Dickens had to return to London after the middle of March for business connected with a charitable Home established at Shepherd's-bush by Miss Coutts, in the benevolent hope of rescuing fallen women by testing their fitness for emigration, of which future mention will be made, and which largely and regularly occupied his time for several years. On this occasion his stay was prolonged by the illness of his father. His health had been failing latterly, and graver symptoms were now spoken of. "I saw my poor father twice yesterday," he wrote to me on the 27th, "the second time between ten and eleven at night. In the morning I thought him not so well. At night, as well as any one in such a situation could be." Next day he was so much better that his son went back to Malvern, and even gave us grounds for hope that we might yet have his presence in Hertfordshire to advise on some questions connected with the comedy which Sir Edward Lytton had written for the Guild. But the end came suddenly. I returned from Knebworth to London, supposing that some accident had detained him at Malvern; and at my house this letter waited me. "Devonshire-terrace, Monday, thirty-first of March 1851. . . . My poor father died this morning at five and twenty minutes to six. They had sent for me to Malvern, but I passed John on the railway; for I came up with the intention of hurrying down to Bulwer Lytton's to-day before you should have left. I arrived at eleven last night, and was in Keppel-street at a quarter past eleven. But he did not know me, nor any one. He began to sink at about noon yesterday, and never rallied afterwards. I remained there until he died—O so quietly. . . . I hardly know what to do. I am going up to Highgate to get the ground. Perhaps you may like to go, and I should like it if you do. I will not leave here before two o'clock. I think I must go down to Malvern again, at night, to know what is to be done about the children's mourning; and as you are returning to Bulwer's I should like to have gone that way, if Bradshaw gave me any hope of doing it. I wish most particularly to see you, I needn't say. I must not let myself be distracted by anything—and God knows I have left a sad sight!—from the scheme on which so much depends. Most part of the alterations proposed I think good." Mr. John Dickens was laid in Highgate Cemetery on the 5th of April; and the stone placed over him by the son who has made his name a famous one in England, bore tribute to his "zealous, useful, cheerful spirit." What more is to be said of him will be most becomingly said in speaking of David Copperfield. While the book was in course of being written, all that had been best in him came more and more vividly back to its author's memory; as time wore on, nothing else was remembered; and five years before his own death, after using in one of his letters to me a phrase rather out of the common with him, this was added: "I find this looks like my poor father, whom I regard as a better man the longer I live."

He was at this time under promise to take the chair at the General Theatrical Fund on the 14th of April. Great efforts were made to relieve him from the promise; but such special importance was attached to his being present, and the Fund so sorely then required help, that, no change of day being found possible for the actors who desired to attend, he yielded to the pressure put upon him; of which the result was to throw upon me a sad responsibility. The reader will understand why, even at this distance of time; my allusion to it is brief.

The train from Malvern brought him up only five minutes short of the hour appointed for the dinner, and we first met that day at the London Tavern. I never heard him to greater advantage than in the speech that followed. His liking for this Fund was the fact of its not confining its benefits to any special or exclusive body of actors, but opening them generously to all; and he gave a description of the kind of actor, going down to the infinitesimally small, not omitted from such kind help, which had a half-pathetic humour in it that makes it charming still. "In our Fund," he said, "the word exclusiveness is not known. We include every actor, whether he be Hamlet or Benedict: the ghost, the bandit, or the court physician; or, in his one person, the whole king's army. He may do the light business, or the heavy, or the comic, or the eccentric. He may be the captain who courts the young lady, whose uncle still unaccountably persists in dressing himself in a costume one hundred years older than his time. Or he may be the young lady's brother in the white gloves and inexpressibles, whose duty in the family appears to be to listen to the female members of it whenever they sing, and to shake hands with everybody between all the verses. Or he may be the baron who gives the fete, and who sits uneasily on the sofa under a canopy with the baroness while the fete is going on. Or he may be the peasant at the fete who comes on the stage to swell the drinking chorus, and who, it may be observed, always turns his glass upside down before he begins to drink out of it. Or he may be the clown who takes away the doorstep of the house where the evening party is going on. Or he may be the gentleman who issues out of the house on the false alarm, and is precipitated into the area. Or, if an actress, she may be the fairy who resides for ever in a revolving star with an occasional visit to a bower or a palace. Or again, if an actor, he may be the armed head of the witch's cauldron; or even that extraordinary witch, concerning whom I have observed in country places, that he is much less like the notion formed from the description of Hopkins than the Malcolm or Donalbain of the previous scenes. This society, in short, says, 'Be you what you may, be you actor or actress, be your path in your profession never so high or never so low, never so haughty or never so humble, we offer you the means of doing good to yourselves, and of doing good to your brethren.'"

Half an hour before he rose to speak I had been called out of the room. It was the servant from Devonshire-terrace to tell me his child Dora was suddenly dead. She had not been strong from her birth; but there was just at this time no cause for special fear, when unexpected convulsions came, and the frail little life passed away. My decision had to be formed at once; and I satisfied myself that it would be best to permit his part of the proceedings to close before the truth was told to him. But as he went on, after the sentences I have quoted, to speak of actors having to come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death itself, to play their parts before us, my part was very difficult. "Yet how often is it with all of us," he proceeded to say, and I remember to this hour with what anguish I listened to words that had for myself alone, in all the crowded room, their full significance: "how often is it with all of us, that in our several spheres we have to do violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, if we would bravely discharge in it our duties and responsibilities." In the disclosure that followed when he left the chair, Mr. Lemon, who was present, assisted me; and I left this good friend with him next day, when I went myself to Malvern and brought back Mrs. Dickens and her sister. The little child lies in a grave at Highgate near that of Mr. and Mrs. John Dickens; and on the stone which covers her is now written also her father's name, and those of two of her brothers.

One more public discussion he took part in, before quitting London for the rest of the summer; and what he said (it was a meeting, with Lord Carlisle in the chair, in aid of Sanitary reform) very pregnantly illustrates what was remarked by me on a former page. He declared his belief that neither education nor religion could do anything really useful in social improvement until the way had been paved for their ministrations by cleanliness and decency. He spoke warmly of the services of Lord Ashley in connection with ragged schools, but he put the case of a miserable child tempted into one of those schools out of the noisome places in which his life was passed, and he asked what a few hours' teaching could effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a whole existence. "But give him, and his, a glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag, and which makes them the callous things they are; take the body of the dead relative from the room where the living live with it, and where such loathsome familiarity deprives death itself of awe; and then, but not before, they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the wretched, and who had compassion for all human sorrow." He closed by proposing Lord Ashley's health as having preferred the higher ambition of labouring for the poor to that of pursuing the career open to him in the service of the State; and as having also had "the courage on all occasions to face the cant which is the worst and commonest of all, the cant about the cant of philanthropy." Lord Shaftesbury first dined with him in the following year at Tavistock-house.

Shortly after the Sanitary meeting came the first Guild performances; and then Dickens left Devonshire-terrace, never to return to it. What occupied him in the interval before he took possession of his new abode, has before been told; but two letters were overlooked in describing his progress in the labour of the previous year, and brief extracts from them will naturally lead me to the subject of my next chapter. "I have been" (15th of September) "tremendously at work these two days; eight hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half to-day, with the Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me over—utterly defeated me!" "I am" (21st of October) "within three pages of the shore; and am strangely divided, as usual in such cases, between sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World."

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] I take the opportunity of saying that there was an omission of three words in the epitaph quoted on a former page (vol. i. p. 120). The headstone at the grave in Kensal-green bears this inscription: "Young, beautiful, and good, God in His mercy numbered her among His angels at the early age of seventeen."

[159] From letters of nearly the same date here is another characteristic word: "Pen and ink before me! Am I not at work on Copperfield! Nothing else would have kept me here until half-past two on such a day. . . . Indian news bad indeed. Sad things come of bloody war. If it were not for Elihu, I should be a peace and arbitration man."

[160] Here is really an only average specimen of the letters as published: "I forgot to say, if you leave your chamber twenty times a day, after using your basin, you would find it clean, and the pitcher replenished on your return, and that you cannot take your clothes off, but they are taken away, brushed, folded, pressed, and placed in the bureau; and at the dressing-hour, before dinner, you find your candles lighted, your clothes laid out, your shoes cleaned, and everything arranged for use; . . . the dress-clothes brushed and folded in the nicest manner, and cold water, and hot water, and clean napkins in the greatest abundance. . . . Imagine an elegant chamber, fresh water in basins, in goblets, in tubs, and sheets of the finest linen!"

