Dickens

As a matter of course it is possible to take exceptions of one kind or another to some of the characters created by Dickens in so extraordinary a profusion. I hardly know of any other novelist less obnoxious to the charge of repeating himself; though, of course, many characters in his earlier or shorter works contained in themselves the germs of later and fuller developments. But Bob Sawyer and Dick Swiveller, Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep are at least sufficiently independent variations on the same themes. On the other hand, Filer and Cute in The Chimes were the first sketches of Gradgrind and Bounderby in Hard Times; and Clemency in The Battle of Life prefigures Peggotty in David Copperfield. No one could seriously quarrel with such repetitions as these, and there are remarkably few of them; for the fertile genius of Dickens took delight in the variety of its creativeness, and, as if to exemplify this, there was no relation upon the contrasted humours of which he better loved to dwell than that of partnership. It has been seen how rarely his inventive power condescended to supplement itself by what in the novel corresponds to the mimicry of the stage, and what in truth is as degrading to the one as it is to the other—the reproduction of originals from real life. On the other hand, he carries his habit too far of making a particular phrase do duty as an index of a character. This trick also is a trick of the stage, where it often enough makes the judicious grieve. Many may be inclined to censure it in Dickens as one of several forms of the exaggeration which is so frequently condemned in him. There was no charge to which he was more sensitive; and in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit he accordingly (not for the first time) turned round upon the objectors, declaring roundly that “what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions is plain truth to another;” and hinting a doubt “whether it is always the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull.” I certainly do not think that the term “exaggerated” is correctly applied to such conventional characters of sensational romance as Rosa Dartle, who has, as it were, lost her way into David Copperfield, while Hortense and Madame Defarge seem to be in their proper places in Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities. In his earlier writings, and in the fresher and less overcharged serious parts of his later books, he rarely if ever paints black in black; even the Jew Fagin has a moment of relenting against the sleeping Oliver; he is not that unreal thing, a “demon,” whereas Sikes is that real thing, a brute. On the other hand, certainly he at times makes his characters more laughable than nature; few great humourists have so persistently sought to efface the line which separates the barely possible from the morally probable. This was, no doubt, largely due to his inclination towards the grotesque, which a severer literary training might have taught him to restrain. Thus he liked to introduce insane or imbecile personages into fiction, where, as in real life, they are often dangerous to handle. It is to his sense of the grotesque, rather than to any deep-seated satirical intention, and certainly not to any want of reverence or piety in his very simple and very earnest nature, that I would likewise ascribe the exaggeration and unfairness of which he is guilty against Little Bethel and all its works. But in this, as in other instances, no form of humour requires more delicate handling than the grotesque, and none is more liable to cause fatigue. Latterly, Dickens was always adding to his gallery of eccentric portraits, and if inner currents may be traced by outward signs, it may be worth while to apply the test of his names, which become more and more odd as their owners deviate more and more from the path of nature. Who more simply and yet more happily named than the leading members of the Pickwick Club—from the poet, Mr. Snodgrass, to the sportsman, Mr. Winkle—Nathaniel, not Daniel; but with Veneering and Lammle, and Boffin and Venus, and Crisparkle and Grewgious—be they actual names or not—we feel instinctively that we are in the region of the transnormal.

Lastly, in their descriptive power and the faithfulness with which they portray the life and ways of particular periods or countries, of special classes, professions, or other divisions of mankind, the books of Dickens are, again of course within their range, unequalled. He sought his materials chiefly at home, though his letters from Italy and Switzerland and America, and his French pictures in sketch and story, show how much wider a field his descriptive powers might have covered. The Sketches by Boz and the Pickwick Papers showed a mastery, unsurpassed before or since, in the description of the life of English society in its middle and lower classes, and in Oliver Twist he lifted the curtain from some of the rotten parts of our civilisation. This history of a work-house child also sounded the note of that sympathy with the poor which gave to Dickens’s descriptions of their sufferings and their struggles a veracity beyond mere accuracy of detail. He was still happier in describing their household virtues, their helpfulness to one another, their compassion for those who are the poorest of all—the friendless and the outcast—as he did in his Old Curiosity Shop, and in most of his Christmas books. His pictures of middle-class life abounded in kindly humour; but the humour and pathos of poverty—more especially the poverty which has not yet lost its self-respect—commended themselves most of all to his descriptive power. Where, as in Nicholas Nickleby and later works, he essayed to describe the manners of the higher classes, he was, as a rule, far less successful; partly because there was in his nature a vein of rebellion against the existing system of society, so that, except in his latest books, he usually approached a description of members of its dominant orders with a satirical intention, or at least an undertone of bitterness. At the same time I demur to the common assertion that Dickens could not draw a real gentleman. All that can be said is that it very rarely suited his purpose to do so, supposing the term to include manners as well as feelings and actions; though Mr. Twemlow, in Our Mutual Friend, might be instanced as a (perhaps rather conscious) exception of one kind, and Sir Leicester Dedlock, in the latter part of Bleak House, as another. Moreover, a closer examination of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Cousin Feenix will show that, gull as the one and ninny as the other is, neither has anything that can be called ungentlemanly about him; on the contrary, the characters, on the whole, rather plead in favour of the advantage than of the valuelessness of blue blood. As for Dickens’s other noblemen, whom I find enumerated in an American dictionary of his characters, they are nearly all mere passing embodiments of satirical fancies, which pretend to be nothing more.

