Dickens

“We seek, so far as in us lies, to elevate the character of the Public Press in England. We believe it would attain a much higher position, and that those who wield its powers would be infinitely more respected as a class, and an important one, if it were purged of a disposition to sordid attacks upon itself, which only prevails in England and America. We discern nothing in the editorial plural that justifies a gentleman, or body of gentlemen, in discarding a gentleman’s forbearance and responsibility, and venting ungenerous spleen against a rival, by a perversion of a great power—a power, however, which is only great so long as it is good and honest. The stamp on newspapers is not like the stamp on universal medicine-bottles, which licenses anything, however false and monstrous; and we are sure this misuse of it, in any notorious case, not only offends and repels right-minded men in that particular instance, but naturally, though unjustly, involves the whole Press, as a pursuit or profession, in the feeling so awakened, and places the character of all who are associated with it at a great disadvantage.

“Entering on this adventure of a new daily journal in a spirit of honourable competition and hope of public usefulness, we seek, in our new station, at once to preserve our own self-respect, and to be respected, for ourselves and for it, by our readers. Therefore, we beg them to receive, in this our first number, the assurance that no recognition or interchange of trade abuse, by us, shall be the destruction of either sentiment; and that we intend proceeding on our way, and theirs, without stooping to any such flowers by the roadside.”

I am unable to say how many days it was after the appearance of this first number that Dickens, or the proprietors of the journal, or, as seems most likely, both sides simultaneously, began to consider the expediency of ending the connexion between them. He was “revolving plans for quitting the paper” on January 30, and resigned his editorship on February 9 following. In the interval, with the exception of two or three more of the Travelling Letters, very few signs of his hand appear in the journal. The number of January 24, however, contains an editorial contribution, in the shape of “a new song, but an old story,” concerning The British Lion, his accomplishment of eating Corn-law Leagues, his principal keeper, Wan Humbug, and so forth. This it would be cruel to unearth. A more important indication of a line of writing that his example may have helped to domesticate in the Daily News appears in the number of February 4, which contains a long letter, with his signature, urging the claims of Ragged Schools, and giving a graphic account of his visit to one in Saffron Hill. After he had placed his resignation in the hands of the proprietors, and was merely holding on at his post till the time of his actual withdrawal, he was naturally not anxious to increase the number of his contributions. The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers—which appeared on February 14—is, of course, an echo of the popular cry of the day; but the subtler pathos of Dickens never found its way into his verse. The most important, and so far as I know, the last, of his contributions to the Daily News, consisted of a series of three letters (March 9, 13, and 16) on capital punishment. It was a question which much occupied him at various times of his life, and on which it cannot be shown that he really changed his opinions. The letters in the Daily News, based in part on the arguments of one of the ablest men of his day, the “unlucky” Mr. Wakefield, are an interesting contribution to the subject; and the first of them, with its Hogarthian sketch of the temptation and fall of Thomas Hocker, Sunday-school teacher and murderer, would be worth reprinting as an example of Dickens’s masterly use of the argument ex concreto.

The few traditions which linger in the Daily News office concerning Dickens as editor of the paper, agree with the conjecture that his labours on its behalf were limited, or very nearly so, to the few pieces enumerated above. Of course there must have been some inevitable business; but of this much may have been taken off his hands by his sub-editor, Mr. W. H. Wills, who afterwards became his alter ego at the office of his own weekly journal and his intimate personal friend. In the days of the first infancy of the Daily News, Mr. Britton, the present publisher of that journal, was attached to the editor as his personal office attendant; and he remembers very vividly what little there can have been to remember about Dickens’s performance of his functions. His habit, following a famous precedent, was to make up for coming late—usually about half-past ten p.m.—by going away early—usually not long after midnight. There were frequently sounds of merriment, if not of modest revelry, audible from the little room at the office in Lombard Street, where the editor sat in conclave with Douglas Jerrold and one or two other intimates. Mr. Britton is not sure that the work did not sometimes begin after the editor had left; but at all events he cannot recollect that Dickens ever wrote anything at the office—that he ever, for instance, wrote about a debate that had taken place in Parliament on the same night. And he sums up his reminiscences by declaring his conviction that Dickens was “not a newspaper man, at least not when in ‘the chair.’” And so Dickens seems on this occasion to have concluded; for when, not long after quitting the paper, he republished with additions the Travelling Letters which during his conduct of it had been its principal ornaments, he spoke of “a brief mistake he had made, not long ago, in disturbing the old relations between himself and his readers, and departing for a moment from his old pursuits.” He had been virtually out of “the chair” almost as soon as he had taken it. His successor, but only for a few months, was his friend Forster.

Never has captive released made a more eager or a better use of his recovered freedom. Before the summer had fairly set in Dickens had let his house, and was travelling with his family up the Rhine towards Switzerland. This was, I think, Dickens’s only passage through Germany, which in language and literature remained a terra incognita to him, while in various ways so well known to his friendly rivals, Lord Lytton and Thackeray. He was on the track of poor Thomas Hood’s old journeyings, whose facetious recollections of Rhineland he had some years before reviewed in a spirit of admiration rather for the author than for the book, funny as it is. His point of destination was Lausanne, where he had resolved to establish his household for the summer, and where by the middle of June they were most agreeably settled in a little villa or cottage which did not belie its name of Rosemont, and from which they looked upon the lake and the mighty Alpine chain beyond. If Rome had reminded Dickens of London, the green woods near Lausanne recalled to him his Kentish glades; but he had the fullest sense and the truest enjoyment of the grandeurs of Alpine scenery, and lost no opportunity of becoming acquainted with them. Thus his letters contain an admirable description (not untinged with satire) of a trip to the Great St. Bernard and its convent, many years afterwards reproduced in one of the few enjoyable chapters of the Second Part of Little Dorrit. More interesting, however, because more characteristic, is the freshness and candour with which in Switzerland, where by most English visitors the native inhabitants are “taken for granted,” he set himself to observe, and, so far as he could, to appreciate, the people among whom he was a temporary resident. His solutions of some of the political difficulties, which were mostly connected with religious differences, at that time rife in Switzerland, are palpably one-sided. But the generosity of spirit which reveals itself in his kindly recognition of the fine qualities of the people around him is akin to what was best and noblest in Dickens.

He had, at the same time, been peculiarly fortunate in finding at Lausanne a circle of pleasant acquaintances, to whom he dedicated the Christmas book which he wrote among the roses and the foliage of his lake-side cottage. Of course The Battle of Life was read aloud by its author to so kindly an audience. The day of parting, however, soon came; on the 16th of November paterfamilias had his “several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of children,” in travelling order, and soon had safely stowed them away at Paris “in the most preposterous house in the world. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes, does not, exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes; the dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The dining-room”—which in another letter he describes as “mere midsummer madness”—“is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in among the branches of the trees. There is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room, but it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery.” Here, with the exception of two brief visits to England, paid before his final departure, he spent three months, familiarising himself for the first time of his life with the second of his “Two Cities.”

Dickens came to know the French language well enough to use it with ease, if not with elegance; and he lost no opportunity, it need hardly be said, of resorting to the best of schools for the purpose. Macready, previously addressed from “Altorf,” had made him acquainted with Regnier, of the Théâtre Français, who in his turn had introduced him to the greenroom of the house of Molière. Other theatres were diligently visited by him and Forster, when the latter arrived on a visit; and celebrities were polite and hospitable to their distinguished English confrère. With these, however, Dickens was not cosmopolitan enough to consort except in passing; the love of literary society because it is literary society was at no time one of his predilections or foibles. The streets of Paris were to him more than its salons, more even than its theatres. They are so to a larger number of Englishmen than that which cares to confess it, but Dickens would have been the last to disown the impeachment. They were the proper sphere for his powers of humorous observation, as he afterwards showed in more than one descriptive paper as true to life as any of his London Sketches. And, moreover, he needed the streets for the work which he had in hand. Dombey and Son had been begun at Rosemont, and the first of its twenty monthly numbers had been published in October, 1846. No reader of the book is likely to forget how, after writing the chapter which relates the death of little Paul, Dickens during the greater part of the night wandered restlessly with a heavy heart about the Paris streets. Sooner, however, than he had intended, his residence abroad had to come to a close; and early in 1847 he and his family were again in London.

Dombey and Son has, perhaps, been more criticised than any other amongst the stories of its author; and yet it certainly is not the one which has been least admired, or least loved. Dickens himself, in the brief preface which he afterwards prefixed to the story, assumed a half-defiant air which sits ill upon the most successful author, but which occasionally he was tempted to assume. Before condescending to defend the character of Mr. Dombey as in accordance with both probability and experience, he “made so bold as to believe that the faculty (or the habit) of correctly observing the characters of men is a rare one.” Yet, though the drawing of this character is only one of the points which have been objected against the story, not only did the book at the time of publication far surpass its predecessor in popularity, but it has, I believe, always preserved to itself a special congregation of enthusiastic admirers. Manifestly, this novel is one of its author’s most ambitious endeavours. In it, more distinctly even than in Chuzzlewit, he has chosen for his theme one of the chief vices of human nature, and has striven to show what pride cannot achieve, what it cannot conquer, what it cannot withstand. This central idea gives to the story, throughout a most varied succession of scenes, a unity of action to be found in few of Dickens’s earlier works. On the other hand, Dombey and Son shares with these earlier productions, and with its successor, David Copperfield, the freshness of invention and spontaneous flow of both humour and pathos which at times are wanting in the more powerfully conceived and more carefully constructed romances of Dickens’s later years. If there be any force at all in the common remark that the most interesting part of the book ends together with the life of little Paul, the censure falls upon the whole design of the author. Little Paul, in something besides the ordinary meaning of the words, was born to die; and though, like the writer, most readers may have dreaded the hour which was to put an end to that frail life, yet in this case there could be no question—such as was possible in the story of Little Nell—of any other issue. Indeed, deep as is the pathos of the closing scene, its beauty is even surpassed by those which precede it. In death itself there is release for a child as for a man, and for those sitting by the pillow of the patient; but it is the gradual approach of death which seems hardest of all for the watchers to bear; it is the sinking of hope which seems even sadder than its extinction. What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a palpitating heart, that was so visibly expressed in him, so plainly seen by so many people? Every heart is softened and every eye dimmed as the innocent child passes on his way to his grave. The hand of God’s angel is on him; he is no longer altogether of this world. The imagination which could picture and present this mysterious haze of feeling, through which the narrative moves, half like a reality, half like a dream, is that of a true poet, and of a great one.

What even the loss of his son could not effect in Mr. Dombey is to be accomplished in the progress of the story by a yet stronger agency than sorrow. His pride is to be humbled to the dust, where he is to be sought and raised up by the love of his despised and ill-used daughter. Upon the relations between this pair, accordingly, it was necessary for the author to expend the greatest care, and upon the treatment of those relations the criticism to which the character of Mr. Dombey has been so largely subjected must substantially turn. The unfavourable judgments passed upon it have, in my opinion, not been altogether unjust. The problem obviously was to show how the father’s cold indifference towards the daughter gradually becomes jealousy, as he finds that upon her is concentrated, first, the love of his innocent little son, and then that of his haughty second wife; and how hereupon this jealousy deepens into hate. But, unless we are to suppose that Mr. Dombey hated his daughter from the first, the disfavour shown by him on her account to young Walter Gay remains without adequate explanation. His dislike of Florence is not manifestly founded upon his jealousy of what Mrs. Chick calls her brother’s “infatuation” for her; and the main motives at work in the unhappy man are either not very skilfully kept asunder, or not very intelligibly intermixed. Nor are the later stages of the relations between father and daughter altogether satisfactorily conceived. The momentary yielding of Mr. Dombey, after his “coming home” with his new wife, is natural and touching; but his threat to visit his daughter with the consequences of her step-mother’s conduct is sheer brutality. The passage in which Mr. Dombey’s ultimatum to Mrs. Dombey is conveyed by him in her presence through a third person is so artificial as to fall not very far short of absurdity. The closing scene which leads to the flight of Florence is undeniably powerful; but it is the development of the relations between the pair in which the art of the author is in my judgment occasionally at fault.

As to the general effect of the latter part of the story—or rather of its main plot—which again has been condemned as melodramatic and unnatural, a distinction should be drawn between its incidents and its characters. Neither Edith Dombey nor Mr. Carker is a character of real life. The pride of the former comes very near to bad breeding, and her lapses into sentiment seem artificial lapses. How differently Thackeray would have managed the “high words” between her and her frivolous mother! how differently, for that matter, he has managed a not altogether dissimilar scene in the Newcomes between Ethel Newcome and old Lady Kew! As for Mr. Carker, with his white teeth and glistening gums, who calls his unhappy brother “Spaniel,” and contemplates a life of sensual ease in Sicily, he has the semi-reality of the stage. Possibly the French stage had helped to suggest the scène de la pièce between the fugitives at Dijon—an effective situation, but one which many a novelist might have worked out not less skilfully than Dickens. His own master-hand, however, re-asserts itself in the wondrously powerful narrative of Carker’s flight and death. Here again he excites terror—as in the same book he had evoked pity—by foreshadowing, without prematurely revealing, the end. We know what the morning is to bring which rises in awful tranquillity over the victim of his own sins; and, as in Turner’s wild but powerful picture, the engine made by the hand of man for peaceful purposes seems a living agent of wrath.8

No other of Dickens’s books is more abundantly stocked than this with genuinely comic characters; but nearly all of them, in accordance with the pathetic tone which is struck at the outset, and which never dies out till the story has run its course, are in a more subdued strain of humour. Lord Jeffrey was, I think, warranted in his astonishment that Dickens should devote so much pains to characters like Mrs. Chick and Miss Tox. Probably the habit remained with him from his earliest times of authorship, when he had not always distinguished very accurately between the humorous and the bizarre. But Polly and the Toodles household, Mrs. Pipchin and her “select infantine boarding-house,” and the whole of Doctor Blimber’s establishment, from the Doctor himself down to Mr. Toots, and up again, in the scale of intellect, to Mr. Feeder, B.A., are among the most admirable of all the great humourist’s creations. Against this ample provision for her poor little brother’s nursing and training Florence has to set but her one Susan Nipper; but she is a host in herself, an absolutely original character among the thousands of soubrettes that are known to comedy and fiction, and one of the best tonic mixtures ever composed out of much humour and not a few grains of pathos. Her tartness has a cooling flavour of its own; but it is the Mrs. Pipchinses only upon whom she acts, as their type acted upon her, “like early gooseberries.” Of course she has a favourite figure of speech belonging to herself, which rhetoricians would probably class among the figures “working by surplusage:”

“‘Your Toxes and your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs. Richards, but that’s no reason why I need offer ’em the whole set.’”

Dickens was to fall very largely into this habit of “labelling” his characters, as it has been called, by particular tricks or terms of speech; and there is a certain excess in this direction already in Dombey and Son, where not only Miss Nipper and Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots, but Major Bagstock too and Cousin Feenix, are thus furnished forth. But the invention is still so fresh and the play of humour so varied, that this mannerism cannot be said as yet seriously to disturb them. A romantic charm of a peculiar kind clings to honest Captain Cuttle and the quaint home over which he mounts guard during the absence of its owner. The nautical colouring and concomitant fun apart—for only Smollett could have drawn Jack Bunsby’s fellow, though the character in his hands would have been differently accentuated—Dickens has never approached more nearly to the manner of Sir Walter Scott than in this singularly attractive part of his book. Elsewhere the story passes into that sphere of society in describing which Dickens was, as a novelist, rarely very successful. But though Edith is cold and unreal, there is, it cannot be denied, human nature in the pigments and figments of her hideous old mother; and, to outward appearance at all events, the counterparts of her apoplectic admirer, Major Bagstock, still pace those pavements and promenades which it suits them to frequent. Cousin Feenix is likewise very far from impossible, and is besides extremely delightful—and a good fellow too at bottom, so that the sting of the satire is here taken away. On the other hand, the meeting between the sacs et parchemins at Mr. Dombey’s house is quite out of focus.

The book has other heights and depths, and pleasant and unpleasant parts and passages. But enough has been said to recall the exuberant creative force, and the marvellous strength of pathos and humour which Dombey and Son proves that Dickens, now near the very height of his powers as a writer of fiction, possessed. In one of his public readings many years afterwards, when he was reciting the adventures of Little Dombey, he narrates that “a very good fellow,” whom he noticed in the stalls, could not refrain from wiping the tears out of his eyes as often as he thought that Toots was coming on. And just as Toots had become a reality to this good fellow, so Toots and Toots’s little friend, and divers other personages in this story, have become realities to half the world that reads the English tongue, and to many besides. What higher praise could be given to this wonderful book? Of all the works of its author none has more powerfully and more permanently taken hold of the imagination of its readers. Though he conjured up only pictures familiar to us from the aspect of our own streets and our own homes, he too wielded a wizard’s wand.

After the success of Dombey it might have seemed that nothing further was wanting to crown the prosperity of Dickens’s literary career. While the publication of this story was in progress he had concluded arrangements for the issue of his collected writings, in a cheap edition, which began in the year 1847, and which he dedicated “to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false, they will very soon die.” He who could thus proudly appeal to posterity was already, beyond all dispute, the people’s chosen favourite among its men of letters. That position he was not to lose so long as he lived; but even at this time the height had not been reached to which (in the almost unanimous judgment of those who love his writings) he was in his next work to attain.

CHAPTER IV

“DAVID COPPERFIELD.”[1847-1851.]

The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close of 1851, were most assuredly the season in which the genius of Dickens produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon Dombey and Son; towards its end he was already engaged upon the earliest portions of Bleak House. And it was during the interval that he produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions of our English school—David Copperfield. To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly periodical, Household Words, began to run its course. There was much play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised:

“‘Play!’ said Thomas Idle. ‘Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion’s belt, and he calls it “Play.” Play!’ exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air; ‘you can’t play. You don’t know what it is. You make work of everything!’”