[161] From this time to his death there was always friendly intercourse with his old publisher Mr. Bentley.

[162] It may be proper to record the fact that he had made a short run to Paris, with Maclise, at the end of June, of which sufficient farther note will have been taken if I print the subjoined passages from a letter to me dated 24th June, 1850, Hotel Windsor, Rue de Rivoli. "There being no room in the Hotel Brighton, we are lodged (in a very good apartment) here. The heat is absolutely frightful. I never felt anything like it in Italy. Sleep is next to impossible, except in the day, when the room is dark, and the patient exhausted. We purpose leaving here on Saturday morning and going to Rouen, whence we shall proceed either to Havre or Dieppe, and so arrange our proceedings as to be home, please God, on Tuesday evening. We are going to some of the little theatres to-night, and on Wednesday to the Francais, for Rachel's last performance before she goes to London. There does not seem to be anything remarkable in progress, in the theatrical way. Nor do I observe that out of doors the place is much changed, except in respect of the carriages which are certainly less numerous. I also think the Sunday is even much more a day of business than it used to be. As we are going into the country with Regnier to-morrow, I write this after letter-time and before going out to dine at the Trois Freres, that it may come to you by to-morrow's post. The twelve hours' journey here is astounding—marvellously done, except in respect of the means of refreshment, which are absolutely none. Mac is very well (extremely loose as to his waistcoat, and otherwise careless in regard of buttons) and sends his love. De Fresne proposes a dinner with all the notabilities of Paris present, but I WON'T stand it! I really have undergone so much fatigue from work, that I am resolved not even to see him, but to please myself. I find, my child (as Horace Walpole would say), that I have written you nothing here, but you will take the will for the deed."

[163] The rest of the letter may be allowed to fill the corner of a note. The allusions to Rogers and Landor are by way of reply to an invitation I had sent him. "I am extremely sorry to hear about Fox. Shall call to enquire, as I come by to the Temple. And will call on you (taking the chance of finding you) on my way to that Seat of Boredom. I wrote my paper for H. W. yesterday, and have begun Copperfield this morning. Still undecided about Dora, but MUST decide to-day. La difficulte d'ecrire l'Anglais m'est extremement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu! si l'on pourrait toujours ecrire cette belle langue de France! Monsieur Rogere! Ah! qu'il est homme d'esprit, homme de genie, homme des lettres! Monsieur Landore! Ah qu'il parle Francais—pas parfaitement comme un ange—un peu (peut-etre) comme un diable! Mais il est bon garcon—serieusement, il est un de la vraie noblesse de la nature. Votre tout devoue, CHARLES. A Monsieur Monsieur Fos-tere."

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Pages 47-48, word split over two pages was mistyped. Word "yester- terday" changed to "yesterday" (Ditto yesterday; except)

Footnote 116, "inim table" changed to "inimitable" (facetiousness of the inimitable)

Page 310, "Nove ber" changed to "November" (21st of November)

Page 311, "hem" changed to "them" (perfect joy in them)

Footnote 139, "Edi burgh" changed to "Edinburgh" (Lord Cockburn. "EDINBURGH)

Footnote 143, "l ght" changed to "light" (Wellbred's light ease)

To retain the integrity of the original text, varied hyphenations, capitalizations, and, at times, spellings were retained.

For example:

Varied hyphenation and capitalization of Devonshire Terrace was retained. Also fac-simile and facsimile. Varied spelling of A'Beckett/A'Becket was retained.



*****



Transcriber's Note:

For the reader: Italic text is surrounded by underscores, bold text is surrounded by equal signs and underlined text is surrounded by tildes. Two breves above the letter e are indicated by ĕ in the text.



THE LIFE

OF



THE LIFE

OF

CHARLES DICKENS

BY

JOHN FORSTER.

VOL. III.

1852-1870.



ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE Autograph of Charles Dickens Fly-leaf

Charles Dickens, aet. 56. From the last photograph taken in America, in 1868. Engraved by J. C. Armytage Frontispiece

Devonshire Terrace. From a drawing by Daniel Maclise, R.A. 41

Tavistock House 53

Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of David Copperfield 157

Facsimile of plan prepared for first number of Little Dorrit 158

The Porch at Gadshill 204

The Chalet 213

House and conservatory, from the meadow 216

The study at Gadshill 222

Facsimile from the last page of Edwin Drood, written on the 8th of June, 1870 468

Facsimile of a page of Oliver Twist, written in 1837 469

The Grave. From an original water-colour drawing, executed for this Work, by S. L. Fildes. Engraved by J. Saddler to face p. 544



TABLE OF CONTENTS.



CHAPTER I. 1850-1853.

Pages 21-50.

DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE. AET. 38-41.

PAGE

Interest of Copperfield 21 Real people in novels 22 Scott, Smollett, and Fielding 22 Complaint and atonement 23 Earlier and later methods 24 Boythorn and Skimpole 26 Yielding to temptation 27 Changes made in Skimpole 28 Relatives put into books 29 Scott and his father 29 Dickens and his father 30 No harm done 32 Micawber and Skimpole 32 Dickens and David 33 Dangers of autobiography 34 Design of David's character 35 Why books continue 36 The storm and shipwreck 37 Goethe on the insane 38 The two heroines 39 Risks not worth running 40 Devonshire Terrace 41 Bleak House 43 Defects of the novel 44 Set-offs and successes 45 Value of critical judgments 46 The contact of extremes 47 Dean Ramsay on Jo 48 Town graves 49 One last friend 49 Truth of Gridley's case 50

CHAPTER II. 1853-1855.

Pages 51-75.

HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES. AET. 41-43.

Titles proposed for Bleak House 52 Restlessness 52 Tavistock House 53 Last child born 54 A young stage aspirant 54 Deaths of friends 55 At Boulogne 55 Publishing agreements 56 At Birmingham 56 Self-changes 57 Employments in Boulogne 59 First reading in public 60 Argument against paid readings 61 Children's theatricals 62 Mr. H. in Tom Thumb 62 Dickens in Fortunio 63 Titles for a new story 65 Difficulties of weekly parts 66 Mr. Ruskin on Hard Times 67 Truths enforced 68 Early experiences 69 Strike at Preston 69 Speaking at Drury Lane 70 Stanfield scenes 71 Tavistock House theatricals 71 Peter Cunningham 73 Incident of a November night 74 Degrees in misery 75

CHAPTER III. 1853.

Pages 76-95.

SWITZERLAND AND ITALY REVISITED. AET. 41.

Swiss people 76 Narrow escape 77 Lausanne and Genoa 78 The Peschiere and its owner 79 On the way to Naples 80 A night on board ship 81 A Greek potentate 82 Going out to dinner 83 The old idle Frenchman 84 Changes and old friends 85 A "scattering" party 86 The puppets at Rome 87 Malaria and desolation 88 Plague-smitten places 89 Again in Venice 90 A painter among paintings 91 Liking for the Sardinians 92 Neapolitans in exile 93 Travelling police arrangements 94 Dickens and the Austrian 95

CHAPTER IV. 1853, 1854, and 1856.

Pages 96-120.

THREE SUMMERS AT BOULOGNE. AET. 41, 42, 44.

Visits to France 96 First summer residence (1853) 97 Villa des Moulineaux 98 Doll's house and offices 99 Bon garcon of a landlord 100 Making the most of it 101 Among Putney market-gardeners 102 Shakespearian performance 103 Pictures at the pig-market 104 English friends 105 Change of villa (1854) 105 The Northern Camp 106 Visit of Prince Albert 107 Emperor, Prince, and Dickens 108 "Like boxing" 109 The Empress at a review 110 A French conjuror 110 Conjuring by Dickens 111 Making demons of cards 112 Conjuror's compliment and vision 114 Old residence resumed (1856) 115 Last of the Camp 116 A household war 117 State of siege 118 Death of Gilbert A'Becket 119 Leaving for England 119

CHAPTER V. 1855, 1856.

Pages 121-153.

RESIDENCE IN PARIS. AET. 43-44.

