Dickens

“‘And which of all them smoking monsters is the Ankworks boat, I wonder? Goodness me!’ cried Mrs. Gamp.

“‘What boat did you want?’ asked Ruth.

“‘The Ankworks package,’ Mrs. Gamp replied. ‘I will not deceive you, my sweet. Why should I?’

“‘That is the Antwerp packet in the middle,’ said Ruth.

“‘And I wish it was in Jonadge’s belly, I do!’ cried Mrs. Gamp, appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in this miraculous aspiration.”

A hardly inferior exertion of creative power was needed in order to fix in distinct forms the peculiarities of her diction, nay, to sustain the unique rhythm of her speech:

“‘I says to Mrs. Harris,’ Mrs. Gamp continued, ‘only t’ other day, the last Monday fortnight as ever dawned upon this Piljian’s Projiss of a mortal wale; I says to Mrs. Harris, when she says to me, “Years and our trials, Mrs. Gamp, sets marks upon us all”—“Say not the words, Mrs. Harris, if you and me is to be continual friends, for sech is not the case.”’”

Yet the reality of Mrs. Gamp has been acknowledged to be such that she has been the death of her sisterhood in a great part (to say the least) of our hospital wards and sick-rooms; and as for her oddities of tongue, they are, with the exception of her boldest figures, but the glorified type of all the utterances heard to this day from charwomen, laundresses, and single gentlemen’s house-keepers. Compared with her, even her friend and patron, Mr. Mould, and her admirer, Mr. Bailey, and in other parts of the book the low company at Todgers’s and the fine company at Mr. Tigg Montague’s sink into insignificance. The aged Chuffey is a grotesque study of a very different kind, of which the pathos never loses itself in exaggeration. As for Pecksniff, he is as far out of the range of grotesque as, except when moralising over the banisters at Todgers’s, he is out of that of genial characters. He is the richest comic type, while at the same time one of the truest, among the innumerable reproductions in English imaginative literature of our favourite national vice—hypocrisy. His friendliness is the very quintessence of falsehood: “Mr. Pinch,” he cries to poor Tom over the currant-wine and captain’s biscuits, “if you spare the bottle, we shall quarrel!” His understanding with his daughters is the very perfection of guile, for they confide in him, even when ignorant of his intentions, because of their certainty “that in all he does he has his purpose straight and full before him.” And he is a man who understands the times as well as the land in which he lives; for, as M. Taine has admirably pointed out, where Tartuffe would have been full of religious phrases, Pecksniff presents himself as a humanitarian philosopher. Comic art has never more successfully fulfilled its highest task after its truest fashion than in this picture of the rise and fall of a creature who never ceases to be laughable, and yet never ceases to be loathsome. Nothing is wanting in this wonderful book to attest the exuberance of its author’s genius. The kindly poetic spirit of the Christmas books breathes in sweet Ruth Pinch; and the tragic power of the closing chapters of Oliver Twist is recalled by the picture of Jonas before and after his deed of blood. I say nothing of merely descriptive passages, though in none of his previous stories had Dickens so completely mastered the secret of describing scenery and weather in their relation to his action or his characters.

Martin Chuzzlewit ran its course of twenty monthly numbers; but already a week or two before the appearance of the first of these, Dickens had bestowed upon the public, young and old, the earliest of his delightful Christmas Books. Among all his productions perhaps none connected him so closely, and as it were personally, with his readers. Nor could it well have been otherwise; since nowhere was he so directly intent upon promoting kindliness of feeling among men—more especially good-will, founded upon respect, towards the poor. Cheerfulness was, from his point of view, twin-sister to charity; and sulkiness, like selfishness, belonged, as an appropriate ort, to the dust-heap of “Tom Tiddler’s Ground.” What more fit than that he should mingle such sentiments as these with the holly and the mistletoe of the only English holiday in which remains a vestige of religious and poetic feeling? Beyond all doubt there is much that is tedious in the cultus of Father Christmas, and there was yet more in the days when the lower classes in England had not yet come to look upon a sufficiency of periodical holidays as part of their democratic inheritance. But that Dickens should constitute himself its chief minister and interpreter was nothing but fit. Already one of the Sketches had commended a Christmas-dinner at which a seat is not denied even to “poor Aunt Margaret;” and Mr. Pickwick had never been more himself than in the Christmas game of Blind-man’s-buff at Dingley Dell, in which “the poor relations caught the people who they thought would like it,” and, when the game flagged, “got caught themselves.” But he now sought to reach the heart of the subject; and the freshness of his fancy enabled him delightfully to vary his illustrations of a text of which it can do no man harm to be reminded in as well as out of season.