Another ingenious enthusiast has catalogued the numerous callings, professions, and trades of the personages appearing in Dickens’s works. I cannot agree with the criticism that in his personages the man is apt to become forgotten in the externals of his calling—the barrister’s wig and gown, as it were, standing for the barrister, and the beadle’s cocked hat and staff for the beadle. But he must have possessed in its perfection the curious detective faculty of deducing a man’s occupation from his manners. To him nothing wore a neutral tint, and no man or woman was featureless. He was, it should be remembered, always observing; half his life he was afoot. When he undertook to describe any novel or unfamiliar kind of manners, he spared no time or trouble in making a special study of his subject. He was not content to know the haunts of the London thieves by hearsay, or to read the history of opium-smoking and its effects in Blue-books. From the office of his journal in London we find him starting on these self-imposed commissions, and from his hotel in New York. The whole art of descriptive reporting, which has no doubt produced a large quantity of trashy writing, but has also been of real service in arousing a public interest in neglected corners of our social life, was, if not actually set on foot, at any rate re-invigorated and vitalised by him. No one was so delighted to notice the oddities which habit and tradition stereotype in particular classes of men. A complete natural history of the country actor, the London landlady, and the British waiter might be compiled from his pages. This power of observation and description extended from human life to that of animals. His habits of life could not but make him the friend of dogs, and there is some reason for a title which was bestowed on him in a paper in a London magazine concerning his own dogs—the Landseer of Fiction. His letters are full of delightful details concerning these friends and companions, Turk, Linda, and the rest of them; nor is the family of their fictitious counterparts, culminating (intellectually) in Merrylegs, less numerous and delightful. Cats were less congenial to Dickens, perhaps because he had no objection to changing house; and they appear in his works in no more attractive form than as the attendant spirits of Mrs. Pipchin and of Mr. Krook. But for the humours of animals in general he had a wonderfully quick eye. Of his ravens I have already spoken. The pony Whisker is the type of kind old gentlemen’s ponies. In one of his letters occurs an admirably droll description of the pig-market at Boulogne; and the best unscientific description ever given of a spider was imagined by Dickens at Broadstairs, when in his solitude he thought

“of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck did. There is one in my cell (with a speckled body and twenty-two very decided knees) who seems to know me.”

In everything, whether animate or inanimate, he found out at once the characteristic feature, and reproduced it in words of faultless precision. This is the real secret of his descriptive power, the exercise of which it would be easy to pursue through many other classes of subjects. Scenery, for its own sake, he rarely cared to describe; but no one better understood how to reproduce the combined effect of scenery and weather on the predisposed mind. Thus London and its river in especial are, as I have said, haunted by the memory of Dickens’s books. To me it was for years impossible to pass near London Bridge at night, or to idle in the Temple on summer days, or to frequent a hundred other localities on or near the Thames, without instinctively recalling pictures scattered through the works of Dickens—in this respect, also, a real liber veritatis.

