Dickens

The particular vein of feeling that led Dickens to the delineation of these satirical figures was one which never ran dry with him, and which suggested some forcible-feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it a vein of feeling only; for he could hardly have argued in cold blood that the efforts which he ridicules were not misrepresented as a whole by his satire. When poor Jo on his death-bed is “asked whether he ever knew a prayer,” and replies that he could never make anything out of those spoken by the gentlemen who “came down Tom-all-Alone’s a-prayin’,” but who “mostly sed as the t’other wuns prayed wrong,” the author brings a charge which he might not have found it easy to substantiate. Yet—with the exception of such isolated passages—the figure of Jo is in truth one of the most powerful protests that have been put forward on behalf of the friendless outcasts of our streets. Nor did the romantic element in the conception interfere with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at first to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the story, is in Dickens’s best pathetic manner, the Bagnet family is in his happiest vein of quiet humour. Mr. Inspector Bucket, though not altogether free from mannerism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For this character, as the pages of Household Words testify, Dickens had made many studies in real life. The detective police-officer had at that time not yet become a standing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the detective of real life begun to destroy the illusion.

Bleak House was least of all among the novels hitherto published by its author obnoxious to the charge persistently brought against him, that he was doomed to failure in his attempts to draw characters taken from any but the lower spheres of life—in his attempts, in short, to draw ladies and gentlemen. To begin with, one of the most interesting characters in the book—indeed, in its relation to the main idea of the story, the most interesting of all—is the youthful hero, if he is to be so called, Richard Carson. From the very nature of the conception the character is passive only; but the art and feeling are in their way unsurpassed with which the gradual collapse of a fine nature is here exhibited. Sir Leicester Dedlock, in some measure intended as a type of his class, has been condemned as wooden and unnatural; and no doubt the machinery of that part of the story in which he is concerned creaks before it gets under way. On the other hand, after the catastrophe has overwhelmed him and his house, he becomes a really fine picture, unmarred by any Grandisonianisms in either thought or phrase, of a true gentleman, bowed but not warped by distress. Sir Leicester’s relatives, both dead and living; Volumnia’s sprightly ancestress on the wall, and that “fair Dedlock” herself; the whole cousinhood, debilitated and otherwise, but of one mind on such points as William Buffy’s blameworthy neglect of his duty when in office; all these make up a very probable picture of a house great enough—or thinking itself great enough—to look at the affairs of the world from the family point of view. In Lady Dedlock alone a failure must be admitted; but she, with her wicked double, the uncanny French maid Hortense, exists only for the sake of the plot.

With all its merits, Bleak House has little of that charm which belongs to so many of Dickens’s earlier stories, and to David Copperfield above all. In part, at least, this may be due to the excessive severity of the task which Dickens had set himself in Bleak House; for hardly any other of his works is constructed on so large a scale, or contains so many characters organically connected with the progress of its plot; and in part, again, to the half-didactic, half-satirical purport of the story, which weighs heavily on the writer. An overstrained tone announces itself on the very first page; an opening full of power—indeed, of genius—but pitched in a key which we feel at once will not, without effort, be maintained. On the second page the prose has actually become verse; or how else can one describe part of the following apostrophe?

“‘This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every mad-house, and its dead in every church-yard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!”’”

It was possibly with some thought of giving to Bleak House also, though in a different way, the close relation to his experiences of living men to which David Copperfield had owed so much, that Dickens introduced into it two portraits. Doubtless, at first, his intention had by no means gone so far as this. His constant counsellor always disliked his mixing up in his fictitious characters any personal reminiscences of particular men, experience having shown that in such cases the whole character came out more like than the author was aware. Nor can Dickens himself have failed to understand how such an experiment is always tempting, and always dangerous; how it is often irreconcilable with good feeling, and quite as often with good taste. In Bleak House, however, it occurred to him to introduce likenesses of two living men, both more or less well known to the public and to himself; and both of individualities too clearly marked for a portrait, or even a caricature, of either to be easily mistaken. Of that art of mystification which the authors of both English and French romans à clef have since practised with so much transient success, he was no master, and fortunately so; for what could be more ridiculous than that the reader’s interest in a character should be stimulated, first, by its being evidently the late Lord P-lm-rst-n or the P– of O–, and then by its being no less evidently somebody else? It should be added that neither of the two portrait characters in Bleak House possesses the least importance for the conduct of the story, so that there is nothing to justify their introduction except whatever excellence may belong to them in themselves.