Dickens’s Christmas books were published in the Christmas seasons of 1843-1846, and of 1848. If the palm is to be granted to any one among them above its fellows, few readers would hesitate, I think, to declare themselves in favour of The Cricket on the Hearth, as tender and delicate a domestic idyl as any literature can boast. But the informing spirit proper of these productions, the desire to stir up a feeling of benevolence, more especially towards the poor and lowly, nowhere shows itself more conspicuously than in the earliest, A Christmas Carol in Prose, and nowhere more combatively than in the second in date, the “Goblin Story” of The Chimes. Of the former its author declared that he “wept and laughed and wept again” over it, “and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner in the composition; and thinking thereof he walked about the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles many a night, when all the sober folks had gone to bed.” Simple in its romantic design like one of Andersen’s little tales, the Christmas Carol has never lost its hold upon a public in whom it has called forth Christmas thoughts which do not all centre on “holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch;” and the Cratchit household, with Tiny Tim, who did not die, are living realities even to those who have not seen Mr. Toole—an actor after Dickens’s own heart—as the father of the family, shivering in his half-yard of comforter.

In The Chimes, composed in self-absorbed solitude at Genoa, he imagined that “he had written a tremendous book, and knocked the Carol out of the field.” Though the little work failed to make “the great uproar” he had confidently anticipated, its purpose was certainly unmistakable; but the effect of hard exaggerations such as Mr. Filer and Alderman Cute, and of a burlesque absurdity like Sir Joseph Bowley, was too dreary to be counteracted by the more pleasing passages of the tale. In his novel Hard Times Dickens afterwards reproduced some of the ideas, and repeated some of the artistic mistakes, to be found in The Chimes, though the design of the later work was necessarily of a more mixed kind. The Christmas book has the tone of a doctrinaire protest against doctrinaires, and, as Forster has pointed out, is manifestly written under the influence of Carlyle. But its main doctrine was one which Dickens lost no opportunity of proclaiming, and which here breaks forth in the form of an indignant appeal by Richard Fern, the outlaw in spite of himself: “Gentlefolks, be not hard upon the poor!” No feeling was more deeply rooted in Dickens’s heart than this; nor could he forbear expressing it by invective and satire as well as by humorous and pathetic pictures of his clients, among whom Trotty Veck too takes a representative place.

The Cricket on the Hearth, as a true work of art, is not troubled about its moral, easily though half-a-dozen plain morals might be drawn from it; a purer and more lightsome creation of the fancy has never been woven out of homespun materials. Of the same imaginative type, though not executed with a fineness so surpassing, is The Battle of Life, the treatment of a fancy in which Dickens appears to have taken great pleasure. Indeed, he declared that he was “thoroughly wretched at having to use the idea for so short a story.” As it stands, it is a pretty idyl of resignation, very poetical in tone as well as in conception, though here and there, notwithstanding the complaint just quoted, rather lengthy. It has been conjectured, with much probability, that the success which had attended dramatic versions of Dickens’s previous Christmas books caused “those admirable comedians, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley,” to be in his mind “when he drew the charming characters of Britain and Clemency Newcome.” At all events the pair serve as good old bits of English pottery to relieve the delicate Sèvres sentiment of Grace and Marion. In the last of Dickens’s Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, he returns once more to a machinery resembling those of the earliest. But the fancy on which the action turns is here more forced, and the truth which it illustrates is after all only a half-truth, unless taken as part of the greater truth, that the moral conditions of man’s life are more easily marred than mended. Once more the strength of the book lies in its humorous side. The picture of the good Milly’s humble protégés, the Tetterby family, is to remind us that happiness consists precisely in that which the poor and the rich may alike obtain, but which it is so difficult for the poor, amidst their shifts and shabbiness, to keep fresh and green. Even without the evil influence of an enchanted chemist, it is hard enough for the Mrs. Tetterbys of real life always to be ministering angels to their families; for the hand of every little Tetterby not occasionally to be against the other little Tetterbys, and even for a devoted Johnny’s temper never to rise against Moloch. All the more is that to be cherished in the poor which makes them love one another.

