Dickens

In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, like the Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with one or more of his familiars, he spared no labour and thought no toil too great. At times, of course, he, like all periodical writers who cannot be merry every Wednesday or caustic every Saturday, felt the pressure of the screw. “As to two comic articles,” he exclaims on one occasion, “or two any sort of articles, out of me, that’s the intensest extreme of no-goism.” But, as a rule, no great writer ever ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His “Uncommercial Travels,” as he at a later date happily christened them, familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects of London his long walks had still left unexplored; and he was as conscientious in hunting up the details of a complicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an obscure pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and “commissioners” assisted him in his labours; but he was no roi fainéant on the editorial sofa which he so complacently describes. Whether he was taking A Walk in a Workhouse, or knocking at the door of another with the supernumerary waifs in Whitechapel, or On (night) Duty with Inspector Field among the worst of the London slums, he was always ready to see with his own eyes; after which the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more properly journalistic, but he is most delightful when he takes his ease in his English or his French Watering-place, or carries his readers with him on A Flight to Paris, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless succession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of all is he when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins—this, however, not until the autumn of 1857—he starts on The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, the earlier chapters of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget himself to enforce the claim of his journal to strengthen the imaginary side of literature. In an assumed character he allows a veteran poet to carry him By Rail to Parnassus, and even good-humouredly banters an old friend, George Cruikshank, for having committed Frauds on the Fairies by re-editing legendary lore with the view of inculcating the principle of total abstinence.

Such, then, were some of the channels in which the intense mental and physical energy of Dickens found a congenial outlet in these busy years. Yet in the very midst of this multifarious activity the mysterious and controlling power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already said, holds, and will always continue to hold, a place of its own among its works. “Of all my books,” he declares, “I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child—and his name is David Copperfield!” He parted from the story with a pang, and when in after life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to master the emotions which it recalled; perhaps even he hardly knew what the effort of its production had cost him.

The first number of David Copperfield was published in May, 1849—the last in November, 1850. To judge from the difficulty which Dickens found in choosing a title for his story—of which difficulty plentiful evidence remains in MS. at South Kensington—he must have been fain to delay longer even than usual on the threshold. In the end the name of the hero evolved itself out of a series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to Copperboy, Copperstone—“Copperfull” being reserved as a lectio varians for Mrs. Crupp—and Copperfield. Then at last the pen could fall seriously to work, and, proceeding slowly at first—for the first page of the MS. contains a great number of alterations—dip itself now into black, now into blue ink, and in a small writing, already contrasting with the bolder hand of earlier days, produce page upon page of an incomparable book. No doubt what so irresistibly attracted Dickens to David Copperfield, and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in the story. Until the publication of Forster’s Life no reader of Copperfield could be aware of the pang it must have cost Dickens to lay bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of Dickens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully playful humor, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a strange coincidence, was passing tranquilly away out of life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyl of the loves of Doady and Dora—with Jip, as Dora’s father might have said, intervening—there were, besides the reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man’s unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed disappointment—the sense that “there was always something wanting.” But in order to be affected by a personal or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very existence. Amelia would gain little by illustrative notes concerning the experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking the existence of an autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be there. But it had far better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused this particular stream of metal with the mass filling his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with David Copperfield, which of all Dickens’s fictions is on the whole the most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in the author’s breast are, as effects, harmonised with local associations old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by Dickens for the first time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his materials.

As to the construction of David Copperfield, however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy’s old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The boy’s flight from London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity, as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. Thus, there is real art in the way in which the scene of Barkis’s death—written with admirable moderation—prepares for the “greater loss” at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire treatment of his hero’s double love story Dickens has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in Esmond and in Adam Bede. The best constructed part of David Copperfield is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of which—except in its very beginnings—it forms no integral part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of David Copperfield might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole literature of modern fiction.

Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpass the history of the picnic—where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an imaginary rival, “Red Whisker,” made the salad—how could they eat it?—and “voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, being an ingenious beast, in the hollow trunk of a tree.” Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative of the young house-keeping David’s real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyl almost imperceptibly passes into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards the fictitious creatures of his own imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here irresistible.

The inventive power of Dickens in none of his other books indulged itself so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities Dickens had copied from a living original; but receiving a remonstrance from the latter, he good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character, and thereby spoiled what there was in it—not much, in my opinion—to spoil. Mr. Dick belongs to a species of eccentric personages—mad people, in a word—for which Dickens as a writer had a curious liking; but though there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. David’s Aunt is a figure which none but a true humourist such as Sterne or Dickens could have drawn, and she must have sprung from the author’s brain armed cap-à-pie as she appeared in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still pointed out where the “one great outrage of her life” was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the “salt” division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr. Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and a merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine character was never conceived than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and her mind made up not to desert Mr. Micawber. Delightful too in his way, though of a class more common in Dickens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray’s Inn, with the dearest girl in the world and her five sisters, including the beauty, on a visit, may have been suggested by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days. In contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, villanous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without being overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that Dickens’s satirical power most diversely displayed itself; and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, the valet Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself could not have surpassed.

Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mood of manhood pervading it from first to last. The reality of David Copperfield is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful art. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author put into it his life’s blood.

CHAPTER V

CHANGES[1852-1858.]

I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles Dickens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man’s house is truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little before, come to such a pass that he wrote to his faithful friend: “I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.” Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him—the boy whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which no eccentric humours and fantastic sobriquets could conceal. In May, 1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself.

In the earlier of these years Dickens’s movements were still very much of the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his working hours in this and the following year—the spring of which was partly spent at Brighton—he was engaged upon his new story, Bleak House, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853. “To let you into a secret,” he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary Boyle, from Dover, “I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as Copperfield. But I foresee, I think, some very good things in Bleak House.” There is no reason to believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its predecessor. According to the author’s own testimony it “took extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months” of its issue, and “retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old Copperfield by a round ten thousand or more.” To this day the book has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On the other hand, Bleak House was probably the first of Dickens’s works which furnished a suitable text to a class of censors whose precious balms have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of amusing being graciously conceded to the “man of genius,” his book was charged with “absolute want of construction,” and with being a heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a number of “odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit.” Of the characters themselves it was asserted that, though in the main excessively funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised, it was regretted that Dickens should never have succeeded in drawing “a man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy.” He belonged, unfortunately, “in literature to the same class as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the illustrator in range and power.” In other words, he was essentially a caricaturist.

As applied to Bleak House, with which I am at present alone concerned, this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to Bleak House may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as compared, not with Pickwick and Nickleby, but with its immediate predecessor, David Copperfield, this novel exhibits a decided advance in that respect. In truth, Dickens in Bleak House for the first time emancipated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less consciously adopted—the novel of adventure, of which the person of the hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element. It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon him, and that the younger writer, whom Dickens was about this time praising for his unlikeness to the “conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes,” was already teaching something to, as well as learning something from, the elder. It may also be that the criticism which as editor of Household Words Dickens was now in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of others, unconsciously affected his own methods and processes. Certain it is that from this point of view Bleak House may be said to begin a new series among his works of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of those concerned in it are not a disconnected background from which the mystery of Lady Dedlock’s secret stands forth in relief; but the two main parts of the story are skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot. Nor is the success of the general action materially affected by the circumstance that the tone of Esther Summerson’s diary is not altogether true. At the same time there is indisputably some unevenness in the construction of Bleak House. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in some of its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the reader is strongly revived when that popular favourite, Mr. Inspector Bucket, appears on the scene, and when, more especially in the admirably vivid narrative of Esther’s journey with the detective, the nearness of the catastrophe exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery, moreover—such as the Smallweed family’s part in the plot—is tiresome; and particular incidents are intolerably horrible or absurd—such as on the one hand the spontaneous combustion (which is proved possible by the analogy of historical facts!), and on the other the intrusion of the oil-grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s grief. But in general the parts of the narrative are well knit together; and there is a subtle skill in the way in which the two main parts of the story converge towards their common close.

The idea of making an impersonal object like a great Chancery suit the centre round which a large and manifold group of characters revolves, seems to savour of a drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme suggested itself to Dickens with a very real purpose, and on the basis of facts which he might well think warranted him in his treatment of it; for, true artist though he was, the thought of exposing some national defect, of helping to bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his mind over any mere literary conception. Primâ facie, at least, and with all due deference to Chancery judges and eminent silk gowns like Mr. Blowers, the length of Chancery suits was a real public grievance, as well as a frequent private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the idea of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce as diversely affecting those who lived by it, those who rebelled against it, those who died of it, was, in its way, of unique force; and while Dickens never brought to any other of his subjects so useful a knowledge of its external details—in times gone by he had served a “Kenge and Carboys” of his own—hardly any one of those subjects suggested so wide a variety of aspects for characteristic treatment.

For never before had his versatility in drawing character filled his canvas with so multitudinous and so various a host of personages. The legal profession, with its servitors and hangers-on of every degree, occupies the centre of the picture. In this group no figure is more deserving of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a four-wheeled affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy manifests itself. We learn very little about him, and probably care less; but he interests us precisely as we should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about whom we might know and care equally little, were we to find him alone in the twilight, drinking his ancient port in his frescoed chamber in those fields where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr. Forster, by-the-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the piety of American research has since put on record, that Mr. Tulkinghorn’s house was a picture of the biographer’s own residence.) The portrait of Mr. Vholes, who supports an unassailable but unenviable professional reputation for the sake of “the three dear girls at home,” and a father whom he has to support “in the Vale of Taunton,” is less attractive; but nothing could be more in its place in the story than the clammy tenacity of this legal ghoul and his “dead glove.” Lower down in the great system of the law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very quintessence of cockney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour of legal sharpness without which the rankness of the mixture would be incomplete. To the legal group Miss Flite, whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the Temple as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, may likewise be said to belong. She is quite legitimately introduced into the story—which cannot be said of all Dickens’s madmen—because her madness associates itself with its main theme.

Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of an eccentric by or under plot in this story, in which the family of the Jellybys and the august Mr. Turveydrop are, actively, or by passive endurance, engaged. The philanthropic section of le monde où l’on s’ennuie has never been satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bitterly. Perhaps at the time of the publication of Bleak House the activity of our Mrs. Jellybys took a wider and more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for we read at the end of Esther’s diary how Mrs. Jellyby “has been disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody—who survived the climate—for rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one.” But Mrs. Jellyby’s interference in the affairs of other people is after all hurtful only because in busying herself with theirs she forgets her own. The truly offensive benefactress of her fellow-creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and tract in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. Among her victims are her own children, including Alfred, aged five, who has been induced to take an oath “never to use tobacco in any form.”