Lawrence Boythorn is described by Mr. Sydney Colvin as drawn from Walter Savage Landor with his intellectual greatness left out. It was, of course, unlikely that his intellectual greatness should be left in, the intention obviously being to reproduce what was eccentric in the ways and manner, with a suggestion of what was noble in the character, of Dickens’s famous friend. Whether, had he attempted to do so, Dickens could have drawn a picture of the whole Landor, is another question. Landor, who could put into a classic dialogue that sense of the naïf to which Dickens is generally a stranger, yet passionately admired the most sentimental of all his young friend’s poetic figures; and it might almost be said that the intellectual natures of the two men were drawn together by the force of contrast. They appear to have first become intimate with one another during Landor’s residence at Bath—which began in 1837—and they frequently met at Gore House. At a celebration of the poet’s birthday in his lodgings at Bath, so Forster tells us in his biography of Landor, “the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its creator.” In Landor’s spacious mind there was room for cordial admiration of an author the bent of whose genius differed widely from that of his own; and he could thus afford to sympathise with his whole heart in a creation which men of much smaller intellectual build have pronounced mawkish and unreal. Dickens afterwards gave to one of his sons the names of Walter Landor; and when the old man died at last, after his godson, paid him an eloquent tribute of respect in All the Year Round. In this paper the personal intention of the character of Boythorn is avowed by implication; but though Landor esteemed and loved Dickens, it might seem matter for wonder, did not eccentrics after all sometimes cherish their own eccentricity, that his irascible nature failed to resent a rather doubtful compliment. For the character of Boythorn is whimsical rather than, in any but the earlier sense of the word, humorous. But the portrait, however imperfect, was in this instance, beyond all doubt, both kindly meant and kindly taken; though it cannot be said to have added to the attractions of the book into which it is introduced.