Actors and dramas 122 Frederic Lemaitre 122 Last scene in Gambler's Life 123 Apartment in Champs Elysees 124 French Translation of Dickens 125 Ary Scheffer and Daniel Manin 126 English friends 126 Acting at the Francais 127 Dumas' Orestes 129 Paradise Lost at the Ambigu 130 Profane nonsense 131 French As You Like It 132 Story of a French drama 133 A delightful "Tag" 134 Auber and Queen Victoria 134 Scribe and his wife 136 At Regnier's 137 Viardot in Orphee 138 Meets Georges Sand 138 Banquet at Girardin's 139 Second banquet 141 Bourse and its victims 142 Entry of troops from Crimea 143 Zouaves and their dog 144 Streets on New Year's Day 145 English and French art 146 Emperor and Edwin Landseer 147 Sitting to Ary Scheffer 148 Scheffer as to the likeness 149 A duchess murdered 150 Truth is stranger than fiction 151 Singular scenes described 152 What became of the actors 153

CHAPTER VI. 1855-1857.

Pages 154-176.

LITTLE DORRIT, AND A LAZY TOUR. AET. 43-45.

Watts's Rochester charity 155 Tablet to Dickens in Cathedral 155 Nobody's Fault 155 How the Dorrit story grew 156 Number-Plan of Copperfield 157 Number-Plan of Dorrit 158 Circumlocution Office 159 Flora and Mr. F—— 160 Weak and strong points 161 A scene of boy-trials 162 Reception of the novel 163 Christmas theatricals 164 Theatre-making 165 Rush for places 166 Douglas Jerrold's death 168 Exertions and result 168 Seeing the serpents fed 169 Lazy Tour projected 170 Up Carrick Fell 170 Accident to Mr. Wilkie Collins 171 At Wigton and Allonby 172 The Yorkshire landlady 173 Doncaster in race week 174 A performance of Money 175

CHAPTER VII. 1857-1858.

Pages 177-201.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THIS TIME. AET. 45-46.

Disappointments and distastes 177 What we seem and are 178 Compensations of Art 179 Misgivings 180 A defect and a merit 181 Reply to a remonstrance 182 Dangerous comfort 183 One happiness missed 184 Homily on life 185 Confidences 186 Rejoinder to a reply 187 What the world cannot give 189 An old project revived 189 Shakespeare on acting 191 Hospital for sick children 192 Charities of the very poor 192 Unsolved mysteries 194 Appeal for sick children 195 Reading for Child's Hospital 195 Proposal for Paid readings 196 Question of the Plunge 198 Mr. Arthur Smith 199 Separation from Mrs. Dickens 200 What alone concerned the public 201

CHAPTER VIII. 1856-1870.

Pages 202-222.

GADSHILL PLACE. AET. 44-58.

First description of it 202 The porch 204 Negotiations for purchase 204 Becomes his home 205 Gadshill a century ago 206 Past owners and tenants 207 Sinking a well 209 Gradual additions 210 Gift from Mr. Fechter 211 Dickens's writing-table 211 The chalet 213 Much coveted acquisition 214 Last improvement 215 Visits of friends 216 Dickens's Dogs 218 A Fenian mastiff 218 Linda and Mrs. Bouncer 219 Favourite walks 220 The study and chair 222



CHAPTER IX. 1858-1859.

Pages 223-238.

FIRST PAID READINGS. AET. 46-47.

Various managements 223 One day's work 224 Impressions of Dublin 225 Irish audiences 226 Young Ireland and Old England 227 Railway ride to Belfast 229 Brought near his Fame 229 A knowing audience 231 Greeting in Manchester 231 Joined by his daughters 232 Strange life 233 Scotch audiences 234 When most successful in reading 235 At public meetings 236 Miss Marie Wilton as Pippo 237 Ed. Landseer on Frith's portrait 238

CHAPTER X. 1859-1861.

Pages 239-254.

ALL THE YEAR ROUND AND THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. AET. 47-49.

Household Words discontinued 240 Earliest and latest publishers 240 Dickens and Mr. Bentley 241 In search of a title 242 A title found 243 Success of new periodical 244 Difference from the old 245 At Knebworth 246 Commercial Travellers' Schools 247 A Traveller for human interests 248 Personal references in writing 249 Birds and low company 250 Bethnal-green fowls 251 An incident of Doughty Street 252 Offers from America 253

CHAPTER XI. 1861-1863.

Pages 255-274.

SECOND SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 49-51.

Daughter Kate's marriage 255 Charles Alston Collins 257 Sale of Tavistock House 257 Brother Alfred's death 258 Metropolitan readings 258 Provincial circuit 259 New subjects for readings 260 Death of Mr. Arthur Smith 261 Death of Mr. Henry Austin 262 Readings at Brighton 263 At Canterbury and Dover 264 Alarming scene 265 Impromptu reading-hall 266 Scenes in Scotland 267 At Torquay 268 Death of C. C. Felton 269 Offers for Australia 270 Writing or Reading? 271 Home arguments 272 Religious Richardson's Show 273 Exiled ex-potentate 274

CHAPTER XII. 1855-1865.

Pages 275-297.

HINTS FOR BOOKS WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN. AET. 43-53.

Book of MS. memoranda 275 Originals of characters 277 Fancies put into books 277 Notions for Little Dorrit 278 Suggestions for other books 279 Hints for last completed book 280 Fancies never used 281 Ideas not worked out 282 A touching fancy 284 Domestic subjects 284 Characters of women 285 Other female groups 286 Uncle Sam 288 Sketches of selfishness 288 Striking thoughts 290 Subjects not accomplished 290 Characters laid aside 291 Available names 293 Titles for books 293 Names for girls and boys 295 An undistinguished crowd 296 Mr. Brobity's snuff-box 297

CHAPTER XIII. 1864-1867.

Pages 298-324.

THIRD SERIES OF READINGS. AET. 52-55.

Death of Thackeray 298 Mother's death 300 Death of second son 300 Interest in Mr. Fechter 301 Notes on theatres 302 Sorrowful new year 303 C. W. Dilke's death 303 Staplehurst accident 305 Illness and suffering 305 Enters on new readings 306 Last meeting with Mrs. Carlyle 308 Mrs. Carlyle's death 309 Offer for more readings 309 Grave warnings 311 In Scotland 312 Exertion and its result 313 Self-deception 314 An old malady 314 Scene at Tynemouth 316 In Dublin with the Fenians 317 Yielding to temptation 318 Pressure from America 319 At bay at last 320 Warning unheeded 321 Discussion useless 322 The case in a nutshell 323 Decision to go 324

CHAPTER XIV. 1836-1870.

Pages 325-386.

DICKENS AS A NOVELIST. AET. 24-58.

See before you oversee 326 M. Taine's criticism 326 What is overlooked in it 327 A popularity explained 328 National excuses for Dickens 330 Comparison with Balzac 330 Anticipatory reply to M. Taine 332 A critic in the Fortnightly Review 333 Blame and praise to be reconciled 333 A plea for objectors 334 "Hallucinative" imagination 335 Vain critical warnings 336 The critic and the criticised 336 An opinion on the Micawbers 338 Hallucinative phenomena 338 Scott writing Bride of Lammermoor 339 Claim to be fairly judged 340 Dickens's leading quality 341 Dangers of Humour 342 His earlier books 343 Mastery of dialogue 344 Character-drawing 345 Realities of fiction 346 Fielding and Dickens 347 Touching of extremes 347 Why the creations of fiction live 349 Enjoyment of his own humour 350 Unpublished note of Lord Lytton 350 Exaggerations of humour 351 Temptations of all great humourists 352 A word for fanciful descriptions 353 Tale of Two Cities 355 Difficulties and success 355 Specialty of treatment 356 Reply to objections 357 Care with which Dickens worked 358 An American critic 359 Great Expectations 360 Pip and Magwitch 361 Another boy-child for hero 362 Unlikeness in likeness 363 Vivid descriptive writing 364 Masterly drawing of character 365 A day on the Thames 366 Homely and shrewd satire 367 Incident changed for Lytton 368 As originally written 369 Christmas Sketches 370 Our Mutual Friend 370 Writing numbers in advance 373 Working slowly 374 Death of John Leech 375 A fatal anniversary 376 Effects on himself and his novel 376 A tale by Edmond About 378 First and Last 378 Doctor Marigold 379 Minor stories 380 "Something from Above" 381 Purity of Dickens's writings 382 Substitute for an alleged deficiency 382 True province of humour 383 Horace Greeley and Longfellow 384 Letters from an American 385 Companions for solitude 386

CHAPTER XV. 1867.

Pages 387-406.

AMERICA REVISITED. NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1867. AET. 55.

