Dickens

He had, at the same time, been peculiarly fortunate in finding at Lausanne a circle of pleasant acquaintances, to whom he dedicated the Christmas book which he wrote among the roses and the foliage of his lake-side cottage. Of course The Battle of Life was read aloud by its author to so kindly an audience. The day of parting, however, soon came; on the 16th of November paterfamilias had his “several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of children,” in travelling order, and soon had safely stowed them away at Paris “in the most preposterous house in the world. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes, does not, exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes; the dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The dining-room”—which in another letter he describes as “mere midsummer madness”—“is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room, but it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery.” Here, with the exception of two brief visits to England, paid before his final departure, he spent three months, familiarising himself for the first time of his life with the second of his “Two Cities.”

Dickens came to know the French language well enough to use it with ease, if not with elegance; and he lost no opportunity, it need hardly be said, of resorting to the best of schools for the purpose. Macready, previously addressed from “Altorf,” had made him acquainted with Regnier, of the Théâtre Français, who in his turn had introduced him to the greenroom of the house of Molière. Other theatres were diligently visited by him and Forster, when the latter arrived on a visit; and celebrities were polite and hospitable to their distinguished English confrère. With these, however, Dickens was not cosmopolitan enough to consort except in passing; the love of literary society because it is literary society was at no time one of his predilections or foibles. The streets of Paris were to him more than its salons, more even than its theatres. They are so to a larger number of Englishmen than that which cares to confess it, but Dickens would have been the last to disown the impeachment. They were the proper sphere for his powers of humorous observation, as he afterwards showed in more than one descriptive paper as true to life as any of his London Sketches. And, moreover, he needed the streets for the work which he had in hand. Dombey and Son had been begun at Rosemont, and the first of its twenty monthly numbers had been published in October, 1846. No reader of the book is likely to forget how, after writing the chapter which relates the death of little Paul, Dickens during the greater part of the night wandered restlessly with a heavy heart about the Paris streets. Sooner, however, than he had intended, his residence abroad had to come to a close; and early in 1847 he and his family were again in London.

Dombey and Son has, perhaps, been more criticised than any other amongst the stories of its author; and yet it certainly is not the one which has been least admired, or least loved. Dickens himself, in the brief preface which he afterwards prefixed to the story, assumed a half-defiant air which sits ill upon the most successful author, but which occasionally he was tempted to assume. Before condescending to defend the character of Mr. Dombey as in accordance with both probability and experience, he “made so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of correctly observing the characters of men is a rare one.” Yet, though the drawing of this character is only one of the points which have been objected against the story, not only did the book at the time of publication far surpass its predecessor in popularity, but it has, I believe, always preserved to itself a special congregation of enthusiastic admirers. Manifestly, this novel is one of its author’s most ambitious endeavours. In it, more distinctly even than in Chuzzlewit, he has chosen for his theme one of the chief vices of human nature, and has striven to show what pride cannot achieve, what it cannot conquer, what it cannot withstand. This central idea gives to the story, throughout a most varied succession of scenes, a unity of action to be found in few of Dickens’s earlier works. On the other hand, Dombey and Son shares with these earlier productions, and with its successor, David Copperfield, the freshness of invention and spontaneous flow of both humour and pathos which at times are wanting in the more powerfully conceived and more carefully constructed romances of Dickens’s later years. If there be any force at all in the common remark that the most interesting part of the book ends together with the life of little Paul, the censure falls upon the whole design of the author. Little Paul, in something besides the ordinary meaning of the words, was born to die; and though, like the writer, most readers may have dreaded the hour which was to put an end to that frail life, yet in this case there could be no question—such as was possible in the story of Little Nell—of any other issue. Indeed, deep as is the pathos of the closing scene, its beauty is even surpassed by those which precede it. In death itself there is release for a child as for a man, and for those sitting by the pillow of the patient; but it is the gradual approach of death which seems hardest of all for the watchers to bear; it is the sinking of hope which seems even sadder than its extinction. What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a palpitating heart, that was so visibly expressed in him, so plainly seen by so many people? Every heart is softened and every eye dimmed as the innocent child passes on his way to his grave. The hand of God’s angel is on him; he is no longer altogether of this world. The imagination which could picture and present this mysterious haze of feeling, through which the narrative moves, half like a reality, half like a dream, is that of a true poet, and of a great one.

What even the loss of his son could not effect in Mr. Dombey is to be accomplished in the progress of the story by a yet stronger agency than sorrow. His pride is to be humbled to the dust, where he is to be sought and raised up by the love of his despised and ill-used daughter. Upon the relations between this pair, accordingly, it was necessary for the author to expend the greatest care, and upon the treatment of those relations the criticism to which the character of Mr. Dombey has been so largely subjected must substantially turn. The unfavourable judgments passed upon it have, in my opinion, not been altogether unjust. The problem obviously was to show how the father’s cold indifference towards the daughter gradually becomes jealousy, as he finds that upon her is concentrated, first, the love of his innocent little son, and then that of his haughty second wife; and how hereupon this jealousy deepens into hate. But, unless we are to suppose that Mr. Dombey hated his daughter from the first, the disfavour shown by him on her account to young Walter Gay remains without adequate explanation. His dislike of Florence is not manifestly founded upon his jealousy of what Mrs. Chick calls her brother’s “infatuation” for her; and the main motives at work in the unhappy man are either not very skilfully kept asunder, or not very intelligibly intermixed. Nor are the later stages of the relations between father and daughter altogether satisfactorily conceived. The momentary yielding of Mr. Dombey, after his “coming home” with his new wife, is natural and touching; but his threat to visit his daughter with the consequences of her step-mother’s conduct is sheer brutality. The passage in which Mr. Dombey’s ultimatum to Mrs. Dombey is conveyed by him in her presence through a third person is so artificial as to fall not very far short of absurdity. The closing scene which leads to the flight of Florence is undeniably powerful; but it is the development of the relations between the pair in which the art of the author is in my judgment occasionally at fault.

As to the general effect of the latter part of the story—or rather of its main plot—which again has been condemned as melodramatic and unnatural, a distinction should be drawn between its incidents and its characters. Neither Edith Dombey nor Mr. Carker is a character of real life. The pride of the former comes very near to bad breeding, and her lapses into sentiment seem artificial lapses. How differently Thackeray would have managed the “high words” between her and her frivolous mother! how differently, for that matter, he has managed a not altogether dissimilar scene in the Newcomes between Ethel Newcome and old Lady Kew! As for Mr. Carker, with his white teeth and glistening gums, who calls his unhappy brother “Spaniel,” and contemplates a life of sensual ease in Sicily, he has the semi-reality of the stage. Possibly the French stage had helped to suggest the scène de la pièce between the fugitives at Dijon—an effective situation, but one which many a novelist might have worked out not less skilfully than Dickens. His own master-hand, however, re-asserts itself in the wondrously powerful narrative of Carker’s flight and death. Here again he excites terror—as in the same book he had evoked pity—by foreshadowing, without prematurely revealing, the end. We know what the morning is to bring which rises in awful tranquillity over the victim of his own sins; and, as in Turner’s wild but powerful picture, the engine made by the hand of man for peaceful purposes seems a living agent of wrath.[8 - It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird Signalman’s Story in one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one’s self. There are excellent descriptions of the rapidity of a railway journey in the first chapter of The Lazy Tour, and in another Household Words paper, called A Flight.]

No other of Dickens’s books is more abundantly stocked than this with genuinely comic characters; but nearly all of them, in accordance with the pathetic tone which is struck at the outset, and which never dies out till the story has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. Lord Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment that Dickens should devote so much pains to characters like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably the habit remained with him from his earliest times of authorship, when he had not always distinguished very accurately between the humorous and the bizarre. But Polly and the Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her “select infantine boarding-house,” and the whole of Doctor Blimber’s establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, and up again, in the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., are among the most admirable of all the great humourist’s creations. Against this ample provision for her poor little brother’s nursing and training Florence has to set but her one Susan Nipper; but she is a host in herself, an absolutely original character among the thousands of soubrettes that are known to comedy and fiction, and one of the best tonic mixtures ever composed out of much humour and not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling flavour of its own; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only upon whom she acts, as their type acted upon her, “like early gooseberries.” Of course she has a favourite figure of speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would probably class among the figures “working by surplusage:”

“‘Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs. Richards, but that’s no reason why I need offer ’em the whole set.’”

Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of “labelling” his characters, as it has been called, by particular tricks or terms of speech; and there is a certain excess in this direction already in Dombey and Son, where not only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished forth. But the invention is still so fresh and the play of humour so varied, that this mannerism cannot be said as yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic charm of a peculiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint home over which he mounts guard during the absence of its owner. The nautical colouring and concomitant fun apart—for only Smollett could have drawn Jack Bunsby’s fellow, though the character in his hands would have been differently accentuated—Dickens has never approached more nearly to the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in this singularly attractive part of his book. Elsewhere the story passes into that sphere of society in describing which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. But though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot be denied, human nature in the pigments and figments of her hideous old mother; and, to outward appearance at all events, the counterparts of her apoplectic admirer, Major Bagstock, still pace those pavements and promenades which it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is likewise very far from impossible, and is besides extremely delightful—and a good fellow too at bottom, so that the sting of the satire is here taken away. On the other hand, the meeting between the sacs et parchemins at Mr. Dombey’s house is quite out of focus.

The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant and unpleasant parts and passages. But enough has been said to recall the exuberant creative force, and the marvellous strength of pathos and humour which Dombey and Son proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his powers as a writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his public readings many years afterwards, when he was reciting the adventures of Little Dombey, he narrates that “a very good fellow,” whom he noticed in the stalls, could not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often as he thought that Toots was coming on. And just as Toots had become a reality to this good fellow, so Toots and Toots’s little friend, and divers other personages in this story, have become realities to half the world that reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What higher praise could be given to this wonderful book? Of all the works of its author none has more powerfully and more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to us from the aspect of our own streets and our own homes, he too wielded a wizard’s wand.

After the success of Dombey it might have seemed that nothing further was wanting to crown the prosperity of Dickens’s literary career. While the publication of this story was in progress he had concluded arrangements for the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition, which began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated “to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die.” He who could thus proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all dispute, the people’s chosen favourite among its men of letters. That position he was not to lose so long as he lived; but even at this time the height had not been reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of those who love his writings) he was in his next work to attain.

CHAPTER IV

“DAVID COPPERFIELD.”

[1847-1851.]

The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close of 1851, were most assuredly the season in which the genius of Dickens produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon Dombey and Son; towards its end he was already engaged upon the earliest portions of Bleak House. And it was during the interval that he produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions of our English school—David Copperfield. To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly periodical, Household Words, began to run its course. There was much play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised:

“‘Play!’ said Thomas Idle. ‘Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it “Play.” Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air; ‘you can’t play. You don’t know what it is. You make work of everything!’”

“A man,” added the same easy philosopher, “who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man.” And as at all times in Dickens’s life, so most emphatically in these years when his physical powers seemed ready to meet every demand, and the elasticity of his mind seemed equal to every effort, he did nothing by halves. Within this short space of time not only did he write his best book, and conduct a weekly journal of solid merit through its most trying stage, but he also established his reputation as one of the best “unpolitical” speakers in the country; and as an amateur actor and manager successfully weathered what may be called three theatrical seasons, to the labours and glories of which it would be difficult to find a parallel even in the records of that most exacting of all social amusements. One likes to think of him in these years of vigorous manhood, no longer the fair youth with the flowing locks of Maclise’s charming portrait, but not yet, I suppose, altogether the commanding and rather stern presence of later years. Mr. Frith’s portrait was not painted till 1859, by which time the face occasionally had a more set expression, and the entire personality a more weather-beaten appearance, than this well-known picture suggests. But even eight years before this date, when Dickens was acting in Lord Lytton’s comedy the part of a young man of mode, Mr. Sala’s well-known comparison of his outward man to “some prosperous sea-captain home from a sea-voyage,” was thought applicable to him by another shrewd observer, Mr. R. H. Horne, who says that, fashionable “make-up” notwithstanding, “he presented a figure that would have made a good portrait of a Dutch privateer after having taken a capital prize.” And in 1856 Ary Scheffer, to whom when sitting for his portrait he had excused himself for being a difficult subject, “received the apology as strictly his due, and said, with a vexed air, ‘At this moment, mon cher Dickens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else;’ for which I apologised again.” In 1853, in the sympathetic neighbourhood of Boulogne, he was “growing a mustache,” and, by 1856, a beard of the Henri Quatre type had been added; but even before that time we may well believe that he was, as Mr. Sala says, “one of the few men whose individuality was not effaced by the mournful conventionality of evening-dress.” Even in morning-dress he unconsciously contrived, born actor as he was, to have something unusual about him; and, if report speaks the truth, even at the sea-side, when most prodigal of ease, he was careful to dress the character.

The five years of which more especially I am speaking brought him repeatedly face to face with the public, and within hearing of the applause that was becoming more and more of a necessity to him. They were thus unmistakably amongst the very happiest years of his life. The shadow that was to fall upon his home can hardly yet have been visible even in the dim distance. For this the young voices were too many and too fresh around him behind the garden-wall in Devonshire Terrace, and amongst the autumnal corn on the cliffs at Broadstairs. “They are all in great force,” he writes to his wife, in September, 1850, and “much excited with the expectation of receiving you on Friday;” and I only wish I had space to quote the special report sent on this occasion to the absent mother concerning her precocious three-year-old. What sorrowful experiences he in these years underwent were such as few men escape amongst the chances of life. In 1848 he lost the sister who had been the companion of his earliest days, and three years later his father, whom he had learned to respect as well as love. Not long afterwards his little Dora, the youngest of his flock, was suddenly taken from him. Meanwhile, his old friends clung to him. Indeed, I never heard that he lost the affection of any one who had been attached to him; and though the circle of his real intimates was never greatly widened, yet he was on friendly or even familiar terms with many whose names belong to the history of their times. Amongst these were the late Lord Lytton—then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton—whose splendid abilities were still devoted mainly to literary labours, and between whom and Dickens there were more points of contrast than might at first sight appear. Of Thackeray, too, he seems to have been coming to know more; and with Leech, more especially during a summer sojourn of both their families at Bonchurch, in 1849, he grew intimate. Mr. Monckton Milnes—then, and since as Lord Houghton, semper amicus, semper hospes both to successful merit and to honest endeavour—Lord Carlisle, and others who adorned the great world under more than one of its aspects, were, of course, welcome friends and acquaintances; and even Carlyle occasionally found his way to the house of his staunch admirer, though he might declare that he was, in the language of Mr. Peggotty’s house-keeper, “a lorn lone creature, and everything went contrairy with him.”

It is not very easy to describe the personal habits of a man who is found seeing the spring in at Brighton and the autumn out at Broadstairs, and in the interval “strolling” through the chief towns of the kingdom at the head of a large company of ladies and gentlemen, according to the description which he put into Mrs. Gamp’s mouth, “with a great box of papers under his arm, a-talking to everybody wery indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful.” But since under ordinary circumstances he made, even in outward matters and arrangements of detail, a home for himself wherever he was, and as a rule cared little for the society of companions whose ideas and ways of life were foreign to his own, certain habits had become second nature to him, and to others he adhered with sophistical tenacity. He was an early riser, if for no other reason, because every man in whose work imagination plays its part must sometimes be alone; and Dickens has told us that there was to him something incomparably solemn in the still solitude of the morning. But it was only exceptionally, and when hard-pressed by the necessities of his literary labours, that he wrote before breakfast; in general he was contented with the ordinary working hours of the morning, not often writing after luncheon, and, except in early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, when engaged on a work of fiction, he considered three of his not very large MS. pages a good, and four an excellent, day’s work; and, while very careful in making his corrections clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a morning’s labour had ultimately produced. On the other hand, he was frequently slow in beginning a story, being, as he himself says, affected by something like despondency at such times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it, “going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.” A temperate liver, he was at the same time a zealous devotee of bodily exercise. He had not as yet given up riding, and is found, in 1848, spending the whole of a March day, with Forster, Leech, and Mark Lemon, in riding over every part of Salisbury Plain. But walking exercise was at once his forte and his fanaticism. He is said to have constructed for himself a theory that, to every portion of the day given to intellectual labour should correspond an equal number of hours spent in walking; and frequently, no doubt, he gave up his morning’s chapter before he had begun it, “entirely persuading himself that he was under a moral obligation” to do his twenty miles on the road. By day he found in the London thoroughfares stimulative variety, and at a later date he states it to be “one of his fancies that even his idlest walk must have its appointed destination;” and by night, in seasons of intellectual excitement, he found in these same streets the refreshment of isolation among crowds. But the walks he loved best were long stretches on the cliffs or across the downs by the sea, where, following the track of his “breathers,” one half expects to meet him coming along against the wind at four and a half miles an hour, the very embodiment of energy and brimful of life.

And besides this energy he carried with him, wheresoever he pitched his tent, what was the second cause of his extraordinary success in so much of the business of life as it fell to him to perform. He hated disorder as Sir Artegal hated injustice; and if there was anything against which he took up his parable with burning indignation, it was slovenliness, and half-done work, and “shoddiness” of all kinds. His love of order made him always the most regular of men. “Everything with him,” Miss Hogarth told me, “went as by clock-work; his movements, his absences from home, and the times of his return were all fixed beforehand, and it was seldom that he failed to adhere to what he had fixed.” Like most men endowed with a superfluity of energy, he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not live in a room or in a house till he had put every piece of furniture into its proper place, nor could he begin to work till all his writing-gear was at hand, with no item missing or misplaced. Yet he did not, like so many, combine with these habits and tendencies a saving disposition. “No man,” he said of himself, “attaches less importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want of it, than I do.” His circumstances, though easy, were never such as to warrant a display to which, perhaps, certain qualities of his character might have inclined him; even at a much later date he described himself—rather oddly, perhaps—as “a man of moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive public position.” But, so far as I can gather, he never had a reasonable want which he could not and did not satisfy, though at the same time he cared for very few of the pursuits or amusements that are apt to drain much larger resources than his. He never had to think twice about country or sea-side quarters; wherever it might suit his purpose or fancy to choose them, at one of his south-coast haunts or, for his wife’s health, at Malvern, thither he went; and when the whim seized him for a trip en garçon to any part of England or to Paris, he had only to bid the infallible Anne pack his trunk. He was a provident as well as an affectionate father; but the cost of educating his numerous family seems to have caused him no serious anxiety. In 1849 he sent his eldest son to Eton. And while he had sworn a kind of vendetta against begging-letter writers, and afterwards used to parry the attacks of his pertinacious enemies by means of carefully-prepared written forms, his hand seems to have been at all times open for charity.

Some of these personal characteristics of Dickens were to be brought out with remarkable vividness during the period of his life which forms the special subject of the present chapter. Never was he more thoroughly himself than as a theatrical manager and actor, surrounded by congenial associates. He starred it to his heart’s content at the country seat of his kind Lausanne friends, Mr. and Mrs. Watson. But the first occasion on which he became publicly known in both the above-mentioned capacities was the reproduction of the amateur performance of Every Man in his Humour. This time the audiences were to be in Manchester and Liverpool, where it was hoped that a golden harvest might be reaped for Leigh Hunt, who was at that time in sore straits. As it chanced, a civil-list pension was just about this time—1847—conferred upon the most unaffectedly graceful of all modern writers of English verse. It was accordingly resolved to divert part of the proceeds of the undertaking in favour of a worthy playwright, the author of Paul Pry. The comedy was acted with brilliant success at Manchester, on July 26, and at Liverpool two days later; and then the “managerial miseries,” which Dickens had enjoyed with his whole heart and soul, were over for the nonce. Already, however, in the following year, 1848, an excellent reason was found for their recommencement; and nine performances of Ben Jonson’s play, this time alternated with The Merry Wives of Windsor, were given by Dickens’s “company of amateurs”—the expression is his own—at the Haymarket, and in the theatres of five of the largest towns in the kingdom, for the benefit of Sheridan Knowles. Nothing could have been more honourable than Dickens’s readiness to serve the interests of an actor with whom, but for his own generous temper, he would only a few months before have been involved in a wordy quarrel. In The Merry Wives, the manager acted Justice Shallow to Mark Lemon’s Falstaff. Dame Quickly was played by Mrs. Cowden Clarke, who speedily became a favourite correspondent of Dickens. But the climax of these excitements arrived in the year of wonders, 1851, when, with a flourish of trumpets resounding through the world of fashion as well as of letters, the comedy Not so Bad as We Seem, written for the occasion by Bulwer Lytton, was performed under Dickens’s management at Devonshire House, in the presence of the Queen, for the benefit of the Guild of Literature and Art. The object was a noble one, though the ultimate result of the scheme has been an almost pitiable failure; and nothing was spared, by the host or the actors, to make the effect worthy of it. While some of the most popular men of letters took parts in the clever and effective play, its scenery was painted by some of the most eminent among the English artists. Dickens was fired by the ardour of the enterprise, and, proceeding on his principle that the performance could not possibly “be a success if the smallest pepper-corn of arrangement were omitted,” covered himself and his associates with glory. From Devonshire House play and theatre were transferred to the Hanover Square Rooms, where the farce of Mr. Nightingale’s Diary was included in the performance, of which some vivid reminiscences have been published by one of the few survivors of that noble company, Mr. R. H. Horne. Other accounts corroborate his recollections of the farce, which was the triumph of “gag,” and would have been reckoned a masterpiece in the old commedia dell’ arte. The characters played by Dickens included Sam Weller turned waiter; a voluble barrister by the name of Mr. Gabblewig; a hypochondriac suffering from a prescription of mustard and milk; the Gampish mother of a charity-boy (Mr. Egg); and her brother, a stone-deaf old sexton, who appeared to be “at least ninety years of age.” The last-named assumption seems to have been singularly effective:

“After repeated shoutings (‘It’s of no use whispering to me, young man’) of the word ‘buried’—‘Brewed! Oh yes, sir, I have brewed many a good gallon of ale in my time. The last batch I brewed, sir, was finer than all the rest—the best ale ever brewed in the county. It used to be called in our parts here “Samson with his hair on!” in allusion’—here his excitement shook the tremulous frame into coughing and wheezing—‘in allusion to its great strength.’ He looked from face to face to see if his feat was duly appreciated, and his venerable jest understood by those around; and then, softly repeating, with a glimmering smile, ‘in allusion to its great strength,’ he turned about, and made his exit, like one moving towards his own grave while he thinks he is following the funeral of another.”

From London the company travelled into the country, where their series of performances was not closed till late in the succeeding year, 1852. Dickens was from first to last the manager, and the ruling spirit of the undertaking. Amongst his latest recruits Mr. Wilkie Collins is specially mentioned by Forster. The acquaintance which thus began soon ripened into a close and lasting friendship, and became, with the exception of that with Forster himself, the most important of all Dickens’s personal intimacies for the history of his career as an author.

Speech-making was not in quite the same sense, or to quite the same degree, as amateur acting and managing, a voluntary labour on Dickens’s part. Not that he was one of those to whom the task of occasionally addressing a public audience is a pain or even a burden. Indeed, he was a born orator; for he possessed both that strong and elastic imaginative power which enables a man to place himself at once in sympathy with his audience, and that gift of speech, pointed, playful, and where necessary impetuous, which pleads well in any assembly for any cause. He had moreover the personal qualifications of a handsome manly presence, a sympathetic eye, and a fine flexible voice, which, as his own hints on public speaking show, he managed with care and intelligence. He had, he says, “fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas.” But though a speaker in whom ease bred force, and force ease, he was the reverse of a mere builder of phrases and weaver of periods. “Mere holding forth,” he declared, “I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure.” His innate hatred of talk for mere talk’s sake had doubtless been intensified by his early reporting experiences, and by what had become his stereotyped notion of our parliamentary system. At the Administration Reform meeting in 1855 he stated that he had never before attended a public meeting. On the other hand, he had been for already several years in great request for meetings of a different kind, concerned with the establishment or advancement of educational or charitable institutions in London and other great towns of the country. His addresses from the chair were often of remarkable excellence; and this not merely because crowded halls and increased subscription-lists were their concomitants, and because the happiness of his humour—never out of season, and even on such occasions often singularly prompt—sent every one home in good spirits. In these now forgotten speeches on behalf of Athenæums and Mechanics’ Institutes, or of actors’ and artists’ and newsmen’s charities, their occasional advocate never appears occasional. Instead of seeming to have just mastered his brief while the audience was taking its seats, or to have become for the first time deeply interested in his subject in the interval between his soup and his speech, the cause which Dickens pleads never has in him either an imperfectly informed or a half-indifferent representative. Amongst many charming illustrations of a vein of oratory in which he has been equalled by very few if by any public men of his own or the succeeding generation, I will instance only one address, though it belongs to a considerably later date than the time of David Copperfield. Nothing, however, that Dickens has ever written—not even David Copperfield itself—breathes a tenderer sympathy for the weakness of unprotected childhood than the beautiful little speech delivered by him on February 9, 1858, on behalf of the London Hospital for Sick Children. Beginning with some touches of humour concerning the spoilt children of the rich, the orator goes on to speak of the “spoilt children” of the poor, illustrating with concrete directness both the humorous and the pathetic side of his subject, and after a skilfully introduced sketch of the capabilities and wants of the “infant institution” for which he pleads, ending with an appeal, founded on a fancy of Charles Lamb, to the support of the “dream-children” belonging to each of his hearers: “the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been.” This is true eloquence, of a kind which aims at something besides opening purse-strings. In 1851 he had spoken in the same vein of mixed humour and pathos on behalf of his clients, the poor actors, when, unknown to him, a little child of his own was lying dead at home. But in these years of his life, as indeed at all times, his voice was at the service of such causes as had his sympathy; it was heard at Birmingham, at Leeds, at Glasgow; distance was of little moment to his energetic nature; and as to trouble, how could he do anything by halves?

There was yet a third kind of activity, distinct from that of literary work pure and simple, in which Dickens in these years for the first time systematically engaged. It has been seen how he had long cherished the notion of a periodical conducted by himself, and marked by a unity of design which should make it in a more than ordinary sense his own paper. With a genius like his, which attached itself to the concrete, very much depended at the outset upon the choice of a title. The Cricket could not serve again, and for some time the notion of an omnipresent Shadow, with something, if possible, tacked to it “expressing the notion of its being cheerful, useful, and always welcome,” seemed to promise excellently. For a rather less ambitious design, however, a rather less ambitious title was sought, and at last fortunately found, in the phrase, rendered proverbial by Shakspeare, “Household Words.” “We hope,” he wrote a few weeks before the first number appeared, on March 30, 1850, “to do some solid good, and we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as we can.” But Household Words, which in form and in cost was to be a paper for the multitude, was to be something more than agreeable and useful and cheap. It was to help in casting out the many devils that had taken up their abode in popular periodical literature, the “bastards of the Mountain,” and the foul fiends who dealt in infamous scurrility, and to do this with the aid of a charm more potent than the most lucid argument and the most abundant facts. “In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor,” says the Preliminary Word in the first number, “we would tenderly cherish that light of fancy which is inherent in the human breast.” To this purpose it was the editor’s constant and deliberate endeavour to bind his paper. “Keep ‘Household Words’ imaginative!” is the “solemn and continual Conductorial Injunction” which three years after the foundation of the journal he impresses, with the artful aid of capitals, upon his faithful coadjutor, Mr. W. H. Wills. In his own contributions he was not forgetful of this maxim, and the most important of them, the serial story, Hard Times, was written with the express intention of pointing it as a moral.

There are, I suppose, in addition to the many mysterious functions performed by the editor of a literary journal, two of the very highest significance; in the first place, the choice of his contributors, and then, if the expression may be used, the management of them. In both respects but one opinion seems to exist of Dickens’s admirable qualities as an editor. Out of the many contributors to Household Words, and its kindred successor, All the Year Round—some of whom are happily still among living writers—it would be invidious to select for mention a few in proof of the editor’s discrimination. But it will not be forgotten that the first number of the earlier journal contained the beginning of a tale by Mrs. Gaskell, whose name will long remain a household word in England, both North and South. And a periodical could hardly be deemed one-sided which included among its contributors scholars and writers of the distinction belonging to the names of Forster and Mr. Henry Morley, together with humorous observers of men and things such as Mr. Sala and Albert Smith. On the other hand, Household Words had what every literary journal ought to have, an individuality of its own; and this individuality was, of course, that of its editor. The mannerisms of Dickens’s style afterwards came to be imitated by some among his contributors; but the general unity perceptible in the journal was the natural and legitimate result of the fact that it stood under the independent control of a vigorous editor, assisted by a sub-editor—Mr. W. H. Wills—of rare trustworthiness. Dickens had a keen eye for selecting subjects from a definite field, a ready skill for shaping, if necessary, the articles accepted by him, and a genius for providing them with expressive and attractive titles. Fiction and poetry apart, these articles have mostly a social character or bearing, although they often deviate into the pleasant paths of literature or art; and usually, but by no means always, the scenes or associations with which they connect themselves are of England, English.

Nothing could surpass the unflagging courtesy shown by Dickens towards his contributors, great or small, old or new, and his patient interest in their endeavours, while he conducted Household Words, and afterwards All the Year Round. Of this there is evidence enough to make the records of the office in Wellington Street a pleasant page in the history of journalism. He valued a good workman when he found him, and was far too reasonable and generous to put his own stamp upon all the good metal that passed through his hands. Even in his Christmas Numbers he left the utmost possible freedom to his associates. Where he altered or modified it was as one who had come to know the pulse of the public; and he was not less considerate with novices, than he was frank and explicit with experts, in the writer’s art. The articles in his journal being anonymous, he was not tempted to use names as baits for the public, though many who wrote for him were men or women of high literary reputation. And he kept his doors open. While some editors deem it their duty to ward off would-be contributors, as some ministers of state think it theirs to get rid of deputations, Dickens sought to ignore instead of jealously guarding the boundaries of professional literature. Nothing in this way ever gave him greater delight than to have welcomed and published several poems sent to him under a feigned name, but which he afterwards discovered to be the first-fruits of the charming poetical talent of Miss Adelaide Procter, the daughter of his old friend “Barry Cornwall.”

In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, like the Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with one or more of his familiars, he spared no labour and thought no toil too great. At times, of course, he, like all periodical writers who cannot be merry every Wednesday or caustic every Saturday, felt the pressure of the screw. “As to two comic articles,” he exclaims on one occasion, “or two any sort of articles, out of me, that’s the intensest extreme of no-goism.” But, as a rule, no great writer ever ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His “Uncommercial Travels,” as he at a later date happily christened them, familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects of London his long walks had still left unexplored; and he was as conscientious in hunting up the details of a complicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an obscure pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and “commissioners” assisted him in his labours; but he was no roi fainéant on the editorial sofa which he so complacently describes. Whether he was taking A Walk in a Workhouse, or knocking at the door of another with the supernumerary waifs in Whitechapel, or On (night) Duty with Inspector Field among the worst of the London slums, he was always ready to see with his own eyes; after which the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more properly journalistic, but he is most delightful when he takes his ease in his English or his French Watering-place, or carries his readers with him on A Flight to Paris, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless succession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of all is he when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins—this, however, not until the autumn of 1857—he starts on The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, the earlier chapters of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget himself to enforce the claim of his journal to strengthen the imaginary side of literature. In an assumed character he allows a veteran poet to carry him By Rail to Parnassus, and even good-humouredly banters an old friend, George Cruikshank, for having committed Frauds on the Fairies by re-editing legendary lore with the view of inculcating the principle of total abstinence.

Such, then, were some of the channels in which the intense mental and physical energy of Dickens found a congenial outlet in these busy years. Yet in the very midst of this multifarious activity the mysterious and controlling power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already said, holds, and will always continue to hold, a place of its own among its works. “Of all my books,” he declares, “I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child—and his name is David Copperfield!” He parted from the story with a pang, and when in after life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to master the emotions which it recalled; perhaps even he hardly knew what the effort of its production had cost him.

The first number of David Copperfield was published in May, 1849—the last in November, 1850. To judge from the difficulty which Dickens found in choosing a title for his story—of which difficulty plentiful evidence remains in MS. at South Kensington—he must have been fain to delay longer even than usual on the threshold. In the end the name of the hero evolved itself out of a series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to Copperboy, Copperstone—“Copperfull” being reserved as a lectio varians for Mrs. Crupp—and Copperfield. Then at last the pen could fall seriously to work, and, proceeding slowly at first—for the first page of the MS. contains a great number of alterations—dip itself now into black, now into blue ink, and in a small writing, already contrasting with the bolder hand of earlier days, produce page upon page of an incomparable book. No doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to David Copperfield, and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in the story. Until the publication of Forster’s Life no reader of Copperfield could be aware of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of Dickens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully playful humor, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyl of the loves of Doady and Dora—with Jip, as Dora’s father might have said, intervening—there were, besides the reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man’s unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed disappointment—the sense that “there was always something wanting.” But in order to be affected by a personal or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very existence. Amelia would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking the existence of an autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be there. But it had far better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused this particular stream of metal with the mass filling his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with David Copperfield, which of all Dickens’s fictions is on the whole the most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in the author’s breast are, as effects, harmonised with local associations old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by Dickens for the first time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his materials.

As to the construction of David Copperfield, however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy’s old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The boy’s flight from London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity, as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. Thus, there is real art in the way in which the scene of Barkis’s death—written with admirable moderation—prepares for the “greater loss” at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire treatment of his hero’s double love story Dickens has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in Esmond and in Adam Bede. The best constructed part of David Copperfield is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of which—except in its very beginnings—it forms no integral part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of David Copperfield might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole literature of modern fiction.

Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpass the history of the picnic—where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an imaginary rival, “Red Whisker,” made the salad—how could they eat it?—and “voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, being an ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk of a tree.” Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative of the young house-keeping David’s real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyl almost imperceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here irresistible.

The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other books indulged itself so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dickens had copied from a living original; but receiving a remonstrance from the latter, he good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character, and thereby spoiled what there was in it—not much, in my opinion—to spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of eccentric personages—mad people, in a word—for which Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. David’s Aunt is a figure which none but a true humourist such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she must have sprung from the author’s brain armed cap-à-pie as she appeared in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still pointed out where the “one great outrage of her life” was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the “salt” division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr. Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and a merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine character was never conceived than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and her mind made up not to desert Mr. Micawber. Delightful too in his way, though of a class more common in Dickens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray’s Inn, with the dearest girl in the world and her five sisters, including the beauty, on a visit, may have been suggested by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days. In contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, villanous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without being overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that Dickens’s satirical power most diversely displayed itself; and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, the valet Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself could not have surpassed.

Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mood of manhood pervading it from first to last. The reality of David Copperfield is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful art. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author put into it his life’s blood.

CHAPTER V

CHANGES

[1852-1858.]

I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles Dickens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man’s house is truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little before, come to such a pass that he wrote to his faithful friend: “I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.” Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him—the boy whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which no eccentric humours and fantastic sobriquets could conceal. In May, 1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself.

In the earlier of these years Dickens’s movements were still very much of the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his working hours in this and the following year—the spring of which was partly spent at Brighton—he was engaged upon his new story, Bleak House, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853. “To let you into a secret,” he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary Boyle, from Dover, “I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as Copperfield. But I foresee, I think, some very good things in Bleak House.” There is no reason to believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its predecessor. According to the author’s own testimony it “took extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months” of its issue, and “retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old Copperfield by a round ten thousand or more.” To this day the book has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On the other hand, Bleak House was probably the first of Dickens’s works which furnished a suitable text to a class of censors whose precious balms have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of amusing being graciously conceded to the “man of genius,” his book was charged with “absolute want of construction,” and with being a heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a number of “odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit.” Of the characters themselves it was asserted that, though in the main excessively funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised, it was regretted that Dickens should never have succeeded in drawing “a man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy.” He belonged, unfortunately, “in literature to the same class as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the illustrator in range and power.” In other words, he was essentially a caricaturist.

As applied to Bleak House, with which I am at present alone concerned, this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to Bleak House may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as compared, not with Pickwick and Nickleby, but with its immediate predecessor, David Copperfield, this novel exhibits a decided advance in that respect. In truth, Dickens in Bleak House for the first time emancipated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less consciously adopted—the novel of adventure, of which the person of the hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element. It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about this time praising for his unlikeness to the “conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes,” was already teaching something to, as well as learning something from, the elder. It may also be that the criticism which as editor of Household Words Dickens was now in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of others, unconsciously affected his own methods and processes. Certain it is that from this point of view Bleak House may be said to begin a new series among his works of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of those concerned in it are not a disconnected background from which the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s secret stands forth in relief; but the two main parts of the story are skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot. Nor is the success of the general action materially affected by the circumstance that the tone of Esther Summerson’s diary is not altogether true. At the same time there is indisputably some unevenness in the construction of Bleak House. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in some of its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the reader is strongly revived when that popular favourite, Mr. Inspector Bucket, appears on the scene, and when, more especially in the admirably vivid narrative of Esther’s journey with the detective, the nearness of the catastrophe exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery, moreover—such as the Smallweed family’s part in the plot—is tiresome; and particular incidents are intolerably horrible or absurd—such as on the one hand the spontaneous combustion (which is proved possible by the analogy of historical facts!), and on the other the intrusion of the oil-grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s grief. But in general the parts of the narrative are well knit together; and there is a subtle skill in the way in which the two main parts of the story converge towards their common close.

The idea of making an impersonal object like a great Chancery suit the centre round which a large and manifold group of characters revolves, seems to savour of a drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme suggested itself to Dickens with a very real purpose, and on the basis of facts which he might well think warranted him in his treatment of it; for, true artist though he was, the thought of exposing some national defect, of helping to bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his mind over any mere literary conception. Primâ facie, at least, and with all due deference to Chancery judges and eminent silk gowns like Mr. Blowers, the length of Chancery suits was a real public grievance, as well as a frequent private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the idea of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce as diversely affecting those who lived by it, those who rebelled against it, those who died of it, was, in its way, of unique force; and while Dickens never brought to any other of his subjects so useful a knowledge of its external details—in times gone by he had served a “Kenge and Carboys” of his own—hardly any one of those subjects suggested so wide a variety of aspects for characteristic treatment.

For never before had his versatility in drawing character filled his canvas with so multitudinous and so various a host of personages. The legal profession, with its servitors and hangers-on of every degree, occupies the centre of the picture. In this group no figure is more deserving of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a four-wheeled affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy manifests itself. We learn very little about him, and probably care less; but he interests us precisely as we should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about whom we might know and care equally little, were we to find him alone in the twilight, drinking his ancient port in his frescoed chamber in those fields where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr. Forster, by-the-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the piety of American research has since put on record, that Mr. Tulkinghorn’s house was a picture of the biographer’s own residence.) The portrait of Mr. Vholes, who supports an unassailable but unenviable professional reputation for the sake of “the three dear girls at home,” and a father whom he has to support “in the Vale of Taunton,” is less attractive; but nothing could be more in its place in the story than the clammy tenacity of this legal ghoul and his “dead glove.” Lower down in the great system of the law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very quintessence of cockney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour of legal sharpness without which the rankness of the mixture would be incomplete. To the legal group Miss Flite, whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the Temple as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, may likewise be said to belong. She is quite legitimately introduced into the story—which cannot be said of all Dickens’s madmen—because her madness associates itself with its main theme.

Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of an eccentric by or under plot in this story, in which the family of the Jellybys and the august Mr. Turveydrop are, actively, or by passive endurance, engaged. The philanthropic section of le monde où l’on s’ennuie has never been satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bitterly. Perhaps at the time of the publication of Bleak House the activity of our Mrs. Jellybys took a wider and more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for we read at the end of Esther’s diary how Mrs. Jellyby “has been disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody—who survived the climate—for rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one.” But Mrs. Jellyby’s interference in the affairs of other people is after all hurtful only because in busying herself with theirs she forgets her own. The truly offensive benefactress of her fellow-creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and tract in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. Among her victims are her own children, including Alfred, aged five, who has been induced to take an oath “never to use tobacco in any form.”

The particular vein of feeling that led Dickens to the delineation of these satirical figures was one which never ran dry with him, and which suggested some forcible-feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it a vein of feeling only; for he could hardly have argued in cold blood that the efforts which he ridicules were not misrepresented as a whole by his satire. When poor Jo on his death-bed is “asked whether he ever knew a prayer,” and replies that he could never make anything out of those spoken by the gentlemen who “came down Tom-all-Alone’s a-prayin’,” but who “mostly sed as the t’other wuns prayed wrong,” the author brings a charge which he might not have found it easy to substantiate. Yet—with the exception of such isolated passages—the figure of Jo is in truth one of the most powerful protests that have been put forward on behalf of the friendless outcasts of our streets. Nor did the romantic element in the conception interfere with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at first to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the story, is in Dickens’s best pathetic manner, the Bagnet family is in his happiest vein of quiet humour. Mr. Inspector Bucket, though not altogether free from mannerism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For this character, as the pages of Household Words testify, Dickens had made many studies in real life. The detective police-officer had at that time not yet become a standing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the detective of real life begun to destroy the illusion.

Bleak House was least of all among the novels hitherto published by its author obnoxious to the charge persistently brought against him, that he was doomed to failure in his attempts to draw characters taken from any but the lower spheres of life—in his attempts, in short, to draw ladies and gentlemen. To begin with, one of the most interesting characters in the book—indeed, in its relation to the main idea of the story, the most interesting of all—is the youthful hero, if he is to be so called, Richard Carson. From the very nature of the conception the character is passive only; but the art and feeling are in their way unsurpassed with which the gradual collapse of a fine nature is here exhibited. Sir Leicester Dedlock, in some measure intended as a type of his class, has been condemned as wooden and unnatural; and no doubt the machinery of that part of the story in which he is concerned creaks before it gets under way. On the other hand, after the catastrophe has overwhelmed him and his house, he becomes a really fine picture, unmarred by any Grandisonianisms in either thought or phrase, of a true gentleman, bowed but not warped by distress. Sir Leicester’s relatives, both dead and living; Volumnia’s sprightly ancestress on the wall, and that “fair Dedlock” herself; the whole cousinhood, debilitated and otherwise, but of one mind on such points as William Buffy’s blameworthy neglect of his duty when in office; all these make up a very probable picture of a house great enough—or thinking itself great enough—to look at the affairs of the world from the family point of view. In Lady Dedlock alone a failure must be admitted; but she, with her wicked double, the uncanny French maid Hortense, exists only for the sake of the plot.

With all its merits, Bleak House has little of that charm which belongs to so many of Dickens’s earlier stories, and to David Copperfield above all. In part, at least, this may be due to the excessive severity of the task which Dickens had set himself in Bleak House; for hardly any other of his works is constructed on so large a scale, or contains so many characters organically connected with the progress of its plot; and in part, again, to the half-didactic, half-satirical purport of the story, which weighs heavily on the writer. An overstrained tone announces itself on the very first page; an opening full of power—indeed, of genius—but pitched in a key which we feel at once will not, without effort, be maintained. On the second page the prose has actually become verse; or how else can one describe part of the following apostrophe?

“‘This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”’”

It was possibly with some thought of giving to Bleak House also, though in a different way, the close relation to his experiences of living men to which David Copperfield had owed so much, that Dickens introduced into it two portraits. Doubtless, at first, his intention had by no means gone so far as this. His constant counsellor always disliked his mixing up in his fictitious characters any personal reminiscences of particular men, experience having shown that in such cases the whole character came out more like than the author was aware. Nor can Dickens himself have failed to understand how such an experiment is always tempting, and always dangerous; how it is often irreconcilable with good feeling, and quite as often with good taste. In Bleak House, however, it occurred to him to introduce likenesses of two living men, both more or less well known to the public and to himself; and both of individualities too clearly marked for a portrait, or even a caricature, of either to be easily mistaken. Of that art of mystification which the authors of both English and French romans à clef have since practised with so much transient success, he was no master, and fortunately so; for what could be more ridiculous than that the reader’s interest in a character should be stimulated, first, by its being evidently the late Lord P-lm-rst-n or the P– of O–, and then by its being no less evidently somebody else? It should be added that neither of the two portrait characters in Bleak House possesses the least importance for the conduct of the story, so that there is nothing to justify their introduction except whatever excellence may belong to them in themselves.

Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin as drawn from Walter Savage Landor with his intellectual greatness left out. It was, of course, unlikely that his intellectual greatness should be left in, the intention obviously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways and manner, with a suggestion of what was noble in the character, of Dickens’s famous friend. Whether, had he attempted to do so, Dickens could have drawn a picture of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who could put into a classic dialogue that sense of the naïf to which Dickens is generally a stranger, yet passionately admired the most sentimental of all his young friend’s poetic figures; and it might almost be said that the intellectual natures of the two men were drawn together by the force of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate with one another during Landor’s residence at Bath—which began in 1837—and they frequently met at Gore House. At a celebration of the poet’s birthday in his lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of Landor, “the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its creator.” In Landor’s spacious mind there was room for cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius differed widely from that of his own; and he could thus afford to sympathise with his whole heart in a creation which men of much smaller intellectual build have pronounced mawkish and unreal. Dickens afterwards gave to one of his sons the names of Walter Landor; and when the old man died at last, after his godson, paid him an eloquent tribute of respect in All the Year Round. In this paper the personal intention of the character of Boythorn is avowed by implication; but though Landor esteemed and loved Dickens, it might seem matter for wonder, did not eccentrics after all sometimes cherish their own eccentricity, that his irascible nature failed to resent a rather doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the word, humorous. But the portrait, however imperfect, was in this instance, beyond all doubt, both kindly meant and kindly taken; though it cannot be said to have added to the attractions of the book into which it is introduced.

While no doubt ever existed as to this likeness, the case may not seem so clear with regard to the original of Harold Skimpole. It would be far more pleasant to pass by without notice the controversy—if controversy it can be called—which this character provoked; but a wrong done by one eminent man of letters to another, however unforeseen its extent may have been, and however genuine the endeavour to repair its effect, becomes part of literary history. That the original of Harold Skimpole was Leigh Hunt cannot reasonably be called into question. This assertion by no means precludes the possibility, or probability, that a second original suggested certain features in the portrait. Nor does it contradict the substantial truthfulness of Dickens’s own statement, published in All the Year Round after Leigh Hunt’s death, on the appearance of the new edition of the Autobiography with Thornton Hunt’s admirable introduction. While, Dickens then wrote, “he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend,” yet “he no more thought, God forgive him! that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature, than he had himself ever thought of charging the blood of Desdemona and Othello on the innocent Academy model who sat for Iago’s leg in the picture. Even as to the mere occasional manner,” he declared that he had “altered the whole of that part of the text, when two intimate friends of Leigh Hunt—both still living—discovered too strong a resemblance to his ‘way.’” But, while accepting this statement, and suppressing a regret that after discovering the dangerous closeness of the resemblance Dickens should have, quite at the end of the story, introduced a satirical reference to Harold Skimpole’s autobiography—Leigh Hunt’s having been published only a year or two before—one must confess that the explanation only helps to prove the rashness of the offence. While intending the portrait to keep its own secret from the general public, Dickens at the same time must have wished to gratify a few keen-sighted friends. In March, 1852, he writes to Forster, evidently in reference to the apprehensions of his correspondent: “Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him singularly unlike the great original.” The “great original” was a man for whom, both before and after this untoward incident in the relations between them, Dickens professed a warm regard, and who, to judge from the testimony of those who knew him well,[9 - Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the Bibliography of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, who has kindly communicated to me part of his collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle against Leigh Hunt repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, unworthy of notice.] and from his unaffected narrative of his own life, abundantly deserved it. A perusal of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography suffices to show that he used to talk in Skimpole’s manner, and even to write in it; that he was at one period of his life altogether ignorant of money matters, and that he cultivated cheerfulness on principle. But it likewise shows that his ignorance of business was acknowledged by him as a misfortune in which he was very far from exulting. “Do I boast of this ignorance?” he writes. “Alas! I have no such respect for the pedantry of absurdity as that. I blush for it, and I only record it out of a sheer painful movement of conscience, as a warning to those young authors who might be led to look upon such folly as a fine thing, which at all events is what I never thought it myself.” On the other hand, as his son showed, his cheerfulness, which was not inconsistent with a natural proneness to intervals of melancholy, rested on grounds which were the result of a fine as well as healthy morality. “The value of cheerful opinions,” he wrote, in words embodying a moral that Dickens himself was never weary of enforcing, “is inestimable; they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him, and consequently they ought to be religiously inculcated upon his children.” At the same time, no quality was more conspicuous in his life than his readiness for hard work, even under the most depressing circumstances; and no feature was more marked in his moral character than his conscientiousness. “In the midst of the sorest temptations,” Dickens wrote of him, “he maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain; and in all public and private transactions he was the very soul of truth and honour.” To mix up with the outward traits of such a man the detestable obliquities of Harold Skimpole was an experiment paradoxical even as a mere piece of character-drawing. The merely literary result is a failure, while a wound was needlessly inflicted, if not upon Leigh Hunt himself, at least upon all who cherished his friendship or good name. Dickens seems honestly and deeply to have regretted what he had done, and the extremely tasteful little tribute to Leigh Hunt’s poetic gifts which, some years before the death of the latter, Dickens wrote for Household Words,[10 - By Rail to Parnassus, June 16, 1855.] must have partaken of the nature of an amende honorable. Neither his subsequent repudiation of unfriendly intentions, nor his earlier exertions on Leigh Hunt’s behalf, are to be overlooked, but they cannot undo a mistake which forms an unfortunate incident in Dickens’s literary life, singularly free though that life, as a whole, is from the miseries of personal quarrels, and all the pettinesses with which the world of letters is too familiar.

While Dickens was engaged upon a literary work such as would have absorbed the intellectual energies of most men, he not only wrote occasionally for his journal, but also dictated for publication in it, the successive portions of a book altogether outside his usual range of authorship. This was A Child’s History of England, the only one of his works that was not written by his own hand. A history of England, written by Charles Dickens for his own or any one else’s children, was sure to be a different work from one written under similar circumstances by Mr. Freeman or the late M. Guizot. The book, though it cannot be called a success, is, however, by no means devoid of interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and printed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, then a hopeful student of the age of five, which was composed, as he informed Douglas Jerrold at the time, “in the exact spirit” of that advanced politician’s paper, “for I don’t know what I should do if he were to get hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the parrots’ necks in his very cradle.” The Child’s History of England is written in the same spirit, and illustrates more directly, and, it must be added, more coarsely, than any of Dickens’s other works his hatred of ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan is pervaded by a prejudice which is the fruit of anything but knowledge; Edward the Confessor is “the dreary old” and “the maudlin Confessor;” and the Pope and what belongs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To be sure, if King John is dismissed as a “miserable brute,” King Henry the Eighth is not more courteously designated as a “blot of blood and grease upon the history of England.” On the other hand, it could hardly be but that certain passages of the national story should be well told by so great a master of narrative; and though the strain in which parts of the history of Charles the Second are recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the young, to whom irony is in general caviare indeed, yet there are touches both in the story of “this merry gentleman”—a designation which almost recalls Fagin—and elsewhere in the book not unworthy of its author. Its patriotic spirit is quite as striking as its Radicalism; and vulgar as some of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow in the passage on King Alfred, which declares the “English-Saxon” character to have been “the greatest character among the nations of the earth;” and there is a yet nobler enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any writer’s while to infuse into the young, in the passionate earnestness with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the truth is enforced that “nothing can make war otherwise than horrible.”