While no doubt ever existed as to this likeness, the case may not seem so clear with regard to the original of Harold Skimpole. It would be far more pleasant to pass by without notice the controversy—if controversy it can be called—which this character provoked; but a wrong done by one eminent man of letters to another, however unforeseen its extent may have been, and however genuine the endeavour to repair its effect, becomes part of literary history. That the original of Harold Skimpole was Leigh Hunt cannot reasonably be called into question. This assertion by no means precludes the possibility, or probability, that a second original suggested certain features in the portrait. Nor does it contradict the substantial truthfulness of Dickens’s own statement, published in All the Year Round after Leigh Hunt’s death, on the appearance of the new edition of the Autobiography with Thornton Hunt’s admirable introduction. While, Dickens then wrote, “he yielded to the temptation of too often making the character speak like his old friend,” yet “he no more thought, God forgive him! that the admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the fictitious creature, than he had himself ever thought of charging the blood of Desdemona and Othello on the innocent Academy model who sat for Iago’s leg in the picture. Even as to the mere occasional manner,” he declared that he had “altered the whole of that part of the text, when two intimate friends of Leigh Hunt—both still living—discovered too strong a resemblance to his ‘way.’” But, while accepting this statement, and suppressing a regret that after discovering the dangerous closeness of the resemblance Dickens should have, quite at the end of the story, introduced a satirical reference to Harold Skimpole’s autobiography—Leigh Hunt’s having been published only a year or two before—one must confess that the explanation only helps to prove the rashness of the offence. While intending the portrait to keep its own secret from the general public, Dickens at the same time must have wished to gratify a few keen-sighted friends. In March, 1852, he writes to Forster, evidently in reference to the apprehensions of his correspondent: “Browne has done Skimpole, and helped to make him singularly unlike the great original.” The “great original” was a man for whom, both before and after this untoward incident in the relations between them, Dickens professed a warm regard, and who, to judge from the testimony of those who knew him well,9 and from his unaffected narrative of his own life, abundantly deserved it. A perusal of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography suffices to show that he used to talk in Skimpole’s manner, and even to write in it; that he was at one period of his life altogether ignorant of money matters, and that he cultivated cheerfulness on principle. But it likewise shows that his ignorance of business was acknowledged by him as a misfortune in which he was very far from exulting. “Do I boast of this ignorance?” he writes. “Alas! I have no such respect for the pedantry of absurdity as that. I blush for it, and I only record it out of a sheer painful movement of conscience, as a warning to those young authors who might be led to look upon such folly as a fine thing, which at all events is what I never thought it myself.” On the other hand, as his son showed, his cheerfulness, which was not inconsistent with a natural proneness to intervals of melancholy, rested on grounds which were the result of a fine as well as healthy morality. “The value of cheerful opinions,” he wrote, in words embodying a moral that Dickens himself was never weary of enforcing, “is inestimable; they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him, and consequently they ought to be religiously inculcated upon his children.” At the same time, no quality was more conspicuous in his life than his readiness for hard work, even under the most depressing circumstances; and no feature was more marked in his moral character than his conscientiousness. “In the midst of the sorest temptations,” Dickens wrote of him, “he maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain; and in all public and private transactions he was the very soul of truth and honour.” To mix up with the outward traits of such a man the detestable obliquities of Harold Skimpole was an experiment paradoxical even as a mere piece of character-drawing. The merely literary result is a failure, while a wound was needlessly inflicted, if not upon Leigh Hunt himself, at least upon all who cherished his friendship or good name. Dickens seems honestly and deeply to have regretted what he had done, and the extremely tasteful little tribute to Leigh Hunt’s poetic gifts which, some years before the death of the latter, Dickens wrote for Household Words,10 must have partaken of the nature of an amende honorable. Neither his subsequent repudiation of unfriendly intentions, nor his earlier exertions on Leigh Hunt’s behalf, are to be overlooked, but they cannot undo a mistake which forms an unfortunate incident in Dickens’s literary life, singularly free though that life, as a whole, is from the miseries of personal quarrels, and all the pettinesses with which the world of letters is too familiar.

While Dickens was engaged upon a literary work such as would have absorbed the intellectual energies of most men, he not only wrote occasionally for his journal, but also dictated for publication in it, the successive portions of a book altogether outside his usual range of authorship. This was A Child’s History of England, the only one of his works that was not written by his own hand. A history of England, written by Charles Dickens for his own or any one else’s children, was sure to be a different work from one written under similar circumstances by Mr. Freeman or the late M. Guizot. The book, though it cannot be called a success, is, however, by no means devoid of interest. Just ten years earlier he had written, and printed, a history of England for the benefit of his eldest son, then a hopeful student of the age of five, which was composed, as he informed Douglas Jerrold at the time, “in the exact spirit” of that advanced politician’s paper, “for I don’t know what I should do if he were to get hold of any Conservative or High Church notions; and the best way of guarding against any such horrible result is, I take it, to wring the parrots’ necks in his very cradle.” The Child’s History of England is written in the same spirit, and illustrates more directly, and, it must be added, more coarsely, than any of Dickens’s other works his hatred of ecclesiasticism of all kinds. Thus, the account of Dunstan is pervaded by a prejudice which is the fruit of anything but knowledge; Edward the Confessor is “the dreary old” and “the maudlin Confessor;” and the Pope and what belongs to him are treated with a measure of contumely which would have satisfied the heart of Leigh Hunt himself. To be sure, if King John is dismissed as a “miserable brute,” King Henry the Eighth is not more courteously designated as a “blot of blood and grease upon the history of England.” On the other hand, it could hardly be but that certain passages of the national story should be well told by so great a master of narrative; and though the strain in which parts of the history of Charles the Second are recounted strikes one as hardly suitable to the young, to whom irony is in general caviare indeed, yet there are touches both in the story of “this merry gentleman”—a designation which almost recalls Fagin—and elsewhere in the book not unworthy of its author. Its patriotic spirit is quite as striking as its Radicalism; and vulgar as some of its expressions must be called, there is a pleasing glow in the passage on King Alfred, which declares the “English-Saxon” character to have been “the greatest character among the nations of the earth;” and there is a yet nobler enthusiasm, such as it would indeed be worth any writer’s while to infuse into the young, in the passionate earnestness with which, by means of the story of Agincourt, the truth is enforced that “nothing can make war otherwise than horrible.”