Warmth of the greeting 388 Same cause as in 1842 388 Old and new friends 389 Changes since 1842 390 First Boston reading 391 Scene at New York sales 393 First New York reading 393 An action against Dickens 394 A fire at his hotel 395 Local and general politics 397 Railway arrangements 398 Police of New York 398 Mistletoe from England 399 As to newspapers 400 Nothing lasts long 401 Cities chosen for readings 401 Scene of a murder visited 402 A dinner at the murderer's 403 Illness and abstinence 404 Miseries of American travel 405 Startling prospect 406

CHAPTER XVI. 1868.

Pages 407-443.

AMERICA REVISITED. JANUARY TO APRIL, 1868. AET. 56.

Speculators and public 408 An Englishman's disadvantage 408 "Freedom and independence" 408 Mountain-sneezers and eye-openers 409 The work and the gain 410 A scene at Brooklyn 411 At Philadelphia 412 "Looking up the judge" 413 Improved social ways 414 Result of thirty-four readings 415 Shadow to the sunshine 416 Readings in a church 417 Change of plan 417 Baltimore women 418 Success in Philadelphia 419 Objections to coloured people 420 With Sumner at Washington 421 President Lincoln's dream 423 Interview with President Johnson 423 Washington audiences 424 A comical dog 425 Incident before a reading 426 The child and the doll 427 North-west tour 428 Political excitement 429 Struggle for tickets 430 American female beauty 432 Sherry to "slop round" with 432 Final impression of Niagara 433 Letter to Mr. Ouvry 434 "Getting along" through water 435 Again attacked by lameness 437 Illness and exertion 437 Seeing prevents believing 439 All but used up 439 Last Boston readings 440 New York farewells 441 The receipts throughout 441 Promise at public dinner 442 The Adieu 443

CHAPTER XVII. 1868-1870.

Pages 444-460.

LAST READINGS. AET. 56-58.

Health improved 444 What the readings did and undid 445 Expenses and gains in America 446 Noticeable changes in him 447 Oliver Twist reading proposed 448 Objections to it 449 Death of Frederick Dickens 450 Macready at Oliver Twist reading 451 Another attack of illness 452 A doctors' difference 454 At Emerson Tennent's funeral 454 The illness at Preston 455 Brought to London 456 Sir Thomas Watson consulted 456 His note of the case 457 Guarded sanction to other readings 458 Close of career as public reader 460

CHAPTER XVIII. 1869-1870.

Pages 461-477.

LAST BOOK. AET. 57-58.

The agreement for Edwin Drood 461 First fancy for it 462 Story as planned in his mind 463 What to be its course and end 463 Merits of the fragment 464 Comparison of early and late MSS 466 Discovery of an unpublished scene 467 Last page of Drood in fac-simile 468 Page of Oliver Twist in fac-simile 469 Delightful specimen of Dickens 470 Unpublished scene for Drood 470-476

CHAPTER XIX. 1836-1870.

Pages 478-526.

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS. AET. 24-58.

Dickens not a bookish man 479 Books and their critics 479 Design of present book stated 480 Dickens made to tell his own story 480 Charge of personal obtrusiveness 481 Lord Russell on Dickens's letters 481 Shallower judgments 481 Absence of self-conceit in Dickens 482 Letter to youngest son 483 As to religion and prayer 485 Letter to a clergyman in 1856 485 Letter to a layman in 1870 486 Objection to posthumous honours 487 As to patronage of literature 488 Vanity of human wishes 488 As to writers and publishers 489 Editorship of his weekly serials 490 Work for his contributors 491 Editorial troubles and pleasures 493 Letter to an author 493 Help to younger novelists 495 Adelaide Procter's poetry 495 Effect of periodical writing 496 Proposed satirical papers 497 Political opinions 498 Not the man for Finsbury 499 The Liverpool dinner in 1869 500 Reply to Lord Houghton 501 Tribute to Lord Russell 501 People governing and governed 502 Alleged offers from her Majesty 503 Silly Rigmarole 504 The Queen sees him act (1857) 505 Desires to hear him read (1858) 506 Interview at the Palace (1870) 507 What passed at the interview 507 Dickens's grateful impression 508 A hope at the close of life 509 Games in Gadshill meadow 510 Home enjoyments 512 Habits of life everywhere 513 Family dependence on him 514 Carlyle's opinion of Dickens 514 Street walks and London haunts 515 Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 517 The first attack of lameness 518 Effect upon his dogs 518 Why right things to be done 519 Silent heroisms 519 At social meetings 520 Delight in "assumption" 520 Humouring a joke 522 Unlucky hits 522 Ghost stories 524 Predominant feeling of his life 525 Sermon of the Master of Balliol 525

CHAPTER XX. 1869-1870.

Pages 527-545.

THE END. AET. 57-58.

Last summer and autumn 527 Showing London to a visitor 528 His son Henry's scholarship 529 Twelve more readings 530 Medical attendance at them 531 Excitement incident to them 532 The Farewell 533 Last public appearances 535 At Royal Academy dinner 535 Eulogy of Daniel Maclise 536 Return of illness 537 Our last meeting 538 A noteworthy incident 538 Last letter received from him 539 Final days at Gadshill 539 Wednesday the 8th of June 540 Last piece of writing 540 The 8th and 9th of June 541 The general grief 542 The burial 544 Unbidden mourners 544 The grave 544

* * * * *

APPENDIX.

I. THE WRITINGS OF CHARLES DICKENS 547

II. THE WILL OF CHARLES DICKENS 561

III. CORRECTIONS MADE IN THE LATER EDITIONS OF THE SECOND VOLUME OF THIS WORK 566

INDEX 571



THE LIFE

OF

CHARLES DICKENS.



CHAPTER I.

DAVID COPPERFIELD AND BLEAK HOUSE.

1850-1853.

Interest of Copperfield—Scott, Smollett, and Fielding—Too close to the Real—Earlier and Later Methods—Dickens at Hatton-garden (1837)—Originals of Boythorn and Skimpole—Last Glimpse of Leigh Hunt (1859)—Changes made in Skimpole—Self-defence—Scott and his Father—Dickens and his Father—Sayings of John Dickens—Skimpole and Micawber—Dickens and David—Self-portraiture not attempted—The Autobiographic Form—Consistent Drawing—Design of David's Character—Tone of the Novel—The Peggottys—Miss Dartle—Mrs. Steerforth—Betsey Trotwood—A Country Undertaker—The Two Heroines—Contrast of Esther and David—Plot of the Story—Incidents and Persons interwoven—Defects of Bleak House—Success in Character—Value of Critical Judgments—Pathetic Touches—Dean Ramsay on Bleak House and Jo—Originals of Chancery Abuses.

DICKENS never stood so high in reputation as at the completion of Copperfield. The popularity it obtained at the outset increased to a degree not approached by any previous book excepting Pickwick. "You gratify me more than I can tell you," he wrote to Bulwer Lytton (July 1850), "by what you say about Copperfield, because I hope myself that some heretofore deficient qualities are there." If the power was not greater than in Chuzzlewit, the subject had more attractiveness; there was more variety of incident, with a freer play of character; and there was withal a suspicion, which though general and vague had sharpened interest not a little, that underneath the fiction lay something of the author's life. How much, was not known by the world until he had passed away.

To be acquainted with English literature is to know, that, into its most famous prose fiction, autobiography has entered largely in disguise, and that the characters most familiar to us in the English novel had originals in actual life. Smollett never wrote a story that was not in some degree a recollection of his own adventures; and Fielding, who put something of his wife into all his heroines, had been as fortunate in finding, not Trulliber only, but Parson Adams himself, among his living experiences. To come later down, there was hardly any one ever known to Scott of whom his memory had not treasured up something to give minuter reality to the people of his fancy; and we know exactly whom to look for in Dandie Dinmont and Jonathan Oldbuck, in the office of Alan Fairford and the sick room of Crystal Croftangry. We are to observe also that it is never anything complete that is thus taken from life by a genuine writer, but only leading traits, or such as may give greater finish; that the fine artist will embody in his portraiture of one person his experiences of fifty; and that this would have been Fielding's answer to Trulliber if he had objected to the pigstye, and to Adams if he had sought to make a case of scandal out of the affair in Mrs. Slipslop's bedroom. Such questioning befell Dickens repeatedly in the course of his writings, where he freely followed, as we have seen, the method thus common to the masters in his art; but there was an instance of alleged wrong in the course of Copperfield where he felt his vindication to be hardly complete, and what he did thereupon was characteristic.

"I have had the queerest adventure this morning," he wrote (28th of December 1849) on the eve of his tenth number, "the receipt of the enclosed from Miss Moucher! It is serio-comic, but there is no doubt one is wrong in being tempted to such a use of power." Thinking a grotesque little oddity among his acquaintance to be safe from recognition, he had done what Smollett did sometimes, but never Fielding, and given way, in the first outburst of fun that had broken out around the fancy, to the temptation of copying too closely peculiarities of figure and face amounting in effect to deformity. He was shocked at discovering the pain he had given, and a copy is before me of the assurances by way of reply which he at once sent to the complainant. That he was grieved and surprised beyond measure. That he had not intended her altogether. That all his characters, being made up out of many people, were composite, and never individual. That the chair (for table) and other matters were undoubtedly from her, but that other traits were not hers at all; and that in Miss Moucher's "Ain't I volatile" his friends had quite correctly recognized the favourite utterance of a different person. That he felt nevertheless he had done wrong, and would now do anything to repair it. That he had intended to employ the character in an unpleasant way, but he would, whatever the risk or inconvenience, change it all, so that nothing but an agreeable impression should be left. The reader will remember how this was managed, and that the thirty-second chapter went far to undo what the twenty-second had done.

A much earlier instance is the only one known to me where a character in one of his books intended to be odious was copied wholly from a living original. The use of such material, never without danger, might have been justifiable here if anywhere, and he had himself a satisfaction in always admitting the identity of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist with Mr. Laing of Hatton-garden. But the avowal of his purpose in that case, and his mode of setting about it, mark strongly a difference of procedure from that which, following great examples, he adopted in his later books. An allusion to a common friend in one of his letters of the present date—"A dreadful thought occurs to me! how brilliant in a book!"—expresses both the continued strength of his temptations and the dread he had brought himself to feel of immediately yielding to them; but he had no such misgivings in the days of Oliver Twist. Wanting an insolent and harsh police-magistrate, he bethought him of an original ready to his hand in one of the London offices; and instead of pursuing his later method of giving a personal appearance that should in some sort render difficult the identification of mental peculiarities, he was only eager to get in the whole man complete upon his page, figure and face as well as manners and mind.

He wrote accordingly (from Doughty-street on the 3rd of June 1837) to Mr. Haines,[164] a gentleman who then had general supervision over the police reports for the daily papers. "In my next number of Oliver Twist I must have a magistrate; and, casting about for a magistrate whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be shown up, I have as a necessary consequence stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton-garden celebrity. I know the man's character perfectly well; but as it would be necessary to describe his personal appearance also, I ought to have seen him, which (fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be) I have never done. In this dilemma it occurred to me that perhaps I might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-garden office for a few moments some morning. If you can further my object I shall be really very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity was found; the magistrate was brought up before the novelist; and shortly after, on some fresh outbreak of intolerable temper, the home-secretary found it an easy and popular step to remove Mr. Laing from the bench.

This was a comfort to everybody, saving only the principal person; but the instance was highly exceptional, and it rarely indeed happens that to the individual objection natural in every such case some consideration should not be paid. In the book that followed Copperfield, two characters appeared having resemblances in manner and speech to two distinguished writers too vivid to be mistaken by their personal friends. To Lawrence Boythorn, under whom Landor figured, no objection was made; but Harold Skimpole, recognizable for Leigh Hunt, led to much remark; the difference being, that ludicrous traits were employed in the first to enrich without impairing an attractive person in the tale, whereas to the last was assigned a part in the plot which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Though a want of consideration was thus shown to the friend whom the character would be likely to recall to many readers, it is nevertheless very certain that the intention of Dickens was not at first, or at any time, an unkind one. He erred from thoughtlessness only. What led him to the subject at all, he has himself stated. Hunt's philosophy of moneyed obligations, always, though loudly, half jocosely proclaimed, and his ostentatious wilfulness in the humouring of that or any other theme on which he cared for the time to expatiate,[165] had so often seemed to Dickens to be whimsical and attractive that, wanting an "airy quality" for the man he invented, this of Hunt occurred to him; and "partly for that reason, and partly, he has since often grieved to think, for the pleasure it afforded to find a delightful manner reproducing itself under his hand, he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend." This apology was made[166] after Hunt's death, and mentioned a revision of the first sketch, so as to render it less like, at the suggestion of two other friends of Hunt. The friends were Procter (Barry Cornwall) and myself; the feeling having been mine from the first that the likeness was too like. Procter did not immediately think so, but a little reflection brought him to that opinion. "You will see from the enclosed," Dickens wrote (17th of March 1852), "that Procter is much of my mind. I will nevertheless go through the character again in the course of the afternoon, and soften down words here and there." But before the day closed Procter had again written to him, and next morning this was the result. "I have again gone over every part of it very carefully, and I think I have made it much less like. I have also changed Leonard to Harold. I have no right to give Hunt pain, and I am so bent upon not doing it that I wish you would look at all the proof once more, and indicate any particular place in which you feel it particularly like. Whereupon I will alter that place."

Upon the whole the alterations were considerable, but the radical wrong remained. The pleasant sparkling airy talk, which could not be mistaken, identified with odious qualities a friend only known to the writer by attractive ones; and for this there was no excuse. Perhaps the only person acquainted with the original who failed to recognize the copy, was the original himself (a common case); but good-natured friends in time told Hunt everything, and painful explanations followed, where nothing was possible to Dickens but what amounted to a friendly evasion of the points really at issue. The time for redress had gone. I yet well remember with what eager earnestness, on one of these occasions, he strove to set Hunt up again in his own esteem. "Separate in your own mind," he said to him, "what you see of yourself from what other people tell you that they see. As it has given you so much pain, I take it at its worst, and say I am deeply sorry, and that I feel I did wrong in doing it. I should otherwise have taken it at its best, and ridden off upon what I strongly feel to be the truth, that there is nothing in it that should have given you pain. Every one in writing must speak from points of his experience, and so I of mine with you: but when I have felt it was going too close I stopped myself, and the most blotted parts of my MS. are those in which I have been striving hard to make the impression I was writing from, unlike you. The diary-writing I took from Haydon, not from you. I now first learn from yourself that you ever set anything to music, and I could not have copied that from you. The character is not you, for there are traits in it common to fifty thousand people besides, and I did not fancy you would ever recognize it. Under similar disguises my own father and mother are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber." The distinction is that the foibles of Mr. Micawber and of Mrs. Nickleby, however laughable, make neither of them in speech or character less loveable; and that this is not to be said of Skimpole's. The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where near relatives are concerned.

For what formerly was said of the Micawber resemblances, Dickens has been sharply criticized; and in like manner it was thought objectionable in Scott that for the closing scenes of Crystal Croftangry he should have found the original of his fretful patient at the death-bed of his own father. Lockhart, who tells us this, adds with a sad significance that he himself lived to see the curtain fall at Abbotsford upon even such another scene. But to no purpose will such objections still be made. All great novelists will continue to use their experiences of nature and fact, whencesoever derivable; and a remark made to Lockhart by Scott himself suggests their vindication. "If a man will paint from nature, he will be most likely to interest and amuse those who are daily looking at it."

The Micawber offence otherwise was not grave. We have seen in what way Dickens was moved or inspired by the rough lessons of his boyhood, and the groundwork of the character was then undoubtedly laid; but the rhetorical exuberance impressed itself upon him later, and from this, as it expanded and developed in a thousand amusing ways, the full-length figure took its great charm. Better illustration of it could not perhaps be given than by passages from letters of Dickens, written long before Micawber was thought of, in which this peculiarity of his father found frequent and always agreeable expression. Several such have been given in this work from time to time, and one or two more may here be added. It is proper to preface them by saying that no one could know the elder Dickens without secretly liking him the better for these flourishes of speech, which adapted themselves so readily to his gloom as well as to his cheerfulness, that it was difficult not to fancy they had helped him considerably in both, and had rendered more tolerable to him, if also more possible, the shade and sunshine of his chequered life. "If you should have an opportunity pendente lite, as my father would observe—indeed did on some memorable ancient occasions when he informed me that the ban-dogs would shortly have him at bay"—Dickens wrote in December 1847. "I have a letter from my father" (May 1841) "lamenting the fine weather, invoking congenial tempests, and informing me that it will not be possible for him to stay more than another year in Devonshire, as he must then proceed to Paris to consolidate Augustus's French." "There has arrived," he writes from the Peschiere in September 1844, "a characteristic letter for Kate from my father. He dates it Manchester, and says he has reason to believe that he will be in town with the pheasants, on or about the first of October. He has been with Fanny in the Isle of Man for nearly two months: finding there, as he goes on to observe, troops of friends, and every description of continental luxury at a cheap rate." Describing in the same year the departure from Genoa of an English physician and acquaintance, he adds: "We are very sorry to lose the benefit of his advice—or, as my father would say, to be deprived, to a certain extent, of the concomitant advantages, whatever they may be, resulting from his medical skill, such as it is, and his professional attendance, in so far as it may be so considered." Thus also it delighted Dickens to remember that it was of one of his connections his father wrote a celebrated sentence; "And I must express my tendency to believe that his longevity is (to say the least of it) extremely problematical:" and that it was to another, who had been insisting somewhat obtrusively on dissenting and nonconformist superiorities, he addressed words which deserve to be no less celebrated; "The Supreme Being must be an entirely different individual from what I have every reason to believe him to be, if He would care in the least for the society of your relations." There was a laugh in the enjoyment of all this, no doubt, but with it much personal fondness; and the feeling of the creator of Micawber as he thus humoured and remembered the foibles of his original, found its counterpart in that of his readers for the creation itself, as its part was played out in the story. Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities. "The longer I live, the better man I think him," he exclaimed afterwards. The fact and the fancy had united whatever was most grateful to him in both.

It is a tribute to the generally healthful and manly tone of the story of Copperfield that such should be the outcome of the eccentricities of this leading personage in it; and the superiority in this respect of Micawber over Skimpole is one of many indications of the inferiority of Bleak House to its predecessor. With leading resemblances that make it difficult to say which character best represents the principle or no principle of impecuniosity, there cannot be any doubt which has the advantage in moral and intellectual development. It is genuine humour against personal satire. Between the worldly circumstances of the two, there is nothing to choose; but as to everything else it is the difference between shabbiness and greatness. Skimpole's sunny talk might be expected to please as much as Micawber's gorgeous speech, the design of both being to take the edge off poverty. But in the one we have no relief from attendant meanness or distress, and we drop down from the airiest fancies into sordidness and pain; whereas in the other nothing pitiful or merely selfish ever touches us. At its lowest depth of what is worst, we never doubt that something better must turn up; and of a man who sells his bedstead that he may entertain his friend, we altogether refuse to think nothing but badly. This is throughout the free and cheery style of Copperfield. The masterpieces of Dickens's humour are not in it; but he has nowhere given such variety of play to his invention, and the book is unapproached among his writings for its completeness of effect and uniform pleasantness of tone.

What has to be said hereafter of those writings generally, will properly restrict what is said here, as in previous instances, mainly to personal illustration. The Copperfield disclosures formerly made will for ever connect the book with the author's individual story; but too much has been assumed, from those revelations, of a full identity of Dickens with his hero, and of a supposed intention that his own character as well as parts of his career should be expressed in the narrative. It is right to warn the reader as to this. He can judge for himself how far the childish experiences are likely to have given the turn to Dickens's genius; whether their bitterness had so burnt into his nature, as, in the hatred of oppression, the revolt against abuse of power, and the war with injustice under every form displayed in his earliest books, to have reproduced itself only; and to what extent mere compassion for his own childhood may account for the strange fascination always exerted over him by child-suffering and sorrow. But, many as are the resemblances in Copperfield's adventures to portions of those of Dickens, and often as reflections occur to David which no one intimate with Dickens could fail to recognize as but the reproduction of his, it would be the greatest mistake to imagine anything like a complete identity of the fictitious novelist with the real one, beyond the Hungerford scenes; or to suppose that the youth, who then received his first harsh schooling in life, came out of it as little harmed or hardened as David did. The language of the fiction reflects only faintly the narrative of the actual fact; and the man whose character it helped to form was expressed not less faintly in the impulsive impressionable youth, incapable of resisting the leading of others, and only disciplined into self-control by the later griefs of his entrance into manhood. Here was but another proof how thoroughly Dickens understood his calling, and that to weave fact with fiction unskilfully would be only to make truth less true.

The character of the hero of the novel finds indeed his right place in the story he is supposed to tell, rather by unlikeness than by likeness to Dickens, even where intentional resemblance might seem to be prominent. Take autobiography as a design to show that any man's life may be as a mirror of existence to all men, and the individual career becomes altogether secondary to the variety of experiences received and rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood, and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him are more within control.

Consider Copperfield thus in his proper place in the story, and sequence as well as connection will be given to the varieties of its childish adventure. The first warm nest of love in which his vain fond mother, and her quaint kind servant, cherish him; the quick-following contrast of hard dependence and servile treatment; the escape from that premature and dwarfed maturity by natural relapse into a more perfect childhood; the then leisurely growth of emotions and faculties into manhood; these are component parts of a character consistently drawn. The sum of its achievement is to be a successful cultivation of letters; and often as such imaginary discipline has been the theme of fiction, there are not many happier conceptions of it. The ideal and real parts of the boy's nature receive development in the proportions which contribute best to the end desired; the readiness for impulsive attachments that had put him into the leading of others, has underneath it a base of truthfulness on which at last he rests in safety; the practical man is the outcome of the fanciful youth; and a more than equivalent for the graces of his visionary days, is found in the active sympathies that life has opened to him. Many experiences have come within its range, and his heart has had room for all. Our interest in him cannot but be increased by knowing how much he expresses of what the author had himself gone through; but David includes far less than this, and infinitely more.

That the incidents arise easily, and to the very end connect themselves naturally and unobtrusively with the characters of which they are a part, is to be said perhaps more truly of this than of any other of Dickens's novels. There is a profusion of distinct and distinguishable people, and a prodigal wealth of detail; but unity of drift or purpose is apparent always, and the tone is uniformly right. By the course of the events we learn the value of self-denial and patience, quiet endurance of unavoidable ills, strenuous effort against ills remediable; and everything in the fortunes of the actors warns us, to strengthen our generous emotions and to guard the purities of home. It is easy thus to account for the supreme popularity of Copperfield, without the addition that it can hardly have had a reader, man or lad, who did not discover that he was something of a Copperfield himself. Childhood and youth live again for all of us in its marvellous boy-experiences. Mr. Micawber's presence must not prevent my saying that it does not take the lead of the other novels in humorous creation; but in the use of humour to bring out prominently the ludicrous in any object or incident without excluding or weakening its most enchanting sentiment, it stands decidedly first. It is the perfection of English mirth. We are apt to resent the exhibition of too much goodness, but it is here so qualified by oddity as to become not merely palatable but attractive; and even pathos is heightened by what in other hands would only make it comical. That there are also faults in the book is certain, but none that are incompatible with the most masterly qualities; and a book becomes everlasting by the fact, not that faults are not in it, but that genius nevertheless is there.

Of its method, and its author's generally, in the delineation of character, something will have to be said on a later page. The author's own favourite people in it, I think, were the Peggotty group; and perhaps he was not far wrong. It has been their fate, as with all the leading figures of his invention, to pass their names into the language, and become types; and he has nowhere given happier embodiment to that purity of homely goodness, which, by the kindly and all-reconciling influences of humour, may exalt into comeliness and even grandeur the clumsiest forms of humanity. What has been indicated in the style of the book as its greatest charm is here felt most strongly. The ludicrous so helps the pathos, and the humour so uplifts and refines the sentiment, that mere rude affection and simple manliness in these Yarmouth boatmen, passed through the fires of unmerited suffering and heroic endurance, take forms half-chivalrous half-sublime. It is one of the cants of critical superiority to make supercilious mention of the serious passages in this great writer; but the storm and shipwreck at the close of Copperfield, when the body of the seducer is flung dead upon the shore amid the ruins of the home he has wasted and by the side of the man whose heart he has broken, the one as unconscious of what he had failed to reach as the other of what he has perished to save, is a description that may compare with the most impressive in the language. There are other people drawn into this catastrophe who are among the failures of natural delineation in the book. But though Miss Dartle is curiously unpleasant, there are some natural traits in her (which Dickens's least life-like people are never without); and it was from one of his lady friends, very familiar to him indeed, he copied her peculiarity of never saying anything outright, but hinting it merely, and making more of it that way. Of Mrs. Steerforth it may also be worth remembering that Thackeray had something of a fondness for her. "I knew how it would be when I began," says a pleasant letter all about himself written immediately after she appeared in the story. "My letters to my mother are like this, but then she likes 'em—like Mrs. Steerforth: don't you like Mrs. Steerforth?"

Turning to another group there is another elderly lady to be liked without a shadow of misgiving; abrupt, angular, extravagant, but the very soul of magnanimity and rectitude; a character thoroughly made out in all its parts; a gnarled and knotted piece of female timber, sound to the core; a woman Captain Shandy would have loved for her startling oddities, and who is linked to the gentlest of her sex by perfect womanhood. Dickens has done nothing better, for solidness and truth all round, than Betsey Trotwood. It is one of her oddities to have a fool for a companion; but this is one of them that has also most pertinence and wisdom. By a line thrown out in Wilhelm Meister, that the true way of treating the insane was, in all respects possible, to act to them as if they were sane, Goethe anticipated what it took a century to apply to the most terrible disorder of humanity; and what Mrs. Trotwood does for Mr. Dick goes a step farther, by showing how often asylums might be dispensed with, and how large might be the number of deficient intellects manageable with patience in their own homes. Characters hardly less distinguishable for truth as well as oddity are the kind old nurse and her husband the carrier, whose vicissitudes alike of love and of mortality are condensed into the three words since become part of universal speech, Barkis is willin'. There is wholesome satire of much utility in the conversion of the brutal schoolmaster of the earlier scenes into the tender Middlesex magistrate at the close. Nor is the humour anywhere more subtle than in the country undertaker, who makes up in fullness of heart for scantness of breath, and has so little of the vampire propensity of the town undertaker in Chuzzlewit, that he dares not even inquire after friends who are ill for fear of unkindly misconstruction. The test of a master in creative fiction, according to Hazlitt, is less in contrasting characters that are unlike than in distinguishing those that are like; and to many examples of the art in Dickens, such as the Shepherd and Chadband, Creakle and Squeers, Charley Bates and the Dodger, the Guppys and the Wemmicks, Mr. Jaggers and Mr. Vholes, Sampson Brass and Conversation Kenge, Jack Bunsby, Captain Cuttle, and Bill Barley, the Perkers and Pells, the Dodsons and Fogs, Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, and a host of others, is to be added the nicety of distinction between those eminent furnishers of funerals, Mr. Mould and Messrs. Omer and Joram. All the mixed mirth and sadness of the story are skilfully drawn into the handling of this portion of it; and, amid wooings and preparations for weddings and church-ringing bells for baptisms, the steadily-going rat-tat of the hammer on the coffin is heard.

Of the heroines who divide so equally between them the impulsive, easily swayed, not disloyal but sorely distracted affections of the hero, the spoilt foolishness and tenderness of the loving little child-wife, Dora, is more attractive than the too unfailing wisdom and self-sacrificing goodness of the angel-wife, Agnes. The scenes of the courtship and housekeeping are matchless; and the glimpses of Doctors' Commons, opening those views, by Mr. Spenlow, of man's vanity of expectation and inconsistency of conduct in neglecting the sacred duty of making a will, on which he largely moralizes the day before he dies intestate, form a background highly appropriate to David's domesticities. This was among the reproductions of personal experience in the book; but it was a sadder knowledge that came with the conviction some years later, that David's contrasts in his earliest married life between his happiness enjoyed and his happiness once anticipated, the "vague unhappy loss or want of something" of which he so frequently complains, reflected also a personal experience which had not been supplied in fact so successfully as in fiction. (A closing word may perhaps be allowed, to connect with Devonshire-terrace the last book written there. On the page opposite is engraved a drawing by Maclise of the house where so many of Dickens's masterpieces were composed, done on the first anniversary of the day when his daughter Kate was born.)

Bleak House followed Copperfield, which in some respects it copied in the autobiographical form by means of extracts from the personal relation of its heroine. But the distinction between the narrative of David and the diary of Esther, like that between Micawber and Skimpole, marks the superiority of the first to its successor. To represent a storyteller as giving the most surprising vividness to manners, motives, and characters of which we are to believe her, all the time, as artlessly unconscious, as she is also entirely ignorant of the good qualities in herself she is naively revealing in the story, was a difficult enterprise, full of hazard in any case, not worth success, and certainly not successful. Ingenuity is more apparent than freshness, the invention is neither easy nor unstrained, and though the old marvellous power over the real is again abundantly manifest, there is some alloy of the artificial. Nor can this be said of Esther's relation without some general application to the book of which it forms so large a part. The novel is nevertheless, in the very important particular of construction, perhaps the best thing done by Dickens.



In his later writings he had been assiduously cultivating this essential of his art, and here he brought it very nearly to perfection. Of the tendency of composing a story piecemeal to induce greater concern for the part than for the whole, he had been always conscious; but I remember a remark also made by him to the effect that to read a story in parts had no less a tendency to prevent the reader's noticing how thoroughly a work so presented might be calculated for perusal as a whole. Look back from the last to the first page of the present novel, and not even in the highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will it be found, that event leads more closely to event, or that the separate incidents have been planned with a more studied consideration of the bearing they are severally to have on the general result. Nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and to the larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn. The heart of the story is a Chancery suit. On this the plot hinges, and on incidents connected with it, trivial or important, the passion and suffering turn exclusively. Chance words, or the deeds of chance people, to appearance irrelevant, are found everywhere influencing the course taken by a train of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery, to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little law-stationer's servant help directly in the chain of small things that lead indirectly to Lady Dedlock's death. One strong chain of interest holds together Chesney Wold and its inmates, Bleak House and the Jarndyce group, Chancery with its sorry and sordid neighbourhood. The characters multiply as the tale advances, but in each the drift is the same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." Edax rerum the motto of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story are sensibly affected, and to which Chancery itself might have succumbed if its devouring capacities had been less complete. But by the time there is found among the lumber the will which puts all to rights in the Jarndyce suit, it is found to be too late to put anything to rights. The costs have swallowed up the estate, and there is an end of the matter.

What in one sense is a merit however may in others be a defect, and this book has suffered by the very completeness with which its Chancery moral is worked out. The didactic in Dickens's earlier novels derived its strength from being merely incidental to interest of a higher and more permanent kind, and not in a small degree from the playful sportiveness and fancy that lighted up its graver illustrations. Here it is of sterner stuff, too little relieved, and all-pervading. The fog so marvellously painted in the opening chapter has hardly cleared away when there arises, in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, as bad an atmosphere to breathe in; and thenceforward to the end, clinging round the people of the story as they come or go, in dreary mist or in heavy cloud, it is rarely absent. Dickens has himself described his purpose to have been to dwell on the romantic side of familiar things. But it is the romance of discontent and misery, with a very restless dissatisfied moral, and is too much brought about by agencies disagreeable and sordid. The Guppys, Weevles, Snagsbys, Chadbands, Krooks, and Smallweeds, even the Kenges, Vholeses, and Tulkinghorns, are much too real to be pleasant; and the necessity becomes urgent for the reliefs and contrasts of a finer humanity. These last are not wanting; yet it must be said that we hardly escape, even with them, into the old freedom and freshness of the author's imaginative worlds, and that the too conscious unconsciousness of Esther flings something of a shade on the radiant goodness of John Jarndyce himself. Nevertheless there are very fine delineations in the story. The crazed little Chancery lunatic, Miss Flite; the loud-voiced tender-souled Chancery victim, Gridley; the poor good-hearted youth Richard, broken up in life and character by the suspense of the Chancery suit on whose success he is to "begin the world," believing himself to be saving money when he is stopped from squandering it, and thinking that having saved it he is entitled to fling it away; trooper George, with the Bagnets and their household, where the most ludicrous points are more forcible for the pathetic touches underlying them; the Jellyby interior, and its philanthropic strong-minded mistress, placid and smiling amid a household muddle outmuddling Chancery itself; the model of deportment, Turveydrop the elder, whose relations to the young people, whom he so superbly patronizes by being dependent on them for everything, touch delightfully some subtle points of truth; the inscrutable Tulkinghorn, and the immortal Bucket; all these, and especially the last, have been added by this book to the list of people more intimately and permanently known to us than the scores of actual familiar acquaintance whom we see around us living and dying.

But how do we know them? There are plenty to tell us that it is by vividness of external observation rather than by depth of imaginative insight, by tricks of manner and phrase rather than by truth of character, by manifestation outwardly rather than by what lies behind. Another opportunity will present itself for some remark on this kind of criticism, which has always had a special pride in the subtlety of its differences from what the world may have shown itself prone to admire. "In my father's library," wrote Landor to Southey's daughter Edith, "was the Critical Review from its commencement; and it would have taught me, if I could not even at a very early age teach myself better, that Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith were really worth nothing." It is a style that will never be without cultivators, and its frequent application to Dickens will be shown hereafter. But in speaking of a book in which some want of all the freshness of his genius first became apparent, it would be wrong to omit to add that his method of handling a character is as strongly impressed on the better portions of it as on the best of his writings. It is difficult to say when a peculiarity becomes too grotesque, or an extravagance too farcical, to be within the limits of art, for it is the truth of these as of graver things that they exist in the world in just the proportions and degree in which genius can discover them. But no man had ever so surprising a faculty as Dickens of becoming himself what he was representing; and of entering into mental phases and processes so absolutely, in conditions of life the most varied, as to reproduce them completely in dialogue without need of an explanatory word. (He only departed from this method once, with a result which will then be pointed out.) In speaking on a former page of the impression of reality thus to a singular degree conveyed by him, it was remarked that where characters so revealed themselves the author's part in them was done; and in the book under notice there is none, not excepting those least attractive which apparently present only prominent or salient qualities, in which it will not be found that the characteristic feature embodied, or the main idea personified, contains as certainly also some human truth universally applicable. To expound or discuss his creations, to lay them psychologically bare, to analyse their organisms, to subject to minute demonstration their fibrous and other tissues, was not at all Dickens's way. His genius was his fellow feeling with his race; his mere personality was never the bound or limit to his perceptions, however strongly sometimes it might colour them; he never stopped to dissect or anatomize his own work; but no man could better adjust the outward and visible oddities in a delineation to its inner and unchangeable veracities. The rough estimates we form of character, if we have any truth of perception, are on the whole correct: but men touch and interfere with one another by the contact of their extremes, and it may very often become necessarily the main business of a novelist to display the salient points, the sharp angles, or the prominences merely.

The pathetic parts of Bleak House do not live largely in remembrance, but the deaths of Richard and of Gridley, the wandering fancies of Miss Flite, and the extremely touching way in which the gentleman-nature of the pompous old baronet, Dedlock, asserts itself under suffering, belong to a high order of writing. There is another most affecting example, taking the lead of the rest, in the poor street-sweeper Jo; which has made perhaps as deep an impression as anything in Dickens. "We have been reading Bleak House aloud," the good Dean Ramsay wrote to me very shortly before his death. "Surely it is one of his most powerful and successful! What a triumph is Jo! Uncultured nature is there indeed; the intimations of true heart-feeling, the glimmerings of higher feeling, all are there; but everything still consistent and in harmony. Wonderful is the genius that can show all this, yet keep it only and really part of the character itself, low or common as it may be, and use no morbid or fictitious colouring. To my mind, nothing in the field of fiction is to be found in English literature surpassing the death of Jo!" What occurs at and after the inquest is as worth remembering. Jo's evidence is rejected because he cannot exactly say what will be done to him after he is dead if he should tell a lie;[167] but he manages to say afterwards very exactly what the deceased while he lived did to him. That one cold winter night, when he was shivering in a doorway near his crossing, a man turned to look at him, and came back, and, having questioned him and found he had not a friend in the world, said, "Neither have I. Not one!" and gave him the price of a supper and a night's lodging. That the man had often spoken to him since, and asked him if he slept of a night, and how he bore cold and hunger, or if he ever wished to die; and would say in passing "I am as poor as you to-day, Jo" when he had no money, but when he had any would always give some. "He wos wery good to me," says the boy, wiping his eyes with his wretched sleeve. "Wen I see him a-layin' so stritched out just now, I wished he could have heerd me tell him so. He wos werry good to me, he wos!" The inquest over, the body is flung into a pestiferous churchyard in the next street, houses overlooking it on every side, and a reeking little tunnel of a court giving access to its iron gate. "With the night, comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court, to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands, and looks in within the bars; stands looking in, for a little while. It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step, and makes the archway clean. It does so, very busily, and trimly; looks in again, a little while; and so departs." These are among the things in Dickens that cannot be forgotten; and if Bleak House had many more faults than have been found in it, such salt and savour as this might freshen it for some generations.

The first intention was to have made Jo more prominent in the story, and its earliest title was taken from the tumbling tenements in Chancery, "Tom-all-Alone's," where he finds his wretched habitation; but this was abandoned. On the other hand, Dickens was encouraged and strengthened in his design of assailing Chancery abuses and delays by receiving, a few days after the appearance of his first number, a striking pamphlet on the subject containing details so apposite that he took from them, without change in any material point, the memorable case related in his fifteenth chapter. Any one who examines the tract[168] will see how exactly true is the reference to it made by Dickens in his preface. "The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end." The suit, of which all particulars are given, affected a single farm, in value not more than L1200, but all that its owner possessed in the world, against which a bill had been filed for a L300 legacy left in the will bequeathing the farm. In reality there was only one defendant, but in the bill, by the rule of the Court, there were seventeen; and, after two years had been occupied over the seventeen answers, everything had to begin over again because an eighteenth had been accidentally omitted. "What a mockery of justice this is," says Mr. Challinor, "the facts speak for themselves, and I can personally vouch for their accuracy. The costs already incurred in reference to this L300 legacy are not less than from L800 to L900, and the parties are no forwarder. Already near five years have passed by, and the plaintiff would be glad to give up his chance of the legacy if he could escape from his liability to costs, while the defendants who own the little farm left by the testator, have scarce any other prospect before them than ruin."

FOOTNOTES:

[164] This letter is now in the possession of S. R. Goodman Esq. of Brighton.

[165] Here are two passages taken from Hunt's writing in the Tatler (a charming little paper which it was one of the first ventures of the young firm of Chapman and Hall to attempt to establish for Hunt in 1830), to which accident had unluckily attracted Dickens's notice:—"Supposing us to be in want of patronage, and in possession of talent enough to make it an honour to notice us, we would much rather have some great and comparatively private friend, rich enough to assist us, and amiable enough to render obligation delightful, than become the public property of any man, or of any government. . . . If a divinity had given us our choice we should have said—make us La Fontaine, who goes and lives twenty years with some rich friend, as innocent of any harm in it as a child, and who writes what he thinks charming verses, sitting all day under a tree." Such sayings will not bear to be deliberately read and thought over, but any kind of extravagance or oddity came from Hunt's lips with a curious fascination. There was surely never a man of so sunny a nature, who could draw so much pleasure from common things, or to whom books were a world so real, so exhaustless, so delightful. I was only seventeen when I derived from him the tastes which have been the solace of all subsequent years, and I well remember the last time I saw him at Hammersmith, not long before his death in 1859, when, with his delicate, worn, but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged sensuous and voluptuous qualities.

[166] In a paper in All the Year Round.

[167] "O! Here's the boy, gentlemen! Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy!—But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put through a few preliminary paces. Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. He don't find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentleman here, but believes it'll be something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right—and so he'll tell the truth. 'This won't do, gentlemen,' says the coroner, with a melancholy shake of the head. . . . 'Can't exactly say won't do, you know. . . . It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.' Boy put aside; to the great edification of the audience;—especially of Little Swills, the Comic Vocalist."

[168] By W. Challinor Esq. of Leek in Staffordshire, by whom it has been obligingly sent to me, with a copy of Dickens's letter acknowledging the receipt of it from the author on the 11th of March 1852. On the first of that month the first number of Bleak House had appeared, but two numbers of it were then already written.



CHAPTER II.

HOME INCIDENTS AND HARD TIMES.

1853-1854-1855.

Bleak House Sale—Proposed Titles—Restless—Tavistock House—Last Child born—Death of Friends—Liking for Boulogne—Banquet at Birmingham—Self-changes—Overdoing it—Projected Trip to Italy—First Public Readings—Argument against Paid Readings—Children's Theatricals—Small Actors—Henry Fielding Dickens—Dickens and the Czar—Titles for a New Story—"Hard Times" chosen—Difficulties of Weekly Publication—Mr. Ruskin on Hard Times—Exaggerated Rebuke of Exaggeration—Manufacturing Town on Strike—Dinner to Thackeray—Peter Cunningham—Incident of a November Night.