More than one of these Christmas books, both the humour and the sentiment of which are so peculiarly English, was written on foreign soil. Dickens’s general conceptions of life, not less than his literary individuality, had been formed before he became a traveller and sojourner in foreign lands. In Italy, as elsewhere, a man will, in a sense, find only what he takes there. At all events the changed life brought with it for Dickens, though not at once, a refreshment and a brief repose which invigorated him for some of the truest efforts of his genius. His resolution to spend some time on the Continent had not been taken rashly, although it was at least hastened by business disappointments. He seems at this time, as was virtually inevitable, to have seen a good deal of society in London, and more especially to have become a welcome guest of Lady Blessington and Count d’Orsay at Gore House. Moreover, his services were beginning to be occasionally claimed as a public speaker; and altogether he must have found more of his time than he wished slipping through his hands. Lastly, he very naturally desired to see what was to be seen, and to enjoy what was to be enjoyed, by one gifted with a sleepless observation and animated by a genuine love of nature and art. The letters, public and private, which he wrote from Italy, are not among the most interesting productions of his pen; even his humour seems now and then ill at ease in them, and his descriptive power narrow in its range. His eyes were occasionally veiled, as are those of most travellers in quest of “first impressions.” Thus I cannot but think his picture of Naples inadequate, and that of its population unjust. Again, although he may have told the truth in asserting that the Eternal City, at first sight, “looked like—I am half afraid to write the word—like London,” and although his general description of Rome has been pronounced correct by competent judgment, yet it is impossible to ignore in it the undertone of Bow Bells. On the other hand, not even in his newspaper letters can he be said to fall into affectation; his impressions are never given pretentiously, and are accordingly seldom altogether worthless; while his criticisms of works of art, when offered, are candid and shrewd, besides being invariably his own.