This book must have been dictated, and some at least of the latter portion of Bleak House written, at Boulogne, where, after a spring sojourn at Brighton, Dickens spent the summer of 1853, and where were also passed the summers of 1854 and 1856. Boulogne, where Le Sage’s last years were spent, was Our French Watering-place, so graphically described in a paper in Household Words as a companion picture to the old familiar Broadstairs. The family were comfortably settled on a green hill-side close to the town, “in a charming garden in a very pleasant country,” with “excellent light wines on the premises, French cookery, millions of roses, two cows—for milk-punch—vegetables cut for the pot, and handed in at the kitchen window; five summer-houses, fifteen fountains—with no water in ’em—and thirty-seven clocks—keeping, as I conceive, Australian time, having no reference whatever to the hours on this side of the globe.” The energetic owner of the Villa des Moulineaux was the “M. Loyal Devasseur” of Our French Watering-place—jovial, convivial, genial, sentimental too as a Buonapartist and a patriot. In 1854 the same obliging personage housed the Dickens family in another abode, at the top of the hill, close to the famous Napoleonic column; but in 1856 they came back to the Moulineaux. The former year had been an exciting one for Englishmen in France, with royal visits to and fro to testify to the entente cordiale between the governments. Dickens, notwithstanding his humorous assertions, was only moderately touched by the Sebastopol fever; but when a concrete problem came before him in the shape of a festive demonstration, he addressed himself to it with the irrepressible ardour of the born stage-manager. “In our own proper illumination,” he writes, on the occasion of the Prince Consort’s visit to the camp at Boulogne, “I laid on all the servants, all the children now at home, all the visitors, one to every window, with everything ready to light up on the ringing of a big dinner-bell by your humble correspondent. St. Peter’s on Easter Monday was the result.”

Of course, at Boulogne, Dickens was cut off neither from his business nor from his private friends. His hospitable invitations were as urgent to his French villa in the summer as to his London house in the winter, and on both sides of the water the Household Words familiars were as sure of a welcome from their chief. During his absences from London he could have had no trustier lieutenant than Mr. W. H. Wills, with whom, being always ready to throw himself into a part, he corresponded in an amusing paragraphed, semi-official style. And neither in his working nor in his leisure hours had he by this time any more cherished companion than Mr. Wilkie Collins, whose progress towards brilliant success he was watching with the keenest and kindliest interest. With him and his old friend Augustus Egg, Dickens, in October, 1853, started on a tour to Switzerland and Italy, in the course of which he saw more than one old friend, and revisited more than one known scene—ascending Vesuvius with Mr. Layard and drinking punch at Rome with David Roberts. It would be absurd to make any lofty demands upon the brief records of a holiday journey; and, for my part, I would rather think of Dickens assiduous over his Christmas number at Rome and at Venice, than weigh his moralisings about the electric telegraph running through the Coliseum. His letters written to his wife during this trip are bright and gay, and it was certainly no roving bachelor who “kissed almost all the children he encountered in remembrance of the sweet faces” of his own, and “talked to all the mothers who carried them.” By the middle of December the travellers were home again, and before the year was out he had read to large audiences at Birmingham, on behalf of a public institution, his favourite Christmas stories of The Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. As yet, however, his mind was not seriously intent upon any labours but those proper to his career as an author, and the year 1854 saw, between the months of April and August, the publication in his journal of a new story, which is among the most characteristic, though not among the most successful, of his works of fiction.

In comparison with most of Dickens’s novels, Hard Times is contained within a narrow compass; and this, with the further necessity of securing to each successive small portion of the story a certain immediate degree of effectiveness, accounts, in some measure, for the peculiarity of the impression left by this story upon many of its readers. Short as the story relatively is, few of Dickens’s fictions were elaborated with so much care. He had not intended to write a new story for a twelvemonth, when, as he says, “the idea laid hold of him by the throat in a very violent manner,” and the labour, carried on under conditions of peculiar irksomeness, “used him up” after a quite unaccustomed fashion. The book thus acquired a precision of form and manner which commends it to the French school of criticism rather than to lovers of English humour in its ampler forms and more flowing moods. At the same time the work has its purpose so visibly imprinted on its front, as almost to forbid our regarding it in the first instance apart from the moral which avowedly it is intended to inculcate. This moral, by no means new with Dickens, has both a negative and a positive side. “Do not harden your hearts,” is the negative injunction, more especially do not harden them against the promptings of that human kindness which should draw together man and man, old and young, rich and poor; and keep your sympathies fresh by bringing nourishment to them through channels which prejudice or short-sightedness would fain narrow or stop up. This hortatory purpose assumes the form of invective and even of angry menace; and “utilitarian economists, skeletons of school-masters, commissioners of facts, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds,” are warned: “The poor you have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives, so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.”

No authority, however eminent, not even Mr. Ruskin’s, is required to teach reflecting minds the infinite importance of the principles which Hard Times was intended to illustrate. Nor is it of much moment whether the illustrations are always exact; whether the “commissioners of facts” have reason to protest that the unimaginative character of their processes does not necessarily imply an unimaginative purpose in their ends; whether there is any actual Coketown in existence within a hundred miles of Manchester; or whether it suffices that “everybody knew what was meant, but every cotton-spinning town said it was the other cotton-spinning town.” The chief personal grievance of Stephen Blackpool has been removed or abated, but the “muddle” is not yet altogether cleared up which prevents the nation and the “national dustmen,” its law-givers, from impartially and sympathetically furthering the interest of all classes. In a word, the moral of Hard Times has not yet lost its force, however imperfect or unfair the method may have been in which it is urged in the book.

Unfortunately, however, a work of art with a didactic purpose is only too often prone to exaggerate what seems of special importance for the purpose in question, and to heighten contrasts which seem likely to put it in the clearest light. “Thomas Gradgrind, sir”—who announces himself with something of the genuine Lancashire roll—and his system are a sound and a laughable piece of satire, to begin with, only here and there marred by the satirist’s imperfect knowledge of the details which he caricatures. The “Manchester School,” which the novel strives to expose, is in itself to a great extent a figment of the imagination, which to this day serves to round many a hollow period in oratory and journalism. Who, it may fairly be asked, were the parliamentary politicians satirized in the member for Coketown, deaf and blind to any consideration but the multiplication-table? But in any case the cause hardly warrants one of its consequences as depicted in the novel—the utter brutalization of a stolid nature like “the Whelp’s.” When Gradgrind’s son is about to be shipped abroad out of reach of the penalties of his crime, he reminds his father that he merely exemplifies the statistical law that “so many people out of so many will be dishonest.” When the virtuous Bitzer is indignantly asked whether he has a heart, he replies that he is physiologically assured of the fact; and to the further inquiry whether this heart of his is accessible to compassion, makes answer that “it is accessible to reason, and to nothing else.” These returnings of Mr. Gradgrind’s philosophy upon himself savour of the moral justice represented by Gratiano in the fourth act. So, again, Coketown, with its tall chimneys and black river, and its thirteen religious denominations, to which whoever else belonged the working-men did not, is no perverse contradiction of fact. But the influence of Coketown, or of a whole wilderness of Coketowns, cannot justly be charged with a tendency to ripen such a product as Josiah Bounderby, who is not only the “bully of humanity,” but proves to be a mean-spirited impostor in his pretensions to the glory of self-help. In short, Hard Times errs by its attempt to prove too much.