Dickens

The name of Dickens still has a good sound in and about Gad’s Hill. He was on very friendly terms with some families whose houses stand near to his own; and though nothing was farther from his nature, as he says, than to “wear topboots” and play the squire, yet he had in him not a little of what endears so many a resident country gentleman to his neighbourhood. He was head organiser rather than chief patron of village sports, of cricket matches and foot races; and his house was a dispensary for the poor of the parish. He established confidential relations between his house and the Falstaff Inn over the way, regulating his servants’ consumption of beer on a strict but liberal plan of his own devising; but it is not for this reason only that the successor of Mr. Edwin Trood—for such was the veritable name of mine host of the “Falstaff” in Dickens’s time—declares that it was a bad day for the neighbourhood when Dickens was taken away from it. In return, nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which surrounded him in his own country, and Forster has described his astonishment at the manifestation of it on the occasion of the wedding of the youngest daughter of the house in 1860. And, indeed, he was born to be popular, and specially among those by whom he was beloved as a friend or honoured as a benefactor.

But it was not for long intervals of either work or rest that Dickens was to settle down in his pleasant country house, nor was he ever, except quite at the last, to sit down under his own roof in peace and quiet, a wanderer no more. Less than a year after he had taken up his residence for the summer on Gad’s Hill, his home, and that of his younger children, was his wife’s home no longer. The separation, which appears to have been preparing itself for some, but no very long, time, took place in May, 1858, when, after an amicable arrangement, Mrs. Dickens left her husband, who henceforth allowed her an ample separate maintenance, and occasionally corresponded with her, but never saw her again. The younger children remained in their father’s house under the self-sacrificing and devoted care of Mrs. Dickens’s surviving sister, Miss Hogarth. Shortly afterwards, Dickens thought it well, in printed words which may be left forgotten, to rebut some slanderous gossip which, as the way of the world is, had misrepresented the circumstances of this separation. The causes of the event were an open secret to his friends and acquaintances. If he had ever loved his wife with that affection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of his numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty together made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction. It was not incumbent upon his faithful friend and biographer, and much less can it be upon one whom nothing but a sincere admiration of Dickens’s genius entitles to speak of him at all, to declare the standard by which the most painful transaction in his life is to be judged. I say the most painful, for it is with a feeling akin to satisfaction that one reads, in a letter three years afterwards to a lady in reference to her daughter’s wedding: “I want to thank you also for thinking of me on the occasion, but I feel that I am better away from it. I should really have a misgiving that I was a sort of a shadow on a young marriage, and you will understand me when I say so, and no more.” A shadow, too—who would deny it?—falls on every one of the pictures in which the tenderest of modern humourists has painted the simple joys and the sacred sorrows of that home life of which to his generation he had become almost the poet and the prophet, when we remember how he was himself neither blessed with its full happiness nor capable of accepting with resignation the imperfection inherent in it, as in all things human.

CHAPTER VI

LAST YEARS[1858-1870.]

The last twelve years of Dickens’s life were busy years, like the others; but his activity was no longer merely the expression of exuberant force, and long before the collapse came he had been repeatedly warned of the risks he continued to defy. When, however, he first entered upon those public readings, by persisting in which he indisputably hastened his end, neither he nor his friends took into account the fear of bodily ill-effects resulting from his exertions. Their misgivings had other grounds. Of course, had there been any pressure of pecuniary difficulty or need upon Dickens when he began, or when on successive occasions he resumed, his public readings, there would be nothing further to be said. But I see no suggestion of any such pressure. “My worldly circumstances,” he wrote before he had finally made up his mind to read in America, “are very good. I don’t want money. All my possessions are free and in the best order. Still,” he added, “at fifty-five or fifty-six, the likelihood of making a very great addition to one’s capital in half a year is an immense consideration.” Moreover, with all his love of doing as he chose, and his sense of the value of such freedom to him as a writer, he was a man of simple though liberal habits of life, with no taste for the gorgeous or capricious extravagances of a Balzac or a Dumas, nor can he have been at a loss how to make due provision for those whom in the course of nature he would leave behind him. Love of money for its own sake, or for that of the futilities it can purchase, was altogether foreign to his nature. At the same time, the rapid making of large sums has potent attractions for most men; and these attractions are perhaps strongest for those who engage in the pursuit for the sake of the race as well as of the prize. Dickens’s readings were virtually something new; their success was not only all his own, but unique and unprecedented—what nobody but himself ever had achieved or ever could have achieved. Yet the determining motive—if I read his nature rightly—was, after all, of another kind. “Two souls dwelt in his breast;” and when their aspirations united in one appeal it was irresistible. The author who craved for the visible signs of a sympathy responding to that which he felt for his multitudes of readers, and the actor who longed to impersonate creations already beings of flesh and blood to himself, were both astir in him, and in both capacities he felt himself drawn into the very publicity deprecated by his friends. He liked, as one who knew him thoroughly said to me, to be face to face with his public; and against this liking, which he had already indulged as fully as he could without passing the boundaries between private and professional life, arguments were in vain. It has been declared sheer pedantry to speak of such boundaries; and to suggest that there is anything degrading in paid readings such as those of Dickens would, on the face of it, be absurd. On the other hand, the author who, on or off the stage, becomes the interpreter of his writings to large audiences, more especially if he does his best to stereotype his interpretation by constantly repeating it, limits his own prerogative of being many things to many men; and where the author of a work, more particularly of a work of fiction, adjusts it to circumstances differing from those of its production, he allows the requirements of the lesser art to prejudice the claims of the greater.

Dickens cannot have been blind to these considerations; but to others his eyes were never opened. He found much that was inspiriting in his success as a reader, and this not only in the large sums he gained, or even in the “roaring sea of response,” to use his own fine metaphor, of which he had become accustomed to “stand upon the beach.” His truest sentiment as an author was touched to the quick; and he was, as he says himself, “brought very near to what he had sometimes dreamed might be his fame,” when, at York, a lady, whose face he had never seen, stopped him in the street, and said to him, “Mr. Dickens, will you let me touch the hand that has filled my house with many friends?” or when, at Belfast, he was almost overwhelmed with entreaties “to shake hands, Misther Dickens, and God bless you, sir; not ounly for the light you’ve been in mee house, sir—and God love your face!—this many a year.” On the other hand—and this, perhaps, a nature like his would not be the quickest to perceive—there was something vulgarising in the constant striving after immediate success in the shape of large audiences, loud applause, and satisfactory receipts. The conditions of the actor’s art cannot forego these stimulants; and this is precisely his disadvantage in comparison with artists who are able to possess themselves in quiet. To me, at least, it is painful to find Dickens jubilantly recording how at Dublin “eleven bank-notes were thrust into the pay-box—Arthur saw them—at one time for eleven stalls;” how at Edinburgh “neither Grisi, nor Jenny Lind, nor anything, nor anybody, seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings;” while, every allowance being made, there is something almost ludicrous in the double assertion, that “the most delicate audience I had ever seen in any provincial place is Canterbury; but the audience with the greatest sense of humour certainly is Dover.” What subjects for parody Dickens would have found in these innocent ecstasies if uttered by any other man! Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm was closely connected with the very thoroughness with which he entered into the work of his readings. “You have no idea,” he tells Forster, in 1867, “how I have worked at them. Finding it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be better than at first, I have learnt them all, so as to have no mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the situation.” “From ten years ago to last night,” he writes to his son from Baltimore in 1868, “I have never read to an audience but I have watched for an opportunity of striking out something better somewhere.” The freshness with which he returned night after night and season after season to the sphere of his previous successes, was itself a genuine actor’s gift. “So real,” he declares, “are my fictions to myself, that, after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers as if I had never stood there before.”

Dickens’s first public readings were given at Birmingham, during the Christmas week of 1853-’54, in support of the new Midland Institute; but a record—for the authenticity of which I cannot vouch—remains, that with true theatrical instinct he, before the Christmas in question, gave a trial reading of the Christmas Carol to a smaller public audience at Peterborough. He had since been repeatedly found willing to read for benevolent purposes; and the very fact that it had become necessary to decline some of these frequent invitations had again suggested the possibility—which had occurred to him eleven years before—of meeting the demand in a different way. Yet it may, after all, be doubted whether the idea of undertaking an entire series of paid public readings would have been carried out, had it not been for the general restlessness which had seized upon Dickens early in 1858, when, moreover, he had no special task either of labour or of leisure to absorb him, and when he craved for excitement more than ever. To go home—in this springtime of 1858—was not to find there the peace of contentment. “I must do something,” he wrote in March to his faithful counsellor, “or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state.”

So by April the die was cast, and on the 29th of that month he had entered into his new relation with the public. One of the strongest and most genuine impulses of his nature had victoriously asserted itself, and according to his wont he addressed himself to his task with a relentless vigour which flinched from no exertion. He began with a brief series at St. Martin’s Hall, and then, his invaluable friend Arthur Smith continuing to act as his manager, he contrived to cram not less than eighty-seven readings into three months and a half of travelling in the “provinces,” including Scotland and Ireland. A few winter readings in London, and a short supplementary course in the country during October, 1859, completed this first series. Already, in 1858, we find him, in a letter from Ireland, complaining of the “tremendous strain,” and declaring, “I seem to be always either in a railway carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course.” But the enthusiasm which everywhere welcomed him—I can testify to the thrill of excitement produced by his visit to Cambridge, in October, 1859—repaid him for his fatigues. Scotland thawed to him, and with Dublin—where his success was extraordinary—he was so smitten as to think it at first sight “pretty nigh as big as Paris.” In return, the Boots at Morrison’s expressed the general feeling in a patriotic point of view: “‘Whaat sart of a hoose, sur?’ he asked me. ‘Capital.’ ‘The Lard be praised, for the ’onor o’ Dooblin.’”

The books, or portions of books, to which he confined himself during this first series of readings were few in number. They comprised the Carol and the Chimes, and two stories from earlier Christmas numbers of Household Words—may the exclamation of the soft-hearted chambermaid at the Holly Tree Inn, “It’s a shame to part ’em!” never vanish from my memory!—together with the episodic readings of the Trial in Pickwick, Mrs. Gamp, and Paul Dombey. Of these the Pickwick, which I heard more than once, is still vividly present to me. The only drawback to the complete enjoyment of it was the lurking fear that there had been some tampering with the text, not to be condoned even in its author. But in the way of assumption Charles Mathews the elder himself could have accomplished no more Protean effort. The lack-lustre eye of Mr. Justice Stareleigh, the forensic hitch of Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, and the hopeless impotence of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle were alike incomparable. And if the success of the impersonation of Mr. Samuel Weller was less complete—although Dickens had formerly acted the character on an amateur stage—the reason probably was that, by reason of his endless store of ancient and modern instances, Sam had himself become a quasi-mythical being, whom it was almost painful to find reproduced in flesh and blood.

I have not hesitated to treat these readings by Dickens as if they had been the performances of an actor; and the description would apply even more strongly to his later readings, in which he seemed to make his points in a more accentuated fashion than before. “His readings,” says Mr. C. Kent, in an interesting little book about them, “were, in the fullest meaning of the words, singularly ingenious and highly-elaborated histrionic performances.” As such they had been prepared with a care such as few actors bestow upon their parts, and—for the book was prepared not less than the reading—not all authors bestow upon their plays. Now, the art of reading, even in the case of dramatic works, has its own laws, which even the most brilliant readers cannot neglect except at their peril. A proper pitch has to be found, in the first instance, before the exceptional passages can be, as it were, marked off from it; and the absence of this ground-tone sometimes interfered with the total effect of a reading by Dickens. On the other hand, the exceptional passages were, if not uniformly, at least generally excellent; nor am I at all disposed to agree with Forster in preferring, as a rule, the humorous to the pathetic. At the same time, there was noticeable in these readings a certain hardness which competent critics likewise discerned in Dickens’s acting, and which could not, at least in the former case, be regarded as an ordinary characteristic of dilettanteism. The truth is that he isolated his parts too sharply—a frequent fault of English acting, and one more detrimental to the total effect of a reading than even to that of an acted play.

No sooner had the heaviest stress of the first series of readings ceased than Dickens was once more at work upon a new fiction. The more immediate purpose was to insure a prosperous launch to the journal which, in the spring of 1859, took the place of Household Words. A dispute, painful in its origin, but ending in an amicable issue, had resulted in the purchase of that journal by Dickens; but already a little earlier he had—as he was entitled to do—begun the new venture of All the Year Round, with which Household Words was afterwards incorporated. The first number, published on April 30, contained the earliest instalment of A Tale of Two Cities, which was completed by November 20 following.

This story holds a unique place amongst the fictions of its author. Perhaps the most striking difference between it and his other novels may seem to lie in the all but entire absence from it of any humour or attempt at humour; for neither the brutalities of that “honest tradesman,” Jerry, nor the laconisms of Miss Pross, can well be called by that name. Not that his sources of humour were drying up, even though, about this time, he contributed to an American journal a short “romance of the real world,” Hunted Down, from which the same relief is again conspicuously absent. For the humour of Dickens was to assert itself with unmistakable force in his next longer fiction, and was even before that, in some of his occasional papers, to give delightful proofs of its continued vigour. In the case of the Tale of Two Cities, he had a new and distinct design in his mind which did not, indeed, exclude humour, but with which a liberal indulgence in it must have seriously interfered. “I set myself,” he writes, “the little task of writing a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true to nature, but whom the story itself should express more than they should express themselves by dialogue. I mean, in other words, that I fancied a story of incident might be written, in place of the bestiality that is written under that pretence, pounding the characters out in its own mortar, and beating their own interests out of them.” He therefore renounced his more usual method in favour of one probably less congenial to him. Yet, in his own opinion at least, he succeeded so well in the undertaking, that when the story was near its end he could venture to express a hope that it was “the best story he had written.” So much praise will hardly be given to this novel even by admirers of the French art of telling a story succinctly, or by those who can never resist a rather hysterical treatment of the French Revolution.

In my own opinion A Tale of Two Cities is a skilfully though not perfectly constructed novel, which needed but little substantial alteration in order to be converted into a not less effective stage-play. And with such a design Dickens actually sent the proof-sheets of the book to his friend Regnier, in the fearful hope that he might approve of the project of its dramatisation for a French theatre. Cleverly or clumsily adapted, the tale of the Revolution and its sanguinary vengeance was unlikely to commend itself to the Imperial censorship; but an English version was, I believe, afterwards very fairly successful on the boards of the Adelphi, where Madame Celeste was certainly in her right place as Madame Defarge, an excellent character for a melodrama, though rather wearisome as she lies in wait through half a novel.

The construction of this story is, as I have said, skilful but not perfect. Dickens himself successfully defended his use of accident in bringing about the death of Madame Defarge. The real objection to the conduct of this episode, however, lies in the inadequacy of the contrivance for leaving Miss Pross behind in Paris. Too much is also, I think, made to turn upon the three words “and their descendants”—non-essential in the original connexion—by which Dr. Manette’s written denunciation becomes fatal to those he loves. Still, the general edifice of the plot is solid; its interest is, notwithstanding the crowded background, concentrated with much skill upon a small group of personages; and Carton’s self-sacrifice, admirably prepared from the very first, produces a legitimate tragic effect. At the same time the novelist’s art vindicates its own claims. Not only does this story contain several narrative episodes of remarkable power—such as the flight from Paris at the close, and the touching little incident of the seamstress, told in Dickens’s sweetest pathetic manner—but it is likewise enriched by some descriptive pictures of unusual excellence: for instance, the sketch of Dover in the good old smuggling times, and the mezzo-tint of the stormy evening in Soho. Doubtless the increased mannerism of the style is disturbing, and this not only in the high-strung French scenes. As to the historical element in this novel, Dickens modestly avowed his wish that he might by his story have been able “to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.” But if Dickens desired to depict the noble of the ancien régime, either according to Carlyle or according to intrinsic probability, he should not have offered, in his Marquis, a type historically questionable, and unnatural besides. The description of the Saint Antoine, before and during the bursting of the storm, has in it more of truthfulness, or of the semblance of truthfulness; and Dickens’s perception of the physiognomy of the French workman is, I think, remarkably accurate. Altogether, the book is an extraordinary tour de force, which Dickens never repeated.

The opening of a new story by Dickens gave the necessary impetus to his new journal at its earliest stage; nor was the ground thus gained ever lost. Mr. W. H. Wills stood by his chief’s side as of old, taking, more especially in later years, no small share of responsibility upon him. The prospectus of All the Year Round had not in vain promised an identity of principle in its conduct with that of its predecessor; in energy and spirit it showed no falling off; and, though not in all respects, the personality of Dickens made itself felt as distinctly as ever. Besides the Tale of Two Cities he contributed to it his story of Great Expectations. Amongst his contributors Mr. Wilkie Collins took away the breath of multitudes of readers; Mr. Charles Reade disported himself amongst the facts which gave stamina to his fiction; and Lord Lytton made a daring voyage into a mysterious country. Thither Dickens followed him, for once, in his Four Stories, not otherwise noteworthy, and written in a manner already difficult to discriminate from that of Mr. Wilkie Collins. For the rest, the advice with which Dickens aided Lord Lytton’s progress in his Strange Story was neither more ready nor more painstaking than that which he bestowed upon his younger contributors, to more than one of whom he generously gave the opportunity of publishing in his journal a long work of fiction. Some of these younger writers were at this period amongst his most frequent guests and associates; for nothing more naturally commended itself to him than the encouragement of the younger generation.

But though longer imaginative works played at least as conspicuous a part in the new journal as they had in the old, the conductor likewise continued to make manifest his intention that the lesser contributions should not be treated by readers or by writers as harmless necessary “padding.” For this purpose it was requisite not only that the choice of subjects should be made with the utmost care, but also that the master’s hand should itself be occasionally visible. Dickens’s occasional contributions had been few and unimportant, till in a happy hour he began a series of papers, including many of the pleasantest, as well as of the mellowest, amongst the lighter productions of his pen. As usual, he had taken care to find for this series a name which of itself went far to make its fortune.