d.i.c.kens.
by Adolphus William Ward.
PREFACE.
At the close of a letter addressed by d.i.c.kens to his friend John Forster, but not to be found in the English editions of the _Life_, the writer adds to his praises of the biography of Goldsmith these memorable words: "I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic."
d.i.c.kens was a man of few close friendships--"his breast," he said, "would not hold many people"--but, of these friendships, that with Forster was one of the earliest, as it was one of the most enduring. To d.i.c.kens, at least, his future biographer must have been the embodiment of two qualities rarely combined in equal measure--discretion and candour. In literary matters his advice was taken almost as often as it was given, and nearly every proof-sheet of nearly every work of d.i.c.kens pa.s.sed through his faithful helpmate"s hands. Nor were there many important decisions formed by d.i.c.kens concerning himself in the course of his manhood to which Forster was a stranger, though, unhappily, he more than once counselled in vain.
On Mr. Forster"s _Life of Charles d.i.c.kens_, together with the three volumes of _Letters_ collected by d.i.c.kens"s eldest daughter and his sister-in-law--his "dearest and best friend"--it is superfluous to state that the biographical portion of the following essay is mainly based. It may be superfluous, but it cannot be considered impertinent, if I add that the shortcomings of the _Life_ have, in my opinion, been more frequently proclaimed than defined; and that its merits are those of its author as well as of its subject.
My sincere thanks are due for various favours shown to me in connexion with the production of this little volume by Miss Hogarth, Mr. Charles d.i.c.kens, Professor Henry Morley, Mr. Alexander Ireland, Mr. John Evans, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Britton. Mr. Evans has kindly enabled me to correct some inaccuracies in Mr. Forster"s account of d.i.c.kens"s early Chatham days on unimpeachable first-hand evidence. I also beg Captain and Mrs. Budden to accept my thanks for allowing me to see Gad"s Hill Place.
I am under special obligations to Mr. R. F. Sketchley, Librarian of the Dyce and Forster Libraries at South Kensington, for his courtesy in affording me much useful aid and information. With the kind permission of Mrs. Forster, Mr. Sketchley enabled me to supplement the records of d.i.c.kens"s life, in the period 1838-"41, from a hitherto unpublished source--a series of brief entries by him in four volumes of _The Law and Commercial Daily Remembrancer_ for those years. These volumes formed no part of the Forster bequest, but were added to it, under certain conditions, by Mrs. Forster. The entries are mostly very brief; and sometimes there are months without an entry. Many days succeed one another with no other note than "Work."
Mr. R. H. Shepherd"s _Bibliography of d.i.c.kens_ has been of considerable service to me. May I take this opportunity of commending to my readers, as a charming reminiscence of the connexion between _Charles d.i.c.kens and Rochester_, Mr. Robert Langton"s sketches ill.u.s.trating a paper recently printed under that t.i.tle?
Last, not least, as the Germans say, I wish to thank my friend Professor T. N. Toller for the friendly counsel which has not been wanting to me on this, any more than on former occasions.
A. W. W.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE "PICKWICK."
[1812-1836.]
Charles d.i.c.kens, the eldest son, and the second of the eight children, of John and Elizabeth d.i.c.kens, was born at Landport, a suburb of Portsea, on Friday, February 7, 1812. His baptismal names were Charles John Huffham.