Thus, and in many ways which it would be labour lost to attempt to describe, and by many a stroke or touch of genius which it would be idle to seek to reproduce in paraphrase, the most observing and the most imaginative of our English humourists revealed to us that infinite multitude of associations which binds men together, and makes us members one of another. But though observation and imagination might discern and discover these associations, sympathy—the sympathy of a generous human heart with humanity—alone could breathe into them the warmth of life. Happily, to most men, there is one place consecrated above others to the feelings of love and good-will; “that great altar where the worst among us sometimes perform the worship of the heart, and where the best have offered up such sacrifices and done such deeds of heroism as, chronicled, would put the proudest temples of old time, with all their vaunting annals, to the blush.” It was thus that Dickens spoke of the sanctity of home; and, English in many things, he was most English in that love of home to which he was never weary of testifying. But, though the “pathway of the sublime” may have been closed to him, he knew well enough that the interests of a people and the interests of humanity are mightier than the domestic loves and cares of any man; and he conscientiously addressed himself, as to the task of his life, to the endeavour to knit humanity together. The method which he, by instinct and by choice, more especially pursued was that of seeking to show the “good in everything.” This it is that made him, unreasonably sometimes, ignobly never, the champion of the poor, the helpless, the outcast. He was often tempted into a rhetoric too loud and too shrill, into a satire neither fine nor fair; for he was impatient, but not impatient of what he thought true and good. His purpose, however, was worthy of his powers; nor is there recorded among the lives of English men of letters any more single-minded in its aim, and more successful in the pursuit of it, than his. He was much criticised in his lifetime; and he will, I am well aware, be often criticised in the future by keener and more capable judges than myself. They may miss much in his writings that I find in them; but, unless they find one thing there, it were better that they never opened one of his books. He has indicated it himself when criticising a literary performance by a clever writer:

“In this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended to, whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of the earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has made her face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference that the writer can generally imagine without trying it. You don’t want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don’t want any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion that it is there.”

The sentiment which Dickens means is the salt which will give a fresh savour of their own to his works so long as our language endures.

THE END

1

See Idyll. xv. 77. This discovery is not my own, but that of the late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly with great gusto.

2

For operas, as a form of dramatic entertainment, Dickens seems afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it is difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid.

3

W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of Cannon Street, and their private house in Mosely Street.

4

As there is hardly a character in the whole world of fiction and the drama without some sort of a literary predecessor, so Dickens may have derived the first notion of Grip from the raven Ralpho—likewise the property of an idiot—who frightened Roderick Random and Strap out of their wits, and into the belief that he was the personage Grip so persistently declared himself to be.

5

After dining at a party including the son of an eminent man of letters, he notes in his Remembrancer that he found the great man’s son “decidedly lumpish,” and appends the reflexion, “Copyrights need be hereditary, for genius isn’t.”

6

From a list of MSS. at South Kensington, kindly furnished me by Mr. R. F. Sketchley, I find that Mr. R. H. Shepherd’s Bibliography of Dickens is incomplete on this head.

7

By an odd coincidence, not less than four out of the six theatres advertising their performances in this first number of the Daily News announce each a different adaptation of The Cricket on the Hearth. Amongst the curiosities of the casts are observable: At the Adelphi, Wright as Tilly Slowboy, and at the Haymarket Buckstone in the same character, with William Farren as Caleb Plummer. The latter part is taken at the Princess’s by Compton, Mrs. Stirling playing Dot. At the Lyceum, Mr., Mrs., and Miss Mary Keeley, and Mr. Emery, appear in the piece.

8

It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the railway-train. Of the effect of the weird Signalman’s Story in one of his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one’s self. There are excellent descriptions of the rapidity of a railway journey in the first chapter of The Lazy Tour, and in another Household Words paper, called A Flight.

9

Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the Bibliography of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, who has kindly communicated to me part of his collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle against Leigh Hunt repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, unworthy of notice.

10

By Rail to Parnassus, June 16, 1855.

11

One of the last things ever written by Dickens was a criticism of M. Fechter’s acting, intended to introduce him to the American public. A false report, by-the-way, declared Dickens to have been the author of the dramatic version of Scott’s novel, which at Christmas, 1865-’66, was produced at the Lyceum, under the title of The Master of Ravenswood; but he allowed that he had done “a great deal towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, on the stage in his own gallant manner.”

12

Dickens undoubtedly had a genius for titles. Amongst some which he suggested for the use of a friend and contributor to his journal are, “What will he do with it?” and “Can he forgive her?”

13

This title has helped to extinguish the phrase of which it consists. Few would now be found to agree with the last clause of Flora’s parenthesis in Little Dorrit: “Our mutual friend—too cold a word for me; at least I don’t mean that very proper expression, mutual friend.”

14

In the last volume of his magnum opus of historical fiction Gustav Freytag describes “Boz” as, about the year 1846, filling with boundless enthusiasm the hearts of young men and maidens in a small Silesian country town.

15

The passage in Oliver Twist (chapter xxxvii.) which illustrates the maxim that “dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine,” may, or may not, be a reminiscence of Sartor Resartus, then (1838) first published in a volume.