Charles Dickens: His Life and Work E-Book

Stephen Leacock

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Stephen Leacock shares the stage with Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as one of the best-loved humorists in the English-speaking world. At the time of its original publication, Leacock's biography of Dickens was widely and enthusiastically hailed as a vital, grand, and masterful examination of the man and his writing. It was a book that Leacock was enormously proud of.

Readable, entertaining and insightful, full of sharp commentary, this biography tells the life-story of one of the best-loved writers in the English language, and offers new insights into Dickens' greatest works.

Leseprobe

Charles Dickens: His Life and Work

 by Stephen Leacock

First published in 1933

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Charles Dickens

His Life and Work

CHAPTER ITHE CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH OF CHARLES DICKENS

SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY

People reading Dickens,—all over the world for a hundred years, almost, there have been people reading Dickens. In town and in country, at home and abroad, in winter with the candles lighted and the outside world forgotten, in summer beneath a shadowing tree or in a sheltered corner of the beach, in garret bedrooms, in frontier cabins, in the light of the camp fire and in the long vigil of the sickroom,—people reading Dickens.

And everywhere the mind enthralled, absorbed, uplifted, the anxieties of life, the grind of poverty, the loneliness of bereavement, and the longings of exile,—forgotten, conjured away as there rises from the magic page the inner vision of the lanes and fields of England, and on the ear the murmured sounds of London, the tide washing up the Thames, and the fog falling upon Lincoln’s Inn.

And of all the people who have thus read Dickens hardly any have read for an ulterior purpose and with an artificial aim. Other writers are read as a task, are read for self-improvement, for the pedantry and for the vainglory of scholarship. Not so Charles Dickens. His books from first to last have been read for their own sake. The written word has of itself called forth that laughter that lay among the lines and for its own sake the tears that have fallen upon the page.

One stands appalled at the majesty of such an achievement. In the sheer comprehensiveness of it, no writer in all the world has ever equalled or approached it. None ever will. The time is past.

There are many younger people now, so we are told, who do not read Dickens. Nor is it to be wondered at. We live in a badly damaged world. It is a world of flickering shadows tossed by electric currents, of a babel of voices on the harassed air, a world of inconceivable rapidity, of instantaneous effects, of sudden laughter and momentary tragedy, where every sensation is made and electrocuted in a second, and passes into oblivion. It is a world in which nothing lives. Art itself is as old as man, and as immortal. But the form and fashion of it changes. Dickens lived and wrote in a world that is visibly passing, the age of individual eminence that is giving place to the world of universal competence.

If early adversity is what is needed to bring out latent genius, Charles Dickens had a rare chance. He was born in a shabby second-rate home and spent his childhood in a series of homes each as shabby and as second-rate as the last. For a time the ‘home’ of his impecunious father was a debtors’ prison. At the best it only rose to the level of what might be called respectability.

Of school he had but little: of college none at all. The early flowering of his boyish genius received neither encouragement nor recognition. If he was precocious there was none to know it. A little boy reading in an attic his tattered books,—who cared for that? A child in an agony of humiliation at his lot as a little working drudge,—who was there to notice that? In all the pictures drawn by Dickens of the pathos of neglected or suffering childhood, there is none more poignant than the picture of little Dickens himself. The pathos of little Oliver, of Tiny Tim, and little Paul is drawn with a sympathy that sprang from the childhood experiences of Charles Dickens.

It is the wont of biographers to ramble through details of ancestry as tedious as they are remote. Fortunately nothing of that sort is needed in the case of Dickens. He came of a family on both sides and in all branches as utterly undistinguished as those of all the rest of us: a fact which helped perhaps to implant in Dickens’s mind a contempt for ancestry in general and for descent at large. The queer opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, with the biography of the Chuzzlewits from the crusades down, may well combine something of personal bitterness in its burlesque. The thousand and one references to dead-and-gone dullness, the contempt for the arrogant solemnity of ancient nobility, and the wooden immobility of the landed gentry of the old school, remind us that all that was a world to which Dickens was born a stranger and which he never entered nor coveted. There is no man living who can overcome the ingrained prejudice of social disadvantages. Yet it was on the basis of these disadvantages, without opportunity, without encouragement, that Charles Dickens achieved his unrivalled success in the world of imaginative literature.

He was born on Feb. 7, 1812, in a house in what was then Landport, Portsea, and which still stands as No. 387 Mile End Terrace, Portsmouth. He was christened Charles John Huffham Dickens. His father was John Dickens and his mother, in her maiden name, Elizabeth Barrow,—both entirely undistinguished people until their gifted son raised them above distinction to immortality as Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby.

Dickens was born in war-time, and his father John Dickens was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office whose duties placed him at the time beside the great seaport of Portsmouth, of which Portsea was a suburb. Readers of David Copperfield will recall Mr. Micawber, whose name has become almost a part of the English language; will recall his shiftless life in and out of luck, in and out of a debtors’ prison, waiting for something to turn up and mingling heroic tears with rapid returns of cheerfulness over a pot of porter. This was, it seems, quite literally John Dickens. His job was small, his family was large, and he shifted from one shabby home to another with the ease of impecuniosity, enveloped always in a cloud of debt. He was at Portsea till the peace of 1814, then in London lodgings (Norfolk Street) for two years, after which the Lords of the Admiralty sent him to Chatham (1816-1821) and then placed him again in London, where he lived on the ragged edge of penury till he subsided into the debtors’ prison of the Marshalsea in 1822. Yet brains he must have had and a queerly radiant mind, full of bright fancies and self-deceptions,—and ability, since his ill-fortunes ended later on with his accession to the post of a shorthand reporter in the gallery of the old House of Commons.

His helpmate bore him many children and shared his ill-luck with what grace and cheerfulness we do not know. One child, Fanny Dickens, came before Charles, and after him six other children, of whom two died in childhood. After the fashion of those unsanitary days, death took its easy and accustomed toll.

The precocious intellect of little Charles enabled him dimly to remember even the Portsea home, and to retain vague memories of the first lodgment in London. But the house at Chatham (in St. Mary’s Place) was his first truly remembered home. He was a frail child, debarred from rough play. Books were his earliest world. His father numbered among his Chatham possessions a few books grandiloquently called by him his ‘library’. Dickens has told us what these books meant to him. Among them were Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe. ‘They came out,’ he wrote (pretending that he was David Copperfield) ‘a glorious host to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that place and time, they and the Arabian Nights and the Tales of the Genii,—and did me no harm. For whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me: I knew nothing of it.’

People who seek for the literary background on which Dickens’s work was based will find it partly in the books he read thus for himself as a child. These books and presently the streets and sounds of London and the glittering gaslight of the cheap London stage. But the real basis and background was his instinctive observation and interpretation of the life about him. This was born in him, not made. There is no need to quote Latin over a thing so obvious.

Of instruction Dickens never had had much. At Chatham he went to a dame’s school and attended, at the age of eight and nine, something like a real school kept by a William Giles, a Baptist minister. The Chatham of those days was still a sort of country place with the fields in easy reach, with Rochester cathedral near at hand (waiting for Edwin Drood). The town was rendered bright and romantic by the presence of the military, with the spectacles of sham fights (such as the one that overwhelmed Mr. Pickwick). Beside it the Medway opened to a view of the tall ships out at sea. In spite of isolation and neglect, little Dickens was happy there.

But fortune darkened over his head. His unlucky father, still wrapped in his cloud of debt, was moved by the Lords of the Admiralty to work in London. The journey in a stage coach from Chatham up to London (the year was 1821) lived in the memory of his son as his first acquaintance with those pictures of highways and coaches, gabled inns and quaint villages, and guards blowing on key bugles and galloping horses clattering on the frosty road, which live for ever in his works. Later on, when Tom Pinch sat staring in the coach, lost in a new world of wonder on his journey from Salisbury up to London, he had been preceded in reality by a little boy of nine who journeyed up from Chatham.

With London came the darkest period of Dickens’s childhood, one may say of his whole life. It would be difficult indeed to imagine a childhood of deeper shadow and greater pathos. The family lived in a succession of mean homes and in an atmosphere of sordid makeshift and continual debt. Their first abode was in a little house in Baynham Street, Camden Town,—a poor suburb in those days,—somewhere just below the level of respectability. A washerwoman lived next door, a Bow Street runner over the way. Little Charles, occupying a back garret looking out on a squalid court, wept even for his humble home at Chatham, his lessons and the little life of romance that he had built about him. In Baynham Street there was nothing. Lessons had stopped. There were no playmates, and at home nothing but neglect, penury and the shadow of a coming disaster. Most of all, and hardest for the child to bear, was the fact that nobody seemed to care what might become of him. ‘Many times,’ writes his intimate friend and biographer John Forster, ‘had he spoken to me of this and how he seemed at once to fall into a solitary condition apart from all other boys of his own age and to sink into a neglected state at home which had always been unaccountable to him.’

It is indeed hard to account for it. There was nothing vicious or cruel about the parents of little Dickens. His father was proud of the boy’s talents, would have him up on a chair to sing or recite for his friends; from first to last there was great affection between them and Charles Dickens wrote of him afterward in the highest terms. ‘I know my father,’ he said, ‘to be as kind-hearted and generous a man as ever lived in the world. Every thing that I can remember of his conduct to his wife or children, or friends, in sickness or affliction, is beyond all praise. By me, as a sick child, he has watched night and day, unweariedly and patiently many nights and days. He never undertook any business, charge or trust that he did not zealously conscientiously, punctually, honourably discharge. But in the ease of his temper and the straightness of his means he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all.’

The truth is the elder Dickens was a man of easy temperament. He saw only what he had to see. Living in financial embarrassment, the cloud of debt threatening to burst over his head, he preferred no doubt to fancy to himself that all was well with the beautiful and gifted boy moping his heart out in an attic.

Of his mother we know less. Her domestic cares must have been great. But if there was any realization in her mind of the genius and suffering of her son during these times and the still darker hours of his childhood that followed, at least the evidence of it is hard to find.

Yet Mrs. Dickens made an effort to get the family out of the rising tide of debt. It was a characteristic effort. She plunged in more deeply still,—sauter pour mieux reculer as it were. She moved into a larger house,—in Gower Street North,—and indicated that it had become a young ladies’ school by having a brass plate put on the door with the legend Mrs. Dickens’s Establishment. It was confidently expected by the family that the influx of young ladies,—especially of rich creoles from across the sea, attracted somehow by the process of paying His Majesty’s navy,—would restore the family fortunes. It was characteristic of Dickens’s parents that even in the lowest stage of their adversity a mirage of prosperity haunted their imaginations: even in the desert march they pictured the oasis which must lie before them. Thus might Mr. Micawber have opened a school on borrowed money and engaged Mrs. Nickleby to conduct it.

No pupils came,—not one. Credit failed. Even the brass plate ceased to inspire confidence. There was an unpaid landlord, an indignant butcher and a baker whose patience was exhausted. The rigour of the law accorded them a remedy forgotten since. John Dickens was arrested and the doors of the Marshalsea prison shut him in.

The old King’s Bench prison of the Marshalsea has long since vanished from the earth. It stood south of the Thames in Southwark, dated back to Plantagenet times and took its name from the Marshal of the King’s House, among whose functions was the custody of debtors. Prisoners for debt, under the law of England of Dickens’s day, were not under the conditions of incarceration imposed upon criminals. Within the precincts of the ‘prison’ they maintained their liberty. If they had money they could spend it within the prison itself on the purchase of extra food or more comfortable quarters than the vile diet and squalid accommodation afforded by the government. Beer flowed freely; bad gin and dubious wines were sold to the prisoners by the turnkeys themselves. Visitors came and went. There was a perpetual noise and clatter and the false merriment that for shame’s sake covers misfortune with the mimic bravery of laughter. And side by side with it the listless despair and dull stagnation of those whose imprisonment ran back into uncounted years, and forward, it might be, to the grave. Among these scenes of disgrace and misery, of carouse and apathy, there lived and moved the wives and children of the debtors. For a small fee these were accommodated within the prison itself, which thus became the ‘home’ of little children reared in the shadow. Human progress is slow, but we have, in England and in America at least, passed this milestone forever. But let those who wish to see a picture of the prison life of the debtor open again the pages of their Pickwick and recall the incarceration of that eminent man in the Fleet. What seems perhaps at first sight a merry caricature becomes on reflection a simple statement of fact, no feature of it exaggeration, no word of it untrue.

Charles Dickens had reason to know all about it. For many months the Marshalsea prison was all the ‘home’ he had. His mother, when her husband was taken for debt, made a feeble attempt at maintaining the family outside. The Gower Street furniture was sold, item by item, to the pawnshops. Thither little Charles himself carried his beloved books of his father’s pretentious library. At last there was nothing left. Then Mrs. Dickens and the younger children moved into the prison. Money was found to place the elder daughter Fanny in a school. Charles had a humble lodging outside, at Lant Street in the Borough, from which he came each morning early to wait till the Marshalsea gates were open so that he might go in and get breakfast with his mother and father. From the prison, when the gates shut at night, the little boy,—he was ten years old,—took his solitary way to the garret room where he slept.

Dickens always looked back to the memory of these days with feelings too deep for casual expression. To his own family he never spoke of them; even to John Forster, scarcely at all; and to the world at large, never. But it seems to have been his intention to set down some day for all the world to read the whole story of his life. This design he never fulfilled. What should have been the autobiography of Charles Dickens became presently the fictitious biography of David Copperfield. It reappears here and there in his books in indirect form, and the prison life of his father is reflected in the incarceration of Mr. Pickwick and the shadowed tragedy of Edward Dorrit.

But some part of the earlier story of Dickens’s life is preserved for us as he first wrote it and as confided to Forster. Here he has given us an account of his father’s entry to the debtors’ prison more grim and more pathetic than his fiction itself.

‘My father was waiting for me in the lodge,’ he writes, ‘and we went up to his room (on the top story but one) and cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now: with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals. . . . I really believed at this time,’ said Dickens, ‘that they had broken my heart.’

But even more bitter to him in later years than the recollection of the prison was his remembrance of his life outside. Some relative of the family, with the consent of his father and mother, found work for little Charles in a blacking warehouse, at No. 30 Hungerford Stairs, Strand, a ‘crazy tumbled-down old house abutting on the river and literally overrun with rats.’ Here the boy worked with two or three others, pasting labels on pots of blacking; the other boys were of the commonest sort, the work was mean and monotonous, the whole surroundings sordid to a degree. ‘No words can express’, wrote Dickens, ‘the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship, compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood, and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless, of the shame I felt in my position, at the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me never to be brought back any more, cannot be written.’

The child meantime lived (during this working period) as a lodger in Little College Street, Camden Town, with a lady in reduced circumstances who ‘took in children to board.’ Dickens and two other boys slept in the same room. Charles bought his own supplies, a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk and a quarter of a pound of cheese being stored in his cupboard as the breakfast and supper for the days when he did not walk to the prison. His dinner he carried with him to Hungerford Stairs, or bought in a nearby shop. ‘It was generally’, he tells us, ‘a fourpenny plate of beef from a workshop: sometimes a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer from a miserable old public house across the way.’ On Sundays Charles and his sister Fanny spent their day in the Marshalsea. Such was the boy’s life. And through it all, from week-end to week-end, he had, so he tells us himself, ‘no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone I can call to mind, so help me God.’

In time the pathos of it seems to have reached even the easygoing intelligence of the imprisoned father. The child pleaded to be removed from his sordid lodgings, and his father, giving way to the plea, got him another room, a back attic that looked out over a timber yard, into which was sent a mattress with some bedding and a bed made up on the floor. The place, all his own, seemed to little Dickens, so he tells us, ‘like a paradise’. It was here in this very lodging, transferred to the pages of fiction and enlarged, that there lived the merry medico, Mr. Bob Sawyer, and it was up these stairs to the attic that Mr. Pickwick and his friends found their way to Mr. Sawyer’s ill-fated party.

After this the little boy could take his breakfast and his supper in the prison every day.

A further chance came. Dickens senior had a quarrel with the relative by whom his son was employed and with characteristic hauteur removed him from his service. No doubt by this time his genuinely kind nature had awaked to the facts. But it is sad to relate that the mother saw it in a different light. She was all for composing the quarrel and letting her son return to this unhappy situation. ‘My father,’ so writes Dickens, ‘said I should go back no more and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily, for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am. But I never afterwards forgot,—I shall never forget, I can never forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.’

There are many of us no doubt who can share, even after the lapse of a century, this indignation, and who feel that we want to know nothing more of Mrs. John Dickens than just that.

At last the clouds lifted. John Dickens, like Mr. Micawber, was always waiting for something to turn up. Something did. A miraculous legacy of several hundred pounds carried John Dickens out of prison on a temporary tide of affluence. The small pension which he drew from a grateful country, even while it held him in prison for debt, added to the legacy, and supplemented presently by general earnings, removed the elder Dickens henceforth from the penury into which he had sunk. The family had a home again, or rather, a series of homes. Mr. and Mrs. Dickens moved so often that it would puzzle a research student to follow the dates and details of their migrations. They were in lodgings in Little College Street, then at No. 13 Johnson Street, then at the Polygon, Somers Town, then in Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy Square, then at 18 Bentinck Street, Cavendish Square. These are at least some of the places where John Dickens lived.

Meantime little Charles was at last able, from the age of twelve to the age of fourteen, to attend a school, this time a real school. It was quite a pretentious one in its way,—Wellington House Academy in the Hampstead Road, a spacious building with quite a staff of masters and a real playground, though the playground and a good part of the house was later on ignominiously shovelled away to make room for the Birmingham Railway. It exists still in a rather glorified form as David Copperfield’s school of Salem House and in ‘Our School’ as described in Household Words. But little Dickens was never really head boy of it, as David was, and most likely never learned the Latin and such with which he endowed David. But he recaptured at any rate the cheery happiness of a child’s life, denied to him in the shadows of the prison and the factory.

‘He was a healthy looking boy,’ wrote one of his schoolfellows long afterward, ‘small but well built, with a more than usual flow of spirits inducing to harmless fun, seldom if never to mischief. I cannot recall then that he indicated that he would hereafter become a literary celebrity.’ ‘I do not remember,’ wrote another classmate, ‘that Dickens distinguished himself in any way or carried off any prizes. My belief is that he did not learn Latin and Greek there and you will remember that there is no allusion to the classics in any of his writings. He was a handsome, curly-headed lad, full of animation and animal spirits.’ All of those who have described the youthful Dickens from boyhood to adolescence, have spoken of the singular animation of his look, the arresting power of his eye, the impression of a ‘mesmeric’ personality. As to ‘allusions to the classics’, we have at least Dr. Blimber of Dombey to the contrary. But no doubt the writer meant ‘quotations’.

The schooling was but brief. Charles Dickens was never educated, or rather, as his father once grandiloquently phrased it, ‘he may be said to have educated himself.’ At fourteen the little boy passed on to the status of an attorney’s clerk,—not articled, but what would now be called an office-boy,—with a Mr. Edward Blackmore of Gray’s Inn. This was from May 1827 to November 1829. Here began for Dickens that profound knowledge of the forms and surroundings of the law and that profound contempt for it which never left him; here were laid the first foundations of the jurisprudence of Bardell vs. Pickwick; here begin the long series of the Dodsons and Foggs, the Vholeses, the Parkers and the Tulkinghorns who embody forever in the paper of Dickens’s book the figures and the figments of the Victorian bar and bench. Throughout his life Charles Dickens saw little but the comic side of law and government. Politics to him were humbug, the cabinet system a delirious piece of nonsense, and a political party a delightful make-believe. He saw either this or the tragic side,—the tyranny and oppression of the strong, the law’s injustices and the heartbreak of the delays of the Chancery. Living in the solid security of Victorian England, with peace and prosperity and stability, the very firmness of the ground concealed from him the basis on which it rested. Once or twice only he stood on other ground as when he depicted the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge or the flames of the French revolution. But it did not occur to him that perhaps the existence of ‘Doodle and Coodle’, alternating in the cabinet with ‘Noodle and Foodie’, and of the wooden magistrates and even the solemn nincompoops of the Circumlocution Office, had something to do with the unbroken life of peace and security which he himself enjoyed. To the simplest of us now, law, politics, and government have become a life and death matter. Not so to Dickens. He saw only the joke of it. No doubt it was better so.

At this time Dickens the elder, with a characteristic change of fortune, converted himself into a reporter working for a London newspaper in the press gallery of the Commons. There is something queer and appealing about John Dickens, alternating from the desk of the pay office, and from the tears and the pewter pots of the debtors’ prison to the swift efficiency of the shorthand expert in the world’s greatest legislature.

‘Shorthand’ at that time was a rising art. Cultivated in one shape or another since ancient times it had, like so many other things, made enormous advances in England in the eighteenth century. It had learned to follow sounds, not letters. It had caught up with the ordinary pace of human speech. It had been immensely stimulated by the licensed publication of debates, the steam press, and the rapid carriage of newspapers by the ‘flying coaches’ of the days of William IV. How old Dickens learned it we do not know. But young Dickens threw himself into the study of the mystic art with ardour and passion. His inimitable description of David Copperfield (that non-existent and unconvincing personage) learning shorthand describes his own efforts and his own success. But access to the parliamentary gallery was not to be had at once, even for so expert a writer as Charles Dickens rapidly became. He got employment as a reporter in one of the offices of ‘Doctors’ Commons’. This quaint and ancient institution, which has charmed and mystified the readers of Dickens for over half a century, was from the days of Queen Elizabeth till 1857 a society of lawyers concerned with cases of Church jurisdiction, and with such matters as wills and testaments, marriage and divorce as have, or once had, a ghostly connotation. They were incorporated as the ‘College of Law Exercent in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts.’ The thirty-four ‘proctors’ of the college,—as who should say the solicitors, ground the grist in the mills of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty courts. Among these lived and moved the Mr. Spenlow and the ‘inexorable’ Mr. Jorkins of David Copperfield. And in the office of one of them laboured as a reporter for two years the youth Charles Dickens.

Dickens, when he reported at Doctors’ Commons, was aged eighteen,—nineteen when he left it. The law itself as a career meant nothing to him: his work was a task and nothing more, but illuminated and relieved his abiding appreciation of the comic side of anything serious. But life was opening in front of him. He lived, still with his parents, at No. 18 Bentinck Street; had many friends and acquaintances and went out and about in what was not society with a capital S, but was at any rate social company. It was not unfitting that later on Dickens should have made David Copperfield’s Dora (famous among the heroines of fiction) the daughter of Mr. Spenlow of Doctors’ Commons. For it was in his days at the Commons that he met his own Dora and fell as immediately and as hopelessly in love as David did. Of this ‘Dora’ one must speak in a later chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that she was separated in station from young Charles by one of those nice gradations of social status familiar in England,—in the England that was,—but indistinguishable from a distance. The shabby-genteel status of the Dickens family, their lack of prospects and their want of ‘class’, put them a cut below the Beadnells. Young Maria’s family saw to it that Dickens was not encouraged; and that a little later, absence and distance should terminate the whole connection. Henceforth, for twenty years, Maria was to Dickens like the lost Annabel Lee to Edgar Allen Poe. Pity that she didn’t stay lost. The history of literature would have been spared one of its meanest episodes.

But not even a broken heart can check the ardour of a body of nineteen. Dickens after all had the sharp spur of necessity and with that plenty of other interests. The ‘self-improvement’ idea had struck him hard. He read and studied in the British Museum. And more than all, there dawned upon his impressionable mind the glittering of the stage. From youth to age everything dramatic fascinated Charles Dickens. From his boyhood he haunted the cheap and popular theatres of the London of that day. Even in his Wellington House days he took the lead in getting up amateur theatricals, a pursuit and a hobby of which he never tired. Had he not turned into a writer, he would inevitably have become an actor. His public ‘readings’, later on, were largely histrionic performances, which held his audiences gripped by the mesmeric power of the presentation. As Dickens ‘read’, the audience saw not Charles Dickens beside a desk but the crouching figure of the murderer Bill Sikes, or the glorious comicality of Mr. Weller.

The theatre (not the classic stage of Shakespeare and Racine) left a deep mark on the thought and the work of Dickens,—and not all for its good. ‘The popular drama of that time,’ writes Mr. Robert Blatchford looking back in, and over, his Eighty Years, ‘would be derided to-day as wild absurdity. . . . The audience (at the little London theatre called the Bower) had a robust taste. They demanded ghosts and pirates, smugglers and slave drivers, jack-tars and brigands: combats, abductions, love, treachery, battle, murder and blue fire,—and they got them. . . . I have witnessed,’ continues the same writer, ‘a soul-stirring combat between one seaman and sixteen smugglers. Jack always fought two-handed, but before he drew his swords he would knock down a pair of pirates with his fists, disable another with his quid, stop a fourth with his hat, and then, putting the muslin-clad damsel in distress behind him, he would get to the business of the evening.

This is the stage which Dickens has portrayed in Nicholas Nickleby, the stage of the inimitable but actual Mr. Vincent Crummels, and the stage from which Dickens drew the melodramatic language of his characters, and delirious coincidence of his plots. ‘Open the door of some place’, says the murderer Sikes to his associates, ‘where I can lock this Screeching Hell Babe’. Just so: right out of the Bower theatre.

Throughout his Doctors’ Commons days Dickens’s mind was constantly on the stage. ‘He went to the theatre almost every night for a long time’, wrote John Forster, his biographer, ‘he studied and practised himself in parts and finally resolved to make his first plunge’. It was just at the beginning of the year 1831 when he wrote to a Covent Garden manager, received an encouraging reply and an appointment, and then, by one of his own vital coincidences, had a severe earache and could not go. And when his ear was well, and the next chance came, other gates had opened for him on wider prospects and Charles Dickens the actor that might have been was converted into ‘Boz’ the writer that actually was. The penury, the servitude, and the apprenticeship were over. Charles Dickens was coming into his own.

CHAPTER IIMR. PICKWICK TAKES THE WORLD BY STORM

DICKENS AS A REPORTER—SKETCHES BY BOZ—THE PICKWICK PAPERS

Charles Dickens was admitted to the gallery of the old House of Commons,—the unreformed and unburned House of 1831,—at the age of nineteen years. He had made himself, even in the merely mechanical sense, a marvellous reporter. He had conquered the systems of shorthand as then dispensed at ten and sixpence by a Mr. Gurney. He could write it with singular speed and accuracy, and write it, apparently, sitting or standing, moving or at rest, and,—what is the really harder thing to do with shorthand,—read it again and transcribe it without a missing word. Thirty years later Dickens once told an admiring company of what reporting meant in the days when the stage coach was, and the telegraph was not. ‘I have often,’ he said, ‘transcribed for the printer from my shorthand 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 of my hand by the light of a dark lantern in a postchaise and four, galloping through a wild country, through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . I have worn my knees by writing on them in 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 like so many sheep. . . . I have been in my time belated on miry byroads towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a rickety carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys and got back in time for publication.’

From such memories as these Dickens was to draw later on those wonderful scenes of coaching days and coaching nights that adorn so many pages of his books; the flight of Mr. Jingle and the maiden aunt; the moonlight journey of Tom Pinch, and the mail coach on the Dover Road on a heavy November night in the scene that opens the immortal Tale of Two Cities.

But meantime Dickens, while still reporting, had begun to ‘write’. It seems that from his childhood he had always made up in his head imaginary tales and sketched imaginary characters. He had even written them down. At school he had improvised dramas and made up a sort of mimic language for himself and his schoolfellows. Now he began in earnest, writing stories, and at length, greatly daring, he sent one by post to a magazine. Every book on Dickens has quoted the passage in which he has himself described his sensations at his first literary success. He had dropped his first manuscript into a letter-box, posting it after dark with stealth and fear. Then in due course he saw himself in all the majesty of print. ‘On which occasion,’ he says, ‘I walked down to Westminster Hall and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.’ The magazine to which he sent the story was the Old Monthly Magazine, published by a Captain Holland, and the story was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk, afterwards published under the name of Mr. Minns and his Cousin. It appeared in December of 1833 and was followed by nine other sketches in the same magazine. The sketch of August 1834 was the first to be signed with the pen-name ‘Boz’. This was the nickname of Dickens’s youngest brother, Augustus, and was a sort of nursery adaptation of Moses.

The young author received no pay, the editor of the struggling publication being utterly unable to give him any. So the contributions came to an end. But by good luck a new opening appeared just at the right moment. The Morning Chronicle, for which young Dickens worked as a reporter at a salary of five guineas a week, was about to add an evening edition of a special nature. Dickens proposed to the organizing editor, a Mr. Hogarth, that he should contribute sketches to the evening paper and receive an award of extra pay. The arrangement was made. Indeed every one on the Chronicle, and most of all John Black the editor, seems to have been immensely impressed with Dickens from start to finish. The extra two guineas a week added to his salary was a further proof of it. Henceforth the sketches flowed in a stream from Dickens’s easy pen. The name ‘Boz’ became well known, not to the world at large but at least to the newspaper world of London. When the sketches had sufficiently accumulated, a publisher (John Macrone) was found who offered a hundred and fifty pounds for the copyright. In due time the Sketches by Boz (2 volumes, 1836) appeared as Dickens’s first work. The volumes were illustrated by the well-known George Cruikshank. Thenceforth and for many years Dickens was ‘Boz’ to those who read him. The Pickwick Papers in their first dress bore the legend, ‘Edited by Boz’. Oliver Twist as a serial was signed by ‘Boz’, and it was ‘Boz’ who edited the Memoirs of Grimaldi in 1838. But Pickwick as a book (1837) and Oliver Twist as a book (1838) were signed by Charles Dickens. After that the name disappeared, but the public both in England and America went on using the name at least as an affectionate term for Dickens for many years. It was never, however, a question of hiding a real name behind an anonymity. At first people knew who Boz was, and were no wiser if told that his real name was Dickens. In time the name wore out, fortunately enough, for it lacked dignity and seriousness, being after all more fit for a dog or a clown or a patent medicine than for a writer. The wonder is that it clung so long. The Americans of the ‘forties all welcomed Dickens as ‘Boz’: old-fashioned people kept it up for a long time. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, writing his book on Dickens in 1905, ‘bozzes’ him perpetually and apologises for it, as a reminiscence not shaken off in old age. ‘Time was’, he says, ‘when it was in everybody’s mouth, and it conveyed a great deal more than it does now, . . . a pleasant tone of affectionate interest.’

It is difficult at this date to estimate the literary value of the Sketches by Boz. On the one hand, they belong to a bygone time. The passage of a hundred years (it is, one notes, exactly a hundred years since they were written) has greatly changed the form of our thought, the fashion of our literature and the character and cast of our humour. Since they were written a million writers, great and small, have chronicled their impression of ‘everyday life and everyday people’. In this, as in all else, we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us; albeit that in imaginary literature the position is different from the rising steps of science and the footing is infinitely harder to keep. It would be silly to say that all writers now are better than any writers then. But at least all now share in the legacy they left then.

On the other hand, and working in the other direction, is the fact that the Sketches by Boz were written by Charles Dickens, and that when we read them we know who wrote them. This gives them something of the sacred quality which surrounds the quaint incompetence of a primitive artist and opens the way to much the same conventional admiration.

The Sketches made no pretence of being in a lofty plane, or opening a tragic depth. They are just light pictures of ordinary people and ordinary happenings. The aim is to interest and amuse. The humour is distinctly in advance of most that had preceded it. Humour in its expression in literature has passed through various stages. There is the humour of primitive literature, reproduced in the nursery as Jack the Giant Killer and such; there is the gargantuan and grotesque humour of the Middle Ages; the eighteenth century humour of horseplay and the practical joke; and this we see here passing into the humour of discomfiture and comic misadventure. This became par excellence the humour of the early Victorian England and is only now passing to its rest. From the volumes of Dickens it is never quite absent, and it was at least intended as the primary inspiration of Pickwick. This mode of humour appears as the main current of Dickens’s first story, Mr. Minns and his Cousin. Mr. Minns, a precise trim little old bachelor, is visited by a loud-voiced vulgarian cousin who eats a lion’s share at his breakfast, cuts his ham the wrong way, and whose dog chaws up Mr. Minns’ curtains. Invited to dinner by the cousin, Mr. Minns is delayed by the coach, choked by the dinner, bored by the company, kicked in the shin by the cousin’s awful child (his godson), and brought to a collapse by having to make a speech, misses the home coach, walks till three in the morning,—and as a result cuts the awful child out of his will.

But there is much more in the sketches than the mere humour of misadventure. That alone could never have floated them so long and so high. There is a power of description, or rather of observation, quite out of the common; and that easy and extraordinary command of language to match the observation which came to Dickens as a birthright. But the quite moderate success of the Sketches by Boz was soon to be entirely absorbed by the colossal, the phenomenal success that was so rapidly to follow.

Before, however, the sunrise of Mr. Pickwick appeared over the horizon, an even greater illumination, in the personal sense, was breaking upon Dickens’s life. He was rushing headlong towards marriage. The Mr. Hogarth who had come down from Scotland to work on the Morning Chronicle was a man of cultivation and culture, possessed of a comfortable home, adorned with a bevy of three charming daughters, each as beautiful as the other. Young Dickens, talented and brilliant, was taken into the bosom of the family, and took the girls, all of them, to his heart. No doubt it was a wonderful experience for him, after his nondescript upbringing, to find himself the welcome guest of a normal and comfortable home, the idol of an admiring circle of pretty sisters. Charles ended by marrying one, and one only, of the Hogarth girls, inasmuch as the law of the land would not allow him more than one. But he fell in love with them collectively, and those who know the sequel may still wonder where his final preference lay. All were young. Catherine the eldest, when Charles Dickens became engaged to her, was only twenty years old. Below her was Mary Hogarth, a beautiful girl of sixteen, the joy of the household, beside whose chair there stood already the unseen figure of Death. The youngest was Georgina, whose later fate it was to share his home for nearly thirty years.

In those days the youth of Catherine, the inexperience of Charles, and the uncertainties of the future were no bar to marriage. It was the fashion then to marry early, just as it is the fashion now to marry often. Aspiring brides of eighteen and nineteen dashed off to Gretna Green, pursued by pink and white parents of eight and thirty. An unmarried female of twenty-five was an old maid and Cupid closed his ledgers, apart from his comic supplement, well below forty. Readers of Dickens’s books do not need to be told that with him a woman over forty was either a saint, a freak, or a joke.

Meantime young Dickens, in the process of blossoming forth, had left the parental roof and set up quarters of his own in Furnival’s Inn—not a tavern but a set of chambers,—a quite portentous place in Holborn with a sort of terrace effect and a spacious colonnaded portico. Here, for example, he was seen and described by that once famous American writer Nathaniel P. Willis, who was at this time in London putting together the notes for a book on England. He speaks of an ‘uncarpeted and bleak-looking room with a deal table, two or three chairs and a few books.’ He describes young Dickens as showing an ‘English obsequiousness’ to the publisher who introduced the American to the youthful Boz,—a statement which John Forster charmingly describes as ‘garbage’.

It was to this Inn that Dickens a short time later was to bring his bride. But that was not till the marriage had been rendered feasible by the ‘tempting emolument’ of fifteen guineas a month,—the dazzling bait which lured him to the writing of Pickwick. Indeed the wedding and the appearance of Pickwick took place almost simultaneously. The 31st of March 1836 saw the publication of the first month’s number of the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travel Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members, edited by ‘Boz’. The 2nd of April of 1836 witnessed the marriage of Charles John Huffam Dickens to Catherine Thomson Hogarth. (He had dropped the ‘h’ of his baptismal name.) The honeymoon was spent at Chalk, on the Dover Road close to Rochester in that part of Kent with which the life and works of Dickens were so closely associated. Then the young couple returned to take up their quarters in London (at Furnival’s Inn, and then at 48 Doughty Street) with all the world, and all that is best in it, before them.

Happily and auspiciously began the married life whose hearth thus brightly illuminated was to burn to dead, cold ashes.

But meantime Mr. Pickwick waits.

Just before his marriage,—while young Dickens was enjoying the rapture of courtship and engagement and tasting the first delights of literary success, the fates were preparing for him a sudden and astounding rise to eminence, unparalleled at any time in the history of letters. The ‘origin’ of the Pickwick papers has been the subject of so much controversy, so much vituperation, and of so much anger on the part of Dickens himself, that it is well to proceed step by step, moving on assured ground.

There was in London at this date (the close of the year 1835) a new and enterprising firm of publishers by name Chapman and Hall. Dickens had acquired a certain connection with them, having contributed to their Library of Humour a story called The Tuggs’s at Ramsgate, afterwards included in the Sketches by Boz. There was in London also a caricature artist called Robert Seymour. He also had worked with Chapman and Hall, having drawn the plates for their Squib Annual which came out in November 1835. Seymour made a suggestion to Mr. Chapman which Mr. Chapman (thirteen years later at the request of Dickens for a statement as to the origin of the Pickwick Papers) explained as follows: ‘He said he would like to do a series of cockney-sporting plates of a superior sort to those he had already published. I said they might do if accompanied by letterpress and published in monthly parts.’ Mr. Hall, the other member of the firm, then called on Dickens to invite him to undertake the work.

‘The idea propounded to me,’ explained Dickens afterwards, ‘was that the monthly something should be a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by Mr. Seymour. And there was a notion either on the part of that admirable humorous artist or of my visitor that a Nimrod club, the members of which were to go out shooting, fishing, and so forth and getting themselves into difficulty through their want of dexterity, would be the best means of introducing these.’ Dickens adds that, as he ‘was no great sportsman except in regards to all kinds of locomotion,’ he asked permission to take his own way with a freer range of English scenes and people. He adds in a sentence that deserves an abiding place in the history of literature, ‘My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number from the proof sheets of which Mr. Seymour made his drawings of the club and his happy portrait of its founder.’

Seymour drew also the well-known cover of the first number of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. It carries at the top the picture of a very clumsy marksman firing at a very saucy bird; at the bottom, the picture of a middle-aged gentleman fishing in a punt,—fast asleep: at the sides, guns, fishing-rods, landing nets and the bows and arrows of genteel archery. This is Seymour’s Nimrod Club right enough, with Mr. Winkle specially designed for membership in it and Mr. Pickwick destined to rise to glory out of it.