among those who de- 
 nounced the new rule was Dickens himself. Whilst 
 this difference of opinion was being fought out, 
 came a series of lean years, failure of harvests, and 
 
lo Charles Dickens. 
 
 hunger more acute than usual, which led to the 
 movement known as Chartism (a hint that the 
 middle-class triumph of '32 was by no means a 
 finality, seeing that behind that great class was a 
 class, numerically at all events, much greater); at 
 the same time went on the Corn-law struggles. 
 Reading the verses of Ebenezer Elliott, one cannot 
 but reflect on the scope in England of those days 
 for a writer of fiction who should have gone to 
 work in the spirit of the Rhymer, without impulse 
 or obligation to make his books amusing. But 
 the novelist of homely life was already at his task, 
 doing it in his own way, picturing with rare vivid- 
 ness the England that he knew; and fate had blest 
 him with the spirit of boundless mirth. 
 
 There are glimpses in Dickens of that wide- 
 spread, yet obscure, misery which lay about him in 
 his early years. As, for instance, where we read in 
 Oliver Twisty in the description of the child's walk 
 to London, that ^'in some villages large painted 
 boards were fixed up; warning all persons who 
 begged within the district, that they would be sent 
 to jail". And in his mind there must ever have 
 been a background of such knowledge, influencing 
 his work, even when it found no place in the scheme 
 of a story. 
 
 In a rapid view of the early century, attention is 
 'demanded by one detail, commonly forgotten, and 
 by the historian easily ignored, but a matter of the 
 first importance as serving to illustrate some of 
 Dickens's best work. In 1833, Lord Ashley (after- 
 wards Lord Shaftesbury) entered upon his long 
 strife with stubborn conservatism and heartless 
 interest on behalf of little children who worked for 
 wages in English factories and mines. The law 
 
His Times. ii 
 
 then in force forbade children under thirteen years 
 of age to engage in such labour for more than 
 thirteen hours a day; legislators of that period were 
 so struck by the humanity of the provision that no 
 eloquence could induce them to think of supersed- 
 ing it. Members of the reformed House of Com- 
 mons were naturally committed to sound economic 
 views on supply and demand; they enlarged upon 
 the immorality of interfering with freedom of con- 
 tract; and, when Lord Ashley was guilty of perse- 
 vering in his anti-social craze, of standing all but 
 alone, year after year, the advocate of grimy little 
 creatures who would otherwise have given nobody 
 any trouble, howling insult, or ingenious calumny, 
 long served the cause of his philosophic opponents. 
 Let anyone who is prone to glorify the commer- 
 cial history of nineteenth-century England search 
 upon dusty shelves for certain Reports of Commis- 
 sioners in the matter of children's employments at 
 this time of Lord Ashley's activity, and there read 
 a tale of cruelty and avarice which arraigns the 
 memory of a generation content so infamously to 
 enrich itself. Those Reports make clear that some 
 part, at all events, of modern English prosperity 
 results from the toil of children (among them babies 
 of five and six), whose lives were spent in the black 
 depths of coal-pits and amid the hot roar of 
 machinery. Poetry has found inspiration in the 
 subject, but no verse can make such appeal to heart 
 and conscience as the businesslike statements of a 
 Commission. Lord Ashley's contemporaries in 
 Parliament dismissed these stories with a smile. 
 Employers of infant labour naturally would lend no 
 ear to a sentimental dreamer; but it might have 
 been presumed that at all events in one direction. 
 
12 Charles Dickens. 
 
 that of the church, voices would make themselves 
 heard in defence of ** these little ones". We read, 
 however, in the philanthropist's Diary: *4n very few 
 instances did any mill-owner appear on the platform 
 with me; in still fewer the representatives of any 
 religious denomination". This quiet remark serves 
 to remind one, among other things, that Dickens 
 was not without his reasons for a spirit of distrust 
 towards religion by law established, as well as 
 towards sundry other forms of religion — the spirit 
 which, especially in his early career, was often 
 misunderstood as hostility to religion in itself, a 
 wanton mocking at sacred things. Such a fact 
 should always be kept in mind in reading Dickens. 
 It is here glanced at merely for its historical signi- 
 ficance; the question of Dickens's religious attitude 
 will call for attention elsewhere. 
 
 Dickens, if any writer, has associated himself 
 with the thought of suffering childhood. The cir- 
 cumstances of his life confined him, for the most 
 part, to London in his choice of matter for artistic 
 use, and it is especially the London child whose 
 sorrows are made so vivid to us by the master's pen. 
 But we know that he was well acquainted with the 
 monstrous wickedness of that child labour in mines 
 and mills, and find where he might the pathetic 
 little figures useful to him in his fiction, he was 
 always speaking, consciously, to an age remarkable 
 for stupidity and heartlessness in the treatment of 
 all its poorer children. Perhaps in this direction 
 his influence was as great as in any. In recogniz- 
 ing this, be it remembered for how many years an 
 Englishman of noble birth, one who, on all accounts, 
 might have been thought likely to sway the minds 
 of his countrymen to any worthy end, battled in 
 
His Times. 13 
 
 vain and amid all manner of obloquy, for so simple 
 a piece of humanity and justice. Dickens had a 
 weapon more efficacious than mere honest zeal. 
 He could make people laugh; and if once the crowd 
 has laughed with you, it will not object to cry a 
 little — nay, it will make good resolves, and some- 
 times carry them out. 
 
 It was a time by several degrees harsher, coarser, 
 and uglier than our own. Take that one matter of 
 hanging. Through all his work we see Dickens 
 preoccupied with the gallows; and no wonder. In 
 his Sketches there is the lurid story of the woman 
 who has obtained possession of her son after his 
 execution, and who seeks the aid of a doctor, in 
 hope of restoring the boy to life; and in so late a 
 book as Great Expectations occurs that glimpse of 
 murderous Newgate, which is among his finest 
 things. His description of a hanging, written to 
 a daily paper, is said to have had its part in putting 
 an end to public executions; but that was compara- 
 tively late in his life, and at his most impression- 
 able time the hanging of old and young, men and 
 women, regularly served as one of the entertain- 
 ments of Londoners. Undoubtedly, even in Dickens's 
 boyhood, manners had improved to some extent 
 upon those we see pictured in Hogarth, but from 
 our present standpoint the difference, certainly in 
 poorer London, is barely appreciable. It was an 
 age in which the English character seemed bent on 
 exhibiting all its grossest and meanest and most 
 stupid characteristics. Sheer ugliness of everyday 
 life reached a limit not easily surpassed ; thickheaded 
 national prejudice, in consequence of great wars 
 and British victories, had marvellously developed ; 
 aristocracy was losing its better influence, and power 
 
14 Charles Dickens. 
 
 passing to a well-fed multitude, remarkable for a 
 dogged practicality which, as often as not, meant 
 ferocious egoism. With all this, a prevalence of 
 such ignoble vices as religious hypocrisy and servile 
 snobbishness. Our own day has its faults in plenty; 
 some of them perhaps more perilous than the worst 
 here noted of our ancestors; but it is undeniably 
 much cleaner of face and hands, decidedly more 
 graceful in its common habits of mind. 
 
 One has but to open at any page of Pickwick to 
 be struck with a characteristic of social life in 
 Dickens's youth, which implies so much that it 
 may be held to represent the whole civilization in 
 which he was born and bred. Mr. Pickwick and 
 his friends all drank brandy; drank it as the simplest 
 and handiest refreshment, at home or abroad ; drank 
 it at dawn or at midnight, in the retirement of the 
 bedchamber, or by the genial fireside ; offered it as 
 an invitation to good-fellowship, or as a reward of 
 virtue in inferiors; and on a coach-journey, whether 
 in summer or winter, held it among indispensable 
 comforts. ^'He", said Samuel Johnson, *'who 
 aspires to be a hero, must drink brandy"; and in 
 this respect the Pickwickians achieve true heroism. 
 Of course they pay for their glory, being frequently 
 drunk in the most flagrant sense of the word; 
 but to say that they **come up smiling" after it 
 is to use an inadequate phrase — however appro- 
 priate to those times; he would indeed have been 
 a sorry Pickwickian who owned to a morning's 
 headache. If such a thing existed, unavowed, there 
 was the proverbial remedy at hand — ''a hair of the 
 dog ". It is conceivable that, in some age remote, 
 a student of Pickwick might point, as an obvious 
 explanation of the marvellous flow of vitality and 
 
His Times. 15 
 
 merriment among the people of Dickens*s day, to 
 their glorious beverage, something doubtless more 
 ethereal and yet more potent than any drink known 
 among later mortals — the divine liquor called 
 brandy. 
 
 Amid this life of the young century — cruel, un- 
 lovely, but abounding in vital force — there arose 
 two masters in the art of fiction. To one of them 
 was given the task of picturing England on its 
 brighter side, the world of rank and fashion and 
 wealth, with but rare glances (these, however, more 
 noteworthy than is generally recognized) at the 
 populace below. The other had for his field that 
 vast obscurity of lower town life which till then had 
 never been turned to literary uses. Of the country 
 poor, at a somewhat earlier date, admirable present- 
 ment had been made in the verse of Crabbe, a writer 
 (in truth the forerunner of what is now called ** real- 
 ism ") whose most unmerited neglect may largely 
 be accounted for by the unfortunate vehicle of his 
 work, the ** riding-rhyme", which has become so 
 distasteful to the English ear; but poverty amid a 
 wilderness of streets, and that class of city popula- 
 tion just raised above harsh necessity, no one had 
 seriously made his theme in prose or verse. Thack- 
 eray and Dickens supplement each other, and, 
 however wide apart the lives they depict, to a strik- 
 ing degree confirm each other's views of a certain 
 era in the history of England. In their day, both 
 were charged with partiality, with excessive em- 
 phasis. Both being avowedly satirists, the charge 
 can be easily understood, and to a certain point 
 may be admitted. In the case of Dickens, with 
 whom alone I am here concerned, it will be part of 
 my endeavoui to vindicate him against the familiar 
 
i6 Charles Dickens. 
 
 complaint that, however trustworthy his background, 
 the figures designed upon it, in general, are mere 
 forms of fantasy. On re-reading his work, it is not 
 thus that Dickens's characters, on the whole, impress 
 me. With reserves which will appear in the course 
 of my essay, I believe him to have been, what he 
 always claimed to be, a very accurate painter of the 
 human beings, no less than of the social conditions, 
 he saw about him. He has not a wide scope; he 
 is always noticeably at his best in dealing with an 
 ill-defined order of English folk, a class (or classes) 
 characterized by dulness, prejudice, dogged indi- 
 viduality, and manners, to say the least, unengag- 
 ing. From this order he chose the living figures 
 of his narrative, and they appear to me, all in all, 
 no less truly representative than the persons selected 
 by Thackeray to illustrate a higher rank of life. 
 Readers of Dickens who exclaim at the '' unreality" 
 of his characters (I do not here speak of his conduct 
 of a story) will generally be found unacquainted 
 with the English lower classes of to-day; and one 
 may remark in passing that English people are 
 distinguished among nationalities by the profound 
 mutual ignorance which separates their social ranks. 
 In a recent publication I have seen it summarily 
 observed that Dickens gives us types, not indi- 
 viduals ; types, moreover, of the most abstract kind, 
 something like the figures in the old moralities; 
 embodied hypocrisy, selfishness, pride, and so on, 
 masking as everyday mortals. This appears to 
 me an unconsidered judgment, however common. 
 Dickens's characters will pass before us and be 
 attentively reviewed; speaking of them generally, I 
 see in them, not abstractions, but men and women 
 of such loud peculiarities, so aggressively indi- 
 
 (M444) 
 
His Times. 17 
 
 vidual in mind and form, in voice and habit, that 
 they for ever proclaim themselves the children of a 
 certain country, of a certain time, of a certain rank. 
 Clothed abstractions do not take hold upon the 
 imagination and the memory as these people of 
 Dickens did from the day of their coming into life. 
 The secret of this subtle power lay in the actu- 
 ality of the figures themselves. There are charac- 
 ters in Dickens (meant, moreover, to be leading 
 persons of the drama) which have failed thus to 
 make good their being; their names we may re- 
 member, but all else has become shadowy; and 
 what is the reason of this vanishment, in contrast 
 with the persistence of figures less important? 
 Simply that here Dickens has presented us with 
 types, abstractions. The social changes of the last 
 sixty years are not small ; but to anyone who really 
 knows the lower middle class in London it will be 
 obvious that many of the originals of Dickens still 
 exist, still pursue the objectionable, or amusing, 
 tenor of their way, amid new names and new forms 
 of ugliness. Sixty years ago, grotesques and 
 eccentricities were more common than nowadays; 
 the Englishman, always angular and self-assertive, 
 had grown flagrant in his egoism during the long 
 period of combat with menacing powers; education 
 had not set up its grindstone for all and sundry, 
 and persons esteemed odd even in such a society 
 abounded among high and low. For these oddities, 
 especially among the poorer folk, Dickens had an 
 eager eye; they were offered to him in measure 
 overflowing; nowadays he would have to search 
 for them amid the masses drilled into uniformity, 
 but there they are — the same creatures differently 
 clad. Precisely because his books are rich in ex- 
 
 (M444) B 
 
i8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 travagances of human nature is Dickens so true a 
 chronicler of his day and generation. 
 
 A time of ugliness: ugly religion, ugly law, ugly 
 relations between rich and poor, ugly clothes, ugly 
 furniture. What would Charles Dickens have made 
 of all this had his genius been lacking in the grace 
 of humour? Yet it is not his humour alone that 
 will preserve him for the delight of young and old 
 no less than for the instruction of the studious. In 
 his work there is a core of perpetuity ; to find it we 
 must look back upon the beginnings of his life, and 
 on the teaching which prepared him for his life's 
 work. 
 
 Chapter II. 
 The Growth of Man and Writer. 
 
 Needless to recount in detail the biography of 
 Charles Dickens. Living, he was regarded with a 
 warmth of personal interest such as no other Eng- 
 lish writer ever inspired; all the facts of his life 
 which could rightly become public property (and 
 some with which the public had no concern) were 
 known to every contemporary reader; and as yet 
 they seem in no risk of being forgotten. 
 
 By accident he was not born a Londoner, but 
 his life in London began while he was yet a child. 
 His earliest impressions, however, were received at 
 Rochester and Chatham, where he went to what 
 was called a school, and in the time at his own dis- 
 posal began to educate himself in his own way by 
 reading the eighteenth-century novelists. A happy 
 thing for Dickens, and for us, that he was permitted 
 to pass these few years of opening life elsewhere 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 19 
 
 than in London. He speaks of himself as ** not a 
 very robust child sitting in byeplaces near Roches- 
 ter Castle, with a head full of Partridge, Strap, 
 Tom Pipes, and Sancho Panza"; better from every 
 point of view, than if he had gained his first know- 
 ledge of English fiction amid the brick walls of 
 Camden Town. Dickens always had a true love 
 of the country, especially of that which is near to 
 picturesque old towns of historic interest ; and this 
 most precious characteristic, to which we owe some 
 of the sweetest, freshest pages in his work, might 
 never have developed in him but for the early 
 years at Rochester. Very closely has he linked his 
 memory with that district of Kent, — nowadays, of 
 course, like every other district easily accessible 
 from London, all but robbed of the old charm. At 
 Rochester begin the adventurous travels of Mr. 
 Pickwick; near Rochester stands the house of Gads- 
 hill; and it was Rochester that he chose for the 
 scene of his last story, the unfinished Edwin Drood, 
 With London began unhappiness. David Cop- 
 perfield has made universally familiar that figure 
 of the poor little lad slaving at ignoble tasks 
 in some by-way near the River Thames. David 
 works for a wine-merchant, cleaning bottles; his 
 original had for taskmasters a firm of blacking- 
 makers. We know how sorely this memory rankled 
 in the mind of the successful author; he kept the 
 fact from his wife till long after marriage, and, we 
 are told, could never bear to speak to his children 
 of that and the like endurances. This I have seen 
 mentioned as a proof of sensitiveness verging on 
 snobbery; but surely it is nothing of the kind. 
 Dickens would not, like his pet aversion, Josiah 
 Bounderby in Hard Times, proclaim from the 
 
20 Charles Dickens. 
 
 house-tops that he had been a poor boy toiling for 
 a few shillings a week, and most certainly he would 
 have preferred to look back upon a childhood like 
 to that of his friends and neighbours ; but the true 
 reason for his shrinking from this recollection lay 
 in the fact that it involved a grave censure upon 
 his parents. **It is wonderful to me," he writes, 
 in the fragment of autobiography preserved by For- 
 ster {Life^ Bk. I., 2), '*how I could have been so 
 easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful 
 to me that, even after my descent into the poor little 
 drudge I had been since we came to London, no 
 one had compassion enough on me — a child of 
 singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon 
 hurt, bodily or mentally — to suggest that something 
 might have been spared, as certainly it might have 
 been, to place me at any common school. Our 
 friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any 
 sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. 
 They could hardly have been more so, if I had 
 been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Gram- 
 mar School, and going to Cambridge." In this 
 passage the tone of feeling is unmistakeable; as 
 the boy had suffered from a sense of undeserved 
 humiliation, so did the man feel hurt in his deepest 
 sensibilities whenever he reflected on that evil time. 
 His silence regarding it was the most natural re- 
 serve. 
 
 In middle age we find Dickens saying about his 
 father, that the longer he lived, the better man he 
 thought him. To us the elder Dickens is inevitably 
 Mr. Micawber, and who shall say that he has no 
 affection for that type of genial impecuniosity? To 
 his father, no doubt, the novelist owed the happy 
 temperament which had so large a part in his sue- 
 
The Growth of Man and "Writer. 21 
 
 cess; plainly, he owed little more. Of his mother, 
 only one significant fact is recorded, viz. that when 
 at length an opportunity offered for the boy's escape 
 from his drudgery in the blacking warehouse, Mrs. 
 Dickens strongly objected to any such change. An 
 unpleasant topic; enough to recognize in passing, 
 that this incident certainly was not without its per- 
 manent effect on the son's mind. 
 
 The two years of childish hardship in London 
 (1822-1824) which have resulted in one of the most 
 picturesque and pathetic chapters that English 
 literature can show, were of supreme importance 
 in the growth of the novelist. Recollections of 
 that time supplied him with a store of literary 
 material upon which he drew through all the years 
 of his best activity. In the only possible way he 
 learnt the life of obscure London ; himself a part of 
 it, struggling and suffering in its sordid welter, at 
 an age when the strongest impressions are received. 
 It did not last long enough to corrupt the natural 
 sweetness of his mind. Imagine Charles Dickens 
 kept in the blacking warehouse for ten years; pic- 
 ture him striving vainly to find utterance for the 
 thoughts that were in him, refused the society of 
 any but boors and rascals, making, perhaps, a futile 
 attempt to succeed as an actor, and in full manhood 
 measuring the abyss which sundered him from all 
 he had hoped; it is only too easy, knowing the 
 character of the man so well, to conceive what 
 would have resulted. But at twelve years old he 
 was sent to school, and from that day never lost a 
 step on the path of worldly success. In spite of all, 
 he was one of fortune's favourites; what he had 
 undergone turned to his ultimate advantage, and 
 the man who at twenty-four found himself the most 
 
32 Charles Dickens. 
 
 popular author of his time and country, might well 
 be encouraged to see things on the cheery side and 
 to laugh with his multitudinous public. 
 
 Dickens's biographer makes a fanciful suggestion 
 that the fact of his having observed low life at so 
 tender an age (from ten to twelve) accounts for 
 the purity of tone with which that life is treated in 
 the novelist's works. In its proper place I shall 
 take a different view of Dickens's method in this 
 matter ; it is not to be supposed for a moment that 
 the boy, familiar with London on its grimiest side, 
 working in cellars, inhabiting garrets, eating in 
 cookshops, visiting a debtors' prison (his father was 
 detained in the Marshalsea), escaped the conta- 
 mination of his surroundings. London in all its 
 foulness was stamped on the lad's memory. He 
 escaped in time, that was all, and his fortunate 
 endowment did the rest. 
 
 The year 1825, then, saw him at a day-school in 
 North London; the ordinary day-school of that time, 
 which is as much as to say that it was just better 
 than no school at all. One cannot discover that he 
 learnt anything here, or from any other professed 
 teacher, beyond the very elements of common know- 
 ledge. And here again is a point on which through- 
 out his life Dickens felt a certain soreness; he 
 wished to be thought, wished to be, a well-educated 
 man, yet was well aware that in several directions 
 he could never make up for early defects of training. 
 In those days it was socially more important than 
 now to have received a *^ classical education", and 
 with the classics he had no acquaintance. There is 
 no mistaking the personal note in those passages of 
 his books which treat of, or allude to, Greek and 
 Latin studies in a satirical spirit. True, it is just 
 
The Growth of Man and ^V^iter. 23 
 
 as impossible to deny that, in this particular field 
 of English life, every sort of insincerity was ramr 
 pant Carlyle (who, by the by, was no Grecian) 
 threw scorn upon ** gerund-grinding", and with 
 justice; Dickens delighted in showing classical 
 teachers as dreary humbugs, and in hinting that 
 they were such by the me^e necessity of the case. 
 Mr. Feeder, B. A., grinds, with his Greek or Latin 
 stop on^^for the edification of Toots. MDr. Blimber 
 snuffles at dinner-time, "It is remarkable that 
 the Romans — ", and every terrified boy assumes 
 an air of impossible interest: even Copperfield*s 
 worthy friend. Dr. Strong, potters in an imbecile 
 fashion over a Greek dictionary which there is 
 plainly not the slightest hope of his ever com- 
 pleting. Numerous are the side-hits at this edu- 
 cational idol of wealthy England. For all that, 
 remember David's self-congratulation when, his 
 schooldays at an end, he feels that he is ** well- 
 taught " ; in other words, that he is possessed of 
 the results of Dr. Strong's mooning over dead 
 languages. Dickens had far too much sense and 
 honesty to proclaim a loud contempt where he 
 knew himself ignorant. For an example of the 
 sort of thing impossible to him, see the passage in 
 an early volume of the Goncourts' Diary, where the 
 egregious brothers report a quarrel with St. Victor, 
 a defender of the Ancients; they, in their monu- 
 mental fatuity, ending the debate by a declaration 
 that a French novel called Adolphe was from every 
 point of view preferable to Homer. Dickens knew 
 better than this ; but, having real ground for satire 
 in the educational follies of the day, indulged that 
 personal pique of which I spoke in the first chapter, 
 and doubtless reflected that he, at all events, had 
 
24 Charles Dickens. 
 
 not greatly missed the help of the old heathens in 
 his battle of life. When his own boys had passed 
 through the approved curriculum of Public School 
 and University, he viewed the question more liber- 
 ally. One of the most pleasing characters in his 
 later work, Mr. Crisparkle in Edwin Droody is 
 a classical tutor, and without shadow of humbug; 
 indeed, he is perhaps the only figure in all Dickens 
 presenting a fair resemblance to the modern type of 
 English gentleman. 
 
 There is no use in discussing what a man might 
 have done had he been in important respects 
 another man than he was. That his lack of educa- 
 tion meant a serious personal defect in Dickens 
 appears only too plainly throughout the story of 
 his life; that it shows from time to time as a dis- 
 advantage in his books there is no denying. I am 
 not concerned with criticism such as Macaulay's 
 disgust at Hard Times, on the ground that it 
 showed a hopeless misconception of the problems 
 and methods of Political Economy; it seems to me 
 that Dickens here produced a book quite unworthy 
 of him, and this wholly apart from the question of 
 its economic teaching. At the same time, I feel that 
 the faults of such a book as Hard Times must, in 
 some measure, be attributed to Dickens's lack of 
 acquaintance with various kinds of literature, with 
 various modes of thought. The theme, undoubtedly, 
 is admirable, but the manner of its presentment 
 betrays an extraordinary naivete, plainly due to un- 
 trained intellect, a mind insufficiently stored. His 
 work offers several such instances. And whilst on 
 this point, it is as well to remember that Dickens's 
 contemporaries did not join unanimously in the 
 chorus of delighted praise which greeted each new 
 
The Growth of Man and "Writer. 25 
 
 book; now and then he met with severe criticism 
 from the graver literary organs, and in most cases 
 such censure directed itself against precisely this 
 weakness. It was held that Dickens set himself 
 to treat of questions beyond his scope, and made 
 known his views with an acrimony altogether 
 unjustified in one who had only prejudice, or, at 
 best, humane sentiment, to go upon. Some of his 
 letters prove how keenly he felt this kind of criti- 
 cism, which of course had no effect but to confirm 
 him in his own judgments and habits of utterance. 
 In truth, though there were numbers of persons 
 who could point out Dickens's shortcomings as a 
 thinker, only one man could produce literature such 
 as his, enriching a large part of the human race 
 with inestimable gifts of joy and kindness. He 
 went his way in spite of critics, and did the work 
 appointed him. 
 
 Of the results of his neglected boyhood as they 
 appear in the details of his life, something will be 
 said hereafter. It would have been wonderful if 
 from such beginnings there had developed, by its 
 own force, a well-balanced character. In balance, 
 in moderation, Dickens was conspicuously lacking, 
 whether as man or artist. Something more of 
 education, even in the common sense of the word, 
 would assuredly have helped to subdue this fault 
 in one so largely endowed with the genial virtues. 
 He need not have lost his originality of mind. We 
 can well enough conceive Charles Dickens ripening 
 to the degree of wisdom which would have assured 
 him a more quietly happy, and therefore a longer, 
 life. But to that end other masters are needed than 
 such as pretended to, and such as really did, in- 
 struct the unregarded son of the navy pay-officer. 
 
26 Charles Dickens. 
 
 If one asks (as well one may) how it came to pass 
 that an uneducated man produced at the age of 
 three-and-twenty a book so original in subject and 
 treatment, so wonderfully true in observation, and 
 on the whole so well written as Sketches by Boz, 
 there is of course but one answer: the man had 
 genius. But even genius is not independent of 
 external aid. ^^Pray, sir," asked someone of the 
 elder Dickens, '* where was your son educated?" 
 And the parent replied, ''Why, indeed, sir — ha! 
 ha! — he may be said to have educated himself!" 
 How early this self-instruction began we have 
 already had a hint in that glimpse of the child 
 sitting by Rochester Castle ''with a head full of 
 Partridge, Strap and Tom Pipes and Sancho 
 Panza". Sancho Panza, it may be presumed, is 
 known even to the present generation; but who 
 were those others? Indeed, who knows anything 
 nowadays of the great writers who nourished the 
 young mind of Dickens? Smollett, Fielding — 
 perhaps, after all, it is as well that these authors 
 do not supply the amusement of our young people. 
 When eight or nine years old, Charles Dickens 
 read them rapturously, all but got them by heart, 
 and he asserts, what may be readily believed, that 
 they did him no jot of harm. But these old novel- 
 ists arc strong food; a boy who is to enrich the 
 literature of the world may well be nourished upon 
 them; other boys, perchance, had better grow up 
 on milder nutriment! 
 
 The catalogue of his early reading is most im- 
 portant; let it be given here, as Dickens gives it in 
 David Copperfield^ with additions elsewhere sup- 
 plied. Roderick Random^ Peregrine Pickle^ Humph- 
 rey Clinker^ Tom Jones ^ The Vicar of Wakefield^ Don 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 27 
 
 Quixote, Gil Bias, Robinson Crusoe , The Arabian 
 Nights y and Tales of the Genii] also volumes of 
 Essayists ; The Taller, The Spectator, The Idler, The 
 Citizen of the World, and a Collection of Farces 
 edited by Mrs. Inch bald. These the child had found 
 in his father's house near Rochester; he carried 
 them with him in his head to London, and there 
 found them his solace through the two years of 
 bitter bondage. The importance of this list lies 
 not merely in the fact that it certifies Dickens's 
 earliest reading; it remained throughout his whole 
 life (with very few exceptions) the sum of books 
 dear to his memory and to his imagination. Those 
 which he read first were practically the only books 
 which influenced Dickens as an author. We must 
 add the Bible (with special emphasis, the New 
 Testament), Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Sterne; 
 among his own contemporaries, Scott and Carlyle. 
 Therewith we may close this tale of authors whom 
 he notably followed through his youth of study and 
 his career as man of letters. After success came to 
 him (and it came so early) he never had much time 
 for reading, and probably never any great inclina- 
 tion. We are told that he especially enjoyed books 
 of travel, but they served merely as recreation. 
 His own travels in Europe supplied him with no 
 new authors (one hears of his trying to read some 
 French novelist, and finding the dialogue intolerably 
 dull), nor with any new mental pursuit. He learned 
 to speak in French and Italian, but made very little 
 use of the attainment. Few really great men can 
 have had so narrow an intellectual scope. Turn to his 
 practical interests, and there indeed we have another 
 picture; I speak at present only of the book-lore 
 which shaped his mind, and helped to direct his pen. 
 
28 Charles Dickens. 
 
 To this early familiarity with English classics is 
 due the remarkable command of language shown 
 even in his first sketches. When I come to speak 
 of Dickens's style, it will be time enough to touch 
 upon faults which are obvious; vulgarisms occur 
 in his apprentice work, but the wonder is that they 
 were not more frequent; assuredly they must have 
 been, but for the literary part of that self-education 
 which good fortune had permitted him. A thorough 
 acquaintance with the books above mentioned made 
 him master of that racy tongue which was demanded 
 by his subject, and by his way of regarding it. 
 Destined to a place in the list of writers charac- 
 teristically English, he found in the works of his 
 predecessors a natural inheritance, and without 
 need of studious reflection came equipped to his 
 task. 
 
 No, they are not read nowadays, the old masters 
 of the English novel ; yet they must needs be read 
 by anyone who would understand the English 
 people. To the boy Dickens, they presented 
 pictures of life as it was still going on about him ; 
 not much had altered; when he himself began to 
 write fiction, his scenes, his characters, made a 
 natural continuance of the stories told by Smollett, 
 Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith. To us, at the 
 end of the nineteenth century, Nicholas Nickleby 
 tells of a social life as far away as that described in 
 Roderick Random) yet in another respect these 
 books are nearer to us, of more familiar spirit, than 
 the novel — whatever it may be — newest from the 
 press and in greatest vogue. They are a part of 
 our nationality; in both of them runs our very 
 life-blood. However great the changes on the 
 surface of life, England remains, and is likely to 
 
The Growth of Man and 'Writer. 29 
 
 remain, the same at heart with the England of our 
 eighteenth-century novelists. By communing with 
 them, one breaks through the disguises of modern 
 fashion, gauges the importance of ** progress", 
 and learns to recognize the historically essential. 
 Before the end of this essay, I shall have often 
 insisted on the value of Dickens's work as an 
 expression of national life and sentiment. Born, 
 of course, with the aptitude for such utterance, he 
 could not have had better schooling than in the 
 lumber-room library at Rochester. There he first 
 heard the voice of his own thoughts. And to those 
 books we also must turn, if the fury of to-day's 
 existence leave us any inclination or leisure for a 
 study of the conditions which produced Charles 
 Dickens. 
 
 His choice of a pseudonym for the title-page of 
 his Sketches is significant, for, as he tells us him- 
 self, **Boz" was simply a facetious nasal contrac- 
 tion, used in his family, of the nickname Moses, 
 the original Moses being no other than the son of 
 Dr. Primrose in the Vicar of Wakefield, There is 
 a peculiar happiness in this close link between 
 Goldsmith and Dickens, spirits so much akin in 
 tender humanity. Indeed, Dickens had a special 
 affection for the Vicar of Wakefield, When think- 
 ing of his first Christmas book (and who could 
 more have delighted in the Carol than Oliver Gold- 
 smith?), he says that he wishes to write a story of 
 about the same length as The Vicar, One could 
 easily draw a parallel between the two authors ; and 
 it is certain that among the influences which made 
 Dickens, none had more importance than the ex- 
 ample of Goldsmith's fiction. 
 
 A word is called for by the two books, among 
 
30 Charles Dickens. 
 
 those mentioned above, which are least connected 
 with English traditions and English thought. The 
 Arabian Nights and Tales of the Genii were cer- 
 tainly more read in Dickens's day than in ours; 
 probably most children at present would know 
 nothing of eastern romance but for the Christmas 
 pantomime. Oddly enough, Dickens seems to 
 make more allusions throughout his work to the 
 Arabian Nights than to any other book or author. 
 He is not given to quoting, or making literary 
 references ; but those fairy tales of the East supply 
 him with a good number of illustrations, and not 
 only in his early novels. Is it merely fanciful to 
 see in this interest, not of course an explanation, 
 but a circumstance illustrative of that habit of mind 
 which led him to discover infinite romance in the 
 obscurer life of London? Where the ordinary man 
 sees nothing but everyday habit, Dickens is filled 
 with the perception of marvellous possibilities. 
 Again and again he has put the spirit of the 
 Arabian Nights into his pictures of life by the river 
 Thames. Some person annoyed him once by 
 speaking of his books as *^ romances", and his 
 annoyance is quite intelligible, for a ** romance" in 
 the proper sense of the word he never wrote; yet 
 the turn of his mind was very different from that 
 exhibited by a modern pursuer of veracity in fiction. 
 He sought for wonders amid the dreary life of 
 common streets; and perhaps in this direction also 
 his intellect was encouraged when he made ac- 
 quaintance with the dazzling Eastern fables, and 
 took them alternately with that more solid nutri- 
 ment of the eighteenth-century novel. 
 
 The Essayists must have done much for the refin- 
 ing of his intelligence; probably his reading of 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 31 
 
 Addison and Steele came nearer to education, 
 specially understood, than anything else with which 
 he was occupied in boyhood. Long afterwards, 
 when he had thought of a periodical publication 
 (which was to become Household Words)^ he wrote 
 about it to Forster: **I strongly incline to the notion 
 of a kind of Spectator (Addison's) — very cheap and 
 pretty frequent". How strange it sounds to our 
 ears I What editor would nowadays dream of tak- 
 ing Addison as his model? But Dickens was so 
 much nearer to the age of graceful leisure, and, on 
 one side of his personality, had profited so well by 
 its teaching. 
 
 Of Sir Walter Scott, I believe, he never speaks 
 with any special enthusiasm, and, as regards the 
 purely Scottish novels, this is easily understood; 
 they could make no strong appeal to the mind of 
 Dickens. But it seems to me that Scott's influence 
 is not to be mistaken in the narrative of Bamahy 
 Rudge. 
 
 One artist there was, an artist with the brush and 
 an engraver, of whom it may be said that Dickens 
 assuredly learnt, though I cannot see the possibility 
 of comparing their work, of which Forster and others 
 make so much. The genius of Hogarth differed 
 widely from that of the author of Pickwick^ but it 
 was inevitable that such profound studies of life 
 and character should attract, even fascinate, a mind 
 absorbed in contemplation of poverty and all its 
 concomitants. Added thereto was the peculiar in- 
 terest in the artist's name, which resulted to Dickens 
 from his marriage at the age of twenty-four with 
 Miss Hogarth, this lady claiming descent from her 
 great namesake. Both men were strenuous moralists, 
 but it would be hard to show any other point of 
 
32 Charles Dickens. 
 
 resemblance in their methods of presenting fact. 
 As to their humour, I am unable to find anything 
 in Hogarth which can for a moment be compared 
 with that quality in Dickens. Hogarth smiles, it is 
 true, but how grimly! There prevails in him an 
 uncompromising spirit of which the novelist had 
 nothing whatever. Try to imagine a volume of 
 fiction produced by the artist of Gin Lane, of The 
 Harlot's Progress, and put it beside the books which, 
 from Pickwick onwards, have been the delight of 
 English homes. Puritans both of them, Hogarth 
 shows his religion on the sterner side ; Dickens, in 
 a gentle avoidance of whatsoever may give offence 
 to the pure in heart, the very essence of his artistic 
 conscience being that compromise which the other 
 scorned. In truth, as artists they saw differently. 
 Dickens was no self-deceiver; at any moment his 
 steps would guide him to parts of London where he 
 could behold, and had often beheld, scenes as terrible 
 as any that the artist struck into black and white; 
 he looked steadily at such things, and, at the proper 
 time, could speak of them. But when he took up 
 the pen of the story-teller, his genius constrained 
 him to such use, such interpretation, of bitter fact 
 as made him beloved, not dreaded, by readers ask- 
 ing, before all else, to be soothingly entertained. 
 On this point I shall have more to say presently. 
 Enough here, that Hogarth undoubtedly helped to 
 concentrate the young writer's mind on the subjects 
 he was to treat in his own way. Evidence, were it 
 needed, is found in the preface to Oliver Twist, 
 where, after speaking of the romantic types of 
 rascality then popular in fiction, he declares that 
 only in one book has he seen the true thief depicted, 
 namely, in the works of Hogarth. 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 33 
 
 A friend, himself a painter, suggests to me that 
 the true parallel in this sort would be between 
 Dickens and Wilkie. Certainly there is strong 
 resemblance, though, it must be remembered, only 
 on one plane of Dickens's observant and imaginative 
 powers; Wilkie's spirit, in his familiar pictures, 
 strikes one as no less tolerant, no less mirthful, than 
 that of the greater man in whose work he was known 
 to delight; he has the same inborn appreciation of 
 homeliness, the same seeking after quaint truth in 
 the commonplace. With another contemporary 
 artist Dickens had closer relations. The Sketches 
 were illustrated by George Cruikshank; so was 
 Oliver Twisty and a foolish bit of gossip, troublesome 
 at the time, would have it that Oliver's history had 
 come into being at the suggestion of certain draw- 
 ings of Cruikshank's own. For my own part, I can 
 enjoy only a few of the famous woodcuts in these 
 early books; it appears to me that a man of less ori- 
 ginality than Cruikshank's, the late Fred Barnard, 
 has done incomparably better work in his pictures 
 to the novels. But in their leaning to the grotesque, 
 author and illustrator were so much alike that one 
 can at all events understand the baseless story which 
 Dickens took all possible trouble to refute. Some 
 years afterwards, when Cruikshank published his 
 picture called The Bottle^ intended as a blow in the 
 cause of temperance, Dickens constantly spoke and 
 wrote of it with high admiration, though he had 
 fault to find with the manner in which its lesson 
 was conveyed. There could not but exist much 
 sympathy between these workers on lines so similar 
 in different arts; but beyond the fact of Dickens's 
 liking for the artist's designs from the beginning of 
 his own career, nothing, so far as I know, can be 
 
 (M444) c 
 
34 Charles Dickens. 
 
 advanced in proof of his having been guided or 
 prompted by Cruikshank's genius. 
 
 It was in imitation of his father's example that 
 Dickens, by learning shorthand, prepared himself 
 to become, first a reporter in one of the offices in 
 Doctors'-Commons (the remarkable region so well 
 known from David Copperfield)^ and after that in 
 the gallery of the House. Thus far had he got at 
 nineteen. With the vivacious energy which was 
 always his leading characteristic, he made himself, 
 forthwith, a journalist of mark in the sphere to 
 which he was restricted. Prior to this, whilst earn- 
 ing his livelihood as a clerk in an attorney's office, 
 he had somehow read a good deal at the British 
 Museum, and had devoted most of his evenings to 
 the theatre. It may safely be said that the evening 
 amusement was much more important in its results 
 than any formal study he undertook; unless, in- 
 deed, — a not improbable conjecture, — he, like 
 Charles Lamb, sought the reading-room of the 
 Museum chiefly for dramatic literature. At this 
 time of his life, Dickens had resolved upon a theat- 
 rical career; whether as dramatist or actor he did 
 not much mind, feeling equal to either pursuit. His 
 day's drudgery, however thoroughly performed, 
 was endured only in the hope of release as soon as 
 he found his chance upon the stage. Of course he 
 would have succeeded in either capacity, though 
 with a success far less brilliant than fate had in 
 store for him. He did in the end become, if not 
 strictly an actor, at all events a public entertainer 
 whose strongest efforts were produced by the exer- 
 cise of melodramatic talent; as an amateur, he acted 
 frequently throughout his life. His attempts at 
 dramatic authorship — The Straiige Gentleman^ a 
 
The Growth of Man and "Writer. 35 
 
 farce played in 1836; The Village Coquettes ^ a lib- 
 retto, produced in the same year; and The Lamp- 
 lighter^ a farce written in 1838, but never acted — 
 gave no serious proof of his powers in this direc- 
 tion; they were hurriedly thrown off at the time 
 when his literary fame was already beginning. But 
 in the year or two before he wrote his Sketches, 
 when the consciousness of vague ability and high 
 ambition made him restive in his mechanical calling 
 of shorthand writer, he applied to the manager of 
 Covent Garden Theatre for an opportunity of show- 
 ing what he could do. The accident of illness 
 interfered with an appointment granted him, and, 
 owing to some start in journalism, the application 
 was not renewed. Plainly Dickens came very near 
 indeed to entering upon the actor's life, and so close 
 throughout is his connection with the theatrical 
 world, that one cannot glance at this incident as a 
 mere detail in the story of his youth. It declares a 
 natural bent of mind, not the passing inclination 
 which is so often felt by lads more or less gifted. 
 
 When, in the full enjoyment of his fancy, Dickens 
 amused himself and served charitable ends by get- 
 ting up dramatic performances, we note a signifi- 
 cance in his selection of a play. He chose Ben 
 Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, himself 
 taking the part of Bobadil. How early he read Ben 
 Jonson, I am unable to say; I should like to be 
 assured that it was in those hours spent at the 
 British Museum, when all his work yet lay before 
 him. One can well imagine the delight of Dickens 
 in a first acquaintance with rare Ben. Forster gives 
 an excellent description of the zeal and gusto with 
 which his friend entered into the character of Boba- 
 dil ; how for some weeks he actually became Bobadil, 
 
36 Charles Dickens. 
 
 talking him and writing him on every opportunity. 
 What more natural than his enjoyment of the ster- 
 ling old writer whose strength lay in the exhibition 
 of extravagant humours ! Dickens had no such life 
 about him as the Elizabethan; in comparison, his 
 world was starved and squalid ; but of the humours 
 of the men he knew — humours precisely in Jonson's 
 sense — he made richer use than anything in that 
 kind known to English literature since the golden 
 age. All Dickens might be summed in the title 
 of Jonson's play; no figure but is representative of 
 a ^^ humour", running at times into excesses hardly 
 surpassed by Ben himself. On several occasions 
 (1845-50) he acted in this comedy, and one can 
 hardly doubt that it helped to confirm his tendency 
 to exuberance of grotesque characterization. 
 
 So much, then, for that part of his self-education 
 which came from books. Meanwhile life had been 
 supplying him with abundant experience, which no 
 one knew better than Dickens how to store and 
 utilize. Theophile Gautier, an observer of a very 
 different type, says somewhere of himself: ^^Toute 
 ma valeur, c'est que je suis un homm^e pour qui le 
 monde visible existe'' ; in Dickens this was far from 
 the sole, or the supreme, quality; but assuredly few 
 men have known so well how to use their eyes. A 
 student is commonly inobservant of outward things; 
 Dickens, far from a bookish youth, looked about 
 him in those years of struggle for a livelihood with 
 a glance which missed no minutest feature of what 
 he saw. We are told that his eyes were very 
 bright, impressing all who met him with a sense of 
 their keenness. Keen they were in no ordinary 
 sense; for they pierced beneath the surface, and (in 
 Lamb's phrase) discerned the quiddity of common 
 
The Growth of Man and ^Vriter. 37 
 
 objects. Everything he looked upon was registered 
 in his mind, where at any moment he could revive 
 the original impression, and with his command of 
 words, vital, picturesque, show the thing to others. 
 His work as attorney's clerk lasted for not quite 
 two years (1827-28); his reportership in the courts 
 of Doctors'-Commons seems to have been of even 
 shorter duration ; but in this time he probably 
 acquired most of his knowledge of the legal world, 
 which was shown first of all in Pickwick^ and con- 
 tinued to appear, in one form or another, through- 
 out his books. For exactitude of observation, this 
 group of professional figures, from office-boy up to 
 judge, is the most valuable thing in Dickens. It 
 strikes one as noteworthy, on the other hand, that 
 he never cared to use his experience of journalism. 
 Practically, he once attempted to resume his con- 
 nection with the press, and became editor of The 
 Daily News — for not quite three weeks (1846); but 
 the novels (unless we take account of the caricatures 
 in Pickwick) have no concern with that side of 
 literary life. Within limits the picture is supplied 
 by Thackeray. But Dickens might have put to 
 wonderful service his memories of the time when 
 he reported for the True Sutiy the Mirror of Parlia- 
 ment^ and the Morning Chronicle (1831-36). He 
 told the story, long afterwards, in one of the best 
 and brightest of his speeches, that given at the 
 dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund in 1865; 
 when, speaking to a generation which travelled by 
 steam, he recalled how he had been upset in almost 
 every description of vehicle known in this country, 
 and had carried reports to his editor in the teeth ol 
 difficulties insuperable by any man of merely com- 
 mon energy and resource. What use he made of 
 
38 Charles Dickens. 
 
 his experiences in travel by highway and byway, 
 we know well, for these are among his characteristic 
 pages. Never is Dickens more joyously himself 
 than when he tells of stage-coach and posting- 
 vehicles. He tried his hand at a description of the 
 railway, but with no such gusto, no such success. 
 His youth belonged to the pre-locomotive time, the 
 time of jolly faring on English roads — jolly in spite 
 of frost and rain, and discomforts innumerable. 
 All this he has made his own, and he learned it as 
 a newspaper reporter. 
 
 For the acquiring of knowledge of his own coun- 
 try he could hardly have been better placed. Hither 
 and thither he sped, north and south, east and west, 
 to report the weighty words of orators now long 
 forgotten. He saw most English towns; he marked 
 with pleasure the hamlets and villages; of inns, 
 great and small, he learnt all that man is capable 
 of learning. And in that old England, there was 
 more of the picturesque, more of the beautiful, than 
 we see to-day. I have insisted upon the ugliness 
 of the life of that time; indeed, it can hardly be exag- 
 gerated; but there is another aspect of Dickens's 
 England, one which might be illustrated with ample 
 detail from all his better books. Side by side with 
 the increase of comfort (or of luxury), with that 
 lightening of dark places which is surely good, 
 goes on the destruction of so much one would fain 
 preserve. Think, for instance, of Yarmouth, as 
 seen in David Copperfield^ and the Yarmouth of 
 this year's railway advertisements. What more 
 need be said? 
 
 Not only, then, in London, but through the 
 length and breadth of the land, Dickens was seeing 
 and studying his countrymen. Nothing that he 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 39 
 
 learnt embittered him, any more than had his own 
 hardships in the years happily gone by; but he 
 noted many a form of suffering, with the tyranny, 
 great or small, the hypocrisy and the thickheaded- 
 ness which were responsible for it; and when his time 
 came, he knew how to commend these things to the 
 sympathy, the indignation, the mirth of larger 
 audiences than any author had yet controlled. 
 Overflowing with the enjoyment of life, he natur- 
 ally found more sunshine than gloom, whether in 
 crowded streets, or by the wayside with its scattered 
 wanderers. Now, as always, he delighted in the 
 amusements of the people, in fairs and shows, and 
 every sort of humble entertainment. A conjurer, 
 a fortune-teller, a shabby acrobat, a cheap-Jack — 
 one and all were irresistible to him ; he could not 
 pass a menagerie, a circus, a strolling troop of 
 players ; the squeak of Punch had as much charm 
 for him as for any child. Merely to mention such 
 folk is to call up a host of reminiscences from the 
 books which bear his name. He had not the vaga- 
 bond nature which we see, for instance, in George 
 Borrow ; he is a man of the town, of civilization ; 
 but the forms of vagabondage which arise amid a 
 great population, quaint survivals, ragged eccen- 
 tricities, laughter-moving incarnations of rascality 
 and humbug, excited his unfailing interest. He 
 lived to take his place in a society of wealth, 
 culture, and refinement, but his heart was always 
 with the people, with the humble-minded and those 
 of low estate. Among these he had found the 
 material for his genius to work upon, and, most 
 important of all, among these he learnt to make 
 himself the perfect mouthpiece of English homeli- 
 ness. 
 