Thus, there was never anything truer in its way than the account which he gave to Maclise of his first impressions a few days after his arrival at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, where he found himself settled with his family in July, 1844. He re-christened his abode, the Villa Bagnerello (“it sounds romantic, but Signor Banderello is a butcher hard by”), “the Pink Jail.” Here, with abundance of space and time, and with a view from his writing-table of “the sea, the mountains, the washed-out villas, the vineyards, the blistering hot fort, with a sentry on the drawbridge standing in a bit of shadow no broader than his own musket, and the sky,” he began his villeggiatura, and resolving not to know, or to be known where it could be helped, looked round him at his leisure. This looking round very naturally took up some time; for the circuit of Dickens’s daily observation was unusually wide. Soon he was seeking winter-quarters in Genoa it self, and by October was established in the Palazzo Peschiere, situate on a height within the walls of the city, and overlooking the whole of it, with the harbour and the sea beyond. “There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier residence.” Even here, however, among fountains and frescoes, it was some time before he could set steadily to work at his Christmas story. At last the bells of Genoa chimed a title for it into his restless ears; and, though longing with a nostalgy that was specially strong upon him at periods of mental excitement for his nightly walks in the London streets, he settled down to his task. I have already described the spirit in which he executed it. No sooner was the writing done than the other half of his double artist-nature was seized with another craving. The rage which possesses authors to read their writings aloud to sympathizing ears, if such can be found, is a well-worn theme of satire; but in Dickens the actor was almost as strong as the author, and he could not withstand the desire to interpret in person what he had written, and to watch its effect with his own eyes and ears. In the first days of November, therefore, he set off from Genoa, and made his way home by Bologna, Venice, Milan, and the Simplon Pass. Of this journey his Pictures from Italy contains the record, including a chapter about Venice, pitched in an unusually poetic key. But not all the memories of all the Doges could have stayed the execution of his set purpose. On the 30th of November he reached London, and on the 2d of December he was reading the Chimes, from the proofs, to the group of friends immortalised in Maclise’s inimitable sketch. Three days afterwards the reading was repeated to a slightly different audience; and, indeed, it would seem, from an enthusiastic postscript to a letter addressed to his wife, that he had read at least part of the book to Macready on the night before that of the first conclave. The distance was no doubt wide between the intimacy of these friendly readings and the stormy seas of public audiences; but, however unconsciously, the first step had been taken. It may be worth noticing, in connexion with this, that the scheme of a private dramatic performance, which was to occupy much of Dickens’s “leisure” in the year following, was proposed for the first time on the occasion of the first reading of the Chimes. Before Christmas he was back again in his “Italian bowers.” If the strain of his effort in writing the Chimes had been severe, the holiday which followed was long. In the later winter and early spring of 1845 he and the ladies of his family saw Rome and Naples, and in June their Italian life came to an end, and they were in London before the close of the month. Projects of work remained in abeyance until the absorbing fancy of a private play had been realised with an earnestness such as only Dickens could carry into his amusements, and into this particular amusement above all others. The play was Every Man in his Humour; the theatre, the little house in Dean Street, of whose chequered fortunes no theatrical history has succeeded in exhausting the memories; and the manager was, of course, “Bobadil,” as Dickens now took to signing himself. His joking remark to Macready, that he “thought of changing his present mode of life, and was open to an engagement,” was after all not so very wide of the mark. According to the inevitable rule in such things, he and his friends—among whom Mark Lemon, Douglas Jerrold, and Forster were conspicuous—were “induced” to repeat their performance at a larger house for a public charity, and later in the year they played The Elder Brother for Miss Fanny Kelly’s benefit. Leigh Hunt, whose opinion, however, could hardly fail to be influenced by the circumstances under which Ben Jonson’s comedy was afterwards performed by the amateurs, and who was no longer the youthful Draco of the News, afterwards spoke very highly of Dickens’s Bobadil. It had “a spirit in it of intellectual apprehension beyond anything the existing stage has shown.” His acting in the farce which followed Leigh Hunt thought “throughout admirable; quite rich and filled up.”

Christmas, 1845, had passed, and The Cricket on the Hearth had graced the festival, when an altogether new chapter in Dickens’s life seemed about to open for him. The experience through which he now passed was one on which his biographer, for reasons easy to guess, has touched very slightly, while his Letters throw no additional light on it at all. Most people, I imagine, would decline to pronounce upon the qualifications requisite in an editor of a great political journal. Yet, literary power of a kind which acts upon the multitude rapidly and powerfully, habits of order so confirmed as to have almost become second nature, and an interest in the affairs of the nation fed by an ardent enthusiasm for its welfare—these would seem to go some way towards making up the list. Of all these qualifications Dickens at various times gave proof, and they sufficed in later years to make him the successful conductor of a weekly journal which aimed at the enlightenment hardly less than at the entertainment of no inconsiderable portion of the British public. But, in the first place, political journalism proper is a craft of which very few men have been known to become masters by intuition, and Dickens had as yet had no real experience of it. His zealous efforts as a reporter can hardly be taken into account here. He had for a short time edited a miscellany of amusement, and had failed to carry beyond a beginning the not very carefully considered scheme of another. Recently, he had resumed the old notion of Master Humphrey’s Clock in a different shape; but nothing had come of his projected cheap weekly paper for the present, while its title, “The Cricket,” was reserved for a different use. Since his reporting days he had, however, now and then appeared among the lighter combatants of political literature. In 1841 he had thrown a few squibs in the Examiner at Sir Robert Peel and the Tories; and from about the same date he had, besides occasionally contributing to the literary and theatrical columns of the same weekly journal, now and then discussed in it subjects of educational or other general interest.6 Finally, it is stated by Forster that in 1844, when the greatest political struggle of the last generation was approaching its climax, Dickens contributed some articles to the Morning Chronicle which attracted attention and led to negotiations with the editor that arrived at no positive result. If these contributions treated any political questions whatever, they were, with the exception of the few Examiner papers, and of the letters to the Daily News to be mentioned in this chapter, the only articles of this kind which, to my knowledge, he ever wrote.

For, from first to last, whether in the days when Oliver Twist suffered under the maladministration of the Poor-law, or in those when Arthur Clennam failed to make an impression upon the Circumlocution Office, politics were with Dickens a sentiment rather than a study or a pursuit. With his habits of application and method, it might have taken but a very short time for him to train himself as a politician; but this short time never actually occurred. There is, however, no reason to suppose that when, in 1841, a feeler was put out by some more or less influential persons at Reading, with regard to his willingness to be nominated for the representation of that borough, he had any reason for declining the proposal besides that which he stated in his replies. He could not afford the requisite expense; and he was determined not to forfeit his independence through accepting Government—by which I hope he means Whig party—aid for meeting the cost of the contest. Still, in 1845, though slack of faith in the “people who govern us,” he had not yet become the irreclaimable political sceptic of later days; and without being in any way bound to the Whigs, he had that general confidence in Lord John Russell which was all they could expect from their irregular followers. As yet, however, he had shown no sign of any special aptitude or inclination for political work, though if he addressed himself to questions affecting the health and happiness of the humbler classes, he was certain to bring to them the enthusiasm of a genuine sympathy. And a question of this kind was uppermost in Englishmen’s minds in this year 1845, when at last the time was drawing near for the complete abolition of the tax upon the staple article of the poor man’s daily food.

The establishment of a new London morning paper, on the scale to which those already in existence had attained, was a serious matter in itself; but it seems to have been undertaken in no spirit of diffidence by the projectors and first proprietors of the Daily News. With the early history of the experiment I cannot here concern myself; it is, however, an open secret that the rate of expenditure of the new journal was at first on a most liberal, not to say lavish, scale, and that the losses of the proprietors were for many years very large indeed. Established on those principles of Radicalism which, on the whole, it has in both good and evil times consistently maintained, the Daily News was to rise superior to the opportunism, if not to the advertisements, of the Times, and to outstrip the cautious steps of the Whig Morning Chronicle. Special attention was to be given to those industrial enterprises with which the world teemed in that speculative age, and no doubt also to those social questions affecting the welfare and elevation of the masses and the relations between employers and employed, which were attracting more and more of the public attention. But in the first instance the actual political situation would oblige the new journal to direct the greater part of its energies to one particular question, which had, in truth, already been threshed out by the organs of public opinion, and as to which the time for action had at last arrived. No Liberal journal projected in 1845, and started early in 1846, could fail to concentrate its activity for a time upon the question of the Corn-laws, to which the session of 1846 was to give the death-blow.

It is curious enough, on opening the first number of the Daily News, dated January 21, 1846, to find one’s self transplanted into the midst of one of the most memorable episodes of our more recent political history. The very advertisements of subscriptions to the Anti-Corn-law League, with the good old Manchester names figuring conspicuously among them, have a historic interest; and the report of a disputation on free-trade at Norwich, in which all the hits are made by Mr. Cobden, another report of a great London meeting on the same subject, and some verses concerning the people’s want of its bread, probably written by Mr. Charles Mackay, occupy an entire page of the paper. Railway news and accounts of railway meetings fill about the same space; while the foreign news is extremely meagre. There remain the leading articles, four in number—of which three are on the burning question of the day—and the first of a series of Travelling Letters Written on the Road, by Charles Dickens (the Avignon chapter in the Pictures from Italy.)7 The hand of the editor is traceable only in this feuilleton and in the opening article of the new paper. On internal evidence I conclude that this article, which has little to distinguish it from similar manifestoes, unless it be a moderation of tone that would not have suited Captain Shandon, was not written by Dickens alone or unassisted. But his hand is traceable in the concluding paragraphs, which contain the following wordy but spirited assertion of a cause that Dickens lost no opportunity of advocating: