THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES sst date stamped below UNIVERSITY OF CAliFORr" LIBRARY, i-OS ANGELES. CALIF. i,j\t% o ko-ir (gngibl) Mtn of Cctters EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY CHARLES DICKENS 2)icF?ens by ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, LL.D., Litt.D. AUTHOR OF "HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMATIC LITERATURE" "CHAUCER" ETC. Bnalisb /iDen of Xettcrs EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY . ^i I • I I t « HARPER &■ BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1902 f'. 7 9 7 r. % .< ?o « • c • • • • • ^ c • • • • vV %\ PREFACE. At the close of a letter addressed by Dickens to his friend John Forster, but not to be found in the English editions of the Life, the writer adds to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words : " I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." Dickens was a man of few close friendships — "his breast, "he said, "would not hold many people" — but, of these friend- ships, that with Forster was one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. To Dickens, at least, his futiu-e biogra- pher must have been the embodiment of two qualities rarely combined in equal measure — discretion and candour. In lit- erary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was given, and nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of Dickens passed through his faithful helpmate's hands. Nor were there many important decisions formed by Dickens con- cerning himself in the course of his manhood to which Forster was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once coim- selled in vain. On Mr. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, together with the three volumes of Letters collected by Dickens's eldest daughter and his sister-in-law — his "dearest and best friend" — it is superfluous to state that the biographical portion of the follow- ing essay is mainly based. It may be superfluous, but it can- not be considered impertinent, if I add that the shortcomings of the Life have, in my opinion, been more frequently pro- claimed than defined ; and that its merits are those of its author as weU as of its subject. My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me in connexion with the production of this little volume by Miss W PREFACE. Hogarth, Mr. Charles Dickens, Professor Henry Morley, Mr. Alexander Ireland, Mr. John Evans, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Britton. Mr. Evans has kindly enabled me to correct some inaccuracies in Mr. Forster's account of Dickens's early Chat- ham days on unimpeachable first-hand evidence. I also beg Captain and Mrs. Budden to accept my thanks for allowing me to see Gad's Hill Place. I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Libra- rian of the Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in affording me much useful aid and informa- tion. With the kind permission of Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of Dickens's life, in the period 1838- '41, from a hitherto unpublished source — a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of TJie Law and Com- mercial Daily Remembrancer for those years. These volumes formed no part of the Forster bequest, but vpere added to it, under certain conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief ; and sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another with no other note than "Work." Mr. R. H. Shepherd's Bibliography of Dickens has been of considerable service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as a charming reminiscence of the connexion between Charles Dickens and Rochester, Mr. Robert Langton's sketches illustrating a paper recently printed under that title ? Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to nve on thiS;, any more than on former occa- sions. A. W. W. CONTENTS. PA«T! PRSrACB V CHAPTER I. Before "Pickwick" 1 CHAPTER II. From Success to Success 20 CHAPTER ni. Strange Lands 49 CHAPTER rV. '^'DaTID COPPERriELD" 86 CHAPTER V. Changes 108 CHAPTER VI. Last Years 346 CHAPTER Vll. The Futcrk or Dickens's Fame 192 DICKENS. CHAPTER I. BEFORE " PICKWICK." [1812-1836.] Charles Dickexs, the eldest son, and the second of the eight children, of John and Elizabeth Dickens, was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on Friday, February Y, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huff- ham. His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay OflBce, and employed in the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was recalled to London when his eldest son was only two ye,ars of age ; and two years afterwards was transferred to Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 1821. Thus Chatham, and the more venerable city of Rochester adjoining, with their neighbourhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodland and marshes, be- came, in the words of Dickens's biographer, the_birthplace of his fancj. He looked upon himself as, to all intents and purposes, a Kentish man born and bred, and his heart was always in this particular corner of the incomparable county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred Jingle's spas- modic eloquence had, in the very first number of Pickioick^ I* 13 2 DICKENS. [chap. epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, al- ready the scene of one of the Sketches, Dickens returned to the local associations of his early childhood. It was at Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on his solitary tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night's sleep "near a cannon, happy in the society of the sentry's footsteps ;" and in many a Christmas narrative or uncommercial etch- ing the familiar features of town and country, of road and river, were reproduced, before in Great ^Expectations they suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his faithful fancy once more haunted the well-known pre- cincts. During the last thirteen years of his life he was again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where, with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so often made holiday ; where, when hope was young, he had spent his honey-moon ; and whither, after his last rest- less wanderings, he was to return, to seek such repose as he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the daily life of the "very queer small boy" of that early time is only quite incidentally to be associated with the grand gentleman's house on Gad's Hill, where his father, little thinking that his son was to act over again the story of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he might some day come to live, if he were to be very perse- vering, and to work hard. The family abode was in Ordnance (not St. Mary's) Place, at Chatham, amidst sur- roundings classified in Mr. Pickwick's notes as " appear- ing to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and dock-yard men." But though the half-mean, half-pictu- resque aspect of the Chatham streets may already at an early age have had its fascination for Dickens, yet his childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of ob- I.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 3 servation. Having learned reading from his naother, he was sent with his elder sister, Fanny, to a day-school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles, the eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, whose family had formed an intimate acquaintance with their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The younger Giles children were pupils at the school of their elder brother with Charles and Fanny Dickens, and thus naturally their constant playmates. In later life Dickens preserved a grateful remembrance, at times refreshed by pleasant com- munications between the families, of the training he had received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as generous man, who, recognising his pupil's abilities, seems to have resolved that they should not lie fallow for want of early cultivation. Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for supposing that this period of his life was anything but happy. For his sister Fanny he always preserved a tender regard; and a touching little paper, written by him after ter death in womanhood, relates how the two children used to watch the stars together, and make friends with one in particular, as belonging to them- selves. But obviously he did not lack playmates of his own sex ; and it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes made him disinclined to take much part in the rougher sports of his school -fellows, that he found plenty of time for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came to pass that already as a child he followed his own likings in the two directions from which they were never very materially to swerve. He once said of himself that he had been " a writer when a mere baby, an actor always." Of these two passions he could always, as a child and as a man, be " happy with either," and occasionally with both at the same time. In bis tender years he was taken 4 DICKENS. [chap. by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to see the legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits be- hind the scenes at private theatricals; while his own ju- venile powers as a teller of stories and singer of comic songs (he was possessed, says one who remembers him, of a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fel- lows. He also wrote a — not strictly original — tragedy, which is missing among his Reprinted Pieces. There is nothing unique in these childish doings, nor in the cir- cumstance that he was an eager reader of works of fic- tion ; but it is noteworthy that chief arnong the books to which he applied himself, in a small neglected bookroom in his father's house, were those to which his allegiance remained true through much of his career as an author. Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination for his mind from his earliest childhood, besides the " Ara- bian Nights " and kindred tales, and the English Essayists, he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes and Le Sage, in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald's collec- tion of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as he was no great reader in the days of his authorship, and had to go through hard times of his own before, it was well that the literature of his childhood was good of its kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay. Dickens afterwards made it an article of his social creed that the imagination of the young needs nourishment as much as their bodies require food and clothing; and he had reason for gratefully remembering that at all events the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect. But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began. Misfortune pursued the I.] BEFORE '< PICKWICK." 6 elder Dickens to town, his salary having been decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street, Camden Town ; and here, what with the pecuniary embarrassments in which he was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son's education to take care of itself. John Dickens appears to have been an honourable as well as a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him, and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years ; nor would it be fair, because of a similar- ity in their experiences, and in the grandeur of their habit- ual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the im- mortal Mr. Micawber. > Still less, except in certain details of manner and incident, can the character of the elder Dickens be thought to have suggested that of the pitiful " Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison, almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London. Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles, whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive sketches of odd per- sonages among his acquaintance, bad become familiar with the inside of a pawnbroker's shop, and had sold the pa- ternal " library " piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller, with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber's representative. But neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. Dickens's abortive efforts at setting up an educational establishment had been of avail. Her hus- band's creditors would not give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and more especiaUy for the 6 DICKENS. [chap. little eldest son, now ten years old, in which, as he after- wards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, " but for the mercy of God, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little vagabond." Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiog- raphy, communicated to him by Dickens five-and-twenty years after the period to which it refers, and subsequent- ly incorporated with but few changes in the Personal His- tory of David Copper field. Who can forget the thrill with which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of the solitary child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, was an episode in the life of Charles Dick- ens himself? Between fact and fiction there was but a difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby's wine ware- house down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren's black- ing warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, in which a place had been found for the boy by a relative, a partner in the con- cern; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and the miserable pay, the uncongenial companionship during worktime, and the speculativ^e devices of the dinner-hour were the same in each case. At this time, after his fam- ily had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to the little waif at night was a lodging in Little College Street, Camden Town, presenting even fewer attractions than Mr. Micawber's residence in Windsor Terrace, and kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs. Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. On his urgent remonstrance — "the first I had ever made about my lot" — concerning the distance from his family at which he was left through the week, a back attic was found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, " where r.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 7 Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards ;" and he now breakfasted and supped with his parents in their apart- ment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon by a faithful " orfling," who had accompanied the family and its fortunes from Chatham, and who is said by Forster to have her part in the character of the Marchioness. Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his discharge, and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodg- ings, a quarrel occurred between the elder Dickens and his cousin, and the boy was in consequence taken away from the business. He had not been ill-treated there ; nor indeed is it ill- treatment which leads to David Copperfield's running away in the story. Nevertheless, it is not strange that Dickens should have looked back with a bitterness very unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish soli- tude and degradation. He never "forgot" his mother's having wished him to remain in the warehouse ; the sub- ject of his employment there was never afterwards men- tioned in the family ; he could not bring himself to go near old Hungerford Market so long as it remained stand- ing ; and to no human being, not even to his wife, did he speak of this passage in his life until he narrated it in the fragment of autobiography which he confided to his trusty friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain ; for no man is expected to dilate upon the days " when he lived among the beggars in St. Mary Axe," and it is only the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or falsely, in the sordid memories of the time before they became lich or powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his child- hood might have ceased to be resented by one whom the world on the whole treated so kindly, at least they left his heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender to 8 DICKENS. [chap. the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion " eaten his bread with tears " when a puny child. A happy accident having released the David Copper- field of actual life from his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at that time was the lot of most boys of the class to which he belonged. " The world has done much better since jji that way, and will do far better yet," he writes at the close of his descrip- tion of Our School, the Wellington House Academy," sit- uate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this worthy and his usher, "considered to know everything as opposed to the chief who was considered to know nothing," furnished some of the features in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly doubted by an old school- fellow whether the statement "We were First Boy" is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles Dickens, when he entered the school, was " put into Virgil," he was not put there to much purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the resumption of the old amusements which were to grow into the occu- pations of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot. After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for Charles Dickens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who had probably lost his oflScial post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber's phrase, " hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking em' I.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 9 ployment as a parliamentary reporter, and must have re- joiced when a Gray's Inn solicitor of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son, took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His office associates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the blacking warehouse ; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequent- ed, in company with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor thea- tres, and even occasionally to have acted there ; and assur- edly it must have been personal knowledge which suggest- ed the curiously savage description of Private Theatres in the Sketches by Boz, the all but solitary unkindly refer- ence to theatrical amusements in his works. But what- ever his experiences of this kind may have been, he passed unscathed through them ; and during the year and a half of his clerkship picked up suflficient knowledge of the technicalities of the law to be able to assail its enormities without falling into rudimentary errors about it, and suffi- cient knowledge of lawyers and lawyers' men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters. Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the son into the line of life from which he was easily to pass into the career where success and fame awaited him. The elder Dickens having obtained employ- ment as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Herald, his son, who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Man- chester Square, resolved to essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life, two of his most marked characteristics — -strengths -of - w ill, and a d et ermina tion, if _he did a thing^at all, to do it 10 DICKENS. [CHA?. thoroughly. The art of short-hand, which he now resolute- ly set himself to master, was in those days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the diflBculties which he had conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But Dickens, whose education no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a reporter of the highest class he needed something besides the knowledge of short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of Dickens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what is not less true than obvious ; but he had this one quality of the true lover of reading, that he never profess- ed a familiarity with that of which he knew little or noth- ing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors' Commons. With this occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years. Once more David Copper- field, the double of Charles Dickens in his youth, will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story, but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of opinion that he had loved particularly wisely ; but how well he had loved is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora ; for it was as such that, not very chival- t] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 11 rously, he could bring himself to describe her, for the second time, in Little Dorrit. Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a news- paper, he had, and not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It was the profes- sion to which — uncommercially — he was attached during so great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a stage of his own, he seemed to be but follow- inof an irresistible fascination. His best friend described him to me as " a born actor ;" and who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only — those whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is be- hind them? His love of acting was stronger than him- self ; and I doubt whether he ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it. "Assump- tion," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, *' has charms for me — I hardly know for how many wild reasons — so delightful that I feel a loss of, oh ! I can't say what ex- quisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre and everything which savoured of histrionics with an in- tensity not even to be imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same passion. He had that " belief in a play " which he so pleasantly described as one of the characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and acting which makes a little separate world of the "quality." One of the staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English tragedian of his age, Macready ; one of the delights of his last years was his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No performer, however, was so ob- scure or so feeble as to be outside the pale of his sympa- 12 DICKENS. [chap, thy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all man- ner of entertainers and entertainments — from Mr. Vincent Crummies and the more or less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary's horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley's wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickle- son the giant ; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously applauding a young lady " who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the principal lion, upon which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, ex- claims, * Behold the abazid power of woobad!' " He was unable to sit through a forlorn performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house when he entered, and which "had warmed up in the course of the evening to twelve shillings ;" and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as Panta- loon : " Mr. Dickens, you know our profession, sir — no one knows it better, sir — there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five - and - thirty years, and was displaced by a boy, sir ! — a boy !" Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the streets he first sees in the United States remind him irre- sistibly of the set-scene in a London pantomime ; and at Verona his interest is divided between Romeo and Juliet and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the amphi- theatre. What success Dickens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he achieved as an ama- teur actor and manager, and in his more than balf-dra- matic readings. But, the influence of early associations tj BEFORE "PICKWICK." 18 and personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the genius of Frederic Lemaitre, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. " Sound melodrama and farce" were the dramatic species which he affected, and in which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more in the other ; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his thoroughness, which extended itself to every de- tail of performance or make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was preserved for litera- ture. But he had carefully prepared himself for his in- tended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of the illness of the ap- plicant. Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last — in the year 1831 — obtained employment as a parlia- mentary reporter, and after some earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the famous Whig Morning Chronicle, then in its best days under the editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had an opportunity of putting forth the en- ergy that was in him. He shrunk from none of the diffi- culties which in those days attended the exercise of his craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his death he " held a brief for his brothers " at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund : " I have of- ten transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising ; writing on the palm 14 DICKENS. [cttip. of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post- chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. ... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons ; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to^be huddled together like so many sheep kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restufl5ng. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every de- scription of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless car- riage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew." Thus early had Dickens learnt the secret of throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and 'of half achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When at the close of the parlia- mentary session of the year 1836 his labours as a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gal- lery. During this period his naturally keen powers of ob- servation must have been sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which constitutes, per- haps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To Dick- ens's experience as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed, in which there was a good deal of infidelity ; or, at all events, his determined con- I.J BEFORE "PICKWICK." 15 tempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the mouth of "Thisman" or of "Thatman," and his rooted dislike of the " cheap- jacks " and "national dustmen" whom he discerned among our orators and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words. Moreover, the period of Dickens's most active labours as a reporter was one that succeeded a time of great political excitement ; and when men wish thank- fully to rest after deeds, words are in season. Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the significance for himself of his first steps pn a slippery path, Dickens had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a writer as a " baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer's clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the Monthly Magazine published a paper which he had drop- ped into its letter-box, and with eyes " dimmed with joy and pride " the young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called A Dinner at Poplar Walk, was after- wards reprinted in the Sketches by Boz under the title of Mr. Minns and his Cousin, and is laughable enough. His success emboldened him to send further papers of a simi- lar character to the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February, 1835. That which ap- peared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since Dickens used this signature not only as the author of the Sketches and a few other minor produc- tions, but also as " editor " of the Pickwick Papers, it is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and in America, the name should have clung to 16 DICKENS. [chap, him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complain- ing to his wife : " Boz keeps himself very close." But the Monthly Magazine, though warmly welcoming its young contributor's lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the Evening Chronicle, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting stafE of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the Morning Chronicle that Dickens should be duly remu- nerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival's Inn — one of those old legal inns which he loved so well — he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high- road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the Sketches by Boz printed in the Evening Chronicle were already numerous enough, and their success was suflScient- ly established to allow of his arranging for their republi- cation. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and passed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the Pick- 2vick Papers, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards Dickens married Catherine Ho- garth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so effi- ciently aided him in his early literary ventures. Mr. George Hogarth's name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction ; for Lockhart speaks of t] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 17 him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott, Dickens's apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun ; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the daz- zling light of popularity. As for the Sketches by Boz, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it. In their collected form these Sketches modestly de- scribed themselves as "illustrative of eveiy-day life and every-day people." Herein they only prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little diflBculty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coarse, the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of Dickens's humour are already here, together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early Sketches the latter is at times strained, but its power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the humour — more especially that of the Tales — is not of the most refined sort, and often degen- erates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the bane of " light " journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it, very pardonable under the circum- stances, but generally absent from Dickens's later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent ; and the diction but rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which Pickwick and its successors excel. For the rest, Dickens's favourite passions and favourite aversions alike reflect 2 U 18 DICKENS. [chap. themselves here in small. In the description of the elec- tion for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its full freshness upon it — however he may pretend at Astley's that his " histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course the gift which these Sketches pre-eminently revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose Bight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous in an association suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the illustrious dead (the old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of " the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent " red cab," was not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets. Dickens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts ; and in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the Sketches may be accounted for by the fact that common- place people love to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed the days of coaching ; " Honest Tom " no more paces the lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D'Orsay hat ; the Hickses of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house dinner - tables ; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young men in attitudes to Lord Byron, or to " Satan " I.] BEFORE "PICKWICK." 19 Montgomery. But the Sketches by Boz have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to mount CHAPTER IL FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. [1836-1841.] Even in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his life, Charles Dickens, like the rest of the world, had his share of troubles — troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart, and vexations mani- fold in the way of business. But in the history of his early career as an author the word failure has no place. Not that the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published as they were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm ; for the public needed two or three months to make up its mind that " Boz " was equal to an effort considerably in advance of his Sketches. But when the popularity of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished at the present day. Against the productions of Pickwick, and of other works of amusement of which it was the prototype. Dr. Arnold thought himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby ; and twenty years later young men at the university talked nothing but Pickwick, and quoted nothing but Pickwick, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the world at large CHAP. 11.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 21 an examination paper in Pickwick, over which pretentious half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to " describe the common Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory definition of " a red-faced Nixon." No changes in man- ners and customs have interfered \Vith the hold of the work upon nearly all classes of readers at home ; and no translation has been dull enough to prevent its being relished even in countries where all English manners and customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally absurb. So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more than thrice fortunate book, that the wildest legends have grown up as to the history of its origin. The facts, how- ever, as stated by Dickens himself, are few and plain. At- tracted by the success of the Sketches, Messrs. Chapman & Hall proposed to him that he should write " something " in monthly numbers to serve as a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R, Seymour ; and either the publishers or the artist suggest^ ed as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a "Nimrod Club " of unlucky sportsmen. The proposition was at Dickens's suggestion so modified that the plates were " to arise naturally out of the text," the range of the latter be- ing left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle's misfortunes by flood and field hold their place by the side of the philanthropical meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An original was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the hero of the book, and a felicitous name for him soon sug- gested itself. Only a single number of the serial had ap- peared when Mr. Seymour's own hand put an end to his life. It is well known that among the applicants for the vacant office of illustrator of the Pickwick Papera was 22 DICKENS. [chap. Thackeray — the senior of Dickens by a few months-— whose style as a draughtsman would have been singularly unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr. Pick- wick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some of Dickens's books, Mr. Hablot Browne (" Phiz ") was chosen as illustrator. Some happy hits — such as the fig- ure of Mr. Micawber — apart, the illustrations of Dickens by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, are apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author's fidelity to nature, and on the other, to intensify his unreality. Oliver Twist, like the Sketches, was illustrated by George Cruik- shank, a pencil humourist of no common calibre, but as a rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of his heart. Dickens himself was never so well satisfied with any illus- trator as with George Cattermole {alias "Kittenmoles"), a connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hab- lot Browne in Master Humphrey's Clock; in his latest works he resorted to the aid of younger artists, whose reputation has since justified his confidence. The most congenial of the pictorial interpreters of Dickens, in his brightest and freshest humour, was his valued friend John Leech, whose services, together occasionally with those of Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as well as of his faithful Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his Christmas books. The Pickwick Papers, of which the issue was completed by the end of 1837, brought in to Dickens a large sum of money, and after a time a handsome, annual income. On the whole this has remained the most general favourite of all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that Pickwick defies criticism, but also because the circum- stances under which the book was begun and carried on make it preposterous to judge it by canons applicable to its author's subsequent fictions. As the serial proceeded, n.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 28 the interest wtich was to be divided between the inserted tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, was absorbed by the latter. The rise in the style of the book can almost be measured by the change in the treat- ment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself. In a later preface, Dickens endeavoured to illustrate this change by the analogy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it was only as the author proceeded that he recognised the capabilities of the character, and his own power of making it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as laughable. Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. Nupkins, there follows a little bit of the idyl between Sam and the pretty housemaid, written with a delicacy that could hardly have been suspected in the chronicler of the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative will be found exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos of which Dickens was afterwards so repeatedly to prove himself master, more especially, of course, in those prison scenes for which some of our older novelists may have furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of humour is not wanting which is content to miss its effect with the less attentive reader ; as in this passage concern- ing the ruined cobbler's confidences to Sam in the Fleet : " The cobbler paused to . ascertain what effect his story had pro- duced on Sam ; but finding that he had dropped asleep, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, sighed, put it down, drew the bedclothes over his head, and went to sleep too." Goldsmith himself could not have put more of pathos and more of irony into a single word. But it may seem out of place to dwell upon details such 24 DICKENS. [chap. as this in view of the broad and universally acknowledged comic effects of this masterpiece of English humour. Its many genuinely comic characters are as broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and as true to nature as the most elaborate products of Addison's art. The author's humour is certainly not one which eschews simple in favour of subtle means, or which is averse from occasional desipience in the form of the wild- est farce. Mrs. Leo Hunter's garden-party — or rather "public breakfast" — at The Den, Eatanswill; Mr. Pick- wick's nocturnal descent, through three gooseberry-bushes and a rose-tree, upon the virgin soil of Miss Tomkins's es- tablishment for young ladies ; the supplice cfun homme of Mr. Pott; Mr. Weller junior's love-letter, with notes and comments by Mr. Weller senior, and Mr. Weller senior's own letter of afl3iction written by somebody else; the footmen's " swarry " at Bath, and Mr. Bob Sawyer's bach- elors' party in the Borough — all these and many other scenes and passages have in them that jovial element of exaggeration which nobody mistakes and nobody resents. Whose duty is it to check the volubility of Mr. Alfred Jingle, or to weigh the heaviness, quot libras, of the Fat Boy ? Every one is conscious of the fact that in the con- tagious high spirits of the author lies one of the chief charms of the book. Not, however, that the effect pro- duced is obtained without the assistance of a very vigilant art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character which is upon the whole the most brilliant of the many brilliant additions which the author made to his original group of personages. If there is nothing so humorous in the book as Sam Weller, neither is there in it anything more pathetic than the relation between him and his mas- ter. As for Sam Weller's style of speech, scant justice n.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS 26 was done to it by Mr. Pickwick when he observed to Job Trotter, " My man is in the right, although his mode of expressing his opinion is somewhat homely, and occasion- ally incomprehensible." The fashion of Sam's gnomic philosophy is at least as old as Theocritus;* but the spe- cial impress which he has given to it is his own, rudely foreshadowed, perhaps, in some of the apophthegms of his father. Incidental Sam Wellerisms in Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nicklehy show how enduring a hold the whim- sical fancy had taken of its creator. For the rest, the freshness of the book continues the same to the end ; and farcical as are some of the closing scenes — those, for in- stance, in which a chorus of coachmen attends the move- ments of the elder Mr. Weller — there is even here no straining after effect. An exception might perhaps be found in the catastrophe of the Shepherd, which is coarse- ly contrived ; but the fun of the character is in itself nei- ther illegitimate nor unwholesome^ It will be observed below that it is the constant harping on the same string, the repeated picturing of professional preachers of religion as gross and greasy scoundrels, which in the end becomes offensive in Dickens. On the whole, no hero has ever more appropriately bid- den farewell to his labours than Mr. Pickwick in the words which he uttered at the table of the ever-hospitable Mr. Wardle at the Adelphi. " ' I shall never regret,' said Mr. Pickwick, in a low voice — ' I shall never regret having devoted the greater part of two years to mixing with different varieties and shades of human character ; frivolous as ' See Idyll, xv. 77. This discovery is not my own, but that of the late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly with great gusto. 2* C 26 DICKENS. ' [chap. my pursuit of novelty may appear to many. Nearly the whole of my previous life having been devoted to business and the pursuit of wealth, numerous scenes of which I had no previous conception have dawned upon me — I hope to the enlargement of my mind, and to the improvement of my understanding. If I have done but little good, I trust I have done less harm, and that none of my adventures will be other than a source of amusing and pleasant recollection to me in the decline of life. God bless you all* " /' / Of course Mr. Pickwick " filled and drained a bumper " to the sentiment. Indeed, it " snoweth " in this book " of meat and drink." Wine, ale, and brandy abound there, and viands to which ample justice is invariably done — even under Mr. Tupman's hear-trending circumstances at the (now, alas ! degenerate) Leather Bottle. Something of this is due to the times in which the work was com- posed, and to the class of readers for which we may sup- pose it in the first instance to have been intended; but Dickens, though a temperate man, loved the paraphernalia of good cheer, besides cherishing the associations which are inseparable from it. At the same time, there is a lit- tle too much of it in the Pickwick Papers, however well its presence may consort with the geniality which per- vades them. It is diflBcult to turn any page of the book without chancing on one of those supremely felicitous phrases in the ready mintage of which Dickens at all times excelled. But its chief attraction lies in the spirit of the whole — that spirit of true humour which calls forth at once merriment, good-will, and charity. In the year 1836, which the commencement of the Pick- wick Papers has made memorable in the history of English literature, Dickens was already in the full tide of author- ship. In February, 1837, the second number of Bentleyi's Miscellany, a new monthly magazine which he had under- u.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 27 taken to edit, contained the opening chapters of his story of Oliver Twist. Shortly before this, in September and December, 1836, he had essayed two of the least ambitious branches of dramatic authorship. The acting of Harley, an admirable dry comedian, gave some vitality to The Strange Gentleman, a " comic burletta," or farce, in two acts, founded upon the tale in the Sketches called The Great Winglehury Duel. It ran for seventy nights at Drury Lane, and, in its author's opinion, was "the best thing Harley did." But the adaptation has no special feat- ure distinguishing it from the original, unless it be the ef- fective bustle of the opening. The Village Coquettes, an operetta represented at the St. James's Theatre, with mu- sic by Hullah, was an equally unpretending effort. In this piece Harley took one part, that of " a very small farmer with a very large circle of intimate friends," and John Parry made his debut on the London stage in an- other. To quote any of the songs in this operetta would be very unfair to Dickens.* He was not at all depressed by the unfavourable criticisms which were passed upon his libretto, and against which he had to set the round decla- ration of Braham, that there had been " no such music since the days of Shiel, and no such piece since The Du- enna.'''' As time w^ent on, however, he became anything but proud of his juvenile productions as a dramatist, and strongly objected to their revival. His third and last at- tempt of this kind, a farce called The Lamplighter, which he wrote for Covent Garden in 1838, was never acted, hav- ing been withdrawn by Macready's wish; and in 1841 Dickens converted it into a story printed among the Pic- * For operas, as a form of dramatic entertainment, Dickens seems afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it is difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid. 28 DICKENS. [chap. nic Papers, a collection generously edited by him for the benefit of the widow and children of a publisher towards whom he had little cause for personal gratitude. His friendship for Macready kept alive in him for some time the desire to write a comedy worthy of so distinguished an actor ; and, according to his wont, he had even chosen beforehand for the piece a name which he was not to for- get — JVo Thoroughfare. But the genius of the age, an influence which is often stronger than personal wishes or inclinations, diverted him from dramatic composition. He would have been equally unwilling to see mentioned among his literary works the Life of Grimaldi, which he merely edited, and which must be numbered among forgotten me- morials of forgotten greatness. To the earlier part of 1838 belong one or two other publications, which their author never cared to reprint. The first of these, however, a short pamphlet entitled Sunday under Three Heads, is not without a certain bio- graphical interest. This little book was written with im- mediate reference to a bill " for the better observance of the Sabbath," which the House of Commons had recently thrown out by a small majority ; and its special purpose was the advocacy of Sunday excursions, and harmless Sun- day amusements, in lieu of the alternate gloom and drunk- enness distinguishing what Dickens called a London Sun- day as it is. His own love of fresh air and brightness in- tensified his hatred of a formalism which shuts its ears to argument. In the powerful picture of a Sunday evening in London, "gloomy, close, and stale," which he afterwards drew in Little Dorrit, he almost seems to hold Sabbatari- anism and the weather responsible for one another. When he afterwards saw a Parisian Sunday, he thought it " not comfortable," so that, like others who hate bigotry, he may II.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESSL 29 perhaps have come to recognise the difficulty of arrang- ing an English Sunday as it might be made. On the oth- er hand, he may have remembered his youthful fancy of the good clergyman encouraging a game of cricket after church, when thirty years later, writing from Edinburgh, he playfully pictured the counterpart of Sunday as Sab- bath bills would have it : describing how " the usual prep- arations are making for the band in the open air in the afternoon, and the usual pretty children (selected for that purpose) are at this moment hanging garlands round the Scott monument preparatory to the innocent Sunday dance round that edifice with which the diversions invariably close." The Sketches of Young Gentlemen, published in the same year, are little if at all in advance of the earlier Sketches by Boz, and were evidently written to order. He finished them in precisely a fortnight, and noted in his diary that " one hundred and twenty-five pounds for such a book, without any name to it, is pretty well." The Sketches of Young Couples, which followed as late as 1840, have the advantage of a facetious introduction, sug- gested by her Majesty's own announcement of her ap- proaching marriage. But the life has long gone out of these pleasantries, as it has from others of the same cast, in which many a mirthful spirit, forced to coin its mirth into money, has ere now spent itself. It was the better fortune of Dickens to be able almost from the first to keep nearly all his writings on a level with his powers. He never made a bolder step forwards than when, in the very midst of the production of Pick- wick, he began his first long continuous story, the Advent- ures of Oliver Tivist. Those who have looked at the MS. of this famous novel will remember the vigour of the handwriting, and how few, in comparison with his later 30 DICKENS. [chap. MSS., are the additions and obliterations which it exhibits. But here and there the writing shows traces of excite- ment ; for the author's heart was in his work, and much of it, contrary to his later habit, was written at night. No doubt he was upheld in the labour of authorship by something besides ambition and consciousness of strength. Oliver 2JM;^>f_was_certaiEly v/vitteD. with a purpose, and with one that was afterwards avowed. The author in- tended to put before his readers — " so long as their speech did not offend the ear" — a picture of "dregs of life," hitherto, as he believed, never exhibited by any novelist in their loathsome reality. Yet the old masters of fic- tion, Fielding in particular, as well as the old master of the brush whom Dickens cites (Hogarth), had not shrunk from the path which their disciple now essayed. Dickens, however, was naturally thinking of his own generation, which had already relished Paul Clifford, and which was not to be debarred from exciting itself over Jack Shep- pard, begun before Oliver Twist had been completed, and in the self-same magazine. Dickens's purpose was an hon- est and a praiseworthy one. But the most powerful and at the same time the most lovable element in his genius suggested the silver lining to the cloud. To that unfail- ing power of sympathy which was the mainspring of both his most affecting and his most humorous touches, we owe the redeeming features in his company of criminals ; not only the devotion and the heroism of Nancy, but the ir- resistible vivacity of the Artful Dodger, and the good-hu- mour of Charley Bates, which moved Talfourd to " plead as earnestly in mitigation of judgment" against him as ever he had done " at the bar for any client he most re- spected." Other parts of the story were less carefully tempered. Mr. Fang, the police - magistrate, appears to u.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 31 have been a rather hasty portrait of a living original ; and the whole picture of Bumble and Bumbledom was cer- tainly a caricature of the working of the new Poor-law, confounding the question of its merits and demerits with that of its occasional maladministration. On the other hand, a vein of truest pathos runs through the whole of poor Nancy's story, and adds to the effect of a marvel- lously powerful catastrophe. From Nancy's interview with Rose at London Bridge to the closing scenes — the flight of Sikes, his death at Jacob's Island, and the end of the Jew — the action has an intensity rare in the literature of the terrible. By the side of this genuine tragic force, which perhaps it would be easiest to parallel from some of the " low " domestic tragedy of the Elizabethans, the author's comic humour burst forth upon the world in a variety of entirely new types : Bumble and his partner ; Noah Clay- pole, complete in himself, but full of promise for Uriah Heep ; and the Jew, with all the pupils and supporters of his establishment of technical education. Undeniably the story of Oliver Twist also contains much that is artificial and stilted, with much that is weak and (the author of Endymion is to be thanked for the word) "gushy." Thus, all the Maylie scenes, down to the last in which Oliver dis- creetly " glides " away from the lovers, are barely endura- ble. But, whatever its shortcomings, Oliver Twist remains an almost unique example of a young author's brilliant success in an enterprise of complete novelty and extreme difficulty. Some of its situations continue to exercise their power even over readers already familiarly acquainted with them ; and some of its characters will live by the side of Dickens's happiest and most finished creations. Even had a sapient critic been right who declared, during the prog- ress of the story, that Mr. Dickens appeared to have worked S2 DICKENS. [chap. out "the particular vein of humour which had hitherto yielded so much attractive metal," it would have been worked out to some purpose. After making his readers merry with Pickivick, he had thrilled them with Oliver Twist ; and by the one book as by the other he had made them think better of mankind. But neither had his vein been worked out, nor was his hand content with a single task. In April, 1838, several months before the completion of Oliver Twist, the first number of Nicholas Nicklehy appeared; and while en- gaged upon the composition of these books he contributed to Bentletfs Miscellany, of which he retained the editor- ship till the early part of 1839, several smaller articles. Of these, the Mudfog Papers have been recently thought worth reprinting ; but even supposing the satire against the Association for the Advancement of Everything to have not yet altogether lost its savour, the fun of the day before yesterday refuses to be revived. Nicholas Nickle- hy, published in twenty numbers, was the labour of many months, but was produced under so great a press of work that during the whole time of publication Dickens was never a single number in advance. Yet, though not one of the most perfect of his books, it is indisputably one of the most thoroughly original, and signally illustrates the absurdity of recent attempts to draw a distinction between the imaginative romance of the past and the realistic novel of the present. Dickens was never so strong as when he produced from the real; and in this instance — starting, no doubt, with a healthy prejudice — so carefully had lie inspected the neighbourhood of the Yorkshire schools, of which Dotheboys Ilall was to be held up as the infamous type, that there seems to be no difficulty in identifying the ^te of the very school itself; while the Portsmouth II.] FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS. 83 Theatre is to the full as accurate a study as the Yorkshire school. So, again, as every one knows, the Brothers Chee- ryble were real personages well known in Manchester,' where even the original of Tim Linkinwater still survives in local remembrance. On the other hand, with how con- scious a strength has the author's imaginative power used and transmuted his materials : in the Squeers family creat- ing a group of inimitable grotesqueness ; in their humblest victim Smike giving one of his earliest pictures of those outcasts whom he drew again and again with such infinite tenderness ; and in Mr. Vincent Crummies and his com- pany, including the Phenomenon, establishing a jest, but a kindly one, for all times ! In a third series of episodes in this book, it is universally agreed that the author has no less conspicuously failed. Dickens's first attempt to picture the manners and customs of the aristocracy cer- tainly resulted in portraying some very peculiar people. Lord Frederick Verisopht, indeed — who is allowed to re- deem his character in the end — is not without touches resembling nature. " ' I take an interest, my lord,' said Mrs. Wititterly, with a faint smile, ' such an interest in the drama.' " ' Ye-es. It's very interasting,' replied Lord Frederick. '"I'm always ill after Shakspeare,' said Mrs. Wititterly. 'I scarcely exist the next day. I find the reaction so very great after a tragedy, my lord, and Shakspeare is such a delicious creature.' " ' Ye-es,' replied Lord Frederick. ' He was a clayver man.' " But Sir Mulberry Ilawk is a kind of scoundrel not fre- quently met with in polite society ; his henchmen Pluck and Pyke have the air of " followers of Don John," and ' W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of Cannon Street, and their private house in Mosely Street. 15 84 DICKENS. [chap. the enjoyments of the " trainers of young noblemen and gentlemen " at Hampton races, together with the riotous debauch which precedes the catastrophe, seem taken direct from the transpontine stage. The fact is that Dickens was here content to draw his vile seducers and wicked orgies just as commonplace writers had drawn them a thousand times before, and will draw them a thousand times again. Much of the hero's talk is of the same con- ventional kind. On the other hand, nothing could be more genuine than the flow of fun in this book, which finds its outlet in the most unexpected channels, but no- where so resistlessly as in the invertebrate talk of Mrs. Nickleby. For her Forster discovered a literary proto- type in a character of Miss Austen's ; but even if Mrs. Nickleby was founded on Miss Bates, in Emma, she left her original far behind. Miss Bates, indeed, is verbose, roundabout, and parenthetic ; but the widow never devi- ates into coherence. Nicholas Nickleby shows the comic genius of its author in full activity, and should be read with something of the buoyancy of spirit in which it was written, and not with a callousness capable of seeing in so amusing a scamp as Mr. Mantalini one of Dickens's " monstrous failures." At the same time this book displays the desire of the author to mould his manner on the old models. The very title has a savour of Smollett about it ; the style has more than one reminiscence of him, as well as of Fielding and of Gold- smith ; and the general method of the narrative resembles that of our old novelists and their Spanish and French predecessors. Partly for this reason, and partly, no doubt, because of the rapidity with which the story was written, its construction is weaker than is usual even with Dick- casional use. And it was only gradually that he enlarged and improved his Kentish place so as to make it the pretty and comfortable country-house which at the present day it appears to be ; constructing, in course of time, the passage under the high-road to the shrubbery, where the Swiss chalet given to him by Mr. Fechter was set up, and build- ing the pretty little conservatory, which, when completed, he was not to live many days to enjoy. But an old-fash- ioned, homely look, free from the slightest aflfectation of quietness, belonged to Gad's Hill Place, even after all these alterations, and belongs to it even at this day, when Dick- ens's solid old-fashioned furniture has been changed. In the pretty little front hall still hangs the illuminated tablet recalling the legend of Gad's Hill ; and on the inside pan- els of the library door remain the facetious sham book- titles : " Hudson's Complete Failure^'' and " Ten Minutes in China,^'' and " Cats' Lives,^'' and, on a long series of leather backs, " Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleepy The rooms are all of a modest size, and the bedrooms — amongst them Dickens's own — very low ; but the whole house looks thor- oughly habitable, while the vuews across the cornfields at the back are such as in their undulation of soft outline are nowhere more pleasant than in Kent. Rochester and the Medway are near, even for those who do not — like Dickens and his dogs — count a stretch past three or four " mile- stones on the Dover road" as the mere beginning of an afternoon's walk. At a distance little greater there are in one direction the green glades of Cobham Park, with Chalk and Gravesend beyond; and in another the flat country towards the Thames, with its abundance of market-gardens. v.] CHANGES. 143 There, too, are the marshes on the border of which lie the massive ruin of Cooling Castle, the refuge of the Lollard martyr who was not concerned in the affair on Gad's Hill, and Cooling Church and church-yard, with the quaint little gravestones in the grass. London and the office were with- in easy reach, and Paris itself was, for practical purposes, not much farther away, so that, in later days at all events, Dickens found himself " crossing the Channel perpetually." The name of Dickens still has a good sound in and about Gad's Hill. He was on very friendly terms with some families whose houses stand near to his own; and though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, than to " wear topboots " and play the squire, yet he had in him not a little of what endears so many a resident country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He was head organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of cricket matches and foot races ; and his house was a dis- pensary for the poor of the parish. He established con- fidential relations between his house and the Falstaff Inn over the way, regulating his servants' consumption of beer on a strict but liberal plan of his own devising ; but it is not for this reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin Trood — for such was the veritable name of mine host of the " Falstaff " in Dickens's time — declares that it was a bad day for the neighbourhood when Dickens was taken away from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which surrounded him in his own country, and Forster has described his astonishment at the manifestation of it on the occasion of the wedding of the youngest daughter of the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popu- lar, and specially among those by whom he was beloved as a friend or honoured as a benefactor. But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest 144 DICKENS. [chap. that Dickens was to settle down in his pleasant country house, nor was he ever, except quite at the last, to sit down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a wanderer no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his resi- dence for the summer on Gad's Hill his home, and that of his younger children, was his wife's home no longer. The separation, which appears to have been preparing itself for some, but no very long, time, took place in May, 1858, when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. Dickens left her husband, who henceforth allowed her an ample separate maintenance, and occasionally corresponded with her, but never saw her again. The younger children remained in their father's house under the self-sacrificing and devoted care of Mrs. Dickens's surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. Shortly afterwards, Dickens thought it well, in printed words which may be left forgotten, to rebut some slander- ous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrep- resented the circumstances of this separation. The causes of the event were an open secret to his friends and ac- quaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that af- fection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty together made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in his- tory or figured in fiction. It was not incumbent upon his faithful friend and biographer, and much less can it be upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of Dick- ens's genius entitles to speak of him at all, to declare the T.] CHANGES. 146 standard by which the most painful transaction in his life is to be judged. I say the most painful, for it is with a feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in a letter three years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter's wedding : " I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand me when I say so, and no more." A shadow, too — who would deny it? — falls on every one of the pictures in which the tenderest of modern humourists has painted the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life of which to his generation he had become almost the poet and the prophet, when we remember how he was himself neither blessed with its full happiness nor capable of accepting with resignation the imperfection inherent in it, as in all things human. 7* 32 CHAPTER VI. LAST YEARS, [1858-1870.] The last twelve years of Dickens's life were busy years, like the others ; but his activity was no longer merely the expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he con- tinued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputa- bly hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into account the fear of bodily ill-effectfs resulting from his ex- ertions. Their misgivings had otbor grounds. Of course, had there been any pressure of pecuniary diflBculty or need upon Dickens when he began, or when on successive occa- sions he resumed, his public readings, there would be noth- ing further to be said. But I see no suggestion of any such pressure. " My worldly circumstances," he wrote be- fore he had finally made up his mind to read in America, " are very good. I don't want money. All my posses- sions are free and in the best order. Still," he added, *' at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one's capital in half a year is an immense con- sideration." Moreover, with all his love of doing as he chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious ex- CHAP. Ti] LAST YEARS. 147 travagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in the course of nature he would leave behind him. Love of money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent at- tractions for most men ; and these attractions are perhaps strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake of the race as well as of the prize. Dickens's readings were virtually something new ; their success was not only all his own, but unique and unprecedented — what nobody but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. Yet the determining motive — if I read his nature rightly — was, after all, of another kind. "Two souls dwelt in his breast ;" and when their aspirations united in one ap- peal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he felt for his multitudes of readers, and the actor who longed to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thorough- ly said to me, to be face to face with his public ; and against this liking, which he had already mdulged as fully as he could without passing the boundaries between private and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries ; and to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid read- ings such as those of Dickens would, on the face of it, be absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own 148 DICKENS. [chap. prerogative of being many things to many men ; and where the author of a work, more particularly of a work of fiction, adjusts it to circumstances differing from those of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser art to prejudice the claims of the greater. Dickens cannot have been blind to these considerations ; but to others his eyes were never opened. He found much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the " roaring sea of response," to use his own fine metaphor, of which he had become accustomed to " stand upon the beach." His truest sentiment as an author was touched to the quick ; and he was, as he says himself, " brought very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be his fame," when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, " Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends ?" or when, at Belfast, he was al- most overwhelmed with entreaties " to shake hands, Mis- ther Dickens, and God bless you, sir ; not ounly for the light you've been in mee house, sir — and God love your face ! — this many a year." On the other hand — and this, perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to perceive — there was something vulgarising in the constant striving after immediate success in the shape of large au- diences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts. The con- ditions of the actor's art cannot forego these stimulants; and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To me, at least, it is painful to find Dickens jubilantly record- ing how at Dublin " eleven bank-notes were thrust into the pay-box — Arthur saw them — at one time for eleven stalls ;" how at Edinburgh " neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind, Ti.] LAST YEARS. 149 nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings ;" while, every allowance be- ing made, there is something almost ludicrous in the dou- ble assertion, that " the most delicate audience I had ever seen in any provincial place is Canterbury ; but the audi- ence with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover." What subjects for parody Dickens would have found in these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man ! Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with the very thoroughness with which he entered into the work of his readings. " You have no idea," he tells Fors- ter, in 1867, "how I have worked at them. Finding it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, / have learnt them all, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know ; made the humorous points much more humorous ; corrected ray utterance of certain words; cultivated a self- possession not to be disturbed ; and made myself master of the situation." " From ten years ago to last night," he writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, "I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere." The fresh- ness with which he returned night after night and season after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was itself a genuine actor's gift. " So real," he declares, " are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never stood there before." Dickens's first public readings were given at Birming- ham, during the Christmas week of 1853 -'54, in sup- port of the new Midland Institute ; but a record — for the 150 DICKENS. [chap. authenticity of which I cannot vouch — remains, that with true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in ques- tion, gave a trial reading of the Christmas Carol to a smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent pur- poses ; and the very fact that it had become necessary to decline some of these frequent invitations had again sug- gested the possibility — which had occurred to him eleven years before — of meeting the demand in a different way. Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of un- dertaking an entire series of paid public readings would have been carried out, had it not been for the general rest- lessness which had seized upon Dickens early in 1858, when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or of leisure to absorb liim, and when he craved for excite- ment more than ever. To go home — in this springtime of 1858 — was not to find there the peace of contentment. " I must do something, ^^ he wrote in March to his faithful counsellor, " or I shall wear my heart away, I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state." So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that month he had entered into his new relation with the pub- lic. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of his nature had victoriously asserted itself, and according to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relent- less vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began with a brief series at St. Martin's Hall, and then, his inval- uable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his man- ager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven read- ings into three months and a half of travelling in the " provinces," including Scotland and Ireland. A few win- ter readings in London, and a short supplementary course vi.J LAST YEARS. 161 in the country during October, 1859, completed tliis first scries. Already, in 1858, we find liiin, in a letter from Ireland, complaining of tlic "tremendous strain," and de- claring, " I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, when- ever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course." But the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed him — I can testify to the thrill of excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in Octo- ber, 1859 — repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed to him, and with Dublin — where his success was extraor- dinary — he was so smitten as to think it at first sight " pretty nigh as big as Paris." In return, the Boots at Morrison's expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of view : " ' Whaat sart of a hoose, sur V he asked me. * Capital.' * The Lard be praised, for the 'onor o' Dooblin.' " The books, or ^jortions of books, to which he confined himself during this first series of readings were few in number. They comprised the Carol and the Chimes, and two stories from earlier Christmas numbers of Household Words — may the exclamation of the soft-hearted chamber- maid at the Ilolly Tree Inn, " It's a shame to part 'em !" never vanish from my memory ! — together with the epi^ sodic readings of the Trial in Pickwick, Mrs. Oamp, and Paul Dombey. Of these the Pickivick, which I heard more than once, is still vividly present to me. The only drawback to the complete enjoyment of it was the lurking fear that there had been some tampering with the text, not to be condoned even in its author. But in the way of assumption Charles Mathews the elder himself could have accomplished no more Protean effort. The lack- lustre eye of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, the forensic hitch of 152 DICKENS. [chap. Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, and the hopeless impotence of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle were alike incomparable. And if the success of the impersonation of Mr. Samuel Weller was less complete — although Dickens had formerly acted the character on an amateur stage — the reason probably was that, by reason of his endless store of ancient and modern instances, Sam had himself become a quasi-mythical being, whom it was almost painful to find reproduced in flesh and blood. I have not hesitated to treat these readings by Dickens as if they had been the performances of an actor ; and the description would apply even more strongly to his later readings, in which he seemed to make his points in a more accentuated fashion than before. "His readings," says Mr. C. Kent, in an interesting little book about them, " were, in the fullest meaning of the words, singularly in- genious and highly -elaborated histrionic performances." As such they had been prepared with a care such as few actors bestow upon their parts, and — for the book was pre- pared not less than the reading — not all authors bestow upon their plays. Now, the art of reading, even in the case of dramatic works, has its own laws, which even the most brilliant readers cannot neglect except at their peril. A proper pitch has to be found, in the first instance, be- fore the exceptional passages can be, as it were, marked off from it ; and the absence of this ground-tone some- times interfered with the total effect of a reading by Dick- ens. On the other hand, the exceptional passages were, if not uniformly, at least generally excellent ; nor am I at all disposed to agree with Forster in preferring, as a rule, the humorous to the pathetic. At the same time, there was noticeable in these readings a certain hardness which com- petent critics likewise discerned in Dickens's acting, and VI.] LAST YEARS. 153 which could not, at least in the former case, be regarded as an ordinary characteristic of dilettanteism. The truth is that he isolated his parts too sharply — a frequent fault of English acting, and one more detrimental to the total effect of a reading than even to that of an acted play. No sooner had the heaviest stress of the first series of readings ceased than Dickens was once more at work upon a new fiction. The more immediate purpose was to insure a prosperous launch to the journal which, in the spring of 1859, took the place of Household Words. A dispute, painful in its origin, but ending in an amicable issue, had resulted in the purchase of that journal by Dickens; but already a little earlier he had — as he was entitled to do — begun the new venture of All the Year Round, with which Household Wo7-ds was afterwards in- corporated. The first number, published on April 30, contained the earliest instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, which was completed by November 20 following. This story holds a unique place amongst the fictions of its author. Perhaps the most striking difference between it and his other novels may seem to lie in the all but entire absence from it of any humour or attempt at humour ; for neither the brutalities of that " honest tradesman," Jerry, nor the laconisms of Miss Pross, can well be called by that name. Not that his sources of humour were drying up, even though, about this time, he contributed to an Ameri- can journal a short " romance of the real world," Hunted Down, from which the same relief is again conspicuously absent. For the humour of Dickens was to assert itself with unmistakable force in his next longer fiction, and was even before that, in some of his occasional papers, to give delightful proofs of its continued vigour. In the case of 154 DICKENS. [chap. the Tale of Two Cities, he had a new and distinct design in his mind which did not, indeed, exclude humour, but with which a liberal indulgence in it must have seriously interfered. " I set myself," he writes, " the little task of writing a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express more than they should express themselves by dia- logue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of them." He therefore renounced his more usual method in favour of one probably less congenial to him. Yet, in his own opinion at least, he succeeded so well in the under- taking, that when the story was near its end he could vent- ure to express a hope that it was " the best story he had written." So much praise will hardly be given to this novel even by admirers of the French art of telling a story succinctly, or by those who can never resist a rather hys- terical treatment of the French Revolution. In my own opinion A Tale of Two Cities is a skilfully though not perfectly constructed novel, which needed but little substantial alteration in order to be converted into a not less effective stage-play. And with such a design Dickens actually sent the proof-sheets of the book to his friend Regnier, in the fearful hope that he might approve of the project of its dramatisation for a French theatre. Cleverly or clumsily adapted, the tale of the Revolution and its sanguinary vengeance was unlikely to commend itself to the Imperial censorship ; but an English version was, I believe, afterwards very fairly successful on the boards of the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste was cer- tainly in her right place as Madame Defarge, an excellent VI.] LAST YEARS. 166 character for a melodrama, though rather wearisome as she lies in wait through half a novel. The construction of this story is, as I have said, skilful hut not perfect. Dickens himself successfully defended his use of accident in bringing about the death of Ma- dame Defarge. The real objection to the conduct of this episode, however, lies in the inadequacy of the contrivance for leaving Miss Pross behind in Paris. Too much is also, I think, made to turn upon the three words " and their descendants" — non-essential in the original connexion — by which Dr. Manette's written denunciation becomes fatal to those he loves. Still, the general edifice of the plot is solid ; its interest is, notwithstanding the crowded background, concentrated with much skill upon a small group of person- ages ; and Carton's self-sacrifice, admirably prepared from the very first, produces a legitimate tragic effect. At the same time the novelist's art vindicates its own claims. Not only does this story contain several narrative episodes of remarkable power — such as the flight from Paris at the close, and the touching little incident of the seamstress, told in Dickens's sweetest pathetic manner — but it is like- wise enriched by some descriptive pictures of unusual ex- cellence : for instance, the sketch of Dover in the good old smuggling times, and the mezzo -tint of the stormy evening in Soho. Doubtless the increased mannerism of the style is disturbing, and this not only in the high-strung French scenes. As to the historical element in this novel, Dickens modestly avowed his wish that he might by his story have been able " to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book." But if Dickens desired to depict the noble of the ancien regime, either according to Carlyle or 166 DICKENS. [ohap. according to intrinsic probability, he should not have of- fered, in his Marquis, a type historically questionable, and unnatural besides. The description of the Saint Antoine, before and during the bursting of the storm, has in it more of truthfulness, or of the semblance of truthfulness ; and Dickens's perception of the physiognomy of the French workman is, I think, remarkably accurate. Altogether, the book is an extraordinary tour deforce, which Dickens never repeated. The opening of a new story by Dickens gave the neces- sary impetus to his new journal at its earliest stage; nor was the ground thus gained ever lost. Mr. W. H. Wills stood by his chief's side as of old, taking, more especially in later years, no small share of responsibility upon him. The prospectus of All the Year Round had not in vain promised an identity of principle in its conduct with that of its predecessor; in energy and spirit it showed no falling off ; and, though not in all respects, the personality of Dickens made itself felt as distinctly as ever. Besides the Tale of Two Cities he contributed to it his story of Great Expectations. Amongst his contributors Mr. Wilkie Collins took away the breath of multitudes of readers; Mr. Charles Reade disported himself amongst the facts which gave stamina to his fiction ; and Lord Lytton made a daring voyage into a mysterious country. Thither Dickens followed him, for once, in his Four Stories, not otherwise noteworthy, and written in a manner already difficult to discriminate from that of Mr. Wilkie Collins. For the rest, the advice with which Dickens aided Lord Lytton's progress in his Strange Story was neither more ready nor more painstaking than that which he bestowed upon his younger contributors, to more than one of whom he generously gave the opportunity of publishing in his VI.] LAST YEARS. 15V journal a long work of fiction. Some of these younger writers were at this period amongst his most frequent guests and associates ; for nothing more naturally com- mended itself to him than the encouragement of the younger generation. But though longer imaginative works played at least as conspicuous a part in the new journal as they had in the old, the conductor likewise continued to make manifest his intention that the lesser contributions should not be treated by readers or by writers as harmless necessary " padding." For this purpose it was requisite not only that the choice of subjects should be made with the ut- most care, but also that the master's hand should itself be occasionally visible. Dickens's occasional contributions had been few and unimportant, till in a happy hour he began a series of papers, including many of the pleasant- est, as well as of the mellowest, amongst the lighter pro- ductions of his pen. As usual, he had taken care to find for this series a name which of itself went far to make its fortune. " I am both a town and a countiy traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connexion in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent Garden, London — now about the city streets, now about the country by - roads, seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others." The whole collection of these Uncommercial Traveller papers, together with the Uncommercial Samples which succeeded them after Dickens's return from America, and which begin with a graphic account of his homeward voy- age Aboard Shi]), where the voice of conscience spoke in 168 DICKENS. [chap. the motion of the screw, amounts to thirty-seven articles, and spreads over a period of nine years. They are neces- sarily of varying merit, but amongst them are some which deserve a permanent place in our lighter literature. Such are the description of the church-yards on a quiet evening in The City of the Absent^ the grotesque picture of loneli- ness in Chambers — a favourite theme with Dickens — and the admirable papers on Shy Neighbourhoods and on Tramps. Others have a biographical interest, though delightfully objective in treatment ; yet others are mere fugitive pieces; but there are few without some of the most attractive qualities of Dickens's easiest style. Dickens contributed other occasional papers to his jour- nal, some of which may be forgotten without injury to his fame. Amongst these may be reckoned the rather dreary George Silverman^ Explanation (1868), in which there is nothing characteristic but a vivid picture of a set of rant- ers, led by a clique of scoundrels ; on the other hand, there will always be admirers of the pretty Holiday Romance, published nearly simultaneously in America and England, a nosegay of tales told by children, the only fault of which is that, as with other children's nosegays, there is perhaps a little too much of it. I have no room for helping to rescue from partial oblivion an old friend, whose portrait has not, I think, found a home amongst his master's collect- ed sketches. Pincher's counterfeit has gone astray, like Pincher himself. Meanwhile, the special institution of the Christmas number flourished in connexion with All the Year Round down to the year 1867, as it had during the last five years of Household Words. It consisted, with the exception of the very last number, of a series of short stories, in a framework of the editor's own devising. To the authors of the stories, of which he invariably himself Tl.] LAST YEARS. 169 wrote one or more, lie left the utmost liberty, at times stipulating for nothing but that tone of cheerful philan- thropy which he had domesticated in his journal. In the Christmas numbers, which gradually attained to such a popularity that of one of the last something like a quarter of a million copies were sold, Dickens himself shone most conspicuously in the introductory sections; and some of these are to be reckoned amongst his very best descriptive character-sketches. Already in Household Words Christ- mas numbers the introductory sketch of the Seven Poor Travellers fi-om Watt's Charity at supper in the Rochester hostelry, and the excellent description of a winter journey and sojourn at the Holly Tree Inn, with an excursus on inns in general, had become widely popular. The All the Year Round numbers, however, largely augmented this success. After Tom Tiddler^s Ground, with the advent- ures of Miss Kitty Kimmeens, a pretty little morality in miniature, teaching the same lesson as the vagaries of Mr. Mopes the hermit, came Somebody^ s Luggage, with its ex- haustive disquisition on waiters ; and then the memorable chirpings of Mrs. Lirriper, in both Lodgings and Legacy, admirable in the delicacy of their pathos, and including an inimitable picture of London lodging-house life. Then followed the Prescriptions of Dr. Marigold, the eloquent and sarcastic but tender-hearted Cheap Jack ; and Mughy Junction, which gave words to the cry of a whole nation of hungry and thirsty travellers. In the tales and sketches contributed by him to the Christmas numbers, in addition to these introductions, he at times gave the rein to his love for the fancifnl and the grotesque, which there was here no reason to keep under. On the whole, written, as in a sense these compositions were, to order, nothing is more astonishing in them than his continued freshness, against 160 DICKENS. [chap. which his mannerism is here of vanishing importance; and, inasmuch as after issuing a last Christmas number of a different kind, Dickens abandoned the custom when it had reached the height of popular favour, and when man- ifold imitations had offered him the homage of their flat- tery, he may be said to have withdrawn from this cam- paign in his literary life with banners flying. In the year 1859 Dickens's readings had been compar- atively few ; and they had ceased altogether in the follow- ing year, when the Uncommercial Traveller began his wanderings. The winter from 1859 to 1860 was his last winter at Tavistock House ; and, with the exception of his rooms in Wellington Street, he had now no settled resi- dence but Gad's Hill Place. He sought its pleasant re- treat about the beginning of June, after the new experience of an attack of rheumatism had made him recognise "the necessity of country training all through the summer." Yet such was the recuperative power, or the indomitable self-confidence, of his nature, that after he had in these summer months contributed some of the most delightful Uncommercial Traveller papers to his journal, we find him already in August "prowling about, meditating a new book." It is refreshing to think of Dickens in this pleasant interval of country life, before he had rushed once more into the excitement of his labours as a public reader. We may picture him to ourselves, accompanied by his dogs, striding along the country roads and lanes, exploring the haunts of the country tramps, " a piece of Kentish road," for instance, " bordered on either side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a skirt- ing patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant river Ti.] LAST YEARS. 161 stealing steadily away to the ocean like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, ■which the moss, primroses, vio- lets, bluebells, and wild roses would soon render illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may." At the foot of that hill, I fancy, lay Dull- borough town half asleep in the summer afternoon; and the river in the distance was that which bounded the horizon of a little boy's vision *' whose father's family name was Pirrip, and whose Christian name was Philip, but whose infant tongue could make of both names noth- ing longer or more explicit than Pip." The story of Pip's adventures, the novel of Great Ex- pectations, was thought over in these Kentish perambula- tions between Thames and Medway along the road which runs, apparently with the intention of running out to sea, from Higham towards the marshes ; in the lonely church- yard of Cooling village by the thirteen little stone -loz- enges, of which Pip counted only five, now nearly buried in their turn by the rank grass ; and in quiet saunters through the familiar streets of Rochester, past the " queer " Town- hall ; and through the "Vines" past the fine old Restora- tion House, called in the book (by the name of an alto- gether different edifice) Satis House. And the climax of the narrative was elaborated on a unique steamboat excur- sion from London to the mouth of the Thames, broken by a night at the " Ship and Lobster," an old riverside inn call- ed "The Ship" in the story. No wonder that Dickens's descriptive genius should become refreshed by these studies of his subject, and that thus Great Expectations should have indisputably become one of the most picturesque of his books. But it is something very much more at the same time. The Tale of Two Cities had as a story strongly 8 33 162 DICKENS. [chap. seized upon the attention of the reader. But in the earlier chapters of Great Expectations every one felt that Dickens was himself again. Since the Yarmouth scenes in David Copperfield he had written nothing in which description married itself to sentiment so humorously and so tender- ly. Uncouth, and slow, and straightforward, and gentle of heart, like Mr. Peggotty, Joe Gargery is as new a con- ception as he is a genuinely true one ; nor is it easy to know under what aspect to relish him most — whether dis- consolate in his Sunday clothes, " like some extraordinary bird, standing, as he did, speechless, with his tuft of feath- ers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm," or at home by his own fireside, winking at his little comrade, and, when caught in the act by his wife, "drawing the back of his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions." Nor since David Copperfield had Dickens again shown such an insight as he showed here into the world of a child's mind. " To be quite sure," he wrote to Forstcr, " I had fallen into no unconscious repe- titions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe." His fears were unnecessary ; for with all its charm the history of Pip lacks the personal element which insures our sympathy to the earlier story and to its hero. In delicacy of feeling, however, as well as in humour of de- scription, nothing in Dickens surpasses the earlier chap- ters of Great Expectations ; and equally excellent is the narrative of Pip's disloyalty of heart toward his early friends, down to his departure from the forge, a picture of pitiable selfishness almost Rousseau-like in its fidelity to poor human nature; down to his comic humiliation, when in the pride of his ncAV position and his new clothes, before " that unlimited miscreant, Trabb'a boy." The ri] LAST YEARS. 16S later and especially the concluding portions of this novel contain much that is equal in power to its opening ; but it must be allowed that, before many chapters have ended, a false tone finds its way into the story. The whole his- tory of Miss Havishani, and the crew of relations round the unfortunate creature, is strained and unnatural, and Estella's hardness is as repulsive as that of Edith Dombey herself. Mr. Jaggers and his house-keeper, and even Mr. Wemmick, have an element of artificiality in them, whilst about the Pocket family there is little, if anything at all, that is real. The story, however, seems to recover itself as the main thread in its deftly-woven texture is brought forward again : when on a dark, gusty night, ominous of coming trouble, the catastrophe of Pip's expectations an- nounces itself in the return from abroad of his unknown benefactor, the convict whom he had as a child fed on the marshes. The remainder of the narrative is successful in conveying to the reader the sense of sickening anxiety which fills the hero ; the interest is skilfully sustained by the introduction of a very strong situation — Pip's narrow escape out of the clutches of " Old Orlick " in the lime-kiln on the marshes ; and the climax is reached in the admi- rably-executed narrative of the convict's attempt, with the aid of Pip, to escape by the river. The actual winding- up of Great Expectations is not altogether satisfactory ; but on the whole the book must be ranked among the very best of Dickens's later novels, as combining, with the closer construction and intenser narrative force common to several of these, not a little of the delightfully genial humour of his earlier works. Already, before Great Expectations was completely pub- lished, Dickens had given a few readings at the St. James's Hall, and by the end of October in the same year, 1861, 164 DICKENS. [chap. he was once more engaged in a full course of country readings. They occupied him till the following January, only ten days being left for his Christmas number, and a brief holiday for Christmas itself; so close was the ad- justment of time and work by this favourite of fortune. The death of his faithful Arthur Smith befell most unto- wardly before the country readings were begun, but their success was unbroken, from Scotland to South Devon. The long-contemplated extract from Copperfield had at last been added to the list — a self-sacrifice coram publico, hallowed by success — and another from Nicholas Nicklehy, which " went in the wildest manner." He was, however, nearly worn out with fatigue before these winter readings were over, and was glad to snatch a moment of repose before a short spring course in town began. Scarcely was this finished, when he was coquetting in his mind with an offer from Australia, and had already proposed to himself to throw in, as a piece of work by the way, a series of papers to be called The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Doivn. Meanwhile, a few readings for a charitable pur- pose in Paris, and a short summer course at St. James's Hall, completed this second series in the year 1863. Whatever passing thoughts overwork by day or sleep- lessness at night may have occasionally brought with them, Dickens himself would have been strangely sur- prised, as no doubt would have been the great body of a public to which he was by this time about the best known man in England, had he been warned that weakness and weariness were not to be avoided even by a nature en- dowed with faculties so splendid and with an energy so conquering as his. He seemed to stand erect in the strength of his matured powers, equal as of old to any task which he set himself, and exulting, though with less Ti.] LAST YEARS. 166 buoyancy of spirit than of old, in the wreaths which con- tinued to strew his path. Yet already the ranks of his contemporaries were growing thinner, while close to him- self death was taking away members of the generation before, and of that after, his own. 'Amongst them was his mother — of whom his biography and his works have little to say or to suggest — and his second son, Happy events, too, had in the due course of things contracted the family circle at Gad's Hill. Of his intimates, he lost, in 1863, Augustus Egg; and in 1864 John Leech, to whose genius he had himself formerly rendered eloquent homage, A still older associate, the great painter Stanfield, sur- vived till 1867. " No one of your father's friends," Dick- ens then wrote to Stanfield's son, " can ever have loved him more dearly than I always did, or can have better known the worth of his noble character." Yet another friend, who, however, so far as I can gather, had not at any time belonged to Dickens's most familiar circle, had died on Christmas Eve, 1863 — Thackeray, whom it had for some time become customary to compare or contrast with him as his natural rival. Yet in point of fact, save for the tenderness which, as with all humourists of the hio[hest or- der, was an important element in their writings, and save for the influences of time and country to which they were both subject, there are hardly two other amongst our great humourists who have less in common. Their unlikeness shows itself, among other things, in the use made by Thackeray of suggestions which it is difficult to believe he did not in the first instance owe to Dickens. Who would venture to call Captain Costigan a plagiarism from Mr. Snevellici, or to affect that Wenham and Wagg were copied from Pyke and Pluck, or that Major Pendennis — whoso pardon one feels inclined to beg for the juxtaposition-^ 166 DICKENS. [chap. was founded upon Major Bagstock, or tlie Old Campaigner in the Newcomes on the Old Soldier in Copper field? But that suggestions were in these and perhaps in a few other instances derived from Dickens by Thackeray for some of his most masterly characters, it would, I think, be idle to deny. In any case, the style of these two great writers differed as profoundly as their way of looking at men and things. Yet neither of them lacked a thorough apprecia- tion of the other's genius ; and it is pleasant to remember that, after paying in Pendennis a tribute to the purity of Dickens's books, Thackeray in a public lecture referred to his supposed rival in a way which elicited from the latter the warmest of acknowledgments. It cannot be said that the memorial words which, after Thackeray's death, Dick- ens was prevailed upon to contribute to the Cornhill Mag- azine did more than justice to the great writer whom Eng- land had just lost; but it is well that the kindly and un- stinting tribute of admiration should remain on record, to contradict any supposition that a disagreement which had some years previously disturbed the harmony of their intercourse, and of which the world had, according to its wont, made the most, had really estranged two generous minds from one another. The effort which on this occa- sion Dickens made is in itself a proof of his kindly feeling towards Thackeray. Of Talfourd and Landor and Stan- field he could write readily after their deaths, but he frank- ly told Mr. Wilkie Collins that, " had he felt he could," he would most gladly have excused himself from writing the "couple of pages" about Thackeray. Dickens, it should be remembered, was at no time a man of many friends. The mere dalliance of friendship was foreign to one who worked so indefatigably in his hours of recreation as well as of labour ; and fellowship VI.] LAST YEARS. 167 in work of one kind or another seems to have been, in later years at all events, the surest support to his intimacy. Yet he was most easily drawn, not only to those who could help him, but to those whom he could help in con- genial pursuits and undertakings. Such was, no doubt, the origin of his friendship in these later years with an accomplished French actor on the English boards, whom, in a rather barren period of our theatrical history, Dickens may have been justified in describing as " far beyond any one on our stage," and who certainly was an " admirable artist." In 1864 Mr. Fechter had taken the Lyceum, the management of which he was to identify with a more ele- gant kind of melodrama than that long domesticated lower down the Strand; and Dickens was delighted to bestow on him counsel frankly sought and frankly given. As an author, too, he directly associated himself with the art of his friend.^ For I may mention here by anticipa- tion that the last of the All the Year Bound Christmas numbers, the continuous story of J}io Thoroughfare, was written by Dickens and Mr. Wilkie Collins in 18G7, with a direct eye to its subsequent adaptation to the stage, for which it actually was fitted by Mr. Wilkie Collins in the following year. The place of its production, the Adelphi, suited the broad effects and the rather conventional comic humour of the story and piece. From America, Dickens ' One of the last things ever written by Dickens was a criticism of M. Fechter's acting, intended to introduce him to the American public. A false report, by-the-way, declared Dickens to have been the author of the dramatic version of Scott's novel, which at Christ- mas, 1865-'66, was produced at the Lyceum, under the title of 7%« Mastet- of liavenswood ; but he allowed that he had done "a great deal towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, on the stage in his own gallant manner." 168 DICKENS. [chap. watched the preparation of the piece with unflagging in- terest; and his innate and irrepressible genius for stage- management reveals itself in the following passage from a letter written by him to an American friend soon after his return to England : " No Thoroughfare is very shortly coming out in Paris, where it is now in active rehearsal. It is still playing here, but without Fechter, who has been very ill. He and Wilkie raised so many pieces of stage- effect here, that, unless I am quite satisfied with the re- port, I shall go over and try my stage-managerial hand at the Vaudeville Theatre. I particularly want the drugging and attempted robbery in the bedroom-scene at the Swiss Inn to be done to the sound of a water-fall rising and fall- ing with the wind. Although in the very opening of that scene they speak of the water-fall, and listen to it, nobody thought of its mysterious music. I could make it, with a good stage-carpenter, in an hour." Great Expectations had been finished in 1860, and al- ready in the latter part of 1861, the year which comprised the main portion of his second series of readings, he had been thinking of a new story. He had even found a title — the unlucky title which he afterwards adopted^ — but in 1862 the tempting Australian invitation had been a seri- ous obstacle in his way. " I can force myself to go aboard a ship, and I can force myself to do at that reading-desk what I have done a hundred times ; but whether, with all this unsettled, fluctuating distress in my mind, I could force an original book out of it is another question." Nor was it the " unsettled, fluctuating distress " which made it a serious effort for him to attempt another longer fiction. Dickens shared with most writers the experience that both the inventive power and the elasticity of memory decline with advancing years. Already since the time when he VI.] LAST YEARS. 169 was thinking of writing Little Dorrit it had become his habit to enter in a book kept for the purpose memoranda for possible future use, hints for subjects of stories,' scenes, situations, and characters ; thoughts and fancies of all kinds ; titles for possible books. Of these Somehody^s Luggage, Our Mutual Friend, and No Thoroughfare — the last an old fancy revived — came to honourable use ; as did many names, both Christian and surnames, and com- binations of both. Thus, Bradley Headstone's prcenomen was derived directly from the lists of the Education De- partment, and the Lammles and the Stiltstalkings, with Mr. Merdle and the Dorrits, existed as names before the characters were fitted to them. All this, though no doubt in part attributable to the playful readiness of an observa- tion never to be caught asleep, points in the direction of a desire to be securely provided with an armoury of which, in earlier days, he would have taken slight thought. Gradually — indeed, so far as I know, more gradually than in the case of any other of his stories — he had built up the tale for which he had determined on the title of Our Mut- ual Friend, and slowly, and without his old self-confidence, he had, in the latter part of 1863, .set to work upon it. "I want to prepare it for the spring, but I am determined not to begin to publish with less than four numbers done. I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn, and if I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more." For, unfort- unately, he had resolved on returning to the old twenty- number measure for his new story. Begun with an effort, ' Dickens undoubtedly had a genius for titles. Amongst some which he suggested for the use of a friend and contributor to hi3 journal are, " What will he do with itP and " Can he forgive herT' M 8* 170 DICKENS. [chap. Our Mutual Friend — the publication of which extended from May, 1864, to November, 1865 — was completed un- der difficulties, and difficulties of a kind hitherto unknown to Dickens. In February, 1865, as an immediate conse- quence, perhaps, of exposure at a time when depression of spirits rendered him less able than usual to bear it, he had a severe attack of illness, of which Forster says that it " put a broad mark between his past life and what remained to him of the future." From this time forward he felt a lameness in his left foot, which continued to trouble him at intervals during the remainder of his life, and which finally communicated itself to the left hand. A comparison of times, however, convinced Forster that the real origin of this ailment was to be sought in general causes. In 1865, as the year wore on, and the pressure of the novel still continued, he felt that he was " working himself into a damaged state," and was near to that which has greater terrors for natures like his than for more placid temperaments — breaking down. So, in May, he went first to the sea-side and then to France. On his return (it was the 9th of June, the date of his death five years afterwards) he was in the railway train which met with a fearful ac- cident at Staplehurst, in Kent. His carriage was the only passenger-carriage in the train which, when the bridge gave way, was not thrown over into the stream. He was able to escape out of the window, to make his way in again for his brandy-flask and the MS. of a number of Our Mutual Friend which he had left behind him, to clamber down the brickwork of the bridge for water, to do what he could towards rescuing his unfortunate fellow-travellers, and to aid the wounded and the dying. " I have," he wrote, in describing the scene, " a — I don't know what to call it : constitutional, I suppose — presence of mind, and was not VI.] LAST YEARS. Ill in the least fluttered at the time, . . . But in writing these scanty words of recollection I feel the shake, and am obliged to stop." Nineteen months afterwards, when on a hurried reading tour in the North, he complains to Miss Hogarth of the effect of the railway shaking which since the Staple- hurst accident *' tells more and more." It is clear how serious a shock the accident had caused. He never, Miss Hogarth thinks, quite recovered it. Yet it might have acted less disastrously upon a system not already nervously weakened. As evidence of the decline of Dickens's nervous power, I hardly know whether it is safe to refer to the gradual change in his handwriting, which in his last years is a melancholy study. All these circumstances should be taken into account in judging of Dickens's last completed novel. The author would not have been himself had he, when once fairly en- gaged upon his work, failed to feel something of his old self-confidence. Nor was this feeling, which he frankly confessed to Mr. Wilkie Collins, altogether unwarranted. Our Mutual FriemV is, like the rest of Dickens's later writings, carefully and skilfully put together as a story. No exception is to be taken to it on the ground that the identity on which much of the plot hinges is long fore- seen by the reader ; for this, as Dickens told his critics in his postscript, had been part of his design, and was, in fact, considering the general nature of the story, almost indispensable. The defect rather lies in the absence of that element of uncertainty which is needed in order to ' This title has helped to extinguish the phrase of which it con- sists. Few would now be found to agree with the last clause of Flo- ra's parenthesis in Little Dorrit: "Our mutual friend — too cold a word for me ; at least I don't mean that very proper expression, mutual friend." 11% DICKENS. [CHAR sustain the interest. The story is, no doubt, ingeniously enough constructed, but admiration of an ingenious con- struction is insufficient to occupy the mind of a reader through an inevitable disentanglement. Moreover, some of the machinery, though cleverly contrived, cannot be said to work easily. Thus, the ruse of the excellent Bof- fin in playing the part of a skinflint might pass as a mo- mentary device, but its inherent improbability, together with the likelihood of its leading to an untoward result, makes its protraction undeniably tedious. It is not, how- ever, in my opinion at least, in the matter of construction that Our Mutual Friend presents a painful contrast with earlier works produced, like it, " on a large canvas." The conduct of the story as a whole is fully vigorous enough to enchain the attention ; and in portions of it the hand of the master displays its unique power. He is at his best in the whole of the water-side scenes, both where " The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" (identified by zealous discoverers with a tavern called "The Two Brewers") lies like an oasis in the midst of a desert of ill-favoured tidal deposits, and where Rogue Riderhood has his lair at the lock higher up the river. A marvellous union of observation and imagi- nation was needed for the picturing of a world in which this amphibious monster has his being; and never did Dickens's inexhaustible knowledge of the physiognomy of the Thames and its banks stand him in better stead than in these powerful episodes. It is unfortunate, though in accordance with the common fate of heroes and heroines, that Lizzie Ucxham should, from the outset, have to dis- card the colouring of her surroundings, and to talk the conventional dialect as well as express the conventional sentiments of the heroic world. Only at the height of the action she ceases to be commonplace, and becomes entitled VI.] LAST YEARS. 173 to be remembered amongst tlie true heroines of fiction. A more unusual figure, of tlie half-patlictic, half-grotcsquo kind for which Dickens had a peculiar liking, is Lizzie's friend, the doll's dressmaker, into whom he has certainly infused an clement of genuine sentiment; her protector, Rial), on the contrary, is a mere stage-saint, though by this character Dickens appears to have actually lioped to re- deem the aspersions he was supposed to have cast upon the Jews, as if Riah could have redeemed Fagin, any more than Sheva redeemed Shylock. But in this book whole episodes and parts of the plot through which the mystery of John Harmon winds its length along are ill-adapted for giving pleasure to any reader. The whole Boflin, Wcgg, and Venus business — if the term may pass — is extremely wearisome ; the character of Mr. Venus, in particular, seems altogether unconnected or unarticulated with the general plot, on which, indeed, it is but an accidental excrescence. In the Wilfer family there are the outlines of some figures of genuine humour, but the outlines only ; nor is Bella raised into the sphere of the charming out of that of the pert and skittish. A more ambitious attempt, and a more noteworthy failure, was the endeavour to give to the main plot of this novel such a satiric foil as the Circumlocution Office had furnish- ed to the chief action of Little Doi-rit, in a caricature of society at large, its surface varnish and its internal rotten- ness. The Barnacles, and those who deemed it their duty to rally round the Barnacles, had, we saw, felt themselves hard hit ; but what sphere or section of society could feel itself specially caricatured in the Veneerings, or in their associates — the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly brutal Fodsnap, Fascination Fledgeby, and the Laramles, a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and tho 1V4 DICKENS. [chap. Chamber of Horrors ? Caricature such as this, represent- ing no society that has ever in any part of the world pre- tended to be "good," corresponds to the wild rhetoric of the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the " gospel according to Podsnappery ;" but it is, in truth, satire from which both wit and humour have gone out. An angry, often almost spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their place. Amongst the personages moving in " society " are two which, as playing serious parts in the progress of the plot, the author is necessarily obliged to seek to endow with the flesh and blood of real human beings. Yet it is precisely in these — the friends Eugene and Mortimer — that, in the earlier part of the novel at all events, the con- straint of the author's style seems least relieved ; the dia- logues between these two Templars have an unnaturalness about them as intolerable as euphuism or the effeminacies of the Augustan age. It is true that, when the story reaches its tragic height, the character of Eugene is borne along with it, and his affectations are forgotten. But in previous parts of the book, where he poses as a wit, and is evidently meant for a gentleman, he fails to make good his claims to either character. Even the skilfully contrived contrast between the rivals Eugene Wrayburn and the school - master, Bradley Headstone — through whom and through whose pupil, Dickens, by-the-way, dealt another blow against a system of mental training founded upon facts alone — fails to bring out the conception of Eugene which the author manifestly had in his mind. Lastly, the old way of reconciling dissonances — a marriage which " society " calls a mesalliance — has rarely furnished a lamer ending than here; and, had the unwritten laws of English popular fiction permitted, a tragic close would have better accorded with the sombre hue of Ti.] LAST YEARS. 176 the most powerful portions of this curiously unequal ro- mance. The effort — for such it was — of Oxir Mutual Friend had not been over for more than a few months, when Dickens accepted a proposal for thirty nights' readings from the Messrs. Chappell ; and by April, 1866, he was again hard at work, flying across the country into Lanca- shire and Scotland, and back to his temporary London residence in Southwick Place, Hyde Park. In any man more capable than Dickens of controlling the restlessness which consumed him the acceptance of this offer would have been incomprehensible; for his heart had been de- clared out of order by his physician, and the patient had shown himself in some degree awake to the significance of this opinion. But the readings were begun and accom- plished notwithstanding, though not without warnings, on which he insisted on putting his own interpretation. Sleeplessness aggravated fatigue, and stimulants were al- ready necessary to enable him to do the work of his readings without discomfort. Meanwhile, some weeks before they were finished, he had been induced to enter into negotia- tions about a further engagement to begin at the end of the year. Time was to be left for the Christmas number, which this year could hardly find its scene anywhere else than at a railway junction ; and the readings were not to extend over forty nights, which seem ultimately to have been increased to fifty. This second series, which in- cluded a campaign in Ireland, brilliantly successful despite snow and rain, and Fenians, was over in May. Then came the climax, for America now claimed her share of the great author for her public halls and chapels and lecture- theatres; and the question of the summer and autumn was whether or not to follow the sound of the distant m DICKENS. [chap. dollar. It was closely debated between Dickens and his friend Forster and Wills, and he describes himself as " tempest-tossed " with doubts ; but his mind had inclined in one direction from the first, and the matter was virtu- ally decided when it resolved to send a confidential agent to make enquiries on the spot. Little imported another and grave attack in his foot ; the trusty Mr. Dolby's report was irresistible. Eighty readings within half a year was the estimated number, with profits amounting to over fif- teen thousand pounds. The gains actually made were nearly five thousand pounds in excess of this calculation. A farewell banquet, under the presidency of Lord Lyt- ton, gave the favourite author Godspeed on his journey to the larger half of his public ; on the 9th of November he sailed from Liverpool, and on the 19th landed at Bos- ton. The voyage, on which, with his old buoyancy, he had contrived to make himself master of the modest revels of the saloon, seems to have done him good, or at least to have made him, as usual, impatient to be at his task. Barely arrived, he is found reporting himself " so well, that I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night, instead of this night week." By December, however, he was at his reading-desk, first at Boston, where he met with the warmest of welcomes, and then at New York, where there was a run upon the tickets, which he described with his usual excited delisrht. The enthusiasm of his re- o ception by the American public must have been heighten- ed by the thoaght that it was now or never for them to see him face to face, and, by-gones being by-gones, to tes- tify to him their admiration. But there may have been some foundation for his discovery that some signs of agi- tation on his part were expected in return, and " that it would have been taken as a suitable compliment if I would Ti.] LAST YEARS. Ill stagger on the platform, and instantly drop, overpowered by the spectacle before me." It was but a sad Christmas which he spent with his faithful Dolby at their New York inn, tired, and with a " genuine American catarrh upon him," of which he never freed himself during his stay in the country. Hardly had he left the doctor's hands than he was about again, reading in Boston and New York and their more immediate neighbourhood — that is, within six or seven hours by railway — till February ; and then, in order to stimulate his public, beginning a series of appear- ances at more distant places before returning to his start- ing-points. His whole tour included, besides a number of New England towns, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Wash- ington, and in the north Cleveland and Buffalo. Canada and the West were struck out of the programme, the lat- ter chiefly because exciting political matters were begin- ning to absorb public attention. During these journey ings Dickens gave himself up alto- gether to the business of his readings, only occasionally allowing himself to accept the hospitality proffered him on every side. Thus only could he breast the diflSculties of his enterprise ; for, as I have said, his health was never good during the whole of his visit, and his exertions were severe, though eased by the self-devotion of his attendants, of which, as of his constant kindness, both serious and sportive, towards them it is touching to read. Already in January he describes himself as not seldom " so dead beat" at the close of a reading " that they lay me down on a sofa, after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour," and as suffering from intolerable sleeplessness at night. His appetite was equally disordered, and he lived mainly on stimulants. Why had he condemned himself to such a life? 24 118 DICKENS. [chap. When at last lie could declare the stress of his work over he described himself as " nearly used up. Climate, distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work have begun — I may say so, now they are nearly all over — to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness besets me ; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down." Indeed, but for his wonderful energy and the feeling of exultation which is derived from a heavy task nearly ac- complished, he would have had to follow the advice of " Longfellow and all the Cambridge men," and give in nearly at the last. But he persevered through the fare- well readings, both at Boston and at New York, though on the night before the last reading in America he told Dolby that if he " had to read but twice more, instead of once, he couldn't do it." This last reading of all was given at New York on April 20, two days after a farewell banquet at Delmonico's. It was when speaking on this occasion that, very naturally moved by the unalloyed wel- come which had greeted him in whatever part of the States he had visited, he made the declaration already mentioned, promising to perpetuate his grateful sense of his recent American experiences. This apology, which was no apology, at least remains one amongst many proofs of the fact that with Dickens kindness never fell on a thankless soil. The merry month of May was still young in the Kent- ish fields and lanes when the master of Gad's Hill Place was home again at last. " I had not been at sea three days on the passage home," he wrote to his friend Mrs. Watson, " when I became myself again." It was, how- ever, too much when " a ' deputation ' — two in number, of whom only one could get into my cabin, while the oth- er looked in at my window — came to ask me to read to VI.] LAST YEARS. 179 the passengers that evening in the saloon. I respectfully replied that sooner than do it I would assault the captain and be put in irons." Alas ! he was already fast bound, by an engagement concluded soon after he had arrived in Boston, to a final series of readings at home. " Farewell" is a difficult word to say for any one who has grown ac- customed to the stimulating excitement of a public stage, and it is not wonderful that Dickens should have wished to see the faces of his familiar friends — the English pub- lic — once more. But the ensrasrement to which he had set his hand was for a farewell of a hundred readings, at the recompense of eight thousand pounds, in addition to expenses and percentage. It is true that he had done this before he had fully realized the effect of his American exertions ; but even so there was a terrible unwisdom in the promise. These last readings — and he alone is, in common fairness, to be held responsible for the fact — cut short a life from which much noble fruit might still have been expected for our literature, and which in any case might have been prolonged as a blessing beyond all that gold can buy to those who loved him. Meanwhile he had allowed himself a short respite be- fore resuming his labours in October. It was not more, his friends thought, than he needed, for much of his old buoyancy seemed to them to be wanting in him, except when hospitality or the intercourse of friendship called it forth. What a charm there still was in his genial humour his letters would suffice to show. It does one good to read his description to his kind American friends Mr. and Mrs. Fields of his tranquillity at Gad's Hill : " Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mir- rors in the Swiss chalet where I write, and they reflect and 180 DICKENS. [chap. refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up amongst the branches of the trees, and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious," Part of this rare leisure he generously devoted to the preparation for the press of a volume of literary remains from the pen of an old friend. The Religious Opinions of Chauncey Hare Townshend should not be altogether overlooked by those interested in Dickens, to whom the loose undogmatic theology of his friend commended itself as readily as the sincere religious feeling underlying it. I cannot say what answer Dickens would have returned to an enquiry as to his creed, but the nature of his religious opinions is obvious enough. Born in the Church of Eng- land, he had so strong an aversion from what seemed to Mm dogmatism of any kind, that he for a time — in 1843 — connected himself with a Unitarian congregation ; and to Unitarian views his own probably continued during his life most nearly to approach. He described himself as " morally wide asunder from Rome," but the religious conceptions of her community cannot have been a matter of anxious enquiry with him, while he was too liberal- minded to be, unless occasionally, aggressive in his Protes- tantism. For the rest, his mind, though imaginative, was without mystical tendencies, while for the transitory super- stitions of the day it was impossible but that he should entertain the contempt which they deserved. " Although," he writes — Ti.] LAST YEARS. 181 •' I regard with a hushed and solemn fear the mysteries between which, and this state of existence, is interposed the barrier of the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live ; and, al- though I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them, I cannot reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells, creaking of boards, and such like insignificances, with the majestic beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am per- mitted to understand." His piety was undemonstrative and sincere, as his books alone would suffice to prove ; and he seems to have sought to impress upon his children those religious truths with the acceptance and practice of which he remained himself content. He loved the New Testament, and had, after some fashion of his own, paraphrased the Gospel narrative for the use of his children ; but he thought that " half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testa- ment as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the V'ld Testament into alliance with it — whereof comes all man- ner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining." Of Pu- ritanism in its modern forms he was an uncompromising, and no doubt a conscientious, opponent ; and though, with perfect sincerity, he repelled the charge that his attacks upon cant were attacks upon religion, yet their animus is such as to make the misinterpretation intelligible. His Dissenting ministers are of the Bartholomew Fair species ; and though, in his later books, a good clergyman here and there makes his modest appearance, the balance can hard- ly be said to be satisfactorily redressed. The performance of this pious office was not the only kind act he did after his return from America. Of course, however, his own family was nearest to his heart. No kinder or more judicious words were ever addressed by a 182 DICKENS. [chap. father to his children than those which, about this time, he wrote to one of his sons, then beginning a successful career at Cambridge, and to another — the youngest — who was setting forth for Australia, to join an elder brother already established in that country. "Poor Plorn," he afterward wrote, "is gone to Australia. It was a hard parting at the last. He seemed to me to become once more my youngest and favourite child as the day drew near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken." In October his "farewell" readings began. He had never had his heart more in the work than now. Curious- ly enough, not less than two proposals had reached him during this autumn — one from Birmingham and the other from Edinburgh — that he should allow himself to be put forward as a candidate for Parliament ; but he declined to entertain either, though in at least one of the two cases the prospects of success would not have been small. His views of political and parliamentary life had not changed since he had written to Bulwer Lytton in 1865 : "Would there not seem to be something horribly rotten in the sys- tem of political life, when one stands amazed how any man, not forced into it by his position, as you are, can bear to live it ?" Indeed, they had hardly changed since the days when he had come into personal contact with them as a reporter. In public and in private he had never ceased to ridicule our English system of party, and to ex- press his contempt for the Legislature and all its works. He had, however, continued to take a lively interest in public affairs, and his letters contain not a few shrewd remarks on both home and foreign questions. Like most liberal minds of his age, he felt a warm sympathy for the cause of Italy ; and the English statesman whom he ap- pears to have most warmly admired was Lord Russell, in VI.] LAST YEARS. 183 whose ffood intentions neither friends nor adversaries were wont to lose faith. Meanwhile his Radicalism gradually becarae of the most thoroughly independent type, though it interfered neither with his approval of the proceedings in Jamaica as an example of strong government, nor with his scorn of " the meeting of jawbones and asses " held against Governor Eyre at Manchester. The political ques- tions, however, which really moved him deeply were those social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had always directed his attention — the Poor-law, temperance, Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labour and strikes. On all these heads sentiment guided his judg- ment, but he spared no pains to convince himself that he was in the right ; and he was always generous, as when, notwithstanding his interest in Household Words, he de- clared himself unable to advocate the repeal of the paper duty for a moment, " as against the soap duty, or any other pressing on the mass of the poor." Thus he found no difficulty in adhering to the course he had marked out for himself. The subject which now occupied him before all others was a scheme for a new reading, with which it was his wish to vary and to intensify the success of the series on which he was engaged. This was no other than a selection of scenes from Oliver Twist, culminating in the scene of the murder of Nancy by Sikes, which, before producing it in public, he resolved to " try " upon a select private audience. The trial was a brilliant success. " The public," exclaimed a famous actress who was present, *' have been looking out for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and, by Heaven, they have got it !" Accordingly, from January, 1869, it formed one of the most frequent of his readings, and the effort which it involved counted for much in the collapse which was to 184 DICKENS. [chap follow. Never were the limits between reading and acting more thorouglily efEaced by Dickens, and never was the production of an extraordinary effect more equally shared by author and actor. But few who witnessed this ex- traordinary performance can have guessed the elaborate preparation bestowed upon it, which is evident from the following notes (by Mr. C. Kent) on the book used in it by the reader : " What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however — that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write — is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. ' Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,' is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word * Action.^ Not a word of it was said. It was simply donf Again, immediately below that, on the same page — Sikes loquitur : ' Oh ! you haven't, haven't you ?' passing a pistol into a more conven- ient pocket ('-4c