40 Charles Dickens. 
 
 In Oliver Twist we come upon a casual mention, 
 quite serious, of "continental frivolities". The 
 phrase is delightfully English, and very charac- 
 teristic of Dickens's mind when he began to write. 
 Ten years later he would not have used it ; he out- 
 grew that narrowness ; but it was well that he knew 
 no better at five-and-twenty. Insularity in his 
 growing time was needful to him, and must be 
 counted for a virtue. 
 
 A year before Queen Victoria's accession appeared, 
 in two volumes. Sketches by Boz^ Illustrative of 
 Everyday Life and Everyday People^ a collection of 
 papers which had already seen the light in periodi- 
 cals. This book came from a 'prentice hand, but 
 it contains in germ all the future Dickens. Glance 
 at the headings of the pages; here we have the 
 Beadle and all connected with him, London streets, 
 theatres, shows, the pawnshop, Doctors'-Commons, 
 Christmas, Newgate, coaching, the River; here we 
 have a satirical picture of Parliament, fun made of 
 cheap snobbery, a rap on the knuckles of sectarian- 
 ism. Hardly a topic associated with Dickens in 
 his maturity is missing from the earliest attempts. 
 What could be more prophetic than the title of the 
 opening chapters — Our Parish? With the Parish 
 — a large one, indeed — Dickens to the end concerned 
 himself; therein lay his force, his secret of vitality. 
 He began with a rapid survey of his whole field; 
 hinting at all he might accomplish, indicating the 
 limits he was not to pass. 
 
 He treats at once of the lower middle class, where 
 he will be always at his best; with the class below 
 it, with those who literally earn bread in the sweat 
 of their brows, he was better acquainted than any 
 other novelist of his time, but they figure much less 
 
The Growth of Man and Writer. 41 
 
 prominently in his books. To the lower middle 
 class, a social status so peculiarly English, so rich 
 in virtues yet so provocative of satire, he by origin 
 belonged; in its atmosphere he always breathed 
 most freely, and had the largest command of his 
 humorous resources. Humour is a characteristic of 
 Boz^ but humour undeveloped, tentative; merely a 
 far-off promise of the fruit which ripened so rapidly. 
 There is joking about the results of matrimony, a 
 primitive form of facetiousness which belongs to 
 the time and the class, and which it took Dickens 
 a good many years to shake off. Vulgarity was, of 
 course, inseparable from his subject, and that the 
 young author should have been himself involved 
 in the charge is easily understood. A vulgar ex- 
 pression may be here and there discovered (I mean, 
 of course, in the author's own words), but the tone 
 of the whole work is as far from vulgarity as that of 
 the eighteenth-century sketches and meditations of 
 which we are occasionally reminded. As for the 
 form, it strikes one as more original than that of the 
 subsequent books. No one, indeed, had ever made 
 such use as this of materials taken from the very 
 dust-heap of decent London life; such common paltry 
 stuff of the town, yet here so truthfully described, 
 with such intimate touches, such glimpses of mirth- 
 ful motive, as come only from the hand of the born 
 artist. Veracity I take to be the high merit of these 
 sketches. Dickens has not yet developed his liking 
 for the grotesque, the extravagant; he pictures the 
 commonplace, with no striving for effect, and 
 admirably succeeds. Some of these descriptions of 
 the town in its various aspects, day and night, he 
 never surpassed ; they abound in detail, yet never 
 by any chance admit a false note. His persons live 
 
42 Charles Dickens. 
 
 and move; you may encounter nearly all of them 
 to-day, affected by the course of time, but still re- 
 cognizable from his fine portraiture. It was no 
 slight achievement for a youth of four-and-twenty, 
 this putting on record once for all of so large and 
 significant a portion of English life. 
 
 Therewith ended Dickens's apprenticeship. He 
 had stored his material, was on the point of attain- 
 ing full command of his powers. When next he 
 sat down to write he produced a masterpiece. 
 
 Chapter III. 
 The Story-teller. 
 
 A glance over the literary annals of the time 
 during which Dickens was apprentice to his craft 
 shows us, in fiction, the names of Disraeli, Peacock, 
 Mrs. Norton, Bulwer, Ainsworth, and Marryat. 
 One and all signify little to the coming master, 
 though he professed a high esteem for the romances 
 of Lord Lytton, and with Captain Marryat shared 
 the tradition of the eighteenth-century novelists. 
 Tennyson had already come forth; Browning had 
 printed a poem; Sartor Resartus had ''got itself 
 published ", and was waiting for readers. In an- 
 other sphere. Tracts for the Times were making 
 commotion; regarding which matter the young 
 student of life doubtless had already his opinion. 
 It is of more interest to note that in 1832 were 
 established Chambers^ Journal and Knight's Penny 
 Magazine \ indicative of the growth of a new public, 
 a class of readers which no author had hitherto 
 directly addressed, and which was only to be 
 
The Story-teller. 43 
 
 reached by publication in the cheapest form. From 
 the preface to Oliver Twist we learn that romances 
 of highwaymen had much vogue, of course among 
 the populace, and about this time Ainsworth re- 
 sponded to the demand with his Jack Sheppard, 
 Against this prevalent glorification of rascality 
 Dickens directed his first novel, properly so called. 
 
 Pickwick cannot be classed as a novel ; it is merely 
 a great book. Everyone knows that it originated 
 in the suggestion of a publisher that the author of 
 Sketches by Boz should write certain facetious chap- 
 ters to accompany certain facetious drawings; it 
 was to be a joke at the expense of Cockney sports- 
 men. Dickens obtained permission to write in his 
 own way. Of the original suggestion there remains 
 Mr. Winkle with the gun; for the rest, this bit of 
 hackwork became a good deal more than the writer 
 himself foresaw. Obviously he sat down with only 
 the vaguest scheme; even the personality of his 
 central figure was not clear to him. A pardonable 
 fault, when the circumstances are known, but the 
 same defect appears in all Dickens's earlier books; 
 he only succeeded in correcting it when his imagi- 
 native fervour had begun to cool, and in the end 
 he sought by the artifices of an elaborate plot to 
 make up for the decline of qualities greatly more 
 important. In considering Dickens as an artist, I 
 propose first of all to deal with the construction of 
 his stories. Let it be understood that in the present 
 chapter I discuss the novels solely from this point 
 of view, postponing consideration of those features 
 of the master's work which are his strength and his 
 glory. 
 
 However ill-constructed, Pickwick^ I imagine, was 
 never found uninteresting. One may discourse 
 
44 Charles Dickens. 
 
 about it in good set terms, pointing out that it 
 belongs to a very old school of narrative, and indi- 
 cating resemblances with no less a work than Do7i 
 Quixote^ — Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller being in 
 some degree the antitypes of the Knight of La 
 Mancha and Sancho. Intrigue there is none (save 
 in the offices of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg). The 
 thing is aimed at the reader's diaphragm, and, by 
 ricochet, touches his heart. Lord Campbell de- 
 clared that he would rather have written Pickwick 
 than be Chief Justice of England; yet here we have 
 simply the rambles and accidents and undignified 
 escapades of certain Londoners, one of them accom- 
 panied by a man-servant, whom he picked up as 
 boots at an inn; we have a typical London land- 
 lady, a breach-of-promise case, and a debtors' 
 prison. What unpromising material, in the year 
 1837, for any author but the one who knew how to 
 make immortal use of it! 
 
 As in the Sketches we found the germ of all 
 Dickens, so in this second book, not yet a novel, 
 may we mark tendencies soon to have full develop- 
 ment. The theme itself admitting no great variety 
 of tone, we have the time-honoured device of epi- 
 sodic stories ; one of them shows that melodramatic 
 bent which was to be of such importance in future 
 books; another, the tale of Gabriel Grub, gives, 
 thus early, a hint of the Christmas fantasies which 
 so greatly strengthened their author's hold on the 
 popular admiration and love. The close gives us 
 our first example of Dickens's resolute optimism. 
 Everybody (or all but everybody) is to be made 
 happy for ever after; knavish hearts are softened 
 by gratitude, and those of the good beat high in 
 satisfied benevolence. This is the kind of thing 
 
The Story-teller. 45 
 
 that delights the public, and lucky would be the 
 public if it were often offered to them with a noble 
 sincerity like that of Dickens. 
 
 With Oliver Twist we take up the tradition of 
 English novel-writing; at once we are reminded of 
 the old books in the library at Rochester. Scenes 
 and people and tone are new, but the manner is that 
 long ago established. As for construction, there is 
 a little, and a very little, more of it than in Pickwick; 
 it is badly managed, so badly, that one seeks to 
 explain the defect by remembering that the early 
 part of Oliver and the last part of Pickwick were in 
 hand simultaneously. Yet not in this book alone 
 did Dickens give proof of an astonishing lack of 
 skill when it came to inventing plausible circum- 
 stances. Later, by sheer force of resolve, he exhi- 
 bited ingenuity enough, often too much for his pur- 
 pose; but the art of adapting simple probabilities to 
 the ends of a narrative he never mastered. In his 
 plots, unfortunately, he is seldom concerned with 
 the plain motives of human life. (Observe that I 
 am speaking of his plots,) Too often he prefers 
 some far-fetched eccentricity, some piece of knavish- 
 ness, some unlikely occurrence, about which to 
 weave his tale. And this, it seems to me, is directly 
 traceable to his fondness for the theatre. He planned 
 a narrative as though plotting for the stage. When 
 the necessities of intrigue did not weigh upon him 
 — as happily was so often the cause in his roomy 
 stories — he could forget the footlights ; at the first 
 demand for an ** effect", gas and limelight are both 
 turned on. Cannot we often hear the incidental 
 music? Dickens's love for the stage was assuredly 
 a misfortune to him, as author and as man. 
 
 In the idle mysteries which are made to surround 
 
46 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Oliver, and in the incredible weakness of what is 
 meant to be the darkest part of the story, we have 
 pure stage-work. Chapter XVII. contains a passage 
 ridiculing the melodrama of the time, a tissue of 
 mediaeval villanies; what Dickens himself did, in 
 these worst moments of his invention, was to use the 
 motives of standard melodrama on a contemporary 
 subject. Even the dialogue occasionally proves 
 this. *' Wolves tear your throats!" growls Bill 
 Sikes, fleeing from his pursuers — a strange excla- 
 mation for a London burglar. And again, when 
 brought to bay after the murder he calls one of 
 the horrified thieves ^^this screeching Hell-babe" — 
 phrase natural enough on the boards of the Adelphi 
 Theatre, but incongruous in a London slum. That 
 part of the book in which Rose Maylie and her 
 lover appear smacks rather of the circulating library 
 than of the stage. We read of Rose in distress that 
 '*a heavy wildness came over her soft blue eyes". 
 I cannot remember that Dickens was ever again 
 guilty of lapses such as these; but the theatric vice 
 appears in his construction to the end. 
 
 In the years 1838 and 1839 ^^ ^^^ ^^^ too much. 
 Nicholas Nicklehy was begun long before the end 
 of Oliver Twisty as Oliver was begun before the end 
 of Pickwick. Ill-considered engagements so pressed 
 upon him that in February, 1839, we find him 
 appealing to his publisher for patience, and express- 
 ing an opinion that *^the conduct of three different 
 stories at the same time, and the production of a 
 large portion of each every month, would have been 
 beyond Scott himself". It came as a natural result 
 of his sudden and great success. Finally, he put 
 himself at ease by a simple refusal to be bound by 
 his undertakings ; an extreme step, but one which 
 
The Story-teller. 47 
 
 has to be balanced against the interested calculations 
 of a shrewd publisher. 
 
 It is plain that Nicklehy suffered from these cir- 
 cumstances of undue stress; in spite of its popu- 
 larity, and of merits presently to be recognized, it 
 is the least satisfactory of the group of books written 
 before Dickens's first visit to America. Five books 
 in five years, from Pickwick in 1837 ^^ Bamahy 
 Rudge in 1841 — a record nothing like that of Scott, 
 but wonderful as the work of a man with only half 
 Scott's length of experience to draw upon. Nicklehy 
 being much longer than its predecessor, the faulty 
 construction is more felt, and becomes a weariness, 
 an irritation; that is to say, if one thinks of the 
 matter at all, which one never should in reading 
 Dickens. Again we are involved in melodrama of 
 the feeblest description; towards the end of the 
 story there are wastes of stagey dialogue and 
 action, unreadable by any but the very young. All 
 this is quite unworthy of the author, but, following 
 upon Oliver^ it indicated the limits of his power as 
 a novelist. Dickens never had command of *^ situa- 
 tion", though he was strong in incident. A great 
 situation must be led up to by careful and skilful 
 foresight in character and event — precisely where 
 his resources always failed him. Thus, scenes 
 which he intended, and perhaps thought, to be 
 very effective, fall flat through their lack of sub- 
 stance. A mature reader turns away in disgust, 
 and, if he belong to a hasty school of modern criti- 
 cism, henceforth declares that Dickens is hopelessly 
 antiquated, and was always vastly overpraised. 
 
 Here, for the last time, we have episodic stories ; 
 admissible enough in a book -which, for all its 
 faults, smacks so of the leisurely old fiction. In 
 
48 Charles Dickens. 
 
 The Old Curiosity Shop^ which came next, there is 
 more originaHty of design : one does not smell the 
 footlights, but has, instead, delicious wafts of fresh- 
 ness from the fields and lanes of England. Of 
 course we find an initial vice of construction, in- 
 separable from Dicl^ens's habit at that time of 
 beginning to write without any settled scheme. 
 Master Humphrey opens with talk of himself, 
 enters upon a relation of something that befell him 
 in his wanderings, and of a sudden — the author 
 perceiving this necessity — vanishes from the scene, 
 which is thenceforth occupied by the figures he 
 has served to introduce. In other words, readers 
 of the periodical called Master Humphreys Clock 
 having shown some impatience with its desultory 
 character, Dickens converted into a formal novel 
 the bit of writing which he had begun as sketch or 
 gossip. Nowadays it would be all but impossible 
 for a writer of fiction, who by any accident should 
 have written and published serially a work with 
 such a fault of design, to republish it in a volume 
 without correcting the faulty part; a very slight 
 degree of literary conscientiousness, as we under- 
 stand it, would impose this duty; nay, fear of the 
 public would exact it. But such a thing never 
 occurred to Dickens. Conscientious he was in 
 matters of his art, as we shall have occasion to 
 notice, but the art itself was less exacting in his 
 day; a multitude applauded, and why should he 
 meddle with what they had so loudly approved? 
 In the same way we find Walter Scott coming 
 one fine day upon an old manuscript of his own 
 — two or three chapters of a romance long ago 
 begun and thrown aside. He reads the pages, 
 smiles over them, and sits down to complete the 
 
The Story-teller. 49 
 
 story. In reading the proofs of Waverleyy if not 
 before, he must have been well aware of the great 
 gap between its two portions, of the difference of 
 style, the contrast of tone: the early chapters so 
 obviously an experiment, the latter mature and 
 masterly. It would have taken him a very few 
 hours to rewrite the beginning; but why? The 
 whole thing was done for his amusement. The 
 public, in its turn, was something more than 
 amused. And our grave Art of Fiction, a bitter 
 task-mistress, had nothing to do with the matter. 
 
 For the rest. The Old Curiosity Shop is greatly 
 superior from this point of view to the previous 
 novels. The story has more of symmetry; it moves 
 more regularly to its close, and that close is much 
 more satisfying; it remains in one's mind as a 
 whole, with no part that one feels obtrusive or 
 incongruous or wearily feeble. In writing the last 
 portion, Dickens was so engrossed by his theme 
 that he worked at unusual hours, prolonging the 
 day's labour into the night — never of course a habit 
 with a man of his social instincts. The book 
 gained thereby its unity of effect. It is a story in 
 the true sense, and one of the most delightful in 
 our language. 
 
 Last of this early group — product of one con- 
 tinuous effort through five of the happiest years 
 that man ever lived — comes Barnaby Rudge^ which 
 is in part a romance of private life, in part a his- 
 torical novel. The two parts are not well knit 
 together; the interest with which we begin is lost 
 in far wider interests before we end; nevertheless 
 Barnaby is free from Dickens's worst vices of con- 
 struction. Granting the imperfection of the scheme, 
 it is closely wrought and its details not ill-contrived. 
 
 (M444) D 
 
50 Charles Dickens. 
 
 One defect forced upon our attention is character- 
 istic of Dickens : his inability to make skilful revela- 
 tion of circumstances which, for the purpose of the 
 story, he has kept long concealed. This skill never 
 came to him; with apology for so disrespectful a 
 word, he must be held to have bungled all his 
 effects of this kind, and there can be no doubt that 
 the revealing of the mystery of Edwin Drood would 
 have betrayed the old inability. Permit Dickens to 
 show us the life he knew in its simple everyday 
 course and he is unsurpassed by any master of 
 fiction ; demand from him a contrived story, and he 
 yields at once to the very rank and file of novelists. 
 
 A peculiarity of this book is the frequent opening 
 of a chapter with several lines of old-fashioned 
 moralising, generally on the moral compensations 
 of life. Later, Dickens found a happy substitute 
 for this kind of thing in his peculiar vein of good- 
 humoured satire, which had a more practical if a 
 narrower scope. 
 
 The year 1842 was a turning-point in his career. 
 He paid his first visit to America, and came back 
 with his ideas enlarged on many subjects. After 
 publishing American Notes ^ and the first of his 
 Christmas books, the Carols he completed, in 1844, 
 what is in some respects the greatest of his works, 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, The fact that such a judgment 
 is possible shows how little the characteristic merit 
 of Dickens's writings has to do with their complete- 
 ness as works of art ; for a novel more shapeless, a 
 story less coherent than Martin Chuzzlewit will not 
 easily be found in any literature. Repeated read- 
 ings avail not to fix it in one's mind as a sequence 
 of events; we know the persons, we remember 
 many a scene, but beyond that all is a vague remi- 
 
The Story-teller. 51 
 
 niscence. I repeat, that one can only feel astonish- 
 ment at the inability of such a man as Dickens to 
 scheme better than this. Had he but trusted to 
 some lucid story, however slight I Misled by the 
 footlights he aims at a series of ** effects'*, every 
 one void of human interest, or, at best, an outrage 
 to probability. He involves himself in complica- 
 tions which necessitate leaps and bounds of perverse 
 ingenuity. And at last, his story frankly hopeless, 
 he cuts through knots, throws difficulties into 
 oblivion, and plays up his characters to a final 
 rally; so sure of his touch upon the readers* emo- 
 tions that he can disregard their bewilderment. 
 The first chapter, a very dull, long-drawn piece of 
 ridicule directed against the supposed advantages 
 of ** birth", has nothing whatever to do with the 
 story; the book would gain by its omission. 
 Dickens in a splenetic mood (a rare thing) is far 
 from at his best. Chuzzlewit surpasses all his 
 novels in the theatrical conventionality of its great 
 closing scene — its grand finale (see Chapter LH.). 
 Around old Martin (at the centre of the stage) are 
 grouped all the dramatis personae, whether they 
 have any business there or not; Mrs. Gamp, Poll 
 Sweedlepipes, and young Bailey coming in without 
 rhyme or reason, simply to complete the circle. 
 It is magnificent; the brilliant triumph of stage 
 tradition. But it does not suffice ; something more 
 is needed that the reader's appetite for a cheerful 
 ending may have entire satisfaction; therefore, 
 before the book closes, who should turn up in the 
 heart of London but that very family of miserable 
 emigrants whom Martin and Tapley had left behind 
 them in the wild west of America I Here they are, 
 at the foot of the Monument, close by Todgers' — 
 
52 Charles Dickens. 
 
 arrived on purpose to shake hands with everyone, 
 and to fill the cup of benevolent rejoicing. What 
 man save Dickens ever dared so much ; what man 
 will ever find the courage to strike that note again? 
 
 It is necessary to bear in mind that these novels 
 appeared in monthly parts — twenty of them — and 
 that the author began publishing with only three 
 or four parts completed. Such a mode of writing 
 accounts for many things. Dickens admitted cer- 
 tain disadvantages, but held to the end that this 
 was still the best way of pursuing his art. Of 
 course the novel became an improvisation. In 
 beginning Chuzzlewity he had no intention what- 
 ever of sending his hero to America; the resolve 
 was taken, suddenly, when a declining sale proved 
 that the monthly instalments were not proving so 
 attractive as usual. Impossible ever to make changes 
 in the early chapters of a story, however urgently 
 the artist's conscience demanded it; impossible, in 
 Dickens's case, to see mentally as a whole the work 
 on which he was engaged. What he had written, 
 he had written; it had to serve its purpose. One 
 can only lament that such were the defects of his 
 inimitable qualities. 
 
 The next great book was not finished till 1848; 
 meanwhile there had been travel and residence on 
 the Continent; a bright chapter in Dickens's life, 
 but without noteworthy influence on his work. His 
 Italian sketches are characteristic of the man ; one 
 cannot say more. Among the Alps he wrote Dom- 
 bey and Son, not without trouble due to the un- 
 familiar surroundings. *^ You can hardly imagine", 
 he declares to Forster, **what infinite pains I take, 
 or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting 
 on fast ... I suppose this is partly the effect of 
 
The Story-teller. 53 
 
 two years' ease, and partly of the absence of the 
 streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how 
 much I want these. It seems as if they supplied 
 something to my brain, which I cannot bear, when 
 busy, to lose." In truth, away from London he 
 was cut off from the source of his inspiration; but 
 he had a memory stored with London pictures. He 
 tells us, and we can well believe him, that, whilst 
 writing, he saw every bed in the dormitory of Paul's 
 school, every pew in the church where Florence was 
 married. In which connection it is worth mention- 
 ing that not till the year 1855 did Dickens keep 
 any sort of literary memorandum-book. After all 
 his best work was done, he felt misgivings which 
 prompted him to make notes. A French or English 
 realist, with his library of documents, may muse 
 over this fact — and deduce from it what he pleases. 
 Domhey is the first of the novels which have a 
 distinct moral theme; its subject is Pride. Here 
 there is no doubt that Dickens laid down the broad 
 outlines of his story in advance, and adhered to 
 them; we feel that the book is built up with great 
 pains, with infinite endeavour to make a unity. 
 The advance is undeniable (of course we have lost 
 something, for all that), but one cannot help notic- 
 ing that with the death of Paul ends a novel which 
 is complete in itself, a novel more effective, I think, 
 than results from the prolonged work. Dickens 
 tells, in letters, of the effort it cost him to transfer 
 immediately all the interest of his story from the 
 dead boy to his sister Florence; the necessity for it 
 was unfortunate. As usual, we have loud melo- 
 drama side by side with comedy unsurpassed for 
 its delicate touches of truth and fancy. The girl 
 Alice and her disreputable mother, pendants to 
 
54 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Edith Dombey and Mrs. Skewton, are in mid-lime- 
 light; perhaps Dickens never so boldly defied the 
 modesty of nature as here, both in character and 
 situation. An instance of far-fetched and cumbrous 
 contrivance, with gross improbability added to it, is 
 Mr. Dombey 's discovery of the place to which his 
 wife has fled. Nothing easier than to bring about 
 the same end by simple and probable means ; but 
 Dickens had an ** effect" in view — of the kind that 
 so strangely satisfied him. His melodrama serves 
 an end which is new in Dombey ^ though afterwards 
 of frequent occurrence; that of bringing together, 
 in strangely intimate relations, figures representing 
 social extremes. Dickens came to delight in this. 
 His best use of the motive is in Bleak House -^ and 
 a striking instance occurs in the last pages he ever 
 wrote. 
 
 It was whilst telling the story of little Paul, a 
 victim of excessive parental care, that, perhaps by 
 force of contrast, the novelist looked back upon his 
 own childhood, and thought of turning it to literary 
 use. We learn from Forster (Book I. 2.) that in 
 the year 1847 was written a chapter of reminiscences 
 which Dickens at first intended to be the beginning 
 of an autobiography. Wisely, no doubt, he soon 
 abandoned this idea; but the memory of his own 
 sad childhood would not be dismissed, and it made 
 the groundwork of his next novel (1850), David 
 Copperfield, Dickens held this to be his best book, 
 and the world has agreed with him. In no other 
 does the narrative move on with such full sail from 
 first to last. He wrote from his heart; picturing 
 completely all he had suffered as a child, and even 
 touching upon the domestic trouble of his later life. 
 It is difficult to speak of David Copperfield in terms 
 
The Story-teller. 55 
 
 of cool criticism, but for the moment I am concerned 
 only with its form, and must put aside the allure- 
 ment of its matter. Once more, then, combined 
 with lavish wealth of description, character, pathos, 
 humour, we meet with poverty of invention, abuse 
 of drama. All the story of Emily (after her child- 
 hood) is unhappily conceived. (Of course this part 
 of the book was at once dramatized and acted.) 
 Such a subject lay wholly beyond Dickens's scope, 
 and could not be treated by him in any but an 
 unsatisfactory way. The mysteries surrounding 
 Mr. Wickham, the knaveries of Uriah Heep, have 
 no claim upon our belief; intrigue half-heartedly 
 introduced merely because intrigue seems necessary; 
 even Mr. Micawber, in all his robust reality, has 
 to walk among these airy figments, and play his 
 theatrical part. In the scene between Emily and 
 Rosa Dartle (chapter L.) the orchestra plays very 
 loudly indeed; every word has its accompanying 
 squeak or tremolo. But enough; one has not the 
 heart to dwell upon the shortcomings of such a 
 book. 
 
 It may be noted, however, with what frankness 
 Dickens accepts the conventionality of a story told 
 in the first person. David relates in detail con- 
 versations which take place before he is born, and 
 makes no apology for doing so. Why should he? 
 The point never occurs to the engrossed reader. 
 In Bleak House ^ where the same expedient is used 
 (in part), such boldness is not shown, though the 
 convention still demands abundant sacrifice of 
 probability in another way. Finally, in Great 
 Expectations we have a narrative in the first 
 person, which, granting to the narrator nothing 
 less than Dickens's own equipment of genius, pre- 
 
56 Charles Dickens. 
 
 serves verisimilitude with remarkable care, nothing 
 being related, as seen or heard, which could not 
 have been seen or heard by the writer. This in- 
 stance serves to show that Dickens did become 
 conscious of artistic faults, and set himself to 
 correct them. But, in the meantime, he had 
 touched the culmination of his imaginative life, 
 and a slight improvement in technical correctness 
 could not compensate the world's loss when his 
 characteristic strength began to fail and his natural 
 force to be abated. 
 
 Bleak House (1853) is constructed only too well. 
 Here Dickens applied himself laboriously to the 
 perfecting of that kind of story he had always had 
 in view, and produced a fine example of theatrical 
 plot. One cannot say, in this case, that the intrigue 
 refuses to be remembered ; it is a puzzle, yet ingeni- 
 ously simple ; tjie parts fitting together very neatly 
 indeed. So neatly, that poor untidy Life disclaims 
 all connection with these doings, however willingly 
 she may recognize for her children a score or so of 
 the actors. To be sure there are oversights. How 
 could Dickens expect one to believe that Lady 
 Dedlock recognized her lover's handwriting in a 
 piece of work done by him as law-writer — she not 
 even knowing that he was so employed? What 
 fate pursued him that he could not, in all the 
 resources of his brain, hit upon a device for such 
 a simple end more convincing than this? Still, 
 with an aim not worth pursuing, the author here 
 wrought successfully. The story is child's play 
 compared with many invented, for instance, by 
 Wilkie Collins; but in combination with Dickens's 
 genuine powers, it produces its designed effect; we 
 move in a world of choking fog and squalid pit- 
 
The Story-teller. 57 
 
 falls, amid plot and counterplot, cold self-interest 
 and passion over-wrought, and can never refuse 
 attention to the magician who shows it all. 
 
 I have left it to this place to speak of the sin, most 
 gross, most palpable, which Dickens everywhere 
 commits in his abuse of ^^coincidence". Bleak 
 House is the supreme example of his recklessness. 
 It seems never to have occurred to him, thus far 
 in his career, that novels and fairy tales (or his isi- 
 vonniQ Arabian Nights) should obey different laws in 
 the matter of incident. When Oliver Twist casually 
 makes acquaintance with an old gentleman in the 
 streets of London, this old gentleman of course turns 
 out to be his relative, who desired of all things to 
 discover the boy. When Steerforth returns to Eng- 
 land from his travels with Emily, his ship is of 
 course wrecked on the sands at Yarmouth, and his 
 dead body washed up at the feet of David Copper- 
 field, who happened to have made a little journey 
 to see his Yarmouth friends on that very day. In 
 Bleak House scarcely a page but presents some 
 coincidence as glaring as these. Therein lies the 
 worthlessness of the plot, which is held together 
 only by the use of coincidence in its most flagrant 
 forms. Grant that anything may happen just where 
 or when the interest of the story demands it, and a 
 neat drama may pretty easily be constructed. The 
 very boldness of the thing prevents readers from 
 considering it; indeed most readers take the author's 
 own view, and imagine every artificiality to be per- 
 mitted in the world of fiction. 
 
 Dickens was content to have aroused interest, 
 wonder, and many other emotions. The conception 
 is striking; the atmosphere could hardly be better; 
 even the melodrama (as in Krook's death by 
 
58 Charles Dickens. 
 
 spontaneous combustion) justifies itself by magnifi- 
 cent workmanship. No doubt the generality of 
 readers are wise, and it is pedantry to object to the 
 logical extremes of convention in an art which, with- 
 put convention, would not exist. 
 
 One wishes that Esther Summerson had not been 
 allowed to write in her own person — or rather to 
 assume, with such remarkable success, the person- 
 ality of Charles Dickens. This well-meaning young 
 woman, so blind to her own merits, of course had 
 no idea that she was a great humourist and a writer 
 of marvellous narrative; but readers (again the re- 
 flective few) are only too much impressed by her 
 powers. Again one closes his eyes, and suffers a 
 glad illusion. But for the occasional '' I" one may 
 easily enough forget that Miss Summerson is speak- 
 ing. 
 
 I must pass rapidly over the novels that remain. 
 Of Little Dorrit (1855), as of Martin Chuzzlezvit, 
 who can pretend to bear the story in mind? There 
 is again a moral theme ; the evils of greed and 
 vulgar ambition. As a rule, we find this book 
 dismissed rather contemptuously; it is held to be 
 tedious, and unlike Dickens in its prevalent air of 
 gloom. For all that, I believe it to contain some of 
 his finest work, some passages in which he attains 
 an artistic finish hardly found elsewhere; and to 
 these I shall return. There were reasons why the 
 book should be lacking in the old vivacity — never 
 indeed to be recovered, in so far as it had belonged 
 to the golden years of youth; it was written in a 
 time of domestic unhappiness and of much unsettle- 
 ment, the natural result of which appeared three 
 years later, when Dickens left the study for the 
 platform. As a narrative, Little Dorrit is far from 
 
The Story-teller. 59 
 
 successful; it is cumbered with mysteries which 
 prove futile, and has no proportion in its contrast- 
 ing parts. Here and there the hand of the master 
 is plainly weary. 
 
 More so, however, in the only other full-length 
 novel which he lived to complete. None of his 
 books is so open to the charge of tedious superfluity 
 as Our Mutual Friend (1865); on many a page 
 dialogue which is strictly no dialogue at all, but 
 mere verbosity in a vein of forced humour, drags its 
 slow length along in caricature of the author at his 
 best. A plot, depending on all manner of fantastic 
 circumstances, unfolds itself with dreary elaboration, 
 and surely gratifies no one. Yet I have a sense of 
 ingratitude in speaking thus of Our Mutual Friend] 
 for in it Dickens went far towards breaking with his 
 worst theatrical traditions, and nowhere, I think, 
 irritates one with a violent improbability in the 
 management of his occurrences. The multiplication 
 of wills, as Dickens insisted in reply to criticism, 
 need not trouble anyone who reads the newspapers; 
 at worst it lacks interest. With anything, however, 
 but gratification, one notes that the author is adapt- 
 ing himself to a new time, new people, new manners. 
 Far behind us are the stage-coach and the brandy- 
 drinkers; the age, if more respectable, has become 
 decidedly duller. Even so with Dickens; he feels 
 the constraint of a day to which he was not born, 
 and whilst bending himself to its demands, succeeds 
 only in making us regret the times gone by. 
 
 For new schools of fiction have meanwhile arisen 
 in England. Charlotte Bronte has sent forth her 
 three books; Kingsley is writing, and Charles 
 Reade, and Anthony TroUope; George Meredith, 
 and, later, George Eliot, have begun their careers. 
 
6o Charles Dickens. 
 
 We are in the time of the ^* Origin of Species". A 
 veteran in every sense but the literal, Dickens keeps 
 his vast popularity, but cannot hope to do more 
 than remind his readers (and his hearers) of all that 
 he had achieved. 
 
 Of Hard Times ^ I have said nothing; it is 
 practically a forgotten book, and little in it de- 
 mands attention. Two other short novels remain 
 to be mentioned (the Christmas books belong 
 to a genre that does not call for criticism in this 
 place), and one of them. Great Expectations (1861), 
 would be nearly perfect in its mechanism but for 
 the unhappy deference to Lord Lytton's judgment, 
 which caused the end to be altered. Dickens 
 meant to have left Pip a lonely man, and of course 
 rightly so; by the irony of fate he was induced 
 to spoil his work through a brother novelist's 
 desire for a happy ending — a strange thing, in- 
 deed, to befall Dickens. Observe how finely the 
 narrative is kept in one key. It begins with a 
 mournful impression — the foggy marshes spreading 
 drearily by the seaward Thames — and throughout 
 recurs this effect of cold and damp and dreariness ; 
 in that kind Dickens never did anything so good. 
 Despite the subject, we have no stage fire — except 
 around the person of Mr. Wopsle, a charming bit 
 of satire, recalling and contrasting with the far-off 
 days of Nicklehy, The one unsatisfactory feature is 
 the part concerned with Miss Havisham and Estella. 
 Here the old Dickens survives in unhappy fashion ; 
 unable to resist the lure of eccentricity, but no longer 
 presenting it with the gusto which was wont to be 
 more than an excuse. Passing this, one can hardly 
 overpraise the workmanship. No story in the first 
 person was ever better told. 
 
The Story-teller. 6i 
 
 Of the Tale of Two Cities (1859) it is impossible 
 to speak so favourably. Like Barnahy Rudge a 
 historical novel, it is better constructed than that 
 early book, but by no means so alive. In his two 
 novels deaHng with a past time, Dickens attacks the 
 two things he most hated in the present: reHgious 
 fanaticism and social tyranny. Barnahy is in 
 all senses a characteristic book. The Tale of Two 
 Cities can hardly be called so in anything but its 
 theme. The novelist here laid a restraint upon him- 
 self; he aimed deliberately at writing a story for the 
 story's sake; the one thing he had never yet been 
 able to do. Among other presumed superfluities, 
 humour is dismissed. To some readers the result 
 appears admirable; for my part, I feel the restraint 
 throughout, miss the best of my author, and, whilst 
 admitting that he has produced something like a 
 true tragedy, reflect that many another man could 
 have handled the theme as well, if not better. It 
 leaves no strong impression on my mind; even the 
 figure of Carton soon grows dim against a dimmer 
 background. 
 
 In the autumn of 1867 Dickens left England on 
 his second voyage across the Atlantic, to give that 
 long series of public readings which shattered his 
 health and sent him back a doomed man. Upon 
 this aspect of his public life something will be said 
 in a later chapter. The spring of 1868 saw him 
 return, and before the end of the year he had entered 
 upon a series of farewell readings in his own country. 
 Defiant of the gravest physical symptoms, — it was 
 not in the man's nature to believe that he could be 
 beaten in anything he undertook, — he laboured 
 through a self-imposed duty which would have 
 tasked him severely even in the time of robust 
 
62 Charles Dickens. 
 
 health, and finally took leave of his audience on the 
 5th of April, 1870. Meanwhile (in a few months of 
 rest to which he was constrained by medical advice) 
 he had begun the writing of a new book, which was 
 to appear in twelve monthly numbers, instead of the 
 old heroic twenty ; its name. The Mystery of Edwin 
 Drood. Six numbers only were finished. As an 
 indication of the disturbance of mental habit caused 
 by the author's life as a public entertainer, Forster 
 mentions that Dickens miscalculated the length (in 
 print) of his first two parts by no less than twelve 
 pages ; ominous error in one who had rarely found 
 his calculation in this matter wrong even by a line. 
 Beyond the sixth part, only a disjointed scene was 
 written. He worked in his garden house at Gads- 
 hill — the home endeared to him by Shakespearean 
 associations — till the evening of the 8th of June, 
 and an hour or two later was seized by fatal illness. 
 The next day he died. 
 
 Edwin Drood would probably have been his best- 
 constructed book : as far as it goes, the story hangs 
 well together, showing a care in the contrivance of 
 detail which is more than commonly justified by the 
 result. One cannot help wishing that Dickens had 
 chosen another subject — one in which there was 
 neither mystery nor murder, both so irresistibly 
 attractive to him, yet so far from being the true 
 material of his art. Surely it is unfortunate that 
 the last work of a great writer should have for its 
 theme nothing more human than a trivial mystery 
 woven about a vulgar deed of blood. For this, it 
 seems to me, his public readings may well have 
 been responsible. In the last series he had made 
 a great impression by his rendering (acting, in- 
 deed) of the death of Nancy in Oliver Twist, The 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 63 
 
 thing, utterly unworthy of him in this shape, had 
 cost him great pains; his imagination was drenched 
 with gore, preoccupied with a sordid horror. Cast- 
 ing about him for a new story, he saw murder at 
 the end of every vista. It would not have been thus 
 if he had lived a calmer life, with natural develop- 
 ment of his thoughts. In that case we might have 
 had some true successor to David Copperfield, His 
 selection of scene was happy and promising — the 
 old city of his childhood, Rochester. The tone, 
 too, of his descriptive passages is much more ap- 
 propriate than the subject. But Dickens had made 
 his choice in life, and therefrom inevitably resulted 
 his course in literature. 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 
 
 It is a thankless task to write of such a man as 
 Dickens in disparaging phrase. I am impatient to 
 reach that point of my essay where I shall be at 
 liberty to speak with admiration unstinted, to dwell 
 upon the strength of the master's work, and exalt 
 him where he is unsurpassed. But it is necessary 
 to clear the way. So great a change has come over 
 the theory and practice of fiction in the England of 
 our times that we must needs treat of Dickens as, 
 in many respects, antiquated. To be antiquated is 
 not necessarily to be condemned, in art or anything 
 else (save weapons of slaughter) ; but as the result 
 of the last chapter we feel that, in one direction, 
 Dickens suffers from a comparison with novelists, 
 his peers, of a newer day, even with some who were 
 
64 Charles Dickens. 
 
 strictly his contemporaries. We have now to ask 
 ourselves in what other aspects his work differs 
 markedly from the prevalent conception of the art 
 of novel-writing. It will be seen, of course, that, 
 theoretically, he had very little in common with our 
 school of strict veracity, of realism — call it what 
 you please; the school which, quite apart from 
 extravagances, has directed fiction into a path it 
 is likely to pursue for many a year to come. Hard 
 words are spoken of him by young writers whose 
 zeal outruns their discretion, and far outstrips their 
 knowledge; from the advanced posts of modern 
 criticism any stone is good enough to throw at a 
 novelist who avows and glories in his moral pur- 
 pose; who would on no account bring a blush to 
 the middle-class cheek; who at any moment tampers 
 with truth of circumstance that his readers may have 
 joy rather than sorrow. Well, we must look into 
 this matter, and, as^ Captain Cuttle says,' take its 
 bearings. Endeavouring to judge Dickens as a 
 man of his time, we must see in what spirit he 
 approached his tasks ; what he consciously sought to 
 achieve in this pursuit of story-telling. One thing, 
 assuredly, can never become old-fashioned in any 
 disdainful sense; that is, sincerity of purpose. 
 Novelists of to-day desire above everything to be 
 recognized as sincere in their picturing of life. If 
 Dickens prove to be no less honest, according to 
 his lights, we must then glance at the reasons which 
 remove him so far from us in his artistic design and 
 execution. 
 
 Much fault has been found with Forster's Bio- 
 graphy^ which is generally blamed as giving undue 
 prominence to the figure of the biographer. I can- 
 not join in this censure; I prefer to echo the praise 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 65 
 
 of Thomas Carlyle: **So long as Dickens is inter- 
 esting to his fellow-men, here will be seen, face to 
 face, what Dickens's manner of existing was". Car- 
 lyle, I conceive, was no bad judge of a biography; 
 as a worker in literature he appreciated this vivid 
 presentment of a fellow-worker. I should say, in- 
 deed, that there exists no book more immediately 
 helpful to a young man beginning his struggle in 
 the world of letters (especially, of course, to the 
 young novelist) than this of Forster's. And simply 
 because it exhibits in such rich detail the story, and 
 the manner, of Dickens's work; showing him at his 
 desk day by day, recounting his hidden difficulties, 
 his secret triumphs; in short, making the man live 
 over again before us the noblest portion of his life. 
 One thing to be learnt from every page of the 
 biography is the strenuous spirit in which Dickens 
 wrought. Whatever our judgment as to the result, 
 his zeal and energy were those of the born artist. 
 Passages numberless might be quoted from his 
 letters, showing how he enjoyed the labour of pro- 
 duction, how he threw himself into the imaginative 
 world with which he was occupied, how impossible 
 it was for him to put less than all his splendid force 
 into the task of the moment. A good instance is 
 the following. He writes to tell his friend Forster 
 of some private annoyance, which had threatened 
 to upset his day's work. ** I was most horribly put 
 out for a little while; for I had got up early to go 
 to work, and was full of interest in what I had to 
 do. But having eased my mind by that note to 
 you, and taken a turn or two up and down the room, 
 I went at it again, and soon got so interested that I 
 blazed away till nine last night; only stopping ten 
 minutes for dinner. I suppose I wrote eight printed 
 
 (M444) E 
 
66 Charles Dickens. 
 
 pages of Chuzzlewit yesterday. The consequence 
 is that I could finish to-day, but am taking it easy, 
 and making myself laugh very much" (Forster, 
 Book iv. 2). Year after year, he keeps his friend 
 minutely informed by letter of the progress he 
 makes with every book; consults him on endless 
 points, great and small; is inexhaustible in gossip 
 about himself, which never appears egoistic because 
 of the artistic earnestness declared in every syllable. 
 With no whit less conscientiousness did he dis- 
 charge his duties as editor of a magazine. We find 
 him writing to Forster: ** I have had a story" — 
 accepted from an imperfectly qualified contributor — 
 '^to hack and hew into some form for Household 
 Words this morning, which has taken me four hours 
 of close attention ". Four hours of Dickens's time, 
 in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as this! 
 — where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, 
 would have contented himself with a few blottings 
 and insertions, sure that ** the great big stupid 
 public", as Thackeray called it, would be no better 
 pleased, toil how one might. To Dickens the public 
 was not everything; he could not rest until the 
 deformities of that little bit of writing were removed, 
 and no longer offended his eye. 
 
 Even so. On the other hand, having it in mind 
 to make a certain use of a character in Domhey and 
 Sofiy he seriously asks Forster: *'Do you think it 
 may be done, without making people angry?" 
 
 Here is the contradiction so irritating to Dickens's 
 severer critics, the artistic generation of to-day. 
 What! — they exclaim — a great writer, inspired with 
 a thoroughly fine idea, is to stay his hand until he 
 has made grave inquiry whether Messrs. Mudie's 
 subscribers will approve it or not! The mere sug- 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 67 
 
 gestion is infuriating. And this — they vociferate 
 — is what Dickens was always doing. It may be 
 true that he worked like a Trojan; but what is the 
 use of work, meant to be artistic, carried on in 
 hourly fear of Mrs. Grundy? Fingers are pointed 
 to this, that, and the other Continental novelist; 
 can you imagine him in such sorry plight? Why, 
 nothing would have pleased him better than to 
 know he was outraging public sentiment I In fact, 
 it is only when one does so that one*s work has a 
 chance of being good. 
 
 All which may be true enough in relation to the 
 speakers. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. 
 Dickens had before him no such artistic ideal ; he 
 never desired freedom to offend his public. Sym- 
 pathy with his readers was to him the very breath 
 of life; the more complete that sympathy the better 
 did he esteem his work. Of the restrictions laid 
 upon him he was perfectly aware, and there is 
 evidence that he could see the artistic advantage 
 which would result from a slackening of the bonds 
 of English prudery; but it never occurred to him 
 to make public protest against the prejudices in 
 force. Dickens could never have regarded it as 
 within a story-teller's scope to attempt the conversion 
 of his readers to a new view of literary morals. 
 Against a political folly, or a social injustice, he 
 would use every resource of his art, and see no 
 reason to hesitate; for there was the certainty of 
 the approval of all good folk. To write a novel in 
 a spirit of antagonism to all but a very few of his 
 countrymen would have seemed to him a sort of 
 practical hull\ is it not the law of novel-writing, 
 first and foremost, that one shall aim at pleasing as 
 many people as possible? 
 
68 Charles Dickens. 
 
 In his preface to Pendennis Thackeray spoke 
 very plainly on this subject. He honestly told his 
 readers that they must not expect to find in his 
 novel the whole truth about the life of a young 
 man, seeing that, since the author of Tom JoneSy no 
 English writer had been permitted such frankness. 
 The same thing is remarked by Dickens in a letter 
 which Forster prints; a letter written from Paris, 
 and commenting on the inconsistency of English 
 people, who, living abroad and reading foreign 
 authors, complain that ''the hero of an English 
 book is always uninteresting". He proceeds: ''But 
 O my smooth friend, what a shining impostor you 
 must think yourself, and what an ass you must 
 think me, when you suppose that by putting a 
 brazen face upon it you can blot out of my know- 
 ledge the fact that this same unnatural young gen- 
 tleman (if to be decent is to be necessarily unnatural), 
 whom you meet in those other books and in mine, 
 must be presented to you in that unnatural aspect 
 by reason of your morality, and is not to have, I 
 will not say any of the indecencies you like, but 
 not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, 
 and confusions inseparable from the making or un- 
 making of all men!" (Forster, Book xi. i.) This 
 he clearly saw ; but it never disturbed his conscience, 
 for the reason indicated. Thackeray, we may be 
 sure, thought much more on the subject, and in 
 graver mood; and as a result, he allowed himself 
 more liberty than Dickens — not without protest 
 from the many-headed. There existed this difference 
 between the two men. Thackeray had a strength 
 not given to his brother in art. 
 
 Only in one way can the public evince its sym- 
 pathy with an author — by purchasing his books. 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 69 
 
 It follows, then, that Dickens attached great impor- 
 tance to the varying demand for his complete novels, 
 or for the separate monthly parts at their time of 
 issue. Here again is a stone of stumbling for the 
 disinterested artist who reads Dickens's life. We 
 may select two crucial examples. 
 
 After the first visit to America began the publica- 
 tion of Martin Chuzzlewity and it was seen at once 
 that the instalments from month to month were less 
 favourably received than those of the earlier books. 
 The sixty thousand or so of regular purchasers 
 decreased by about two-thirds. ** Whatever the 
 causes," says Forster, **here was the undeniable 
 fact of a grave depreciation of sale in his writings, 
 unaccompanied by any falling off either in them- 
 selves or in the writer's reputation. It was very 
 temporary; but it was present, and to be dealt with 
 accordingly" (Book iv. 2). Dickens's way of deal- 
 ing with it was to make his hero suddenly resolve 
 to go to America. Number Four closed with that 
 declaration, and its results were seen, we are told, 
 in an additional two thousand purchasers. Forster's 
 words, of course, represent Dickens's view of the 
 matter, which amounts to this : that however thor- 
 oughly assured an author may be that he is doing 
 his best, a falling-off in the sale of his work must 
 needs cause him grave mental disturbance; nay, 
 that it must prompt him, as a matter of course, to 
 changes of plan and solicitous calculation. He is 
 to write, in short, with an eye steadily fixed upon 
 his publisher's sale-room; never to lose sight of that 
 index of popular approval or the reverse. That 
 phrase ''to be dealt with accordingly" is more dis- 
 tasteful than one can easily express to anyone with 
 a tincture of latter-day conscientiousness in things 
 
70 Charles Dickens. 
 
 of art. As I have said, it can be explained in a 
 sense not at all dishonourable to Dickens ; but how 
 much more pleasant would it be to read in its place 
 some quite unparliamentary utterance such, for 
 example, as Scott made use of when William Black- 
 wood requested him to change the end of one of 
 his stories! 
 
 It sounds odd to praise Scott, from this point of 
 view, at the expense of Dickens. As a conscien- 
 tious workman Dickens is far ahead of the author 
 of Waverley, who never dreamt of taking such 
 pains as with the other novelist became habitual. 
 We know, too, that Scott avowedly wrote for 
 money, and varied his subjects in accordance with 
 the varying public taste. But let us suppose that 
 his novels had appeared in monthly parts, and that 
 such an experience had befallen him as this of 
 Dickens; can we easily imagine Walter Scott, in 
 an attitude of commercial despondency, anxiously 
 deliberating on the subject of his next chapter? The 
 thing is inconceivable. It marks the difference not 
 only between two men, but two epochs. Not with 
 impunity, for all his generous endowments, did 
 Dickens come to manhood in the year 1832 — the 
 year in which Sir Walter said farewell to a world he 
 no longer recognized. 
 
 The other case which I think it worth while to 
 mention is that of Dickens's first Christmas story, 
 the Carol, In those days Christmas publications did 
 not come out three or four months before the season 
 they were meant to celebrate. The Carol appeared 
 only just before Christmas Eve ; it was seized upon 
 with enthusiasm, and edition followed edition. Un- 
 luckily, the publisher had not exercised prudence in 
 the **cost of production"; the profits were small. 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 71 
 
 and as a consequence we have the following letter, 
 addressed to Forster in January, 1844: **Such a 
 night as I have passed! I really believed I should 
 never get up again until I had passed through all 
 the horrors of a fever. I found the Carol accounts 
 awaiting me, and they were the cause of it. The 
 first six thousand copies show a profit of ;£'23oI 
 and the last four will yield as much more. I had 
 set my heart and soul upon a thousand clear. What 
 a wonderful thing it is that such a great success 
 should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and 
 disappointment! My year's bills, unpaid, are so 
 terrific, that all the energy and determination I can 
 possibly exert will be required to clear me before I 
 go abroad" (Book iv. 2). Now this letter is very 
 disagreeable reading; for, at so early a stage in its 
 writer's career, it points already to the end. Those 
 '^terrific" bills — had they been less terrific, say, by 
 only one quarter, and had they been consistently 
 kept at a point below the terrifying — how much 
 better for Dickens himself and for the world ! It 
 could not be. The great middle class was growing 
 enormously rich with its coal-mines and steam- 
 engines, and the fact of his being an artist did not 
 excuse a member of that class from the British 
 necessity of keeping up appearances. So we have 
 all but the ** horrors of a fever" because a little book, 
 which Thackeray rightly called **a national benefit", 
 brought in only a certain sum of money! In his 
 perturbation Dickens does himself injustice. He 
 had not ''set his heart and soul" on a thousand 
 pounds; he never in all his life set his heart and soul 
 on wealth. ** No man", he said once, in talk with 
 friends, ''attaches less importance to the possession 
 of money, or less disparagement to the want of it, 
 
72 Charles Dickens. 
 
 than I do"; and he spoke essential truth. It would 
 be quite unjust to think of Dickens as invariably 
 writing in fear of diminishing sales, or as trembling 
 with cupidity whenever he opened his publishers' 
 accounts. To understand the whole man we must 
 needs remark the commercial side of him ; but his 
 genius saved him from the worst results of the com- 
 mercial spirit. 
 
 It was not only of money that he stood in need. 
 Remember his theatrical leanings, and one under- 
 stands without difficulty how important to him was 
 the stimulus of praise. From the early days, as 
 has often been observed, the relations between 
 Dickens and his public were notably personal ; in 
 his study, he sat, as it were, with hearers grouped 
 about him, conscious of their presence, happily, in 
 quite another way than that already noticed. Like 
 the actor (which indeed he ultimately became), his 
 desire was for instant applause. Dickens could 
 never have struggled for long years against the 
 lack of appreciation. In coldness towards his work 
 he would have seen its literary condemnation, and 
 have turned to a new endeavour. When the readers 
 of Martin Chuzzlewit fall off he is troubled, first 
 and foremost, by the failure of popular sympathy. 
 He asks himself, most anxiously, what the cause 
 can be; and, with a touching deference to the voice 
 of the crowd, is inclined to think that he has grown 
 less interesting. For, observe, that Dickens never 
 conceives himself, when he aims at popularity, as 
 writing down to his audience. Of that he is wholly 
 incapable; for that he has too much understanding 
 of the conditions of literary success. Never yet was 
 popularity, in whatsoever class, achieved by de- 
 liberate pursuit of a low ideal. The silliest story 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 73 
 
 which ever enjoyed a real vogue among the silliest 
 readers was a true representation of the author's 
 mind; for only to writing of this kind — sincere 
 though in foolishness — comes a response from 
 multitudes of readers. Dickens might alter his 
 intention, might change his theme; but he never 
 did so with the thought that he was condescending. 
 In this respect a true democrat, he believed, pro- 
 bably without ever reflecting upon it, that the 
 approved of the people was necessarily the supreme 
 in art. At the same time, never man wrought more 
 energetically to justify the people's choice. 
 
 How does this attitude of mind affect Dickens's 
 veracity as an artist concerned with everyday life? 
 In what degree, and in what directions, does he feel 
 himself at liberty to disguise facts, to modify cir- 
 cumstances, for the sake of giving pleasure or avoid- 
 ing offence? 
 
 Our "realist" will hear of no such paltering with 
 truth. Heedless of Pilate's question, he takes for 
 granted that the truth can be got at, and that it is 
 his plain duty to set it down without compromise; 
 or, if less crude in hjs perceptions, he holds that 
 truth, for the artist, is the impression produced on 
 him, and that to convey this impression with entire 
 sincerity is his sole reason for existing. To Dickens 
 such a view of the artist's duty never presented it- 
 self. Art, for him, was art precisely because it was 
 not nature. Even our realists may recognize this, 
 and may grant that it is the business of art to select, 
 to dispose — under penalties if the result be falsifica- 
 tion. But Dickens went further; he had a moral 
 purpose; the thing above all others scornfully for- 
 bidden in our schools of rigid art. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten that he made his public 
 
74 Charles Dickens. 
 
 protest — moderate enough, but yet a protest — 
 against smooth conventionalism. In the preface 
 to Nicholas Nickleby he defends himself against 
 those who censured him for not having made his 
 hero '^always blameless and agreeable". He had 
 seen no reason, he says, for departing from the 
 plain facts of human character. This is interesting 
 when we call to mind the personality of Nicholas, 
 who must have got into very refined company for 
 his humanity to prove offensive. But the English 
 novel was at a sorry pass in that day, and doubtless 
 Dickens seriously believed that he had taken a bold 
 step towards naturalism (had he known the word). 
 Indeed, was he not justified in thinking so? Who, 
 if not Dickens, founded the later school of English 
 fiction? He who as a young man had unconsciously 
 obeyed Goethe's precept, taking hold upon the life 
 nearest to him, making use of it for literature, and 
 proving that it was of interest, could rightly claim 
 the honours of an innovator. 
 
 The preface to Oliver Twisty in defending his 
 choice of subject, strikes the note of compromise, 
 and at the same time declares in simple terms the 
 author's purpose. After speaking of the romances 
 of highwaymen then in vogue, which he held to 
 be harmful, because so false to experience, he tells 
 how he had resolved to give a true picture of a band 
 of thieves, seeing no reason '' why the dregs of life 
 (as long as their speech did not offend the ear) 
 should not serve the purpose of a moral ". Here, 
 then, we have it stated plainly that we are not to 
 look for complete verisimilitude in the speech of his 
 characters, and, again, that he only exhibits these 
 characters in terrorem, or, at all events, to induce 
 grave thoughts. When I come to discuss in detail 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 75 
 
 Dickens's characterization I shall have to ask how 
 far it is possible truthfully to represent a foul- 
 mouthed person, whilst taking care that the words 
 he uses do not ** offend the ear". Here I wish only 
 to indicate the limits which Dickens imposed upon 
 himself. He, it is clear, had no misgiving; to him 
 Bill Sikes and Nancy and Charley Bates were con- 
 vincing figures, though they never once utter a vile 
 word — which, as a matter of fact, they one and all 
 did in every other breath. He did not deliberately 
 sacrifice truth to refinement. Moreover, he was 
 convinced that he had done a moral service to the 
 world. That both these ends were attained by help 
 of unexampled buoyancy of spirit, an unfailing flow 
 of the quaintest mirth, the kindliest humour, should 
 in consistency appear to us the strangest thing of 
 all — to us who strive so hard for *' atmosphere", 
 insist so strongly upon ** objectivity" in the author. 
 But in this matter Dickens troubled himself with 
 no theory or argument. He wrote as his soul dic- 
 tated, and surely could not have done better. 
 
 Admitting his limits, accepting them even gladly, 
 he was yet possessed with a sense of the absolute 
 reality of everything he pictured forth. Had the 
 word been in use he must necessarily have called 
 himself a Realist. It is one of the biographical 
 commonplaces concerning Dickens. Everyone 
 knows how he excited himself over his writing, 
 how he laughed and cried with his imaginary 
 people, how he had all but made himself ill with 
 grief over the deathbed of little Nell or of Paul 
 Dombey. This means, of course, that his imagina- 
 tion worked with perfect freedom, had the fullest 
 scope, without ever coming in conflict with the pre- 
 possessions of his public. Permission to write as 
 
76 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Smollett and as Fielding wrote could in no way 
 have advantaged Dickens. He was the born story- 
 teller of a certain day, of a certain class. Again, 
 he does not deem himself the creator of a world, 
 but the laboriously faithful painter of that about 
 him. He labours his utmost to preserve illusion. 
 Dickens could never have been guilty of that capital 
 crime against art so light-heartedly committed by 
 Anthony Trollope, who will begin a paragraph in 
 his novels with some such words as these: " Now, 
 if this were fact, and not a story ..." For all 
 that, Trollope was the more literal copier of life. 
 But his figures do not survive as those of Dickens, 
 who did in fact create — created individuals, to be- 
 come at once and for ever representative of their time. 
 
 Whilst at work, no questioning troubled him. 
 But in speaking of the results, he occasionally 
 allows us a glimpse of his mind; we see how he 
 reconciled art with veracity. The best instance I 
 can recall is his comment upon ^* Doctor Marigold", 
 the Cheap-Jack, of whom he drew so sympathetic 
 a picture. He says, ''It is wonderfully like the 
 real thing, of course a little refined and humoured". 
 Note the of course. Art was art, not nature. He 
 had to make his Cheap-Jack presentable, to dis- 
 guise anything repellent, to bring out every inter- 
 esting and attractive quality. A literal transcript of 
 the man's being would not have seemed to him 
 within his province. But it is just this '* refining" 
 and '' humouring" which our day holds traitorous; 
 the outcome of it is called Idealism. 
 
 At times Dickens's idealism goes further, leading 
 him into misrepresentation of social facts. Refining 
 and humouring, even from his point of view, must 
 have their limits; and these he altogether exceeded 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 77 
 
 in a character such as Lizzie Hexam, the heroine of 
 Our Mutual Friend, The child of a Thames-side 
 loafer, uneducated, and brought up amid the 
 roughest surroundings, Lizzie uses language and 
 expresses sentiment which would do credit to a 
 lady in whatsoever position. In the same way, the 
 girl called Alice Marlow, who plays so melodra- 
 matic a part in Dombey and Son, represents a total 
 impossibility, the combination of base origin and 
 squalid life, with striking mental power, strikingly 
 developed. This kind of thing is permissible to no 
 artist who deals with the actual world. Using a 
 phrase germane to our subject, it is morally mis- 
 chievous. Many a novelist has sinned in this direc- 
 tion; above all, young authors misled by motives 
 alien to art, who delight in idealizing girls of the 
 lower, or lowest class. Dickens had outgrown that 
 stage of pardonable weakness when he wrote Our 
 Mutual Friend. He wished, of course, to contrast 
 the low-born Lizzie Hexam with persons, in the 
 same story, of what is called good birth and breed- 
 ing, and to show her their superior; a purpose 
 which aggravates his fault, the comparison being 
 so obviously unfair. In this connection I recall a 
 figure from Thackeray: the uneducated girl with 
 whom Arthur Pendennis forms a perilous acquaint- 
 ance. Fanny Bolton is one of the truest characters 
 in all fiction, — so unpleasantly true, that readers 
 ignorant of her class might imagine the author to 
 have drawn her in a spirit of social prejudice. 
 Never was his hand more admirably just. Fanny 
 Bolton is one of the instances I had in mind when 
 I alluded to Thackeray's power in describing other 
 modes of life than that with which his name is 
 associated. 
 
78 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Here Dickens idealized to please himself. In 
 the end, it came to the same thing when we see 
 him hesitating over a design of which he doubted 
 the popular acceptance. Walter Gay, in Domhey 
 and Sofiy whose career is so delightfully prosperous, 
 seemed at one moment about to be condemned to a 
 very different fate. ''I think", writes Dickens in 
 a letter, ^*it would be a good thing to disappoint 
 all the expectations this chapter seems to raise of 
 his happy connection with the story and the heroine, 
 and to show him gradually and naturally trailing 
 away from that love of adventure and boyish light- 
 heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, 
 dishonesty, and ruin. To show, in short, that 
 common, everyday miserable declension, of which 
 we know so much in our ordinary life" (Forster, 
 Book vi. 2). Here, indeed, is a suggestion of 
 ** realism"; but we know, in reading it, that 
 Dickens could never have carried it out. He adds, 
 *^Do you think it may be done, without making 
 people angry?" Certainly it could not; Dickens 
 knew it could not, even when the artist deep within 
 him brooded over the theme ; he gave it up almost 
 at once. Forster points out that something of the 
 same idea was eventually used in Bleak House. 
 But Richard Carstone, though he wastes his life, 
 does not sink to ''dissipation, dishonesty, and ruin". 
 The hand was stayed where the picture would have 
 become too painful alike for author and public — 
 always, or nearly always, in such entire sympathy. 
 The phrase about ''making people angry" signi- 
 fies much less than it would in a novelist of to-day. 
 It might well have taken the form: "Can I bring 
 myself to do this thing?" 
 
 To return for a moment to Our Mutual Friend^ 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 79 
 
 I never look into that book without feeling a sus- 
 picion that Dickens originally meant Mr. Boffin to 
 suffer a real change of character, to become in truth 
 the miserly curmudgeon which we are told he only 
 pretended to be. Careful reading of the chapters 
 which bear on this point has confirmed my impres- 
 sion; for which, however, there is no support that 
 I know of, in Forster or elsewhere. It may well 
 have been that here again Dickens, face to face with 
 an unpleasant bit of truth, felt his heart fail him. 
 Again he may have asked, ** Will it make people 
 angry?" If so — on this I wish to insist — it was in 
 no spirit of dishonest compliance that he changed 
 his plan. To make people angry would have been 
 to defeat his own prime purpose. Granting two 
 possible Mr. Boffins: he who becomes a miser in 
 reality, and he who, for a good purpose, acts the 
 miser*s part; how much better to choose the Mr. 
 Boffin who will end in hearty laughter and over- 
 flowing benevolence! 
 
 Avoidance of the disagreeable, as a topic uncon- 
 genial to art — this is Dickens's principle. There 
 results, necessarily, a rather serious omission from 
 his picture of life. Writing once from Boulogne, 
 and describing the pier as he saw it of an evening, 
 he says, ** I never did behold such specimens of the 
 youth of my country, male and female, as pervade 
 that place. They are really in their vulgarity and 
 insolence quite disheartening. One is so fearfully 
 ashamed of them, and they contrast so very unfa- 
 vourably with the natives " (Forster, Book vii. 4). 
 But Dickens certainly had no need to visit Bou- 
 logne to study English ** vulgarity and insolence"; 
 it blared around him wherever he walked in London, 
 and, had he wrought in another spirit, it must have 
 
8o Charles Dickens. 
 
 taken a very large place in every one of his books. 
 He avoided, or showed it only in such forms as 
 amused rather than disgusted. The Boulogne pier- 
 walker, a monumental creature at that day, deserved 
 his niche in fiction ; Dickens glanced at him, and 
 passed him by. 
 
 Two examples dwell in my memory which show 
 him in the mood for downright fact of the unplea- 
 sant sort. More might be discovered, but these, I 
 think, would remain the noteworthy instances of 
 ** realism" in Dickens; moments when, for what- 
 ever reason, he saw fit to tell a harsh truth without 
 any mitigation. One occurs in the short story of 
 Doctor Marigold. We have seen that the figure of 
 the Cheap-Jack was ^^ refined and humoured "; not 
 so that of the Cheap-Jack's wife, the brutal woman 
 who ill-uses and all but kills her child. This pic- 
 ture is remorseless in everyday truth; no humour 
 softens it, no arbitrary event checks the course of 
 the woman's hateful cruelty. The second example 
 is George Silverman's Explanation^ another short 
 story, which from beginning to end is written in a 
 tone of uncompromising bitterness. Being told by 
 Silverman himself, its consistent gloom is drama- 
 tically appropriate and skilful. Here we have a 
 picture of pietistic virulence the like of which can- 
 not be found elsewhere in Dickens ; hard bare fact ; 
 never a smile to lighten the impression; no inter- 
 ference with the rigour of destiny. Anything but 
 characteristic, this little story is still a notable in- 
 stance of Dickens's power. Were the author un- 
 known it would be attributed to some strenuous 
 follower of our '^ realistic" school. 
 
 From his duty as he conceived it, of teaching a 
 moral lesson, Dickens never departs. He has an 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 8i 
 
 unfailing sense of the high importance of his work 
 from this point of view. Not that it preoccupies 
 him, as was the case with George Eliot, and weighs 
 upon him as he writes; naturally and calmly, with- 
 out suspicion of pose, without troublous searching 
 of conscience, he sees his subject as a moral lesson, 
 and cannot understand the position of an artist to 
 whom such thought never occurs. And his morality 
 is of the simplest; a few plain ordinances serve for 
 human guidance; to infringe them is to be marked 
 for punishment more or less sensational ; to follow 
 the path of the just is to ensure a certain amount 
 of prosperity, and reward unlimited in buoyancy 
 of heart. The generality of readers like to see a 
 scoundrel get his deserts, and Dickens, for the most 
 part, gives them abundant satisfaction. No half- 
 measures. When Pecksniff is unmasked, we have 
 the joy of seeing him felled to the ground in the 
 presence of a jubilant company. Nor does this 
 suffice; he and his daughter Cherry, both having 
 forfeited all the sympathies of decent folk, come to 
 actual beggary, and prowl about the murky streets. 
 Nothing more improbable than such an end for Mr. 
 Pecksniff or for his daughter — who was very well 
 able to take care of herself; and obviously a deeper 
 moral would be implied in the continued flourishing 
 of both ; but Dickens and his public were impatient 
 to see the rascal in the dirt, the shrew beside him. 
 Sampson Brass and his sister, whose crime against 
 society is much more serious, pass their later years 
 in the same squalid defeat; yet we feel assured 
 that the virile Sally, at all events, made a much 
 better fight against the consequences of her rascality. 
 Lady Dedlock, having sinned in a manner pecu- 
 liarly unpardonable, is driven by remorse from her 
 
 (M 444) T 
 
82 Charles Dickens. 
 
 luxurious home, and expires in one of the foulest 
 corners of London. Remorse alone, however poig- 
 nant and enduring, would not seem an adequate 
 penalty; we must see the proud lady, the sinful 
 woman, literally brought low, down to the level of 
 the poor wretch who was her accomplice. Ill-doers 
 less conspicuous are let ofif with a punishment 
 which can be viewed facetiously, but punished they 
 are. It is all so satisfying; it so rounds off our 
 conception of life. Nothing so abhorred by the 
 multitude as a lack of finality in stories, a vague- 
 ness of conclusion which gives them the trouble of 
 forming surmises. 
 
 Equally, of course, justice is tempered with mercy. 
 Who would have the heart to demand rigour of the 
 law for Mr. Jingle and Job Trotter? We see them 
 all but starved to death in a debtors' prison, and 
 that is enough; their conversion to honesty gives 
 such scope for Mr. Pickwick's delightful goodness 
 that nothing could be more in accord with the fit- 
 ness of things. Squeers or Mr. Creakle we will 
 by no means forgive; nay, of their hard lot, so well 
 merited, we will make all the fun we can ; but many 
 a pleasant scamp who has shaken our sides shall be 
 put in the way of earning an honest living. Pro- 
 foundly human, however crude to an age that can- 
 not laugh and cry so readily. Good sound practical 
 teaching, which will help the soul of man long after 
 more pretentious work has returned to dust. 
 
 Ah, those final chapters of Dickens ! How eagerly 
 they are read by the young, and with what a pleasant 
 smile by elders who prize the good things of litera- 
 ture ! No one is forgotten, and many an unsuspected 
 bit of happiness calls aloud for gratitude to the 
 author. Do you remember Mr. Mell, the underpaid 
 
Art, Veracity, and Moral Purpose. 83 
 
 and bullied usher in David Copperfield^ — the poor 
 broken-spirited fellow whose boots will not bear 
 another mending, — who uses an hour of liberty to 
 visit his mother in the alms-house, and gladden her 
 heart by piping sorry music on his flute? We lose 
 sight of him, utterly; knowing only that he has 
 been sent about his business after provoking the 
 displeasure of the insolent lad Steerforth. Then, 
 do you remember how, at the end of the book, 
 David has news from Australia, delicious news 
 about Mr. Micawber, and Mrs. Gum midge, and 
 sundry other people, and how in reading the colonial 
 paper, he suddenly comes upon the name of Dr, 
 Melly a distinguished man at the Antipodes? Who 
 so stubborn a theorist that this kindly figment of 
 the imagination does not please him? Who would 
 prefer to learn the cold fact; that Mell, the rejected 
 usher, sank from stage to stage of wretchedness 
 and died — uncertain which — in the street or the 
 workhouse? 
 
 It was not by computing the density of the com- 
 mon brain, by gauging the force of vulgar pre- 
 judice, that Charles Dickens rose to his supreme 
 popularity. Nature made him the mouthpiece of 
 his kind, in all that relates to simple emotions 
 and homely thought. Who can more rightly be 
 called an artist than he who gave form and sub- 
 stance to the ideal of goodness and purity, of honour, 
 justice, mercy, whereby the dim multitudes falter- 
 ingly seek to direct their steps? This was his task 
 in life, to embody the better dreams of ordinary 
 men ; to fix them as bright realities, for weary eyes 
 to look upon. He achieved it in the strength of a 
 faultless sympathy; following the true instincts 
 which it is so unjust — so unintelligent — to interpret 
 
84 Charles Dickens. 
 
 as mere commercial shrewdness or dulness of artistic 
 perception. Art is not single; to every great man 
 his province, his mode. During at least one whole 
 generation, Charles Dickens, in the world of litera- 
 ture, meant England. For his art, splendidly 
 triumphant, made visible to all mankind the char- 
 acteristic virtues, the typical shortcomings, of the 
 homely English race. 
 
 Chapter V. 
 Characterization. 
 
 The familiar objection to Dickens*s characters, 
 that they are **so unreal " (a criticism common in 
 the mouths of persons who would be the last to 
 tolerate downright veracity in fiction), is in part 
 explained — in part justified — by the dramatic con- 
 duct of his stories. What unreality there is, arises 
 for the most part from necessities of ^^plot". This 
 may be illustrated by a comparison between two 
 figures wherein the master has embodied so much 
 homely sweetness and rectitude that both are popu- 
 lar favourites. The boatman Peggotty and Joe 
 Gargery the blacksmith are drawn on similar lines; 
 in both the gentlest nature is manifest beneath a 
 ruggedness proper to their callings. There is a 
 certain resemblance, too, between the stories in 
 which each plays his part; childlike in their simple 
 virtues, both become strongly attached to a child — 
 not their own — living under the same roof, and both 
 suffer a grave disappointment in this affection ; the 
 boatman's niece is beguiled from him to her ruin, 
 the blacksmith's little relative grows into a conceited 
 
Characterization. 85 
 
 youth ashamed of the old companion and the old 
 home. To readers in general I presume that Peg- 
 gotty is better known than Joe ; David Copperfield 
 being more frequently read than Great Expecta- 
 tions-^ but if we compare the two figures as to their 
 ** reality ", we must decide in favour of Gargery. I 
 think him a better piece of workmanship all round; 
 the prime reason, however, for his standing out so 
 much more solidly in one's mind than Little Emily's 
 uncle is that he lives in a world, not of melodrama, 
 but of everyday cause and effect. The convict 
 Magwitch and his strange doings make no such 
 demand upon one's credulity as the story of Emily 
 and Steerforth, told as it is, with its extravagant 
 situations and flagrantly artificial development. Pip 
 is so thoroughly alive that we can forget his dim 
 relations with Satis House. But who can put faith 
 in Mr. Peggotty, when he sets forth to search for 
 his niece over the highways and by-ways of Europe? 
 Who can for a moment put faith in Emily herself 
 after she has ceased to be the betrothed of Ham? 
 As easily could one believe that David Copperfield 
 actually overheard that wildly fantastic dialogue 
 in the lodging-house between the lost girl and Rosa 
 Dartle. 
 
 Many such examples might be adduced of excel- 
 lent, or masterly, characterization spoilt by the de- 
 mand for effective intrigue. We call to mind this 
 or that person in circumstances impossible of credit; 
 and hastily declare that character and situation are 
 alike unreal. And hereby hangs another point 
 worth touching upon. I have heard it very truly 
 remarked that, in our day, people for the most 
 part criticise Dickens from a recollection of their 
 reading in childhood; they do not come fresh to 
 
86 Charles Dickens. 
 
 him with mature minds; in general, they never 
 read him at all after childish years. This is an 
 obvious source of much injustice. Dickens is good 
 reading for all times of life, as are all the great 
 imaginative writers. Let him be read by children 
 together with Don Quixote. But who can speak 
 with authority of Cervantes who knows him only 
 from an acquaintance made at ten years old? To 
 the mind of a child Dickens is, or ought to be, 
 fascinating — (alas for the whole subject of children's 
 reading nowadays I) — and most of the fascination is 
 due to that romantic treatment of common life which 
 is part, indeed, of Dickens's merit, but has smaller 
 value and interest to the older mind. Much of his 
 finest humour is lost upon children; much of his 
 perfect description ; and all his highest achievement 
 in characterization. Taking Dickens ^^as read", 
 people inflict a loss upon themselves and do a wrong 
 to the author. Who, in childhood, ever cared much 
 for Little Dorrit ? The reason is plain ; in this 
 book Dickens has comparatively little of his wonted 
 buoyancy ; throughout, it is in a graver key. True, 
 a house falls down in a most exciting way, and this 
 the reader will remember ; all else is to him a waste. 
 We hear, accordingly, that nothing good can be 
 said for Little Dorrit, Whereas, a competent judge, 
 taking up the book as he would any other, will find 
 in it some of the best work Dickens ever did ; and 
 especially in this matter of characterization ; pictures 
 so wholly admirable, so marvellously observed and 
 so exquisitely presented, that he is tempted to call 
 Little Dorrit the best book of all. 
 
 Again, it is not unusual to seek in Dickens's 
 characters for something he never intended to be 
 there ; in other words, his figures are often slighted 
 
Characterization. 87 
 
 because they represent a class in society which lacks 
 many qualities desired by cultivated readers, and 
 possesses very prominently the distasteful features 
 such a critic could well dispense with. You lay 
 down, for instance, Thackeray *s Pendennis^ and 
 soon after you happen to take up Domhey and Son, 
 Comparisons arise. Whilst reading of Major Bag- 
 stock, you find your thoughts wandering to Major 
 Pendennis; when occupied (rather disdainfully) 
 with Mr. Toots, you suddenly recall Foker. What 
 can be the immediate outcome of such contrast? It 
 seems impossible to deny to Thackeray a great 
 superiority in the drawing of character; his aristo- 
 cratic Major and his wealthy young jackass are so 
 much more ^^real", that is to say, so much more 
 familiar, than the promoted vulgarian Bagstock 
 and the enriched whipper-snapper Toots. A hasty 
 person would be capable of exclaiming that Dickens 
 had plainly taken suggestions from Thackeray, and 
 made but poor use of them. Observe, however, 
 that Dombey and Son appeared, complete, in 1848; 
 Pendennis in 1849. Observe, too, the explanation 
 of the whole matter ; that Bagstock and Toots re- 
 present quite as truthfully figures possible in a 
 certain class, as do Thackeray's characters those to 
 be found in a rank distinctly higher. If Thackeray 
 (who needed no suggestions from others' books) 
 was indeed conscious of this whimsical parallel, we 
 can only admire the skill and finish with which he 
 worked it out. But assuredly he dreamt of no slight 
 to Dickens's performance. They had wrought in 
 different material. Social distinctions are suffi- 
 ciently pronounced even in our time of revolution ; 
 fifty years ago they were much more so. And 
 precisely what estranges the cultivated reader in 
 
88 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Bagstock and Toots, is nothing more nor less than 
 evidence of their creator's truthfulness. 
 
 A wider question confronts one in looking stead- 
 fastly at the masterpieces of a novelist concerned 
 with the lower, sometimes the lowest, modes of life 
 in a great city. Among all the names immortalized 
 by Dickens none is more widely familiar than that 
 of Mrs. Gamp. It is universally admitted that in 
 Mrs. Gamp we have a creation such as can be met 
 with only in the greatest writers; a figure at once 
 individual and typical ; a marvel of humorous pre- 
 sentment; vital in the highest degree attainable by 
 this art of fiction. From the day of her first appear- 
 ance on the stage, Mrs. Gamp has been a delight, 
 a wonder, a byword. She stands unique, no other 
 novelist can show a piece of work, in the same kind, 
 worthy of a place beside her; he must go to the 
 very heights of world-literature, to him who bodied 
 forth Dame Quickly, and Juliet's nurse, for the 
 suggestion of equivalent power. Granted, then, 
 that Mrs. Gamp has indubitable existence ; who and 
 what is she? Well, a sick nurse, living in Kings- 
 gate Street, Holborn, in a filthy room somewhere 
 upstairs, and summoned for nursing of all kinds by 
 persons more or less well-to-do, who are so unfor- 
 tunate as to know of no less offensive substitute. 
 We are told, and can believe, that in the year 1844 
 (the date of Martin Chuzzlewit) few people did know 
 of any substitute for Mrs. Gamp; that she was an 
 institution; that she carried her odious vices and 
 her criminal incompetence from house to house in 
 decent parts in London. Dickens knew her only 
 too well ; had observed her at moments of domestic 
 crisis ; had learnt her language and could reproduce 
 it (or most of it) with surprising accuracy. In plain 
 
Characterization. 89 
 
 words, then, we are speaking of a very loathsome 
 creature; a sluttish, drunken, avaricious, dishonest 
 woman. Meeting her in the flesh, we should shrink 
 disgusted, so well does the foulness of her person 
 correspond with the baseness of her mind. Hear- 
 ing her speak, we should turn away in half-amused 
 contempt. Yet, when we encounter her in the 
 pages of Dickens, we cannot have too much of Mrs. 
 Gamp's company; her talk is an occasion of up- 
 roarious mirth, we never dream of calling her to 
 moral judgment, but laugh the more, the more in- 
 famously she sees fit to behave. Now, in what 
 sense can this figure in literature be called a copy 
 of the human original? 
 
 I am perfectly aware that this inquiry goes to the 
 roots of the theory of Art. Here I have no space 
 (nor would it be the proper moment) to discuss all 
 the issues that are involved in a question so direct 
 and natural ; but if we are to talk at all about the 
 people in Dickens, we must needs start with some 
 understanding of what is implied when we call 
 them true, life-like, finely presented. Is not the fact 
 in itself very remarkable, that by dint (it seems) of 
 omitting those very features which in life most 
 strongly impress us, an artist in fiction can produce 
 something which we applaud as an inimitable 
 portrait? That for disgust he can give us delight, 
 and yet leave us glorying in his verisimilitude? 
 
 Turn to another art. Open the great volume of 
 Hogarth, and look at the several figures of women 
 which present a fair correspondence with that of 
 Mrs. Gamp. We admire the artist's observation, 
 his great skill, his moral significance, even his 
 grim humour; then — we close the book with a 
 feeling of relief. With these faces who would 
 
90 Charles Dickens. 
 
 spend hours of leisure? The thing has been 
 supremely well done, and we are glad of it, and 
 will praise the artist unreservedly; but his basely 
 grinning and leering women must not hang upon 
 the wall, to be looked at and talked of with all and 
 sundry. Hogarth has copied — in the strict sense of 
 the word. He gives us life — and we cannot bear it. 
 
 The Mrs. Gamp of our novel is a piece of the 
 most delicate idealism. It is a sublimation of the 
 essence of Gamp. No novelist (say what he will) 
 ever gave us a picture of life which was not 
 idealized; but there are degrees; degrees of pur- 
 pose and of power. Juliet's Nurse is an idealized 
 portrait, but it comes much nearer to the real thing 
 than Mrs. Gamp; in our middle-class England we 
 cannot altogether away with the free-spoken dame 
 of Verona ; we Bowdlerize her — of course damaging 
 her in the process. Mrs. Berry, in Richard 
 Feverel, is idealized, but she smacks too strongly 
 of the truth for boudoir readers. Why, Moll 
 Flanders herself is touched and softened, for all 
 the author's illusive directness. In Mrs. Gamp, 
 Dickens has done his own Bowdlerizing, but with 
 a dexterity which serves only to heighten his 
 figure's effectiveness. Vulgarity he leaves; that 
 is of the essence of the matter; vulgarity unsur- 
 passable is the note of Mrs. Gamp. Vileness, on 
 the other hand, becomes grotesquerie, wonderfully 
 converted into a subject of laughter. Her speech, 
 the basest ever heard from human tongue, by a 
 process of infinite subtlety, which leaves it the 
 same yet not the same, is made an endless amuse- 
 ment, a source of quotation for laughing lips in- 
 capable of unclean utterance. 
 
 Idealism, then: confessed idealism. But let us 
 
Characterization. 91 
 
 take another character from another book, also a 
 woman supposed to represent a phase of low life 
 in London. Do you recall **good Mrs. Brown", 
 the hag who strips little Florence Dombey of her 
 clothes? And do you remember that this creature 
 has a daughter, her name Alice Marlow, who — 
 presumably having been a domestic servant, or a 
 shop-girl, or something of the kind — was led astray 
 by Mr. Carker of the shining teeth, and has become 
 a wandering nondescript? Now in Alice Marlow 
 we again have idealism; but of a different kind. 
 This child of good Mrs. Brown, tramping into 
 London on a bitter night, is found on the roadside 
 and taken home for tendence by Mr. Carker's sister, 
 neither being aware of the other's identity; and 
 having submitted to this kindness, and having 
 accepted money, the girl goes her way. That 
 same night she learns who has befriended her, and 
 forthwith rushes back a few miles, through storm 
 and darkness, to fling the alms at the giver. Out- 
 lines of a story sufficiently theatrical; but the 
 dialogue 1 One fails to understand how Dickens 
 brought himself to pen the language — at great 
 length — he puts into this puppet's mouth. It is 
 doubtful whether one could pick out a single 
 sentence, a single phrase, such as the real Alice 
 Marlow could conceivably have used. Her passion 
 is vehement; no impossible thing. The words in 
 which she utters it would be appropriate to the 
 most stagey of wronged heroines — be that who it 
 may. A figure less life-like will not be found in 
 any novel ever written. Yet Dickens doubtless 
 intended it as legitimate idealization ; a sort of type 
 of the doleful multitude of betrayed women. He 
 meant it for imagination exalting common fact. 
 
92 Charles Dickens. 
 
 But the fact is not exalted ; it has simply vanished. 
 And the imagination is of a kind that avails nothing 
 on any theme. In Mrs. Gamp a portion of truth 
 is omitted ; in Alice Marlow there is substitution of 
 falsity. By the former process, true idealism may 
 be reached ; by the latter, one arrives at nothing 
 but attitude and sham. 
 
 Of course omission and veiling do not suffice to 
 create Mrs. Gamp. In his alchemy, Dickens had 
 command of the menstruum which alone is power- 
 ful enough to effect such transmutation as this; it 
 is called humour. Humour, be it remembered, is 
 inseparable from charity. Not only did it enable 
 him to see this coarse creature as an amusing per- 
 son ; it inspired him with that large tolerance which 
 looks through things external, gives its full weight 
 to circumstance, and preserves a modesty, a 
 humility, in human judgment. We can form some 
 notion of what Mrs. Gamp would have become in 
 the hands of a rigorous realist, with scorn and 
 disgust (implied inevitably) taking the place of 
 humour. We reject the photograph; it avails us 
 nothing in art or life. Humour deals gently with 
 fact and fate; in its smile there is forbearance, in 
 its laugh there is kindliness. With falsehood — 
 however well meant — it is incompatible; when it 
 has done its work as solvent, the gross adherents 
 are dissipated, the essential truth remains. Do you 
 ask for the Platonic idea of London's monthly 
 nurse early in Queen Victoria's reign? Dickens 
 shows it you embodied. At such a thing as this, 
 crawling between earth and heaven, what can one 
 do but laugh? Its existence is a puzzle, a wonder. 
 The class it represents shall be got rid of as speedily 
 as possible; well and good; we cannot tolerate such 
 
Characterization. 93 
 
 a public nuisance. But the individual — so perfect 
 a specimen — shall be preserved for all time by the 
 magic of a great writer's deep-seeing humour, and 
 shall be known as Mrs. Gamp. 
 
 For a moment, contrast with this masterpiece a 
 picture in which Dickens has used his idealism on 
 material more promising, though sought amid sur- 
 roundings sufficiently like those which formed the 
 portrait of Kingsgate Street. The most successful 
 character in his stories written to be read at Christ- 
 mas is Mrs. Lirriper. She belongs to a class 
 distinguished then, as now, by its uncleanness, its 
 rapacity, its knavery, its ignorance. Mrs. Lirriper 
 keeps a London lodging-house. Here, in depicting 
 an individual, Dickens has not typified a class. 
 He idealizes this woman, but finds in her, ready to 
 his hand, the qualities of goodness and tenderness 
 and cheery honesty, so that there is no question 
 of transmuting a subject repulsive to the senses. 
 Mrs. Lirriper is quite possible, even in a London 
 lodging-house; in the flesh, however, we should 
 not exactly seek her society. Her talk (idealized 
 with excellent adroitness) would too often jar upon 
 the ear; her person would be, to say the least, 
 unattractive. In the book, she has lost these acci- 
 dents of position : we are first amused, then drawn 
 on to like, to admire, to love her. An unfortunate 
 blemish — the ever-recurring artificiality of story — 
 threatens to make her dim; but Mrs. Lirriper 
 triumphs over this. We bear her in memory as a 
 person known — a person most unhappily circum- 
 stanced, set in a gloomy sphere; but of such sweet 
 nature that we forget her inevitable defects, even as 
 we should those of an actual acquaintance of like 
 character. 
 
94 Charles Dickens. 
 
 In looking back on the events of life, do we not 
 see them otherwise than, at the time, they appeared 
 to us? The harsh is smoothed ; the worst of every- 
 thing is forgotten ; things pleasant come into relief. 
 This (a great argument for optimism) is a simili- 
 tude of Dickens's art. Like Time, he obscures the 
 unpleasing, emphasizes all we are glad to remem- 
 ber. Time does not falsify; neither does Dickens, 
 whenever his art is unalloyed. 
 
 Let us turn to his literary method. It is that of 
 all the great novelists. To set before his reader 
 the image so vivid in his own mind, he simply 
 describes and reports. We have, in general, a very 
 precise and complete picture of externals — the face, 
 the gesture, the habit. In this Dickens excels ; he 
 proves to us by sheer force of visible detail, how 
 actual was the mental form from which he drew. 
 We learn the tone of voice, the trick of utterance; 
 he declared that every word spoken by his charac- 
 ters was audible to him. Then does the man reveal 
 himself in colloquy; sometimes once for all, some- 
 times by degrees, in chapter after chapter — though 
 this is seldom the case. We know these people 
 because we see and hear them. 
 
 In a few instances he added deliberate analysis; 
 it was never well done — always superfluous. Very 
 rarely has analysis of character justified itself in 
 fiction. To Dickens the method was alien: he 
 could make no use whatever of it. In the early 
 book which illustrates all his defects, Nicholas 
 Nicklehy^ we have some dreary pages concerned 
 with the inner man of Ralph Nickleby ; seeing that 
 the outer is but shadowy, these details cannot 
 interest; they show, moreover, much crudity and 
 conventionality of thought. Later, an analysis is 
 
Characterization. 95 
 
 attempted of Mr. Dombey — very laborious, very 
 long. It does not help us in the least to understand 
 Paul's father, himself one of the least satisfactory 
 of Dickens's leading persons. One may surmise 
 that the author felt something of this, and went out 
 of his wonted way in an endeavour to give the 
 image more life. 
 
 It results from Dickens's weakness in the devising 
 of incident, in the planning of story, that he seldom 
 develops character through circumstance. There 
 are conversions, but we do not much believe in them; 
 they smack of the stage. Possibly young Martin 
 Chuzzlewit may be counted an exception ; but there 
 is never much life in him. From this point of view 
 Dickens's best bit of work is Pip, in Great Expecta- 
 tions \ Pip, the narrator of his own story, who 
 exhibits very well indeed the growth of a personality, 
 the interaction of character and event. One is not 
 permitted to lose sight of the actual author; though 
 so much more living than Esther Summerson, Pip 
 is yet embarrassed, like her, with the gift of humour. 
 We know very well whose voice comes from behind 
 the scenes when Pip is describing Mr. Wopsle's 
 dramatic venture. Save for this, we acknowledge 
 a true self-revelation. What could be better than 
 the lad's picture of his state of mind, when, after 
 learning that he has ** great expectations", he quits 
 the country home of his childhood and goes to 
 London? '* I formed a plan in outline for bestowing 
 a dinner of roast beef and plum-pudding, a pint of 
 ale, and a gallon of condescension upon everybody 
 in the village" (chap. xix.). It is one of many 
 touches which give high value to this book. 
 
 As a rule, the more elaborate Dickens's conception 
 of character, the smaller his success in working it 
 
96 Charles Dickens. 
 
 out. Again and again he endeavoured to present 
 men and women of exceptionally strong passions : 
 the kind of persons who make such a figure on the 
 boards, where they frown and clench their fists, and 
 utter terrible phrases. It began in Oliver Twist 
 with the man called Monk; in Bamaby came the 
 murderer; in Chuzzlewit appears the mask known 
 as old Martin, a thing of sawdust. Later, the efforts 
 in this direction are more conscientious, more la- 
 boured, but rarely more successful. An exception, 
 perhaps, may be noted in Bradley Headstone, the 
 lover of Lizzie Hexam, whose consuming passion 
 here and there convinces, all the more for its well- 
 contrived contrast with the character of the man 
 whom Lizzie prefers. Charley Hexam, too, is life- 
 like, on a lower plane. The popular voice pleads 
 for Sidney Carton ; yes, he is well presented — but 
 so easy to forget. Think, on the other hand, of the 
 long list of women meant to be tragic, who, one and 
 all, must be judged failures. Edith Dombey, with 
 her silent wrath and ludicrous behaviour, who, 
 intended for a strong, scornful nature, dumbly goes 
 to the sacrifice when bidden by her foolish mother, 
 and then rails at the old worldling for the miseries 
 needlessly brought upon herself. Rosa Dartle, at 
 first a promising suggestion, but falling away into 
 exaggerations of limelight frenzy. Lady Dedlock 
 and her maid Hortense — which is the more obvious 
 waxwork? Mrs. Clennam, in Little Dorrit, is 
 wrought so patiently and placed in so picturesque 
 a scene that one laments over her impossibility; her 
 so-called talk is, perhaps, less readable than any- 
 thing in Dickens. The same book shows us, or 
 aims at showing us. Miss Wade and Tattycoram, 
 from both of whom we turn incredulous. Of Miss 
 
Characterization. 97 
 
 Havisham one grudges to speak ; her ghostly pre- 
 sence does its best to spoil an admirable novel. 
 Women, all these, only in name; a cause of grief 
 to the lovers of the master, a matter of scoffing to 
 his idler critics. When we come to women of 
 everyday stature, then indeed it is a different thing. 
 So numerous are these, and so important in an 
 estimate of Dickens's power of characterization, that 
 I must give them a chapter to themselves. 
 
 Neither at a black-hearted villain was he really 
 good, though he prided himself on his achievements 
 in this kind. Jonas Chuzzlewit is the earliest worth 
 mention ; and what can be said of Jonas, save that 
 he is a surly ruffian of whom one knows very little? 
 The ** setting" of his part is very strong; much 
 powerful writing goes to narrate his history; but 
 the man remains mechanical. Mr. Carker hardly 
 aims at such completeness of scoundreldom, but he 
 would be a fierce rascal — if not so bent on exhibit- 
 ing his teeth, which remind one of the working 
 wires. Other shapes hover in lurid vagueness. 
 Whether, last of all, John Jasper would have shown 
 a great advance, must remain doubtful. The first 
 half of Edwin Drood shows him picturesquely, and 
 little more. We discover no hint of real tragedy. 
 The man seems to us a very vulgar assassin, and 
 we care not at all what becomes of him. 
 
 Against these set the gallery of portraits in which 
 Dickens had displayed to us the legal world of his 
 day. Here he painted from nature, and with an 
 artist's love of his subject. From the attorneys and 
 barristers of Pickwick^ sportive themselves and a 
 cause of infinite mirth in others, to the Old Bailey 
 practitioners so admirably grim in Great Expecta- 
 tions^ one's eye passes along a row of masterpieces. 
 
 (1(444) G 
 
98 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Nay, it is idle to use the pictorial simile ; here are 
 men with blood in their veins — some of them with 
 a good deal of it on their hands. They will not be 
 forgotten; whether we watch the light comedy of 
 Jorkins and Spenlow, or observe the grim gravity of 
 Mr. Jaggers, it is with the same entire conviction. 
 In this department of his work Dickens can be said 
 to idealize only in the sense of the finest art; no 
 praise can exaggerate his dexterity in setting forth 
 these examples of supreme realism. As a picture 
 of actual life in a certain small world Bleak House 
 is his greatest book ; from office-boy to judge, here 
 are all who walk in '^the valley of the Shadow of 
 the Law'\ Impossible to run through the list, 
 much as one would enjoy it. Think only of Mr. 
 Vholes. In the whole range of fiction there is no 
 character more vivid than this ; exhibited so briefly 
 yet so completely, with such rightness in every 
 touch, such impressiveness of total effect, that the 
 thing becomes a miracle. No strain of improbable 
 intrigue can threaten the vitality of these dusty 
 figures. The clerks are as much alive as their 
 employers ; the law-stationer stands for ever face to 
 face with Mr. Tulkinghorn; Inspector Bucket has 
 warmer flesh than that of any other detective in the 
 library of detective literature. As for Jaggers and 
 Wemmick, we should presume them unsurpassable 
 had we not known their predecessors. They would 
 make a novelist's reputation. 
 
 Among the finest examples of characterization (I 
 postpone a review of the figures which belong more 
 distinctly to satire) must be mentioned the Father 
 of the Marshalsea. Should ever proof be demanded 
 — as often it has been — that Dickens is capable of 
 high comedy, let it be sought in the 31st chapter 
 
Characterization. 99 
 
 of book i. of Little Dorrit, There will be seen the 
 old Marshalsea prisoner, the bankrupt of half a life- 
 time, entertaining and patronizing his workhouse 
 pensioner, old Mr. Nandy. For delicacy of treat- 
 ment, for fineness of observation, this scene, I am 
 inclined to think, is unequalled in all the npvels. 
 Of exaggeration there is no trace; nothing raises a 
 laugh; at most one smiles, and may very likely be 
 kept grave by profound interest and a certain emo- 
 tion of wonder. We are in a debtors' prison, among 
 vulgar folk; yet the exquisite finish of this study of 
 human nature forbids one to judge it by any but 
 the highest standards. The Dorrit brothers are 
 both well drawn; they are characterizations in the 
 best sense of the word; and in this scene we have 
 the culmination of the author's genius. That it 
 reveals itself so quietly is but the final assurance of 
 consummate power. 
 
 With the normal in character, with what (all 
 things considered) we may call wholesome normality, 
 Dickens does not often concern himself. Of course 
 there are his homely-minded *Mittle women", of 
 whom more in another place. And there are his 
 benevolent old boys (I call them so advisedly) whom 
 one would like to be able to class with everyday 
 people, but who cannot in strictness be considered 
 here. Walking-gentlemen appear often enough; 
 amiable shadows, such as Tom Pinch's friend 
 Westlock; figures meant to be prominent, such as 
 Arthur Clennam. There remain a few instances of 
 genuine characterization within ordinary limits. I 
 cannot fall in with the common judgment that 
 Dickens never shows us a gentleman. Twice, 
 certainly, he has done so, with the interesting dis- 
 tinction that in one case he depicts a gentleman of 
 
loo Charles Dickens. 
 
 the old school ; in the other, a representative of the 
 refined manhood which came into existence (or 
 became commonly observable) in his latter years. 
 In John Jarndyce I can detect no vulgarity; he 
 appears to me compact of good sense, honour, and 
 gentle feeling. His eccentricity does not pass 
 bounds ; the better we know him the less observable 
 it grows. Though we are told nothing expressly 
 of his intellectual acquirements, it is plain that he 
 had a liberal education, and that his tastes are 
 studious. Impossible not to like and to respect Mr. 
 Jarndyce. Compare him with Mr. Pickwick, or 
 with the Cheerybles, and we see at once the author's 
 intention of social superiority, no less than his in- 
 creased skill in portraiture. The second figure, 
 belonging to a changed time, is Mr. Crisparkle, for 
 whose sake especially one regrets the unfinished 
 state of Edwin Drood. His breezy manner, his 
 athletic habits, his pleasant speech, give no bad 
 idea of the classical tutor who is neither an upstart 
 nor a pedant. Dickens was careful in his choice of 
 names; we see how he formed that of Crisparkle, 
 and recognize its fitness. 
 
 Two other names occur to me, which carry with 
 them a suggestion of true gentility — if the word is 
 permitted; but their bearers can hardly rank with 
 normal personages. Sir Leicester Dedlock, though 
 by no means unsympathetically presented, belongs 
 rather to the region of satire; he is a gentleman, 
 indeed, and meant to be representative of a class, 
 but his special characteristic overcharges the por- 
 trait. Incomparably more of a human being than 
 his wife, he might, with less satirical emphasis, 
 have been a very true gentleman indeed. Then, in 
 Dombey and Son, does one not remember Cousin 
 
Characterization. loi 
 
 Feenix? The name, this time, is unfortunate; this 
 weak-legged scion of aristocracy deserved better 
 treatment. For he is no phantasm ; has no part 
 with the puppets of supposed high-birth whom 
 Dickens occasionally set up only for the pleasure of 
 knocking them down again. However incapable 
 of walking straight across a room, however re- 
 stricted in his views of life, Cousin Feenix has the 
 instincts of birth and breeding. I think one may 
 say that he is Dickens's least disputable success in 
 a sketch (it is only a sketch) from the aristocratic 
 world. His talk does not seem to me exaggerated, 
 and it is unusually interesting; his heart is right, 
 his apprehensions are delicate. That he should be 
 shown as feeble in mind, no less than at the knees, 
 is merely part of the author's scheme; and, after 
 all, the feebleness is more apparent than real. 
 Dickens, moreover, very often associates kindness 
 of disposition with lack of brains; it connects itself, 
 I fancy, with his attitude towards liberal education, 
 which has already been discussed, as well as with 
 his Radicalism, still to be spoken of. No dis- 
 tinctly intellectual person figures in his books; 
 David Copperfield is only a seeming exception, for 
 who really thinks of David as a literary man? To 
 his autobiography let all praise be given — with the 
 reserve that we see the man himself less clearly 
 than any other person of whom he speaks. De- 
 cidedly he is not *■ ' the hero of his own story ". 
 Had Dickens intended to show us a man of letters, 
 he would here have failed most grievously; of 
 course he aimed at no such thing; the attempt 
 would have cost him half his public. And so it is 
 that one never thinks of the good David as a char- 
 acter at all, never for a moment credits hiniy the 
 
I02 Charles Dickens. 
 
 long-suffering youth for whom Dora **held the 
 pens", with that glorious endowment of genius 
 which went to the writing of his life. 
 
 Of an average middle-class family in Dickens's 
 earlier time — decent, kindly, not unintelligent folk 
 — we have the best example in the Meagles group, 
 from Little Dorrit, This household may be con- 
 trasted with, say, that of the Maylies in Oliver 
 Twisty which is merely immature work, and with 
 the more familiar family circles on which Dickens 
 lavishes his mirth and his benevolence. The 
 Meagles do not much interest us, which is quite 
 right; they are thoroughly realized, and take their 
 place in social history. Well done, too, is the 
 Pocket family in Great Expectations ^ an interesting 
 pendant to that of the Jelly bys in Bleak Houses 
 showing how well, when he chose, Dickens could 
 satirize without extravagance. Mrs. Pocket is de- 
 cidedly more credible than Mrs. Jellyby; it might 
 be urged, perhaps, that she belongs to the Sixties 
 instead of to the Fifties, a point of some importance. 
 The likeness in dissimilitude between these ladies' 
 husbands is very instructive. As for the son, 
 Herbert Pocket, he is a capital specimen of the 
 healthy, right-minded, and fairly-educated middle- 
 class youth. Very skilfully indeed is he placed 
 side by side with Pip; each throwing into relief 
 the other's natural and acquired characteristics. 
 We see how long it will take the blacksmith's 
 foster-child (he telling the tale himself) to reach the 
 point of mental and moral refinement to which 
 Herbert Pocket has been bred. 
 
 One more illustration of the ordinary in life and 
 character. Evidently Dickens took much pains 
 with Walter Gay, in Domhey and Son^ meaning 
 
Characterization. 103 
 
 to represent an average middle-class boy, high- 
 spirited, frank, affectionate, and full of cheerful 
 ambition. I have already mentioned the darker 
 design, so quickly abandoned; we feel sure its 
 working out would not have carried conviction, for 
 Walter Gay, from the first, does not ring quite true. 
 The note seems forced; we are not stirred by his 
 exuberance of jollity, and he never for a moment 
 awakens strong interest. Is it any better with 
 Richard Carstone, — in whom the tragic idea was, 
 with modification, carried through? Yes, Richard 
 is more interesting; by necessity of his fortunes, 
 and by virtue of artistic effort. He has his place 
 in a book pervaded with the atmosphere of doom. 
 Vivid he never becomes ; we see him as a passive 
 victim of fate, rather than as a struggling man; if 
 he made a better fight, or if we were allowed to see 
 more of his human weakness (partly forbidden by 
 our proprieties), his destiny would affect us more 
 than it does. In truth, this kind of thing cannot 
 be done under Dickens's restrictions. Thackeray 
 could have done it magnificently; but there was 
 **the great, big, stupid public". 
 
 The ** gentleman" Dickens loved to contemplate 
 was — in echo of Burns's phrase — he who derives 
 his patent of gentility straight from Almighty God. 
 These he found abundantly among the humble of 
 estate, the poor in spirit; or indulged his fine 
 humanity in the belief that they aboundedn A 
 broken squire, reduced to miserly service, but keep- 
 ing through all faults and misfortunes the better 
 part of his honest and kindly nature ; grotesque in 
 person, of fantastic demeanour, but always lovable; 
 — of this dream comes Newman Noggs. A city 
 clerk, grey in conscientious labour for one house, 
 
I04 
 
 Charles Dickens. 
 
 glorying in the perfection of his ledger, taking it 
 ill if his employers insist on raising his salary; — 
 the vision is christened Tim Linkinwater. A young 
 man of bumpkinish appearance, shy, ungainly, 
 who has somehow drifted into the household of a 
 country architect; who nourishes his soul at the 
 church organ; who is so good and simple and 
 reverential that years of experience cannot teach 
 him what everyone else sees at a glance — the hypo- 
 critical rascality of his master; he takes shape, and 
 is known to us as Tom Pinch. A village black- 
 smith, with heart as tender as his thews are tough ; 
 delighting above all things in the society of a little 
 child ; so dull of brain that he gives up in despair 
 the effort to learn his alphabet ; so sweet of temper 
 that he endures in silence the nagging of an out- 
 rageous wife ; so delicate of sensibility that he per- 
 spires at the thought of seeming to intrude upon 
 an old friend risen in life; — what name can be his 
 but Joe Gargery? These, and many another like 
 unto them, did the master lovingly create, and there 
 would be something of sacrilege in a cold scrutiny 
 of his work. Whether or no their prototypes existed 
 in the hurrying crowd of English life, which obscures 
 so much good as well as evil, these figures have 
 fixed themselves in the English imagination, and 
 their names are part of our language. Dickens 
 saw them, and heard them speak; to us, when we 
 choose to enjoy without criticising, they seem no 
 less present. Every such creation was a good deed; 
 the results for good have been incalculable. Would 
 he have been better occupied, had he pried into 
 each character, revealed its vices, insisted on its 
 sordid weaknesses, thrown bare its frequent hy- 
 pocrisy, and emphasized its dreary unintelligence? 
 
Characterization. 105 
 
 Indeed, I think not. I will only permit myself the 
 regret that he who could come so near to truth, and 
 yet so move the affections, as in Joe Gargery, was 
 at other times content with that inferior idealism 
 which addresses itself only to unripe minds or to 
 transitory moods. 
 
 The point to be kept in view regarding these 
 ideal figures is that, however little their speech or 
 conduct may smack of earth, their worldly surround- 
 ings are shown with marvellous fidelity. Tom 
 Pinch worshipping at the shrine of Pecksniff may 
 not hold our attention; but Tom Pinch walking 
 towards Salisbury on the frosty road, or going to 
 market in London with his sister, is unforgettable. 
 This is what makes the difference between an impos- 
 sible person in Dickens and the same kind of vision 
 in the work of smaller writers. One cannot repeat 
 too often that, in our literary slang, he ** visualised" 
 every character — Little Nell no less than Mr. Jag- 
 gers. Seeing them^ he saw the house in which 
 they lived, the table at which they ate, and all the 
 little habits of their day-to-day life. Here is an 
 invaluable method of illusion, if an author can adopt 
 it. Thus fortified, Dickens's least substantial ima- 
 ginings have a durability not to be hoped for the 
 laborious accuracies of an artist uninspired. 
 
 Pass to another group in this scarcely exhaustible 
 world — the confessed eccentrics. Here Dickens 
 revels. An English novelist must needs be occu- 
 pied to some extent with grotesque abnormalities of 
 thought and demeanour. Dickens saw them about 
 him even more commonly than we of to-day, and 
 delighted in noting, selecting, combining. The 
 result is seen in those persons of his drama who 
 are frankly given up by many who will defend his 
 
io6 Charles Dickens. 
 
 verisimilitude in other directions. Mantalini, for 
 example ; Quilp, Captain Cuttle, Silas Wegg, and 
 many another. For Silas Wegg, I fear, nothing 
 can be urged, save the trifle that we know him ; he 
 becomes a bore, one of the worst instances of this 
 form of humour weakened by extenuation. Even 
 Dickens occasionally suffered from the necessity of 
 filling a certain space. Think how long his novels 
 are, and marvel that the difficulty does not more 
 often declare itself. Of Mr. Boythorne we are 
 accustomed to think as drawn from Landor, but 
 then it is Landor with all the intellect left out ; his 
 roaring as gently as any sucking-dove does not 
 greatly charm us, but his talk has good qualities. 
 More of a character, in the proper sense of the word, 
 is Harold Skimpole, whose portrait gave such 
 offence to Leigh Hunt. Now Skimpole is one of 
 the few people in Dickens whom we dislike, and so, 
 a priori, demands attention. If we incline to think 
 his eccentricity overdone, be it remembered that the 
 man was in part an actor, and a very clever actor 
 too. Skimpole is excellent work, and stands with 
 fine individuality among the representatives of true 
 unworldliness. 
 
 To which category belongs Mr. Micawber? The 
 art of living without an income may be successfully 
 cultivated in very different moods. It is possible 
 for a man of the most generous instincts to achieve 
 great things in this line of endeavour; but the fact 
 remains that, sooner or later, somebody has the 
 honour of discharging his liabilities. To speak 
 severely of Mr. Micawber is beyond the power of 
 the most conscientious critic, whether in life or art; 
 the most rigid economist would be glad to grasp 
 him by the hand and to pay for the bowl of punch 
 
Characterization. 107 
 
 over which this type of genial impecuniosity would 
 dilate upon his embarrassments and his hopes; the 
 least compromising realist has but to open at a dia- 
 logue or a letter in which Mr.Micawber's name is seen, 
 and straightway he forgets his theories. No selfish 
 intention can be attributed to him. His bill might 
 not be provided for when he declared it was^ and, in 
 consequence, poor Traddles may lose the table he 
 has purchased for **the dearest girl in the world", 
 but Mr. Micawber had all the time been firmly 
 assured that something would turn up; he will 
 sympathize profoundly with Traddles, and write him 
 an epistle which makes amends for the loss of many 
 tables. No man ever lived who was so consistently 
 delightful — certainly Dickens's father cannot have 
 been so, but in this idealized portraiture we have 
 essential truth. Men of this stamp do not abound, 
 but they are met with, even to-day. As a rule, he 
 who waits for something to turn up, mixing punch 
 the while, does so with a very keen eye on his neigh- 
 bour's pocket, and is recommended to us neither by 
 Skimpole's fantastic gaiety nor by Micawber's elo- 
 quence and warmth of heart; nevertheless, one 
 knows the irrepressibly hopeful man, full of kindli- 
 ness, often distinguished by unconscious affectations 
 of speech, who goes through life an unreluctant 
 pensioner on the friends won by his many good and 
 genial qualities. The one point on which experi- 
 ence gives no support to the imaginative figure is 
 his conversion to practical activity. Mr. Micawber 
 in Australia does the heart good ; but he is a pious 
 vision. We refuse to think of a wife worn out by 
 anxieties, of children growing up in squalor; we 
 gladly accept the flourishing colonist; but this is 
 tribute to the author whom we love. Dickens never 
 
io8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 wrought more successfully for our pleasure and for 
 his own fame. He is ever at his best when dealing 
 with an amiable weakness. And in Micawber he 
 gives us no purely national type — such men are 
 peculiar to no country; all the characteristics of this 
 wonderful picture can be appreciated by civilized 
 readers throughout the world. It is not so in regard 
 to many of his creations, though all the finest have 
 traits of universal humanity. Should time deal 
 hardly with him ; should his emphasis of time and 
 place begin to weigh against his wide acceptance ; 
 it is difficult to believe that the beaming visage of 
 Wilkins Micawber will not continue to be recog- 
 nized wherever men care for literary art. 
 
 This chapter must conclude with a glance at a 
 class of human beings prominent in Dickens's 
 earlier books, but of small artistic interest when 
 treated in the manner peculiar to him. He was 
 fond of characters hovering between eccentricity 
 and madness, and in one case he depicted what he 
 himself calls an idiot, though idiocy is not strictly 
 speaking the form of disease exhibited. Lunatics 
 were more often found at large in his day than in 
 ours; perhaps that accounts for our introduction 
 to such persons as Mrs. Nickleby's wooer and Mr. 
 Dick; Miss Flite, of course, had another significance. 
 The crazy gentleman on the garden walk, who at 
 once flatters and terrifies Mrs. Nickleby, can hardly 
 be regarded as anything but an actor in broad 
 farce ; his talk, indeed, is midsummer madness, but 
 is meant only to raise a laugh. At the end of the 
 century, one does not laugh with such agreeable 
 facility. Mrs. Nickleby commands our attention — 
 at a respectful distance; and here, as always, be- 
 haves after her kind, illustrating the eternal feminine; 
 
Characterization. 109 
 
 but the madman we cannot accept. Betsy Trot- 
 wood's protege comes nearer to the recognizable; 
 nevertheless Mr. Dick's presence in such a book as 
 David Copperfield would seem waste of space, but 
 for certain considerations. He illustrates the for- 
 midable lady's goodness and common-sense; he 
 served a very practical purpose, that of recommend- 
 ing rational treatment of the insane; and he had his 
 place in the pages of an author whose humanity 
 includes all that are in any way afflicted, in mind, 
 body, or estate. Moreover, the craze about King 
 Charles's head has been, and is likely to be, a great 
 resource to literary persons in search of a familiar 
 allusion. In passing to Bamaby Rudge^ we are on 
 different ground. Whatever else, Barnaby is a 
 very picturesque figure, and I presume it was 
 merely on this account that Dickens selected such 
 a hero. In an earlier chapter, I said that this story 
 seemed to me to bear traces of the influence of Scott; 
 its narrative style and certain dialogues in the his- 
 torical part are suggestive of this. May not the 
 crazy Barnaby have originated in a recollection of 
 Madge Wildfire? Crazy, I call him; an idiot he 
 certainly is not. An idiot does not live a life of 
 exalted imagination. But certain lunatics are of 
 imagination all compact, and Barnaby, poetically 
 speaking, makes a good representative of the class. 
 Of psychology — a word unknown to Dickens — we, 
 of course, have nothing; to ask for it is out of place. 
 The idea, all things considered, cannot be judged 
 a happy one. Whilst writing the latter part of the 
 book Dickens thought for a moment of showing 
 the rioters as led by a commanding figure, who, in 
 the end, should prove to have escaped from Bedlam. 
 We see his motive for this, but are not sorry he 
 
no Charles Dickens. 
 
 abandoned the idea. Probably Barnahy Rudge^ 
 good as it is, would have been still better had the 
 suggestion of an insane central figure been also 
 discarded. 
 
 Chapter VI. 
 Satiric Portraiture. 
 
 Not only does Dickens give poetic shape to the 
 better characteristics of English life; he is also 
 England's satirist. Often directed against abuses 
 in their nature temporary, his satire has in some 
 part lost its edge, and would have only historic 
 interest but for the great preservative, humour, 
 mingled with all his books ; much of it, however, is 
 of enduring significance, and reminds us that the 
 graver faults of Englishmen are not to be overcome 
 by a few years of popular education, by general 
 increase of comfort and refinement, by the spread 
 of a genuinely democratic spirit. Some of these 
 blemishes, it is true, belong more or less to all 
 mankind; but in Dickens's England they were 
 peculiarly disfiguring, and the worst of them seem 
 inseparable from the national character. 
 
 Much as they loved and glorified him, his country- 
 men did not fail to make protest when wounded by the 
 force of his satiric portraiture. The cry was ** exag- 
 geration ". As one might surmise, this protest was 
 especially vigorous during the publication of Mar- 
 tin Chuzzlewity in which book the English vice par 
 excellence gets its deserts. Dickens used the oppor- 
 tunity of a preface to answer his critics ; he remarked 
 that peculiarities of character often escape observa- 
 tion until they are directly pointed out, and asked 
 
Satiric Portraiture. m 
 
 whether the charge of exaggeration brought against 
 him might not simply mean that he, a professed 
 student of life, saw more than ordinary people. 
 There was undoubted truth in the plea; Browning 
 has put the same thought — as an apology for art — 
 into the mouth of Fra Lippo Lippi. Dickens as- 
 suredly saw a great deal more in every day of his 
 life than his average readers in threescore years 
 and ten. But it still remained a question whether, 
 in his desire to stigmatize an objectionable peculi- 
 arity, the satirist had not erred by making this pecu- 
 liarity the whole man. Exaggeration there was, 
 beyond dispute, in such a picture as that of Peck- 
 sniff; inasmuch as no man can be so consistently 
 illustrative of an evil habit of mind. There was lack 
 of proportion; the figure failed in human symmetry. 
 Just as, in the same book, the pictures of American 
 life erred through one-sidedness. Dickens had 
 written satire, and satire as pointed, as effective, as 
 any in literature. Let the galled jade wince ; there 
 was an outcry of many voices, appealing to common 
 judgment. It might be noted that these same sen- 
 sitive critics had never objected to ** exaggeration'* 
 when the point at issue was merely one of art; they 
 became aware of their favourite author's defect only 
 when it involved a question of morals or of national 
 character. 
 
 Merely as satirist, however, Dickens never for a 
 moment endangered his popularity. The fact, al- 
 ready noticed, that Martin Chuzzlewit found fewer 
 admirers than the books preceding it, had nothing 
 to do with its moral theme, but must be traced to 
 causes, generally more or less vague, such as from 
 time to time affect the reception of every author's 
 work; not long after its completion, this book be- 
 
112 Charles Dickens. 
 
 came one of the most widely read. There is the 
 satire which leaves cold, or alienates, the ordinary- 
 man, either because it passes above his head, or 
 conflicts with his cherished prejudices; and there is 
 the satire which, by appealing to his better self, — 
 that is, to a standard of morality which he theoreti- 
 cally, or in very deed, accepts, — commands his 
 sympathy as soon as he sees his drift. What is 
 called the '^popular conscience" was on Dickens's 
 side; and he had the immense advantage of being 
 able to raise a hearty laugh even whilst pointing 
 his lesson. Among the rarest of things is this 
 thorough understanding between author and public, 
 permitting a man of genius to say aloud with im- 
 punity that which all his hearers say within them- 
 selves dumbly, inarticulately. Dickens never went 
 too far; never struck at a genuine conviction of the 
 multitude. Let us imagine him, in some moment 
 of aberration, suggesting criticism of the popular 
 idea of sexual morality! Would it have availed 
 him that he had done the state some service? Would 
 argument or authority have helped for one moment 
 to win him a patient hearing? We know that he 
 never desired to provoke such antagonism. Broadly 
 speaking, he was one with his readers, and therein 
 lay his strength for reform. 
 
 As for the charge of exaggeration, the truth is 
 that Dickens exaggerated no whit more in his 
 satire than in his sympathetic portraiture. It is an 
 idle objection. Of course he exaggerated, in all 
 but every page. In the last chapter I pointed to 
 exceptional instances of literal or subdued truthful- 
 ness; not by these did he achieve his triumphs; 
 they lurk for discovery by the curious. Granting 
 his idealistic method, such censure falls wide of the 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 113 
 
 mark. We are struck more forcibly when a char- 
 acter is exhibited as compact of knavery or gro- 
 tesque cruelty, than when it presents incarnate 
 goodness; that is all. The one question we are 
 justified in urging is, whether his characterization 
 is consistent with itself. In the great majority of 
 cases, I believe the answer must be affirmative. 
 Were it not so, Dickens's reputation would by this 
 time linger only among the untaught; among those 
 who are content to laugh, no matter how the mirth 
 be raised. 
 
 His satire covers a great part of English life, 
 public and private. Education, charity, religion, 
 social morality in its broadest sense, society in its 
 narrowest; legal procedure, the machinery of poli- 
 tics, and the forms of government. Licensed to 
 speak his mind, he aims laughingly or sternly, but 
 always in the same admirable spirit, at every glar- 
 ing abuse of the day. He devotes a whole book, a 
 prodigy of skilful labour, to that crowning example 
 of the law's delay, which had wrought ruin in in- 
 numerable homes; he throws off a brilliant little 
 sketch, in a Christmas number, and makes every- 
 body laugh at the absurd defects of railway refresh- 
 ment-rooms. We marvel at such breadth of tire- 
 less observation in the service of human welfare. 
 Impossible to follow him through all the achieve- 
 ments of his satire; I can but select examples in 
 each field, proceeding in the order just indicated. 
 
 It is natural that he should turn, at the beginning 
 of his career, to abuses evident in the parish, the 
 school, the place of worship. These were nearest 
 at hand; they stared at him in his observant child- 
 hood, and during his life as a journalist. Con- 
 sequently we soon meet with Mr. Bumble, with Mr. 
 ( M 444 ) H 
 
114 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Squeers, with the Rev. Mr. Stiggins. Of these 
 three figures, the one most open to the charge of 
 exaggeration is the Yorkshire schoolmaster; yet 
 who shall declare with assurance that Squeers's 
 brutality outdoes the probable in his place and 
 generation? There is crude workmanship in the 
 portrait, and still more in the picture of Dotheboys, 
 where overcharging defeats its own end. The ex- 
 traordinary feature of this bit of work is the in- 
 extricable blending of horrors and jocosity. Later, 
 when Dickens had fuller command of his resources, 
 he would have made Dotheboys very much more 
 impressive; it remains an illustration of super- 
 abundant spirits in a man of genius. We can 
 hardly help an amiable feeling towards the Squeers 
 family, seeing the hearty gusto with which they 
 pursue their monstrous business. The children 
 who suffer under them are so shadowy that we can- 
 not feel the wrong as we ought; such a spectacle 
 should lay waste the heart, and yet we continue 
 smiling. Dickens, of course, did not intend that 
 this gathering of martyred children should have the 
 effect of reality. Enough if he called attention to the 
 existence of a horror; reflection shall come after- 
 wards; his immediate business is story-telling, that 
 is to say, amusement. Wonderfully did he adapt 
 means to ends ; we find, in fact, that nothing could 
 have been practically more effectual than this ex- 
 hibition of strange gaiety. Mr. Bumble, though he 
 comes earlier, is, in truth, better work than Squeers. 
 Read carefully chapter iv. of Oliver Twist, and 
 you will discover, probably to your surprise, that 
 the ^^porochial" functionary is, after all, human: 
 in one line — in a delicate touch — we are shown 
 Bumble softened, to the point of a brief silence. 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 115 
 
 by Oliver's pleading for kind usage. No such 
 moment occurs in the history of Squeers. And 
 we see why not. The master of Dotheboys is not 
 meant for a conscientious study of a human being; 
 he is the representative, pure and simple, of a vile 
 institution. Admit a lurking humanity, and we 
 have suggestion of possible reform. Now the 
 parochial system, bad as it was, seemed a neces- 
 sity, and only needed a thorough overhauling, — 
 observe the perfectly human behaviour of certain 
 of the guardians before whom Oliver appears ; but 
 with the Yorkshire schools, it was root and branch, 
 they must be swept from the earth. I do not think 
 this is refining overmuch. Dickens's genius de- 
 clared itself so consistently in his adaptation of 
 literary means to ends of various kinds; and, how- 
 ever immature the details of his performance, he 
 shows from the first this marvellous precision in 
 effect. 
 
 Dotheboys was of course, even in these bad 
 times, an exceptional method for the rearing of 
 youth. It is not cold-blooded cruelty, but block- 
 headed ignorance, against which Dickens has to 
 fight over the whole ground of education. We 
 have noticed his attitude towards the system of 
 classical training; the genteel private schools of 
 his day invited satire, and supplied him with some 
 of his most entertaining chapters. Dr. Blimber's 
 establishment is a favourable specimen of the kind 
 of thing that satisfied well-to-do parents; genial 
 ridicule suffices for its condemnation. But Dickens 
 went deeper and laid stress upon the initial stages 
 of the absurd system. Mrs. Pipchin, however 
 distinct a personality, was not singular in her 
 mode of dealing with children fresh from the 
 
ii6 Charles Dickens. 
 
 nursery. Always profoundly interested in these 
 little people, Dickens, without reaching any very 
 clear conception of reform, well understood the evil 
 consequences of such gross neglect or mistaken 
 zeal as were common in households of every class. 
 He knew that the vices of society could for the 
 most part be traced to these bad beginnings. A 
 leader in this as in so many other directions, he 
 taught his readers to think much of children just 
 at the time when England had especial need of an 
 educational awakening. Not his satire alone, but 
 his so-called sentimentality, served a great purpose, 
 and the death-bed of Paul Dombey, no less than 
 the sufferings of Mr. Creakle's little victim, helped 
 on the better day. 
 
 Though it has been ** proved to demonstration" 
 — by persons who care for such proof — that tender- 
 ness of heart led him astray in his bitterness against 
 the new Poor Law, we see, of course, that herein 
 he pursued his humane task, seeking in all possible 
 ways to mitigate the harshness of institutions which 
 pressed hardly upon the poor and weak. He could 
 not away with those who held — or spoke as if they 
 held — that a man had no duty to his fellows beyond 
 the strict letter of the law. In this respect that 
 very poor book. Hard TimeSy has noteworthy 
 significance; but the figures of Gradgrind and 
 Bounderby show how completely he could fail 
 when he dispensed (or all but dispensed) with the 
 aid of humour. Oliver Twist's ^*old gentleman in 
 the white waistcoat" is decidedly better as portrai- 
 ture, and as satire more effective. Apologists, or 
 rampant glorifiers, of the workhouse, such as ap- 
 pear in the Christmas Books, need not be viewed 
 too seriously ; they stood forth at a season of none 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 117 
 
 too refined joviality, and were in keeping with 
 barons of beef, tons of plum -pudding, and other 
 such heavy extravagances. They do not live in 
 one's mind; nor, I think, does any of Dickens's 
 persons mean to satirize poor-law abuses. In this 
 matter, his spirit did its work, his art not greatly 
 assisting. 
 
 But when we come to his lashings of religious 
 hypocrisy, the figures castigated are substantial 
 enough. Always delighted to represent a humbug, 
 Dickens can scarce restrain himself when he gets 
 hold of a religious humbug, especially of the coarse 
 type. Brother Stiggins shines immortal in the 
 same pages with Mr. Pickwick and the Wellers. 
 Compare with him the Reverend Mr. Chadband. 
 They are the same men, but one lived in 1837, the 
 other in 1853. Brother Stiggins is, in plain Eng- 
 lish, a drunkard; Mr. Chadband would think 
 shame of himself to be even once overtaken : he is 
 a consumer of tea and muffins. It suited the 
 author's mood, and the day in which he was writ- 
 ing, to have Mr. Stiggins soundly beaten in a 
 pugilistic encounter with Tony Weller, to say 
 nothing of other undignified positions in which the 
 reverend gentleman finds himself; but Mr. Chad- 
 band may discourse upon *'Terewth" in Mr. Snags- 
 by's parlour to any length that pleases him with 
 no fear of such outrage. These same discourses 
 are among the most mirth-provoking things in all 
 Dickens: impossible to regard with nothing but 
 contempt or dislike the man who has so shaken our 
 sides. It might be well for the world if the race of 
 Chadband should disappear (a consummation still 
 far out of sight) ; but the satirist frankly glories in 
 him, and to us he is a joy for ever. This is the 
 
ii8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 best of the full-length pictures ; but we have many 
 a glimpse of kindred personages, always shown 
 us with infinite gusto. The Rev. Melchisedech 
 Howler, for instance. With what extravagance of 
 humour, with what a rapture of robust mirth, are 
 his characteristics touched off in a short passage of 
 Domhey and Son, I must give myself the pleasure 
 of copying it. *^ The Rev. Melchisedech Howler, 
 who, having been one day discharged from the 
 West India Docks on a false suspicion (got up 
 expressly against him by the general enemy) of 
 screwing gimlets into puncheons, and applying his 
 lips to the orifice, had announced the destruction of 
 the world for that day two years, at ten in the morn- 
 ing, and opened a front parlour for the reception of 
 ladies and gentlemen, of the ranting persuasion, 
 upon whom, on the first occasion of their assem- 
 blage, the admonition of the Rev. Melchisedech 
 had produced so powerful an effect, that, in their 
 rapturous performance of a sacred jig, which closed 
 the service, the whole flock broke through into a 
 kitchen below and disabled a mangle belonging to 
 one of the fold" (chap. xv.). There is something of 
 sheer boyishness in this irresistible glee; yet the 
 passage was written more than ten years after Pick- 
 wick. It is the same all but to the end. Dickens 
 treats a thoroughgoing humbug as though he loved 
 him. Reverent of all true religion, and inclined to 
 bitterness against respectable shortcomings in the 
 high places of the church, he goes wild with merri- 
 ment over back-parlour proselytism and the bray- 
 ings of Little Bethel. Perhaps in this respect alone 
 did he give grave and lasting offence to numbers of 
 people who would otherwise have been amongst 
 his admirers. At a later time, he could draw, or 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 119 
 
 attempt, a sympathetic portrait of a clergyman of 
 the Established Church, in Our Mutual Friend^ 
 and, in his last book, could speak respectfully of 
 Canons ; but with Dissent he never reconciled him- 
 self. To this day, I believe, his books are excluded, 
 on religious grounds, from certain families holding 
 austere views. Remembering the England he sets 
 before us, it is perhaps the highest testimony to his 
 power that such hostility did not make itself more 
 felt when he was mocking so light-heartedly at 
 Stiggins and Chadband and the Rev. Melchise- 
 dech. 
 
 Connected with hypocrisy in religion, but very 
 skilfully kept apart from it, is his finest satiric por- 
 trait, that of Mr. Pecksniff. Think of all that is 
 suggested in this representative of an odious vice, 
 and marvel at the adroitness with which a hun- 
 dred pitfalls of the incautious satirist are success- 
 fully avoided. A moral hypocrite, an incarnation 
 of middle-class respectability in the worst sense of 
 the word, in the sense so loathed by Carlyle, and 
 by every other man of brains then living; yet never 
 a hint at subjects forbidden in the family circle, 
 never a word to which that relative of Mr. Peck- 
 sniff, the famous Podsnap, could possibly object. 
 The thing would seem impossible, but that it is 
 done. Let the understanding read between the 
 lines ; as in all great art, much is implied that finds 
 no direct expression. Mr. Pecksniff walks and talks 
 before us, a cause of hilarity to old and young, yet 
 the type of as ugly a failing as any class or people 
 can be afflicted withal. The book in which he figures 
 is directed against self-interest in all its forms. We 
 see the sagacious swindler, and the greedy dupe 
 whose unscrupulousness ends in murder. We see 
 
I20 Charles Dickens. 
 
 the flocking of the Chuzzlewit family, like birds of 
 prey, about the sick-bed of their wealthy relative; 
 and among them the gentlemanly architect of 
 unctuous phrase, who, hearing himself called a 
 hypocrite, signalizes his pre-eminence in an im- 
 mortal remark. ' ' Charity, my dear, when I take 
 my chamber-candlestick to-night, remJnd me to be 
 more than usually particular in praying for Mr. 
 Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done me an injustice." 
 This man is another than Tartuffe ; he belongs to a 
 different age, and different country. His religion 
 is not an end in itself; he does not desire to be 
 thought a saint; his prayers are inseparable from 
 the chamber-candlestick, a mere item in the char- 
 acter of British respectability. A like subordination 
 appears in the piety of all Dickens's religious pre- 
 tenders ; their language never becomes offensive to 
 the ordinary reader, simply because it avoids the 
 use of sacred names and phrases, and is seen to 
 have a purely temporal application. Mr. Chad- 
 band is a tradesman, dealing in a species of exhor- 
 tation which his hearers have agreed to call spiritual, 
 and to rate at a certain value in coin of the realm ; 
 religion in its true sense never comes into question. 
 Mr. Pecksniff, of course, might have become a 
 shining light in some great conventicle, but destiny 
 has made him a layman ; he published his habit of 
 praying, because to pray (over the chamber-candle- 
 stick) was incumbent upon an Englishman who had 
 a position to support, who had a stake in the country. 
 A reputation for piety, however, would not suffice 
 to his self-respect, and to the needs of his business; 
 he adds an all-embracing benevolence, his smile 
 falls like the blessed sunshine on all who meet him 
 in his daily walk. This it is which so impresses 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 121 
 
 the simple-minded Tom Pinch. Tom, a thorough 
 Englishman for all his virtues, would not be at- 
 tracted by a show of merely religious exaltation; 
 faith must be translated into works. Pecksniff must 
 seem to him good, kind, generous, a great man at 
 his profession, sound and trustworthy in all he 
 undertakes. In other words, the Pecksniff whom 
 Tom believes in is the type of English excellence, 
 and evidently no bad type to be set before a nation. 
 Such men existed, and do, and will; we talk little 
 about them, and it is their last desire that we should; 
 they live, mostly in silence, for the honour of their 
 race and of humankind. But, since the Puritan 
 revolution, it has unhappily seemed necessary to 
 our countrymen in general to profess in a peculiar 
 way certain peculiar forms of godliness, and this 
 habit, gradually associated with social prejudices 
 arising from high prosperity, results in the respect- 
 able man. Analyzing this person down to his 
 elements, Carlyle found it an essential, if not the 
 essential, that he should ''keep a gig". If my 
 memory serves me, Mr. Pecksniff did not keep a C^ /^ 
 gig (possibly it is implied in his position), and, g^^i<av/i4^ 
 after all, the gig is but crudely symbolical. ''Let us 
 be moral ", says the great man (happening at that 
 moment to be drunk), and here we get to the honest 
 root of the matter. Though the Englishman may 
 dispense with a gig, and remain respectable, he 
 must not be suspected of immorality. "Let us 
 contemplate existence ", pursues the inebriate sage. 
 We do so, we English, and find that the term mor- 
 ality (more decidedly than religion) includes all that, 
 in our souls, we rate most highly. According to 
 his proved morality (sexual first and foremost), do 
 we put trust in a man. We are a practical people; 
 
122 Charles Dickens. 
 
 we point to our wealth in evidence; and our experi- 
 ence has set it beyond doubt that chastity of thought 
 and act is a nation's prime safeguard. 
 
 Could we but be satisfied with the conviction, 
 and simply act upon it! It is not enough. We 
 must hold it as an article of faith that respectability 
 not only does not err, but knows not temptation. 
 A poet who never asked to be thought respectable 
 has put into words we shall not easily forget his 
 thought about immorality : 
 
 " I waive the danger of the sin, 
 The hazard of concealing, 
 But oh ! it hardens all within, 
 And petrifies the feeling ! " 
 
 The danger of the sin is so grave, the hazard of 
 concealing so momentous, in English eyes, that we 
 form a national conspiracy to exhibit English 
 nature as distinct, in several points, from the 
 merely human. Hence a characteristic delicacy, a 
 singular refinement, contrasting with the manners, 
 say, of the Latin races, and, at its best, resulting in 
 very sweet and noble lives ; hence, also, that coun- 
 terbalancing vice which would fain atone for vice in 
 the more common sense of the word. Though all 
 within may be hopelessly hardened, the feeling 
 petrified into a little idol of egoism, outwardly there 
 shall be a show of everything we respect. ^' Hom- 
 age to virtue", quotha? Well and good, were it 
 nothing more. But Mr. Pecksniff takes up his 
 parable, his innumerable kindred hold forth in 
 the market-place. Respectability cannot hold its 
 tongue, in fact ; and the language it affects is wont 
 to be nauseous. 
 
 Lower than Pecksniff, but of obvious brotherhood 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 123 
 
 with him, stands Uriah Heep. This example of a 
 low-born man, who, chancing to have brains, deems 
 it most expedient to use them for dishonest pur- 
 poses, will not yield in the essentials of respect- 
 ability to the best in the land. He is poor, he is 
 *umble, but his morals must not for a moment be 
 doubted. The undisguisable fact of poverty is 
 accepted and made the most of; it becomes his 
 tower of strength. Mr. Pecksniff, conscious of a 
 well-filled purse, assumes a certain modesty of de- 
 meanour — a foretaste, by the by, of that affectation 
 in rich people which promises such an opportunity 
 for satire in our own day. Uriah Heep wallows in 
 perpetual humility; he grovels before his social 
 superiors, that he may prove to them his equality 
 in soul. With regard to this slimy personage, we 
 note at once that he is a victim of circumstances, 
 the outcome of a bad education and of a society 
 affected with disease. His like abounded at the 
 time; nowadays they will not so easily be dis- 
 covered. The doctrine that '* A man's a man for a' 
 that" has taken solid shape, and our triumphant 
 democracy will soon be ashamed of a motto so dis- 
 paraging. But Heep saw no prospect when he 
 stood upright; only when he crawled did a chance 
 of issue from that too humble life present itself. 
 ** Remember your place!" — from his earliest years 
 this admonition had sounded for him. This prime 
 duty is ever present to his mind ; it prompts him to 
 avow, in and out of season, that he belongs to a 
 very 'umble family, that he is himself the 'umblest 
 of mortals. Meanwhile the man's vitals are con- 
 sumed with envy, hatred, and malice. He cannot 
 respect himself; his training has made the thing 
 impossible; and all men are his enemies. When 
 
124 Charles Dickens. 
 
 he is detected in criminal proceedings we are hard 
 upon him, very hard. Dickens cannot relent to 
 this victim of all that is worst in the society he 
 criticises. Had Uriah stopped short of crime, 
 something might have been said for him, but the 
 fellow is fatally logical. Logic of that kind we 
 cannot hear of for a moment; in our own logic of 
 the police-court and the assizes we will take remark- 
 ably good care that there is no flaw. 
 
 Pecksniff and Uriah have a certain amount of 
 intellect. In his last book Dickens presents us 
 with the monumental humbug who is at the same 
 time an egregious fool. Mr. Sapsea very honestly 
 worships himself; he is respectability weighing a 
 good many stone, with heavy watchguard and ex- 
 pensive tailoring. By incessant lauding of his own 
 virtues to a world always more or less attentive, 
 when such a speaker carries social weight, Sapsea 
 has developed a mania of self-importance. His 
 thickness of hide, his stolidity, are well displayed, 
 but it seems to me that in this case Dickens has 
 been guilty of a piece of exaggeration altogether 
 exceeding the limits of art ; perhaps the one instance 
 where his illusion fails to make us accept an ex- 
 travagance even for a moment. I refer to Sapsea's 
 inscription for his wife's tomb {Edwin Drood^ chap, 
 iv.). Contrasting this with anything to be found 
 in Pecksniff or Uriah Heep, we perceive the limits 
 of his satire, strictly imposed by art, even where he 
 is commonly held to have been most fantastic. 
 
 Dickens applied with extraordinary skill the only 
 method which, granted all his genius, could have 
 ensured him so vast a sway over the public of that 
 time. His art, especially as satirist, lies in the 
 judicious use of emphasis and reiteration. Emphasis 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 
 
 125 
 
 alone would not have answered his purpose; the 
 striking thing must be said over and over again till 
 the most stupid hearer has it by heart. We of to- 
 day sometimes congratulate ourselves on an im- 
 provement in the public taste and intelligence, and 
 it is true that some popular authors conciliate their 
 admirers by an appeal in a comparatively subdued 
 note. But — who has a popularity like to that of 
 Dickens? Should there again rise an author to be 
 compared with him in sincerity and universality 
 of acceptance, once more will be heard that un- 
 mistakable voice of summons to Goodman Dull. 
 We are educated, we are cultured; be it so; but, to 
 say the least, some few millions of us turn with 
 weariness from pages of concentrated art. Fifty 
 years ago the people who did not might have been 
 gathered from the English-speaking world into a 
 London hall, without uncomfortable crowding. 
 Dickens well understood that he must cry aloud and 
 spare not; he did it naturally, as a man of his 
 generation ; he, and his fellow reformers, educators, 
 popular entertainers, were perforce vociferous to the 
 half-awakened multitudes. Carlyle was even more 
 emphatic, and reiterated throughout a much longer 
 life. Education notwithstanding, these will be the 
 characteristics of any writer for whom fate reserves 
 a gigantic popularity in the century to come. 
 
 Yes, it is quite true that Mr. Micawber, Mr. Peck- 
 sniff, Uriah Heep, and all Dickens's prominent 
 creations say the same thing in the same way, over 
 and over again. The literary exquisite is disgusted, 
 the man of letters shakes his head with a smile. 
 Remember: for twenty months did these characters 
 of favourite fiction make a periodical appearance, 
 and not the most stupid man in England forgot 
 
126 Charles Dickens. 
 
 them between one month and the next. The method 
 is at the disposal of all and sundry ; who will use it 
 to this effect? 
 
 In his satires on **high life", Dickens was less 
 successful than with the middle class. I have 
 spoken of Sir Leicester Dedlock and Cousin Feenix, 
 both well done, the latter especially, and character- 
 izations worthy of the author, but they hold no 
 place in the general memory. His earliest attempt 
 at this kind of thing was unfortunate ; Lord Frederick 
 Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk are on a par 
 with the literary lady in Pickwick^ who wrote the 
 ode to an Expiring Frog — an exercise of fancy, 
 which has no relation whatever to the facts of life. 
 Possibly the young author of Nicholas Nicklehy 
 fancied he had drawn a typical baronet and a lord ; 
 more likely he worked with conscious reference to 
 the theatre. In Little Dorrit we are introduced to 
 certain high-born or highly-connected people, who 
 make themselves deliberately offensive, but their 
 names cannot be recalled. Much better is the study 
 of an ancient worldling in Edith Dombey's mother, 
 Mrs. Skewton. Her paralytic seizure, her death in 
 life, are fine and grisly realism; but we do not 
 accept Mrs. Skewton as a typical figure. Too 
 obvious is the comparison with Thackeray's work; 
 Dickens is here at a grave disadvantage, and would 
 have done better not to touch that ground at all. 
 Perhaps the same must be said of his incursions 
 into political satire; and yet, one would be loth to 
 lose the Circumlocution Office. Though by the 
 choice of such a name he seems to forbid our ex- 
 pecting any picture of reality, there seems reason 
 to believe that those pages of Little Dorrit are not 
 much less true than amusing; at all events they are 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 127 
 
 admirably written. Of the Barnacle family we 
 accept readily enough the one who is described as 
 bright and young; indeed, this youngster is a good 
 deal of a gentleman, and represents the surviving 
 element of that day*s civil service; under a com- 
 petitive system, he alone would have a chance. 
 His relatives have significance enough, but very 
 little life. Dickens wrote of them in anger, which 
 was never the case in his satiric masterpieces. 
 Anger abundantly justified, no doubt; but at the 
 same time another critic of the English government 
 was making heard his wrathful voice (it came from 
 Chelsea), and with more of the true prophetic 
 vehemence. Dickens did not feel at home in this 
 Barnacle atmosphere; something of personal feeling 
 entered into his description of its stifling properties. 
 He could write brilliantly on the subject, but not 
 with the calmness necessary for the creation of last- 
 ing characters. 
 
 The upstarts of commerce and speculation came 
 more within his scope. Montague Tigg keeps a 
 place in one's recollection, but chiefly, I think, as 
 the impecunious braggart rather than as the suc- 
 cessful knave. There is an impressiveness about 
 Mr. Merdle, but perhaps rather in the description 
 of his surroundings than in the figure of the man 
 himself; readers in general know nothing of him, 
 his name never points a paragraph. The Veneer- 
 ings, in Our Mutual Friend^ seem better on a re- 
 reading than in a memory of the acquaintance with 
 them long ago. This is often the case with Dickens, 
 and speaks strongly in his favour. They smell of 
 furniture polish ; their newness in society is a posi- 
 tive distress to the nerves; to read of them is to 
 revive a sensation one has occasionally experienced 
 
128 Charles Dickens. 
 
 in fact. Being but sketches, they are of necessity 
 (in Dickens's method) all emphasis ; we never lose 
 sight of their satiric meaning; their very name (like 
 that of the Circumlocution Office) signals caricature. 
 At this point Dickens connects himself once more 
 with literary traditions; we are reminded of the 
 nomenclature of English drama; of Justice Greedy, 
 of Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, and the rest. 
 It is only in his subordinate figures, and rarely then, 
 that he falls into this bad habit, so destructive of 
 illusion. For the most part, his names are aptly 
 selected, or invented with great skill — skill, of 
 course, different from that of Balzac, who aims at 
 another kind of effectiveness. Gamp, Micawber, 
 Bumble, Pipchin — to be sure they are so familiar 
 to us that we associate them inevitably with certain 
 characters, but one recognizes their exquisite right- 
 ness. Pecksniff is more daring, and touches the 
 limit of fine discretion. In a very few cases he drew 
 upon that list of grotesque names which anyone 
 can compile from a directory, names which are 
 generally valueless in fiction just because they really 
 exist ; Venus, for example. 
 
 Anything but a caricature, though as significant 
 a figure as any among these minor groups, is Mr. 
 Casby in Little Dorrit, the venerable ^randsire^ of 
 snowy locks and childlike visage ; the Patriarch, as 
 he is called, who walks in a light of contemplative 
 benevolence. Mr. Casby is a humbug of a pecu- 
 liarly dangerous kind; under various disguises he 
 is constantly met with in the England of to-day. 
 This sweetly philosophic being owns houses, and 
 those of the kind which we now call slums. Of 
 course he knows nothing about their evil condition ; 
 of course he employs an agent to collect his rents, 
 
Satiric Portraiture. 129 
 
 and is naturally suprised when this agent falls 
 short in the expected receipts. It pains him that 
 human nature should be so dishonest; for the sake 
 of his tenants themselves it behoves him to insist 
 on full and regular payment. When, in the end, 
 Mr. Casby has his impressive locks ruthlessly shorn 
 by the agent risen in revolt against such a mass of 
 lies and cruelty and unclean selfishness, we feel that 
 the punishment is inadequate. This question of 
 landlordism should have been treated by Dickens 
 on a larger scale; it reniains one of the curses of 
 English life, and is likely to do so until the victims 
 of house-owners see their way to cut, not the hair, 
 but the throats, of a few selected specimens. Mr. 
 Casby, nowadays, does not take the trouble to 
 assume a sweet or reverend aspect; if he lives in 
 the neighbourhood of his property, he is frankly a 
 brute; if, as is so often the case, he resides in a 
 very different part of the town, his associates are 
 persons who would smile indeed at any affectation 
 of sanctity. In this, and some other directions, 
 hypocrisy has declined among us. Our people of 
 all classes have advanced in the understanding of 
 business, a word which will justify most atrocities, 
 and excuse all but every form of shamelessness. 
 
 That rich little book. Great Expectations^ contains 
 a humbug less offensive than Casby, and on the 
 surface greatly amusing, but illustrative of a con- 
 temptible quality closely allied with the commercial 
 spirit. Seen at a distance Mr. Pumblechook is a 
 source of inextinguishable laughter; near at hand 
 he is seen to be a very sordid creature. A time- 
 server to his marrow, he adds the preposterous self- 
 esteem which always gave Dickens so congenial an 
 opportunitv. Here we have a form of moral dis- 
 
 (M444) I 
 
130 Charles Dickens. 
 
 honesty peculiar to no one people. Mr. Pumble- 
 chook's barefaced pretence that he is the maker of 
 Pip's fortune, his heavy patronage whilst that for- 
 tune endures, and his sour desertion of the young 
 man when circumstances alter, is mere overfed 
 humanity discoverable all the world over. He has 
 English traits, and we are constrained to own the 
 man as a relative ; we meet him as often as we do 
 the tailor who grovels before the customer unex- 
 pectedly become rich. Compare him with the other 
 embodiments of dishonesty, and it is seen, not only 
 what inexhaustible material of this kind lay at 
 Dickens's command, but with what excellent art he 
 differentiates his characters. 
 
 Less successful are the last pieces of satire draw- 
 ing I can find space to mention. In this chapter, 
 rather than in the next, is the place for Mrs. Jellyby, 
 who loses all distinction of sex, and comes near to 
 losing all humanity, in her special craze. Women 
 have gone far towards such a consummation, and 
 one dare not refuse to admit her possibility; but 
 the extravagance of the thing rather repels, and we 
 are never so assured of Mrs. Jellyby as of Mr. 
 Pecksniff. Unacceptable in the same way is that 
 fiercely charitable lady who goes about with her 
 tracts and her insolence among the cottages of the 
 poor. One knows how such persons nowadays 
 demean themselves, and we can readily believe that 
 they behaved more outrageously half a century ago; 
 but being meant as a type, this religious female 
 dragoon misses the mark; we refuse credence and 
 turn away. 
 
 Caricature in general is a word of depreciatory 
 meaning. I have already made it clear how far I 
 am from agreeing with the critics who think that to 
 
"Women and Children. 131 
 
 call Dickens a caricaturist, and to praise his humour, 
 is to dismiss him once for all. It seems to me that 
 in all his very best work he pursues an ideal widely 
 apart from that of caricature in any sense; and that 
 in other instances he permits himself an emphasis, 
 like in kind to that of the caricaturist, but by its 
 excellence of art, its fine sincerity of purpose, re- 
 moved from every inferior association. To call 
 Mrs. Gamp a caricature is an obvious abuse of lan- 
 guage; not less so, I think, to apply the word to 
 Mr. Pecksniff or to Uriah Heep. Occasionally, 
 missing the effect he intended, Dickens produced 
 work which invites this definition ; at times, again, 
 he deliberately drew a figure with that literary over- 
 charging which corresponds to the exaggeration, 
 small or great, of professed caricaturists with the 
 pencil. His finest humour, his most successful 
 satire, belongs to a different order of art. To be 
 convinced of this one need but think of the multi- 
 plicity of detail, all exquisitely finished, which goes 
 to make his best-known portraits. Full justice has 
 never been done to this abounding richness of in- 
 vention, this untiring felicity of touch in minutiae 
 innumerable. Caricature proceeds by a broad and 
 simple method. It is no more the name for Dickens*s 
 full fervour of creation, than for Shakespeare's in 
 his prose comedy. Each is a supreme idealist. 
 
 Chapter VII. 
 Women and Children. 
 
 With female readers Dickens was never a prime 
 favourite. One feels very sure that they contributed 
 
132 Charles Dickens. 
 
 little or nothing to the success of Pickwick, In the 
 angelic Oliver they began, no doubt, to find matter 
 of interest, and thence onward they might ^'take 
 to" the triumphant novelist for the pathos of his 
 child-life and to some extent because of his note of 
 domesticity. But on the whole it was for men that 
 Dickens wrote. To-day the women must be very few 
 who by deliberate choice open a volume of his works. 
 
 The humourist never strongly appeals to that 
 audience. Moreover, it is natural enough that a 
 writer so often boisterous, who deals so largely 
 with the coarser aspects of life, who gives us very 
 little of what is conventionally called tenderness, 
 and a good deal of bloodthirsty violence, should 
 yield to many others in women's choice. For 
 certain of them, Dickens is simply ** vulgar" — 
 and there an end of it; they can no more read him 
 with pleasure than they can his forerunners of the 
 eighteenth century. In a class where this might 
 not be honestly felt as an objection, he is practically 
 unknown to mothers and daughters who devote 
 abundant leisure to fiction of other kinds; and 
 representatives of this public have been known to 
 speak of him with frank dislike. One reason, it 
 seems, for such coldness in presumably gentle 
 hearts goes deeper than those which first suggest 
 themselves. If George Eliot was of opinion that 
 Shakespeare shows himself unjust to women, and 
 on that account could not wholly revere him, we 
 need not be surprised that average members of her 
 sex should see in Dickens something like a personal 
 enemy, a confirmed libeller of all who speak the 
 feminine tongue. 
 
 For, setting aside his would-be tragic figures, 
 the Lady Dedlocks and Edith Dombeys of whom 
 
Women and Children. 133 
 
 enough has been said; neglecting also for the 
 moment his exemplars in the life of home (doubt- 
 fully sympathetic to female readers of our day) ; it 
 is obvious that Dickens wrote of women in his 
 liveliest spirit of satire. Wonderful as fact, and 
 admirable as art, are the numberless pictures of 
 more or less detestable widows, wives, and spinsters 
 which appear throughout his books. Beyond dis- 
 pute, they must be held among his finest work; 
 this portraiture alone would establish his claim to 
 greatness. And I think it might be forcibly argued 
 that, for incontestable proof of Dickens's fidelity in 
 reproducing the life he knew, one should turn in 
 the first place to his gallery of foolish, ridiculous, 
 or offensive women. 
 
 These remarkable creatures belong for the most 
 part to one rank of life, that which we vaguely 
 designate as the lower middle class. In general 
 their circumstances are comfortable ; they suffer no 
 hardship — save that of birth, which they do not 
 perceive as such; nothing is asked of them but a 
 quiet and amiable discharge of household duties; 
 they are treated by their male kindred with great, 
 often with extraordinary, consideration. Yet their 
 characteristic is acidity of temper and boundless 
 license of querulous or insulting talk. The real 
 business of their lives is to make all about them as 
 uncomfortable as they can. Invariably, they are 
 unintelligent and untaught; very often they are 
 flagrantly imbecile. Their very virtues (if such 
 persons can be said to have any) become a scourge. 
 In the highways and by-ways of life, by the fireside, 
 and in the bed-chamber, their voices shrill upon 
 the terrified ear. It is difficult to believe that death 
 can stifle them; one imagines them upon the 
 
134 Charles Dickens. 
 
 threshold of some other world, sounding confusion 
 among unhappy spirits who hoped to have found 
 peace. 
 
 There needs no historical investigation to ascer- 
 tain the truthfulness of these presentments. Among 
 the poorer folk, especially in London, such women 
 may be observed to-day by any inquirer sufficiently 
 courageous; they are a multitude that no man can 
 number; every other house in the cheap suburbs 
 will be found to contain at least one specimen — 
 very often two, for the advantage of quarrelling 
 when men are not at hand. Education has done 
 little as yet to improve the tempers and the intellects 
 of women in this rank. A humourist of our time sug- 
 gests that sheer dulness and monotony of existence 
 explains their unamiable habits, that they quarrel 
 because they can get no other form of excitement. I 
 believe there is some truth in this, but it does not cover 
 the whole ground. Many a woman who frequents 
 theatres and music-halls, goes shopping and lives 
 in comparative luxury, has brought the arts of ill- 
 temper to high perfection. Indeed, I am not sure 
 that increase of liberty is not tending to exasperate 
 these evil characteristics in women vulgarly bred; 
 if Dickens were now writing, I believe he would 
 have to add to his representative women the well- 
 dressed shrew who proceeds on the slightest provo- 
 cation from fury of language to violence of act. 
 Mrs. Varden does not dream of assaulting her hus- 
 band, for in truth she loves him ; Mrs. Snagsby is 
 in genuine terror at the thought that the deferential 
 law-stationer may come to harm. Nowadays these 
 ladies would enjoy a very much larger life, would 
 systematically neglect their children (if they chose 
 to have any), and would soothe their nerves, in 
 
Women and Children. 135 
 
 moments carefully chosen, by flinging at the re- 
 monstrant husband any domestic object to which 
 they attached no special value. 
 
 Through his early life, Dickens must have been 
 in constant observation of these social pests. In 
 every lodging-house he entered, such a voice would 
 surely be sounding. His women use utterance such 
 as no male genius could have invented; from the 
 beginning he knew it perfectly, the vocabulary, the 
 syntax, the figurative flights of this appalling lan- 
 guage. *' God's great gift of speech abused" was 
 the commonplace of his world. Another man, ob- 
 taining his release from those depths, would have 
 turned away in loathing; Dickens found therein 
 matter for his mirth, material for his art. When 
 one thinks of it, how strange it is that such an un- 
 utterable curse should become, in the artist hands, 
 an incitement to joyous laughter! As a matter of 
 fact, these women produced more misery than can 
 be calculated. That he does not exhibit this side of 
 the picture is the peculiarity of Dickens's method; 
 a defect, of course, from one point of view, but in- 
 separable from his humorous treatment of life. 
 Women who might well have wrecked homes, are 
 shown as laughable foils for the infinite goodness 
 and patience of men about them. Justly, by the 
 by, a matter of complaint to the female critic. Wel- 
 ler, and Varden, and Snags by, and Joe Gargery 
 are too favourable specimens of the average hus- 
 band; in such situations, one or other of them 
 would certainly have lost his patience, and either have 
 fled the country, or have turned wife-beater. Varden 
 is a trifle vexed now and then, but he clinks it off 
 at his cheery anvil, and restores his jovial mood 
 with a draught from Toby. Mr. Snagsby coughs 
 
136 Charles Dickens. 
 
 behind his hand, is nervously perturbed, and heartily 
 wishes things were otherwise, but never allows him- 
 self a harsh word to his *Mittle woman". As for 
 Joe Gargery, what could be expected of the sweetest 
 and humanest temper man was ever blest withal? 
 No, it is decidedly unfair. Not even Jonas Chuzzle- 
 wit (who, of course, has a martyr of a wife) can out- 
 balance such a partial record of long-suffering in 
 husbands. 
 
 It is worth while to consider with some attention 
 these promoters of public mirth. Pickwick would 
 have been incomplete without this element of jovi- 
 ality, and we are not likely to forget the thorn in 
 the flesh of Mr. Weller, senior. Sam's father is 
 responsible, I suppose, for that jesting on the sub- 
 ject of widows, which even to-day will serve its turn 
 on the stage or in the comic paper; it is vulgar, 
 to be sure, but vulgarity in Pickwick becomes a fine 
 art; we cannot lose a word of the old coaching 
 hero. Mrs. Weller it is hard to describe in mode- 
 rate terms; taking the matter prosaically, she has 
 all the minor vices that can inhere in woman ; but 
 the mere mention of her moves to chuckling. On 
 her deathbed, we are given to understand, she saw 
 the error of her ways. Such persons occasionally 
 do, but her conversion comes a trifle late. Enough 
 for Dickens that we are touched by the old man's 
 spirit of forgiveness. It is the bit of light in a 
 picture felt, after all, to be grimy enough ; the bit 
 of sweet and clean humanity which our author 
 always desires to show after he has made his fun 
 out of sorry circumstance. In Oliver Twist, the 
 feminine note grows shriller; we have Mrs. Sower- 
 berry, sordid tyrant and scold, and the woman who 
 becomes Mrs. Bumble. We are meant to reflect, of 
 
^Vomen and Children. 137 
 
 course, that the *'porochial" dignitary gets only his 
 deserts; he who marries with his eye upon a pair 
 of silver sugar-tongs, and is a blustering jackass 
 to boot, can hardly be too severely dealt with. So 
 Mrs. Bumble exhibits her true self for her husband's 
 benefit, and, so far as we know, does not repent of 
 her triumphs as an obese virago. Bamahy Riidge 
 is enriched with Mrs. Varden and her handmaid 
 Miggs. Now of Mrs. Varden it can be said that 
 she typifies a large class of most respectable wives. 
 She is not coarse, she is not malignant, she is not 
 incapable of good-humour; but so much value does 
 she attach to the gleams of that bright quality, that 
 not one is suffered to escape her until her house- 
 hold has been brought to the verge of despair by 
 her persistent sourness and sulkiness. No reason 
 whatever can be assigned for it; when she takes 
 offence, it pleases her to do so. She has in perfec- 
 tion all the illogicality of thought, all the madden- 
 ing tricks of senseless language, which, doubtless 
 for many thousands of years, have served her like 
 for weapons. It is an odd thing that evolution has 
 allowed the persistence of this art, for we may be 
 quite sure that many a primitive woman paid for it 
 with a broken skull. Here it is, however, flourish- 
 ing and like to flourish. The generations do not 
 improve upon it; this art of irritation has long ago 
 been brought to its highest possible point. Who 
 knows? A future civilization may discover lapses 
 of common-sense and a finesse of fatuous language 
 unknown to Mrs. Varden. In the present, she 
 points a limit of possibility in these directions. 
 Her talk is marvellously reported; never a note 
 of exaggeration, and nothing essential ever forgot- 
 ten. The same is always to be noted in Dickens's 
 
138 Charles Dickens. 
 
 idiotic women; their phrases might have been 
 taken down by a phonograph for reproduction in 
 literature. Such accuracy is a very great thing 
 indeed; few novelists can compare in it with 
 Dickens. His men he may permit to luxuriate in 
 periods obviously artificial; their peculiarities are 
 sometimes overdone, their talk becomes a fantasia 
 of the author's elaboration, but with his women (of 
 the class we are reviewing) it is never so. Partly, 
 no doubt, because one cannot exaggerate what is 
 already exaggerated to the n'th power; but it was 
 very possible to miss the absolutely right in such a 
 maze of imbecilities, and I believe that Dickens 
 does it never. 
 
 Mrs. Varden repents, Mrs. Varden is stricken 
 with remorse, Mrs. Varden becomes a model wife. 
 Let the Jew believe it! Not even on her deathbed 
 did it happen, but simply because she had a fright 
 in the Gordon riots. Yes; for one week, or per- 
 chance for two, she might have affected (even felt) 
 penitence ; after that, Heaven pity poor Gabriel for 
 having taken her at her word! The thing is plainly 
 impossible. Such women, at her age, are incapable 
 of change ; they will but grow worse, till the pangs 
 of death shake them. Mrs. Varden would have 
 lingered to her ninetieth year, moping and mow- 
 ing her ill-humour when language failed, and grin- 
 ning illogicality with toothless gums. She is 
 converted, to make things pleasant for us. We 
 thank the author's goodness and say, 'tis but a 
 story. 
 
 Miggs, the admirer of Sim Tappertit, is idiocy 
 and malice combined. To tell the truth, one does 
 not much like to read of Miggs: we feel it is all 
 a little hard upon women soured by celibacy. 
 
Women and Children. 139 
 
 Dickens's time was hard indeed on the unwilling 
 spinster, and we do not think it an amiable trait. 
 Nowadays things are so different; it is common to 
 find spinsters who are such by choice, and not a 
 few of them are doing good work in the world. 
 Sixty years ago, every unmarried woman of a cer- 
 tain age was a subject of open or covert mockery: 
 she had failed in her chase of men, and must be 
 presumed full of rancour against both sexes. As 
 for Miggs, of course the detestable Mrs. Varden 
 was largely answerable for her evil qualities; when 
 the handmaid was turned out of doors, the mistress 
 should by rights have gone with her. She amuses 
 a certain class of readers, but has not much value 
 either as humour or satire or plain fact. 
 
 There looms upon us the lachrymose countenance 
 of Mrs. Gummidge. This superannuated nuisance 
 serves primarily, of course, to illustrate the fine 
 qualities of the Peggotty household: that she is 
 borne with for one day says indeed much for their 
 conscientious kindness. The boatman, delicately 
 sympathetic, explains her fits of depression by say- 
 ing that she has ''been thinking of the old 'un". 
 Possibly so, and the result of her mournful reflec- 
 tion is that she behaves with monstrous ingratitude 
 to the people who keep her out of the workhouse. 
 'Tm a lone lorn creature, and everythink goes 
 contrairy with me." This vice of querulousness is 
 one of the most intolerable beheld by the sun. 
 Dickens merely smiles; and of course it is large- 
 hearted in him to do so: he would have us for- 
 bearing with such poor creatures, would have us 
 understand that they suffer as well as cause suffering 
 to others. One acknowledges the justice of the 
 lesson. But we have not done with Mrs. Gum- 
 
140 Charles Dickens. 
 
 midge; together with the Yarmouth family, she 
 emigrated to Australia, and there — became a bright, 
 happy, serviceable woman ! Converted, she, by 
 the great grief that had befallen her friends; made 
 ashamed of whining over megrims when death and 
 shame were making havoc in the little home. Well, 
 it may have been so; but Mrs. Gummidge was very 
 old for such a ray of reason to pierce her skull. In 
 any case, we do not think of her in Australia. She 
 sits for ever in the house on Yarmouth sands (sands 
 not yet polluted by her kin from Whitechapel), and 
 shakes her head and pipes her eye, a monument of 
 selfish misery. 
 
 Behold Mrs. Snagsby. To all Mrs. Varden's 
 vices this woman adds one that may be strongly 
 recommended for the ruin of domestic peace when 
 the others have failed — if fail they can. She is 
 jealous of the little law-stationer; she imagines for 
 him all manner of licentious intrigues. That such 
 imagination is inconsistent with the plainest facts 
 of life in no way invalidates its hold upon Mrs. 
 Snagsby's mind. She will make things as un- 
 pleasant as possible in the grimy house in Cook's 
 Court; the little man shall have rest neither day nor 
 night, his wife shall become a burden to him. And 
 goodness knows that the house, at the best of times, 
 falls a good deal short of cheerfulness. There is 
 Guster. Who shall restrain a laugh, hearing of 
 Guster? Plainly described, this girl is an underpaid, 
 underfed, and overworked slavey, without a friend 
 in the world, — unless it be Mr. Snagsby, — and 
 subject to frequent epileptic fits. And we roar 
 with laughter as often as she is named! It is 
 Dickens's pleasure that we shall do so, and, if it 
 comes to defence of so strange a subject of humour, 
 
"Women and Children. 141 
 
 one can only say that, from a certain point of view, 
 everything in this world is laughable. Look broadly 
 enough, and it is undoubtedly amusing that such a 
 woman as Mrs. Snagsby should coarsely tyrannize 
 over a poor diseased creature, who toils hard and 
 lives on a pittance. But, in strictness, the humour 
 here perceivable is not of the kind we usually attri- 
 bute to Dickens; it has something either of philo- 
 sophic sublimity, or of mortal bitterness. For my 
 own part, I think Dickens points, in such situa- 
 tions as this, to larger significances than were con- 
 sciously in his mind. I may return to the matter 
 in speaking expressly of his humour; here we are 
 specially concerned with the exhibition of Mrs. 
 Snagsby's personality. Happily, she undergoes 
 no moral palingenesis; by the date of Bleak House 
 her creator had outgrown the inclination for that 
 kind of thing. We are sure that she made the 
 deferential little man miserable to the end of his 
 days; and when she had buried him, she held forth 
 for many years more on the martyrdom of her 
 married life. She is decidedly more hateful than 
 Mrs. Varden, by virtue of her cruelty to the girl, 
 and more of a force for ill by virtue of her animal 
 jealousy. In short — a most amusing figure. 
 
 It certainly is a troublesome fact for sensitive 
 female readers that this, a great English novelist 
 of the Victorian age, so abounds in women who 
 are the curse of their husbands' lives. A complete 
 list of them would, I imagine, occupy nearly a page 
 of this book. Mrs. Jellyby I have already discussed. 
 I have spoken of the much more lifelike Mrs. Pocket, 
 a capital portrait. I have alluded to the uncommon 
 realism of Dr. Marigold's wife. A mention must 
 at least be made of Mrs. M 'Stinger, who, as Mrs. 
 
142 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Bunsby, enters upon such a promising field of fresh 
 activity. But there remains one full-length picture 
 which we may by no means neglect, its name Mrs. 
 Joe Gargery. 
 
 Mrs. Gargery belongs to Dickens's later manner. 
 In such work as this, his hand was still inimitably 
 true, and his artistic conscience no longer allowed 
 him to play with circumstance as in the days of 
 Mrs. Varden. The blacksmith's wife is a shrew of 
 the most highly developed order. If ever she is 
 good-tempered in the common sense of the word, 
 she never lets it be suspected ; without any assign- 
 able cause, she is invariably acrid, and ready at a 
 moment's notice to break into fury of abuse. It 
 gratifies her immensely to have married the softest- 
 hearted man that ever lived, and also that he happens 
 to be physically one of the strongest; the joy of 
 trampling upon him, knowing that he who could 
 kill her with a backhand blow will never even 
 answer the bitterest insult with an unkind word! 
 It delights her, too, that she has a little brother, a 
 mere baby still, whom she can ill-use at her leisure, 
 remembering always that every harshness to the 
 child is felt still worse by the big good fellow, her 
 husband. Do you urge that Dickens should give 
 a cause for this evil temper? Cause there is none — 
 save of that scientific kind which has no place in 
 English novels. It is the peculiarity of these women 
 that no one can conjecture why they behave so ill. 
 The nature of the animals — nothing more can be said. 
 
 Notice, now, that in Mrs. Gargery, though he 
 still disguises the worst of the situation with his 
 unfailing humour, Dickens gives us more of the 
 harsh truth than in any previous book. That is a 
 fine scene where the woman, by a malicious lie, 
 
Women and Children. 143 
 
 causes a fight between Joe and Orlick; a true illus- 
 tration of character, and well brought out. Again, 
 Mrs. Joe's punishment. Here we are very far from 
 the early novels. Mrs. Gargery shall be brought 
 to quietness ; but how? By a half-murderous blow 
 on the back of her head, from which she will never 
 recover. Dickens understood by this time that 
 there is no other efficacious way with these orna- 
 ments of their sex. A felling and stunning and all 
 but killing blow, followed by paralysis and slow 
 death. A sharp remedy, but no whit sharper than 
 the evil it cures. Mrs. Gargery, under such treat- 
 ment, learns patience and the rights of other people. 
 We are half sorry she cannot rise and put her learn- 
 ing into practice, but there is always a doubt. As 
 likely as not she would take to drinking, and enter 
 on a new phase of ferocity. 
 
 Of higher social standing, not perhaps better 
 educated but certainly better bred, are the women 
 who acknowledge their great exemplar in Mrs. 
 Nickleby. This lady — all things considered, the 
 term may be applied without abuse — has passed the 
 greater part of her life in a rural district, and 
 morally she belongs, I think, rather to the country 
 than the town; there is a freshness about her, a 
 naivete not — up to a certain point — disagreeable; 
 her manners and conversation are suggestive of 
 long afternoons, and evenings of infinite leisure. 
 Mrs. Nickleby is, above all, well-meaning; accor- 
 ding to her lights she is gracious and tolerant; she 
 has natural affections, and would be sincerely dis- 
 tressed by a charge of selfishness. Unhappily the 
 poor woman has been born with the intellectual 
 equipment of a Somerset ewe. It would be a deli- 
 cate question of psychology to distinguish her from 
 
144 Charles Dickens. 
 
 the harmless, smiling idiot whom we think it unne- 
 cessary and cruel to put under restraint. One may- 
 say, indeed, that this defect is radical in all Dickens's 
 female characters; the better-hearted succeed in 
 keeping it out of sight — in the others it becomes 
 flagrant and a terror. Sixty years ago there was 
 practically no provision in England for the mental 
 training of women. Sent early to a good school, 
 and kept there till the age, say, of one-and-twenty, 
 Mrs. Nickleby would have grown into a quite 
 endurable gentlewoman, aware of her natural weak- 
 ness, and a modest participant in general conversa- 
 tion. Allowed to develop in her own way, and 
 married to a man only less unintelligent than her- 
 self, she puts forth a wonderful luxuriance of ami- 
 able fatuity. Thoughts, in the strict sense of the 
 word, she has none; her brain is a mere blind 
 mechanism for setting in motion an irresponsible 
 tongue; together they express in human language 
 the sentiments of the ewe aforesaid. Mr. Nickleby 
 died in the prime of life; what else could be the 
 fate of a man doomed to listen to this talk morning, 
 noon, and night? With Mrs. Nickleby one cannot 
 converse ; she understands the meaning of nothing 
 that is said to her; she is incapable of answering a 
 question, or of seeing the logical bearings of any 
 statement whatsoever. One conviction is impressed 
 upon her (pardon the word) mind: that throughout 
 life she has invariably said and done the right 
 thing, and that other persons, in their relations 
 with her, have been as invariably wrong. Let 
 events turn how they may, they do but serve to 
 confirm her complacent position. Having exerted 
 herself to the utmost in urging a particular line of 
 conduct, which, on trial, proves to have been the 
 
Women and Children. 145 
 
 worst that could have been followed, Mrs. Nickleby 
 blandly reminds her victims that she had known 
 from the first, and repeatedly declared, what would 
 be the result of such manifest imprudence. Should 
 this lead to an outbreak of masculine impatience, 
 not to say anger, the good lady receives a nervous 
 shock, under which she pales, and pants, and falters 
 as the domestic martyr, the victim of surprising 
 unreason and brutality. As it happens, she does 
 not bring her children to the gutter and herself to 
 the workhouse; we acknowledge the providence 
 that watches over exemplary fools. And after all, 
 as men must laugh at something, it is as well that 
 they should find in Mrs. Nickleby matter for mirth. 
 She is ubiquitous, and doubtless always will be. 
 She cannot be chained and muzzled, or forbidden 
 to propagate her kind. We must endure her, as 
 we endure the caprices of the sky. An ultimate 
 fact of nature, and a great argument for those who 
 decline to take life too seriously. 
 
 This was early work of Dickens, but not to be 
 improved upon by any increase of experience or of 
 skill. A good many years later, he produced a 
 companion portrait, that of Flora Pinching in Little 
 Dorrit — the neglected book which contains several 
 of his best things. We are told that the picture is 
 from life (as was that of Mrs. Nickleby), and that 
 the exuberant Flora, in the bloom of her youth, had 
 been to Dickens himself even what Dora was to 
 David Copperfield — a piece of biography in which 
 one is very willing to put faith. I am disposed to 
 credit Flora Finching with mental power superior 
 to Mrs. Nickleby's; the preference may provoke 
 a charge of subtlety, but I adhere to it after a 
 long acquaintance with both ladies. Indeed, one 
 
 (M444) E 
 
146 Charles Dickens. 
 
 rather likes Flora. Of course she has killed her 
 husband ; but one chooses to forget all that. Flora, 
 to tell the truth, has some imagination, a touch of 
 poetry; in her heart she is convinced that as Mrs. 
 Clennam she would have been a happier woman. 
 Yet she has sense enough and fantasy enough only 
 to play with the thought; it becomes something 
 graceful in her commonplace life; a little lacking 
 in delicacy, she causes her old lover some em- 
 barrassment, but never seriously hopes to win him 
 back. When Clennam marries Little Dorrit, Flora 
 behaves admirably — the all-sufficient proof of what 
 I have just said. Her character is in truth a very 
 strong plea for the fair education of women. Flora 
 needed but that; it would have made her, I really 
 think, rather a charming person. Nowadays one 
 will rarely meet any one suggestive of her; for she 
 was at all times an exception in the vulgar world, 
 and her like have since been schooled into the self- 
 restraint, of which, under favourable conditions, 
 they are perfectly capable. The species of senti- 
 mentality seen in Flora was at that time fed upon 
 songs and verses congenial to the feeble mind ; born 
 thirty years later, Flora would have been led to a 
 much better taste in that direction, with the result 
 of greater self-command in all. She is a kind soul, 
 and doubtless became a very pleasant, even useful, 
 friend of little Mrs. Clennam. Such a woman is 
 only dangerous when she feels that the law has 
 surrendered to her a real live man — has given him, 
 bound hand and foot, to her care and her mercy. 
 As a maid, as a widow, she will do no harm, nor 
 wish to do any, beyond distressing the tympanum 
 and tasking the patience of anyone with whom she 
 genially converses. 
 
Women and Children. 147 
 
 One does not venture to begin praising work such 
 as this. Eulogy would lose itself in enthusiasm. 
 Pass, rather, to the gallery of women who are neither 
 married shrews nor well-meaning pests, yet each 
 peculiar for her mental and moral vice. We glance 
 at Miss Squeers. Fanny, it is plain, has relatives 
 in the pages of Smollett; one seems to remember a 
 damsel in Roderick Random of whom, perhaps, the 
 less said the better; the intercourse between Miss 
 Squeers and Nicholas brings this chapter to mind, 
 and points a change alike in national manners and 
 in literature. As a wife, Fanny would pass into 
 that other category with which we have done. Her 
 London parallel is perhaps Sophy Wh^ckles, from 
 whom Mr. Swiveller had so narrow and so fortunate 
 an escape. Such maidens as these, Dickens must 
 have had many opportunities of observing; his 
 social canvas would have been imperfect without 
 them. Though it seems unjust to put her in this 
 place, I must mention Susan Nipper, the nurse of 
 Florence Dombey. Susan begins well on the pat- 
 tern of her class; she is snappy, and brief-tempered, 
 fond of giving smacks and pulling hair; one sees 
 no reason why with favouring circumstances she 
 should not develop into a nagger of distinction. 
 But something is observable in her which imposes 
 caution on prophecy; we see that Susan, though a 
 mere domestic, has a very unusual endowment of 
 wits ; she is sharp in retort, but also in perception ; 
 in any case she cannot become a mere mouthing 
 idiot. In course of time we see that she has a good 
 heart. And so it comes to pass that, in spite of 
 origin and evil example, the girl grows in grace. 
 She is fortunately situated; her sweet young mis- 
 tress does her every kind of good; and when she 
 
148 Charles Dickens. 
 
 marries Mr. Toots we have no misgivings whatever 
 as to that eccentric gentleman's happiness. 
 
 Then, typical of a very large class indeed, comes 
 Mrs. Crupp, who *Moes for" David Copperfield in 
 his chambers. It is unnecessary to use the short 
 words which would adequately describe Mrs. Crupp; 
 enough to say that she stands for the baser kind of 
 London landlady — a phrase which speaks volumes. 
 Some day it will cause laughter, indeed, and some- 
 thing else, to think that young men beginning life 
 as students, and what not, should have fallen, as a 
 matter of course, into the hands of Mrs. Crupp. 
 Her name smells of strong liquor; it includes all 
 dishonesty and uncleanliness. The monstrosity of 
 her pretensions touches the highest point of the 
 ludicrous. What, then, is one to say of Sarah 
 Gamp, of Betsy Prig, considered as women? Of 
 Mrs. Gamp in another aspect I have spoken at 
 some length ; she is one of those figures in Dickens 
 to which one necessarily returns, again and again ; 
 as art, the very quintessence of his genius; as social 
 fact, worthy of repeated contemplation. After all, 
 women they are, these sister hags of the birth and 
 death chamber. Mrs. Gamp has her own ideas of 
 tender emotion ; she is touched by the sight of an 
 undertaker's children * Splaying at berryings down 
 in the shop, and follerin' the order-book to its long 
 home in the iron safe!" Be it remarked that there 
 is an appreciable difference between Mrs. Gamp's 
 nature and that of Mrs. Prig; we are clearly shown 
 that Betsy is the harder, coarser, more mercenary 
 of the twain. If well plied with spirits and p jckled 
 cucumber, Sarah Gamp might be capable ot an 
 elementary generosity; it is our perception of this 
 which helps to keep the creature amusing, where 
 
Women and Children. 149 
 
 she might so easily sink below everything but our 
 contemptuous disgust. Betsy Prig is of a lower 
 order, even socially; one may be sure that she had 
 much less to do with the better class of clients. 
 There is in her a spitefulness, a greedy malignancy, 
 not found in the nurse of Kingsgate Street; where 
 Mrs. Gamp would exhibit hostility in astounding 
 contortions of thick -throated phrase, irresistibly 
 laughable, Betsy Prig would fall into the mere 
 language of the gutter. Their quarrel (one of the 
 great things in literature) makes proof of this, 
 though Dickens's most adroit idealism avoids the 
 ofifensiveness of the real dialogue. As a girl — try 
 to imagine Sarah Gamp as a young girl I We 
 know where and how she lived, what examples she 
 had. It was practically Hogarth's London which 
 saw her birth and breeding; but the London of 
 to-day is well able to produce such women; one 
 catches a glimpse of her like in the market streets, 
 and the public-houses. Well, as a girl she must 
 have been very plump and good-humoured, with 
 quaint turns of speech, foretelling the eloquence of 
 her prime. Mr. Ruskin has well pointed out the 
 broad distinction between this London jargon and 
 anything worthy of being called a dialect (by the 
 by, the dialect on which London has exercised its 
 deforming influence is that of Essex, where a con- 
 fusion of V and w, no longer heard in town, may 
 still be noticed); he adds that the speech of Mrs. 
 Gamp is pure vulgarity, its insurpassable illustra- 
 tion. And the woman herself (one lingers over her 
 affectionately) may be dismissed as vulgarity incar- 
 nate. Her profession, her time, even her sex, may, 
 from this point of view, be called accidents. Desir- 
 ing to study the essential meaning of the vulgar^ 
 
150 Charles Dickens. 
 
 one turns from every living instance, every acute 
 disquisition, and muses over Sarah Gamp. 
 
 When we speak of the working-class, we under- 
 stand something quite distinct from, though not 
 of necessity inferior to, the classes represented by 
 all these women; though Mrs. Gargery, no doubt, 
 belongs to that social order. With the working- 
 class household, Dickens, I think, is never entirely 
 successful; one reason among others being that 
 he shrinks from criticizing the very poor. In the 
 homes of toilers his great heart has its way, and he 
 can only in general show us such people at their 
 best. But one recalls two working-class women, 
 who, however gently drawn, are living characters: 
 Polly Toodla and Mrs. Plornish. Paul Dombey's 
 nurse, who would have it considered in the wages 
 if she is to be called ^^out of her name", and who 
 as the mother of Rob the Grinder suffers so many 
 anxieties, may fairly stand for a good woman of 
 the proletary; and how very favourably she com- 
 pares with ordinary women in the class (for rea- 
 sons of money) just above her! She is not vulgar, 
 and, as a typical good wife in that rank, need 
 not be so; for it is easier to escape such taint 
 in the house of the engine-driver Toodle than in 
 Mr. Snagsby's upstairs parlour. Mrs. Plornish, 
 the plasterer's wife, is likewise an excellent creature 
 marked by more peculiarity; her firm belief that she 
 makes herself intelligible to a foreigner by grotesque 
 distortion of the English tongue is one of the truest 
 and most amusing things in Dickens. Many a 
 Mrs. Plornish honestly supposes that in order to 
 speak foreign languages, it is only necessary — as I 
 once heard one' of them remark — to ^^ learn how to 
 twist the mouth ". This is an innocent conviction, 
 
W^omen and Children. 151 
 
 which disturbs nobody's peace. We like Mrs. 
 Plornish, too, for her tenderness to the old father 
 from the workhouse, and her sincere admiration 
 when he pipes his thin little song. These women 
 are blessed with a good temper, the source of every- 
 thing enjoyable in life. However poor and ignor- 
 ant, they shed about them the light of home. It is 
 a type that does not much change, so far; and one 
 thinks with misgivings of the day when that in- 
 creased comfort which is their due, shall open to 
 such women the dreadful possibilities of half-know- 
 ledge. 
 
 Come the eccentrics ; of all classes, of all tempers; 
 the signal for mirth. Here, I suppose, must be 
 introduced the sister of Sampson Brass ; though one 
 finds it difficult to think of Miss Sally as feminine. 
 She has the courage of her opinions, and shows 
 something like heroism in scoundreldom, when 
 brought face to face with the criminal law. One 
 never met Miss Brass, but it is very possible that 
 Dickens did. Later, he omits the ferocity from his 
 grotesques. Miss Mowcher, we are told, was meant 
 originally to play a very ugly part in the story of 
 Emily and Steerforth, but an odd incident, nothing 
 less than the reception of a letter from Miss Mow- 
 cher herself, led Dickens to use the character in 
 quite another way, making it point a lesson of 
 charity. Mr. Dom bey's friend Miss Tox is a first- 
 rate toady, if the word may be used of one so 
 respectable and kind-hearted; she represents, with 
 abundance of oddity, the army of genteel old maids, 
 as the term was in that day understood. Miss Tox 
 is out of date, or very nearly so; to-day she finds 
 much better occupation than in prostrating herself 
 before Mr. Dombey, or jealously watching the 
 
152 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Major, or looking after her canaries ; her goodness 
 is reinforced by knowledge, and her presence is a 
 blessing in many of the dark places of our vast city. 
 Eccentric, indeed, but on a fine basis of sense and 
 character, is the immortal Betsy Trotwood. Wasted 
 in her time, or nearly so ; no scope for her beyond 
 the care of Mr. Dick, varied by assaults upon sea- 
 side donkeys (the quadrupeds). To be sure, she is 
 the making of David, but that came accidentally. 
 But Miss Trotwood is in advance of her age ; victim 
 of a bad marriage, she does not see in this an all- 
 sufficient destiny ; where others would have passed 
 their life in tears and tracts. Miss Betsy sets about 
 making for herself a rational existence. We all 
 know her — in various disguises, and should not be 
 sorry to meet her more frequently. For the woman 
 of sense and character is the salt of the earth ; with 
 however flagrant peculiarities, may she increase and 
 multiply ! 
 
 One remembers Miss La Creevy, in her way no 
 less admirably independent. That she got her 
 living by the travesty of art was a misfortune which 
 neither she nor any of her contemporaries (half a 
 dozen perhaps excepted) saw in that light, for she 
 is of the Earliest Victorian. Rememberable, too, 
 is the little doll's dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend y 
 whose *'bad child", her boneless drunkard of a 
 father, keeps her leisure so fully occupied. But 
 they are too numerous for several mention, these 
 quaint examples of more or less distorted woman- 
 kind — distorted by evil circumstances, and then 
 ridiculed by the world responsible for their abnor- 
 malities. Dickens locked on them with tenderness, 
 and makes us like, or respect, them even whilst we 
 laugh. He saw, too, the larger questions involved 
 
W^omen and Children. 153 
 
 in their existence; but on these it was no part of 
 his mission as a story-teller to insist. Had he 
 uttered his whole thought it would hardly have 
 satisfied us upon whom the new century is breaking. 
 His view of the possibilities of womanhood becomes 
 tolerably clear when we turn to his normal types of 
 marriageable maiden. 
 
 In Pickwick there are several of them, and we 
 think them vulgar. They must be called young 
 ladies; they are in easy position, and find it occu- 
 pation enough to amuse themselves. Speaking 
 plainly, Dickens as a young man could hardly have 
 a just criterion of refinement; the damsels of 
 Dingley Dell were probably as like ladies as any- 
 thing he had seen. Does he mean them to be 
 delicate in thought and speech and behaviour? Or 
 is he designedly showing us the decent girl of an 
 unrefined class? Their little screams — their shrill 
 laughter — their amorous facetiousness — you will not 
 find that kind of thing now at Dingley Dell; and 
 even then, I fancy, it was rather out of place in the 
 home of a country gentleman. Put these girls at 
 Pentonville, and the picture excites no uneasiness. 
 
 Mrs. Varden, we know, had a daughter, and the 
 blushing, laughing, petulant Dolly has always 
 been a favourite. Has she not even given her 
 name to millinery? For my own part, I see in 
 Dolly her mother restored to youth, and notwith- 
 standing the Gordon riots, notwithstanding Joe 
 Willet's loss of an arm in *'the Salwanners, in 
 America where the war is", I feel an unpleasant 
 certainty as to Dolly's conduct when she becomes a 
 matron. It was (and is) precisely because so many 
 men admire the foolish in girlhood that at least an 
 equal number deplore the intolerable in wives. 
 
154 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Dolly is a sort of kitten. This comparison is used 
 by George Eliot of Hetty Sorrel, and George Eliot 
 used it advisedly ; she knew very well indeed what 
 comes of human kittenishness. The reader perhaps 
 interposes, smilingly protests, that this is considering 
 altogether too curiously; would hint, with civility, 
 at a defect in appreciation of humour. But no; 
 Dickens's humour and delightfulness are as much 
 to me as to any man living. For the moment, I 
 write of him as the social historian of his day, and 
 endeavour to disclose his real thoughts concerning 
 women. To Dickens, Dolly Varden was an ideal 
 maiden; one, to be sure, of several ideals which 
 haunt the young man's brain. It is nothing to 
 him that Dolly is totally without education, and 
 that her mother's failings are traceable first and 
 foremost to that very source. Instruction was 
 needless for sweet seventeen ; it tended, if anything, 
 to blue-stockingism. Dolly's business in graver 
 hours is to look after stockings of a more common 
 hue. For relaxation, she may smirk and simper 
 and tell little fibs, and smile treacherous little 
 smiles, and on occasion drop a little tear, which 
 means nothing but pique or selfish annoyance. 
 This is the very truth of Dolly. But she wore a 
 delicious hat, and had a dainty little mouth, and 
 was altogether so very kittenish ; and to the end of 
 time poor Gabriel Varden, poor Joe Willet, will 
 find these things irresistible. 
 
 Passing to a book written nearly a quarter of a 
 century after Barnahy Rudge, I discover Dolly in a 
 new incarnation; she has learnt somewhat, she obeys 
 a stricter rule of decorum, and her name is now 
 Bella Wilfer. I admit that Miss Wilfer belongs to 
 a slightly, very slightly, higher grade of society, 
 
Women and Children. 155 
 
 but in those five-and-twenty years all things had 
 advanced. Of Bella one easily grants the charm, 
 and one admires her for not being more spoilt by 
 good fortune ; we perceive, however, the old traits ; 
 we tremble, now and then, at lurking kittenishness. 
 It is permitted us to behold Bella as wife and mother, 
 and we see her doing well in both relations ; but the 
 peril is not past. There will come a day when her 
 husband is less fascinated by pretty ways, when he 
 wants a little intellectual companionship by his fire- 
 side, and that moment must test Bella's metal. 
 Dolly would have made hopeless failure, reproduc- 
 ing Mrs. Varden in the sourest particulars. Bella, 
 perchance, had her self-respect strengthened by the 
 example of her time, and fought down the worst of 
 the feminine. 
 
 Between Bamaby and Our Mutual Friendy 
 Dickens had portrayed many girls. Early come 
 the daughters of Mr. Pecksniff, Charity and Mercy, 
 ** not unholy names, I hope". They are master- 
 pieces, finished to the nail. Here — I cannot re- 
 mind the reader too often of this fact in regard to 
 Dickens's women — one discerns absolutely nothing 
 of ** exaggeration" ; not a word, not a gesture, goes 
 beyond the very truth. Here the master would 
 have nothing to learn from later art; he is the real- 
 ist's exemplar. How admirably are these sisters 
 likened and contrasted! That Jonas Chuzzlewit's 
 wife becomes broken in spirit, meek, morally hope- 
 ful, is no instance of such literary optimism as one 
 has noticed elsewhere, but a strict development of 
 character. Her sister's rancorous appetency, with 
 its train of consequences, belongs no less to nature. 
 The artist must glory in these figures, so representa- 
 tive, so finely individualized. Public merriment 
 
156 Charles Dickens. 
 
 has, of course, done them only the scantiest justice; 
 their value cannot be appraised in laughter. They 
 are among the most precious things left to us by 
 early Victorian literature. 
 
 Together with them, let me speak of Fanny 
 Dorrit. In the London of to-day there is a very 
 familiar female type, known as the shop-girl. Her 
 sphere of action is extensive, for we meet her not 
 only in shops, strictly speaking, but at liquor-bars, 
 in workrooms, and, unfortunately, sometimes in the 
 post-office, to say nothing of fifty other forms of 
 employment open to the underbred, and more or 
 less aggressive, young woman. Dickens saw no- 
 thing like so much of her, but he has drawn her 
 portrait, with unerring hand, in Fanny Dorrit. 
 Her first characteristic is a paltry and ignorant 
 ambition, of course allied with vanity; she is crudely 
 selfish, and has only the elementary scruples of her 
 sex. Withal, there glimmers in her, under favour- 
 ing circumstance, a vulgar good-nature ; if she has 
 much to spare she will bestow it upon those she 
 likes, and at all times she prefers to see cheerfulness 
 around her. In a time of social transition, when 
 the womankind of labourer and office-man tend to 
 intermingle, and together gall the kibes of the 
 daughters of quick-growing capital, Fanny becomes 
 a question. It is not easy to get her taught, either 
 in literature or good manners; it is not easy to re- 
 compense her services, such as they are, on a scale 
 which makes her free of the temptation ever present 
 to this class. When she marries, her knowledge 
 of domestic duties is found to be on a par, say, with 
 that of a newspaper-boy ; her ideas as to expendi- 
 ture resemble those of a prima donna. Miss Dorrit, 
 we know, had an unhappy training; but not worse 
 
^Vomen and Children. 157 
 
 in degree, though dififerent in kind, from that of 
 her modern parallel. Dickens did not know how 
 significant was the picture when working at its 
 details in the year of the Crimean War. Before his 
 death he must have had many opportunities of re- 
 calling, and reflecting upon, the features of that 
 young person. 
 
 It occurs to one how little love-making there is in 
 all his books. This results, in part, from the fact 
 of his dealing with a class which is anything but 
 sentimental, and as little endowed with imagination 
 as any order of civilized beings discoverable through- 
 out the world; partly, again, from his own practical 
 nature. Little Dorrit has her love story, and at one 
 moment it is well told; the chapter describing her 
 travel in Italy deserves high praise. But, on the 
 whole, Little Dorrit is not a success in characteriza- 
 tion. Florence Dombey is, no doubt, in love, but 
 we never think of it as more than the affection of a 
 child ; one forms no image whatever of her married 
 life with Walter Gay. Then there is the shadowy 
 betrothed of Richard Carstone, a good girl, to be 
 sure, but remarkably placid. Esther Summerson 
 cannot count, she has no existence. A favourite 
 with readers of her own sex is Lizzie Hexam, and, 
 putting aside her impossibility, Dickens has perhaps 
 made her his most sympathetic love-heroine. One 
 credits her with loyalty, with ardour; she is more 
 nearly a poetical figure than that of any other girl 
 in his books. Of Little Emily I find it difficult to 
 say more than had its place in a previous chapter. 
 She belongs to the stage, where such a story as hers 
 is necessarily presented in the falsest possible light. 
 Let us note one thing, however. Out of regard for 
 what we call propriety, is it not obvious that this 
 
158 Charles Dickens. 
 
 girl is shown to us as acting with something like 
 cold-blooded deliberation, the simplest form of true 
 immorality? We have no hint of her temptation, and 
 it really looks very much as if she had calculated 
 the probable advantages of flight with Steerforth. 
 I have always felt the same with regard to the cen- 
 tral incident of Adam Bede\ it comes upon one, at 
 the first reading, as a moral shock. So determined 
 are these novelists not to offend our precious deli- 
 cacy, that in the upshot they offend it beyond endur- 
 ance, springing upon us, so to speak, the results of 
 uncontrollable passion, without ever allowing us to 
 suspect that such a motive was in play. The effect 
 of this is a sort of grossness, which dishonours our 
 heroine. So far as we are permitted to judge, there 
 is much reason in the insults hurled at Emily by the 
 frantic Rosa Dartle — a pretty result, indeed, of all 
 our author's delicate gliding over slippery places. 
 
 The Emperor Augustus, we are told, objected to 
 the presence of women at the public games when 
 athletes appeared unclad; but he saw nothing im- 
 proper in their watching the death combats of 
 gladiators. May we not find a parallel to this in 
 the English censorship? To exhibit the actual 
 course of things in a story of lawless (nay, or of law- 
 ful) love is utterly forbidden; on the other hand, a 
 novelist may indulge in ghastly bloodshed to any 
 extent of which his stomach is capable. Dickens, 
 the great writer, even appears on a public platform 
 and recites with terrible power the murder of a 
 prostitute by a burglar, yet no voice is raised in 
 protest. Gore is perfectly decent; but the secrets 
 of an impassioned heart are too shameful to come 
 before us even in a whisper. 
 
 On this account I do not think it worth while to 
 
W^omen and Children. 159 
 
 speak of Nancy, or of other lost creatures appearing 
 in Dickens. But read, I beg, that passage of Little 
 Dorrit where Amy herself and her idiot friend 
 Maggy, wandering about the streets at night, are 
 addressed by a woman of the town (book I., chap, 
 xiv.); read that passage and wonder that the same 
 man who penned this shocking rubbish could have 
 written in the same volume pages of a truthfulness 
 beyond all eulogy. 
 
 Little Em'ly has, after all, but a subordinate part 
 in David Copperfield. The leading lady is Dora. 
 Dora is wooed, Dora is wed — the wooing and wed- 
 ding of a butterfly. Yet it is Dickens's prettiest bit 
 of love, and I shall scarce find it in my heart to 
 criticize the *Mittle Blossom", the gauze-winged 
 fairy of that *' insubstantial, happy, foolish time". 
 Dora is Dolly Varden volatilized; every fault is 
 there, prevented from becoming vice only by utter 
 lack of purpose. The feather-brained little creature 
 has no responsibility; as reasonably would one 
 begin to argue with her toy dog, Gip, when he takes 
 his stand on the cookery book. I have said that we 
 cannot look in Copperfield for any true picture of an 
 author's daily life; but, worse than that, we have 
 very comical misrepresentation. Think only of 
 David at his desk and Dora holding the pens I 
 Pray, how much work was our friend likely to get 
 through with that charming assistance? But it is 
 all a fantasy and defies the test of common daylight. 
 Take Dora seriously, and at once you are compelled 
 to ask by what right an author demands your sym- 
 pathy for such a brainless, nerveless, profitless 
 simpleton. Enter into the spirit of the chapter, and 
 you are held by one of the sweetest dreams of humour 
 and tenderness ever translated into language. 
 
i6o Charles Dickens. 
 
 There is no better illustration of Dickens's pro- 
 gress with the time than a comparison of his heroine 
 in Edwin Drood with those of the early books. I 
 think it a great misfortune that we so abruptly- 
 lost sight of Rosa Bud; if, as seemed likely, the 
 development of her character was to go on through- 
 out the story, she would have been by far the best 
 of Dickens's intelligent and sympathetic women. 
 At first we have misgivings; Dolly Varden and 
 Dora and others of our old acquaintances seem 
 blended in Miss Twinkleton's pupil ; a tricksy and 
 provoking little person, whose reason for not know- 
 ing her own mind is probably the old one — that she 
 has no mind to know. But presently we under- 
 stand; the girl — little more than a child — is in a 
 false position, and suffers under it very consciously. 
 A few pages more, and we see her behaving with 
 rational force of character, the silly prettiness is 
 thrown aside ; Rosa declares herself as sensible and 
 just and kind a girl as one could wish to meet. In 
 the days of Copperfield^ Dickens could not have 
 managed this characterization; in the days of 
 Barnahy Rudge he could as soon have created 
 Rosalind. Change of times, growth of experience, 
 widening of artistic consciousness and power — all 
 are evident in this study which was never to be 
 completed. He laughs at Miss Twinkleton and 
 her establishment, but we have an assurance that 
 Rosa Bud was receiving a ,much better education 
 than fell to the lot of girls thirty years before; even 
 as we feel convinced that Mr. Crisparkle's tuition 
 was a vast improvement upon that of Dr. Blimber. 
 It is possible, of course, that Edwin Drood's paltry 
 ** mystery", with its blood and opium, would have 
 ousted Rosa from the scene; perhaps we had seen the 
 
'Women and Children. i6i 
 
 best of her. None the less, she remains a real and 
 interesting little woman, and we should much have 
 liked to watch the course of her affection for Tartar. 
 
 A *Mittle woman". The phrase is inevitable in 
 speaking of Dickens's pets. A Lady Dedlock 
 might have stature; a Betsy Trotwood even might 
 be of average height; but Em'ly and Amy and 
 Ruth, Dolly and Dora and Esther, must all be tiny 
 vessels for their great virtues. Shakespeare took 
 another view of this matter; but Shakespeare was 
 not concerned with the lower middle-class of the 
 nineteenth century. There is agreement, I am told, 
 among trustworthy observers that the stature of 
 English women has notably increased during the 
 last two or three decades; a natural consequence 
 of improvement in the conditions of their life. In 
 Dickens's day, when girls took no sort of exercise, 
 fed badly, and (amid London streets) never breathed 
 fresh air, of course they were generally diminutive. 
 And among all the little women he presents to us, 
 who exhibits more concentrated charm of littleness 
 than Ruth Pinch? 
 
 I have left her to the last, because she will serve 
 us as the type of all that Dickens really admired in 
 woman. Truth to tell, it was no bad ideal. Granted 
 that the world must go on very much in the old 
 way, that children must be born and looked after, 
 that dinners must be cooked, that houses must be 
 kept sweet, it is hard to see how Ruth Pinch can 
 ever be supplanted. Ruth is no imbecile — your 
 thoroughly kind-hearted and home-loving woman 
 never will be ; with opportunities, she would learn 
 much, even beyond domestic limits, and still would 
 delight in her dainty little aprons, her pastry-board 
 and roller. Ruth would be an excellent mother; 
 
 (M444) L 
 
i62 Charles Dickens. 
 
 when, in the latter days, she sat grey-haired and 
 spectacled, surely would her children arise and call 
 her blessed. A very homely little woman, to be 
 sure. She could not be quite comfortable with 
 domestics at her command; a little house, a little 
 garden, the cooking her own peculiar care, a little 
 maid for the little babies — this is her dream. But 
 never, within those walls, a sound of complaining 
 or of strife, never a wry face, acidly discontented 
 with the husband's doings or sayings. Upon my 
 word — is it a bad ideal? 
 
 There are who surmise that in the far-off time 
 when girls are universally well-taught, when it is 
 the exception to meet, in any class, with the maiden 
 or the wife who deems herself a natural inferior of 
 brother, lover, husband, the homely virtues of Ruth 
 Pinch will be even more highly rated than in the 
 stupid old world. There are who suspect that our 
 servant-question foretells a radical change in ways 
 of thinking about the life of home ; that the lady of a 
 hundred years hence will be much more competent 
 and active in cares domestic than the average shop- 
 keeper's wife to-day; that it may not be found im- 
 possible to turn from a page of Sophocles to the 
 boiling of a potato, or even the scrubbing of a floor. 
 If every spendthrift idiot of a mistress, and every 
 lying lazybones of a kitchen-wench, were swept into 
 Time's dustbin, it might come to pass that a race of 
 brave and intelligent women will smile sister-like at 
 this portrait of little Ruth. They will prize Dickens, 
 instead of turning from him in disgust or weariness; 
 for in his pages they will see that ancient deformity 
 of their sex, and will recognize how justly he pointed 
 out the way of safe reform; no startling innovation, 
 no extravagant idealism, but a gentle insistence on 
 
"Women and Children. 163 
 
 the facts of human nature, a kindly glorifying of 
 one humble little woman, who saw her duty, and 
 did it singing the while. 
 
 A word or two about the children whom he loved 
 to bring into his books, and to make pathetic or 
 amusing. First, of course, we see little Nell; we 
 see her, because she is the mid-figure in a delight- 
 ful romance; but her face is not very plain to us. 
 She is innocence walking among grotesque forms 
 of suffering and wrong; simplicity set amid quaint 
 contortions. Her death is not the dying of a little 
 girl, but the vanishing of a beautiful dream. Oliver 
 Twist is no more real, and certainly less interest- 
 ing. Into what sort of man did this astonishing 
 lad develop? The children of Dotheboys are writh- 
 ing ghosts; perhaps they had lived in some other 
 world, and were bad boys, and afterwards came 
 into Squeers's hands for purification. Sally Brass's 
 poor little slavey is, on the other hand, well realized; 
 a good study of childhood brought to the verge of 
 idiocy by evil treatment. Tiny Tim serves his 
 admirable purpose in a book which no one can 
 bear to criticize; we know that he did die, but in 
 his little lifetime he has softened many a heart. 
 Next rises the son and heir of *'our friend Dombey". 
 Dickens believed that little Paul was one of the 
 best things he had ever done ; contemporary readers 
 were much excited about the child, whose '^old- 
 fashioned " ways became a by-word. I do not find 
 it difficult to accept Paul's inquiry about what the 
 waves were saying (in spite of a most dreadful song, 
 made of that passage, which sounds in my ears from 
 long ago), and of a surety I give more credit to 
 Paul's deathbed speeches than to those of the child 
 in Our Mutual Friend^ who bequeathed a kiss to 
 
i64 Charles Dickens. 
 
 ^* the booful lady" ; but on the whole, Mr. Dombey's 
 hope has only a little more of substance than little 
 Nell. His sister Florence is prettiness and gentle- 
 ness ; an abstraction which affects us not. Passing 
 to young David Copperfield, it is a different matter. 
 Here we have the author's vision of his own child- 
 hood, and he makes it abundantly convincing. 
 This part of Copperfield is one of the narratives 
 which every reader illustrates for himself; the poor 
 little lad stands plain before us, as we read, and in 
 our memory. The picture, I should say, suggests 
 very faithfully an artist's early years, his suscepti- 
 bility, his abnormal faculty of observation, the vivid 
 workings of his mind and heart. Dickens told 
 Forster that this bit of autobiography might be 
 worthy to stand on the shelf together with the 
 corresponding part of that written by Holcroft. 
 Holcroft is forgotten, I suppose; if the mention 
 of him leads a stray reader to his book, that reader's 
 time will not be wasted. 
 
 Of Dickens's true and deep sympathy with child- 
 hood there can be no doubt ; it becomes passionate 
 in the case of little ones doomed to suffering by a 
 cruel or careless world. In all his excellent public 
 speeches, perhaps the best and most moving passage 
 is that which describes a poor baby he saw in Scot- 
 land, a wasting little mortal, whose cradle was an 
 old egg-box ; where, he says, it lay dumb and pitiful, 
 its eyes seeming to wonder *^why, in the name of an 
 All-merciful God, such things should be ". In his 
 novels, we like those children best, of whom we 
 obtain only a passing glimpse, the reason, again, 
 being that remorseless necessity of drama which 
 spoils so many of his older people. But in one 
 case he has written a whole story about children, 
 
Humour and Pathos. 165 
 
 and these toddlers the most lifelike to be found in 
 his pages. It is the story put into the mouth of 
 Boots at the Holly Tree. Accept the fantasy, and 
 these little actors are wonderfully well shown ; their 
 talk is true, their behaviour — down to the crossness 
 of the bride-elect when she gets tired — as truly 
 observed as it is mirth-provoking. No wonder 
 that Boots at the Holly Tree was one of the ** read- 
 ings" most acceptable to Dickens's audience. If 
 he must needs read in public, he could not have 
 chosen a piece more likely to keep sweet his 
 personal memory with those who heard him. 
 
 Chapter VHI. 
 Humour and Pathos. 
 
 To write of Dickens at all, is to presuppose his 
 humour. The plan of my essay has necessitated 
 a separate consideration of the various features of 
 his work, and at moments it may have appeared 
 that I found fault without regard to a vast counter- 
 balance; but it was never possible for me to lose 
 sight of that supreme quality of his genius which 
 must be now dwelt upon with undivided attention. 
 It was as a humorist that Dickens made his name; 
 and in a retrospect of his life's activity one perceives 
 that his most earnest purposes depended for their 
 furtherance upon this genial power, which he shares 
 with nearly all the greatest of English writers. 
 Holding, as he did, that the first duty of an author 
 is to influence his reader for good, Dickens neces- 
 sarily esteemed as the most precious of his gifts 
 that by virtue of which he commanded so great an 
 
i66 Charles Dickens. 
 
 audience. Without his humour, he might have 
 been a vigorous advocate of social reform, but as a 
 novelist assuredly he would have failed ; and as to 
 the advocacy of far-reaching reforms by men who 
 have only earnestness and eloquence to work with, 
 English history tells its tale. Only because they 
 laughed with him so heartily, did multitudes of 
 people turn to discussing the question his page 
 suggested. As a story-teller pure and simple, the 
 powers that remain to him, if humour be subtracted, 
 would never have ensured popularity. Nor, on the 
 other hand, would they have availed him in the 
 struggle for artistic perfection, which is a better 
 thing. Humour is the soul of his work. Like the 
 soul of man, it permeates a living fabric which, but 
 for its creative breath, could never have existed. 
 
 In his earliest writing we discover only the sug- 
 gestion of this quality. The Sketches have a touch 
 of true humour, but (apart from the merits of acute 
 observation and great descriptive power) there is 
 much more of merely youthful high spirits, tending 
 to the farcical. Such a piece as The Tuggs at Rams- 
 gate is distinct farce, and not remarkably good of 
 its kind. This vein Dickens continued to work 
 throughout his career, and often with great success. 
 One must distinguish between the parts of his writ- 
 ing which stir to mere hilarity, and his humour 
 in the strict sense of the word. It is none of 
 my business to define that term, which has long 
 ago been adequately expounded; enough that the 
 humorist has by no means invariably a chuckle in 
 his throat; at moments of his supreme success, he 
 will hardly move us to more of merriment than 
 appears in a thoughtful smile. But there is a per- 
 fectly legitimate, and tolerably wide, range for the 
 
Humour and Pathos. 167 
 
 capers of a laughing spirit, and as a writer of true 
 farce I suppose Dickens has never been surpassed. 
 Pickwick abounds in it, now quite distinct from, 
 and now all but blending with, the higher charac- 
 teristic. One can imagine that the public approval 
 of his Sketches had given the author an impetus 
 which carried him of a sudden into regions of ex- 
 travagant buoyancy and mirthfulness. The first 
 few pages are farce of the frankest. Winkle, S nod- 
 grass, and Tupman remain throughout farcical 
 characters, but not so Mr. Pickwick himself. Farce 
 is the election at Eatanswill, and the quarrel of the 
 rival Editors, and many another well-remembered 
 passage. Only a man of genius has the privilege 
 of being so emphatically young. ** Though the 
 merriment was rather boisterous, still it came from 
 the heart and not from the lips; and this is the 
 right sort of merriment after all." How could one 
 better describe, than in these words from the book 
 itself, that overflowing cheeriness which conquered 
 Dickens's first public? Or take the description of 
 old Wardle coming through the early sunshine to 
 bid Mr. Pickwick good morning, — *^ out of breath 
 with his own anticipations of pleasure". Alas! 
 old gentlemen, however jolly, do not get breathless 
 in this fashion; but the young may, and Dickens, a 
 mere boy himself, was writing for the breathless 
 boyhood of many an age to come. 
 
 The farce in his younger work always results 
 from this exuberance of spirits ; later, he introduces 
 it deliberately; with conscious art — save perhaps at 
 those moments when the impulse of satire is too 
 much for him. One easily recalls his best efforts 
 in this direction. The wild absurdity of the Muffin 
 Company at the beginning of Nicklehy shows him 
 
i68 Charles Dickens. 
 
 still in his boyish mood, and the first chapter of 
 Chuzzlewit finds him unluckily reverting to it at 
 the moment when he was about to produce a master- 
 piece of genuine humour. Mr. Mantalini is capital 
 fun ; he never quite loses his hold upon one, and to 
 the end we shall laugh over the *'demnition ^gg^^ 
 and the *Memnition bow-wows". At this stage 
 Dickens was capable of a facetiousness of descrip- 
 tive phrase which hints the peril involved in a repu- 
 tation such as he had won. ** Madame Mantalini 
 wrung her hands for grief and ruhg the bell for her 
 husband; which done, she fell into a chair and a 
 fainting fit simultaneously." When he had written 
 that passage, and allowed it to stand, his genius 
 warned him ; I remember nothing so dangerous in 
 after time. Quilp, at his best, is rich entertain- 
 ment; in Dick Swiveller we touch higher things. 
 The scene between little David Copperfield and the 
 waiter (chapter v.) seems to me farce, though very 
 good; country innkeepers were never in the habit 
 of setting a dish-load of cutlets before a little boy 
 who wanted dinner, and not even the shrewdest of 
 waiters, having devoured them all, could make 
 people believe that it was the little boy*s achieve- 
 ment; but the comic vigour of the thing is irresis- 
 tible. Better still is the forced marriage of Jack 
 Bunsby to the great M 'Stinger. Here, I think, 
 Dickens reaches his highest point. We cannot 
 call it ''screaming" farce; it appeals not only to 
 the groundlings. Laughter holding both his sides 
 was never more delightfully justified ; gall and the 
 megrims were never more effectually dispelled. It 
 is the ludicrous in its purest form, tainted by no 
 sort of unkindliness, and leaving behind it nothing 
 but the healthful aftertaste of self-forgetful mirth. 
 
Humour and Pathos. 169 
 
 We may notice how Dickens makes use of farcical 
 extravagance to soften the bitterness of truth. When 
 Sally Brass goes down into the grimy cellar-kitchen 
 to give the little slavey her food, we are told that 
 she cut from the joint **two square inches of cold 
 mutton", and bade her victim never say that she had 
 not had meat in that house. This makes one laugh; 
 who can refrain? If he had avoided exaggeration, 
 and shown us the ragged, starving child swallowing 
 the kind of meal which was really set before her, 
 who could have endured it? The point is vastly 
 important for an understanding of Dickens's genius 
 and his popularity. That "two square inches" 
 makes all the difference between painful realism 
 and fiction universally acceptable; it is the secret 
 of Dickens's power for good. Beside it may be set 
 another instance. Judy Small weed, in Bleak House .^ 
 likewise has her little slavey over whom she tyran- 
 nizes; a child, too, who has won our sympathy in 
 a high degree, and whom we could not bear to see 
 brutally used. She is brutally used ; but then Judy 
 Smallweed is a comical figure ; so comical that no 
 one takes her doings with seriousness. Harsh 
 words and broken meats are again provocative of 
 laughter, when in very truth we should sob. With 
 Dickens's end in view, how wise his method! 
 After merriment comes the thought: but what a 
 shame! And henceforth the reader thinks sympa- 
 thetically of poor little girls whether ruled by vicious 
 trollops or working under easier conditions. Omit 
 the jest — and the story becomes too unpleasant to 
 remember. 
 
 Between Dickens's farce and his scenes of humour 
 the difference is obvious. In Mantalini or Jack 
 Bunsby we have nothing illuminative; they amuse. 
 
170 Charles Dickens. 
 
 and there the matter ends. But true humour always 
 suggests a thought, always throws light on human 
 nature. The humorist may not be fully conscious 
 of his own meaning; he always, indeed, implies 
 more than he can possibly have thought out; and 
 therefore it is that we find the best humour inex- 
 haustible, ever fresh when we return to it, ever, as 
 our knowledge of life increases, more suggestive of 
 wisdom. 
 
 Both the Wellers are creations strictly humorous. 
 For one thing, each is socially representative ; each, 
 moreover, is a human type, for ever recognizable 
 beneath time's disguises. Be it noticed that neither 
 the old coachman nor his son is ever shown in a 
 grotesque, or improbable, situation; there is no 
 cutting of capers, even when they make us laugh 
 the loudest. The fantastic is here needless ; nature 
 has wrought with roguish intention, and we are 
 aware of it at every moment of their common life. 
 No one takes Mantalini to his heart ; but Tony and 
 Sam become in very truth our friends, and for 
 knowing them, improbable as it might seem, we 
 know ourselves the better. They are surprising 
 incarnations of the spirit of man, which is doomed 
 to inhabit so variously. The joke consists in per- 
 ceiving how this spirit adjusts itself to an odd 
 situation, reconciles itself with queerest circum- 
 stance. In old Weller, it is a matter of stress; his 
 difficulties, never too severe, bring out the quaint 
 philosophy of the man, and set us smiling in fellow- 
 ship. Sam, at ease in the world, makes life his 
 jest, and we ask nothing better than to laugh with 
 one who sees so shrewdly, feels so honestly. Sam 
 cannot away with a humbug — in this respect, 
 Dickens's own child. Put him face to face with 
 
Humour and Pathos. 171 
 
 Job Trotter, and how his countenance shines, how 
 his tongue is loosed I It is a great part of Sam's 
 business in life to come into genial conflict with 
 Job Trotter; his weapon of mockery is in the end 
 irresistible, and a Cockney serving-man strikes 
 many a stroke for the good of humankind. Of 
 course he does not know it; that is our part, as we 
 look on, and feel in our hearts the warmth of kindly 
 merriment, and give thanks to the great humorist 
 who teaches us so much. 
 
 To survey all his humorous characters would be 
 to repeat, in substance, the same remarks again 
 and again. I have no space for a discussion, from 
 this point of view, of the figures which have already 
 passed before us. But of Mrs. Gamp one word. 
 She sometimes comes into my thought together 
 with Falstaff, and I am tempted to say that there is 
 a certain propriety in the association. Where else 
 since Shakespeare shall we find such force in the 
 humorous presentment of gross humanity? The 
 two figures, of course, stand on different planes. 
 In Falstaff, intellect and breeding are at issue with 
 the flesh, however sorely worsted ; in Sarah Gamp, 
 little intellect and less breeding are to be looked 
 for, and the flesh has its way ; but I discover some 
 likeness of character. If Betsy Prig's awful asser- 
 tion regarding Mrs. Harris must be held as proved, 
 is there not a hint of resemblance between the mood 
 that elaborated this delicious fiction and the temper 
 native to the hero of Gadshill? A fancy ; let it pass. 
 But to my imagination the thick-tongued, leering, 
 yet half-genial woman walks as palpably in Kings- 
 gate Street as yon mountain of a man in Eastcheap. 
 The literary power exhibited in one and the other 
 portrait is of the same kind; the same perfect 
 
172 Charles Dickens. 
 
 method of idealism is put to use in converting to 
 a source of pleasure things that in life repel or 
 nauseate; and in both cases the sublimation of 
 character, of circumstance, is effected by a humour 
 which seems unsurpassable. 
 
 From a mention of Mrs. Harris, one passes very 
 naturally to Spenlow and Jorkins — an only less 
 happy bit of humour. Of course it was taken 
 straight from life; we know that without any 
 authority ; at this moment, be sure of it, more than 
 one Mr. Spenlow is excusing his necessity or his 
 meanness with the plea of Mr. Jorkins' inflexibility. 
 But only the man of genius notes such a thing, and 
 records it for ever among human traits. 
 
 Very rich is Dickens's humour in those passages 
 which serve rather as illustrations of manners than 
 of individual character. Take the scene at Mrs. 
 Kenwig's confinement; a shining chapter in the 
 often weak and crude pages of Nickleby, So 
 quietly it is done, yet so vividl/; never a note of 
 the extravagant; every detail of the scene set before 
 us as it must have been shown in fact, but invested 
 with such mirthful significance. Or, again, the 
 servants' hall at Mr. Dombey's; so much better, 
 because done with so much geniality, than the life 
 that went on upstairs. Or Mr. Smallwood giving 
 his friend Jobling a dinner at the chop-house; 
 where we hear the chink of plates and glasses, and 
 feel hungry at Jobling's acceptance of each new 
 succulent suggestion, and see the law-clerk's wink 
 as he reckons up with Polly the waitress. Among 
 things supreme stands *^ Todgers's". Whenever I 
 chance to come within sight of the Monument, it 
 is not of the fire of London that I think, but of 
 Todgers's; one feels that the house must be still 
 
Humour and Pathos. 173 
 
 existing, discoverable by sufficiently earnest search. 
 It is inconceivable that any age which has not out- 
 grown our language should forget this priceless 
 description; every line close-packed with humorous 
 truth. And how generous the scale! Here is no 
 ** hitting off" in a page or so; a broad canvas filled 
 with detail that never tires, and no touch ever 
 superfluous. Not only are the inhabitants of Todg- 
 ers's made real to us, collectively and individually, 
 by the minutest portraiture; but the very fabric 
 and its furniture fix themselves in the mind, so 
 described that each room, each table, becomes sym- 
 bolic, instinct with a meaning which the ordinary 
 observer would never have suspected. The grim 
 old city of London has of a sudden revealed to us a 
 bit of its very self, and we see in it a museum of 
 human peculiarities, foibles, and vices. There this 
 little group of people lives squeezed amid the brick- 
 and-mortar labyrinth; each so vastly important to 
 himself, so infinitesimal in the general view. They 
 remind us of busy ants, running about with what 
 seems such ridiculous earnestness; yet we know 
 that their concerns are ours, and turn from laughing 
 at them — to go and do likewise. 
 
 The subtlest bit of humour in all Dickens's books 
 is, to my mind, that scene I have already mentioned 
 as a triumph of characterization, the Father of the 
 Marshalsea entertaining his old pensioner Nandy. 
 But public favour turns to pictures of life that have 
 more familiarity. Dickens was always happy when 
 dealing with that common object of his time — 
 nothing like so common nowadays — the travelling 
 show; were it dramatic, or equestrian, waxworks, 
 or Punch and Judy. From Mr. Crummies and his 
 troupe in Nicklelyy down to Chops the Dwarf in a 
 
174 Charles Dickens. 
 
 story written for All the Year Rounds he never 
 failed in such humorous picturing. Codlin and 
 Short are typical instances. These figures never 
 become farcical ; they are always profoundly true, 
 and amuse by pure virtue of their humanity. Akin 
 to this order of beings is another with which he had 
 remarkable acquaintance — the inn waiter. Read 
 again (or only too possibly read for the first time) 
 the waiter's autobiography in Somebody s Luggage. 
 Here is no satire, but very fact made vocal ; made, 
 at the same time, such a delightful example of un- 
 conscious self-disclosure that we cannot sufficiently 
 wonder at the author's sympathetic knowledge. 
 
 No one has equalled him in bringing out the 
 humours of stupidity. One of his masterpieces is 
 old Willet, the landlord of the Maypole. Willet is 
 all but a born idiot, in the proper sense of the word; 
 and that ''all but" becomes in Dickens's hand the 
 opportunity for elaborate portraiture. You may 
 compare the man with the weakest-minded of 
 Dickens's lower-class women (whichever that may 
 be), and find in the parallel a rich subject of specu- 
 lation. Being masculine, Willet is sparing of his 
 words; his great resource is a blank stare of im- 
 becile resentment, implying an estimate of his own 
 importance at which the very gods might stand 
 fixed between amaze and laughter. Inimitable the 
 skill with which this asserter of human dignity is 
 shown at last suffering from mental shock — a shock 
 so severe that it all but reduces him to the condition 
 of a dumb mute. We had thought it impossible 
 that he could fall intellectually lower; when it 
 comes, we can only acknowledge the author's re- 
 serve of power. There he sits, amid the wreck of 
 his fine old inn, staring at his old-time companion, 
 
Humour and Pathos. 175 
 
 the kitchen boiler. Seeing him thus, we have it 
 brought to mind that he really was, in his way, a 
 capable landlord, and had kept the Maypole spick 
 and span for many a long year; which possibly 
 suggests an aspect of English character, and Eng- 
 lish conservatism, not out of keeping with some of 
 Dickens's views on such subjects. 
 
 I must not omit mention of those sketches of 
 genuine grotesques — not Quilp-like extravagances 
 — ^which now and then flash upon us at some odd 
 moment of the story; wonders of swift character- 
 drawing, and instinct with humour. The finest 
 examples I can remember are the figure of Mr. 
 Nadgett, in Chuzzlewit (chap, xxvii.), and that of 
 the old woman called Tamaroo, in the same book 
 (chap, xxxii.). Language cannot do more in the 
 calling up of a vivid image before the mind; and 
 how much of this result is traceable to the writer's 
 humorous insight. There could be no better illus- 
 tration of the difference between Dickens's grasp 
 and presentment of a bit of human nature, a bit of 
 observable fact, and that method which the critics 
 of to-day, inaccurately but intelligibly, call photo- 
 graphic. Nadgett, the tracker of sordid mysteries, 
 and Tamaroo, successor of young Bailey at Todg- 
 ers's, acquire an imaginative importance like in 
 kind (however different in degree) to that of the 
 grandest figures in fiction. Every stroke of such 
 outlines is a manifestation of genius. 
 
 Inseparable from the gift of humour is that of 
 pathos. It was Dickens's misfortune that, owing 
 to habits of his mind already sufficiently discussed, 
 he sometimes elaborated pathetic scenes, in the 
 theatrical sense of the word. I do not attribute to 
 him the cold insincerity so common in the work of 
 
176 Charles Dickens. 
 
 playwrights ; but at times he lost self-restraint and 
 unconsciously responded to the crude ideals of a 
 popular audience. Emphasis and reiteration, how- 
 ever necessary for such hearers, were out of place 
 in pathetic narrative. Thus it comes about that he 
 is charged with mawkishness, and we hear of some 
 who greatly enjoy his humour rapidly turning the 
 pages meant to draw a tear. Chiefly, I suppose, it 
 is the death of Paul Dombey that such critics have 
 in mind ; they would point also to the death of Jo, 
 the crossing-sweeper, and to that of little Nell. On 
 a re-perusal of these chapters, I feel that nothing 
 can be said in defence of Jo ; on his death-bed he is 
 an impossible creature, and here for once moral 
 purpose has been undeniably fatal to every quality 
 of art. Regarding the other narratives, it strikes 
 me that they have been too hastily condemned. 
 The one line which describes the death of Paul's 
 mother is better, no doubt, than the hundreds 
 through which we follow the lading of Paul him- 
 self; but these pages I cannot call mawkish, for I 
 do not feel that they are flagrantly untrue. The 
 tear may rise or not — that depends upon how we 
 are constituted — but we are really standing by the 
 bed of a gentle little child, precociously gifted and 
 cruelly over-wrought, and, if the situation is to be 
 presented at all, it might be much worse done. 
 Such pathos is called *^ cheap". I can only repeat 
 that in Dickens's day, the lives, the happiness of 
 children were very cheap indeed, and that he had 
 his purpose in insisting on their claims to attention. 
 As for the heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop^ dis- 
 taste for her as a pathetic figure seems to me un- 
 intelligent. She is a child of romance; her death 
 is purely symbolical, signifying the premature close 
 
Humour and Pathos. 177 
 
 of any sweet, innocent, and delicate life. Heaven 
 forbid that I should attribute to Dickens a deliberate 
 allegory; but, having in mind those hapless children 
 who were then being tortured in England's mines 
 and factories, I like to see in Little Nell a type of 
 their sufferings; she, the victim of avarice, dragged 
 with bleeding feet along the hard roads, ever pursued 
 by heartless self-interest, and finding her one safe 
 refuge in the grave. Look back upon the close of 
 that delightful novel, and who can deny its charm? 
 Something I shall have to say presently about the 
 literary style ; but as a story of peaceful death it is 
 beautifully imagined and touchingly told. 
 
 Of true pathos Dickens has abundance. The 
 earliest instance I can call to mind is the death of 
 the Chancery prisoner in Pickwick^ described at no 
 great length, but very powerful over the emotions. 
 It worthily holds a place amid the scenes of humour 
 enriching that part of the book. We feel intensely 
 the contrast between the prisoner's life and that 
 which was going on in the free world only a few 
 yards away ; we see in his death a pitiful ness beyond 
 words. A scene in another book, — Bleak House, — 
 this, too, connected with that accursed system of 
 imprisonment for debt, shows Dickens at his best 
 in bringing out the pathos of child-life. The man 
 known to Mr. Skimpole as ** Coavinses" has died, 
 and Coavinses' children, viewed askance by neigh- 
 bours because of their father's calling, are living 
 alone in a garret. They are presented as simply as 
 possible — nothing here of stage emphasis — yet the 
 eyes dazzle as we look. I must quote a line or two. 
 *'We were looking at one another," says Esther 
 Summerson, ^'and at these two children, when 
 there came into the room a very little girl, childish 
 
 (M444) M 
 
178 Charles Dickens. 
 
 in figure but shrewd and older-looking in the face — 
 pretty faced too — wearing a womanly sort of bonnet 
 much too large for her, and drying her bare arms 
 on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were 
 white and wrinkled with washing, and the soapsuds 
 were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms. 
 But for this, she might have been a child playing 
 at washing and imitating a poor working-woman 
 with a quick observation of the truth." It is 
 Charley, of course, who had found a way to sup- 
 port herself and the younger ones. We see how 
 closely the true pathetic and a *' quick observation" 
 are allied. Another picture shown us in Esther's 
 narrative, that of the baby's death in the starved 
 labourer's cottage, moves by legitimate art. Still 
 more of it is felt in the story of Doctor Marigold, 
 the Cheap-Jack, whose child is dying in his arms, 
 whilst for daily bread he plays buffoon before the 
 crowd. This is a noble piece of work and defies 
 criticism. The tale is told by the man himself as 
 simply as possible; he never insists upon the piti- 
 fulness of his position. We hear his whispers to 
 the child, between his hoarse professional shoutings 
 and the guffaws in front ; then he finds his word of 
 tenderness brings no response — he looks closer — he 
 turns from the platform. A piece of work that might 
 atone for literary sins far worse than Dickens ever 
 committed. 
 
 Little Dorrit is strong in pathos, as in humour. 
 Dickens's memories of childhood made his touch 
 very sure whenever he dealt with the squalid prison- 
 v/orld, and life there was for him no less fertile in 
 pathos than death. Very often it is inextricably 
 blended with his humour; in the details of the 
 Marshalsea picture, who shall say which element of 
 
Humour and Pathos. 179 
 
 his genius prevails? Yet, comparing it with the 
 corresponding scenes in Pickwick we perceive a 
 subdual of tone, which comes not only of advancing 
 years, but of riper art ; and, as we watch the Dorrits 
 step forth from the prison door, it is in another 
 mood than that which accompanied the release of 
 Mr. Pickwick. Pathos of this graver and subtler 
 kind is the distinguishing noteof Great Expectations ^ 
 a book which Dickens meant, and rightly meant, to 
 end in the minor key. The old convict, Magwitch, 
 if he cannot be called a tragical personality, has feel- 
 ing enough to move the reader's deeper interest, 
 and in the very end acquires through suffering a 
 dignity which makes him very impressive. Rightly 
 seen, is there not much pathos in the story of Pip's 
 foolishness? It would be more manifest if we could 
 forget Lytton's imbecile suggestion, and restore the 
 author's original close of the story. 
 
 To the majority of readers it seemed — and per- 
 haps still seems — that Dickens achieved his best 
 pathos in the Christmas books. Two of those 
 stories answered their purpose admirably; the other 
 two showed a flagging spirit; but not even in the 
 Carol can we look for anything to be seriously 
 compared with the finer features of his novels. 
 The true value of these little books lies in their 
 deliberate illustration of a theme which occupied 
 Dickens's mind from first to last. Writing for the 
 season of peace, good-will, and jollity, he sets him- 
 self to exhibit these virtues in an idealization of the 
 English home. The type of domestic beauty he 
 finds, as a matter of course, beneath a humble roof. 
 And we have but to glance in memory through the 
 many volumes of his life's work to recognize that 
 his gentlest, brightest humour, his simplest pathos. 
 
i8o Charles Dickens. 
 
 occur in those unexciting pages which depict the 
 everyday life of poor and homely English folk. 
 This is Dickens's most delightful aspect, and I 
 believe it is the most certainly enduring portion of 
 what he has left us. 
 
 His genius plays like a warm light on the char- 
 acteristic aspects of homely England. No man ever 
 loved England more; and the proof of it remains 
 in picture after picture of her plain, old-fashioned 
 life — in wayside inns and cottages, in little dwell- 
 ings hidden amid the city's vastness and tumult, 
 in queer musty shops, in booths and caravans. 
 Finding comfort or jollity, he enjoys it beyond 
 measure, he rubs his hands, he sparkles, he makes 
 us laugh with him from the very heart. Coming 
 upon hardship and woe, he is moved as nowhere 
 else, holds out the hand of true brotherhood, tells 
 to the world his indignation and his grief. There 
 would be no end of selecting passages in illustra- 
 tion, but we must recall a few for the mere pleasure 
 of the thing. Try to imagine the warmest welcome 
 of a cosy little inn, at the end of a long lonely road, 
 on a night of foul weather; you must needs have 
 recourse to the Jolly Sandboys, where Nell and her 
 grandfather and the wandering showmen all found 
 shelter. ** There was a deep ruddy blush upon the 
 room, and when the landlord stirred the fire, send- 
 ing the flames skipping and leaping up — when he 
 took off the lid of the iron pot, and there rushed out 
 a savoury smell, while the bubbling sound grew 
 deeper and more rich, and an unctuous stream 
 came floating out, hanging in a delicious mist 
 above their heads — when he did this, Mr. Codlin's 
 heart was touched" {Old Curiosity Shop, chap, 
 xxviii.). And whose is not? What dyspeptic ex- 
 
Humour and Pathos. i8i 
 
 quisite but must laugh with appetite over such a 
 description? 
 
 As good is the picture of Ruth Pinch at the 
 butcher's. **To see him slap the steak before he 
 laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, 
 was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable, 
 too — it really was — to see him cut it off, so smooth 
 and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act. 
 Although the knife was large and keen, it was a 
 piece of high art . . . Perhaps the greenest cab- 
 bage leaf ever grown in a garden was wrapped 
 about this steak before it was delivered over to 
 Tom. But the butcher had a sentiment for his 
 business, and knew how to refine upon it. When 
 he saw Tom putting the cabbage-leaf into his pocket 
 awkwardly, he begged to be allowed to do it for 
 him ; * for meat ', he said with some emotion, * must 
 be humoured and not drove' I" {Chuzzlewity chap, 
 xxxix.). Reading this, how does one regret that 
 Dickens should have filled with melodrama many 
 a page which might have been given to the com- 
 monest doings of the humble street! 
 
 There is a great chapter of the Old Curiosity 
 Shop (chap, xxxix.), where Kit and Barbara, with 
 their respective mothers, with little Jacob, too, and 
 the Baby, go to spend the evening at Astley's. It 
 would have seemed impossible to get so much 
 kindly fun out of a group of the London poor. 
 Dickens does it by dint of his profound, his over- 
 flowing sympathy with them. He glows with 
 delight when they are delighted; he understands 
 precisely what they enjoy and why; it does his 
 very soul good to hear Kit's guffaws and the 
 screaming laugh of little Jacob. Where else in 
 literature is there such infinite good-feeling ex- 
 
i82 Charles Dickens. 
 
 pressed with such wondrous whimsicality? After 
 the circus, Kit takes all his companions to have an 
 oyster supper (by the way, in those days, as Sam 
 Weller assures us, poverty and oysters always went 
 together). And not one of them enjoyed the meal 
 more than he who gaily described it. How the 
 London poor should love Dickens ! But — with his 
 books always obtainable — they can scarce be said 
 to read him at all. 
 
 Remember that such a scene as this was new in 
 literature, a bold innovation. Dickens had no 
 model to imitate when he sat down to tell of the 
 joys of servant-lads and servant-girls with their 
 washerwomen and sempstress mothers. But in 
 spirit he continues the work of two writers whom 
 he always held dear. Goldsmith and Sterne. Gold- 
 smith's sweetness and compassion, Sterne's sensi- 
 tive humanity, necessarily had their part, and that 
 no small one, in forming Dickens. There is a fore- 
 taste of his humour in Moses (''Boz", as we know), 
 the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, and in the 
 would-be fine company ; there is a palpable hint to 
 him in the Vicar preaching among poor prisoners. 
 Turning to Uncle Toby, to Corporal Trim, we are 
 perforce reminded of those examples of grotesque 
 goodness, of sweet humility under the oddest ex- 
 teriors, upon which Dickens lavished his humour 
 and his love. 
 
 Captain Cuttle is as well known as any of them. 
 In what terms of literary criticism shall one describe 
 that scene {Domhey^ chap, xlix.) where the Captain 
 sits in Solomon Gill's parlour and Florence mixes 
 his grog for him? It is a sort of fairy tale of 
 modern life. No one can for a moment believe that 
 two such persons ever were in such relations; but 
 
Humour and Pathos. 183 
 
 so irrelevant an objection never occurs to us. All 
 we know is, that a spell is laid upon us; that we 
 pass from smiles to laughter, and from laughter to 
 smiles again. Who ever paused to think that the 
 old coasting Captain, Mrs. M^Stinger's lodger, 
 must have been in person and manners and speech 
 not a little repulsive to a young lady straight from 
 a great house in the west of London? It is not 
 germane to the matter. These are actors in the 
 world of humour and imagination, raised above the 
 unessentials of life. Dickens's thought was to 
 make a picture delightful to every heart which can 
 enjoy fun, respect innocence, and sympathize with 
 kindness. Moreover, he wished to point a contrast 
 between the stately house, inhabited by wealth and 
 pride, the atmosphere of which had grown poison- 
 ous from the evil passions nurtured in it; and the 
 little back parlour of a shop somewhere amid the 
 City's noisiest streets, where the homeliest — and 
 therefore the most precious — virtues have a secure 
 abode. Fleeing from the home that is none, the 
 mansion where her womanly instincts have been 
 outraged, Florence betakes herself to this poor 
 haven of refuge, and lives there guarded and 
 honoured as any queen in her palace. What could 
 make stronger appeal to the sensibilities of English 
 readers? No national foible is here concerned : we 
 respond with the very best that is in us. We feel 
 that these are the ideals of English life. We are 
 proud of the possibility underlying a fancy of 
 such irresistible charm. 
 
 For his own fame, Dickens, I think, never puts 
 his genius to better use than in the idealization of 
 English life and character. Whatever in his work 
 may be of doubtful interest to future time, here is 
 
184 Charles Dickens. 
 
 its enduring feature. To be truly and profoundly 
 national is great strength in the maker of literature. 
 What a vast difference from all but every point of 
 view between Dickens and Tennyson; yet it is 
 likely enough that these two may survive together 
 as chosen writers of the Victorian age. They are 
 at one in their English sentiment. They excite 
 the same emotion whenever they speak of the 
 English home; none, I think, of their contem- 
 poraries touches so powerfully that island note. 
 In Tennyson's glorious range, humour is not 
 lacking; it exercises itself on a theme of the most 
 intimately national significance, and his Northern 
 Farmer will live as long as the poet's memory. 
 Of humour the very incarnation, Dickens cannot 
 think of his country without a sunny smile. In our 
 hearts we love him for it, and so, surely, will the 
 island people for many an age to come. 
 
 Chapter IX. 
 Style. 
 
 Dickens is one of the masters of prose, but in a 
 sense that carries qualification. He cannot be 
 compared with Thackeray for flow of pure idiom, 
 for command of subtle melodies. He is often man- 
 nered to the last point of endurance; he has one 
 fault which offends the prime law of prose com- 
 position. For all that, he made unique use of the 
 English language, and his style must be examined 
 as one of the justifications of his place in literature. 
 
 In the beginning it had excellent qualities; his 
 Sketches are phrased with vigour, with variety, and 
 
Style. 185 
 
 with a soundness of construction which he owed to 
 his eighteenth-century studies. Dealing for the 
 most part with vulgarity, his first book is very free 
 from vulgarisms. In one of the earliest letters to 
 Forster, he speaks of **your invite"; but no such 
 abomination deforms his printed pages. Facetious- 
 ness is now and then to blame for an affected 
 sentence, and this fault once or twice crops up in 
 later books. Someone in Pickwick wears '*a grin 
 which agitated his countenance from one auricular 
 organ to the other"; and in Bleak House, when 
 grandfather Smallweed threw his cushion at the old 
 woman, we are told that '*the effect of this act of 
 jaculation was twofold". Without much effort 
 Dickens kept clear of such pitfalls; what might 
 have befallen him but for his fine models and his 
 good sense, we may surmise from the style of 
 certain of his more or less conscious imitators. 
 Slovenly English he never wrote; the nature of the 
 man made it impossible. And in this respect he 
 contrasts remarkably with all save the greatest of 
 his day. As an illustration of what a generally 
 sound writer could permit himself in the hurry of 
 writing a **mere novel", I remember a passage 
 in Ravenshoe (chapter xxviii.), where a dog is 
 trying to attract his master's attention; we read, 
 with a little shock of surprise, that *^the dog 
 wagged his tail and pawed his waistcoat ". But 
 Dickens respected both himself and his public — 
 never a common virtue in the everyday English 
 novelist. 
 
 The gravest of his faults, from Oliver Twist on- 
 wards — and he never wholly overcame it — is the 
 habit of writing metrically. He is not alone in 
 this vice. Charles Kingsley illustrates it very 
 
i86 Charles Dickens. 
 
 badly in some of his prose; especially, I remember, 
 in the Heroes, Should any one wish to see how 
 far the trick (unconsciously, of course) can be car- 
 ried, let him open Richard Jefferies' paper ^'The 
 Open Air", where he will find several pages written, 
 with very few breaks, precisely in a metre made 
 familiar by Longfellow. As thus: ^*A11 the de- 
 vious brooklet's sweetness | where the iris stays the 
 sunlight; | all the wild woods hold of beauty: | all 
 the broad hills' thyme and freedom : | thrice a hun- 
 dred years repeated ". This, of course, betrays an 
 ear untrained in the harmonies of prose ; the worst 
 of it is, that many readers would discover it with 
 delight, and point to it as admirable. A good many 
 years since, I came upon a magazine article entitled 
 *' Dickens as a Poet", the absurd aim whereof was 
 to show admiringly how many passages from the 
 novels could be written and read as blank verse. 
 The fact unfortunately cannot be disputed. Dickens 
 wrote thus under the influence of strong emotion. 
 He observed the tendency, speaks of it as some- 
 thing he cannot help, and is not disturbed by it. 
 The habit overcame him in his moods of softness; 
 and therefore is particularly noticeable towards the 
 end of the Old Curiosity Shop, When his emotion 
 is indignant, on the other hand, he is not thus 
 tempted; simply as a bit of prose, the paragraph 
 giving a general description of the children at 
 Dotheboys, is good, well-balanced, with no out- 
 of-place rhythm. But turn to a passage quoted by 
 Forster (Book iii. 8) from the American Notes \ 
 quoted as a fine expression of his sympathy with 
 the poor. It is nobly felt, most admirably worded ; 
 yet the five-foot cadence is flagrant here and there. 
 ** But bring him here, upon this crowded deck. | Strip 
 
Style. 187 
 
 from his fair young wife her silken dress | . . . . 
 pinch her pale cheek with care and much privation" 
 — and so on. One is half inclined to think that 
 Dickens did it deliberately, regarding it as an im- 
 provement on plain prose. 
 
 For a style simple, direct, and forcible, one may 
 turn to Bamaby Rudge, Taking it all in all, this 
 is perhaps the best written of his novels ; best, that 
 is to say, in the sense of presenting the smoothest 
 and closest strain of narrative. There are no irrup- 
 tions of metre; the periods are flowing, the language 
 is full of subdued energy. Among the first few 
 books it is very noticeable for this peculiar excel- 
 lence. One reason, possibly, is its comparative 
 shortness. Nickleby, on the other hand, has faults 
 of style plainly due to the necessity of writing more 
 than the author wished to say. One of its best-knit 
 chapters is that describing Nicholas's walk from 
 London through Surrey, with Smike. We breathe 
 the very air of the downs, and smell the sweetness 
 of wayside hedges. This power of suggesting a 
 country atmosphere is remarkable in Dickens. He 
 hardly ever mentions a tree or flower by its name ; 
 he never elaborates — perhaps never even sketches — 
 a landscape; yet we see and feel the open-air sur- 
 roundings. The secret is his own delight in the 
 road and the meadow, and his infinite power of 
 suggestion in seemingly unconsidered words. 
 
 In narrative, he is always excellent when describ- 
 ing rapid journeys. The best coach-drive ever put 
 into words is that of the Muggleton coach, in Pick- 
 wick. It surpasses the much longer description in 
 Chuzzlewity which comes near to being monotonous 
 after many paragraphs beginning with the same 
 words; it is incredibly exhilarating, and would put 
 
i88 Charles Dickens. 
 
 a healthy glow, as of a fine frosty morning, into 
 the veins of a man languishing in the tropics. 
 We are asked to believe that the story (in Bleak 
 House) of the posting journey conducted by In- 
 spector Bucket, came from the pen of Miss Esther 
 Summerson ; the brain, at all events, was Dickens's, 
 and working with its most characteristic vigour. He 
 knew every stage covered by the travellers ; he saw 
 the gleam of the lamps, the faces they illumined 
 but for a moment ; the very horses brought out fresh 
 were his old acquaintances. Such writing is no 
 mere question of selecting and collocating words; 
 there must first be vision, and that of extraordinary 
 clearness. Dickens tells us that in times of worry 
 or of grave trouble, he could still write ; he had but 
 to sit down at his desk, and straightway he saw. 
 Where — as would happen — he saw untruly, a mere 
 fantasm thrown forward by the mind, his hand at 
 once had lost its cunning. When vision was but a 
 subtly enhanced memory, he never lacked the skill 
 to make it seen by others. 
 
 Think of the easy graphic power that Dickens 
 possessed, and compare it for a moment with the 
 results of such laborious effort to the same ends as 
 was put forth by the French novelist Flaubert. 
 On the one hand, here is a man who works hard 
 indeed, and methodically, but whose work is ever a 
 joy to him and not seldom a rapture. On the other, 
 we have growls and groans; toil advancing at snail's 
 pace, whilst sweat drips from the toiler's brow; 
 little or no satisfaction to him in the end from all 
 his suffering. And not one page of Flaubert gives 
 proof of sight and grasp equal to that evinced in a 
 thousand of Dickens. This thing cometh not by 
 prayer and fasting, nor by any amount of thinking 
 
Style. 189 
 
 about art. You have it or you have it not. As a 
 boy or youth Dickens was occupied in seeing \ as 
 a young man he took his pen and began to write 
 of what he had seen. And the world saw with him 
 — much better than with its own poor, purblind 
 eyes. 
 
 In the story of David Copperfield's journey on the 
 Dover road, we have as good a piece of narrative 
 prose as can be found in English. Equally good, 
 in another way, are those passages of rapid retro- 
 spect, in which David tells us of his later boyhood; 
 a concentration of memory perfumed with the sweet- 
 est humour. It is not an easy thing to relate with 
 perfect proportion of detail, with interest that never 
 for a moment drops, the course of a year or two of 
 wholly uneventful marriage; but read the chapter 
 entitled *'Our Domestic Life" and try to award 
 adequate praise to the great artist who composed it. 
 One can readily suggest how the chapter might 
 have been spoiled ; ever so little undue satire, ever 
 so little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a 
 line in which it might be bettered? It is perfect 
 writing ; one can say no more and no less. 
 
 Another kind of descriptive writing appears in the 
 nineteenth chapter of Chuzzlewit: the funeral of old 
 Anthony conducted by Mr. Mould. What of the 
 scope declared in a contrast of this chapter with the 
 one in Copperfield just mentioned? I should not 
 like to say that one excels the other; I should find 
 it impossible to decide between their merits. Where 
 is the ** extravagance" which, we are told, has pro- 
 nounced Dickens's doom? Mr. Mould and his 
 retainers, the whole funeral from household to grave, 
 seems to me such realism as no other novelist ever 
 came near unto; for it is mere straightforward 
 
iQo Charles Dickens. 
 
 describing and narrating, without a hint of effort; 
 and there stands the thing for ever. 
 
 A fine piece of the grimly picturesque is Quilp's 
 death. Better, because more human, is the narra- 
 tive in Barnaby Rudge of the day and night before 
 the gaol-delivery when the rioters are to be hung. 
 It has the effect of rapidity, but contains an immense 
 amount of detail, actual and imaginative. Dennis, 
 Hugh, and Barnaby, together in their cell, are seen 
 by us as the swift hours pass, and at the same time 
 we know what is going on without. Of all the 
 broad and the delicate touches in which these pages 
 abound, not one could be omitted as superfluous; 
 and the impression aimed at is obtained with abso- 
 lute success. 
 
 Narrative, of course, includes description ; but in 
 description by itself and in elaborate picturing, as 
 distinguished from the hints which so often serve 
 his purpose, Dickens is very strong. Before speak- 
 ing of the familiar instances let me mention that 
 chapter at the beginning of Little Dorrit^ which 
 opens with a picture of London as seen on a gloomy 
 Sunday — if the phrase be not tautological. It is 
 very curious reading. For once we have Dickens 
 quite divested of his humour, and beholding the 
 great city in something like a splenetic mood. As 
 conveying an impression, the passage could not be 
 better ; it makes us feel precisely what one has felt 
 times innumerable amid the black lifeless houses, 
 under a sky that crushes the spirit. But seldom 
 indeed can Dickens have seen and felt thus. Com- 
 pare with it his picture of the fog — Mr. Guppy's 
 " London particular" — at the opening of Bleak 
 House. This darkness visible makes one rather 
 cheerful than otherwise, for we are spectators in the 
 
Style. 191 
 
 company of a man who allows nothing to balk his 
 enjoyment of life, and who can jest unaffectedly 
 even in such circumstances. Those few pages of 
 Little Dorrity admirable as art, suggest the kind 
 of novels Dickens might have written without his 
 humour. But in that case he would not have writ- 
 ten them at all. 
 
 His normal manner is seen in the description of 
 the Fleet, in Pickuoick, It would appear difficult 
 to make a vivid picture of such a place, a picture 
 which convinces, and yet to omit things vile or 
 intolerable to the feelings; yet here it is done. The 
 same art manifests itself as in his masterpieces of 
 characterization; something is obscured, but nothing 
 falsified. At times, he could make a sketch in what 
 is known as the impressionist manner; rapid, strong, 
 and in the broadest lines suggesting a vast amount 
 of detail; as in the description of the Gordon rioters 
 seen, passing in their drunken fury along the street, 
 from an upper window {Bamahy^ chapter 1.). 
 Dickens was rather proud of this passage; he calls 
 attention to it in a letter written at the time. In- 
 numerable the aspects of London presented in his 
 books; what a wonderful little volume might be 
 made by collecting such passages ! Of the West- 
 end we have glimpses only; one remembers, how- 
 ever, that very genteel but stuffy corner inhabited 
 by the house of Barnacle, and the similar locality 
 where dwelt Miss Tox. Stately and wealthy Lon- 
 don he does not show us; his artistic preference is 
 for the quaint, out-of-the-way quarters, or for the 
 grim and the lurid, out of which he made a pictur- 
 esque of his own. Writing once from Naples 
 (where he was merely disappointed and disgusted, 
 we can see why), he says, ^* I am afraid the conven- 
 
192 Charles Dickens. 
 
 tional idea of the picturesque is associated with such 
 misery and degradation that a new picturesque will 
 have to be established as the world goes onward ". 
 Conventional his own ideas and presentiments cer- 
 tainly were not, but for the most part they are 
 closely connected with misery and degradation. 
 Jacob's Island and Tom-all-alone's have the effect 
 of fine, wild etchings lighted only just sufficiently 
 to show broad features and suggest details one does 
 not desire to pry into. Krook's house and its sur- 
 roundings make an essential part of the world 
 shadowed by Chancery ; unutterably foul and stifl- 
 if^g^j yet so shown as to hold the imagination in 
 no painful way. Dickens views such scenes in a 
 romantic light. It is the property of his genius to 
 perceive romance in the commonplace and the 
 squalid, no less than in clean and comfortable home- 
 liness. 
 
 What he can make out of a wretched little room 
 a few feet square, in a close-packed, sordid neigh- 
 bourhood, is shown in chapter xlvi. of Chuzzlewit, 
 Jonas, become a murderer, is lurking in his own 
 house, and chooses a corner of it where he is not 
 likely to be observed. '^ The room in which he had 
 shut himself up was on the ground -floor, at the 
 back of the house. It was lighted by a dirty sky- 
 light, and had a door in the wall, opening into a 
 narrow, covered passage or blind alley. . . It was 
 a blotched, stained, mouldering room, like a vault; 
 and there were water-pipes running through it, 
 which, at unexpected times in the night, when other 
 things were quiet, clicked and gurgled suddenly, 
 as if they were choking.'' Nothing could be more 
 insignificant, and at the same time more grim. An 
 out-of-doors companion to it may be found in Great 
 
Style. 193 
 
 Expectations, ** I came into Smithfield ; the shame- 
 ful place, being all filth and fat and blood and foam, 
 seemed to stick to me. So I rubbed it off with all 
 possible speed by turning into a street where I saw 
 the great black dome of St. Paul's bulging at me 
 from behind a grim stone building which a by- 
 stander said was Newgate Prison. Following the 
 wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with 
 straw to deaden the sound of passing vehicles ; and 
 from the quantity of people standing about, smell- 
 ing strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the 
 trials were on " (chap. xx.). This is '* locality" as 
 good as the bit of human portraiture which follows 
 (Mr. Jaggers walking through the throng of his 
 clients) ; and higher praise could not be bestowed. 
 
 I suppose there is no English writer, perhaps no 
 writer in any literature, who so often gives proof of 
 wonderfully minute observation. It is an important 
 source of his strength ; it helps him to put people 
 and things before us more clearly than, as a rule, 
 we should ourselves see them. Two examples 
 only can I find room for; but they will suffice. 
 Peggotty's purse, given to little David on his 
 departure from Yarmouth, was found to contain 
 ** three bright shillings, which Peggotty had 
 evidently polished up with whiting for my greater 
 delight ". And again, little Pip, after being washed 
 by his sister, is led to make the remark: '*! suppose 
 myself to be better acquainted than any living 
 authority with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, 
 passing unsympathetically over the human counten- 
 ance ". You will come across no such instances as 
 these in any other novelist, of observation, memory, 
 and imaginative force, all evinced in a touch of 
 detail so indescribably trivial; its very triviality 
 
 (M444) N 
 
194 Charles Dickens. 
 
 being the proof of power in one who could so choose 
 for his purposes among the neglected incidents of 
 life. 
 
 When Dickens writes in his pleasantest mood of 
 things either pleasant in themselves, or especially 
 suggestive of humorous reflection, his style is fault- 
 less ; perfectly suited, that is to say, to the author's 
 aim and to the matter in hand. His Christmas 
 number called The Holly Tree begins with a chapter 
 on Inns; we rise from it feeling that on that subject 
 the last word has been said, and said in the best 
 possible way. His book of collected papers, The 
 Uncommercial Traveller^ consists almost wholly of 
 such writing. Whether its theme is City of London 
 Churches, or Shy Neighbourhoods, Tramps, or 
 Night-walks, or London Chambers, he is invariably 
 happy in phrase, and in flow of language which, 
 always easy, never falls below the level of literature. 
 In such work he must be put beside the eighteenth- 
 century essayists, whom he always had in mind. 
 His English is not less idiomatic than theirs, and 
 his views of life find no less complete expression 
 through the medium of a style so lightly and deftly 
 handled. 
 
 Chapter X. 
 The Radical. 
 
 Dickens's superabounding energy, and the unrest 
 which frequently came upon him in consequence of 
 private worries, now and then diverted his thoughts 
 from the all-sufficient labours of literature, and made 
 him anxious to try his strength in public life. At 
 
The Radical. 195 
 
 one time he made deliberate inquiry as to the 
 possibility of his becoming a stipendiary magistrate; 
 but the replies he received were not encouraging. 
 At another, he fixed his mind on political jour- 
 nalism; and this had practical result in the estab- 
 lishment of the Daily News, which paper, as we 
 have seen, he edited for only a few days. A desire 
 to preside in courts of justice was natural enough in 
 the author of Oliver Twisty and, like other men of 
 letters much concerned with social questions, he 
 imagined that the columns of a great newspaper 
 would afford him the best possible field for making 
 known his views and influencing the world. One 
 step which has tempted writers from their appointed 
 task he seems never to have seriously contemplated; 
 he received invitations to stand as a Parliamentary 
 candidate, but gave no ear to them. 
 
 The term which described him as politician and 
 social reformer is no longer in common use ; he was 
 a Radical. This meant, of course, one who was 
 discontented with the slow course of legislation, 
 moving decorously **from precedent to precedent", 
 and with the aristocratic ideas underlying English 
 life; one who desired radical changes, in the direc- 
 tion of giving liberty and voice to the majority of 
 the people. In a day of advancing Socialism, the 
 demands put forward by such men seem timidly 
 tentative. To our mind, Dickens is in most things 
 a Conservative, and never in his intention demo- 
 cratic — using the word in its original sense. We 
 have to remember the reforms actually achieved in 
 his time, to recognize how progressive was the 
 Radical spirit. Dickens's novels had no small 
 part in the good work, and their influence certainly 
 went further than he knew. 
 
196 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Even in the Sketches he writes satirically of the 
 House of Commons, and at a later time his attitude 
 towards Parliament was no less contemptuous than 
 Carlyle's. A letter, bearing the date 1855, declares 
 his grave belief that Representative Government 
 was a failure in England, owing to the national 
 vice which was then known as ^* flunkeyism ". At 
 that time he was writing Little Dorrity and had 
 many reasons for discontent with things in general. 
 But he never desired or anticipated a political 
 revolution of the thorough kind. His first visit to 
 America gave him impressions on the subject of 
 Republicanism which were never removed. He 
 writes thence to Forster, 1842, that he trembled for 
 any Radical who should cross the Atlantic, ** unless 
 he is a Radical on principle, by reason and reflec- 
 tion, and from the sense of right. I do fear that 
 the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt 
 by this country, in the failure of its example to the 
 earth ". If that example had proved to be in any 
 respect hopeful, he would undoubtedly have rejoiced. 
 Later he probably felt some little satisfaction in the 
 thought that the great Republic had not done so 
 greatly better, all things considered, than monarchic 
 England. 
 
 He never attained to a theory of reform ; it was 
 not in his mind, his character, to elaborate such 
 reflections. What he thought about the bygone 
 story of his country we can read in the series of 
 chapters which he wrote for Household Words, and 
 afterwards published as the Child's History of Eng- 
 land. As literature it is not happy ; only too often 
 one is reminded (at a great distance certainly) of 
 that disgusting series of books called Comic His- 
 tories, which someone or other disgraced himself 
 
The Radical. 197 
 
 by writing. Dickens had no serious historical 
 knowledge, and no true understanding of what is 
 meant by history; his volume shows a series of 
 more or less grotesque sovereigns, who play pranks 
 before high heaven at the expense of the multitudes 
 they are supposed to rule by divine right. Most 
 unfortunate would be the child into whose hand 
 this '* history " was put. The one clear suggestion 
 we carry away after trying to read it, is that Dickens 
 congratulated himself on living in the nineteenth 
 century, a subject of Queen Victoria. It was part 
 of his Radicalism to speak of ** the bad old times ", 
 and true history of course not seldom justifies him. 
 After a visit to Chillon, he writes an admirable 
 letter of description, and ends exclaiming — ''Good 
 God, the greatest mystery in all the earth, to me, 
 is how or why the world was tolerated by its Creator 
 through the good old times, and wasn't dashed to 
 fragments". It was natural that he had no profound 
 love of Walter Scott, who must often have excited 
 his impatience. The past, to his mind, was much 
 better forgotten. That the world progressed, he 
 never for a moment held in doubt; but the rate of 
 progress was not at all in keeping with his energetic 
 habits. 
 
 In a speech on some public occasion he made a 
 political remark, which, from the ambiguity of its 
 wording, caused newspaper discussion; he said 
 that he had little or no faith in the people govern- 
 ing, but faith limitless in the people governed. 
 Obviously, the shrewdest ''trimmer" could not 
 have devised a form of words allowing more latitude 
 of interpretation; but what Dickens meant was plain 
 enough to anyone who did not desire to misunder- 
 stand him. He explained afterwards that the first 
 
198 Charles Dickens. 
 
 ** people" should be spelt with a small initial letter, 
 the second with a capital. But even so, an ambi- 
 guity remains, for *'the people governed" may 
 mean either a fact or a hypothesis. Dickens in- 
 tended the former ; he could have implied the latter 
 without any contradiction of his views as seen 
 throughout the novels. He was never a democrat; 
 in his heart he always held that to he governed was 
 the people's good ; only let the governors be rightly 
 chosen. Herbert Spencer has a precious sentence 
 with which Dickens would profoundly have agreed 
 in all its issues. ** There is no political alchemy 
 by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden 
 instincts." Dickens knew — no man better — how 
 unfit are the vast majority of mankind to form sound 
 views as to what is best for them, whether in public 
 or private life; he knew that ignorance inevitably 
 goes hand in hand with forms of baseness, and that 
 though the voice of the people must be heard, it 
 cannot always be allowed to rule. This is very 
 moderate doctrine indeed, but it then qualified a 
 man as a good Radical. Not much more advanced 
 was the position of the little band of teachers who 
 called themselves '^Christian Socialists", men with 
 whom Dickens very largely sympathized. 
 
 He had the sincerest admiration for Carlyle, the 
 sound of whose great guns could not but delight 
 him — at all events when they were directed against 
 the aristocracy and its game-preserving habits. 
 Himself an aristocrat to the core in the nobler and 
 truer sense of the word, and with very little patience 
 for the simpletons and weaklings whom Dickens 
 took to his heart with so warm a charity, Carlyle 
 was yet far more passionate than the novelist on 
 behalf of the poor and hard-driven sons of men. A 
 
The Radical. 199 
 
 humorist, he too, and among the greatest. Carlyle 
 could jest but grimly where his eyes fell upon those 
 ** hard-entreated brothers"; he felt within himself 
 the wrath of the prophet moved to lift up his voice 
 against the world's injustice. Conscious himself of 
 the ills of poverty, not only in childhood but at the 
 time of life when want breeds gall and bitterness in 
 strong hearts, he could remind the poor of their 
 eternal duties with stoic sternness, but in the next 
 moment turned away to hide a tear. Vastly wider 
 was his vision than that of Dickens, and so much 
 the deeper his compassion. Another great name 
 rightly associated with Radicalism is that of Tenny- 
 son. He who wrote Locksley Hall and Maud had 
 no stinted sympathy with the revolt against pride 
 of place. A hackneyed strophe in Vere de Vere 
 expressed the inmost thought of Dickens's heart. 
 Tennyson moved on to other things ; he had a larger 
 mission ; but no word that stands upon his perfect 
 page did wrong to the ideal of humanity he had 
 followed in his youth. Unable though he was to 
 enter into the poet's highest mood, Dickens held 
 substantially by the same moral and intellectual 
 guidance. Their messages do not contradict, but 
 supplement, each other. 
 
 **I exhort my dear children" — thus runs a passage 
 at the close of Dickens's will — ''humbly to try to 
 guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testa- 
 ment in its broad spirit, and to put no faith in any 
 man's narrow construction of its letter here and 
 there." It is the essence of his religion; and his 
 religion (oddly as it may sound) had a great deal to 
 do with the tone and teaching of his literary work. 
 We are told that, for a few years, he attended a 
 Unitarian place of worship; but this involved no 
 
200 Charles Dickens. 
 
 dogmatic heresy; at all events, no mental travail 
 on religious subjects. It meant only that the clergy 
 of the English church had irritated and disgusted 
 him. The causes of such feeling are not far to seek, 
 but it will be enough here to mention a fact which 
 he emphasizes in one of his letters, that not until 
 the year of grace 1848 did any Bishop of London 
 make his voice heard as to the necessity of provid- 
 ing the poor with better dwellings. One bears in 
 mind what sort of habitations sheltered the poor of 
 London ; one remembers also certain events of that 
 very year '48; and the two reflections help us to 
 understand Dickens's attitude. Preoccupied always 
 with the thought of Christ's simple teaching, he 
 took the trouble to extract, for his children's use, 
 what seemed to him the essential portions of the 
 New Testament ; and it would greatly have pleased 
 him could such a little volume have been used for 
 the instruction of the children of the poor. Instead, 
 he saw them brought up on *^ the church catechism 
 and other mere formularies and subtleties ", and he 
 saw their instructors fighting for this mere husk of 
 religion as though it were the Master's vital word — 
 that word, meanwhile, being by most of them 
 assiduously neglected. None the less he returned 
 to the English Church, and to the end remained a 
 member of it. How he looked upon the more 
 aggressive forms of Dissent we know. It would be 
 a libel to say that Dickens clung to the Establish- 
 ment because it was ** respectable", but undoubtedly 
 he did so in part because the Church belonged to 
 that ancient and solid order of things in England 
 which he never wished to see overturned. Many a 
 man of brains still behaves in the same way, for the 
 same reason. Of his religious sincerity, in the 
 
The Radical. 201 
 
 broader sense, there can be no possibility of doubt. 
 He was the last man to drag sacred names and 
 associations into his books on trivial pretexts; but 
 whenever he alludes to Christian precept or makes 
 mention of the Teacher himself, it is with a simple 
 reverence very beautiful and touching; words which 
 came from his own heart, and go straight to that of 
 his reader. 
 
 We do not nowadays look for a fervent Chris- 
 tianity in leaders of the people. In that, as in 
 several other matters, Dickens was by choice retro- 
 spective. Still writing at a time when '* infidelity" 
 — the word then used — was becoming rife among 
 the populace of great towns, he never makes any 
 reference to it, and probably did not take it into 
 account; it had no place in his English ideal. I 
 doubt, indeed, whether he was practically acquainted 
 with the ** free-thinking" workman. A more notice- 
 able omission from his books (if we except the one 
 novel which I cannot but think a failure) is that of 
 the workman at war with capital. This great 
 struggle, going on before him all his life, found no 
 place in the scheme of his fiction. He shows us 
 poor men who suffer under tyranny, and who ex- 
 claim against the hardship of things; but never 
 such a representative wage-earner as was then to 
 be seen battling for bread and right. One reason is 
 plain ; Dickens did not know the north of England. 
 With adequate knowledge of a manufacturing town, 
 he would never have written so unconvincingly as 
 in his book Hard Times — the opportunity for deal- 
 ing with this subject. Stephen Blackpool represents 
 nothing at all; he is a mere model of meekness, 
 and his great misfortune is such as might befall 
 any man anywhere, the curse of a drunken wife. 
 
202 Charles Dickens. 
 
 The book is a crude attack on materialism, a theme 
 which might, of course, have entered very well into 
 a study of the combatant working-class. But, as I 
 have already pointed out, the working-class is not 
 Dickens's field, even in London. For the purposes 
 of fiction, it is a class still waiting its portrayer; 
 much has been written about it in novels, but we 
 have no work of the first order dealing primarily 
 with that form of life. Mrs. Gaskell essayed the 
 theme very faithfully, and with some success ; but 
 it was not her best work. I can recall no working- 
 class figures in English novels so truly representa- 
 tive as those in Charlotte Bronte's second book. 
 Given a little wider experience, the author of Shirley 
 might have exhibited this class in a masterpiece 
 such as we vainly look for. 
 
 I do not forget Rouncewell in Bleak House, 
 He is a Radical, vigorous in action and in speech ; 
 but then, he happens to be an employer, and not a 
 **hand". His purpose in visiting Chesney Wold 
 is to withdraw from domestic service, as from an 
 unsuitable position, the young girl with whom his 
 son has fallen in love. Mr Rouncewell belongs 
 distinctly to the middle class — the ^' great" middle 
 class. He is a Radical in the way of becoming a 
 considerable capitalist. Note that Dickens saw no 
 incongruity in these things. He makes it plain to 
 us that the man has risen by honest ability and 
 work; this being so, he has a right to stand firmly, 
 but respectfully, face to face with Sir Leicester 
 Dedlock, or with men of even higher title. It is 
 the middle-class ideal; that which developed to- 
 gether with England's wealth — at the cost of things 
 which we agree to forget. Dickens greatly admires 
 and sympathizes with Mr. Rouncewell. Yet, at 
 
The Radical. 203 
 
 this distance of time, we feel it rather difficult to 
 understand why the successful iron-founder should 
 be a more sympathetic figure than the honest- 
 hearted baronet. The one represents a coming 
 triumph; the other, a sinking cause; but, in the 
 meantime, it remains very doubtful whether the 
 triumphing order will achieve more for the interests 
 of humanity than that which has received its death- 
 blow. Mr. RouncewelTs characteristics are very 
 significant; he is the ideal Englishman in the eye 
 of Dickens, and of most of his contemporaries. 
 The son of a domestic servant — who is herself a 
 model woman, having risen to the position of 
 confidential housekeeper in a great family — he 
 could never for a moment feel ashamed of his 
 origin; nay, on due occasion he will be proud of 
 it; but he is making money, and looks forward to 
 establishing a ** family" of his own. Elaborately, 
 yet modestly, he expounds the situation to the 
 wondering Sir Leicester. With a certain semi- 
 conscious self-approval, he makes known to the 
 baronet that it is no uncommon thing for the son 
 of a wealthy manufacturer to fall in love with a 
 working girl, in which event the girl is removed 
 from her lowly position to be suitably educated and 
 prepared for her duties as a middle-class wife. 
 (Observe our progress; Mr. Rouncewell would 
 hardly be so complacent in speaking of such love- 
 affairs nowadays; but that by the by.) There is 
 no hint that the mothers of prosperou^men should 
 be removed from a place of servitude. Old and 
 new here meet amicably. Mrs. Rouncewell would 
 never consent to quit Chesney Wold, where she 
 regards her duties as a high privilege; she ** knows 
 her place ", and her son, anything but an inten- 
 
204 Charles Dickens. 
 
 tional revolutionist, is quite content that this should 
 be so. The whole scene is a most valuable bit of 
 history. Sir Leicester and his lady, with old Mrs. 
 Rouncewell, represent the past; Rouncewell, his 
 son, and the pretty girl in Lady Dedlock's service, 
 stand for the future. All is civilly transacted ; the 
 baronet could not behave otherwise than as noblesse 
 oblige \ the iron-master is very much of a gentle- 
 man. Our author is not entirely aware of his 
 success in satire; for Sir Leicester has more reason 
 to marvel at the social change going on about him 
 than Dickens himself perceived. 
 
 Honesty, hard work, worldly success — these are 
 the ideal of the new order; and Dickens heartily 
 approves them. Was he not himself a brilliant 
 example of the self-made man? Much more than 
 that, to be sure; and therefore he supplements 
 the commonly admired scheme of things with a 
 humanity of thought which places him above tem- 
 porary conditions. Read his address given to 
 audiences of the new democracy; especially that 
 delivered at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, 
 in which he used the ambiguous phrases, quoted 
 above, about the people governing and governed. 
 Here, as often in public speeches, he expressly 
 declares that study must not be undertaken solely 
 for the sake of ^* getting on ", but for the moral and 
 intellectual good resulting to him who studies, and 
 for the power it bestows of doing good to others. 
 He said it with all sincerity; but his audience, we 
 may be sure, kept before them, whilst they listened, 
 the mental image of Mr. Rouncewell. When 
 Dickens spoke of Progress, it was thus that the 
 people interpreted him. And of Progress he spoke 
 much and often, convinced as he was that his 
 
The Radical. 205 
 
 country was moving steadily towards a better day. 
 Human nature being what it is, a commercial epoch 
 might do much worse than set up Mr. Rouncewell 
 as its patron saint. But Sir Leicester, too, had his 
 intimations of futurity; he may, in his darkest 
 moments, have foreseen Chesney Wold fallen 
 into the possession of some lord of millions, who 
 neither knew nor cared anything about the fair 
 traditions of the past, who revelled in vulgar 
 display, and who, by the force of his glaring ex- 
 ample, promoted bitterness and warfare between 
 the classes and the nations of mankind. Dickens 
 lived to see the beginnings of plutocracy. He 
 would not have glorified that form of progress; 
 but all unconsciously he had his part in bringing 
 it about. 
 
 One vice which had formerly been proper to 
 aristocratic circles, that of furious gambling, he saw 
 spreading through society at large, and spoke of it 
 as became him. He chanced to be at Doncaster 
 during the races, and after describing in a letter 
 the scenes of that lively time, he adds, ** I vow to 
 God that I can see nothing in it but cruelty, covet- 
 ousness, calculation, insensibility, and low wicked- 
 ness ". These are honest words. But no man's 
 censure can avail against a national curse which is 
 inseparably connected with the triumph of com- 
 mercialism. 
 
 On its better side, then, Dickens's Radicalism 
 consisted in profound sympathy with the poor, and 
 boundless contempt of all social superiority that is 
 merely obstructive. Speaking of the Chimes^ he 
 said that it was his wish and hope in this book ^^to 
 strike a blow for the poor ''. Many such blows he 
 struck, and that right manfully. Our social experi- 
 
2o6 Charles Dickens. 
 
 ence forbids us to think that his views were always 
 wise. He hated the new Poor Law, merely be- 
 cause it put an end to a ruinous system of out- 
 door relief and compelled the indigent to live in 
 so-called workhouses. One can only wonder that 
 his feeling so much overcame his robust common- 
 sense. Quite late in his career we come across the 
 old animosity in his description of Betty Higden 
 {Our Mutual Friend)^ one of the least valuable of his 
 pictures of poor life. Old Betty lives in terror of 
 the workhouse, and wishes to die in a ditch rather 
 than be taken care of by the Union. This is intel- 
 ligible enough; one knows that workhouses are 
 often brutally conducted, and one sympathizes very 
 thoroughly with a loathing of that *' charity" which 
 is not at all synonymous with charity in its true 
 sense. But Betty, as a figure in fiction, does not 
 interest us ; she is so evidently a mere mouthpiece 
 for criticism of a system ; we do not see her, and do 
 not believe in her talk. The practical man only 
 scoffs. And Dickens could so easily have drawn 
 a character at which no scoffing would have been 
 possible. 
 
 It is an obvious fault of his work, when he ex- 
 hibits victims of social wrong, that it takes no due 
 account of the effect of conditions upon character. 
 Think of little Oliver Twist, who has been brought 
 up under Bumble and Company, amid the outcasts 
 of the world, yet is as remarkable for purity of mind 
 as for accuracy of grammar. Oliver, when taken to 
 Fagin's house, is wholly at a loss to conjecture the 
 meaning of words and acts which even a well-bred 
 boy of his age could not fail to understand; the 
 workhouse lad had evidently never heard of pick- 
 pockets. Granted that Oliver was of gentle blood, 
 
The Radical. 207 
 
 heredity does not go so far as this. Little Dorrit, 
 again; she is the child of the Marshalsea; and 
 think of what that meant, even apart from the fact 
 of her more literal parentage. Yet we find no 
 blemish in her; she has grown up ^^under the lock" 
 without contracting one bad habit of thought or 
 speech; indeed, one does not know in what way 
 Amy Dorrit could be morally improved. This is 
 optimism of the crudest kind, but to Dickens and 
 to his readers it suggested no troublesome reflec- 
 tions. To show either Oliver or Amy as a creature 
 of pure instincts, struggling and stumbling towards 
 the light and often sinking in despair, would have 
 satisfied neither; the good character must be good 
 in spite of everything, or the Ruler of the universe 
 seems dishonoured. 
 
 To us, in a day of sociology, such ideals are un- 
 interesting, and it relieves us when we come across 
 such a capital study of the everyday fact as is seen 
 {Dombey) in Mrs. Toodle's graceless son, Rob the 
 Grinder. Robert was a charity-boy, and probably 
 a fair specimen of the breed. From the doubtless 
 well-meaning care of the Charitable Grinders he 
 has come forth a very troublesome young rascal; 
 slippery, untruthful, dishonest, and the ready in- 
 strument of any mature scoundrel who chooses to 
 throw him a copper. This, notwithstanding the 
 sterling qualities of his father and mother. Rob 
 is quite capable of penitence; it makes him uncom- 
 fortable when he knows that his good mother is 
 crying about him; but after every resolution of 
 amendment comes a speedy relapse, and when we 
 at length lose sight of him, it is with no certainty 
 that he will not live to be transported. Excellent 
 characterization, and far more profitable from the 
 
2o8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 point of view of the good Radical than many cross- 
 ing-sweeper Joes or declaiming Betty Higdens. It 
 goes to the root of the matter. Rob has been in- 
 famously neglected by the pretentious folk who 
 made such a merit of supplying him with bread- 
 and-butter and a hideous garb. This was plainly 
 not the way to make a good citizen out of a low- 
 born child — or any other child. It pointed to the 
 need for education other than that supplied by 
 Grinders, however charitable; and from this point of 
 view, Rob is one of the most important of Dickens's 
 social studies. 
 
 Whilst speaking of the influence of social con- 
 ditions, one ought to glance again at the Smallweed 
 family, in Bleak House, These creatures, whether 
 it was meant or not, plainly stand for the blighted, 
 stunted, and prematurely old offspring of foggiest 
 London. Impossible, we are told, to conceive of 
 them as having ever been young. Nothing could 
 be truer. These are typical products of a monstrous 
 barbarism masked as civilization; savages amid the 
 smoke and filth and clamour of a huge town, just 
 as much as the dirty grizzled Indian crouched in a 
 corner of his wigwam. Dickens chose to dwell on 
 things more pleasant and, as it seemed to him, 
 better for the soul ; but he knew very well that for 
 one Tim Linkinwater there existed five thousand 
 Smallweeds. Not only in the neighbourhood of 
 Chancery do such weeds crop up; it is the pestilent 
 air of crowded brick and mortar that nourishes 
 them. Statisticians tell us that London families 
 simply die out in the third generation; on the whole 
 one is glad to hear it. Unfortunately, their decaying 
 leaves a miasma; and all children so luckless as to 
 breathe it with their daily air shrivel in mind, if 
 
The Radical. 209 
 
 not in body, before they have a chance of enjoying 
 youth. 
 
 Dickens's remedy for the evils left behind by 
 the bad old times was, for the most part, private 
 benevolence. He distrusted legislation; he had 
 little faith in charitable associations; though such 
 work as that of the Ragged Schools strongly in- 
 terested him. His saviour of society was a man 
 of heavy purse and large heart, who did the utmost 
 possible good in his own particular sphere. This, 
 too, was characteristic of the age of free-contract, 
 which claimed every man's right to sell himself 
 as best he could, or buy as many other men as 
 his means allowed. At one with Carlyle in scorn- 
 ing the theory that **cash was the sole nexus" be- 
 tween human beings, Dickens would have viewed 
 uneasily any project for doing away with this nexus 
 altogether; which would mean the abolition of a 
 form of beneficence in which he delighted. With 
 what gusto does he write of any red-cheeked old 
 gentleman who goes about scattering half-sove- 
 reigns, and finding poor people employment, and 
 brightening squalid sick-chambers with the finest 
 produce of Covent Garden. In the Christmas 
 Books, he went to pantomimic lengths in this kind 
 of thing; but no one was asked to take Scrooge 
 very seriously, either as a grasping curmudgeon, 
 or when he bawls out of the window his jovial 
 orders for Christmas fare. Figures, however, such 
 as Mr. Garland and the Cheery bles and John Jarn- 
 dyce and many another were presented in all good 
 faith. We may even see Dickens himself playing 
 the part, and very creditably, in that delightful 
 Christmas paper of his, the Seven Poor Travellers y 
 where it makes one's mouth water to read of the 
 
 (X444) o 
 
2IO Charles Dickens. 
 
 fare he ordered at the inn for those lucky vaga- 
 bonds. In the Cheeryble brothers he indulges his 
 humane imagination to the full. That there indeed 
 existed a couple of kind-hearted merchants, who 
 were as anxious to give money as others are to 
 make it, we will believe on the author's assurance; 
 but that anyone ever saw the Cheerybles in the 
 flesh we decline to credit. They are chubby fairies 
 in tights and gaiters; a light not of this world 
 flushes about their jolly forms. Dickens becomes 
 wild with joyous sympathy in telling of their eccen- 
 tric warm-heartedness. *' Damn you, Tim Linkin- 
 water!" they exclaim — unable in the ordinary 
 language of affection to set free their feelings. To 
 double a clerk's salary is a mere bit of forenoon 
 fun; after dinner, we picture them supplying fraudu- 
 lent debtors with capital for a new undertaking, or 
 purchasing an estate in Hampshire to be made over 
 forthwith to the widow of some warehouse porter 
 with sixteen children. The harm they must have 
 done, those two jolly old boys I But Dickens would 
 not hear of such a suggestion. He considered, 
 above all, the example of self-forgetfulness, of 
 mercy. And as '^people in a book", it is likely 
 enough that Tim Linkinwater's employers are to 
 this day bearing far and wide a true gospel of 
 humanity. 
 
 The very heartiness of this benevolence precludes 
 every suspicion of offensive patronage. We know 
 that these men do good because it gives them more 
 pleasure than anything else; and their geniality is a 
 result thereof. Even so in Dickens himself; he is 
 incapable of speaking and thinking of the poor as 
 from a higher place; no man ever pleaded their 
 cause with simpler sincerity. He is always, and 
 
The Radical. 211 
 
 naturally, on their side, as against the canter, and 
 the bully, and the snob ; even as against a class of 
 rich folk with whom he had otherwise no quarrel. 
 It overjoys him to find good in anyone of lowly 
 station, to show virtues in the uneducated. Those 
 very Cheeryble brothers, do they not eat with their 
 knivesl We should not have known it, but he 
 goes out of his way to tell us; he insists upon the 
 fact with pride, and to throw scorn upon the fas- 
 tidious, who would disapprove of this habit. Always 
 it is the heart rather than the head. A man who 
 has been to school and college may, of course, have 
 virtues; but how much fairer do they shine — thinks 
 Dickens — in him who drops his h's and does not 
 know the world is round! In this respect — as in 
 various others — there is a difference between Dickens 
 and that other Radical novelist, Charles Kingsley. 
 The author of Alton Locke chooses for his hero a 
 working-man whose intellect is so much above the 
 average that he is nothing less than a great poet. 
 One cannot imagine such a figure in Dickens. 
 Copperfield — by the autobiographic necessity of the 
 case — does not come of the proletariate, and I re- 
 member no instance of a person born in that class 
 to whom Dickens gives anything more than mechan- 
 ical aptitudes. It was reserved for Thackeray to 
 make a great artist of a butler*s son, and for 
 Kingsley to show us a tailor writing *^The Sands 
 of Dee ". I mention this simply as a fact, without 
 implying any adverse criticism ; it was the part of 
 Dickens to show the beauty of moral virtues, and 
 to declare that these could be found in all kinds of 
 men, irrespective of birth and education. When 
 sending forth her nephew into the world Betsy Trot- 
 wood gave him this brief counsel, '* Never be mean; 
 
212 Charles Dickens. 
 
 never be false; never be cruel ". Better advice she 
 could not have bestowed; and it was the ideal of 
 conduct held up by Dickens to all his readers, from 
 beginning to end. If he could discover shining 
 examples of such virtue among the poor and the 
 ignorant, their mental dulness seemed to him of 
 but small account. 
 
 It does his heart good to play the advocate and 
 the friend to those with whom nature and man have 
 dealt most cruelly. Upon a Smike or a Maggie (in 
 Little Dorrit) he lavishes his tenderness simply 
 because they are hapless creatures from whom even 
 ordinary kind people would turn with involuntary 
 dislike. Maggie is a starved and diseased idiot, a 
 very child of the London gutter, moping and mow- 
 ing to signify her pleasures or her pains. Dickens 
 gives her for protector the brave and large-hearted 
 child of the Marshalsea, whose own sufferings have 
 taught her to compassionate those who suffer still 
 more. Maggie is to be rescued from filth and cold 
 and hunger; is to be made as happy as her nature 
 will allow. It is nobly done, and, undoubtedly, an 
 example of more value to the world than any glori- 
 fication of triumphant intellect. 
 
 At times, he went too far in his championship of 
 the humble. Chapter xxxviii. of The Old Curiosity 
 Shop contains a paragraph of moralizing in which it 
 is declared that the love of home felt by the poor is 
 ** of truer metal " than anything of the kind possible 
 in the wealthy. Twenty years later Dickens would 
 not have spoken so inconsiderately. Sometimes, 
 too, he goes beyond the safe mean in his exhibition 
 of virtuous humility. The lad Kit, who not only 
 *^came back to work out the shilling", but repels 
 with a sense of injury an offer of new service at 
 
The Radical., 213 
 
 higher wages, comes dangerously near to the kind 
 of thing one meets with in stories written for Sun- 
 day School prizes. Many readers, I daresay, are 
 of opinion that Dickens is constantly falling into 
 this error; that it is his besetting sin. Well, that 
 is one way of regarding the matter; on the alterna- 
 tive point of view I have sufficiently insisted. 
 
 The enviously discontented poor seldom come 
 forward in his pages; indeed, the discontented in 
 any spirit are not often shown. An interesting 
 exception is his paper on ** Tramps", in the Un- 
 commercial Traveller^ where tramps of every species 
 are discussed with much knowledge and infinite 
 humour, and without a trace of sentimentality. We 
 hear the whining of the rascals, and their curses 
 when they fail to get anything by it; their hopeless 
 brutality is set forth with most refreshing candour. 
 Of characters in the novels, there is no low-class 
 malcontent worth mention except Charley Hexam. 
 He, indeed, makes a very good exception, for he 
 is precisely the one member of his class whom 
 Dickens shows as tolerably educated. The date of 
 Our Mutual Friend is 1865; the great scheme of 
 national education was to be established only five 
 years later; and had Dickens been able to foresee 
 every result of 1870, he could not have drawn a more 
 truly prophetic figure than Charley Hexam. This 
 youth has every fault that can attach to a half- 
 taught cub of his particular world. He is a mon- 
 strous egoist, to begin with, and ''school" has 
 merely put an edge on to the native vice. The 
 world exists solely for his benefit; his '' esuriency", 
 to use Carlyle's word, has no bounds. Then he is 
 of course a snob, and with fair opportunity will 
 develop into a petty tyrant with an inclination to 
 
214 Charles Dickens. 
 
 active cruelty. Something of resemblance exists 
 between this fellow and Tom Tulliver; it is an odd 
 coincidence, too, that both should have sisters so 
 vastly their superiors, yet alike devoted to them. 
 Tom had the advantage of country air; he is never 
 quite unwholesome, his selfish coarseness of fibre is 
 recognizable as old English. But Hexam's pride is 
 of base metal, through and through. He is capable 
 of swaggering in a bar-room, of lying contemptibly 
 to an audience of commoner lads. Before he was 
 many years older, he became a ^* secularist" — quite 
 without conviction, and delivered peculiarly blatant 
 lectures; after that he added *' socialism", and 
 pointed to himself as an example of the man of great 
 talents, who had never found a fair chance. Dickens 
 did well in giving him for teacher and friend such 
 a man as Bradley Headstone, whose passionate 
 nature (with which one can sympathize well enough 
 when it comes to the love-story) must needs have 
 an evil influence on Lizzie's brother. But this was 
 not absolutely necessary for the development of a 
 Charley Hexam, whose like, at this moment, may 
 be found throughout London by anyone studying 
 the less happy results of the board-school system. 
 
 Of noble discontent, Dickens cannot be said to 
 give us any picture at all. The inventor in Little 
 Dorrit, foiled by the Circumlocutionists, is too mild 
 and dreamy to nourish a spirit of revolt; Stephen 
 Blackpool in Hard Times would hold rebellion a 
 sin ; and as for the rank and file of hungry creatures, 
 they seem never to have heard that there is move- 
 ment in the land, that voices are raised on their 
 behalf, and even to some purpose. No; their hope 
 is in the Cheeryble brothers ; not at all in Chartist 
 or in Radical or in Christian Socialist. Very signi- 
 
Comparisons. 215 
 
 ficant the omission. Dickens, for all his sympathy, 
 could not look with entire approval on the poor 
 grown articulate about their wrongs. He would 
 not have used the phrase, but he thought the thought, 
 that humble folk must know ** their station". He 
 was a member of the middle class, and as far from 
 preaching ** equality" in its social sense as any man 
 that ever wrote. Essentially a member of the great 
 middle class, and on that very account able to do 
 such work, to strike such blows, for the cause of 
 humanity in his day and generation. 
 
 Chapter XI. 
 Comparisons. 
 
 Twenty years ago a familiar topic for debating 
 societies was a comparison of the literary character- 
 istics of Dickens and Thackeray — or of Thackeray 
 and Dickens, I forget which. Not impossibly, 
 the theme is still being discussed in country towns 
 or London suburbs. Of course, it was always an 
 absurdity, the points of difference between these 
 authors being so manifest, and their mutual rela- 
 tions in literature so easy of dismissal, that debate 
 in the proper sense there could be none. As to 
 which of the two was the ^^ greater novelist", the 
 question may be left for answer to those who are 
 capable of seriously propounding it. He will be 
 most positive in judgment whose acquaintance with 
 the novelists' writings is least profound. 
 
 It seems to me, however, that we may, without 
 waste of time, suggest comparison in certain points 
 between Dickens and one or two of his foreign con- 
 
2i6 Charles Dickens. 
 
 temporaries, writers of fiction who, Hke the English 
 master, were pre-occupied with social questions, 
 and evinced special knowledge in dealing with the 
 life of the poor. Balzac, Victor Hugo, Dostoieifsky, 
 Daudet — these names readily occur to one, and I 
 shall not err in assuming familiarity with their 
 principal works in those who have cared to read so 
 far in this little book. Of course I have no inten- 
 tion of saying all that might easily be said as to 
 points of contrast: so thorough an Englishman as 
 Dickens must needs differ in particulars innumer- 
 able from authors marked on their side by such 
 strong national characteristics. Enough to indicate 
 certain lines of similarity, or divergence, which, 
 pursued in thought, may help to a complete under- 
 standing of our special subject. 
 
 Evidently there is a difference on the threshold 
 between Dickens and three of the foreign authors 
 named — a difference which seems to involve the use 
 of that very idle word '^ realism". Novels such as 
 those of Balzac are said to be remorseless studies 
 of actual life; whereas Dickens, it is plain, never 
 pretends to give us life itself, but a selection, an 
 adaptation. Balzac, calling his work the ''human 
 comedy", is supposed to have smiled over this 
 revelation of the littleness of man, his frequent 
 sordidness, his not uncommon bestiality. Dostoi- 
 effsky, absorbed in compassionate study of the 
 wretched, the desolate, the oppressed, by no means 
 goes out of his way to spare our delicacy or our 
 feelings ; and Daudet, so like to Dickens in one or 
 two aspects, matures into a conception of the novel 
 which would have been intolerable to the author of 
 David Copperfield — cultivates a frankness regarding 
 the physical side of life which in England would 
 
Comparisons. 217 
 
 probably have to be defended before legal autho- 
 rities with an insular conception of art. Realists, 
 we say; men with an uncompromising method, and 
 utterly heedless as to whether they give pleasure or 
 pain. 
 
 The distinction is in no way a censure upon 
 Dickens. As soon as a writer sits down to con- 
 struct a narrative, to imagine human beings, or 
 adapt those he knows to changed circumstances, he 
 enters a world distinct from the actual, and, call 
 himself what he may, he obeys certain laws, certain 
 conventions, without which the art of fiction could 
 not exist. Be he a true artist, he gives us pictures 
 which represent his own favourite way of looking 
 at life; each is the world in little, and the world as 
 he prefers it. So that, whereas execution may be 
 rightly criticised from the common point of view, a 
 master's general conception of the human tragedy or 
 comedy must be accepted as that without which his 
 work could not take form. Dickens has just as much 
 right to his optimism in the world of art, as Balzac 
 to his bitter smile. Moreover, if it comes to invidi- 
 ous comparisons, one may safely take it for granted 
 that '* realism" in its aggressive shapes is very far 
 from being purely a matter of art. The writer who 
 shows to us all the sores of humanity, and does so 
 with a certain fury of determination, may think that 
 he is doing it for art's sake; but in very truth he 
 is enjoying an attack upon the order of the universe 
 — always such a tempting form of sport. Well, 
 Dickens was also combative, and enjoyed his 
 palpable hits; only, his quarrel was with certain 
 people, and certain ways of thought, never with 
 human nature or the world at large. 
 
 There are orders of imaginative work. A novel 
 
2i8 Charles Dickens. 
 
 is distinct from a romance; so is a fairy tale. 
 But there can be drawn only a misleading, futile 
 distinction between novels realistic and idealistic. 
 It is merely a question of degree and of the author's 
 temperament. 
 
 In Balzac's Le Cousin Pons are two figures, 
 amiable, eccentric, such as Dickens might have 
 conceived in other surroundings. Pons, the col- 
 lector of bric-a-brac, and his friend Schmucke, are 
 good, simple creatures, and Balzac loves them ; but 
 so bent is he on showing that life, or at all events 
 Paris, is a vast machine for torturing and crushing 
 the good (and therefore the weak), that these two 
 old men end in the most miserable way, amid base- 
 ness and cruelty which triumphs over them. We 
 know how Dickens would have shaped the story. 
 In art he was incapable of such sternness; and he 
 utterly refused to believe that fate was an irrespon- 
 sible monster. Compare the Maison Vauquer, in Le 
 Pere Goriot^ with ''Todgers's" in Martin Chuzzle- 
 wit. No one will for a moment believe that Dickens's 
 picture differs from that of Balzac because the one 
 is a bit of London, the other of Paris. Nor is it a 
 question of defect of humour; Mme. Vauquer (nee 
 de Conflans) and her group of boarders in the Rue 
 Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, are presented with suffi- 
 cient suggestion of humorous power. But Balzac 
 delights in showing us how contemptible and hate- 
 ful such persons can be; whereas Dickens throws 
 all his heart on to the side of the amusing and the 
 good. When sheets are wanted to shroud the dead 
 body of poor old Goriot (a victim of atrocious greed), 
 Mme. Vauquer exclaims: ^^ Prends les draps re- 
 tournes ; par Dieu! c'est toujours assez bon pour un 
 mort ". It is a fierce touch, and Dickens could no 
 
Comparisons. 219 
 
 more have achieved it in a novel than have uttered 
 the words in his own person. There is a difference 
 of artistic method. We are free to express a pre- 
 ference for this or for that way of presenting life; 
 but such preference involves no judgment. On 
 either side, a host of facts can be brought forward 
 to justify the artist's view; the critic's part is merely 
 to inquire how the work has been executed. 
 
 One finds in Balzac a stronger intellect, but by 
 no means a greater genius. Very much wider is 
 his scope in character and circumstance; he sees as 
 clearly and as minutely as Dickens; but I doubt 
 whether he ever imparts his vision with the vivid- 
 ness of Dickens at his best; and assuredly his 
 leagues of description fail in art when compared 
 with the English author's mode of showing us what 
 he wishes. In construction they are both flagrantly 
 defective, though erring in different ways. 
 
 Let the critic who dismisses Dickens's figures as 
 types, turn for a moment to Victor Hugo's master- 
 piece, Les Miserables. What are we to call the 
 personages in this story? Put side by side the 
 detective Javert and Inspector Bucket. It is plain 
 at once that in the latter we have an individual, a 
 living man full of peculiarities, some professional, 
 others native to himself; he represents, no doubt, 
 the London police force of his day, but only as any 
 very shrewd, brisk, and conscientious inspector 
 would have done so. Javert, on the other hand, 
 is an incarnation of the penal code; neither more 
 nor less. Never for one instant do we mistake him 
 for a being such as walks the earth. He is altogether 
 superhuman ; he talks the language of an embodied 
 Idea; it cannot surprise us however ubiquitous he 
 seems or however marvellous his scent for a criminal. 
 
220 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Go through the book, and it is always the same 
 thing. Jean Valjean might be likened to Pro- 
 metheus; he is a type of suffering humanity, he 
 represents all the victims of social wrong. Let his 
 adventures go to any length of the heroic, the sur- 
 prising, we do not protest; he is not one man, but 
 many. Fantine, too; what is she but the spirit of 
 outraged womanhood? Even as Cosette stands for 
 childhood robbed of its natural inheritance, trodden 
 under foot by a greedy and ferocious civilization. 
 Les Miserahles is one of the world's great books. 
 That cannot be said of any one of Dickens's; but 
 the reason is certainly not because he failed in 
 characterization. Les Miserahles is not rightly to 
 be called a novel; it belongs to the region of 
 symbolic art. And my only reason for putting 
 it beside Dickens's work is to make manifest at a 
 glance his superior quality as a writer of fiction. 
 
 Hugo is concerned with wide historical questions, 
 with great forces in the life of the world ; he probes 
 the theory of society, searches into the rights of the 
 individual ; he judges man ; he seeks to justify the 
 ways of God. He is international; and his vast 
 drama belongs to all modern time. He is in the 
 faithfulest sense of the word a democrat; for him 
 there can be, in the very nature of things, no ruling 
 voice save that of the people; all other potentates 
 and lawgivers are mere usurpers, to be suffered for 
 a time. Dickens, though engaged heart and soul 
 in the cause of the oppressed, fights their battle on 
 a much narrower ground. The laws he combats 
 are local, belonging, for the most part, to certain 
 years of grace. His philosophy is the simplest 
 possible, and all his wisdom is to be read in the 
 Sermon on the Mount. Democrat he is none, but 
 
Comparisons. 221 
 
 a hearty English Radical. His force is in his in- 
 tense nationality, enabling him to utter the thoughts 
 of voiceless England. Yet of necessity there are 
 many points at which his work and Hugo's touch 
 together, inviting comparison. Child-life is one of 
 them. I have spoken of Dickens's true pathos; but 
 is there anything in all his stories that springs from 
 so deep a fount of tender pity as that vision of 
 Cosette putting out her wooden shoe at Christmas? 
 For the rest, Dickens's children are generally crea- 
 tures of flesh and blood ; Cosette, save at moments, 
 belongs to the spirit world. An inferiority in the 
 Englishman — if we care to glance at it — iDecomes 
 plain by a contrast of his wronged women with 
 Fantine. Abstractions these, as we have already 
 noted, and therefore an illustration of what his 
 people for the most part are not; as abstractions, 
 how thin and futile and untrue when brought into 
 the light of a noble creation, such as the mother of 
 Cosette ! At root, both writers have the same faith 
 in man; they glorify the same virtues. But for 
 Dickens life is so much simpler — and so greatly 
 more amusing. From his point of view, how easily 
 all could be set right, if the wealthy and the power- 
 ful were but reasonably good-natured — with an 
 adequate sense of humour ! 
 
 He is wroth with institutions ; never bitter against 
 fate, as is so often the case in ^* realistic" novels 
 of our time. Something of this, though for the 
 most part unconsciously, appears in the great Rus- 
 sian novelist Dostoieffsky, whose work, in which 
 Dickens would have found much to like and admire, 
 shows so sombre a colouring beside the English 
 novels. It is gloomy, for one reason, because it 
 treats of the empire of the Tzar; for another, because 
 
222 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Dostoieffsky, a poor and suffering man, gives us 
 with immense power his own view of penury and 
 wretchedness. Not seldom, in reading him, one is 
 reminded of Dickens, even of Dickens's peculiarities 
 in humour. The note of his books is sympathy; 
 a compassion so intense as often to seem morbid — 
 which indeed it may have been, as a matter of fact. 
 One novel is called The Idiot, a study of mental 
 weakness induced by epilepsy. Mark the distance 
 between this and Barnahy Rudge\ here we have 
 the pathos of saddest truth, and no dallying with 
 half-pleasant fancies. But read the opening of the 
 story called in its French translation Humilies et 
 Offenses \ it is not impossible that Dickens's direct 
 influence worked with the writer in those pages 
 describing the hero's kindness to the poor little waif 
 who comes under his care; in any case, spiritual 
 kindred is manifest. And in how alien a world, 
 regarding all things outward ! 
 
 Dostoieffsky's masterpiece. Crime and Punish- 
 ment, abounds in Dickens-like touches in its lighter 
 passages. Extravagances of character delighted 
 him, and he depicted them with a freer hand than 
 Dickens was permitted or would have cared to use. 
 Suppose the English novelist born in Russia, he 
 might well have been the author of the long scene 
 at the beginning of the book, where Sonia's father, 
 the eccentric drunkard, makes himself known to us 
 in his extraordinary monologue. For that matter, 
 with such change of birth and breeding, Dickens 
 might well have written the whole book, which is a 
 story of a strange murder, of dectective ingenuity, 
 of a ruined girl who keeps her soul clean, and of a 
 criminal redeemed by love and faith in Christ; the 
 scene throughout being amid the darkness, squalor, 
 
Comparisons. 223 
 
 and grotesque ugliness of Russia's capital. Dos- 
 toieffsky is invariably pure of tone and even decor- 
 ous from our own peculiar point of view; his supe- 
 riority as a ** realist" to the aiuthor of David Copper- 
 field consists merely in his frank recognition of facts 
 which Dickens is obliged to ignore or to hint with 
 sighing timidity. Sonia could not have been used 
 by the Englishman as a heroine at all; as a subor- 
 dinate figure he would have turned her to his most 
 stagey purposes, though meaning all the time an 
 infinitude of gentleness and sympathy; instead of a 
 most exceptional girl (by no means, I think, impos- 
 sible), she would have become a glaring unreality, 
 giving neither pleasure nor solace to any rational 
 reader. The crucial chapter of the story, the magni- 
 ficent scene in which Raskolnikoff makes confession 
 to Sonia, is beyond Dickens, as we know him; it 
 would not have been so but for the defects of educa- 
 tion and the social prejudices which forbade his 
 tragic gift to develop. Raskolnikoff himself, a 
 typical Russian, a man of brains maddened by 
 hunger and by the sight of others hungry, is the 
 kind of character Dickens never attempted to por- 
 tray; his motives, his reasonings, could not be com- 
 prehended by an Englishman of the lower middle 
 class. And the murder itself — Bill Sikes, Jonas 
 Chuzzlewit, show but feebly after we have watched 
 that lank student, with the hatchet under his coat, 
 stealing up the stairs; when we have seen him do 
 his deed of blood, and heard the sound of that awful 
 bell tinkling in the still chamber. Dostoieffsky's 
 work is indescribably powerful and finely tragic; the 
 murders in Dickens are too vulgar of motive greatly 
 to impress us, and lack the touch of high imagina- 
 tiveness. 
 
224 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Little as he cared for foreign writers, we learn 
 that Dickens found pleasure in a book called Le 
 Petit Chose ^ the first novel of a very young author 
 named Alphonse Daudet. It would have been 
 strange indeed had he not done so; for Daudet at 
 that time as closely resembled Dickens himself as a 
 Frenchman possibly could. To repeated sugges- 
 tions that he modelled his early work on that of his 
 great contemporary, M. Daudet has replied with a 
 good-humoured shake of the head; and as an illus- 
 tration of how one can seem to plagiarize without 
 doing anything of the kind, he mentions that he 
 was about to give to the little lame girl, Desiree 
 Delobelle, the occupation of doll's dressmaker, 
 when a friend made known to him the existence of 
 just such a figure in Our Mutual Friend. This 
 being the case, we can only wonder at the striking 
 resemblance between his mind and that of Dickens. 
 Not only is it a question of literary manner, and of 
 the humour which is a leading characteristic in both; 
 the Frenchman is penetrated with a delicate sense, 
 a fine enjoyment of the virtues and happiness of 
 simple domestic life, and in a measure has done for 
 France what Dickens in his larger way did for 
 England, shaping examples of sweetness and good- 
 ness among humble folk, which have been taken to 
 their hearts by his readers. Belisaire, in Fromont 
 JeunCy is a typical instance; and the like may be 
 found even in his later novels, where, as some think, 
 he has been unhappily led after false gods by the 
 literary fashion of his time. Real life has frequently 
 supplied him with an artistic motive precisely such 
 as Dickens rejoiced in finding; for example, *'pere 
 Joyeuse" in Le Nabobs the clerk who, having lost 
 his employment, shrinks from letting his family 
 
Comparisons. 225 
 
 know, and leaves home each morning as if going to 
 the office as usual — a delightful sketch, done with 
 perfection of kindliness and humour. Then, there 
 is Daudet's fine compassion. He says in his auto- 
 biographic sketches: "/<? me sens en cceur F amour 
 de Dtcke7is pour les disgracies et les pauvres^ les 
 enfafices melees aux m^iseres des grandes villes^^] 
 and this is abundantly proved throughout his writ- 
 ings. 
 
 Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of 
 construction. Where, as in Fromont Jeune^ he 
 constructs too well, that is to say, on the stage 
 model, we see what a gain it was to him to have 
 before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire 
 instead of that of London in the early Victorian 
 time. Moreover, he is free from English fetters; 
 he can give us such a portrait as Sidonie, done 
 with wonderful truth yet with a delicacy, even a 
 tenderness, which keeps it thoroughly in tone with 
 his pure ideals. I do not speak of the later novels, 
 much as I see to admire and like in them ; only of 
 the time when his resemblance to Dickens was most 
 pronounced. Jack's mother, the feather-brained 
 Ida de Barancy, belongs to a very different order of 
 art from anything attained in female portraiture by 
 the English novelist. In his men, too, this advan- 
 tage is often very noticeable. Delobelle the illus- 
 trious, and the mouthing D'Argenton, have points 
 of character which easily suggest persons in Dickens; 
 but they belong to a world which has more colour, 
 more variety, and the writer does not fear to present 
 them completely. These things notwithstanding, 
 Dickens's work is of course beyond comparison 
 wider in scope and richer in significance. We 
 may concede to Daudet all his superiority as a 
 
 (H444) F 
 
226 Charles Dickens. 
 
 finished artist, and only become the more conscious 
 of Dickens's unapproachable genius. 
 
 Telling us of the hapless lad from whom he 
 modelled his Jack, M. Daudet touches on points of 
 difference between the characters in life and in 
 fiction ; the real Jack had not altogether that refine- 
 ment which heightens our interest in the hero of 
 the novel. ^^ II faut dire^\ adds the writer, '^ que 
 le peuple ignore Men des delicatesses^ des suscepti- 
 hilites morales y Could such a remark possibly 
 have fallen from the pen of Dickens, even when 
 not employed upon fiction? Of ^Hhe people" he 
 could neither have said nor thought it ; was it not to 
 "the people" that he turned when he wanted an 
 example of the finest delicacy of heart, the most 
 sensitive moral susceptibility? Perhaps it was just 
 this lack of faith that held Daudet from fulfilling 
 what seemed the promise of his early time. Such 
 lack of faith in the multitude is not difficult to 
 account for in a very acute observer. It was 
 especially hard to maintain in face of a literary 
 movement which devoted itself to laying bare the 
 worst of popular life. The brothers Goncourt, 
 Flaubert, and M. Zola were not companions likely 
 to fortify a naive ideal. It is just possible that they 
 inflicted serious injury upon Daudet's work, and 
 robbed France of a precious gift — the books he 
 might have written but for the triumph of "realism". 
 Dickens, who died before the outbreak of the 
 Franco-Prussian war, can barely have suspected 
 the lines that literature was to follow in the next 
 decade; to the end he represented in himself a 
 literary force which had burst upon the world with 
 irresistible charm, had held its way victoriously for 
 five-and-thirty years, and seemed as far as ever 
 
The Latter Years. 227 
 
 from losing its dominion over English readers. 
 The likelihood is that his unwavering consistency- 
 will stand him in better stead through the century 
 to come than any amount of that artistic perfection 
 as only a small class can appreciate and enjoy. 
 
 Chapter XII. 
 The Latter Years. 
 
 It is the privilege of a great writer to put into his 
 work the finest qualities of his heart and brain, to 
 make permanent the best part of himself, and 
 through that to influence the world. In speaking 
 of Dickens's triumphs as an author, I have felt that 
 the most fervent praise could not err by excess; 
 every time I open his books, as the years go on, it 
 is with ever more of wonder, delight, admiration, 
 and love. To point out his shortcomings as a man 
 could give little satisfaction to one who thus thinks 
 of him ; merely for the sake of completeness in my 
 view of his life and works, I feel it necessary to 
 glance at those disastrous latter years which show 
 him as a ** public entertainer", all true peace and 
 leisure at an end, shortening his life that he might 
 be able to live without pecuniary anxiety. Carlyle 
 said that the story of Charles Dickens's doings in 
 America *' transcended in tragic interest, to a think- 
 ing reader, most things one has seen in writing". 
 We see plainly enough what a deplorable mistake 
 it was, and men such as Forster, Dickens's true 
 friends, not only saw it at the time, but did their 
 utmost in protest. He himself had no misgiving 
 would confess none. In the words with which 
 
228 Charles Dickens. 
 
 he prefaced his first paid reading (1858) he said he 
 had satisfied himself, that to adopt this career could 
 involve no possible compromise of the credit and in- 
 dependence of literature, and that whatever brought 
 a public man and his public face to face, on terms 
 of mutual confidence and respect, was of necessity 
 a good thing. Both assertions may be contested. 
 Carlyle, and many another man of letters, saw very 
 grave objections to semi-theatrical ** touring" on 
 the score of the credit of literature; and as to the 
 relations between ^^a public man" and his admirers, 
 it is very doubtful whether a novelist should bear 
 that title at all. But Dickens's intimate relations 
 with the theatre made it impossible for him to give 
 due weight to these objections. Moreover he was 
 a very keen man of business, and could not resist 
 the temptation of enriching himself by means 
 which, in themselves, were thoroughly congenial to 
 him. 
 
 For he enjoyed those readings. The first he ever 
 gave — that of his Christmas Carol to a little group 
 of friends — was arranged on his own suggestion, 
 and he read several times for charitable purposes 
 before he began to do so for profit. Not without 
 reason he felt that all who knew him in his books 
 were as personal friends to him, and he to them ; he 
 delighted in standing before those vast audiences, 
 and moving them to laughter or to tears. Opinions 
 differ as to his merits as a reader, but it is plain that 
 the public thought him insurpassable. He had 
 always wished to shine as an actor; as a ^^ reader" 
 (it was in truth recitation, and not reading) he came 
 very near to that — especially in such efforts as the 
 murder scene from Oliver Twist. The life, too, one 
 of ceaseless travel and excitement, suited him at the 
 
The Latter Years. 229 
 
 time when he was making grave changes in his 
 domestic circumstances; changes which may or 
 may not have been inevitable, but which doubtless 
 helped to urge him along the fatal course. Forster's 
 Biography makes it clear that, from 1857 onwards, 
 Dickens suffered somewhat in character from the 
 effects of this public life; nothing like so much as 
 in health, but he was no longer quite the man of 
 his best literary years. Remember the intensely 
 practical strain in his nature. As a very young 
 man, he allowed himself to be put at a disadvantage 
 with publishers; but this was soon, and energeti- 
 cally, set right; afterwards, he transacted the busi- 
 ness of his books with high commercial aptitude. 
 It was the same in everything; subtract his genius, 
 and we have a most capable, upright, vigorous 
 man of business — the very ideal (so much better 
 than all but a 'few actual examples) of commercial 
 England. It is a surprising combination; such 
 qualities united with those which characterized the 
 author Charles Dickens. To minds of a certain 
 type there appears to be the utmost satisfaction in 
 pointing out that Shakespeare made money, and 
 built "the trimmest house in Stratford town"; but 
 who can seriously suggest that, even mutatis 
 mutandis^ Shakespeare's business aptitudes and 
 success were comparable with those of Dickens? 
 The author of Hamlet indubitably had common 
 sense, but, most happily, business as it is under- 
 stood among us nowadays had not been dreamt of 
 in Elizabethan England, and one may very safely 
 assert that Shakespeare was no distinguished mer- 
 chant even in the sense of that day. Dickens might 
 easily have become a great capitalist; and his 
 generosity would have secured him against any 
 
230 Charles Dickens. 
 
 self-reproach when treading the ways of capitalism. 
 He reflected with annoyance on the serious loss 
 occasioned him by the lack of American copyright ; 
 granted the opportunity, he could have drawn up 
 an international arrangement in this matter which 
 would have been a model of clear-headed justice. 
 After all, what was the financial result of his 
 brilliant and laborious life? He had a large family; 
 his expenses were considerable ; he bought himself 
 a country house, which became to him, as an occu- 
 pation of his leisure, a small Abbotsford. And at 
 his death he leaves an estimated total of ;^93,ooo. 
 The merest bagatelle, from a commercial point of 
 view. His readings seem to have brought him, 
 altogether, a matter of some ;^4o,ooo. What man 
 of business, with a world-wide reputation, would be 
 content to toil to the detriment of his health for such 
 results? I go into these details merely to suggest 
 how a man such as Dickens must have felt regard- 
 ing the pecuniary question. Save in reference to 
 American copyright, he did not complain; that 
 would have been ignoble, and inconsistent with his 
 habits of mind. But it seemed to him indispensable 
 that he should gain more money than would arrive 
 from his literary work. His sons must go forth into 
 the world as English gentlemen — a term implying 
 so much; his daughters must be made independent; 
 his own mode of life must be on a scale recognized 
 as ''respectable" by middle-class England. One 
 need not be much of an optimist to foresee that, 
 as in days gone by, so in a time to come, the 
 spectacle of such a man so beset will be altogether 
 impossible, and the record of such a life will become 
 a matter for wonder and sad smiling. 
 
 With the utmost precision of punctuality in all 
 
The Latter Years. 231 
 
 details of daily life, he combined a character of 
 sanguine impulsiveness, and as a result thereof 
 could not endure restraints and burdens which 
 ordinary men accept as a matter of course. If he 
 desired a thing, he must at once obtain it; or at all 
 events aim at obtaining it, and with all his energy. 
 He could work day after day — the kind of work 
 which demands a patience, an assiduity, a self- 
 control unintelligible to the mass of mankind; 
 could exhibit in himself, and exact from others, a 
 rare conscientiousness in things small and great; 
 but when it came to any kind of constraint which 
 was not imposed by his own temperament he failed 
 at once. The moralist may remark, in his dry way, 
 that no man can receive so much of the good things 
 of life, and remain unspoilt; that Dickens, more- 
 over, was a very unlikely man to go through the 
 ordeal of world-wide flattery, and draw from it 
 moral benefit. The wonder is that Dickens was 
 spoilt so little. In a day when there exists no 
 writer of supreme acceptance, we are in danger of 
 forgetting what his popularity meant. I suppose 
 that for at least five-and-twenty years of his life, 
 there was not an English-speaking household in 
 the world, above the class which knows nothing of 
 books, where his name was not as familiar as that 
 of any personal acquaintance, and where an allusion 
 to characters of his creating could fail to be under- 
 stood. When seeking a title for the periodical 
 eventually called Household Words — it was in 1849 — 
 he seriously suggested *' Charles Dickens: Con- 
 ducted by Himself". It was, he admitted, **a 
 strange idea, but with decided advantages". In 
 any other writer then living, the idea would have 
 been strange indeed, and of anything but decided 
 
232 Charles Dickens. 
 
 advantage. Dickens could entertain it without 
 egoism, without ridicule; far and wide, at home 
 and abroad, hands would have clutched eagerly at 
 the magazine bearing such a superscription. He 
 passed it over; but whatever the title of the paper 
 he edited, Household Words or All the Year Rounds 
 the name it bore in all minds was no other than 
 ^^ Charles Dickens". 
 
 It is easy to distinguish between the British 
 characteristic of practicality, and the unpleasant 
 attribute of worldliness ; but the intensely practical 
 man seldom escapes a tincture of that neighbouring 
 vice. In dismissing as ** fanciful" every intrusion 
 of the pure idea^ the English guard themselves 
 against certain risks, and preserve a pretty even 
 current of national life; but they pay a penalty, 
 understood or not. Dickens is an illustration of it. 
 I cannot do better than copy the words written on 
 this subject by his most intimate friend ; they occur 
 in the chapter which tells all that need be told 
 about his domestic troubles. ^* Not his genius 
 only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively 
 made up of sympathy for, and with, the real in its 
 most intense form, to be sufficiently provided 
 against failure in the realities around him. There 
 was for him no ^ city of the mind ' against outward 
 ills for inner consolation and shelter. ... By 
 his very attempts to escape the world, he was driven 
 back into the thick of it. But what he would have 
 sought there, it supplies to none; and to get the 
 infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many 
 a stout heart." This, observe, is spoken of a man 
 who was not only **good" in most meanings of 
 the word, but had a profound feeling for the moral 
 significance of the religion he professed. We see 
 
The Latter Years. 233 
 
 the type of nineteenth-century Englishman; the 
 breed of men who established a commercial supre- 
 macy which is (or very lately was) the wonder, the 
 envy, and the jest of the outer world. You cannot 
 create Lancashire and Yorkshire if at the same time 
 you have to guard a ** city of the mind " ; much too 
 embarrassing would be the multitude of uneasy 
 questions rushing in at every new step. This 
 typical Englishman has no ** detachment". In 
 work or play, he must press onward by the world's 
 high-road. In 1857 Dickens 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, going. What I am in that way, nature made 
 me first, and my way of life has of late, alas I con- 
 firmed." It was a moment of peculiar stress, but 
 that was not needed to explain the letter. As I 
 said in the early pages of this essay, a better educa- 
 tion might have done much for Dickens; yet it 
 could hardly have helped him to that ** removed 
 ground " where some few men, even in thriving 
 England, were able to possess their souls in 
 peace. 
 
 His life was ceaseless activity, mental and physi- 
 cal. After an ailing childhood, he grew into health 
 which perhaps was never robust, but which allowed 
 him to expend the energy of three ordinary mortals. 
 He thought nothing of a twenty-mile walk in the 
 odd hours before dinner, and would not be deterred 
 from it by rain or snow. His position obliged him 
 to give a great deal of time to social and public 
 engagements; yet they never interfered with his 
 literary tasks. He was always ready to take the 
 chair at a meeting for any charitable purpose with 
 
234 Charles Dickens. 
 
 which he sympathized, and his speeches on these 
 occasions were masterpieces of their kind. Three 
 of them are worthy of a permanent place among his 
 writings; that spoken on behalf of the Child's Hos- 
 pital; that in which, at the dinner of the Newspaper 
 Press Fund, he gave his recollections of life as a 
 reporter; that for the Theatrical Fund, in which he 
 sketches, as no other man ever did or could have 
 done, the whole world of the stage, with the drollest 
 humour and the kindliest note of pathos. With a 
 popular audience on such occasions he was most 
 perfectly in touch. Never for a moment did his 
 style or thought rise above their heads; never was 
 there a suspicion of condescending. He knew how 
 to bestow pleasant flattery, without ever passing 
 the limits of tact and taste. If ladies were among 
 his hearers, he always put in a word of jesting 
 gallantry which was exactly what they liked and 
 expected. Withal, his talk invariably made appeal 
 to the good and unselfish instincts; it was always 
 admirable common sense; it was always morally 
 profitable. 
 
 The power he had of pursuing his imaginative 
 tasks amid distractions which most men would find 
 fatal, is especially interesting. Read Forster's de- 
 scription of the state of things in Dickens's house 
 just before the Christmas of 1856, whilst Little Dor- 
 rit was being written. ^' Preparations for the 
 private play had gone on incessantly, and in turn- 
 ing the schoolroom into a theatre sawing and ham- 
 mering worthy of Babel continued for weeks." The 
 novelist became stage-carpenter as well as stage- 
 manager. ^^All daylong", he writes in a letter. 
 
The Latter Years. 235 
 
 **a labourer heats size over the fire in a great cru- 
 cible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell it. 
 Seventy paint-pots (which came in a van) adorn the 
 stage." The private play was acted night after 
 night to overflowing audiences, and not till the 20th 
 of January was the house clear and quiet. But 
 fiction-writing went on as usual, with never a hint 
 at difficulty owing to circumstances. 
 
 In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life's 
 literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing 
 such letters; I mean, letters of such length and 
 detail, for the quality is Dickens's own. He evi- 
 dently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page 
 of Forster's *'Life" is occupied with transcription 
 from private correspondence, and never a line of 
 this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preser- 
 vation. If he makes a tour in any part of the British 
 Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of 
 everything that happens, and writes it with such 
 gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, 
 as appear in no other private letters ever given to 
 the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, 
 a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a school-boy. 
 See how he writes from Cornwall, when on a trip 
 with two or three friends, in 1843. ** Heavens! if 
 you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting 
 in their immense variety of shape, peering out of 
 the carriage pockets ! If you could have witnessed 
 the deep devotion of the postboys, the maniac glee 
 of the waiters I If you could have followed us into 
 the earthy old churches we visited, and into the 
 strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down 
 into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of 
 
236 Charles Dickens. 
 
 giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water 
 was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet 
 below! ... I never laughed in my life as I did 
 on this journey. It would have done you good to 
 hear me. I was choking and gasping and burst- 
 ing the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. 
 And Stanfield" — the painter — ''got into such apo- 
 plectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat 
 him on the back with portmanteaus before we could 
 recover him." 
 
 The mention of ''bottles, distracting in their 
 immense variety", leads one to speak of the convivial 
 temper so constantly exhibited in Dickens's letters 
 and books. It might be easily imagined that he 
 was a man of large appetite and something of a 
 toper. Nothing of the kind ; when it came to actual 
 eating and drinking no man was more habitually 
 moderate. I am not much in the way of attending 
 "temperance" meetings, and cannot say whether 
 the advocates of total abstinence make a point of 
 holding up Dickens's works to reprobation ; but I 
 should hardly think they look upon him with great 
 favour. Indeed, it is an odd thing that, writing so 
 much of the London poor, he so seldom refers to 
 the curse of drunkenness. Of drinking there is any 
 amount, but its results serve only for gaiety or comic 
 extravagance. One remembers "Mr. Dolls" in 
 Our Mutual Friend^ a victim to the allurements of 
 gin; he is a pitiful creature, and Jenny, the doll's 
 dressmaker, suffers much from his eccentricities; 
 for all that, we are constrained to laugh at him. A 
 tragedy of drink Dickens never gives us. Criticis- 
 ing Cruikshank's pictured morality, "The Bottle", 
 
The Latter Years. 237 
 
 he points out, truly enough, that the artist had 
 seriously erred in making the habit of drunkenness 
 arise from mere conviviality in persons well-to-do; 
 drink, as a real curse, being commonly the result 
 of overwork, semi-starvation, vile dwellings, and 
 lack of reasonable entertainment. Nowadays he 
 would necessarily have viewed the subject in a 
 graver light. The national habits in this matter 
 have been so greatly changed during the last half- 
 century, that it would now be impossible to glorify 
 the flowing bowl as Dickens does in all his most 
 popular writing. His works must have had a great 
 part in promoting that Christmas joviality which of 
 later years is manifestly on the decline. Whatever 
 the perils of strong drink, his imagination could not 
 dispense with it. One is amused to find him writ- 
 ing to his friend from America: *' I wish you drank 
 punch, dear Forster. It's a shabby thing not to be 
 able to picture you with that cool green glass." 
 How it happened that John Forster, after many 
 years of such intimacy, did not make at all events 
 a show of handling the **cool green glass", passes 
 our comprehension. We hear in Dickens's words 
 a note of humorous, yet true, regret; it seemed 
 impossible to him that a man could be in the enjoy- 
 ment of his fireside if no alcoholic comfort stood at 
 his elbow. Scott, by the by, though as hearty and 
 hospitable a man as ever lived, and in youth no 
 shirker of the bottle, always speaks with grave dis- 
 approbation of excessive conviviality. Possibly a 
 difference of rank accounts for this ; whilst the upper 
 classes were learning to live with prudence and 
 decency, the lower clung to th^ir old habits. Be 
 
238 Charles Dickens. 
 
 that as it may, Dickens could not throw his weight 
 on the side of teetotalism. He held that, if social 
 reforms such as he advocated could only be set in 
 motion, the evils of drink would tend to disappear 
 of themselves. He was right; the tendency showed 
 itself beyond dispute; and if, as some think, drunken- 
 ness is again increasing among us, the cause must 
 be sought in the social conditions of a new time — a 
 civilization fraught, perhaps, with quite as many 
 evils as those of the old order. 
 
 But not only in holiday time did Dickens live 
 with extraordinary gusto ; at his desk he was often 
 in the highest spirits. Behold how he pictured 
 himself, one day at Broadstairs, when he was writ- 
 ing Chuzzlewit, '^ In a bay-window in a one-pair 
 sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with 
 rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and 
 grins, as if he thought he were very funny indeed. 
 At one he disappears, presently emerges from a 
 bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of sal- 
 mon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. 
 After that, he may be viewed in another bay-window 
 on the ground-floor eating a strong lunch ; and after 
 that, walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his 
 back on the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers 
 him, unless they know he is disposed to be talked 
 to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. 
 He's as brown as a berry, and they do say he is as 
 good as a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells 
 beer and cold punch." Here is the secret of such 
 work as that of Dickens ; it is done with delight — 
 done (in a sense) easily, done with the mechanism 
 of mind and body in splendid order. Even so did 
 
The Latter Years. 
 
 239 
 
 Scott write, though more rapidly and with less 
 conscious care; his chapter finished before the 
 world had got up to breakfast. Later, Dickens 
 produced novels less excellent with much more 
 of mental strain. The effects of age could not 
 have shown themselves so soon, but for the unfor- 
 tunate loss of energy involved in his non-literary 
 labours. 
 
 Travel was always a great enjoyment to him, and 
 when on the Continent he largely appreciated the 
 spirit of life dissimilar to that of England. His 
 Pictures from Italy are not of great value either for 
 style or information ; there are better things in his 
 private letters written whilst he travelled than in 
 any volume. For Italy he had no intellectual pre- 
 paration; he saw everything merely with the eyes 
 of intelligence and good-humour. Switzerland and 
 France gave him a better opportunity. Very notice- 
 able is the justice he does to the French character. 
 As a proof of this, and of the fact that his genius 
 did not desert him when he crossed the Channel, 
 nothing could be better than his description of M. 
 Beaucourt, the proprietor of a house he rented at 
 Boulogne. It is a picture — to be put together out 
 of various anecdotes and sketches — really wonderful 
 for its charm. In this little French bourgeois the 
 great novelist had found a man after his own heart — 
 loyal, mirthful, sweet-natured, and made only more 
 likeable by traits especially amusing to an English- 
 man. *' I see little of him now, as, all things being 
 hien arrangees^ he is delicate of appearing. His wife 
 has been making a trip in the country during the 
 last three weeks, but (as he mentioned to me with 
 
240 Charles Dickens. 
 
 his hat in his hand) it was necessary that he should 
 remain here, to be continually at the disposition of 
 the tenant of the property. (The better to do this, 
 he has had roaring dinner-parties of fifteen daily; 
 and the old woman who milks the cows has been 
 fainting up the hill, under vast burdens of cham- 
 pagne.)" And what could be more apt, more 
 beautiful, than the words which describe M. Beau- 
 court as he retires from Dickens's presence, after 
 a little dialogue in which he has shown all the 
 gentle goodness of his heart? *^ He backed himself 
 down the avenue with his cap in his hand, as if he 
 were going to back himself straight into the evening 
 star, without the ceremony of dying first." 
 
 This was at the time of the Anglo-French alliance 
 in the Russian war. How just he could be under 
 less favourable circumstances, and how strongly in 
 contrast with that peculiarly offensive type, the 
 supercilious Englishman abroad, appears in an 
 account of his experiences in leaving Italy by the 
 Austrian frontier. *^The Austrian police are very 
 strict, but they really know how to do business, and 
 they do it. And if you treat them like gentlemen 
 they will always respond. . . . The thing being 
 done at all, could not be better done, or more 
 politely — though I daresay if I had been sucking a 
 gentish cane all the time, or talking in English to 
 my compatriots, it might not unnaturally have been 
 different." Dickens could always hold his own as 
 a man among men. At all times he was something 
 more than a writer of books; in this respect, as in 
 literary genius, establishing his claim of brother- 
 hood with Fielding and with Scott. 
 
The Latter Years. 241 
 
 Reading his life, it is with much satisfaction that 
 we come to his last appearance as a public enter- 
 tainer. The words with which he took leave of his 
 audience at St. James's Hall have frequently been 
 quoted ; they breathe a sense of relief and hopeful- 
 ness very pathetic in the knowledge of what followed. 
 ** In but two short weeks from this time I hope that 
 you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series 
 of readings at which my assistance will be indis- 
 pensable; but from these garish lights I vanish 
 now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respect- 
 ful, affectionate farewell." The garish lights had 
 done their work upon him, but he did not recognize 
 it; he imagined that he had but to sit down in his 
 house at Gadshill, and resume the true, the honour- 
 able occupation of his life, with assurance that 
 before long all would be well with him in mind 
 and body. It was too late, and the book he pro- 
 mised to his hearers remains in our hands a frag- 
 ment. 
 
 Throughout the pages of Edwin Drood there is 
 premonition of the end. Whether it came of feeble 
 health; whether of the melancholy natural in one 
 who has just closed a definite epoch of his life, or 
 merely of the theme he had chosen, there broods over 
 this interrupted writing a shadow of mortality; not 
 oppressive; a shadow as of the summer eventide, de- 
 scending with peaceful hush. We are in and about 
 the old minster of a quiet English town ; among 
 the old graves, to which our attention is constantly 
 directed. It is touching to read that final chapter, 
 which must have brought back to the writer's mind 
 the days long past, when, a little boy, he read and 
 
 (M444) Q 
 
242 Charles Dickens. 
 
 dreamt amid the scenes he was now describing. 
 There is no gloom; he shows us such a brilliant 
 morning as, after a lifetime, will yet linger in the 
 memory from days of earliest childhood. He was 
 tired, but not despondent ; true to himself, he 
 saw the sunshine above the world's dark places, 
 nourished the hope of something beyond this pre- 
 sent. ** Changes of glorious light from moving 
 boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, 
 woods, and fields . . . penetrate into the cathe- 
 dral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the 
 Resurrection and the Life." It was no form of 
 words; what he wrote in that solemn mood as- 
 suredly he believed. Whatever his mistakes and 
 his defects, insincerity had no place among them. 
 
 For him, there could be no truer epitaph than 
 the words written by Carlyle on hearing he was 
 dead: 
 
 '^The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, 
 noble Dickens — every inch of him an honest 
 
Index. 
 
 American Notes ^ 50, 186. 
 Arabian Nights, 30. 
 Ashley, Lord, 10. 
 
 Balzac, 216, 218. 
 
 Barnaby Rudge, 31, 49, 109, 137, 
 
 174, 187, 190, 191- 
 Barnard, Fred, 33. 
 Bleak House, 54, 56, 78, icx), 140, 
 
 169, 177, 188, 190, 192, 202, 
 
 203, 208. 
 Boflfin, 79. 
 Borrow, George, 39. 
 "Boz", 29. 
 British Museum, 34. 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 202. 
 Bumble, 114. 
 
 Carlyle, 27, 65, 198, 227. 
 Carstone, Ricliard, 78. 
 Childhood of Charles Dickens, 21. 
 Child's History of England, A, 
 
 196. 
 Christmas Books, 44, 70, 179. 
 Coincidence, abuse of, 57. 
 Crabbe, 15. 
 Crisparkle, 24, 100. 
 Cruikshank, 33, 236. 
 Cuttle, Captain, 182. 
 
 Daily News, 37. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 216, 224. 
 
 David Copperfield, 19, 54, 83, 10 1, 
 
 139, 159, 193. 
 Death of Charles Dickens, 62. 
 
 Dedlock, Sir L., 100, 203. 
 Doctor Marigold, 76, 80, 178. 
 Dombey attd Son, 53, 66, 77, 78> 
 
 87, 91, loi, 102, 126, 150, 163^ 
 
 176, 207. 
 Dora, 159. 
 Dostoieffsky, 221. 
 
 Editorial work, 66. 
 Education, views on, 22, 1 16. 
 Edwin Drood, 19, 24, 50, 62, 97, 
 
 100, 160, 241. 
 Eliot, George, 81, 214. 
 Essayists, the i8th-Century, 30. 
 
 Farce, as distinct firom Humour^ 
 
 166. 
 Forster, John, 64. 
 
 Gamp, Mrs., 88, 148, 171. 
 Gargery, Joe, 84. 
 George Silverman, 80. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 29. 
 Great Expectations, 55, 60, 95, 
 102, 129, 142, 179, 193. 
 
 Hard Times, 24, 60, 116, 201. 
 Heep, Uriah, 123. 
 Hexam, Charley, 213. 
 Hex am, Lizzie, 77. 
 Hogarth, 31, 89. 
 Holly Tree, The, 165. 
 Hugo, Victor, 219. 
 
 Idealism, 90. 
 
244 
 
 Charles Dickens. 
 
 Jamdyce, John, loo. 
 JefFeries, Richard, i86. 
 Jonson, Ben, 35. 
 Journalism, 37. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 185, 211. 
 Kingsley, Henry, 185. 
 
 Legal world, 97. 
 
 Letters, 235. 
 
 Lirriper, Mrs., 93. 
 
 Little Dorrit, 58, 86, 99, 102, 126, 
 
 128, 145, 150, 156, 159, 173, 178, 
 
 190, 207, 212, 234. 
 Love in novels, 157. 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 50, 66, 69, 88, 
 no, 155, 172, 175, 181, 187, 
 189, 192, 238. 
 
 Master Humphrey's Clock, 48. 
 
 Meredith, George, 90. 
 
 Micawber, 106. 
 
 Middle class, 8. 
 
 Narrative, excellence of, 187. 
 Nicholas Nickleby, 46, 74, 94, 126, 
 
 143, 187, 210. 
 Nickleby, Mrs., 143. 
 Note-book, 53. 
 Novelists, the 1 8th -Century, 26, 
 
 182. 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, 48, 176, 180, 
 
 181, 186, 212. 
 Oliver Twist, 10, 33, 40, 43, 45, 
 
 74, 102, 114, 206. 
 Our Mutual Friend, 59, 77, 78, 
 
 127, 206, 213, 224. 
 
 PecksniJff, 81, 119. 
 PeggOtty, 84. 
 
 Pickwick, 14, 43, 136, 153, 167, 
 
 177, 187, 191. 
 Pictures from Italy, 52. 
 Pinch, Ruth, 161. 
 Pinch, Tom, 121. 
 Pip> 95. 
 
 Reading, early, 26. 
 Readings, public, 61, 228. 
 Religion, views on, 199. 
 Rochester, 18. 
 
 Scott, Sir W., 8, 27, 31, 48, 70, 
 
 109, 197, 237. 
 Seven Poor Travellers, 209. 
 Shakespeare, 229. 
 Sketches by Boz, 40. 
 Skimpole, Harold, 106. 
 Somebody's Luggage, 174. 
 Speeches, 204, 234. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 198. 
 Squeers, 114. 
 Stage, inclination to the, 34. 
 
 Tale of Two Cities, 61. 
 
 Tennyson, 184, 199. 
 
 Thackeray, 16, 37, 68, 71, 77, 87, 
 
 184, 211, 215. 
 Trollope, Anthony, 76. 
 
 Uncommercial Traveller, The, 194, 
 213. 
 
 Varden, Dolly, 153. 
 Varden, Mrs., 137. 
 
 Wellers, Sam and Tony, 170. 
 Wilfer, Bella, 155. 
 Wilkie, David, 33. 
 Women, tragic, 96. 
 
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