His father, at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and employed in the Portsmouth Dock-yard, was recalled to London when his eldest son was only two years of age; and two years afterwards was transferred to Chatham, where he resided with his family from 1816 to 1821. Thus Chatham, and the more venerable city of Rochester adjoining, with their neighbourhood of chalk hills and deep green lanes and woodland and marshes, became, in the words of d.i.c.kens"s biographer, the birthplace of his fancy. He looked upon himself as, to all intents and purposes, a Kentish man born and bred, and his heart was always in this particular corner of the incomparable county. Again and again, after Mr. Alfred Jingle"s spasmodic eloquence had, in the very first number of _Pickwick_, epitomised the antiquities and comforts of Rochester, already the scene of one of the _Sketches_, d.i.c.kens returned to the local a.s.sociations of his early childhood. It was at Chatham that poor little David Copperfield, on his solitary tramp to Dover, slept his Sunday night"s sleep "near a cannon, happy in the society of the sentry"s footsteps;" and in many a Christmas narrative or uncommercial etching the familiar features of town and country, of road and river, were reproduced, before in _Great Expectations_ they suggested some of the most picturesque effects of his later art, and before in his last unfinished romance his faithful fancy once more haunted the well-known precincts. During the last thirteen years of his life he was again an inhabitant of the loved neighbourhood where, with the companions of his mirthful idleness, he had so often made holiday; where, when hope was young, he had spent his honey-moon; and whither, after his last restless wanderings, he was to return, to seek such repose as he would allow himself, and to die. But, of course, the daily life of the "very queer small boy" of that early time is only quite incidentally to be a.s.sociated with the grand gentleman"s house on Gad"s Hill, where his father, little thinking that his son was to act over again the story of Warren Hastings and Daylesford, had told him he might some day come to live, if he were to be very persevering, and to work hard. The family abode was in Ordnance (not St. Mary"s) Place, at Chatham, amidst surroundings cla.s.sified in Mr. Pickwick"s notes as "appearing to be soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, offices, and dock-yard men." But though the half-mean, half-picturesque aspect of the Chatham streets may already at an early age have had its fascination for d.i.c.kens, yet his childish fancy was fed as fully as were his powers of observation. Having learned reading from his mother, he was sent with his elder sister, f.a.n.n.y, to a day-school kept in Gibraltar Place, New Road, by Mr. William Giles, the eldest son and namesake of a worthy Baptist minister, whose family had formed an intimate acquaintance with their neighbours in Ordnance Row. The younger Giles children were pupils at the school of their elder brother with Charles and f.a.n.n.y d.i.c.kens, and thus naturally their constant playmates. In later life d.i.c.kens preserved a grateful remembrance, at times refreshed by pleasant communications between the families, of the training he had received from Mr. William Giles, an intelligent as well as generous man, who, recognising his pupil"s abilities, seems to have resolved that they should not lie fallow for want of early cultivation.
Nor does there appear to be the slightest reason for supposing that this period of his life was anything but happy. For his sister f.a.n.n.y he always preserved a tender regard; and a touching little paper, written by him after her death in womanhood, relates how the two children used to watch the stars together, and make friends with one in particular, as belonging to themselves. But obviously he did not lack playmates of his own s.e.x; and it was no doubt chiefly because his tastes made him disinclined to take much part in the rougher sports of his school-fellows, that he found plenty of time for amusing himself in his own way. And thus it came to pa.s.s that already as a child he followed his own likings in the two directions from which they were never very materially to swerve. He once said of himself that he had been "a writer when a mere baby, an actor always."
Of these two pa.s.sions he could always, as a child and as a man, be "happy with either," and occasionally with both at the same time. In his tender years he was taken by a kinsman, a Sandhurst cadet, to the theatre, to see the legitimate drama acted, and was disillusioned by visits behind the scenes at private theatricals; while his own juvenile powers as a teller of stories and singer of comic songs (he was possessed, says one who remembers him, of a sweet treble voice) were displayed on domestic chairs and tables, and then in amateur plays with his school-fellows. He also wrote a--not strictly original--tragedy, which is missing among his _Reprinted Pieces_. There is nothing unique in these childish doings, nor in the circ.u.mstance that he was an eager reader of works of fiction; but it is noteworthy that chief among the books to which he applied himself, in a small neglected bookroom in his father"s house, were those to which his allegiance remained true through much of his career as an author.
Besides books of travel, which he says had a fascination for his mind from his earliest childhood, besides the "Arabian Nights" and kindred tales, and the English Essayists, he read Fielding and Smollett, and Cervantes and Le Sage, in all innocence of heart, as well as Mrs. Inchbald"s collection of farces, in all contentment of spirit. Inasmuch as he was no great reader in the days of his authorship, and had to go through hard times of his own before, it was well that the literature of his childhood was good of its kind, and that where it was not good it was at least gay.
d.i.c.kens afterwards made it an article of his social creed that the imagination of the young needs nourishment as much as their bodies require food and clothing; and he had reason for gratefully remembering that at all events the imaginative part of his education had escaped neglect.
But these pleasant early days came to a sudden end. In the year 1821 his family returned to London, and soon his experiences of trouble began.
Misfortune pursued the elder d.i.c.kens to town, his salary having been decreased already at Chatham in consequence of one of the early efforts at economical reform. He found a shabby home for his family in Bayham Street, Camden Town; and here, what with the pecuniary embarra.s.sments in which he was perennially involved, and what with the easy disposition with which he was blessed by way of compensation, he allowed his son"s education to take care of itself. John d.i.c.kens appears to have been an honourable as well as a kindly man. His son always entertained an affectionate regard for him, and carefully arranged for the comfort of his latter years; nor would it be fair, because of a similarity in their experiences, and in the grandeur of their habitual phraseology, to identify him absolutely with the immortal Mr. Micawber. Still less, except in certain details of manner and incident, can the character of the elder d.i.c.kens be thought to have suggested that of the pitiful "Father of the Marshalsea," to which prison, almost as famous in English fiction as it is in English history, the unlucky navy-clerk was consigned a year after his return to London.
Every effort had been made to stave off the evil day; and little Charles, whose eyes were always wide open, and who had begun to write descriptive sketches of odd personages among his acquaintance, had become familiar with the inside of a p.a.w.nbroker"s shop, and had sold the paternal "library" piecemeal to the original of the drunken second-hand bookseller, with whom David Copperfield dealt as Mr. Micawber"s representative. But neither these sacrifices nor Mrs. d.i.c.kens"s abortive efforts at setting up an educational establishment had been of avail. Her husband"s creditors _would not_ give him time; and a dark period began for the family, and more especially for the little eldest son, now ten years old, in which, as he afterwards wrote, in bitter anguish of remembrance, "but for the mercy of G.o.d, he might easily have become, for any care that was taken of him, a little robber or a little vagabond."
Forster has printed the pathetic fragment of autobiography, communicated to him by d.i.c.kens five-and-twenty years after the period to which it refers, and subsequently incorporated with but few changes in the _Personal History of David Copperfield_. Who can forget the thrill with which he first learned the well-kept secret that the story of the solitary child, left a prey to the cruel chances of the London streets, was an episode in the life of Charles d.i.c.kens himself? Between fact and fiction there was but a difference of names. Murdstone & Grinby"s wine warehouse down in Blackfriars was Jonathan Warren"s blacking warehouse at Hungerford Stairs, in which a place had been found for the boy by a relative, a partner in the concern; and the bottles he had to paste over with labels were in truth blacking-pots. But the menial work and the miserable pay, the uncongenial companionship during worktime, and the speculative devices of the dinner-hour were the same in each case. At this time, after his family had settled itself in the Marshalsea, the haven open to the little waif at night was a lodging in Little College Street, Camden Town, presenting even fewer attractions than Mr. Micawber"s residence in Windsor Terrace, and kept by a lady afterwards famous under the name of Mrs.
Pipchin. His Sundays were spent at home in the prison. On his urgent remonstrance--"the first I had ever made about my lot"--concerning the distance from his family at which he was left through the week, a back attic was found for him in Lant Street, in the Borough, "where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards;" and he now breakfasted and supped with his parents in their apartment. Here they lived in fair comfort, waited upon by a faithful "orfling," who had accompanied the family and its fortunes from Chatham, and who is said by Forster to have her part in the character of the Marchioness. Finally, after the prisoner had obtained his discharge, and had removed with his family to the Lant Street lodgings, a quarrel occurred between the elder d.i.c.kens and his cousin, and the boy was in consequence taken away from the business.
He had not been ill-treated there; nor indeed is it ill-treatment which leads to David Copperfield"s running away in the story. Nevertheless, it is not strange that d.i.c.kens should have looked back with a bitterness very unusual in him upon the bad old days of his childish solitude and degradation. He never "forgot" his mother"s having wished him to remain in the warehouse; the subject of his employment there was never afterwards mentioned in the family; he could not bring himself to go near old Hungerford Market so long as it remained standing; and to no human being, not even to his wife, did he speak of this pa.s.sage in his life until he narrated it in the fragment of autobiography which he confided to his trusty friend. Such a sensitiveness is not hard to explain; for no man is expected to dilate upon the days "when he lived among the beggars in St.
Mary Axe," and it is only the Bounderbies of society who exult, truly or falsely, in the sordid memories of the time before they became rich or powerful. And if the sharp experiences of his childhood might have ceased to be resented by one whom the world on the whole treated so kindly, at least they left his heart unhardened, and helped to make him ever tender to the poor and weak, because he too had after a fashion "eaten his bread with tears" when a puny child.
A happy accident having released the David Copperfield of actual life from his unworthy bondage, he was put in the way of an education such as at that time was the lot of most boys of the cla.s.s to which he belonged. "The world has done much better since in that way, and will do far better yet,"
he writes at the close of his description of _Our School_, the "Wellington House Academy," situate near that point in the Hampstead Road where modest gentility and commercial enterprise touch hands. Other testimony confirms his sketch of the ignorant and brutal head-master; and doubtless this worthy and his usher, "considered to know everything as opposed to the chief who was considered to know nothing," furnished some of the features in the portraits of Mr. Creakle and Mr. Mell. But it has been very justly doubted by an old school-fellow whether the statement "We were First Boy"
is to be regarded as strictly historical. If Charles d.i.c.kens, when he entered the school, was "put into Virgil," he was not put there to much purpose. On the other hand, with the return of happier days had come the resumption of the old amus.e.m.e.nts which were to grow into the occupations of his life. A club was founded among the boys at Wellington House for the express purpose of circulating short tales written by him, and he was the manager of the private theatricals which they contrived to set on foot.
After two or three years of such work and play it became necessary for Charles d.i.c.kens once more to think of earning his bread. His father, who had probably lost his official post at the time when, in Mr. Micawber"s phrase, "hope sunk beneath the horizon," was now seeking employment as a parliamentary reporter, and must have rejoiced when a Gray"s Inn solicitor of his acquaintance, attracted by the bright, clever looks of his son, took the lad into his office as a clerk at a modest weekly salary. His office a.s.sociates here were perhaps a grade or two above those of the blacking warehouse; but his danger now lay rather in the direction of the vulgarity which he afterwards depicted in such samples of the profession as Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling. He is said to have frequented, in company with a fellow-clerk, one of the minor theatres, and even occasionally to have acted there; and a.s.suredly it must have been personal knowledge which suggested the curiously savage description of _Private Theatres_ in the _Sketches by Boz_, the all but solitary _unkindly_ reference to theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts in his works. But whatever his experiences of this kind may have been, he pa.s.sed unscathed through them; and during the year and a half of his clerkship picked up sufficient knowledge of the technicalities of the law to be able to a.s.sail its enormities without falling into rudimentary errors about it, and sufficient knowledge of lawyers and lawyers" men to fill a whole chamber in his gallery of characters.
Oddly enough, it was, after all, the example of the father that led the son into the line of life from which he was easily to pa.s.s into the career where success and fame awaited him. The elder d.i.c.kens having obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter for the _Morning Herald_, his son, who was living with him in Bentinck Street, Manchester Square, resolved to essay the same laborious craft. He was by this time nearly seventeen years of age, and already we notice in him what were to remain, through life, two of his most marked characteristics--strength of will, and a determination, if he did a thing at all, to do it thoroughly. The art of short-hand, which he now resolutely set himself to master, was in those days no easy study, though, possibly, in looking back upon his first efforts, David Copperfield overestimated the difficulties which he had conquered with the help of love and Traddles. But d.i.c.kens, whose education no Dr. Strong had completed, perceived that in order to succeed as a reporter of the highest cla.s.s he needed something besides the knowledge of short-hand. In a word, he lacked reading; and this deficiency he set himself to supply as best he could by a constant attendance at the British Museum. Those critics who have dwelt on the fact that the reading of d.i.c.kens was neither very great nor very extensive, have insisted on what is not less true than obvious; but he had this one quality of the true lover of reading, that he never professed a familiarity with that of which he knew little or nothing. He continued his visits to the Museum, even when in 1828 he had become a reporter in Doctors" Commons. With this occupation he had to remain as content as he could for nearly two years.
Once more David Copperfield, the double of Charles d.i.c.kens in his youth, will rise to the memory of every one of his readers. For not only was his soul seized with a weariness of Consistory, Arches, Delegates, and the rest of it, to which he afterwards gave elaborate expression in his story, but his heart was full of its first love. In later days he was not of opinion that he had loved particularly wisely; but how well he had loved is known to every one who after him has lost his heart to Dora. Nothing came of the fancy, and in course of time he had composure enough to visit the lady who had been its object in the company of his wife. He found that Jip was stuffed as well as dead, and that Dora had faded into Flora; for it was as such that, not very chivalrously, he could bring himself to describe her, for the second time, in _Little Dorrit_.
Before at last he was engaged as a reporter on a newspaper, he had, and not for a moment only, thought of turning aside to another profession. It was the profession to which--uncommercially--he was attached during so great a part of his life, that when he afterwards created for himself a stage of his own, he seemed to be but following an irresistible fascination. His best friend described him to me as "a born actor;" and who needs to be told that the world falls into two divisions only--those whose place is before the foot-lights, and those whose place is behind them? His love of acting was stronger than himself; and I doubt whether he ever saw a play successfully performed without longing to be in and of it.
"a.s.sumption," he wrote in after days to Lord Lytton, "has charms for me--I hardly know for how many wild reasons--so delightful that I feel a loss of, oh! I can"t say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one in voice, etc., not at all like myself." He loved the theatre and everything which savoured of histrionics with an intensity not even to be imagined by those who have never felt a touch of the same pa.s.sion. He had that "belief in a play" which he so pleasantly described as one of the characteristics of his life-long friend, the great painter, Clarkson Stanfield. And he had that unextinguishable interest in both actors and acting which makes a little separate world of the "quality." One of the staunchest friendships of his life was that with the foremost English tragedian of his age, Macready; one of the delights of his last years was his intimacy with another well-known actor, the late Mr. Fechter. No performer, however, was so obscure or so feeble as to be outside the pale of his sympathy. His books teem with kindly likenesses of all manner of entertainers and entertainments--from Mr. Vincent Crummles and the more or less legitimate drama, down to Mr. Sleary"s horse-riding and Mrs. Jarley"s wax-work. He has a friendly feeling for Chops the dwarf, and for Pickleson the giant; and in his own quiet Broadstairs he cannot help tumultuously applauding a young lady "who goes into the den of ferocious lions, tigers, leopards, etc., and pretends to go to sleep upon the princ.i.p.al lion, upon which a rustic keeper, who speaks through his nose, exclaims, "Behold the abazid power of woobad!"" He was unable to sit through a forlorn performance at a wretched country theatre without longing to add a sovereign to the four-and-ninepence which he had made out in the house when he entered, and which "had warmed up in the course of the evening to twelve shillings;" and in Bow Street, near his office, he was beset by appeals such as that of an aged and greasy suitor for an engagement as Pantaloon: "Mr. d.i.c.kens, you know our profession, sir--no one knows it better, sir--there is no right feeling in it. I was Harlequin on your own circuit, sir, for five-and-thirty years, and was displaced by a boy, sir!--a boy!" Nor did his disposition change when he crossed the seas; the streets he first sees in the United States remind him irresistibly of the set-scene in a London pantomime; and at Verona his interest is divided between _Romeo and Juliet_ and the vestiges of an equestrian troupe in the amphitheatre.
What success d.i.c.kens might have achieved as an actor it is hardly to the present purpose to inquire. A word will be said below of the success he achieved as an amateur actor and manager, and in his more than half-dramatic readings. But, the influence of early a.s.sociations and personal feelings apart, it would seem that the artists of the stage whom he most admired were not those of the highest type. He was subdued by the genius of Frederic Lemaitre, but blind and deaf to that of Ristori. "Sound melodrama and farce" were the dramatic species which he affected, and in which as a professional actor he might have excelled. His intensity might have gone for much in the one, and his versatility and volubility for more in the other; and in both, as indeed in any kind of play or part, his thoroughness, which extended itself to every detail of performance or make-up, must have stood him in excellent stead. As it was, he was preserved for literature. But he had carefully prepared himself for his intended venture, and when he sought an engagement at Covent Garden, a preliminary interview with the manager was postponed only on account of the illness of the applicant.
Before the next theatrical season opened he had at last--in the year 1831--obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter, and after some earlier engagements he became, in 1834, one of the reporting staff of the famous Whig _Morning Chronicle_, then in its best days under the editorship of Mr. John Black. Now, for the first time in his life, he had an opportunity of putting forth the energy that was in him. He shrunk from none of the difficulties which in those days attended the exercise of his craft. They were thus depicted by himself, when a few years before his death he "held a brief for his brothers" at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund: "I have often transcribed for the printer from my short-hand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising; writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want restuffing. Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been in my time belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew." Thus early had d.i.c.kens learnt the secret of throwing himself into any pursuit once taken up by him, and of half achieving his task by the very heartiness with which he set about it. When at the close of the parliamentary session of the year 1836 his labours as a reporter came to an end, he was held to have no equal in the gallery.
During this period his naturally keen powers of observation must have been sharpened and strengthened, and that quickness of decision acquired which const.i.tutes, perhaps, the most valuable lesson that journalistic practice of any kind can teach to a young man of letters. To d.i.c.kens"s experience as a reporter may likewise be traced no small part of his political creed, in which there was a good deal of infidelity; or, at all events, his determined contempt for the parliamentary style proper, whether in the mouth of "Thisman" or of "Thatman," and his rooted dislike of the "cheap-jacks" and "national dustmen" whom he discerned among our orators and legislators. There is probably no very great number of Members of Parliament who are heroes to those who wait attendance on their words.
Moreover, the period of d.i.c.kens"s most active labours as a reporter was one that succeeded a time of great political excitement; and when men wish thankfully to rest after deeds, words are in season.
Meanwhile, very tentatively and with a very imperfect consciousness of the significance for himself of his first steps on a slippery path, d.i.c.kens had begun the real career of his life. It has been seen how he had been a writer as a "baby," as a school-boy, and as a lawyer"s clerk, and the time had come when, like all writers, he wished to see himself in print. In December, 1833, the _Monthly Magazine_ published a paper which he had dropped into its letter-box, and with eyes "dimmed with joy and pride" the young author beheld his first-born in print. The paper, called _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, was afterwards reprinted in the _Sketches by Boz_ under the t.i.tle of _Mr. Minns and his Cousin_, and is laughable enough. His success emboldened him to send further papers of a similar character to the same magazine, which published ten contributions of his by February, 1835. That which appeared in August, 1834, was the first signed "Boz," a nickname given by him in his boyhood to a favourite brother. Since d.i.c.kens used this signature not only as the author of the _Sketches_ and a few other minor productions, but also as "editor" of the _Pickwick Papers_, it is not surprising that, especially among his admirers on the Continent and in America, the name should have clung to him so tenaciously. It was on a steamboat near Niagara that he heard from his state-room a gentleman complaining to his wife: "Boz keeps himself very close."
But the _Monthly Magazine_, though warmly welcoming its young contributor"s lively sketches, could not afford to pay for them. He was therefore glad to conclude an arrangement with Mr. George Hogarth, the conductor of the _Evening Chronicle_, a paper in connexion with the great morning journal on the reporting staff of which he was engaged. He had gratuitously contributed a sketch to the evening paper as a personal favour to Mr. Hogarth, and the latter readily proposed to the proprietors of the _Morning Chronicle_ that d.i.c.kens should be duly remunerated for this addition to his regular labours. With a salary of seven instead of, as heretofore, five guineas a week, and settled in chambers in Furnival"s Inn--one of those old legal inns which he loved so well--he might already in this year, 1835, consider himself on the high-road to prosperity. By the beginning of 1836 the _Sketches by Boz_ printed in the _Evening Chronicle_ were already numerous enough, and their success was sufficiently established to allow of his arranging for their republication. They appeared in two volumes, with etchings by Cruikshank, and the sum of a hundred and fifty pounds was paid to him for the copyright. The stepping-stones had been found and pa.s.sed, and on the last day of March, which saw the publication of the first number of the _Pickwick Papers_, he stood in the field of fame and fortune. Three days afterwards d.i.c.kens married Catherine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of the friend who had so efficiently aided him in his early literary ventures.
Mr. George Hogarth"s name thus links together the names of two masters of English fiction; for Lockhart speaks of him when a writer to the signet in Edinburgh as one of the intimate friends of Scott. d.i.c.kens"s apprenticeship as an author was over almost as soon as it was begun; and he had found the way short from obscurity to the dazzling light of popularity. As for the _Sketches by Boz_, their author soon repurchased the copyright for more than thirteen times the sum which had been paid to him for it.
In their collected form these _Sketches_ modestly described themselves as "ill.u.s.trative of every-day life and every-day people." Herein they only prefigured the more famous creations of their writer, whose genius was never so happy as when lighting up, now the humorous, now what he chose to term the romantic, side of familiar things. The curious will find little difficulty in tracing in these outlines, often rough and at times coa.r.s.e, the groundwork of more than one finished picture of later date. Not a few of the most peculiar features of d.i.c.kens"s humour are already here, together with not a little of his most characteristic pathos. It is true that in these early _Sketches_ the latter is at times strained, but its power is occasionally beyond denial, as, for instance, in the brief narrative of the death of the hospital patient. On the other hand, the humour--more especially that of the _Tales_--is not of the most refined sort, and often degenerates in the direction of boisterous farce. The style, too, though in general devoid of the pretentiousness which is the bane of "light" journalistic writing, has a taint of vulgarity about it, very pardonable under the circ.u.mstances, but generally absent from d.i.c.kens"s later works. Weak puns are not unfrequent; and the diction but rarely reaches that exquisite felicity of comic phrase in which _Pickwick_ and its successors excel. For the rest, d.i.c.kens"s favourite pa.s.sions and favourite aversions alike reflect themselves here in small. In the description of the election for beadle he ridicules the tricks and the manners of political party-life, and his love of things theatrical has its full freshness upon it--however he may pretend at Astley"s that his "histrionic taste is gone," and that it is the audience which chiefly delights him. But of course the gift which these _Sketches_ pre-eminently revealed in their author was a descriptive power that seemed to lose sight of nothing characteristic in the object described, and of nothing humorous in an a.s.sociation suggested by it. Whether his theme was street or river, a Christmas dinner or the extensive groves of the ill.u.s.trious dead (the old clothes shops in Monmouth Street), he reproduced it in all its shades and colours, and under a hundred aspects, fanciful as well as real. How inimitable, for instance, is the sketch of "the last cab-driver, and the first omnibus cad," whose earlier vehicle, the omnipresent "red cab," was not the gondola, but the very fire-ship of the London streets.
d.i.c.kens himself entertained no high opinion of these youthful efforts; and in this he showed the consciousness of the true artist, that masterpieces are rarely thrown off at hazard. But though much of the popularity of the _Sketches_ may be accounted for by the fact that commonplace people love to read about commonplace people and things, the greater part of it is due to genuine literary merit. The days of half-price in theatres have followed the days of coaching; "Honest Tom" no more paces the lobby in a black coat with velvet facings and cuffs, and a D"Orsay hat; the Hickses of the present time no longer quote "Don Juan" over boarding-house dinner-tables; and the young ladies in Camberwell no longer compare young men in att.i.tudes to Lord Byron, or to "Satan" Montgomery. But the _Sketches by Boz_ have survived their birth-time; and they deserve to be remembered among the rare instances in which a young author has no sooner begun to write than he has shown a knowledge of his real strength. As yet, however, this sudden favourite of the public was unaware of the range to which his powers were to extend, and of the height to which they were to mount.
CHAPTER II.
FROM SUCCESS TO SUCCESS.
[1836-1841.]
Even in those years of which the record is brightest in the story of his life, Charles d.i.c.kens, like the rest of the world, had his share of troubles--troubles great and small, losses which went home to his heart, and vexations manifold in the way of business. But in the history of his early career as an author the word failure has no place.
Not that the _Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_, published as they were in monthly numbers, at once took the town by storm; for the public needed two or three months to make up its mind that "Boz" was equal to an effort considerably in advance of his _Sketches_. But when the popularity of the serial was once established, it grew with extraordinary rapidity until it reached an altogether unprecedented height. He would be a bold man who should declare that its popularity has very materially diminished at the present day. Against the productions of _Pickwick_, and of other works of amus.e.m.e.nt of which it was the prototype, Dr. Arnold thought himself bound seriously to contend among the boys of Rugby; and twenty years later young men at the university talked nothing but _Pickwick_, and quoted nothing but _Pickwick_, and the wittiest of undergraduates set the world at large an examination paper in _Pickwick_, over which pretentious half-knowledge may puzzle, unable accurately to "describe the common Profeel-machine," or to furnish a satisfactory definition of "a red-faced Nixon." No changes in manners and customs have interfered with the hold of the work upon nearly all cla.s.ses of readers at home; and no translation has been dull enough to prevent its being relished even in countries where all English manners and customs must seem equally uninteresting or equally absurd.
