Dickens

All these circumstances should be taken into account in judging of Dickens’s last completed novel. The author would not have been himself had he, when once fairly engaged upon his work, failed to feel something of his old self-confidence. Nor was this feeling, which he frankly confessed to Mr. Wilkie Collins, altogether unwarranted. Our Mutual Friend13 is, like the rest of Dickens’s later writings, carefully and skilfully put together as a story. No exception is to be taken to it on the ground that the identity on which much of the plot hinges is long foreseen by the reader; for this, as Dickens told his critics in his postscript, had been part of his design, and was, in fact, considering the general nature of the story, almost indispensable. The defect rather lies in the absence of that element of uncertainty which is needed in order to sustain the interest. The story is, no doubt, ingeniously enough constructed, but admiration of an ingenious construction is insufficient to occupy the mind of a reader through an inevitable disentanglement. Moreover, some of the machinery, though cleverly contrived, cannot be said to work easily. Thus, the ruse of the excellent Boffin in playing the part of a skinflint might pass as a momentary device, but its inherent improbability, together with the likelihood of its leading to an untoward result, makes its protraction undeniably tedious. It is not, however, in my opinion at least, in the matter of construction that Our Mutual Friend presents a painful contrast with earlier works produced, like it, “on a large canvas.” The conduct of the story as a whole is fully vigorous enough to enchain the attention; and in portions of it the hand of the master displays its unique power. He is at his best in the whole of the water-side scenes, both where “The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” (identified by zealous discoverers with a tavern called “The Two Brewers”) lies like an oasis in the midst of a desert of ill-favoured tidal deposits, and where Rogue Riderhood has his lair at the lock higher up the river. A marvellous union of observation and imagination was needed for the picturing of a world in which this amphibious monster has his being; and never did Dickens’s inexhaustible knowledge of the physiognomy of the Thames and its banks stand him in better stead than in these powerful episodes. It is unfortunate, though in accordance with the common fate of heroes and heroines, that Lizzie Hexham should, from the outset, have to discard the colouring of her surroundings, and to talk the conventional dialect as well as express the conventional sentiments of the heroic world. Only at the height of the action she ceases to be commonplace, and becomes entitled to be remembered amongst the true heroines of fiction. A more unusual figure, of the half-pathetic, half-grotesque kind for which Dickens had a peculiar liking, is Lizzie’s friend, the doll’s dressmaker, into whom he has certainly infused an element of genuine sentiment; her protector, Riah, on the contrary, is a mere stage-saint, though by this character Dickens appears to have actually hoped to redeem the aspersions he was supposed to have cast upon the Jews, as if Riah could have redeemed Fagin, any more than Sheva redeemed Shylock.

But in this book whole episodes and parts of the plot through which the mystery of John Harmon winds its length along are ill-adapted for giving pleasure to any reader. The whole Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business—if the term may pass—is extremely wearisome; the character of Mr. Venus, in particular, seems altogether unconnected or unarticulated with the general plot, on which, indeed, it is but an accidental excrescence. In the Wilfer family there are the outlines of some figures of genuine humour, but the outlines only; nor is Bella raised into the sphere of the charming out of that of the pert and skittish. A more ambitious attempt, and a more noteworthy failure, was the endeavour to give to the main plot of this novel such a satiric foil as the Circumlocution Office had furnished to the chief action of Little Dorrit, in a caricature of society at large, its surface varnish and its internal rottenness. The Barnacles, and those who deemed it their duty to rally round the Barnacles, had, we saw, felt themselves hard hit; but what sphere or section of society could feel itself specially caricatured in the Veneerings, or in their associates—the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly brutal Podsnap, Fascination Fledgeby, and the Lammles, a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and the Chamber of Horrors? Caricature such as this, representing no society that has ever in any part of the world pretended to be “good,” corresponds to the wild rhetoric of the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the “gospel according to Podsnappery;” but it is, in truth, satire from which both wit and humour have gone out. An angry, often almost spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their place. Amongst the personages moving in “society” are two which, as playing serious parts in the progress of the plot, the author is necessarily obliged to seek to endow with the flesh and blood of real human beings. Yet it is precisely in these—the friends Eugene and Mortimer—that, in the earlier part of the novel at all events, the constraint of the author’s style seems least relieved; the dialogues between these two Templars have an unnaturalness about them as intolerable as euphuism or the effeminacies of the Augustan age. It is true that, when the story reaches its tragic height, the character of Eugene is borne along with it, and his affectations are forgotten. But in previous parts of the book, where he poses as a wit, and is evidently meant for a gentleman, he fails to make good his claims to either character. Even the skilfully contrived contrast between the rivals Eugene Wrayburn and the school-master, Bradley Headstone—through whom and through whose pupil, Dickens, by-the-way, dealt another blow against a system of mental training founded upon facts alone—fails to bring out the conception of Eugene which the author manifestly had in his mind. Lastly, the old way of reconciling dissonances—a marriage which “society” calls a mésalliance—has rarely furnished a lamer ending than here; and, had the unwritten laws of English popular fiction permitted, a tragic close would have better accorded with the sombre hue of the most powerful portions of this curiously unequal romance.

The effort—for such it was—of Our Mutual Friend had not been over for more than a few months, when Dickens accepted a proposal for thirty nights’ readings from the Messrs. Chappell; and by April, 1866, he was again hard at work, flying across the country into Lancashire and Scotland, and back to his temporary London residence in Southwick Place, Hyde Park. In any man more capable than Dickens of controlling the restlessness which consumed him the acceptance of this offer would have been incomprehensible; for his heart had been declared out of order by his physician, and the patient had shown himself in some degree awake to the significance of this opinion. But the readings were begun and accomplished notwithstanding, though not without warnings, on which he insisted on putting his own interpretation. Sleeplessness aggravated fatigue, and stimulants were already necessary to enable him to do the work of his readings without discomfort. Meanwhile, some weeks before they were finished, he had been induced to enter into negotiations about a further engagement to begin at the end of the year. Time was to be left for the Christmas number, which this year could hardly find its scene anywhere else than at a railway junction; and the readings were not to extend over forty nights, which seem ultimately to have been increased to fifty. This second series, which included a campaign in Ireland, brilliantly successful despite snow and rain, and Fenians, was over in May. Then came the climax, for America now claimed her share of the great author for her public halls and chapels and lecture-theatres; and the question of the summer and autumn was whether or not to follow the sound of the distant dollar. It was closely debated between Dickens and his friend Forster and Wills, and he describes himself as “tempest-tossed” with doubts; but his mind had inclined in one direction from the first, and the matter was virtually decided when it resolved to send a confidential agent to make enquiries on the spot. Little imported another and grave attack in his foot; the trusty Mr. Dolby’s report was irresistible. Eighty readings within half a year was the estimated number, with profits amounting to over fifteen thousand pounds. The gains actually made were nearly five thousand pounds in excess of this calculation.

A farewell banquet, under the presidency of Lord Lytton, gave the favourite author Godspeed on his journey to the larger half of his public; on the 9th of November he sailed from Liverpool, and on the 19th landed at Boston. The voyage, on which, with his old buoyancy, he had contrived to make himself master of the modest revels of the saloon, seems to have done him good, or at least to have made him, as usual, impatient to be at his task. Barely arrived, he is found reporting himself “so well, that I am constantly chafing at not having begun to-night, instead of this night week.” By December, however, he was at his reading-desk, first at Boston, where he met with the warmest of welcomes, and then at New York, where there was a run upon the tickets, which he described with his usual excited delight. The enthusiasm of his reception by the American public must have been heightened by the thought that it was now or never for them to see him face to face, and, by-gones being by-gones, to testify to him their admiration. But there may have been some foundation for his discovery that some signs of agitation on his part were expected in return, and “that it would have been taken as a suitable compliment if I would stagger on the platform, and instantly drop, overpowered by the spectacle before me.” It was but a sad Christmas which he spent with his faithful Dolby at their New York inn, tired, and with a “genuine American catarrh upon him,” of which he never freed himself during his stay in the country. Hardly had he left the doctor’s hands than he was about again, reading in Boston and New York and their more immediate neighbourhood—that is, within six or seven hours by railway—till February; and then, in order to stimulate his public, beginning a series of appearances at more distant places before returning to his starting-points. His whole tour included, besides a number of New England towns, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and in the north Cleveland and Buffalo. Canada and the West were struck out of the programme, the latter chiefly because exciting political matters were beginning to absorb public attention.

During these journeyings Dickens gave himself up altogether to the business of his readings, only occasionally allowing himself to accept the hospitality proffered him on every side. Thus only could he breast the difficulties of his enterprise; for, as I have said, his health was never good during the whole of his visit, and his exertions were severe, though eased by the self-devotion of his attendants, of which, as of his constant kindness, both serious and sportive, towards them it is touching to read. Already in January he describes himself as not seldom “so dead beat” at the close of a reading “that they lay me down on a sofa, after I have been washed and dressed, and I lie there, extremely faint, for a quarter of an hour,” and as suffering from intolerable sleeplessness at night. His appetite was equally disordered, and he lived mainly on stimulants. Why had he condemned himself to such a life?

When at last he could declare the stress of his work over he described himself as “nearly used up. Climate, distance, catarrh, travelling, and hard work have begun—I may say so, now they are nearly all over—to tell heavily upon me. Sleeplessness besets me; and if I had engaged to go on into May, I think I must have broken down.” Indeed, but for his wonderful energy and the feeling of exultation which is derived from a heavy task nearly accomplished, he would have had to follow the advice of “Longfellow and all the Cambridge men,” and give in nearly at the last. But he persevered through the farewell readings, both at Boston and at New York, though on the night before the last reading in America he told Dolby that if he “had to read but twice more, instead of once, he couldn’t do it.” This last reading of all was given at New York on April 20, two days after a farewell banquet at Delmonico’s. It was when speaking on this occasion that, very naturally moved by the unalloyed welcome which had greeted him in whatever part of the States he had visited, he made the declaration already mentioned, promising to perpetuate his grateful sense of his recent American experiences. This apology, which was no apology, at least remains one amongst many proofs of the fact that with Dickens kindness never fell on a thankless soil.

The merry month of May was still young in the Kentish fields and lanes when the master of Gad’s Hill Place was home again at last. “I had not been at sea three days on the passage home,” he wrote to his friend Mrs. Watson, “when I became myself again.” It was, however, too much when “a ‘deputation’—two in number, of whom only one could get into my cabin, while the other looked in at my window—came to ask me to read to the passengers that evening in the saloon. I respectfully replied that sooner than do it I would assault the captain and be put in irons.” Alas! he was already fast bound, by an engagement concluded soon after he had arrived in Boston, to a final series of readings at home. “Farewell” is a difficult word to say for any one who has grown accustomed to the stimulating excitement of a public stage, and it is not wonderful that Dickens should have wished to see the faces of his familiar friends—the English public—once more. But the engagement to which he had set his hand was for a farewell of a hundred readings, at the recompense of eight thousand pounds, in addition to expenses and percentage. It is true that he had done this before he had fully realized the effect of his American exertions; but even so there was a terrible unwisdom in the promise. These last readings—and he alone is, in common fairness, to be held responsible for the fact—cut short a life from which much noble fruit might still have been expected for our literature, and which in any case might have been prolonged as a blessing beyond all that gold can buy to those who loved him.

Meanwhile he had allowed himself a short respite before resuming his labours in October. It was not more, his friends thought, than he needed, for much of his old buoyancy seemed to them to be wanting in him, except when hospitality or the intercourse of friendship called it forth. What a charm there still was in his genial humour his letters would suffice to show. It does one good to read his description to his kind American friends Mr. and Mrs. Fields of his tranquillity at Gad’s Hill: “Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night. The place is lovely, and in perfect order. I have put five mirrors in the Swiss châlet where I write, and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of waving corn, and the sail-dotted river. My room is up amongst the branches of the trees, and the birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the open windows, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing for miles and miles, is most delicious.”

Part of this rare leisure he generously devoted to the preparation for the press of a volume of literary remains from the pen of an old friend. The Religious Opinions of Chauncey Hare Townshend should not be altogether overlooked by those interested in Dickens, to whom the loose undogmatic theology of his friend commended itself as readily as the sincere religious feeling underlying it. I cannot say what answer Dickens would have returned to an enquiry as to his creed, but the nature of his religious opinions is obvious enough. Born in the Church of England, he had so strong an aversion from what seemed to him dogmatism of any kind, that he for a time—in 1843—connected himself with a Unitarian congregation; and to Unitarian views his own probably continued during his life most nearly to approach. He described himself as “morally wide asunder from Rome,” but the religious conceptions of her community cannot have been a matter of anxious enquiry with him, while he was too liberal-minded to be, unless occasionally, aggressive in his Protestantism. For the rest, his mind, though imaginative, was without mystical tendencies, while for the transitory superstitions of the day it was impossible but that he should entertain the contempt which they deserved. “Although,” he writes—

“I regard with a hushed and solemn fear the mysteries between which, and this state of existence, is interposed the barrier of the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and, although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them, I cannot reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells, creaking of boards, and such like insignificances, with the majestic beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted to understand.”

His piety was undemonstrative and sincere, as his books alone would suffice to prove; and he seems to have sought to impress upon his children those religious truths with the acceptance and practice of which he remained himself content. He loved the New Testament, and had, after some fashion of his own, paraphrased the Gospel narrative for the use of his children; but he thought that “half the misery and hypocrisy of the Christian world arises from a stubborn determination to refuse the New Testament as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it—whereof comes all manner of camel-swallowing and of gnat-straining.” Of Puritanism in its modern forms he was an uncompromising, and no doubt a conscientious, opponent; and though, with perfect sincerity, he repelled the charge that his attacks upon cant were attacks upon religion, yet their animus is such as to make the misinterpretation intelligible. His Dissenting ministers are of the Bartholomew Fair species; and though, in his later books, a good clergyman here and there makes his modest appearance, the balance can hardly be said to be satisfactorily redressed.

The performance of this pious office was not the only kind act he did after his return from America. Of course, however, his own family was nearest to his heart. No kinder or more judicious words were ever addressed by a father to his children than those which, about this time, he wrote to one of his sons, then beginning a successful career at Cambridge, and to another—the youngest—who was setting forth for Australia, to join an elder brother already established in that country. “Poor Plorn,” he afterward wrote, “is gone to Australia. It was a hard parting at the last. He seemed to me to become once more my youngest and favourite child as the day drew near, and I did not think I could have been so shaken.”

In October his “farewell” readings began. He had never had his heart more in the work than now. Curiously enough, not less than two proposals had reached him during this autumn—one from Birmingham and the other from Edinburgh—that he should allow himself to be put forward as a candidate for Parliament; but he declined to entertain either, though in at least one of the two cases the prospects of success would not have been small. His views of political and parliamentary life had not changed since he had written to Bulwer Lytton in 1865: “Would there not seem to be something horribly rotten in the system of political life, when one stands amazed how any man, not forced into it by his position, as you are, can bear to live it?” Indeed, they had hardly changed since the days when he had come into personal contact with them as a reporter. In public and in private he had never ceased to ridicule our English system of party, and to express his contempt for the Legislature and all its works. He had, however, continued to take a lively interest in public affairs, and his letters contain not a few shrewd remarks on both home and foreign questions. Like most liberal minds of his age, he felt a warm sympathy for the cause of Italy; and the English statesman whom he appears to have most warmly admired was Lord Russell, in whose good intentions neither friends nor adversaries were wont to lose faith. Meanwhile his Radicalism gradually became of the most thoroughly independent type, though it interfered neither with his approval of the proceedings in Jamaica as an example of strong government, nor with his scorn of “the meeting of jawbones and asses” held against Governor Eyre at Manchester. The political questions, however, which really moved him deeply were those social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had always directed his attention—the Poor-law, temperance, Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labour and strikes. On all these heads sentiment guided his judgment, but he spared no pains to convince himself that he was in the right; and he was always generous, as when, notwithstanding his interest in Household Words, he declared himself unable to advocate the repeal of the paper duty for a moment, “as against the soap duty, or any other pressing on the mass of the poor.”

Thus he found no difficulty in adhering to the course he had marked out for himself. The subject which now occupied him before all others was a scheme for a new reading, with which it was his wish to vary and to intensify the success of the series on which he was engaged. This was no other than a selection of scenes from Oliver Twist, culminating in the scene of the murder of Nancy by Sikes, which, before producing it in public, he resolved to “try” upon a select private audience. The trial was a brilliant success. “The public,” exclaimed a famous actress who was present, “have been looking out for a sensation these last fifty years or so, and, by Heaven, they have got it!” Accordingly, from January, 1869, it formed one of the most frequent of his readings, and the effort which it involved counted for much in the collapse which was to follow. Never were the limits between reading and acting more thoroughly effaced by Dickens, and never was the production of an extraordinary effect more equally shared by author and actor. But few who witnessed this extraordinary performance can have guessed the elaborate preparation bestowed upon it, which is evident from the following notes (by Mr. C. Kent) on the book used in it by the reader:

“What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however—that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write—is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. ‘Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,’ is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word ‘Action.’ Not a word of it was said. It was simply done. Again, immediately below that, on the same page—Sikes loquitur: ‘Oh! you haven’t, haven’t you?’ passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket (‘Action’ again in MS. on the margin.) Not a word was said about the pistol.... So again, afterwards, as a rousing self-direction, one sees notified in MS. on page 107 the grim stage direction, ‘Murder coming!’”

The “Murder” was frequently read by Dickens not less than four times a week during the early months of 1869, in which year, after beginning in Ireland, he had been continually travelling to and fro between various parts of Great Britain and town. Already in February the old trouble in his foot had made itself felt, but, as usual, it had long been disregarded. On the 10th of April he had been entertained at Liverpool, in St. George’s Hall, at a banquet presided over by Lord Dufferin, and in a genial speech had tossed back the ball to Lord Houghton, who had pleasantly bantered him for his unconsciousness of the merits of the House of Lords. Ten days afterwards he was to read at Preston, but, feeling uneasy about himself, had reported his symptoms to his doctor in London. The latter hastened down to Preston, and persuaded Dickens to accompany him back to town, where, after a consultation, it was determined that the readings must be stopped for the current year, and that reading combined with travelling must never be resumed. What his sister-in-law and daughter feel themselves justified in calling “the beginning of the end” had come at last.