A Letter Book

    Dec. 12th. 1838.

Respected Sir,

I have given Squeers one cut on the neck and two on the head, at which he appeared much surprised and began to cry, which, being a cowardly thing, is just what I should have expected from him – wouldn't you?

I have carefully done what you told me in your letter about the lamb and the two "sheeps" for the little boys. They have also had some good ale and porter, and some wine. I am sorry you didn't say what wine you would like them to have. I gave them some sherry, which they liked very much, except one boy, who was a little sick and choked a good deal. He was rather greedy, and that's the truth, and I believe it went the wrong way, which I say served him right, and I hope you will say so too.

Nicholas had his roast lamb, as you said he was to, but he could not eat it all, and says if you do not mind his doing so he should like to have the rest hashed to-morrow with some greens, which he is very fond of, and so am I. He said he did not like to have his porter hot, for he thought it spoilt the flavour, so I let him have it cold. You should have seen him drink it. I thought he never would have left off. I also gave him three pounds of money, all in sixpences, to make it seem more, and he said directly that he should give more than half to his mamma and sister, and divide the rest with poor Smike. And I say he is a good fellow for saying so; and if anybody says he isn't I am ready to fight him whenever they like – there!

Fanny Squeers shall be attended to, depend upon it. Your drawing of her is very like, except that I don't think the hair is quite curly enough. The nose is particularly like hers, and so are the legs. She is a nasty disagreeable thing, and I know it will make her very cross when she sees it; and what I say is that I hope it may. You will say the same I know – at least I think you will.

I meant to have written you a long letter, but I cannot write very fast when I like the person I am writing to, because that makes me think about them, and I like you, and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight o'clock at night, and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when it is my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not say anything more besides this – and that is my love to you and Neptune; and if you will drink my health every Christmas Day I will drink yours – come.

    I am,
    Respected Sir,
    Your affectionate Friend.

P.S. I don't write my name very plain,[128 - Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.] but you know what it is you know, so never mind.

50. To Mr. W. C. Macready

    Saturday, May 24th, 1851.

My dear Macready,

We are getting in a good heap of money for the Guild. The comedy has been very much improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in the play. And there is a farce to be produced on Tuesday next, wherein a distinguished amateur will sustain a variety of assumption-parts, and in particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on Wednesday or Thursday.

Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you think of us among the London fleas! But they tell me you are coming in for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town to attend to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in the streets. They will misdirect you for what the vulgar call "a lark," meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into some respectable shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by his being dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his hat being made of sticking-plaster. You may perhaps see in some odd place an intelligent-looking man, with a curious little wooden table before him and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but don't do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These, too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy should be), I would recommend you to see – at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Anybody will show it to you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile, recollect. Porter is twopence per pint; what is called stout is fourpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these will please you after a time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can serve you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your happy family, so remote from this Babel.

Believe me, my dear Friend,

    Ever affectionately yours.
    [Charles Dickens]

P.S. I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of King Charles the First.[129 - "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's Not so Bad as we Seem, acted by Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years ago, and about to be reproduced in loco as these proofs are being revised.]

51. To Mr. Edmund Yates

    Tavistock House,
    Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. 1858.

My dear Yates,

Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text is not "Which his 'owls was organs." When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he never took his hands away from his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby." On encountering that spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution) "took with fits." For this distressing complaint he was medically treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid him on his back upon the airy stones" – please to observe what follows – "and she was told, to ease her mind, his 'owls was organs."

That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counterpane, and not yet "put comfortable," hears a noise apparently proceeding from the backyard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner: "What 'owls are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor, looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs. Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam? – no, no, no! What are we thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am, organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."

    Yours faithfully, [C. D.]

CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)

There are some people who, while thinking that the author of Westward Ho! has not, at least recently, been given his due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings Kingsley was inaccurate, – almost (as his friend and brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.

But none of his foibles – not even corn-treading – is a fatal defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good chance here, and his Letters and Memoirs have been deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot show in full the really exceptional versatility which enabled the same man to write Yeast and Westward Ho!, Andromeda and The Water Babies, the best of the Essays and the best of the Sermons, Alton Locke and At Last. But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed in one respect – as a writer – Kingsley is perhaps better in his letters than in his Essays, where he too often affects a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds. The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied character – as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman, and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him – "the most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men of letters I know nothing so rare as this."

It is true that the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays was an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman were almost fresh, he writes that he has read The Dream of Gerontius "with admiration and awe." θυμός, in this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on the other side we get, through him of As You Like It, an explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow, did it sulkily.

52. To Tom Hughes, Esq.

    Jan. 12. 1857.

I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his cock-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment frankly. Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in? So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company, I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint. Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I have good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class below. They are effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than in fancying that by keeping down manly θυμός, which Plato saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and 'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy. Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of – , who cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when he saw the melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and would try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at Hurst… We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over Hazeley Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and a streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight, and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if you can get a horse through that clay vale, why then you can get him 'mostwards'; leastwise so I find, for a black region it is, and if you ain't in the same field with the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all supernumerary vegetations. Actually I was pounded in a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the amount of green stuff in these parts. Come and see me, and take the old mare out, and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

The peculiar wilfulness – the unkind called it wrong-headedness – which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of displaying itself in all his work, public as well as private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he chosen, might as well have taken another – while he might have chosen this in some which do not actually call themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference, except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume of Modern Painters to Verona in time, or from The Seven Lamps of Architecture to Unto This Last in subject. If anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets the benefit of both very often – of a curious study of high character and great powers uncontrolled by logical self-criticism almost always. The following – part of a still longer letter which he addressed to the Daily Telegraph, Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question – was of course written for publication, but so, practically, was everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but much of his nobler idealism, while it is a capital example of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam" are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom, tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity enough" – the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper had printed, hoc instead of hac. "A book of Scripture," Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a baby-farmer of the day.

53. From "The Daily Telegraph"

    September 18, 1865.

DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir,

I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse, understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families. The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio, or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And, indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth, that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him. That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.

The relation of master and servant involves every other – touches every condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good. You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic, have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them: for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education would sometimes start to be reminded that his "noctes coenaeque Deum!" meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader in the Art-Journal for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted in the last paper of the Idler?

"I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched in poverty; and beloved by the gods."

"Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body, has now found deliverance for that also."

How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last legend, and write —

"This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has now found captivity for that also."

I will not pass without notice – for it bears also on wide interests – your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply, but determines what ought to be demanded and what can be supplied. A child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.

Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself – for the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be knights among us, who will need squires – captains among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate? Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill? Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It might come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they are so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again, instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.

ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON

(1850-1894)

The author of Treasure Island (invariably known to his friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved in the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that of our Matthew on Shelley. For a short time some of these friends – not perhaps the wisest of them – were inclined to regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer of criticisms and miscellaneous articles – a sort of new Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the New Arabian Nights than they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen for a long time – such as, in respect of anything imitable, had never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in with these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure Romance, and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar. On the other hand his letters are almost as good as his fiction, and not in the least open to the charges of a certain non-naturalness of style – even of thought – which could, justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their "touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference to its context) need not be discussed.