So extraordinary has been the popularity of this more than thrice fortunate book, that the wildest legends have grown up as to the history of its origin. The facts, however, as stated by d.i.c.kens himself, are few and plain. Attracted by the success of the _Sketches_, Messrs. Chapman & Hall proposed to him that he should write "something" in monthly numbers to serve as a vehicle for certain plates to be executed by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour; and either the publishers or the artist suggested as a kind of leading notion, the idea of a "Nimrod Club" of unlucky sportsmen. The proposition was at d.i.c.kens"s suggestion so modified that the plates were "to arise naturally out of the text," the range of the latter being left open to him. This explains why the rather artificial machinery of a club was maintained, and why Mr. Winkle"s misfortunes by flood and field hold their place by the side of the philanthropical meanderings of Mr. Pickwick and the amorous experiences of Mr. Tupman. An original was speedily found for the pictorial presentment of the hero of the book, and a felicitous name for him soon suggested itself. Only a single number of the serial had appeared when Mr. Seymour"s own hand put an end to his life. It is well known that among the applicants for the vacant office of ill.u.s.trator of the _Pickwick Papers_ was Thackeray--the senior of d.i.c.kens by a few months--whose style as a draughtsman would have been singularly unsuited to the adventures and the gaiters of Mr.
Pickwick. Finally, in no altogether propitious hour for some of d.i.c.kens"s books, Mr. Hablot Browne ("Phiz") was chosen as ill.u.s.trator. Some happy hits--such as the figure of Mr. Micawber--apart, the ill.u.s.trations of d.i.c.kens by this artist, though often both imaginative and effective, are apt, on the one hand, to obscure the author"s fidelity to nature, and on the other, to intensify his unreality. _Oliver Twist_, like the _Sketches_, was ill.u.s.trated by George Cruikshank, a pencil humourist of no common calibre, but as a rule ugly with the whole virtuous intention of his heart. d.i.c.kens himself was never so well satisfied with any ill.u.s.trator as with George Cattermole (_alias_ "Kittenmoles"), a connection of his by marriage, who co-operated with Hablot Browne in _Master Humphrey"s Clock_; in his latest works he resorted to the aid of younger artists, whose reputation has since justified his confidence. The most congenial of the pictorial interpreters of d.i.c.kens, in his brightest and freshest humour, was his valued friend John Leech, whose services, together occasionally with those of Doyle, Frank Stone, and Tenniel, as well as of his faithful Stanfield and Maclise, he secured for his Christmas books.
The _Pickwick Papers_, of which the issue was completed by the end of 1837, brought in to d.i.c.kens a large sum of money, and after a time a handsome annual income. On the whole this has remained the most general favourite of all his books. Yet it is not for this reason only that _Pickwick_ defies criticism, but also because the circ.u.mstances under which the book was begun and carried on make it preposterous to judge it by canons applicable to its author"s subsequent fictions. As the serial proceeded, the interest which was to be divided between the inserted tales, some of which have real merit, and the framework, was absorbed by the latter. The rise in the style of the book can almost be measured by the change in the treatment of its chief character, Mr. Pickwick himself.
In a later preface, d.i.c.kens endeavoured to ill.u.s.trate this change by the a.n.a.logy of real life. The truth, of course, is that it was only as the author proceeded that he recognised the capabilities of the character, and his own power of making it, and his book with it, truly lovable as well as laughable. Thus, on the very same page in which Mr. Pickwick proves himself a true gentleman in his leave-taking from Mr. Nupkins, there follows a little bit of the idyl between Sam and the pretty housemaid, written with a delicacy that could hardly have been suspected in the chronicler of the experiences of Miss Jemima Evans or of Mr. Augustus Cooper. In the subsequent part of the main narrative will be found exemplified nearly all the varieties of pathos of which d.i.c.kens was afterwards so repeatedly to prove himself master, more especially, of course, in those prison scenes for which some of our older novelists may have furnished him with hints. Even that subtle species of humour is not wanting which is content to miss its effect with the less attentive reader; as in this pa.s.sage concerning the ruined cobbler"s confidences to Sam in the Fleet: